“Kane?” MacDonald snapped back at him. “Chris Kane, is that you?”
“That’s right. And if you’re goin’ to shoot, you might as well get it over with, ’cause I ain’t goin’ anywhere with you. I’ll drop these cutters, all right, but only to go for my gun.”
“Don’t do it, kid,” MacDonald warned. “There’s four of us and only two of you.”
“I don’t care,” Kane said, his voice shaking a little from the depth of the emotions going through him. “You’ve pushed us too far. I ain’t backin’ down.”
With that, he opened his hand and let the fence-cutters drop. To Frank they seemed to fall slowly, floating toward the ground as Kane twisted toward the Slash D men and reached down for the butt of the gun on his hip. . . .
That was when the trees behind Frank and the men with him erupted with flame and lead.
14
Gun thunder filled the night. Frank spun around, drawing as he turned. One of the men with him yelled in pain. Muzzle flashes lit up the darkness under the trees. Frank threw himself to the ground and triggered the Peacemaker as he did so. Three shots roared from the Colt in the time it took him to hit the dirt.
MacDonald and the other cowboys returned the fire, too. The racket was deafening as shot after shot blasted out. The air began to stink of burned powder.
“Get down!” MacDonald yelled over the uproar. “Slash D, everybody down!”
The problem was that there was no cover between the trees and the fence line. All Frank and the cowboys could do was hug the ground. Slugs kicked up dirt around them.
To make matters worse, they were in a perfect position to be caught in a cross fire. Those two fence-cutters were behind them.
But when Frank risked a glance over his shoulder, he didn’t see the two men anymore. Had they fled when the shooting started? He didn’t know, and he didn’t really have time to ponder the question. He waited until a gun flashed under the trees again and then snapped a shot just above the orange spurt of flame.
A man screamed, and Frank knew his shot had found its target. MacDonald and the others were throwing a lot of lead into the trees, too, and some of it might be hitting its mark. The gunfire from the shadows seemed to be tapering off. Maybe the bushwhackers were losing heart since their intended victims were putting up a good fight.
Frank squeezed off his fifth round and was rewarded with another yelp of pain from under the trees. His Colt was empty now, since he nearly always carried it with the hammer resting on an empty chamber. Moving with smooth, practiced efficiency, he slipped more cartridges from the loops on his belt and reloaded. As he did so, a bullet buzzed past his ear, only a few inches away. It sounded like a giant bee.
He snapped the cylinder closed and started firing again, placing his shots carefully. A moment later, during a lull in the fighting, a man yelled, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
Frank stayed where he was, stretched out flat on the ground, mindful that the shout might have been the bait for a trap. The shooting abruptly fell off to nothing, and a couple of minutes later, Frank heard the swift rataplan of retreating hoofbeats. The bushwhackers were running. They had abandoned their ambush.
At least so it appeared. When the other men started to get up, Frank barked, “Stay down. Give it another couple of minutes.”
“You heard the man,” Ed MacDonald said. “Stay on your bellies.”
A long few minutes passed by, and then Frank said, “I reckon it’s all right now.” He hadn’t heard a sound from the trees since the hoofbeats had dwindled off into the distance.
Still, he kept the Peacemaker trained on the shadows, just in case the bushwhackers had left a man or two there.
Nothing happened as the Slash D men climbed to their feet. Now that the echoes of the shots had died down, silence once again ruled the night. There weren’t even any sounds of small animals rustling in the brush. The storm of gunfire had made all the wildlife go to ground.
As Frank looked around, he became aware that he saw only three men standing instead of four. “Who’s hit?” he asked sharply.
“Sound off,” Ed MacDonald ordered, his voice ragged with strain.
“I’m all right, Ed,” Stiles Warren said.
“Me, too,” Pitch Carey added between gritted teeth. “A bullet knocked a chunk of meat outta my leg, but I can stand on it.”
“That leaves Dave,” MacDonald said. “Dave, where the hell are you?”
The only answer was a low groan.
MacDonald cursed, and a couple of seconds later, a match flared into life in his hand. The flickering flame cast only a small circle of light, but as MacDonald moved around, that unsteady glow fell on a figure sprawled facedown in the grass.
Frank and Warren rushed over with Carey limping behind them. The two able-bodied men got hold of Dave Osmond and carefully turned him over. The right half of Osmond’s shirt was sodden with blood. He had been hit high on that side, just under the shoulder.
Frank knelt beside Osmond and ripped the shirt back so that he could see the wound. He had barely gotten a look at it when the match went out and Ed MacDonald cursed because the flame had reached his fingers. That look was enough to tell Frank what he needed to know, however.
“I think he’ll be all right,” he said. “The wound’s messy and it may have busted his collarbone, but I reckon with a doctor’s care he’ll recover.”
“We’ll take him on to the ranch house,” MacDonald decided quickly. “It’s closer. Stiles, you head back to Brownwood right now and fetch Doc Yantis. Bring him straight to the Slash D.”
“What if he doesn’t want to come?” Warren asked.
“Then make him, damn it!” MacDonald drew a deep breath. “I reckon he’ll come along without any trouble, though. Him and the old man are friends.”
“I’ll go with Stiles,” Frank volunteered, “and bring the horses back down here. Pitch doesn’t need to walk on that wounded leg any more than he has to.”
“I’m all right, I tell you,” Carey insisted. His voice was thin with pain, though.
“Stay here with me and Dave,” MacDonald ordered. “Frank, I’m obliged for your help.”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Frank promised as he straightened to his feet. He and Warren hurried through the trees and across the open range toward the trail where they had left their horses.
Along the way, Frank worried a little that the bushwhackers might have freed their mounts and hazed them off. The gunmen hadn’t taken the time to do that, though, he saw as he and Warren approached the trail. Stormy and the other horses were right where Frank and the Slash D cowboys had left them.
It took only a few minutes to untie the horses and lead them down to the creek. Warren helped Carey into the saddle, and then Pitch said, “Lift Dave up here in front of me. I’ll hold him on. Nothing wrong with my arms.”
That sounded like a good idea to Frank. Dave Osmond was unconscious, although he let out a low groan now and then. He wouldn’t be able to stay on a horse by himself.
As carefully as possible, Frank, MacDonald, and Warren lifted Osmond to the back of the horse and positioned him in front of Carey. Carey put his arms around him and held on.
“Somebody will have to lead my horse,” Carey said.
“I’ll do that,” MacDonald said. “Frank, you come along with us and keep an eye out for trouble. Stiles, light a shuck for town and the doc.”
“I’m already gone,” Warren said as he swung up into his saddle. He kicked the horse into a run that carried him back toward Brownwood.
Before the rest of them left for the Slash D, Frank took a quick look along the fence line where the two wire-cutters had been. There was no sign of them now, almost no indication that they had ever been there.
But Frank’s keen eyes spotted a dark splotch in the grass, and when he bent over and touched it, he felt a sticky wetness on his fingertips. He rubbed his fingers together, recognizing the all-too-familiar texture.
“You coming, Frank?” Ed
MacDonald asked.
“Yeah,” Frank said. As he mounted up, he didn’t mention what he had found by the barbed-wire fence.
Blood had splashed on the grass over there. One of the fence-cutters had been wounded, probably in that first volley, and from the looks of it, he had been hit pretty bad.
Frank couldn’t help but wonder where those two men were now.
* * *
Chris Kane cursed repeatedly under his breath as he rode along through the darkness, leading the other horse. From time to time he looked back over his shoulder and said urgently, “Hold on, Will. Just hold on, damn it.”
Will Bramlett’s only response was a groan. The older man sat hunched over in his saddle in obvious pain. He held on to the horn somehow and kept himself from falling off. There was no telling how long he would be able to make it, though. He was hit bad.
Kane rasped his tongue over dry lips. He hoped that if he could get Will to the little spread they shared on Blanket Creek, he could take care of his friend. He could make Will more comfortable, anyway, and then fetch the doctor.
What the hell had happened back there? he asked himself over and over. The Slash D men had come out of nowhere, and then all that shooting started....
Kane had thought at first that all the shots came from Earl Duggan’s riders and were directed at him and Will Bramlett. Will had been wounded right away, and after that Kane hadn’t thought about much of anything except getting both of them out of there before they got killed.
But even though he couldn’t be sure about it, he had gotten the impression that somebody else was shooting, that the Slash D cowboys were being fired upon, too. That there had been men under the trees along the creek and they had been shooting at anything that moved. That didn’t make any sense, but that was the way it had looked to Kane in those brief moments filled with gun thunder and fear.
He had lifted Will to his feet, slung an arm around his waist, and half-carried, half-dragged him away from the fence and back to the spot where they had left their horses. Then the struggle to get Will in the saddle had taken several minutes. Once that was accomplished, Kane got on his own horse and spurred away, holding tightly to the reins of Will’s mount.
And as he had done that, the gunfire had still continued along the creek.
Somebody had to have jumped the Slash D men. That was the only explanation that made sense. But who? Al Rawlings and some of the other small ranchers?
The thing was, nobody knew that he and Will had planned to come down here and cut Duggan’s fence tonight. They had kept it to themselves and hadn’t told Rawlings or any of their other allies in the struggle against the big ranchers. So their friends hadn’t been looking out for them tonight.
It was a puzzle that Kane couldn’t work out, so he shoved the questions aside and concentrated on more pressing problems instead.
Like the fact that Ed MacDonald had recognized his voice. MacDonald would go to the law. Despite the coolness of the night, beads of sweat stood out on Kane’s forehead. He wasn’t going back to jail. They would have to kill him first. He had done a year on a rustling charge, back when he’d been riding for a spread over close to Hico. Fact of the matter was, he had stolen those cows and deserved the sentence, but he didn’t care about that. He had gone straight ever since . . . until tonight.
Damn a state legislature that would make it a crime to cut a damn bob-wire fence, anyway, he thought.
Will Bramlett muttered incoherently behind him. Suddenly his voice grew stronger and he said, “Chris . . . God, Chris, it hurts! You got to do something!”
“I’m trying, Will,” Kane said. “I’m going to get you back to the ranch, and then I’ll go get the doc.”
“Doc won’t do me . . . any good,” Bramlett grated. “I’m shot in . . . the belly . . . You know I’m a goner.”
“The hell I do!” Kane swore. “Don’t talk like that. You’re gonna be fine—”
“Chris . . . don’t get yourself killed . . . over this. I ain’t worth it . . . The spread ain’t . . . worth it . . .”
If that was true, Kane asked himself, then what was worth dying for? If avenging a friend and defending a simple piece of ground didn’t justify fighting and maybe dying, then what would?
Kane couldn’t answer those questions. He rode on into the night, leading the other horse.
Blanket Creek was less than ten miles away, but it seemed to take forever to get there. The hour had to be close to midnight before Kane and Bramlett rode up to the double log cabin with a dogtrot in between the two sides. The fella who had owned this spread before them had built the cabin and done a good job of it, erecting a sturdy structure. But it hadn’t helped his wife and son when they fell victim to a sudden fever, and the grieving man had wanted to move on. He had been more than willing to sell his place to a couple of cowboys who had been saving up their wages for just such a spread. Old Man Duggan hadn’t been happy when Kane and Bramlett told him they were quitting to start a ranch of their own.
That had been a couple of years earlier, before things had gotten so bad. Before the war had started brewing . . .
As Kane reined to a halt in front of the cabin, a voice came from the shadows inside the dogtrot. “Who’s there?” a man asked, and the low, dangerous tone of his voice made it clear that the question was backed up with a gun.
Kane recognized the voice of the stocky young cowboy he and Bramlett had hired a couple of weeks earlier. He said urgently, “Give me a hand, Tye. Will’s been shot.”
The young man, no more than five and a half feet tall but very broad-shouldered, stepped out of the dogtrot holding a Winchester. The moonlight fell on his fair hair and open, friendly face.
Kane and Bramlett knew him only as Tye, but his real name was Tyler Beaumont.
15
Frank Morgan, Ed MacDonald, and Pitch Carey followed the same trail they had been on earlier, before they had gotten sidetracked by the shoot-out along the creek. Carey held Dave Osmond on the horse in front of him. The riders moved fast but didn’t rush. They didn’t want the wounded man jolted around any more than was necessary.
In less than a half hour after the brief gun battle, they came to a gate in the barbed-wire fence. Two men stood there inside the wire, holding rifles. Before they even had a chance to call out a challenge, MacDonald shouted, “Brad, Joe, it’s us! Open the gate! Dave’s been shot!”
The two guards sprang to obey the order. They swung the gate back so that Frank and the others could ride through. Dog loped along behind them.
“The ranch house is only a couple of miles away now,” MacDonald told Frank. “Pitch, how’s Dave doing?”
“He came to enough to cuss a little,” Carey answered. “I think he’s passed out again, though.”
“All right, just hang on to him. Morgan, I’m riding ahead to warn them at the house that we’ve got an injured man. Just follow the trail. If you start to go wrong, Pitch can steer you back where you’re supposed to go.”
“Don’t worry about us,” Frank told the ramrod. “I can find the place.”
MacDonald nodded and then heeled his horse into a gallop. The drumming hoofbeats faded into the night as he rode toward the ranch house as fast as he could.
Frank and Pitch Carey followed at a more deliberate pace. The trail curved around some shallow hills. A few minutes later, the riders came in sight of some lights up ahead. As Frank watched, more lamps were lit, and he took that as a sign that MacDonald had reached the ranch headquarters and roused everyone there.
A good-sized group of men was waiting for them when they rode up to the sprawling ranch house. Several of them held lanterns. Others hurried forward. A rawboned man with a thick shock of white hair and a rugged, weathered face said, “Careful with him, boys. Don’t jostle him too much.”
The note of authority in the man’s voice told Frank he was probably Earl Duggan, the owner of the Slash D. The white-haired man stood by, watching intently as Dave Osmond was lifted down from the horse an
d carried into the house. Then a couple of the men helped Carey dismount and assisted him inside despite his protests that he was all right.
“Doc Yantis will need to take a look at that leg of yours, too, Pitch,” said the man Frank had pegged as Earl Duggan. He was about to follow the others in when he stopped on the porch and turned to look at Frank, who stood there holding Stormy’s reins. He asked, “You’re Morgan?”
Frank nodded. “That’s right.”
“I’m Earl Duggan,” the man said, confirming Frank’s guess. “Ed told me you fought side by side with my boys during the ruckus tonight. I’m obliged to you for that, Morgan.”
“Well, those bushwhackers were shooting at me, too,” Frank pointed out. “Only seemed fair that I shoot back at them.”
Duggan grunted, and it took Frank a second to realize that the sound had been a laugh. The rancher went on. “Ed said you had a run-in with Al Rawlings in Brownwood, too. You didn’t kill him, though.”
“Didn’t quite seem necessary.”
“You may regret that. I don’t believe in leavin’ a snake alive. I’d hate to think I was bit by the same rattler I could’ve stomped when I had the chance.”
“I guess we’ll see,” Frank said.
“Yeah. Come on in, Morgan. I’ve already told the cook to rustle some grub for you and the other fellas. Told him I’d cut his pigtail off if he didn’t hurry it up, damn his black Chinaman’s heart.”
Frank tied Stormy’s reins to a hitching post and followed Duggan into the house. He found that Dave Osmond had been taken straight to one of the bedrooms. By looking around, Frank could tell that no woman lived here. The furnishings were strictly utilitarian. There were no curtains on the windows, only oilcloth shades, and no pictures hung on the walls. The floor was bare wood. The house was big, though, as if it had been built for a family. He wondered if Duggan had ever had a wife and children.
Duggan checked to make sure that Dave Osmond had been made as comfortable as possible under the circumstances. Then he returned to the parlor, where Frank waited, and asked, “Care for a drink, Morgan?”
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