She dropped to a knee and raised her Winchester. “Keep going!” She pumped a cartridge into the rifle’s action and aimed up the slope behind her and Jay.
Jay wheeled and started running up the next rise, carpeted in fine sandstone gravel and abutted with rocks and boulders. Behind her, the thunder of horse hooves grew louder until she knew the men were topping the first steep rise from the cabin.
She gave a little hitch in her step when Myra’s rifle thundered.
A horse whinnied shrilly. A man cursed. It was followed by the metallic rasp of Myra pumping a fresh round into the Winchester’s breech and the tinkle of the spent casing clattering onto the rocks at her feet.
“She’s got a rifle, dammit!” yelled one of Reed’s men a quarter second before Myra threw another round at them, and then another. She fired one more, causing panicked shouting and a chaotic clattering of hooves up the previous rise.
Ahead, Jay saw the silhouette of a horse shuffling its feet nervously where it was tied to a twisted cedar angling out from the base of a low sandstone ridge capping the rise. Jay ripped the reins off the cedar. As she did, she heard the crunch of gravel as Myra ran up the rise behind her, breathing hard.
The shooting had stopped. Jay could hear the shuffling of hooves and the bellowing of angry curses beyond the previous rise as Reed’s men gathered themselves, angrily discouraged by Myra’s Winchester.
“Climb up on the filly, Jay,” Myra said, casting a cautious glance over her shoulder. “I’ll swing up behind you.”
A sharp flash appeared on the previous ridge. It was followed by a rifle’s wail. The bullet shrieked off a rock near Jay and Myra, both of whom sucked sharp, startled breaths.
“Where in the hell are we going?” Jay said as she toed a stirrup and swung up into the leather.
“I don’t know.” Myra stepped onto a rock and then leaped up onto the filly’s back, settling her weight behind Jay. “I have no idea what’s out here. We’ll just follow the trail and hope we can outrun these sons of fork-tailed devils!”
“I hope we can!” Jay said, reining the filly around and putting it onto the narrow trail that appeared to drop into yet another shallow canyon.
Myra racked another round into her Winchester’s breech. “I’ll cover us from behind!”
“I know you will, honey,” Jay said, giving an ironic laugh despite the terror sparking in her nerves and veins. “I know you will!”
Myra had sand—Jay would give her that. In fact, Jay couldn’t think of another young lady with whom she’d rather be facing such tall odds.
The moonlight shone on the winding trail ahead. The filly followed it sure-footedly, so Jay gave the horse its head. It could see better than Jay could. The horse thundered into the next canyon, then climbed the opposite side at an angle, following the trail.
As it climbed, Jay and Myra looked back to see the shadows of Reed’s men outlined against the starry sky. They were just then reaching the previous rise and dropping down the near side—a long, wriggling snake glistening in the starlight and moonlight winking off tack chains, bits, and guns.
When Jay and Myra gained the next ridge, then galloped along its top, following what was probably an old hunting or prospecting trail, Myra twisted around to her left and raised the Winchester to her shoulder.
“Stick your finger in your ear, Jay!”
Jay did as she’d been instructed. Still, the Winchester’s bellow was sharp in that ear, and the sharp tang of gunpowder assaulted her nostrils. Myra’s rifle gave another cracking report. Keeping her left index finger in her left ear, Jay watched one of the riders just then traversing the canyon below bound sideways off his horse with a shrill, agonized cry. Moonlight flashed off the rifle the man tossed in the air as he and the horse tumbled into the darkness beside the trail.
The others yelled and cursed.
“Damn,” Jay said. “You’re good with that thing!”
“Where I come from, a girl had to be!”
“Totally understand!”
The trail dropped again. At the bottom, they crossed a narrow, brush and rock-choked wash, then started up the other side. The filly was blowing hard. Jay could feel the horse’s gait become strained. As she glanced anxiously behind, she saw the shadows of their pursuers gaining the previous ridge and start down the near side, hot on Jay and Myra’s heels.
“We’re not gonna make it, hon,” Jay said. “The filly’s going to collapse!”
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
Myra stared straight up the slope they were galloping north on. Jaycee looked that way to see a high ridge of rock. It was shaped like a short, tall boat in the darkness. There was something unnatural about its appearance. That ridge was flanked by yet another, steeper ridge.
“Your guess is as good as mine!” Jay said. “Stop.”
“What?”
“Stop! We’ll make a stand!”
Jay reluctantly reined in the blowing filly. It was hard to stop with men intending to kill you hard on your trail, but she figured it was better to stop when it was Myra’s idea rather than the horse’s.
Myra leaped off the horse behind Jay. Jay scrambled out of the saddle. Myra spanked the filly’s behind with the flat of her hand and then bolted forward toward the tall, boat-shaped ridge.
“Where to?” Jay asked.
“Climb!”
“Oh, boy!”
Jay followed Myra, who began scrambling up the side of the ridge. Jay quickly saw that the ridge was formed of many medium-size rocks. It was a tailing pile from a mine. Mines peppered the Front Range around Camp Collins, and this was likely one of the several abandoned mines near Horsetooth Rock, which Jay could see humping up darkly just over her left shoulder, maybe a mile away.
The formation had gotten its name for good reason. The solid rock escarpment was shaped like three giant horse teeth jutting at the vault of flickering starlight that silhouetted it.
Hoof thuds rose behind Jay.
“Oh, God!” she groaned under her breath.
“Keep climbing, Jay!”
“I’m climbing, hon. I’m climbing!”
She and Myra both gave clipped screams as a bullet cracked off a rock to their left, followed by the screech of a rifle below and behind them. Reed and his men were shouting now as they closed on the base of the ridge. Another bullet slammed into a rock to Jay’s right. The rifle wailed angrily.
“Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy,” Jay said, scrambling up the rocks and wishing she was wearing jeans like Myra was. Having to escape a kidnapping in the rugged mountains was an occasion for practical attire if there ever was one. A dress of any kind, however fashionable, was exactly not the appropriate attire.
More bullets spanged off rocks around her and Myra before they gained the top of the tailing pile. Jay dropped to her hands and knees, keeping her head down as the rifles belched below. Myra swung around, dropped to a knee, and went to work with the Winchester, shooting back down the steep, rocky slope. Jay glanced between the rocks at the lip of the pile, staring down toward the shooters. Myra’s first couple of shots scattered the Tumbling Box H riders—black shadows scrambling for cover in the moonlit rocks around the base of the pile.
Myra fired another round, evoking a sharp, shrill curse from below.
Myra pulled the Winchester down and snickered. “Got one!”
She rolled onto her side and reached into a denim pocket for a handful of fresh cartridges.
“Nice shooting,” Jay said. “But how long can you hold them off?”
Myra’s breathless voice came hard and angry. “Well, I got one or two between here and the cabin. I pinked another one just now, so they’re down to probably only two or three operational shooters by now. If the others show their heads, I’ll blow them off, and then we’ll be dancing over their rotten, no-good carcasses!”
“I don’t think so.”
Just then Jay had heard a spur chime behind her. She saw a shadow pass through the
moonlight over her left shoulder. A tall figure crouched over Myra, jerked the rifle out of her hands. Cartridges clattered onto the rocky ground. Myra cursed, then grunted as the man thrust the rifle’s stock out and up against Myra’s jaw.
The girl gave a clipped yowl, then flopped onto her back and lay still.
Jay’s heart thudded as she lay on her right hip and elbow, staring up as Cisco Walsh turned toward her, his eyes glinting devilishly in the silver moonlight beneath the narrow brim of his brown bowler. He thrust up a hand, stretched his lips back away from his white teeth, and said, “Hold your fire! It’s Walsh! I got the situation under control!”
He was glaring down at Jay staring in wide-eyed shock back up at the Camp Collins marshal. “You made a big mistake, Jay. A big, big mistake!”
“Cisco!”
Walsh turned to one of the two other men Jay just realized was flanking him, and said, “Grab the girl. I got this one.”
Jay opened her mouth to speak, but fear rendered her mute.
Walsh reached down, grabbed her wrist, and brusquely pulled her to her feet. He stepped behind her and gave her a forward shove. She stumbled away from the crest of the tailing pile. Ahead of her lay a ramshackle log cabin hunched near the base of the higher ridge and roughly a hundred feet away from her, silhouetted in the pearl moonlight. Pale smoke curled from a chimney pipe. The small, low, sashed windows were lit with weak umber lamplight.
Jay realized with a chill that she and Myra had unwittingly wandered into Walsh’s outlaw camp.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, as the old saw went.
Walsh stepped up beside Jay and squeezed her arm. Through gritted teeth, keeping his voice low, he said, “Why couldn’t you listen to me?”
“Go to hell,” Jay said tightly as one of the other two men stepped up to her right, carrying Myra belly down over his right shoulder, holding a rifle in his other hand. He, too, was heading toward the cabin. He wore a badge on his vest. Jay glanced at the other men walking a little behind Walsh and to his left. That man, too, had a badge on his vest.
“Oh, my God,” she muttered.
“You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into, riding out here,” Walsh said. “No idea at all!”
“I think I do, Cisco,” Jay said with toneless defiance. “Sadly, I think I do.”
Hooves drummed. Jay turned to see four riders gallop up the trail that wound around the tailing pile. The riders remaining from the pack of those who’d chased her and Myra from the other cabin horseshoed at the base of the ridge galloped toward the cabin, their dust rising like fog in the moonlight.
Jay glanced at the other two men with her and Walsh, and said, “They’re sheriff’s deputies, aren’t they? That’s why they wouldn’t help Delbert Thayer.”
“Don’t dig your grave any deeper, Jay,” Walsh said, giving her another shove.
Jay stumbled forward, got her feet beneath her, and swung angrily around to face the marshal. “Where’s Delbert, Cisco? Is he part of this, too?”
Walsh stopped. He stared grimly down at Jay, his eyes glinting again like a devil’s eyes in the silvery wash of moonlight. “Thayer’s dead, Jay. Just like you and the girl, he got too close. And he’s feeding the buzzards now for his trouble.”
Jay bit down on a knuckle of her right hand to quell a sob. Guilt wrapped its angry black fist around her. She’d gotten the poor boy killed!
Again, Walsh shook his head and gritted his teeth. “Why in the hell didn’t you listen to me, Jay? I can’t help you anymore. Now you’re going to be joining young Thayer, and it’s all your own damn fault!”
CHAPTER 31
Well, at least the killers’ ultimatum eased the tension a little, Slash thought as he and Pecos positioned the jail wagon in a horseshoe of a mostly dry, sandy wash. He didn’t doubt the killers would keep their word and not attack until after midnight. That had made the ride through the long, hot, sunhammered afternoon less nerve-wracking if not peaceful. He and the other members of their party didn’t find themselves tensely, constantly scanning the horizon in all directions, looking for signs of the stalking human wolves.
Oh, they were out there, all right, keeping just out of rifle range. But the threat had been postponed. Around midnight and afterward would be the time to start worrying again, and watching for them again . . .
It was a miserable damn country to hold off a dozen savage killers.
The terrain out here, roughly forty miles north of Cheyenne now, was flat and featureless. An endless carpet of green and purple sage, buck brush, and prickly pear swept away in all directions. There were bluffs in the distance that would offer a better, safer camp than the one Slash and Pecos had ended up choosing now, out on the flat by the wash, but reaching them in the wagon would be a longshot. The terrain was relatively flat, but it was also rough with knee-high sage and rocks, and cut with shallow washes made perilous by deep sand and alkali.
They had little cover here except the wash itself, but they would be easily surrounded and shot to ribbons. Here, they didn’t stand a chance. At least the wash offered a slender trickle of water, and they needed water now after the long, hot, miserable day.
Lacking cover from the killers, there was really only one thing to do. Slash didn’t even discuss it with Pecos. His partner knew what needed to be done as well as he himself did. They finished setting up camp, building a low fire for coffee and supper, emptying the three jailed killers’ slop buckets, and shoving food to the surly-eyed savages through the cracked door. The three coyotes, battered and bloody, smoked cigarettes and glared. Slash tended to them while Pecos stood back, holding his shotgun on the sullen trio. Talon Chaney was even more sullen than before since he was now, like Frank Beecher, sporting only one earlobe, thanks to Slash’s bullet through the bars earlier.
When Slash had tended the killers, quickly locking the door again and pocketing the key, he and Pecos set to work cleaning and loading their pistols and rifles. Pecos took special care with his sawed-off ten-gauge, snapping it back together, shoving a fresh wad into each barrel, and snapping the big popper closed.
“What’s going on?” Jenny Claymore asked them, casting her puzzled gaze between the two ex-cutthroats.
She and Glenn Larsen had been sitting back against their saddles, eating their bowls of beans and fatback with fried corncakes, the fire’s low flames flashing in their eyes as they’d watched the two strangely silent and purposeful older men.
Slash and Pecos looked at each other.
Slash sucked on the quirley dangling from a corner of his mouth as he ran his oiled rag down his Winchester’s forestock. “We’re takin’ it to them.”
Jenny and Larsen looked at each other as though waiting for the other to translate.
Pecos translated for them. “The war. We’re takin’ it to them.”
“What’re you talking about?” Larsen asked.
Slash shrugged as he glanced around the fire. The sun was down, but a weak green and salmon light lingered over the land. “Look around. We got no cover out here. If we let them come here . . . bring the battle to us . . . we wouldn’t have a chance.”
“So we’re going to take the battle to where they’ve camped,” Slash said.
“You’re gonna what?” Chaney exclaimed from inside the jail wagon, parked fifty feet to the north of the campfire, near where Slash and Pecos had tied the horses to picket pins.
“Shut up over there or I’ll shoot you in the kneecap,” Slash said. Turning to Larsen and Jenny, he said, “You two stay here with the wagon. Don’t go near it. Remember, they can grab you through the bars if you get too close. Ignore them no matter what they say or do. I’m going to keep the key to the cage with me.”
Larsen said, “Listen, fellas, that just sounds crazy to me. You’re only two men. Two against a dozen.”
“Here, we’d be four against a dozen with damn little cover,” Pecos pointed out. “Slash and me have chosen the hand with the best odds. Not that either one is a r
oyal flush. Far from it.”
“Two pair, maybe,” Slash said with an ironic snort. “Just remember to stay away from that wagon.”
“What happens if you don’t come back?” Larsen asked.
Slash and Pecos shared a look.
Slash turned back to Larsen and said, “Kill them.” He cast his gaze toward the jail wagon. “Throw your saddle on one of the geldings and ride south as fast as you can. We’ll likely be able to thin their ranks a little, before . . .”
Again, he glanced at Pecos, who glanced back at him, flushed, then looked at the ground.
“What’d he say?” asked one of the prisoners. It was a whisper, so it was hard to tell which one had asked the question.
One of the others muttered a response too quietly for Slash to hear.
“To what?” The exclamation was from Black Pot.
Pecos scowled and said, “One more word from the jail wagon, and I’m gonna let Slash come over there and blow a couple toes off.”
A couple of softly whispered curses were the only response. Slash could see the prisoners’ slumped silhouettes and the orange coals of their cigarettes.
Jenny looked anxiously up at the ex-cutthroats and said, “How will you ever find them? They could be anywhere out there.” She cast her gaze into the thickening darkness beyond the camp.
“We already know where to find them, Jenny,” Pecos told her in a gentle voice. “They’re camped at the base of a bluff to the northwest. We seen the smoke from their cook fire earlier.”
“How can you be sure they’re all in one group?” Larsen asked. “They could be spread out, keeping an eye on us from several different locations.”
Slash grabbed his saddle and blanket up off the ground and started carrying the tack toward his horse. “We can’t be sure.”
“Just a chance we have to take,” Pecos said, swinging his shotgun’s lanyard over his head and right shoulder, letting the big Richards hang barrel down behind his back. He grabbed his own saddle and headed toward his horse. “Give us a few hours. If we’re not back by midnight, shoot the prisoners and light a shuck for Cheyenne.”
The Wicked Die Twice Page 24