Sidewinders:#3: Cutthroat Canyon

by Johnstone, William W.

  “Reckon we’ll ever get all our gear back?” Scratch asked. “Not that it’s really important, I reckon, but…”

  “I know what you mean,” Bo said. “I’d like to have my own guns and boots back. We can always replace whatever we lost later, though.”

  Scratch grinned. “’Specially if we wind up ownin’ a share of a gold mine.”

  Bo looked over at him with a frown. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, I was just thinkin’…Luz intends to claim a share in the mine for helpin’ these folks, and it seems to me that we’ve already done a whole heap more to fight Davidson than she has.”

  “She helped rescue us when we were about to be massacred by that machine gun.”

  “That’s true,” Scratch admitted. “And I don’t really care how big the shares are. It just seems to me like we ought to get somethin’ for our trouble. Maybe a couple o’ saddlebags full of gold ore, or somethin’ like that.”

  “We’ll worry about that later,” Bo said. “First, we have to get rid of Davidson.”

  “And live through whatever’s comin’.”

  “Yeah,” Bo said. “Being alive would make it a lot easier to spend any gold we might happen to wind up with.”

  He hadn’t given any real thought to the riches to be found in Cutthroat Canyon when he’d decided that Davidson’s reign of terror had to be ended. As far as he was concerned, the villagers from San Ramon could have the mine. After all these years of drifting, the last thing Bo wanted was to be tied down to some sort of business, and he’d be willing to wager that Scratch felt the same way. The thought of all that gold might be appealing to Scratch right now, but that appeal would wane in a hurry once the urge to roam came over the silver-haired Texan again, as it was bound to do.

  They climbed back to the spot that gave them a good view of the canyon and the surrounding area. Again being careful not to skylight themselves or let the sun glint on their rifle barrels, they searched the landscape with their eyes. After a few minutes, Scratch said, “There’s a ridge about five hundred yards west of here. Couple of riders just poked their heads above it for a second.”

  Bo trusted Scratch’s eyes. The silver-haired Texan’s vision was as keen as an eagle’s, despite his age. Bo said, “It was probably two of Davidson’s other men. I don’t reckon Skinner would make a mistake like that.”

  “Nope. Nor the kid either, I’ll bet. But that’s bound to be the search party. Who else’d be ridin’ around this Godforsaken wilderness today?”

  “Rurales maybe?” Bo suggested.

  “They wear those gray, steeple-crowned sombreros, remember? These fellas had on regular Stetsons.”

  Bo nodded. The Mexican rural police wore that distinctive headgear, all right, just as Scratch said. And even though, as the name of their force indicated, they were supposed to patrol the frontier areas, the Rurales usually stayed closer to the settlements. Out in the middle of nowhere, there weren’t enough people to offer them bribes.

  “Which way were they going?” Bo asked.

  “Headed yonderways,” Scratch replied with a wave of his hand toward the southwest. “Don’t I recollect Teresa sayin’ something about a natural bridge over there?”

  “You do,” Bo replied as a grin slowly formed on his face. “There’s a big gully, and that bridge is the easiest way over it.”

  “Once those fellas are out on the bridge, there wouldn’t be any place for ’em to go if somebody was to throw down on ’em. Can we get there in time, though?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Bo said.

  Moving quickly now, they headed across country toward the natural bridge Teresa had mentioned. Such formations were fairly common in rocky, mountainous country. Bo had seen a number of them in Utah and Arizona.

  The idea of bushwhacking the hunters didn’t sit well with him. Time and again, this ruckus with Davidson had forced him to do things he didn’t like to do. Bo knew he would do whatever was necessary, though, to break the man’s hold on the valley and its people. After the brutality in which Davidson had engaged, Bo wouldn’t lose any sleep over ventilating some of the mine owner’s hired guns.

  And shooting Jim Skinner would be no different than shooting a mad dog, he reminded himself.

  Since they didn’t know the area as well as Teresa, they had to backtrack a couple of times when the trails they were following wound up in dead ends. Maybe they should have brought her with them after all, Bo thought, although he still believed his reasoning was sound. Once the bullets started to fly, he and Scratch didn’t need to be thinking about anything except staying alive and killing their enemies.

  The natural bridge was empty when they finally reached it, and Bo didn’t see any signs to indicate that anyone had crossed it recently. A horse might kick over a rock so that its damp underside showed, or an iron shoe could nick a stone and leave a mark. Bo didn’t see anything like that here, and Scratch confirmed his opinion.

  The bridge was an arch of stone that spanned a gully about forty feet deep. It was fifteen or sixteen feet wide, plenty big enough for men to ride over it in single file. Two men could ride over it side by side if they had to, although that would be riskier with the dangerous drop into the gully yawning on either side.

  “What do you think?” Scratch asked. “One man at each end of the bridge, so they’ll be caught between a rock and a hard place?”

  Bo thought about it for a second, and then nodded. “Which end do you want?”

  “I’ll take the other one. I see some rocks over yonder I can fort up in.”

  Bo found a good place for himself in the rocks near the eastern end of the bridge, while Scratch trotted to the other side. Within minutes, both Texans were well hidden, waiting for Davidson’s men to show up.

  They didn’t have to wait very long. Bo estimated that less than fifteen minutes had passed when he heard horseshoes clinking against stone not far away. The hoofbeats grew louder, and then four riders came into view.

  Bo tensed as he realized that Skinner and Douglas weren’t among them. He recognized the four men as some of Davidson’s mine supervisors, drafted to be manhunters instead. They were hard-faced men, capable of whatever brutal violence was necessary, but they weren’t professional killers like Skinner and the kid. Bo realized that he couldn’t cut down on them without warning.

  He knew Scratch would wait for him to start the ball and would follow his lead, whatever it was. He stayed hidden until the four riders had moved out onto the natural bridge, then stood up, leveled his rifle at them, and shouted, “Hold it right there!”

  The men reined their horses to a halt and jerked around in their saddles, reaching for their guns as they did so. They froze as Scratch called from the other side of the gully, “First man who touches iron, I’ll blow him outta the saddle!”

  Bo felt the skin on the back of his neck crawling. This had to be a trap. Skinner had set it, using these four men as bait. But the Texans needed the guns and ammunition the men were carrying, so they had to risk it.

  “Drop your guns and then get off those horses!” Bo ordered. “You’ll be walking back to Cutthroat Canyon!”

  “Damn it, Burl, we gonna let them get away with this?” one of the men demanded of a companion.

  The man called Burl glared at Bo, but said, “Don’t look like we’ve got much choice. They got the drop on us.”

  He untied the thong holding the holster to his leg, then unbuckled the gunbelt, dangled it from his hand, and let it fall to the rock bridge. When he reached for the Winchester that stuck up from a saddle boot, Bo warned, “Careful with that rifle. Don’t make my trigger finger get touchy.”

  Burl gripped the Winchester by the breech, slid it from its sheath, and then held it by the barrel as he lowered it to the bridge. The other three men followed suit, carefully disarming themselves.

  Bo wanted the horses because he figured the extra ammunition the men had brought with them would be in the saddlebags. “Get down and walk over her
e,” he told them.

  “You can’t make us walk all the way back to the mine!” one of the men complained. “Hell, it must be more than two miles!”

  “Yeah, well, when you get there, maybe your sore feet will remind you that you shouldn’t be working for a skunk like Davidson,” Bo said.

  “You used to work for him yourself, mister,” the man pointed out.

  “Only until I found out what sort of man he really is. You already knew, so you don’t have that excuse.” Bo gestured curtly with the rifle barrel. “Move!”

  Grumbling and taking their time about it, the men dismounted. Bo was surprised that Skinner and Douglas hadn’t shown up by now. Maybe he and Scratch could get away with the horses and the guns after all, and send these men on a long, painful trek back to Cutthroat Canyon.

  He should have known better than to hope for such a stroke of luck, he thought a second later. From the corner of his eye, he caught the faintest wink of reflected light from the rugged slope above him and to the right. He twisted sharply to one side as a gun boomed, the report echoing back from the surrounding mountains.

  As he hit the ground, a bullet whipped past his ear and slammed into the rocks, throwing grit and splinters of stone into the air. Bo rolled behind a boulder, and as he did so, he saw the men on the natural bridge grabbing for the guns they had dropped. He snapped a shot at them, the slug whining off the bridge.

  On the other side of the gully, Scratch had begun firing as well, but he aimed his shots upward at whoever had just bushwhacked Bo. That had to be Skinner or Douglas or both gunmen, Bo thought. It had taken them that long to get into position while the others were crossing the bridge.

  The man called Burl emptied his six-gun toward Bo, but the bullets all ricocheted harmlessly from the rocks. When Burl tried to leap into the saddle, Bo tracked him with the Winchester and squeezed off a shot.

  Burl’s back arched as he let out a cry of pain. He hung there like that for a second, poised beside his horse with one foot in the stirrup, before he toppled backward off the bridge. His scream lasted only a second before his body crunched into the rocky bottom of the gully forty feet below.

  Another bullet from above came too close to Bo for comfort, forcing him to scramble for better cover. He stretched out under the overhang of a rock that shielded him from the bushwhacker’s bullets. From this position, he could also fire through the narrow gap between two other rocks at the men on the bridge.

  One of them made it into the saddle, but his mount, spooked by the gunfire, skittishly danced too close to the edge. The horse neighed shrilly in panic as its hooves slid out from under it. The rider tried to throw himself out of the saddle, but he was too late. Man and horse both went over the edge.

  Bo fired and saw another man double over in agony as the slug punched into his guts. That left just one man on the bridge. Firing a revolver as he ran, he charged toward the western end where Scratch had hidden in the rocks. Scratch put a round from the Winchester into the man’s chest that knocked him backward. He landed with his arms and legs splayed out and didn’t move again.

  That left the bushwhackers high above the gully. Bo rolled over and tried to find an angle from which he could draw a bead on them, but the effort was futile. They couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see them.

  They could sling plenty of lead in his direction, though, probably in hopes that the slugs would bounce around among the rocks and a ricochet would get him. Bo kept his head low and listened to the spent bullets zinging around him. Across the gully, Scratch tried to provide some covering fire, but he obviously couldn’t get a good angle on the bushwhackers either.

  Bo could hear two different guns up there, so he was confident the hidden riflemen were Skinner and Douglas. For the moment it was a standoff, and Bo wondered how long they would keep up the siege. He and Scratch had limited ammunition, but Skinner and Douglas might not know that.

  After a few minutes, the shooting died away. Bo and Scratch had already stopped firing to conserve bullets. Silence settled down over the gully and the natural stone bridge that spanned it.

  The three remaining horses had crossed the bridge and stampeded up the trail on the other side, trying to get as far away from the shooting as they could, so now it was just Bo and Scratch, the bushwhackers hidden above them—and the men in the gully who were dying or already dead.

  The one Bo had shot in the belly let out a groan. With a wound like that, it would take a while for him to cross the divide. Bo thought about putting a bullet in his head to end his suffering.

  He didn’t have to. One of the hidden riflemen fired suddenly, the whipcrack of sound echoing through the gully. The wounded man’s head jerked, and blood poured out of the hole that had appeared in his temple. One leg kicked, and then he was still.

  Douglas had to be responsible for that, Bo thought. He had sensed that the kid had a few shreds of decency left, even though they weren’t enough to make him turn against Davidson. Jim Skinner sure wouldn’t have performed such a gesture of mercy. Someone else’s suffering meant nothing to him.

  Silence reigned once again along the gully. Bo listened intently, thinking that maybe Skinner and Douglas were trying to work their way down to where they could get better shots at the Texans. Instead of rocks clattering down the slope, though, what he heard after several minutes was the swift rataplan of hoofbeats.

  Someone was riding away.

  Two horses, from the sound of it, Bo told himself—but that didn’t mean that both gunmen were leaving. This could be a trick as well. Skinner could have sent Douglas back to the horses with orders to ride off and take the other mount with him. Bo wasn’t going to budge from concealment until he was more confident that Skinner and the kid were both gone, and he knew Scratch wouldn’t either.

  The heat continued to grow more oppressive. Sweat trickled down Bo’s forehead and into his eyes. He wiped them with his sleeve. Minutes stretched out until they seemed like hours.

  “I’m comin’ out, partner,” Scratch called at last. “I reckon they’ve lit a shuck.”

  Bo was convinced of that by now himself, so he said, “All right. But be ready to dive for cover if you have to.”

  “I always am,” Scratch replied with a chuckle.

  He stepped out from the rocks at the far end of the natural bridge. Bo emerged from hiding as well, swinging up the Winchester toward the last place where he had seen the bushwhackers. No shots sounded.

  “Well, we whittled down the odds a mite,” Scratch said as he started out onto the bridge. He checked the last man he had shot. “This fella’s dead. Got a box of forty-fives in his pocket. We can use ’em.”

  “We’ll gather up all the guns and ammunition and take them with us,” Bo said as he stood at the eastern end of the bridge, swiveling his head around so that he could watch for trouble. “Those horses that ran off probably didn’t go very far either. We’ll see if we can find them.”

  He looked down into the gully at the two men and the horse. They all lay there unmoving, busted up by the fall. Bo saw pools of blood around the heads of the men.

  Scratch climbed down there and salvaged what he could, coming back up with two belted Colts and a Winchester, as well as the saddlebags from the dead horse. He had the saddlebags draped over one shoulder, the gunbelts over the other.

  “You look like you’re armed for bear,” Bo commented as his old friend joined him at the eastern end of the bridge.

  “More like coyote, or even skunk, since we’re talkin’ about Davidson,” Scratch said. “Don’t insult the bears.”

  Bo grinned, but before he could say anything else, he lifted his head and his eyes narrowed as he heard the distant popping of gunshots.

  “Son of a bitch!” Scratch exclaimed. “I hear ’em, too. Sounds like they’re comin’ from—”

  “The place we left the others,” Bo finished.

  CHAPTER 27

  They were too far away to get back to the hideout in a hurry. And after a few mom
ents, the shooting stopped. The following silence was like a dagger in the hearts of Bo and Scratch.

  “Let’s see if we can find those horses,” Bo said. “If we can, they’ll get us back there quicker.”

  “Yeah. Might make a difference.”

  Scratch didn’t sound convinced of that, however.

  They hurried across the bridge, and followed the trail on the other side around several bends before they came across the three surviving mounts that Davidson’s men had been riding. The horses had stopped to crop at some tufts of hardy grass that grew in the stony ground alongside the trail.

  Bo and Scratch approached the animals carefully, not wanting to spook them again. Both of the Texans had decades of experience at handling horses, so they were able to walk up and take hold of the reins, even though the skittish horses rolled their eyes a little. Bo and Scratch had buckled on the gunbelts Scratch had retrieved from two of the corpses; they slung the extra gunbelts and the saddlebags on the back of the extra horse.

  Mounting up, they rode back across the rock bridge over the gully and started toward the hideout. They couldn’t take the exact same route they had used to get here, since they had been on foot then. Again, not knowing the area as well as Teresa did, they had to use a process of trial and error to find their way, but managed to keep going in the right general direction most of the time.

  Silence still hung ominously over the hot, rugged landscape. They spotted some familiar landscapes, and a few minutes later found themselves approaching the narrow cleft through the rocks that led to the hidden spring and clearing. Bo lifted a hand in a signal to stop.

  He and Scratch reined in. Scratch’s voice was a whisper as he asked, “You reckon Davidson left gunmen waitin’ in there for us?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Bo replied. “But the only way to find out what happened to Teresa and the others—”

  “Is to go in there,” Scratch finished. “Yeah, I know. I’ll go first. You stay out here until I give you the all clear.”