by Marsha Ward
“Brownie, you’re one good cow pony.” Carl patted his mount. “Let’s get that steer up there.”
Ducking under the overhanging limb of a juniper, Carl and the brown horse went after yet another errant steer.
~~~
Marie looked around her, peering through the berry-laden bushes as she popped a blackberry into her mouth. “Where’s Julianna? Has that girl wandered off again?”
“I haven’t seen her since we moved into this gully. I reckon we’d best go back and find her.” Ellen craned her neck to examine the brambles through which they had come.
“Oh, let her find us. I’m tired of coaxing her to keep up.”
“Marie, what if the Indians get her? Your ma will have our hides. Besides, we’ve got enough berries for the pies.”
“Well, we have come pretty far today. You’re right. We’d better go back.” Marie turned to un-snag her apron from a bramble, and smoothed it down over her skirt. She straightened up and tugged her sunbonnet into place, then turned again and looked toward her friend.
Ellen stood in front of a big black horse, her hands pinioned behind her back. The scruffy, thickset man who held her covered her mouth with his massive hand. Ellen struggled, and her abductor laughed as the berries in her pail scattered on the ground.
Marie screamed, and the cry echoed back, bouncing on the walls of the canyon. A heavy hand clamped over her own mouth, and she tried to bite it, but the man only let go and slapped her across the mouth. She fell, scraping her arm on a rock as she went down. She screamed again, and the man reached down and yanked her to her feet. He turned her roughly around and tied her hands, laughing.
“Go ahead and scream till you’re blue in the face, girlie. Ain’t nobody out here to give a listen. ‘Course, if your noise gets on my nerves, I’ll slug you again.” He tested the security of his knots, then whipped her around and leered at her, sunken blue eyes beneath shaggy eyebrows looking her up and down. His dirty brown hair hung to his shoulders, matted and tangled, and his beard was stained with tobacco juice and old bits of food.
Marie choked back her next scream, almost retching at the sight of her attacker.
“Rankin, you gag her up. No telling how far those cries will carry in this still air. We ain’t far enough behind them riders to take a chance.” Willy held his hand over Ellen’s mouth, and he grinned at her as he let go. “You cry out and you’ll get the same treatment as your friend. I ain’t opposed to taming you good and proper, you little wildcat.”
He tied Ellen’s hands, then stuffed a dirty neckerchief into her mouth and shoved her toward his horse.
“We’re going to take a little ride,” he chortled. He mounted his horse and hauled Ellen up into the saddle in front of him. Rankin pushed Marie over to his horse and stepped into his saddle.
“You let loose a peep and I’ll yank out your hair,” he threatened the terrified girl. Then he bent down and jerked her up into his filthy arms.
Julianna scrambled behind a boulder as the men rode out of the ravine with their captives. She watched, breathless, as they passed three feet in front of her hiding place, saddle leather creaking with the added weight of the two girls. In silence she waited, long agonizing minutes until she was sure the men were gone, then she crept out from behind the rock and set off for home, running as best she could down the hills that lay in her path, heart thumping, pounding, choking up into her throat.
She heard riders coming behind her, and she darted into a clump of trees, hoping they hadn’t seen her yet. Trying not to breathe aloud, she gulped air, waiting for them to capture her. Then, as they came alongside her place of concealment, she recognized the men, and cried out, “Papa, Papa! Help them! They been carried off!”
Chapter 19
“Julianna! Daughter, you’re a welcome sight.” Rod reined in his horse as his youngest child dashed from behind the tree. “You’re not out here alone, are you?” He dismounted, and Julianna flung herself into his arms, sobbing.
“Oh Papa, they been took away.” She burrowed her face into his chest. “We was picking blackberries, and two mangy old men came up and grabbed ‘em. I heard ‘em screaming and I hid when they went by. Oh Papa, you got to go after ‘em!”
“Whoa there, Jule. Who got took?” Rod tried to calm the hysterical child.
“Marie and Ellen. They took ‘em up toward the mountain.” She waved her hand toward the looming Greenhorn.
Carl blanched and wheeled his horse back the way they had come, and James followed closely behind him.
Rod boosted Julianna up onto Albert’s horse. “Clay, Albert, take your sister home. If there are only two of them acting so bold this close to the headquarters, there’s likely more around somewhere. You stay there and see that your ma’s safe.”
Rod mounted his horse as his two younger sons rode down the mountain with their sister. He motioned up the trail with his head, and spoke to the others. “We’d best catch up to the boys, or they’ll have the whole situation arranged without our help.” Rod rode off in the direction Carl and James had taken.
Tilden looked at Dawes. Pete nodded his head in the same direction. “Let’s go.” They followed Rod and the other riders up the trail.
~~~
Carl drew rein in the blackberry canyon. Ellen’s pail lay in the path, contents scattered and mashed into the dirt.
“They took them here, but they didn’t linger,” he told James through tight lips.
“We’d best wait for Rulon. He’s the best tracker of us all.”
“I’m good enough to follow these hair-bellied four-flushers. I ain’t waiting for Rulon. They’ve got Ellen.”
Carl alighted from his horse and fingered the hoof marks left by the kidnappers’ horses. “Only one bug has scooted through here. They ain’t been gone long.” He stepped into the saddle. “Come on, James. Let’s get them scoundrels.”
James checked his pistol load, and made sure the rifle was secure in the saddle scabbard. “How are your firearms?” he asked Carl.
His brother drew his pistol and spun the cylinder. “It’s full but for one chamber.” Turning in the saddle, he loosened the flap of a saddlebag and removed the Smith and Wesson. “This one’s ready to go. I keep all six chambers loaded, just for varmints.” He tucked it down behind his waistband, then checked the rifle in his scabbard. “We’d best get a move on,” he said, frowning. “Every minute their lead gets longer.” He put spurs to the horse’s flanks and followed the trail out of the canyon.
Heading south, he skirted the boulder Julianna had used for cover and picked up the tracks of the abductors. James came behind, and they took the trail leading upward, into the pine forest, then past a deep canyon that reached back up the mountain. The trail forked, and Carl took the branch that stretched into the forest, where the path soon lay under a thick layer of pine needles.
“I lost ‘em,” he sputtered, and circled his horse back to cast around for the tracks. He glanced up and saw his father and the other riders coming through the trees. “Well, here’s Rulon’s chance to go to work,” he muttered.
When Rulon was in hailing distance, Carl called out to him. “I lost the trail. You been tracking?”
Rulon grinned. “Does a red hound have fleas? You missed a turn back yonder. They headed straight into the canyon. I reckon they know you’re following them now.”
“Where they going? We ain’t been on this section of the mountain.”
Sourdough Smith, the cook Bill Henry had brought along, turned over the lump of plug tobacco in his cheek. “I reckon they’re heading for an old cabin up there, below the crest of the ridge. I done some trapping through here, years ago.” He spit a stream of tobacco juice into the brush. “I reckon I can still find it, if you want me to take you there.”
“You find it,” Carl said. “I’ll be right behind you. Nobody but a lowdown snake abuses a woman where I come from.”
Rod looked around at the riders. “I know I’m not paying soldier’s wages, but who
will stand with me and my boys to get those girls back?”
Bill Henry said, “We go after scum like that for free down in Texas.” He turned to the others. “Any of you want to stay behind, you’re declaring yourselves in favor of snakes and lowlifes.”
Pete Dawes looked around at the sober-eyed Owen men. “Well, I shoot any snakes I come across,” he said, spreading his lips open across his teeth.
“I ain’t in favor of no lowlifes,” grunted Frank Tilden.
Chico Henderson checked his revolver. “Let’s go.”
“You got my gun,” added Bob Henry.
Sourdough led off, up the canyon on the left side, the rest of the riders following him on the dim trail, one by one, riding with their rifles loose in their scabbards and their eyes scanning the way ahead.
Carl felt a prickle in the hairs on the back of his neck. As he changed directions on a switchback in the trail, he muttered to Rulon, “I don’t like this. We’re all exposed on the face of this wall. If they’re laying for us, they can pick us off one at a time, and us with no cover.”
Rulon nodded. “Keep your eyes peeled when we top that ridge.”
The canyon wall was steep, and the horses were winded by the climb as they approached the lip of the cut. The ten riders edged cautiously into the open on top, and moved quickly into the shelter of the forest.
Sourdough pointed through the trees in the direction of the summit. “We’ve got a right smart way yet to go. Best we let the horses rest a while.” He dismounted, and his horse shied against Frank Tilden’s mount.
Tilden’s horse reared, but the man kept his seat, cursing the cook. “I don’t ride with rum-soaked, broken-down old codgers. Here’s yours.”
He drew and fired at Sourdough, but the horse turned as he pulled the trigger, and his bullet struck Bob Henry in the chest, knocking him off his horse.
“You stupid oaf,” cried Pete Dawes. “Can’t you do anything right?” His gun was out, and he shot Chico through the left shoulder. “Damn, you got me doing it now,” he shouted, firing at Rod as he turned his horse to flee. His last shot also went high, and opened a furrow across Rod’s skull. Then he was gone, and Tilden with him, and three men were down, their blood soaking into the pine needles.
Carl and Bill Henry started to ride after them, but Rulon called them back. “Let them go. I reckon I’d druther have them in front of me than behind, now that we know the set of their minds.”
James and Sourdough bent over the injured men. Bob was the worst hit, struggling to breathe, fighting the pain of his shattered chest.
Bill went to his knees and looked at the gaping hole in his cousin’s body. “Lie still,” he growled, his face working. “You’re going to pull through.”
“Ah, Bill,” Bob coughed, choking on his own blood. “Be sure they bury me in a patch of green. I never could abide the dust in Texas.”
“Don’t you go!” his cousin cried out, but Bob never heard him.
James stuffed moss into the hole in Chico’s shoulder. “It missed the bone, tore up the muscle, then came out the back, so you won’t die of lead poisoning,” He untied Chico’s neckerchief and used it to bind the wound. “We got to get you off this mountain and down to Ma. She can clean you up better.” James looked around at Rulon and Carl, who were tending to Rod’s wound. “How’s Pa? Can he ride?”
“It’s deeper than I first thought, but if he don’t pass out, he’s tough enough to make it.” Rulon helped his father to his feet. “Dizzy, Pa? This fight’s over for you. You need to get Chico down where Ma can put him and you to rights.”
Rod shook his head to clear it. “I got to what?” he asked, obviously confused by the bullet crease on his head.
“Go home, Pa. We lost Bob. Take his body down home. Ma will patch you up.”
“I should have had more sense,” Rod muttered, seemingly getting his thoughts straight at last. “Them eyes always had something in them I didn’t like.” Drying blood covered one side of his face.
Rulon brought Rod’s horse over to him and helped him to mount. James had Chico in the saddle and handed the reins to Rod, then patted the neck of Chico’s horse. Carl tied the reins of Bob’s horse onto Chico’s saddle while Sourdough and Bill secured the blanket-wrapped burden of Bob’s body across his horse.
“Don’t stop until you get home, Pa,” said Rulon, slapping Rod’s horse on the rump. The animal started down the trail.
“I hope Chico can stay on that horse,” James said. “He’s lost a passel of blood.”
“He’ll do,” said Bill. “He’s got sand in his craw.”
Sourdough was up on his horse. “That cabin’s still a good piece distant,” he reminded them. “We need to ride to catch them fellers before nightfall.”
Carl’s blood boiled him up into his saddle as he remembered that Ellen was in the hands of men like Dawes and Tilden. “I reckon the odds are getting well nigh even now,” he shouted. “They got four, and we got five.”
“We know about four,” Rulon corrected. “The way Dawes and Tilden chewed up the trail, I can’t tell if anybody else has been along this way.”
Sourdough led off again, Rulon beside him to check the trail, and the other three came in a bunch behind. The horses were rested, and they made good time, climbing the gentle slope of the mountain through the pines and firs that girdled its higher reaches.
Three hours before nightfall, Sourdough called a halt.
“That cabin ain’t but a half mile or less through them trees,” he said. “It’s partly a dugout into the side of the mountain. We’ll surround it easy, for there ain’t but one way in, but they’ve got them girls, so they have a fair hand of cards, too. What you might call a Mexican standoff. When dark falls, we can get in real close, but if we go to shooting, we might hit them girls.”
“Best we sneak on up there and have a good look,” Bill said. “Can’t harm nothing to know how the ground lies.”
Dismounting, they picketed their horses in a protected hollow where they could graze, took their rifles, and set out on foot.
Rulon saw the cabin first, its log front protruding from the side of the mountain, and reached out to tap Carl on the shoulder.
“Yep,” whispered Carl, crouching behind a pine trunk.
James came silently behind them, and whispered, “Where do you think they put their horses? I went a piece to the right, and there’s no cover close in big enough to hide four horses. They ain’t in the woods, or we would have heard them.”
“I reckon if I was them, I’d want my horse close by,” Rulon reasoned. “We’ll circle to the left and check. The mountain ain’t swallowed them up.”
Sourdough appeared behind a neighboring pine. He glided over to join the three brothers.
“That cabin’s weathered some since I was last here. The roof’s in bad shape. Another storm will knock it down, and then the front wall will fall in.” He looked back toward the cabin and spotted a rifle barrel poking through the front window. “I reckon they know we arrived.”
A bullet whanged into a tree behind them, and the four men ducked into the brush, spreading out to cover the entire front of the cabin.
“Ah ha!” rang out a cry. “We have meet again. And this time you will not have the good luck.”
Carl’s stomach churned. “It’s Acosta,” he exclaimed. “I should have finished him off back in Kansas City.”
“We should have ground his bones on the prairie,” James responded, gritting his teeth.
“I must thank you for the gift of these lovely young muchachas, but where is the other one, the diosa blanca? I have been yearning to pay my respects to her.”