“He’s supposed to be in Mexico,” Sam said.
“Sure, but does Victorio know that?” Matt asked, half-joking.
There were roads, dirt roads, and horse and game trails inscribing a thin tracery across the dizzying space of the flat.
An undulating rock curtain, snaking north to south, was actually the eastern face of a minor mountain range. It seemed solid only from a distance. Up close, lofty cliffs revealed themselves to be shot through with gaps, openings that were passes and canyon mouths.
Toward mid-morning, the duo neared Spear Blade Spur. They never approached it by the same route twice in a row. Not that the claim was secret or hidden. It couldn’t be, not in a town as mineral mad as Tombstone, where everybody and his brother ran a sideline seeking a silver-rich bonanza.
But Sam and Matt constantly varied the course of their arrivals and departures. Manhunting is like hunting any other game. The hunter looks for patterns of behavior in the prey, using them to stalk and slay. They weren’t going to make it easy for hostile interests to track their comings and goings to use against them.
Spear Blade Spur was located on the western slope of the range. The duo came from the east, entering a mountain pass. The pass ran roughly east to west. Its far end would put them at a point a quarter-mile north of the claim.
The pass was twisty, snakelike. It was filled with cool blue shadows. In several places it ran north and south, always ultimately returning to its east-west course. At one point, it brought Matt and Sam to the eastern face of the rear wall of the box canyon housing their claim. The canyon mouth opened on the west, on the opposite side of the range.
The outer wall of the box canyon was about a hundred-and-fifty feet high.
Gaps and notches opened in the top of the wall, some considerably deep. A line of smoke rose above the wall, lifting skyward, feathering into a thin haze in the heights. The air was still, with barely the breath of a breeze to disturb the smoke. Sam and Matt halted, looking at the smoke.
“Uninvited guests,” Matt said at last, breaking the silence.
“If they’re uninvited, they can’t be guests,” Sam sensibly pointed out.
“No, but we’ll give them a warm welcome anyway. Wonder what they’ve got planned for us?”
“I’ll find out.”
Some time later, from out of the west end of the pass came a lone rider, Matt Bodine. Sam Two Wolves was nowhere in view.
Matt rode out on the flat, turning left, south. A number of rocky arms and buttresses thrust out from the cliffs to the desert floor. Matt rode clear of them, coming to a wedge-shaped formation shaped roughly like the blade of a spear: Spear Blade Spur.
South of it lay a canyon stretching east deep into the rocks, a box canyon. It was shaped like a landlocked cove. Inside, a long, gentle slope rose to an elevation of a hundred feet, cresting in a half-moon-shaped shelf whose broad end faced outward.
The claim diggings were sited up on the shelf. Beyond rose a curved wall sealing up the canyon, the same notched wall whose outer face was accessible via the pass.
There was no sign of smoke now. Nor should there be. Matt had taken his time swinging wide west on the flat before curving back in toward the canyon. Plenty of time for the interlopers to get rid of the fire and hide themselves.
Matt came on into the canyon, eyes restlessly scanning the scene. As he neared the foot of the slope, his skin felt like a tautly stretched drumhead.
Much of the canyon was still in shadow. Even without the touch of animating sunbeams, mineral-rich rocks flashed and glinted with fugitive gleams. He started his horse up the slope, hoping the unseen lurkers wouldn’t just blast him.
He thought they wouldn’t. Crooks are lazy. They’d rather have him deliver himself right to their doorstep (his doorstep actually, his and Two Wolves’s), rather than gun him down from a distance and have to get off their lazy asses to rob the corpse and round up his horse.
Crooks are cruel, too, more often than not. They’d want to revel in having a victim in their power, so they could gloat over it and play cat-and-mouse games with human prey.
Crooks were pretty damned predictable, mostly. Still, it wouldn’t do to underestimate them. You never know when you meet up with a tricky one.
One thing was sure, though. The intruders were not Apaches. When they were laying for you, you didn’t see them unless they wanted you to.
The gray climbed up the slope, and Matt looked for signs. He saw plenty of them. The trespassers couldn’t have left more evidence of their presence if they’d tried. The places where they’d used broken branches from bushes and shrubs to erase the tracks of their horses were almost more obvious than the tracks themselves would have been. Broad, swirly, smoothed-off bands of sand and dirt were rarely found in nature.
The gray crested the slope, coming onto the shelf, a semicircular bowl or disk. It was several hundred yards long and stretched seventy-five yards back at its widest.
A freshwater spring bubbled at the base of curved rock walls, yielding a thin trickling stream that wandered along the floor of the bowl. There were ankle-high patches of dark green grass. Stunted dwarf mesquite trees, a little larger than bushes, clung to narrow rock ledges along the inner rock wall.
An open-sided wooden shack with a flat, slanted roof sat on the shelf, facing west. Matt and Sam hadn’t been working the site long enough to build a more permanent structure. They’d been too busy digging for silver ore.
Shafts were sunk in the rock walls, seeking silver-rich veins. Mounds of rock fragments, tailings, were piled high, like heaps of stony gray skulls.
The ears of Matt’s horse stood up straight. Nostrils flaring, the gray breathed gustily. Matt patted its muscular neck, stroking and smoothing it, murmuring soft sounds of easement.
The gray knew of the lurkers, sensing their presence. It smelled them maybe, them or their horses. There were places on the shelf to hide horses, behind wagon-sized boulders and thick lines of scrub pine.
Matt heard the metallic clicking of a rifle being levered, jacking a cartridge into place. Gunfire cracked, a bullet whipping past his head.
It was a warning shot. If the shooter had wanted to hit him, he would have. The gray started, not violently. A horse of Matt Bodine’s soon became used to gunfire. If the gray trembled, it was from eagerness; if it desired to run, it was not to flee but to charge.
Matt was statue still in the saddle as the claim jumpers came into view Instead of melting into the shadows, they emerged from them. They were ranged in a loose arc at the opposite end of the shelf.
Matt was grim faced, impassive. He kept his hands clear of the twin Colts holstered at his hips. Even the fastest draw can’t clear leather in time to beat already drawn guns.
The claim jumpers were a rowdy bunch, frayed, dirty, down at the heels. He knew them. Some of them he’d seen around Tombstone. They were part of the New Mexico crowd, outcasts and fugitives from that state’s Lincoln County War, where Billy the Kid and his cohorts were making life hell for the big cattle ranchers who ran the territory.
When things got too hot in Lincoln County, a sizeable bunch emigrated to Tombstone, where they had fast-graduated from public nuisance to menace.
The trespassers came forward, guns in hand, swaggering. They were grouped on a ledge which raised them to eye level with Matt on horseback.
Their names were Justin Vollin, Dick Buttolph, Mick McGarren, Doug Chasen, and Hake Craney.
Justin Vollin was more tinhorn than cowboy, a gunslick but no great outdoorsman. He held a smoking rifle in both hands. He must have been the one who had fired the warning shot at Matt.
Beside him stood his longtime pard, his partner in crime, Dick Buttolph. Six-and-a-half feet tall, he wore a black, high-crowned hat with flat round brim, a single eagle feather sticking up straight out of the hatband. A big-bore .44 revolver was in his hand.
Mick McGarren showed carrot-colored hair, jug ears, a freckled horse face, and pipestem limbs. His thumbs were ho
oked in the top of a gun belt bearing twinned holstered sideguns.
Hake Craney was an older man, hatchet faced, beady eyed, with a thick brushy salt-and-pepper mustache.
Doug Chasen stood near the shack, where he’d been holding the gang’s horses, reins gathered in his red-knuckled fists.
“Well, Bodine!” Justin Vollin crowed.
“That’s Bodine? He don’t look like much,” Chasen said.
“You’d change your tune fast enough if he had those guns in hand, Doug,” said Vollin.
“But he don’t. And he ain’t gonna get the chance, either.”
“You’re on private property, boys,” Matt said.
That got a laugh from the intruders.
“Private property, huh? Yeah—mine,” Vollin cracked.
That got a bigger laugh, except for Mick McGarren, unamused, who said, “Ours.”
Vollin frowned, not liking being called on that particular possessive pronoun.
“Why waste time jawing? Shoot him and be done with it,” Hake Craney complained. Hake Craney was the celebrated Dakota back shooter.
“Slow down, Hake, I’m calling the shots around here,” Vollin said.
“Call ’em, then. Finish it so we can get back to town. I’m thirsty, and we done run out of whiskey.”
“Somehow I can’t see you as a prospector, Vollin,” Matt said.
“You’re the prospector, I’m the claim jumper,” Vollin said smugly.
“Why don’t you shoot?” Craney urged.
“Because I want to know where his redskin pard is. Everybody knows they string together. Where Bodine is, the Injun can’t be far off.”
“You don’t know how right you are, Vollin,” Matt said.
“Start talking before I start shooting pieces off of you, Bodine. Where’s your red-ass buddy?”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
“He’s behind you.”
Outlaw laughter came again, raw and jeering.
“That’d be a pretty good trick,” Vollin said, snickering.
“It is,” Matt said. He raised his voice: “Best get to it, Sam, before Vollin gets off a lucky shot.”
“Luck’s got nothing to do with it—it’s called skill,” Vollin said, swinging the rifle toward Matt.
Matt was in a tight spot, but he hadn’t shown himself to the claim jumpers simply to get slaughtered. It was in the nature of a diversion while Sam Two Wolves got into place and got his ducks all lined up in a row.
One of the horses held by Doug Chasen was restive, jerking its head up and down. Doug changed his grip, moving it higher on the horse’s reins. He glanced up as he did so.
What he saw gave him a violent start, but not quickly enough to stop Vollin from tightening his finger on the trigger of the rifle leveled on Matt.
“End of the trail,” Vollin breathed—and then the top of his head exploded.
The Brothers of the Wolf were cautious men. It helped keep them alive. Part of that was scouting the terrain.
Spear Blade Spur’s box canyon had no back door. Not to horsemen, that is. A rider could approach from only one direction, west. The curved wall at the eastern end closed it off, boxing it in.
But the east wall was open to a man on foot. Sam and Matt knew this, because they had previously scouted all possible avenues of entrance and exit.
Earlier, then, coming through the mountain pass, Sam had closely eyed the notched outer wall. It looked accessible, and was. He climbed the wall from the east, using outcroppings and ledges as stepping-stones. He slipped through a notch in the wall to the other side, into the box canyon.
It was a most useful escape route, in or out. Now, this day, he put it to use again. He tied up his horse to a tree at the base of the wall, slung his rifle across his back by a strap, and started scaling the east face of the cliff while Matt rode west through the pass.
It was an easy climb. For most of it, all he had to do was walk up, hopping from ledge to ledge, like mounting a crude giant stairway. Only a few places required him to pull himself up to the next handhold or foothold. Luckily, Sam had no fear of heights.
The sun was high. The rocks were hot, hot to the touch. Sam was not impervious to pain; he felt it the same as anybody else. But he just put it out of his mind, the Cheyenne way.
Presently, he reached the base of the deepest notch, a plunging V-shaped gap in the curved rock wall. He stepped through it, crossing to the far side.
He looked down into the box canyon. The base of the shelf was some forty feet below. The interlopers were bunched up there, five of them, hiding from Matt until he could ride up the slope to them.
Sam could have picked them off with his rifle, but he held his fire. It was better to wait until Matt was in position. That was the plan. Else, one or more of the bushwhackers might escape.
The claim jumpers’ attention was focused outward, west, on Matt. As Sam had often noted in the past, people don’t look up. White people especially.
Sam eased down from the base of the notch into a square of shadow on the west side of the wall. He hunkered down there, becoming one with the rocks.
He was more concerned about the horses than their owners. Animals are sensitive. But as he was aloft, his alien man-scent could not reach them. He was silent, with no betraying footfall to alert them, nor a pebble fall, and no dislodged dust. He climbed down the broken rock face, getting into position.
Matt rode into view, topping the slope, riding deeper onto the shelf. Matt did not tilt his head to look up, avoiding tipping the claim jumpers to Sam’s presence. Sam waved, alerting Matt that he was in position.
The ploy played out as planned. The claim jumpers, certain that they had got the drop on Matt, emerged from their hiding places as he neared, stepping into view.
Vollin, their leader, at the fore, leveled a rifle. He did most of the talking, plenty of it. He and his bunch were arrogant, contemptuous, secure in their power. They were so sure of themselves that some of them didn’t even bother to draw their guns.
Matt came on, nearing, closing the distance to where his six-guns could be brought into play.
Sam assumed the kneeling shooting position: rifle shouldered, elbow of left arm resting on the bent knee of his left leg, weapon tilted downward. Not the easiest of shots.
Firing downward could be tricky, but he was a sharpshooter.
The claim jumpers were working themselves up to the kill, not that they needed much encouragement. Sam lined the rifle’s top sights up on the back of Vollin’s head.
The horses were bunched up, due to their reins being all gathered together in Doug’s hands. The animals were uneasy under the crowding. Maybe the human bloodlust was getting to them, too. Though, with this bunch, they should have been used to it.
The animals sidled against one another, jostling, pawing the ground. A horse lurched to one side, jerking its head up.
Doug Chasen, jerked off-balance, tightened his grip, moving it higher on the animals’ reins. He glanced up, seeing Sam, then choking out an inarticulate outcry.
No whit distracted, Sam squeezed the trigger. The rifle barked, simultaneous with the top of Vollin’s head exploding as the bullet drilled down through it.
Brain and bone fragments spewed, stinging the two bracketing Vollin—Dick Buttolph and Mick McGarren.
Instant brain death resulted for Vollin, suppressing a reflex trigger pull. Vollin was gone, his body so much inert directionless meat. The corpse pitched forward, falling on its face.
Matt threw himself to the right, off his horse, diving headfirst to the ground.
Pandemonium! Matt’s gray horse upreared, rising on its hind legs. Buttolph and McGarren fired blindly, jerking the triggers of their guns. They both missed Matt by a mile, and missed his horse, too.
Matt hit the ground with a jolt, cushioned somewhat by grass and dirt. He rolled sideways away from the gray, getting clear of its hooves. Getting his feet under him, he rose in a
half-crouch, filling his hands with both guns.
He cut loose with the gun in his right hand, putting two shots into McGarren’s belly. McGarren fell backwards.
Buttolph banged away at Matt, missing. Matt turned the Colt in his left fist on Buttolph, shooting him in the chest one, two, three times.
Buttolph swayed as slugs tore into him, shattering his chest. Yet somehow he managed to stay on his feet, backpedaling. He tried to lift his gun, but it was heavy, too heavy. He fell down.
Hake Craney had his gun in hand but the gray horse was between him and Matt Bodine. Cursing, Craney scuttled about, angling for a clear shot.
Sam shot him. The rifle round struck Craney, drilling him. Craney reeled, toppling sideways.
Doug Chasen let the gathered reins of the horses fall when the first shot was fired. He drew—then had to scramble to one side to avoid being trampled by the horses, some of whom surged forward.
A roan sideswiped him, slamming him against the cliff. He fought to keep hold of his gun, fought to stay on his feet and avoid falling and going under the horses’ trampling hooves. They were not running yet, because they did not have enough room to run. Chasen flattened against the rock wall as horses rushed by him, scattering.
When they were clear of him and he of them, Chasen pointed his gun upward, seeking a clear line of fire on Sam Two Wolves high up on the rock wall. An outcropping spoiled his aim.
Chasen stepped out, away from the cliff for a better shot. He walked right into a bullet from Matt Bodine’s gun. The impact swatted him like a fly. He was thrown backwards, slamming into a flat-faced boulder.
His legs folded, bending at the knees. He slid down the smooth rock face, the exit wound in his back leaving a bloody vertical smear.
He sat down, hard. He nodded, head tilting forward, spilling the hat from his head. It rolled on the brim, downhill, curving to one side in a half-circle before coming to a stop.
Matt rose, holding two leveled guns hip high. A puffy cloud of gun smoke hung in mid-air around him. He stepped through it, and the cloud broke apart.
Blood Bond 16: A Hundred Ways to Die Page 3