“That would sure be somethin’ to see, all right,” Duck agreed. “I’m gonna save my money, and after I put in a few more years in the Lighthorse, I’ll—”
Bo straightened in the saddle as he spotted the glint of sunlight reflecting off something on top of that bluff, which was now only about a hundred yards away. He opened his mouth to interrupt Duck, but before he could say anything, the flat crack of a rifle shot split the morning air.
And beside Bo, Duck Forbes grunted in pain and rocked back in his saddle.
CHAPTER 15
Bo caught a glimpse of the puff of powder smoke from the top of the bluff, but he was already turning to look at Duck. The stocky Cherokee, his eyes wide with pain, swayed back and forth in the saddle as he pressed a hand to his chest. Blood welled between his splayed-out fingers, telling Bo that Duck was badly wounded.
Everybody in the group had heard the shot and knew they were under attack. Brubaker yanked back on the team’s reins, bringing the wagon to a halt as he shouted, “Everybody spread out!”
At the same time, Charley Graywolf yelled, “Take cover!”
Both of those commands sent the riders scattering for the closest rocks or trees.
Bo leaned over and grabbed the reins of Duck’s horse. The tribal policeman had dropped them when he was shot. Clinging tightly to the reins, Bo led Duck’s mount behind him as he galloped toward a cluster of boulders. He hoped Duck could manage to stay in the saddle.
More shots came from the bluff. Bo didn’t know where the bullets went, but he reached the rocks without being hit. When he was safely behind the boulders, he dismounted almost before his horse stopped moving and sprang to the side of Duck’s horse just as the young Cherokee toppled off the animal. Bo caught him and eased him to the ground.
Duck’s mouth opened and closed several times as he looked up at Bo. He seemed to be struggling to say something. He couldn’t get the words out, though. The only sound that came from him was a cross between a wheeze and a whistle ... and that came from the hole in his chest.
Bo knew that sound meant the bullet had penetrated one of Duck’s lungs. He ripped Duck’s shirt open and saw the bullet hole still welling bright, frothy blood. Tearing off a piece of Duck’s shirt, he wadded it up and shoved it into the opening as hard as he could. That would serve two purposes. It would slow down the bleeding and also close the wound temporarily, which would help Duck breathe.
Duck’s distress seemed to ease slightly, but he still couldn’t say anything.
“Take it easy,” Bo told him. “Try not to move around any. You’ll see those oceans and deserts yet, Duck.”
Bo wasn’t sure of that at all, but he wanted to give Duck some hope to hold on to. When a man was badly wounded, despair was often fatal, but stubborn determination and a fighting spirit could bring him back from the brink of death.
Bo ran to his horse and pulled his Winchester from its sheath. The shooting still continued, and he could tell now that the members of Charley Graywolf’s posse were returning the ambusher’s fire. He figured Scratch and Brubaker were getting in on the action, too. He crawled up a huge, slanting slab of rock so he could get a look at the trail and the bluff where the hidden rifleman was located.
Several shots from a clump of trees on the other side of the trail drew his attention. He caught a glimpse of what looked like Scratch’s cream-colored Stetson and watched until he got a better look at his old friend. Scratch poked the barrel of his rifle around a tree trunk and squeezed off a shot. When he drew back, Bo called, “Scratch!”
The silver-haired Texan looked over, grinned, and waved. Bo returned the wave. Confident now that they were both all right, he turned his attention to the man on top of the bluff.
Large boulders lined the edge of that outcropping. The rifleman was probably firing through a narrow gap between a couple of the rocks, which meant it would be almost impossible for their return fire to hit him. He could sit up there and keep them pinned down all day.
Evidently that wasn’t his goal, because he shifted his aim to the wagon and started peppering it with slugs. Cara screamed and Lowe and Elam bellowed curses, making Bo wonder if some of the bullets had gone through the ventilation slits and whipped around the heads of the prisoners. That was possible, considering the angle from which the ambusher was firing.
Scratch must have been worried about the same thing, because he yelled at the wagon, “Cara! You and those boys get down as low as you can!”
The fact that the prisoners were being endangered probably meant that the man on the bluff wasn’t trying to free them. Indeed, he didn’t seem to care if he killed them. That ruled out Hank Gentry and his gang.
The most likely possibility was that the men being pursued by the Cherokee Lighthorse had left someone behind to slow them down. In that case, the man wouldn’t know who Bo, Scratch, and Brubaker were, nor why the wagon was traveling with Charley Graywolf and the others. But to him, they would all be enemies, anyway.
The bullets were coming too close to the team. The normally stolid draft horses finally spooked and lunged forward against their harness, desperate to be out of the line of fire. They bolted, taking off along the trail and pulling the wagon behind them. The prisoners inside the vehicle howled even louder.
Jake Brubaker yelled in alarm and broke out of the trees where he had taken cover. He ran after the wagon, ignoring Scratch’s shout of warning.
“Forty-two, no!”
“Let them go, Marshal!” Bo shouted from the other side of the trail.
Brubaker’s hat suddenly flew off his head, plucked from it by a bullet. Even more than the shouts from the Texans, that had to make him realize that he was out in the open ... and that was a bad spot to be in right now. Another bullet kicked up dirt at his feet as he whirled toward the side of the trail and threw himself behind a log that was lying there. Chucks of bark and splinters of wood flew in the air as slugs chewed into the fallen tree.
Bo opened fire on the bluff as the rest of the group resumed shooting. Brubaker was still in a bad spot. If they could keep the bushwhacker occupied for a few moments, it might give the deputy time to reach some better cover.
Brubaker surged up into a run. He made it behind some trees and rocks, where he slid to the ground. Bo watched him lie there panting heavily. As far as Bo could tell, the lawman wasn’t hurt.
The wagon careened around a bend in the trail and vanished from sight.
Bo wasn’t worried about the prisoners getting away. The runaway horses would slow down and stop as their panic wore off. The prisoners’ chains and the lock on the door were secure. The biggest problem was that the wagon might overturn and crash before the team came to a stop. If that happened, the prisoners might be injured, or even killed in the wreck.
Bo wondered if there was any way to reach that bluff, work his way up to the top, and take the ambusher by surprise. Even as he considered the idea, he saw that it wouldn’t work. The bluff commanded too broad a field of fire.
Knowing that his rifle wasn’t going to make a difference in the fight, he slid back down to the bottom of the rock and hurried to the spot where Duck Forbes lay. Dropping to a knee beside the wounded man, Bo leaned over to check on his condition.
The Texan’s face took on a hard, grim cast as he saw the way Duck’s eyes were staring sightlessly into the blue sky. He rested a hand on Duck’s chest to make sure and found that it was motionless. While Bo was up in the rocks trading shots with the man on the bluff, the young Cherokee Lighthorseman had crossed the divide.
“I’m sorry, Duck,” Bo said quietly. “If I can, I’ll settle the score for you. You have my word on that.”
For all the good it did now. Bo couldn’t stop that bitter thought from edging into his mind. Whoever was up there on the bluff had chosen the perfect spot for an ambush. He could keep them pinned down until dark ...
But why just keep your enemies pinned down, Bo suddenly asked himself, when you could close the jaws of a trap on them? Scra
tch and the others were all concentrating on the danger in front of them, when something even worse could be coming up from behind.
That thought had just gone through Bo’s head when a bullet whistled past his head, struck one of the boulders, and ricocheted off with a whine like the wail of an evil banshee.
CHAPTER 16
Bo whirled around as another slug smacked into the rock nearby, flattening this time instead of glancing off. The attackers were in the trees behind the group of lawmen. Bo flung himself aside as he heard the wind-rip of yet another bullet past his ear. He wedged his body into a gap between boulders.
The killers couldn’t draw a bead on him, but from where he was, he couldn’t get a shot at them, either. The futility of that stand-off, along with the anger he felt at Duck’s death, gnawed at him. He suppressed the urge to lunge out into the open and start blazing away at the trees. That would just get him killed in a hurry and wouldn’t help the others at all.
Now it sounded more than ever like a small war was going on, as shot after shot rang out from all directions. Bullets whined and zipped menacingly. Clouds of powder smoke rolled through the air and stung men’s eyes and noses.
The stony gap in which Bo had taken cover was narrow enough that he thought he might be able to work his way upward between the two slabs of rock. He braced his back against one side, his feet against the other. When he shoved himself upward, his progress was maddeningly slow, but eventually he was high enough that he was able to pull himself on top of one of the slabs.
From here he could fire at the trees where the attackers were hidden, but his position also left him exposed to the man on top of the bluff. He rolled to his left as a bullet spanked off the rock only a few feet away from him. That put him behind a hardy bush that had forced its way through a crack in the rock in its eternal quest for sunlight.
The bush didn’t offer much real cover, but at least the man on top of the bluff couldn’t see him as easily now. Bo stayed as low as he could and took advantage of the respite to study his situation.
He seemed to be the only one on this side of the trail. Scratch and the others had taken cover in a small stand of trees to the left of the path. The gunmen who had come up from the rear were in some other trees on the same side of the trail as Bo. The bluff was on the opposite side.
So he was directly between the two forces, he realized, on an imaginary line that cut across the trail at an angle. Scratch, Brubaker, and the Cherokee Lighthorsemen were slightly off to one side but still effectively caught between two fires.
If there was some way for him to eliminate the man on the bluff, Bo speculated, then Scratch and the others could turn all their attention to the threat from the rear and would have a better chance of fighting them off. Bo parted the branches a little and squinted toward the bluff.
There was no way of knowing how long the boulders along the edge of the bluff had been perched there. Probably quite a while, Bo thought, judging by the way the earth was undercut beneath them, worn away by the elements. Sooner or later some of those big rocks would topple.
Why not today?
The odds of him being able to accomplish that were slim, he knew, but he couldn’t see any other options. If things continued like they were, eventually the attackers would pick off him and all of his friends.
He thrust the Winchester’s barrel through the brush and waited for the man on top of the bluff to fire again. Bo wanted to pinpoint the ambusher’s location.
After a few seconds he spotted another jet of powder smoke from up there. The bullet rattled through the branches above his head, but he ignored that. Marking the exact site of the smoke, he was able to tell which boulder the rifleman was using for most of his cover.
Bo drew a bead on the bluff at the base of that rock and squeezed off a shot.
Dirt flew in the air as his bullet smacked into its target. The would-be killer probably believed Bo had just missed badly. He was probably smirking up there, Bo thought, or maybe even laughing.
Bo worked the rifle’s lever as fast as he could and sent shot after shot into the same place. He emptied the Winchester in what must have sounded like a futile expression of the frustration he felt.
He expected that when he paused to reload, the ambusher would take some more potshots at him. Instead, the man seemed to be concentrating his fire on the trees where Scratch and the other men had taken cover. He must have decided that Bo wasn’t a threat to be bothered with anymore.
Bo could only hope that the varmint was making a bad mistake about that.
The Winchester held fifteen rounds. Without rushing, Bo made sure of his aim and sent all fifteen shots, one after the other, into the same spot at the base of the boulder. He waited to see if it was going to move.
The big rock didn’t budge.
Bo had never been the sort of hombre to give up. If he had been, despair might have welled up inside him at that moment. He was convinced that his idea was a good one and would show some results sooner or later ... but would he have to lie here and keep shooting all day, firing off hundreds of bullets, before they did any good?
By that time, he and the others would probably all be dead.
He didn’t let that knowledge stop him. Instead he reloaded, reminding himself that while he had several boxes of cartridges in his saddlebags, he would have only a few more rounds in his pocket after he emptied the Winchester this time. That fact right there was enough to emphasize that he was running out of time.
They all were, he told himself grimly.
He aimed the Winchester at the bluff and started firing again. His shoulder was starting to get a little sore from the rifle’s recoil. He ignored that and continued shooting.
The boulder shifted. At first he didn’t notice and even squeezed off another shot before he saw what was happening. The big rock tilted forward, and once its mass shifted, that was all it took. Bo’s slugs had dug out enough dirt underneath it to destroy its balance.
The boulder toppled off the edge of the bluff, fell twenty feet or so to the slope, landed with a crash, and started to roll, taking brush, dirt, and smaller rocks along with it.
Bo didn’t pay any attention to the rock slide he had caused. Swiftly now, he centered the Winchester’s sights on the surprised man who suddenly was exposed as he knelt there where the boulder had been.
Bo triggered three more shots as fast as he could work the Winchester’s lever.
His aim was as deadly as ever. The slugs ripped through the ambusher’s body. He jerked to his feet, lurched to one side, and dropped his rifle as he clapped his hands to his bullet-riddled torso. For a second longer, he swayed there at the edge, and then he pitched forward and followed in the wake of the rock slide, bouncing and flopping like a rag doll as he tumbled down the face of the bluff.
From the trees on the other side of the trail came an unmistakably Texan whoop. Scratch must have seen the man on the bluff fall.
The attackers must have seen that, too, and now that their quarry was no longer pinned down, the odds appeared to have shifted. Bo swung around. He still had some shots left in his rifle, so he started spraying the trees where the men were hidden. That turned the tables even more.
When Bo ceased fire, he heard pounding hoofbeats. They were headed west, paralleling the trail but keeping the screen of trees between them and the lawmen.
Bo cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Hold your fire! They’re lighting out!”
The shots died away. After a moment, Scratch called, “You all right up there, Bo?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. How about you fellas?”
“Couple of nicks, but nothin’ to speak of.”
Brubaker emerged from the trees carrying his rifle.
“Blast it, we’ve got to get after that wagon! Creel, where’s your horse?”
Bo wasn’t just about to turn over his horse to Brubaker. He said, “Hold on!” and slid down the rock to the ground.
He cast a regretful look at Duck Forb
es’s corpse, then caught his horse’s dangling reins and swung up into the saddle. Duck’s mount still stood there, too, so Bo led it out of the rocks and handed the reins to the eager Brubaker.
The deputy had the decency to ask, “What happened to the fella who was ridin’ this animal?”
“He was the first one hit,” Bo said. “He didn’t make it.”
“Duck Forbes, right? Damn it, I liked that boy, what little I knew of him.” Brubaker hauled the horse’s head around. “Come on!”
He galloped along the trail with Bo close behind him. They raced past the bluff where the ambusher had lurked, then rounded a couple of bends before abruptly reining to a halt.
The wagon was stopped as the team cropped grass at the side of the trail. As Bo had expected, the horses had run for a short distance and then forgotten to be scared anymore. All of them appeared to be unharmed, including Brubaker’s saddle mount that was still tied to the back of the vehicle.
“Well, it didn’t wreck, anyway,” Brubaker said. “That’s something to be thankful for.” He drew his gun. “Be careful, Creel.”
Bo could see that the door at the rear of the wagon was still fastened with the big padlock.
“They can’t have gone anywhere,” he told Brubaker.
“No, I reckon not, but I still don’t trust ’em.”
Bo didn’t, either, but he didn’t see any way the prisoners could have gotten free. He drew his Colt, too, as he approached the wagon alongside Brubaker.
“Hey, in there!” the deputy yelled. “Sing out and let me know you’re all right!”
“You don’t care whether we’re all right!” Cara replied through the ventilation slits. The thick walls of the enclosure muffled her voice a little. “You want us all dead!”
“I want you all to hang after a legal trial,” Brubaker replied. “There’s a big difference.”
Texas Bloodshed Page 9