“Maybe so. But this sure looks terrible right now.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Bo said. “We’ll have to watch where we’re walking. There are still places that will be pretty hot. Might burn right through our boots.”
Brubaker nodded and said, “I reckon we should head for the ridge. That was the last place we saw Morton and that bunch.”
Bo agreed with that decision. They started trudging toward the ridge, which was about half a mile away. With every step, fine gray ashes puffed up around their feet and swirled in the air.
They hadn’t gone very far when Bo stopped short. He put a hand on the deputy’s arm and said, “Listen. Do you hear that?”
Brubaker lifted his head and listened with a look of intense concentration on his face. After a few seconds, his eyes widened in surprise.
“That sounds like horses!” he said.
Bo nodded and said, “Those are hoofbeats, all right. And I don’t think anybody else is likely to be moving around out here except the folks we’re looking for.”
“How in the world did they survive?” Brubaker asked. “And with their horses, too.”
“I don’t know, but maybe we can find out. We’d better hunt some cover until we’re sure what we’re dealing with.”
Brubaker jerked his head in a nod.
“Damn right.” More ashes swirled around his legs as he hurried toward some rocks. “Come on.”
The rocks weren’t big enough to provide much cover, but they were better than nothing and certainly better than the burned trees and brush, which wouldn’t conceal much of anything. Bo and Brubaker knelt behind the largest of the boulders and waited as the steady thudding of hoofbeats came closer.
Bo’s breath caught in his tortured throat as the first rider came into view around a little knob. He recognized Cara LaChance instantly. She rode with a rifle held across the saddle in front of her, and she had gotten hold of a holstered revolver and gun belt, which she had strapped around her waist.
The next rider was the slender, redheaded, foxlike man Brubaker had called Bouchard. Bo’s heart sank. He had hoped to see Scratch following Cara.
Then his spirits leaped as the third rider appeared. The fancy duds and the cream-colored Stetson were grimy from smoke and ashes, but there was no mistaking Scratch. As far as Bo could tell, his old friend was all right. He didn’t see any bloodstains on Scratch’s clothes, and the silver-haired Texan was riding easily enough.
Big, shaggy Chet Ryan came next, followed by the three hard cases leading the packhorses. Brubaker leaned closer to Bo and whispered, “Where in blazes is Gentry?”
“Blazes is probably right,” Bo replied, equally quietly. “The fire must have gotten him.”
All the other members of the gang seemed to be fine, other than some coughing and sniffling from breathing too much smoke. At the front of the group, Cara rode with her head held high, and her attitude made it clear that she was now in charge of this bunch. Bo supposed that she had inherited leadership of the gang from Hank Gentry.
That didn’t really matter. What was important was that the surviving members of the gang were here, and so was the loot they had come after. This was the chance to round them up and recover the stolen money. They wouldn’t be expecting anyone else to be around in this burned-out devastation.
Bo looked over at Brubaker. The deputy nodded, tightened his hands on his rifle, and suddenly stood up, leveling the Winchester at the outlaws.
“Hold it right there!” Brubaker bellowed. “You’re under arrest!”
CHAPTER 33
Scratch had seldom been more surprised—or more relieved—than he was when Bo and Brubaker stood up from behind those rocks and threw down on the gang.
After leaving the little cavelike area under the overhang and seeing the terrible destruction that the wildfire had wreaked on the countryside, Scratch had figured that nothing could have lived through it. If Bo and Brubaker had been caught out here, surely they had perished.
But that wasn’t the case, he now knew. He had never seen two more muddy, bedraggled figures, but they were definitely alive.
For now.
But that might not be the case for very long, because Cara whipped up her rifle and the other outlaws clawed at their guns as the blonde screamed, “Those damn lawmen! Kill them!”
She kicked her horse and caused the animal to leap aside just as Brubaker fired. The bullet went harmlessly past her.
Cara didn’t return Brubaker’s fire. She let the others do that, as a storm of lead from Bouchard, Ryan, and the other three hard cases made Bo and the deputy leap for cover behind the rocks again.
Cara swung her Winchester toward Scratch instead.
“You double-crosser!” she cried. “You led them to us somehow!”
That wasn’t exactly true. That had been the plan, all right, but fate had intervened. Because of the apocalyptic blaze, Scratch had never had the chance to send any sort of signal to his friends. But that same fate, and stubbornly sticking to the general plan they had worked out, had brought Bo and Brubaker across their trail anyway.
Scratch palmed out his Remingtons and guided his horse with his knees as he sent the animal plunging to the side. Cara’s rifle cracked, but the shot missed. Scratch heard the slug scream past his ear. He brought up both pistols and triggered them. It was too late to worry about the fact that he was shooting at a woman.
Bouchard’s horse gave a skittish leap just as Scratch fired, taking him into the path of one of the bullets from the silver-haired Texan’s guns. The slug smashed into Bouchard’s right shoulder from behind and rocked him forward in the saddle as he cried out in pain.
Scratch’s other shot missed Cara, who whirled her mount and kicked it into a run. A gray cloud of ashes boiled up behind her as she galloped across the hellish landscape.
Scratch hated to leave Bo when he had just seen his old pard for the first time in days, but he didn’t want Cara to get away. He sent his horse leaping past Bouchard’s wildly cavorting mount and leaned forward in the saddle as he pounded after her. He pouched his left-hand iron and used that hand to grip the reins.
He was a little surprised that Cara was fleeing. He would have said that she was crazy enough, she would want to stay and fight it out. But maybe for once self-preservation had gotten the best of the insane rage that filled her.
Regardless of the reason, Scratch knew he had come too far to let her get away now. He urged his horse on as the two riders tore across the burned landscape at breakneck speed.
Bo’s Winchester kicked hard against his shoulder as he knelt behind the rock and fired. He worked the rifle’s lever so fast it was a blur. His bullets sprayed across the space between him and the outlaws. One of the men with the packhorses pitched out of the saddle as a slug tore through him.
Next to Bo, Brubaker kept up a deadly fire as well. Bouchard was wounded, and that made it hard for him to control his plunging horse. The deputy drew a bead on him and pressed the trigger. Bouchard’s head jerked as the lawman’s bullet drilled him.
Outlaw lead whined all around them. Brubaker suddenly grunted and went over backward. Bo glanced over at him.
“I’m all right, damn it!” Brubaker yelled. “Keep shootin’!”
Bo knew that Brubaker was hit, but they were still outnumbered three to two. There wasn’t time to check on how badly the deputy was hurt. Bo swung his rifle and lined the sights on Ryan’s broad chest. Ryan’s six-gun spurted flame at the same instant that Bo’s rifle cracked.
The black Stetson flew off Bo’s head with a neat hole through its crown from Ryan’s bullet. Bo’s shot had found its mark. Ryan rocked back in the saddle as the bullet drove into his chest.
But he didn’t fall. Instead, roaring out his defiance, he sent his horse lunging forward, straight at the rocks where Bo and Brubaker had taken cover. He kept firing, slamming shots at the two of them.
Brubaker had made it back to his knees. His left arm was clumsy because that was
where the bullet had ripped through his flesh, but Bo could tell the bone wasn’t broken because Brubaker managed to lift his rifle again. He and Brubaker both fired, and Ryan jerked again, more bloodstains springing out on the outlaw’s buckskin shirt like crimson flowers opening.
Ryan still didn’t go down. His bullets whined off the rock that shielded Bo and Brubaker, coming close enough to make them dive to the sides, one in each direction. Lying on his side on the ground, Bo triggered off the last two rounds in the Winchester. One of them smashed through Ryan’s throat and traveled upward at an extreme angle through his brain.
That was finally enough to kill the big man. He dropped his gun and flew out of the saddle as his horse came to an abrupt, skidding halt. The massive body crashed facedown across the rock where Bo and Brubaker had taken cover.
Lying on his belly, Brubaker sighted in on one of the remaining outlaws and broke the man’s right arm with a well-placed slug. That left just one of them, and as Bo tossed his empty rifle aside and came up with Colt in hand, that man turned to light a shuck out of there. Bo sent two shots racketing over his head. The outlaw hauled back on the reins and then thrust his hands into the air.
“Don’t shoot!” he cried. “I give up, damn it! Don’t shoot!”
Brubaker was already drawing a bead on the man. Bo said, “He’s surrendering, Forty-two. You shoot him now and it’ll be murder.”
“Not if nobody knows about it,” Brubaker said. He growled in disgust. “But I reckon you’re right. I ain’t in the habit of gunnin’ down prisoners, no matter what some of those no-account lawyers back in Fort Smith would have you believe.”
Bo kept the remaining owlhoot covered as he approached and said, “Get your guns on the ground, mister, and be mighty careful about it. I may need an excuse to shoot you, but I don’t need much of one.”
“I’m not gonna give you any,” the outlaw said. He dropped his pistol on the ground, then used his left hand to pull his rifle from the saddle boot and toss it aside, too.
Brubaker checked on the other men and made sure they were dead while Bo got the remaining outlaw off his horse and tied his hands behind his back. He marched the man back to the rocks and had him sit down on one of them.
“All the others are done for,” Brubaker announced, “and those packhorses have run off. We’re gonna have to catch some of the saddle mounts and round them up.”
“What about Scratch and Cara?” Bo asked.
The deputy shook his head.
“They’re gone. She took off for the tall and uncut, and Morton went after her. I lost sight of ’em while we were swappin’ lead with the others.”
Bo’s forehead creased in a worried frown.
Brubaker went on, “I don’t know if he was tryin’ to capture her, or if he’s really thrown in with her.”
“Scratch would never do that,” Bo said without a shred of doubt. “He’ll bring her back ... or die trying.”
A second later, as a flurry of shots rang out in the distance, he wished he hadn’t said that.
The fire had burned off all the vegetation, but it hadn’t had any effect on the basic terrain. The ridges, the gullies, the rocks all remained, and they prevented Scratch and Cara from racing their horses at top speed.
Scratch stayed stubbornly behind her, matching her pace as best he could. At any moment, either of the horses might take a spill in this rugged landscape, but somehow the animals managed to avoid that.
Cara topped a rise and disappeared. Scratch reached the crest a moment later and expected to see her descending the far slope.
Instead, as his eyes scanned the burned-out wasteland, he didn’t spot her. The land fell away in front of him for about a mile in a series of natural terraces, and at the bottom lay a wide stream dotted with sandbars.
That was the Brazos River, Scratch realized. On the other side of it, more hills rose, but these held at least a hint of green. The drought had muted the color, but it was there, signifying that the fire hadn’t burned that side of the river. The blaze must have started somewhere around here, Scratch thought.
He didn’t really care about that. What mattered was that Cara seemed to have disappeared into thin air. That just wasn’t possible, Scratch told himself as he reined in and twisted his head from side to side, searching for her.
He didn’t see the little gully tucked away in a fold of the hills until she fired at him from it. Powder smoke spurted as the shot rang out. At the same instant, Scratch heard the wind-rip of the bullet past his ear.
The Remington in his hand roared as he kicked his horse down the slope toward the gully. He squeezed off three shots that had Cara ducking for cover.
Scratch was on top of the gully before he realized it. Suddenly aware that his horse couldn’t stop in time, he booted the animal’s flanks again and sent it lunging into the air in a daring leap that carried horse and rider all the way over the gully.
The horse landed awkwardly, though, and lost its footing. Scratch yanked his feet out of the stirrups and left the saddle in a dive. A cloud of ashes rose around him and choked him as he landed on his shoulder and rolled. Pain shot through him. His old bones didn’t take kindly to such punishment.
But he was all right, and he came up on a knee with both guns drawn as Cara burst out of the gully mounted on her horse. The revolver in her hand blasted at him. He threw himself to the side and returned the fire as her bullets smacked into the ground beside him, kicking up dirt and more ashes.
She was past him in the blink of an eye. Scratch’s right-hand Remington was empty, but the left-hand gun still held a couple of rounds. He lifted it and squeezed them off just as she twisted in the saddle and flung one final shot back at him.
Scratch had time to see her body jerk as if she were hit, then something slammed into his head with tremendous force, knocking him down so that he was stretched out on his back. He tried to get up, but his muscles refused to obey him. The fire must have started up again, he thought crazily, because red, leaping flames seemed to fill his brain. He was vaguely aware that the drumming of hoofbeats continued, then a terrible roaring sound welled up and drowned them out. That roar was his own blood inside his skull, he realized.
And Cara was getting away. There was nothing he could do to stop her now. Consciousness had started to slip away from him, and when it went, it would probably take his life with it, he knew.
“S-sorry, Bo ...” he whispered through lips crusted with bitter ashes.
Then the darkness took him.
CHAPTER 34
There had been a drought in East Texas, too, but nowhere near as bad as the one that gripped the country west of Fort Worth. So even though it was still winter, the countryside around Tyler was considerably greener than it had been over there in the Palo Pinto Hills where Bo, Scratch, and Brubaker had fought their battle with the Gentry gang.
The three men looked considerably better, too, as they left the courthouse. They were dressed in clean clothes again, Bo had a new hat to replace the one with the hole shot through it, and although Brubaker’s left arm was in a black silk sling and Scratch had a bandage around his head so that he had to wear his hat cuffed back a little, those were the only outward signs of their injuries. Bo hadn’t been wounded at all during the ruckus.
All three men were still a little hoarse when they talked, though, and from time to time fits of coughing seized them.
One such fit struck Brubaker now. The deputy stopped and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, coughing into it until the spasms subsided. He glared at the dark stains on the handkerchief and rasped, “I think I’m gonna be coughin’ up ashes the rest of my borned days.”
“You’ll get over it sooner or later, Forty-two,” Bo told him.
“Yeah, but it’ll be a long time before the smell of smoke stops givin’ you the fantods,” Scratch added. “Maybe never. I feel the same way.”
“Well, at least the job’s done now,” Brubaker said as he put away his handkerchief. “And none too
soon to suit me. I’ll be glad to get back to Fort Smith. I plan on headin’ that direction as soon as I’ve seen the sentence carried out, so I can tell Judge Parker I saw the last of the Gentry gang swing with my own eyes.”
“Only it ain’t the last of ’em, is it?” Scratch asked quietly.
“You said you thought you hit Cara with your last shot,” Bo pointed out. “She may not have made it.”
The three of them had just come from Judge Josiah Southwick’s courtroom, where the esteemed federal jurist that Bo and Scratch still knew from their youth as “Bigfoot” had sentenced Dayton Lowe, Jim Elam, and Cutter Brown to be hanged by the neck until dead. Brown was the outlaw who had surrendered in the violent aftermath of the wildfire, but he had only postponed his fate by doing so.
Bo had galloped over the hills and found Scratch lying unconscious on the slope overlooking the Brazos River. Blood and ashes had painted a ghastly pallor over Scratch’s face, but he’d been breathing, and once Bo had cleaned up the wound he had seen that his old friend was only grazed on the side of the head, enough to knock him out but not enough to kill him. When Scratch had come to, Bo had informed him that that cast-iron skull of his had saved his life again.
“Cara got away,” Scratch had said then, bothered by that more than he was the head wound.
“I know,” Bo said. “But wherever she is, she’s somebody else’s problem now.”
It had taken the rest of the day to round up some horses and recover those pack animals loaded down with stolen loot. Bo found his horse, which had survived the fire although its hide was singed in places. They never found any sign of Brubaker’s mount.
Nobody wanted to spend the night out there in that smoky wasteland, so they had ridden through the darkness back to Weatherford with their prisoner. The wildfire had burned itself out before it reached the town, but it had left a wide swath of devastation through the Cross Timbers. The area would be a long time recovering from this ... but as Bo had said, it would recover.
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