by Jake Logan
Lydia turned over on the table and lifted her feet to the edges, then lewdly spread her knees to expose herself to Cooper’s lustful gaze.
“You got any more steam in that engine?” she asked.
“You always bring out the best in me, Lydia,” he said. Cooper moved forward, bent over and kissed the woman. Or did she kiss him? To Slocum it was obvious that Lydia was giving as good as she got.
And then Cooper was moving between the woman’s legs, facing her this time. The anger Slocum felt at risking his life to rescue her powered his feet enough to find the small stone ledge once more. He kicked down and propelled himself a few inches up the chimney. This was enough to relieve the pressure on his chest and let him breathe more freely.
To his relief, the butt of his pistol also rested on a ledge. Pulling upward, using the six-gun as a lever and pushing with his toe, he got free. He worked up the rest of the way to finally drop into the hay in the loft, filthy with soot and burning with anger.
Lydia was in cahoots with Cooper. Worse, they were lovers. Slocum knew then that she had ignored him when he had seen her crossing the pastureland because she was too intent on meeting Cooper. Why Cooper hadn’t wanted her to cry out and alert the three drunken cowboys was something Slocum could only guess at. It might have been part of their playacting, her pretending to be the helpless captive and Cooper the bold conqueror.
Slocum was too disgusted to want to find out, much less care for the answer.
He found a stack of rags and wiped the soot off himself the best he could. As he finished, he heard Cooper and Lydia below between the stalls. He looked down at them, arms laced as they left the barn. Slocum pointed his six-shooter at them. He had two shots left. The hammer came back, but he couldn’t decide who got the first shot. He hesitated too long making his decision. They left the barn and were joined by Cooper’s four henchmen. Loud calls, and others rushed up.
“Larsen, you old son of a whore,” Cooper called cheerfully. “Good to see your ugly face again.”
Slocum sagged back into the hay. Cooper’s reinforcements had arrived. Deadly killers to fight Tewksbury’s peaceable ranchers.
He had to let Tewksbury know—about the gunmen he faced, if not about his treacherous daughter who had sold out body and soul to his most deadly adversary.
15
“You look like you been rode hard and put away wet, Slocum,” John Tewksbury said as he stared up at Slocum. “Leastways, you stole yerse’f a nice-lookin’ horse.” The way the man looked at him told Slocum he wasn’t merely making chin music but wanted to know if his daughter was all right. Slocum wasn’t sure how he was going to answer that.
“They owed it to me,” Slocum said, dismounting. It had been a long night. He had hidden in the barn for several hours while the festivities surrounding Larsen’s arrival and Cooper’s victory over the ranchers dragged on. Eventually, enough whiskey had been downed to make even the most attentive guard sloppy. Slocum had walked past one sentry passed out at the corral and had his pick of the horses. He hoped he had chosen Cooper’s horse—or at least Larsen’s—but all he wanted was a horse strong enough to carry him away from the Blevins ranch and back here.
Slocum looked around the small bivouac in front of the Tewksbury house and saw tiny knots of men hunched over cooking fires. There wasn’t a whole lot of merriment. What surprised him, though, was the number of men who had stayed. After such a crushing defeat most ranchers would have returned to their spreads, tails between their legs like whipped dogs, and worked hard at thinking up excuses for what had gone wrong and promises to make to Andy Cooper so they wouldn’t be on the wrong end of his wrath.
“Spit it out, Slocum. You know what I want to hear.”
Slocum hesitated. He had no reason to hurt Tewksbury, but the sight of Lydia with Cooper had caused him considerable upset. And worse, he had risked his life for a no-account whore.
“I couldn’t get to her,” Slocum said carefully. “But she’s not hurt. Cooper is keeping her safe and sound.”
“Why hasn’t he sent a ransom demand? The varmint ain’t so dumb as to think I wouldn’t give him anything he wanted fer Lydia’s return.”
“There’ll be a price to pay eventually,” Slocum said. “It’s just not now.” He looked around at the yard and the dozen fires sputtering there. “Doesn’t look like you lost many of them.”
“The only ones I lost are dead. We gotta git ’em back from Cooper so’s we kin bury ’em.”
“He got a dozen or so men to reinforce him this afternoon,” Slocum said. “A real stone killer name of Larsen.”
“Shotgun Larsen?” Tewksbury shook his head. “I heard of him when we was in Texas. If Cooper shoots ’em in the back, Larsen does the same, only with a shotgun so’s there won’t be any chance he’ll miss.”
“He’s the one,” Slocum said. “You’re going to need a small army to go up against killers of his water. Send word to the sheriff over in Prescott and have him bring a posse. Even better, alert the commander at Fort Apache and get a company of cavalry troopers here. Even forty or fifty soldiers might not be enough to stop Cooper.”
“He’s a bad one, but with his pa shot like that, he ain’t gonna stop till he’s got revenge.”
“Cooper shot his own father in the back, then dragged the body out to make it look like you killed him. Matt Blevins was dead before he came out on that porch.”
“Son of a bitch,” Tewksbury said, slapping his thigh. A small dust cloud rose. He wiped his hand on his vest. “There ain’t nuthin’ that owlhoot won’t do, is there?”
Slocum knew exactly how far Cooper had already gone, but he said nothing. Tewksbury would give up and ride out of the Tonto Basin if he thought his own daughter was with Andy Cooper of her own accord.
Slocum wondered what Tewksbury might do if he ever found out that Lydia had been sleeping with Tom Graham, too.
“You need a better plan than riding straight into their guns,” Slocum said. “More men would go a ways toward a victory, too.”
“Cain’t afford to lose another fight, kin I? Well now, I got word out to a dozen other ranches. Most of them ought to show up by noon tomorrow with ammunition, maybe explosives and fifty or more men willing to fight. Turned out there was fewer men who’d taken a likin’ to Old Man Blevins than I thought. And the ones what remember Andy, they’re willin’ to join up.”
“To split up both the Graham and Blevins spreads?” Slocum asked. He saw Tewksbury react enough to know this was the bait used to lure allies.
“Won’t do them varmints much good if all of ’em is dead.”
“What do you get out of all this?”
“My daughter,” Tewksbury said, sounding as if he meant it. “Turn in, Slocum, git all rested up. Tomorrow’s gonna determine the future of this whole territory.”
Slocum noticed that Tewksbury hadn’t said anything about more careful planning. If he didn’t have some clever attack mapped out with all the ranchers behind him, he’d be right about the fight ending the feud in the Basin.
“He’s not been here in years,” Tewksbury said, “so’s I figger he’ll think this is a good way to come.” The grizzled man pointed out the valleys and ravines in the rolling pastureland. “Him and his gang’ll come ridin’ up from their place and have to funnel down into that there ravine. We hit ’em from both sides. Real purty strategy, ain’t it, Slocum?”
“Only if he doesn’t split his men into two groups, one riding down the ravine and the other coming from behind those hills. You ought to have a scout or two posted a couple miles off to warn you.”
“I need every single gun I kin muster. He ain’t bright enough to think like that. After he won so easy at his place, he’ll reckon he kin do it all over again out here. He’s wrong.”
Slocum worried about the blind spot behind Tewksbury’s left flank. The men along the right side of the ravine wouldn’t be in position to support or attack if Cooper caught those on the left bank from front and back.
“I kin git ’em into position and out again, if it comes to that,” Tewksbury assured him. “But I’m mighty worried about Lydia. You think Cooper might bring her along, as a shield? I couldn’t order any kind of attack if he was hidin’ behind her skirts.”
“He won’t do that,” Slocum said. From what he had seen of Cooper and Lydia together, the outlaw wanted to impress Lydia with how brave he was. To do that she might be watching from some safe vantage, but Cooper would want her far enough away so he could cut and run, if the need arose. He might even indulge himself in some savagery that wouldn’t be seen by her; then he could go and have his way with her.
Slocum found himself grinding his teeth together. He had taken a fancy to Lydia. Maybe not for a long spell, but the time he had been here he had liked her. Finding out she slept with her pa’s worst enemies revealed a dark current flowing under her bright smile that Slocum had not guessed was there. Misjudging her so completely rankled as much as anything.
“I got to git the men into position. Caleb’s offered to be the decoy and lead the lambs to the slaughter.”
“Caleb?”
“He wants to git his sister back safe and sound, too. We’re family, Slocum. Blood’s thicker’n water.” With that, Tewksbury rode off shouting to other ranchers and getting them split into two roughly equal forces, one for each side of the deep, rugged, rocky ravine where he thought he could trap Cooper.
Slocum kept eyeing the distant ridge. One more gun wasn’t going to matter. He wished Caleb had been available to go scout that distant ridge, but Slocum couldn’t fault the young man for his willingness to go along with this cockamamie battle plan even trained soldiers weren’t likely to execute properly. All it took was one man to get buck fever and fire early to warn Cooper away from the ambush. Even if everything went well, Slocum knew it would be a fight. Tewksbury had not bothered with a plan to bottle up Cooper and his men. If they started taking serious casualties, all Cooper had to do was retreat the way he had come.
But that distant ridge—Cooper need only bring a dozen men over it to completely destroy Tewksbury’s strategy.
“Git ready, boys. There’s Caleb signalin’ he’s got Cooper followin’ him!”
“Tewksbury, I’m going to the other side, to scout the ridge,” Slocum called, but the rancher was too caught up in playing general. Tewksbury shouted orders that made no sense, but that hardly mattered since no one was paying him any attention. The ranchers knew what had to be done and were getting ready for Cooper to ride into the ravine like a cow down the chute in a slaughterhouse.
Slocum stood in his stirrups and shielded his eyes when he saw a solitary rider trotting along at the foot of the hill he worried most about. He grabbed his field glasses from his saddlebags and peered into them. His heart leapt when he saw that it was a woman.
“Lydia!”
A more careful look told him this was some other woman, older and bigger than the petite Lydia Tewksbury and sporting midnight dark hair that escaped here and there from under her hat.
“Tewksbury,” he called, but the man had ridden away. Slocum got his mare down the steep ravine embankment and found a path up the other slope. He had to warn the woman away from the battle. How she had ridden out across the Basin today, at this precise time was something he didn’t want to think on. Coincidences like that could prove deadly. Worse, Cooper might spot her and not be lured into Tewksbury’s trap.
Slocum lost sight of her in the rolling hills. He struggled to get to the top of a low rise and then forgot all about the solitary woman. His worst fear had been realized. He swung in the saddle and looked down the ravine where Caleb galloped hard, a half dozen men following him. A half dozen! The rest of Cooper’s back-shooting murderers attacked in exactly the way Slocum had feared they might. More than fifty armed and ready outlaws crested the hill, then rushed forward.
“It’s a trap!” Slocum shouted. Seeing that his warning fell on deaf ears, he drew his rifle and began firing, hoping to get the attention of the men on the left bank. They would be trapped between the overwhelming firepower from Cooper’s attack and the sheer drop into the ravine. The front line of Cooper’s force appeared at the base of the hill where Slocum stood watch. Slocum fired methodically and knocked a horse out from under one of Cooper’s men. Then the rest were out of Slocum’s rifle range and rushed on to attack the men forming Tewksbury’s left flank.
Slocum swung his horse around and cut back at an angle to get in front of the horde of men closing fast on the left flank.
“Behind you. They’re coming from behind you!” he shouted. He got off a couple more shots that accomplished nothing. The men Tewksbury had strung out along the left bank of the ravine thought they were hearing only the reports of their own rifles—until hot lead began cutting them down.
Someone turned and saw the danger, but they had no cover from a rear attack. The men on the far side of the ravine were unable to give supporting fire without shooting through their own ranks. But they did anyway. Slocum cringed as hot lead winged over from the other bank, some of it killing allies and the rest wasted.
“Get ’em, men. No quarter. Dequello!” Cooper called.
Slocum heard the voice and knew the Mexican order that had been given at the Alamo. No quarter. He slowed his wild gallop and turned more toward Andy Cooper. There was nothing he could hope to do by joining Tewksbury’s men in death. But there might be one last gift he could give the world. Kill Andy Cooper.
Slocum swung the rifle to his shoulder as his horse ran into the ranks of Cooper’s men. He squeezed off a shot that missed Cooper by a country mile. His next shot was hardly closer, but the third one he managed to get off just as his horse was straining forward and not bouncing him all over the meadow. He was pleased to see Cooper recoil and grab for his right side. Slocum’s bullet had drawn blood. He had hoped for a clean kill, but this was enough for the moment. It forced Cooper to fall back and let his men advance without him shouting encouragement.
Not that any of them needed it. Shotgun Larsen rode near the front of the tidal wave washing over Tewksbury’s flank. His sawed-off, double-barreled weapon roared repeatedly, and the loads of heavy buckshot tore savage paths through men who had only seconds before thought they were going to win this battle. From the corner of his eye Slocum saw one man’s head explode as Larsen loosed both barrels at almost point-blank range. Then Larsen galloped past before the man’s headless body hit the ground.
Slocum saw that he no longer had a clear shot at Cooper. The owlhoot fell back and let his men form a shield between him and Slocum.
But Slocum found himself suddenly occupied when he heard his name called out.
“Slocum, you miserable sheep-lovin’—” The rest of Shotgun Larsen’s imprecation was drowned out by the thunder of dozens of rifles being fired—all at Tewksbury’s men.
Slocum bent low so that Larsen’s buckshot missed his head. Hot stabs on his side told him that at least two of the shotgun pellets had grazed him, though. A little wobbly from the pain, Slocum lifted his rifle and fired. He hit someone, but it wasn’t Larsen. Then he was sliding down the steep embankment into the ravine. He heard the report of a shotgun and felt his horse melt under him. When he hit the rocky bottom, he knew his mare was dead from a double blast of double-ought buck.
He lay on the gravelly stream bottom and waited. Above him the roar of death-giving rifles and pistols went on unabated. Tewksbury’s men had dropped their weapons and tried to escape, only to find no way to retreat. Too many of them had been shot down by their own side and by the ranchers stretched along the right-hand side of the ravine. Slocum lifted his head a little and saw bodies littering the ground all around him. Without moving too much, he slid
his Colt Navy free of its holster, cocked it and waited.
It didn’t take Larsen long to find a path down into the ravine. He wanted to stand over Slocum’s dead body and gloat. Between half-opened eyelids, Slocum watched the killer ride up. Larsen puffed up his chest and looked like he was going to give voice to a long, loud cry of triumph, like some jungle animal.
Slocum never gave him the chance. He rolled onto his side, winced at the pain from the two creases in his hide, aimed and fired. The bullet caught Larsen just under the chin and knocked his head back. Larsen fell, but his feet caught in his stirrups. His horse reared, then tore out at a gallop, going past Slocum and up the ravine, its grisly cargo bouncing from side to side. Slocum pushed up to one elbow and flopped over in time to see Larsen finally fall free of his horse.
“See you in hell, Shotgun,” Slocum said. Moving painfully, Slocum got to his feet and immediately dived for the bank of the deep ravine to avoid the fire from Cooper’s men now occupying the left bank.
Sporadic fire came from those on the right side, but Slocum suspected most of them had seen the handwriting on the wall and hightailed it. Twice now John Tewksbury had lost a major fight with Blevins and his son, Andy Cooper.
“Kill ’em, kill ’em all, men!” Cooper shouted encouragement from just above Slocum.
Craning his neck around, Slocum caught sight of the outlaw pointing to the far side of the ravine. Slocum got off a shot and nicked Cooper’s wrist. Luckily for him, Cooper thought the round came from the other side of the ravine. Otherwise, if Cooper had ordered all the gunfire turned downward, Slocum would have been cut to bloody ribbons.
Realizing that his hatred for the man was clouding his judgment, Slocum began edging along the ravine wall, hunting for some way to climb up the far side and get help from Tewksbury and his men. Cooper wasn’t inclined to give up and begin his second celebration in as many days. He kept his men firing at anything moving on the right side of the ravine.