Sam looked around and found a fist-sized chunk of sandstone. The guard was to his right, so he drew back his arm as much as he could in the narrow confines of the crack and threw the rock in that direction. It sailed up and out and came thudding down on the ground atop the mesa.
Sam followed the rock, moving fast.
As he emerged from the crack with the Winchester cradled in both hands, he threw himself forward on his belly. About twenty feet away, a man in range clothes was turning toward him. The rock had done its job and served as a distraction, causing the guard to take his attention off the crack for a second.
The rustler held a rifle, too, and it spat flame and lead as he hurried a shot at Sam. The bullet hit the ground well to Sam’s left.
Sam fired more deliberately, and his aim was true. The .44-40 round punched into the rustler’s midsection and doubled him over. The man dropped his gun and howled in pain as he clutched himself. He staggered to the side.
That took him too close to the edge. He let out a sudden scream as he toppled off into empty air. The scream continued for the couple of heartbeats it took him to fall all the way to the rocks next to the mesa.
As Sam scrambled to his feet, he heard the soggy thud of the rustler’s landing. That grim sound ended the scream.
He ran toward the other side of the mesa. With all the other shooting going on, the rest of the rustlers might not have noticed the shots Sam had traded with the guard, but he couldn’t count on that. He had to move fast while he still had the chance.
As he had suspected, the mesa had some grass growing on its top and even a few small bushes. Off to Sam’s right was a basin where the top of the mesa had sunk, creating a rock-lined pool that held water from the occasional rains.
Gathered around that pool were the cattle that had been stolen from John Henry Boyd’s ranch. They didn’t need to be fenced in. They wouldn’t get far from the water, and anyway, where would they go?
Beyond the pool was a rope corral made from a couple of lassos and some stakes pounded into the hard ground. Four horses were inside the corral. Since Sam had already killed one man, that meant there were three more rustlers up here.
He got instant confirmation of that a second later when three men emerged from behind the horses and charged toward him, guns blazing.
Chapter 30
Sam was outnumbered and the scrubby vegetation atop the mesa offered no protection.
So he angled toward the only cover he could find, the cattle clustered around the pool.
Bullets sang around him. He returned the fire as he ran, working the Winchester’s lever and snapping shots toward the rustlers.
One of the cows let out a bellow as a stray slug struck it. Sam ducked between two of the beasts. One of them swung its head and nearly hooked him with a horn. He bounced off the sturdy flank of the other cow.
Sam kept his head down as one of the rustlers shouted, “Where the hell did he go?”
“He’s in amongst the cattle!” one of the other men answered. “Spread out! We’ll circle them!”
Sam couldn’t afford to let that happen. He yanked his hat off his head and slashed right and left with it, swatting the rumps of several cows. At the same time he fired his Winchester one-handed into the air and let out a howl like a panther.
The cattle reacted as he hoped they would. The normally stolid beasts around him spooked at the racket and at being swatted, and in a herd of cattle, when one cow panicked, they all panicked.
The herd surged away from the pool in a full-on stampede, straight at the rustlers.
Even over the pounding of hooves, Sam heard the frightened yells that came from the three men as they tried to get out of the way.
He had his own scrambling to do, since he was in the midst of the cattle when they began to run. He leaped from side to side to avoid the lumbering beasts, but he was still pummeled.
If he fell, he would never get up again. The cattle would trample him to death. Sam knew that. He dropped his rifle, willing to lose the Winchester if it would save his life, and used both hands to grab the horns of a steer charging past him. The steel-spring muscles in his legs vaulted him onto the animal’s back.
Sam hung on for dear life.
With his legs clamped around the steer’s neck, Sam used his grip on the horns to twist the beast’s head. That forced it toward the edge of the stampeding herd.
He had lost track of the three rustlers, but he had more pressing worries at the moment. The steer began to buck.
Sam had heard that down in Texas, cowboys had started to have what they called rodeos, competitions that centered around ranch work. One of them was bull-riding, or so he had been told.
This was a steer, not a bull, but the ride was a thrilling and dangerous one anyway. Sam thought a couple of times that the steer was going to throw him off, but he managed to stay on until the animal reached the edge of the herd.
He let go of the horns and piled off, leaping desperately to put as much distance between himself and the stampede as possible. When he hit the ground, he rolled away fast and came up running.
Dust choked him, but at least none of the cattle ran over him. When he looked back, he saw that he was clear.
Now he could start looking for the rustlers again, he thought as he blinked grit out of his eyes and drew the Colt that had stayed thronged down in its holster.
The thing about a stampede on top of a mesa was that the cattle didn’t have very far they could go. When the leaders reached the edge, they began to turn, and the herd started to mill. Sam ran around the confusion, searching for the three men.
The first one he found wouldn’t ever steal any more cows. The man hadn’t been able to get out of the way, and the thundering hooves had pounded him into a gory mess that barely resembled anything human.
The second man had been more fortunate, but not much. Both of his legs were broken. His groans of agony led Sam to him.
But just like a broken-backed rattlesnake can still bite, this crippled rustler was dangerous. When he spotted Sam, he heaved himself up with one hand and lifted a revolver with the other. Flame geysered from the muzzle.
Sam flung himself aside and returned the fire. He didn’t have time for anything fancy. The rustler’s head snapped back as a red-rimmed hole appeared in his forehead and Sam’s bullet drilled into his brain.
Sam grimaced. He wanted to take at least one of the men alive so they could question him. Now that might not be possible.
He swung around looking for the third man, and as he did, the scrape of boot leather on rock warned him.
But not in time for him to get out of the way. The last rustler slammed into him from behind, driving him off his feet.
Sam went down with the man on his back. The rustler must have lost his gun in the chaos of the stampede, otherwise he would have just shot Sam. Instead he looped an arm around Sam’s throat from behind and started trying to choke the life out of him.
Sam tried to buck the rustler off, just as the steer had bucked under him. The rustler clung with the same tenacity Sam had, though.
Heaving himself up on hands and knees, Sam rolled, thinking that maybe he could break the man’s grip that way.
Instead the arm across his throat just pressed harder, cutting off his air as effectively as if it had been an iron bar.
Sam still had his gun. He struck behind him with it in an attempt to knock his attacker unconscious.
The rustler ducked his head and pressed his face into the back of Sam’s neck.
“I’m gonna kill you, redskin!”
Sam heard the harsh whisper, although it sounded muffled because of the roar of blood in his ears. His vision was beginning to blur as a red haze dropped over his eyes.
He had no choice.
He pushed the Colt’s barrel against the man’s leg and pulled the trigger.
The rustler screamed in his ear and let go of him. Sam arched his back, throwing the man to the side. He rolled away and came up in a cro
uch, holding the Colt ready to fire again if he needed to.
But all the fight had already gone out of the rustler, along with a great deal of blood. As the man screamed again, a crimson fountain shot into the air from the wound in his thigh. He pawed at it, but the blood just ran between his fingers like a river.
Sam knew his bullet had torn an artery. He had intended just to inflict a flesh wound, something to make the rustler let go, but now he saw that the man had only moments to live unless that bleeding could be stopped.
Sam leaped forward and slammed the Colt against the rustler’s head, knocking the man out. There was no time to waste in struggling with him.
He dropped the gun and pulled the man’s belt off, then wrapped it around the thigh as high as he could above the wound and pulled it tight. Slipping the Colt’s barrel into a loop he fashioned in the belt, he began twisting it.
As the belt tightened and cut into the flesh of the rustler’s leg, the gush of blood slowed. Sam used both hands to twist the Colt and draw the makeshift tourniquet even tighter. The blood stopped.
A grotesque rattle came from the man’s throat.
“Blast it, no!” Sam burst out. He held the belt tight with one hand on the gun and used the other hand to feel for a heartbeat. The rustler’s eyes were open and staring, and the muscles of his face were slack.
After a minute, Sam had to admit to himself that he wasn’t going to find a heartbeat. The fourth and final rustler on top of this mesa was dead.
Sam had just heaved a sigh of disgust when he heard a man’s voice call his name. He turned his head to look and saw Stovepipe Stewart running toward him, followed by Wilbur Coleman and John Henry Boyd.
“Sam, you all right?” Stovepipe asked as he pounded up. “Lord, that’s a lot of blood!”
“It’s all his,” Sam said. He released the tourniquet and pulled his gun loose from the dead man’s belt. “I was trying to wing him, but I nicked an artery instead.”
“I’ll say you did,” Wilbur put in. “Looks like he bled practically a whole lake.”
Weariness gripped Sam as he got to his feet.
“What about the rest of you?” he asked. “Was anybody hurt?”
“One of my riders, Ben Conroy, was killed,” Boyd said grimly. “Couple men got creased, but that’s all.” He looked around the mesa. “Any more of the varmints up here?”
“None breathing,” Sam told him. “There were four men with the cattle.”
“This is just about the craziest thing I ever saw,” Boyd went on. “Who’d be loco enough to drive cattle up a narrow little trail like that to the top of a mesa?”
“Somebody who knew the chances of you findin’ ’em would be mighty small,” Stovepipe said. “If it wasn’t for Sam’s eyes, likely we never would’ve spotted the way up here.”
Boyd looked at Sam and nodded. He waved a hand to indicate the cattle and the dead rustlers.
“I reckon this proves you didn’t have anything to do with that stock being stolen, Two Wolves. You wouldn’t have done what you did if you were part of this bunch.”
“If you check the bodies, you’ll see that they’re all white,” Sam pointed out. “Not Navajo.”
In his habitual gesture, Boyd rubbed his chin.
“Yeah, I reckon I was wrong about that, too,” he said.
“You ever seen this fella before, Mr. Boyd?” Stovepipe asked as he nodded to the man who had bled to death.
Boyd frowned.
“I don’t think I have.”
“I have,” Wilbur said. “I don’t know who he is, but I remember seein’ him in Flat Rock durin’ the past week or so.”
Stovepipe nodded and said, “I was just thinkin’ the same thing, pard. Let’s have a look at the others.”
“You won’t be able to tell much about one of them,” Sam warned. “He got caught in the stampede.”
“Got to pick him up with a shovel, eh?” Stovepipe hunkered on his heels next to the man Sam had shot in the head. “Well, we’ll let that one go. This one, though, I’ve seen him in town, too. Don’t you think, Wilbur?”
“Yeah, he looks familiar,” the freckle-faced puncher agreed.
“So the gang’s holed up in Flat Rock,” Boyd said. “We’ll go in there and clean out the whole place if we have to.”
“That won’t do any good,” Sam cautioned. “You don’t know who else is part of the bunch. What we need to do is figure out a way to draw them into the open.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Boyd said with obvious reluctance. “I know my boys, though, and they’re gonna want to go in shooting.”
“You’ll have to keep them from doing that.” Sam turned toward the rope corral, which had survived the stampede intact as the cows went around it. “I want to take a look at their horses. Maybe that’ll tell us something.”
“I was just thinkin’ the same thing,” Stovepipe said.
Together they examined the rustlers’ mounts. The brands were ones that Sam didn’t recognize, and neither did Boyd.
“That just means they didn’t come from any of the spreads around here,” the rancher said. “I figured as much.”
All four horses were unsaddled, but as Sam ran his hands over the flanks of a leggy roan, he said, “This one is hotter than the others. He’s been run hard fairly recently.”
“You reckon one of those fellas made a fast trip out here?” Stovepipe asked.
“That would mean the rustlers left three men to keep an eye on the cattle,” Sam said. “That sounds reasonable.”
“Then why’d the fourth man come out here all hell-for-leather?” Wilbur asked.
“To warn the other hombres that we were tryin’ to trail the stolen herd,” Stovepipe answered. “That the way it lays out to you, Sam?”
“Yeah. The men who tried to bushwhack me this morning hurried back to Flat Rock to tell their boss that I wasn’t dead. They must have seen the two of you join up with me, and then Mr. Boyd and his men came along and we all started trailing the cattle. The boss sent word to his men out here, hoping they’d get rid of us.”
“They jumped the gun a mite,” Stovepipe drawled.
“Yeah, one of them has a habit of doing that,” Sam said. He thought it was very likely that the man who had taken that first shot at him and Matt was dead now, one of the four men who had been killed here on top of the mesa.
“Getting those cows down off this mesa is gonna be a chore,” Boyd complained. “I’ll be damned if I’ll leave them up here, though. We’ll wait until morning and see if we can drive them back down that trail.”
“That’s up to you and your men,” Sam said. “Now that you’ve decided that Stovepipe and Wilbur and I are trustworthy after all, there’s something else we need to do.”
“What’s that?” Stovepipe asked.
Sam thought about Matt. The canyon where Caballo Rojo’s clan lived wasn’t very far away. They might not be able to reach it by nightfall, but he thought he could find it even after darkness had fallen.
“Let’s just say I want to go visit a sick friend.”
Chapter 31
This had been one of the longest days of Matt Bodine’s life.
He knew it had been hard on Elizabeth, too, but at least she had been in the shade part of the time. He had been baking in the blistering sun all day, tied to a stake. Standing there like that for hours had caused the wounds in his side to ache like a bad tooth.
But he could tell the bullet holes weren’t bleeding again, just hurting, and that was something to be thankful for, anyway.
They hadn’t really hurt Elizabeth, either, just forced her to sit beside Juan Pablo’s hogan and watch Matt’s torment. That was the only other good thing about this ordeal.
He looked over at her now and saw how her face was pale and drawn with the strain. He tried to summon up a smile to let her know that everything was all right, but he couldn’t quite manage it.
Things weren’t all right, though, and they both knew it. Juan Pablo and his followers i
ntended to kill both of them. It was just a matter of time.
Juan Pablo had at least a dozen men backing his play. Matt didn’t know if Caballo Rojo was one of them, or if the clan headman was just staying out of this for the time being because he didn’t want Juan Pablo challenging him for leadership of everyone who lived in the canyon.
But the Navajo had been drifting in from their homes along the creek all day, gathering here to look at the captive white man, and some of them seemed very happy about it. The men had taken turns standing guard over Matt, although with his hands tied behind his back and his torso lashed to the stake, he wasn’t about to go anywhere.
He supposed it made them feel like they were accomplishing something to stand there clutching their old rifles and glaring at him.
Matt didn’t look directly at them. He didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of letting them see what bad shape he was really in. The sun had baked his brain until his vision was fuzzy, his thoughts were clouded, and despair gripped his heart. He felt like the heat had leached every bit of moisture out of his body. His tongue was swollen and his mouth as dry as cotton.
His head drooped forward, but he wouldn’t allow himself to pass out. Even though he was helpless, he wanted to know what was going on around him.
Because of that, he saw movement as someone approached him late that afternoon. The sun had started its slide toward the western horizon, which gave him a certain amount of blessed relief although the canyon still felt like an oven.
Through slitted eyes, Matt watched as Juan Pablo walked up to him, as haughty, cruel, and arrogant as if he were old Manuelito come back to life.
“Bodine,” Juan Pablo said. “This day has taught you that the Navajo are still a proud people.”
“I never ... doubted that.” Matt had to force the words out through his parched throat and mouth and past blistered lips. “But there is no pride ... in cruelty. You have ... nothing to be proud of ... Juan Pablo.”
The man’s face darkened in anger. He stepped closer and backhanded Matt viciously across the face.
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