That last word had just made its way out of his mouth before Colter’s lower jaw dropped nearly to the wash-worn red bandanna twisted into a knot around his neck. Either a cloud had just pushed over the bench before him, or yet another group of riders was storming toward him, up the north side of the bench and cutting off his escape route.
Colter blinked.
His heart thudded.
It was the latter, all right. The silhouettes of individual pursuers took shape in Colter’s field of vision. Like the first group, this bunch was also riding stirrup to stirrup, dusters buffeting out around them like the wings of giant birds, their dusty hat brims bending in the wind of their ground-hammering passage.
They were straight out ahead of the redhead and his galloping coyote dun, maybe seventy yards away and closing fast.
“Whoahhhhh!” Colter yelled, drawing back sharply on Northwest’s reins.
Ahead, riders stormed toward him.
Behind, riders stormed toward him.
Quickly, Colter looked around. He had two directions in which to ride—to the east or the west. He couldn’t ride east because of a deep cut in the bench in that direction. There was only west, straight on up the gradually rising bench.
Reining the coyote dun sharply left, Colter poked the horse again with his spurs and whipped his rein ends against the mount’s left hip, though he hadn’t needed to do any coaxing. This wasn’t the dun’s first rodeo.
He and the horse’s rider had had plenty of bounty hunters and lawmen after them, after Colter had killed Bill Rondo, the rogue sheriff of Sapinero in the Colorado Territory. Rondo had killed Colter’s foster father, Trace Cassidy, and then, when Colter had ridden to Sapinero to investigate, Rondo had used his legendary branding iron to burn a large, ugly S into Colter’s left cheek. The “Mark of Sapinero” some called it, indicating the bearer of the brand was no longer wanted back in Rondo’s territory.
In Colter’s case, most deemed it the “Mark of Satan.”
Others, especially those who’d seen the young, left-handed, redheaded, scar-faced firebrand at work with his guns, had dubbed Colter a redheaded devil, one with a good working knowledge of the old Remington .44 in the holster positioned for the cross-draw on the left-hander’s right hip, and the old-model Henry Tyler .44 rifle in the scabbard jutting up from under his left thigh.
Colter’s criminal reputation had grown when Bill Rondo had framed him for the murder of two deputy U.S. marshals. Now, here he was, two years later, on the run once more with a whole horde of bounty hunters or lawmen—possibly both—galloping so close behind him now that one of their bullets curled the air just off his right ear before shrieking off a rock dead ahead of him.
That caused him to flinch and for his heart to race even faster.
He glanced behind.
Again, he’d opened up a gap between himself and his pursuers. He’d been right. He had the best horse of the lot. Still, the horde’s foremost riders were only sixty or so yards behind him, and judging by how low they sat in their saddles, avoiding the wind, and by how they were spurring their mounts and whipping the horses with their reins, they were damned determined.
Still, Colter’s heart was buoyed by the fact that with every long stretch of Northwest’s slender but muscular legs, he and the coyote dun were widening the distance between him and the gun wolves.
But, then . . .
“Oh no,” Colter heard himself say beneath the wind roaring in his ears.
He stared straight ahead over Northwest’s laid-back ears.
There was a problem. A big one. Not in the form of more riders, though that couldn’t have been much worse.
It appeared that Colter and Northwest, storming up the gentle incline of open ground, were fast approaching the end of the bench. A shadowy line shone across the ground ahead, and as Colter and Northwest continued to gallop toward it, that shadowy line grew wider.
They were fast approaching a slender chasm.
It appeared as though, maybe several eons back, something had pried both ends of the bench apart and left it with a long, jagged crack down its back, extending from Colter’s left to his right. Beyond the gap, the bench continued.
Still, there was the gap. The end of the road. Not just the end of the road, but the end of Colter’s life.
Should he stop and fight despite the futility of going up against thirty armed men with federal bounty money dancing in their eyes, or deprive them of their quarry by riding right on over the cliff and into eternity?
Or . . .
He saw now as he closed on it quickly that the gap was no more than thirty, possibly thirty-five, feet across.
Could Northwest clear it?
Suddenly, Colter had no choice but to let the horse try. He was now too near the chasm to stop.
Colter leaned even lower, squeezing his knees taut against the horse’s barrel, and shouted, “Go, boy—gooo!”
His blood raced like frigid snowmelt in his veins. The sweat pasting his hickory shirt to his back suddenly turned to ice.
Northwest shook his head and lunged off the bench and into thin air. Time slowed as horse and rider arced up and over the chasm.
Colter looked down.
His gut leaped into his throat as he saw that the knife slash across the bench had to be at least two hundred feet deep—a devil’s red maw of churned gravel, fluted sandstone, sloping rocky shelves, and tonguelike projections of raw earth with a few tufts of wiry brown grass and desert shrubs growing amongst the debris of the planet’s bowels, down there in the sun-dappled shadows of an earthen sarcophagus.
Northwest had kicked several rocks from the cliff’s lip as the horse had made its leap. Colter saw those rocks tumbling down, down, down into the chasm’s open jaws, one or two bouncing off the sheer wall behind Colter now as he and Northwest gained the far side of the bench.
They made it!
But as Northwest’s front hooves gained the ground on the opposite side, Colter looked down and slightly behind him to see that the dun’s rear hooves just barely cleared the chasm. They landed not two inches on this side of it, grinding into the black gravel and coarse brown grass, kicking the gravel out behind them and into the canyon as the horse’s momentum drove horse and rider forward, away from certain death.
Or maybe not . . .
Colter had just turned his head forward when the horse shifted violently. It lurched to its right. Right away, Colter knew why. He heard the grinding rasp of gravel as the horse’s right hoof slid inward.
Northwest whinnied.
Instinctively, Colter pulled his feet free of his stirrups. He’d gentled horses back in his home range of the Lunatics, back before all his worldly troubles, before Bill Rondo had killed Trace, and Colter had drifted down the vengeance trail, and he knew that the first thing a horseman did when sensing trouble was to pull his boots free of his stirrups lest he wanted to get his bones pounded to chalk.
As Northwest pulled to the left, sagging beneath him, Colter flew to the right, the ground coming up fast in a gray-brown blur. It hammered Colter about the head and shoulders. It pounded a shrill “Ohh!” out of him and then he went rolling, rolling like a rag doll, feeling his hat flying away from him.
He felt the slashing, grinding assault of a million small rocks and some not so small before he came to a stop on his belly, his lips pressed against more dirt and gravel. Instantly, before he even knew if he was all in one piece, he heaved himself to his feet and swung toward his horse, more worried at the moment about Northwest than he was about himself.
One, he was a horseman, born and bred. His horse was as much a part of him as his own arms and legs, his own soul.
Two, without a horse, he was dead out here even if he had shed the posse, which remained to be seen . . .
Chapter 4
Colter looked around him, dazed, shaking away the cobwebs.
To his left, Northwest also appeared to be shaking away the fog of the violent tumble as he regained his feet in a sh
roud of wafting dust. The dun clawed his front legs forward and hoisted his rear end while breaking at the hocks of his rear legs and lifting up and forward.
Colter’s saddle hung down the horse’s near side, along with Colter’s rifle and scabbard. His saddlebags were on the ground.
Colter was relieved to see that the horse appeared all right. At least, Colter hadn’t heard the horrific clatter of broken bones.
The redhead whipped his head back in the direction from which he’d come. He was roughly a hundred feet from the gap. His pursuers milled around on their horses roughly another hundred feet beyond the gap, talking amongst themselves. They were obviously discussing the gap between them and their prey. One of the riders threw lead at Colter, but there was a slight slope between Colter and the gap, and the shooter’s bullet skimmed the brow of the slope before ricocheting off a rock to Colter’s right.
Colter lurched to his feet. His bones felt creaky. His hips were sore and his neck was stiff. Still, he didn’t think anything was broken. He quickly grabbed Northwest’s reins and led the horse down into a rocky depression, out of the line of fire from Colter’s pursuers trapped on the other side of the gap.
Colter shucked his Tyler Henry rifle from the scabbard then walked back up onto the relatively level ground of the gap. He dropped behind a rock and racked a cartridge into the rifle’s action. He gazed across the gap at the thirty or so riders gathered there—a small army of heavily armed men speaking in hushed, angrily conferring tones.
One man—a black-bearded man in a black duster and tan Stetson sitting a fine dapple-gray stallion—spat to one side, then, pointing angrily toward the gap, yelled, “He did it—we can, too! He ain’t gettin’ away! Not again!”
Shucking his rifle from the scabbard on the right side of his saddle, the bearded man cocked it one-handed, rested the barrel across his saddle bows, then ground his spurs into his horse’s flanks. He threw his head back to give a caterwauling wail as the dapple-gray lunged off its rear hooves and bolted forward, pinning its ears back against its head.
The others followed suit behind the lead rider, whooping and hollering and grinding their spurs into their mounts’ flanks. The mass of men and horses, forming a triangle behind the point rider, whose duster flew out around him like giant black wings, rushed toward the gap, and Colter hunkered down behind his covering rock, grinning like a bobcat eyeing a cottontail.
Hooves rumbled. Colter could hear the squawk of leather tack and the jangle of bridle chains.
The lead rider chewed up the ground between himself and the gap. Horse and rider grew larger and larger in Colter’s field of vision, the others flanking him also closing quickly on the chasm.
The lead rider’s bearded face trembled with the violent jostling of his galloping mount. Colter saw fear in the man’s dark eyes, beneath the wide brim of his tan Stetson.
The dapple-gray lunged off its rear hooves and vaulted out over the narrow canyon, reaching desperately forward with its front hooves. At the apex of his arc over the earth’s deadly grin, the bearded rider glanced down and his jaw hung in shock.
A second later, when the dapple-gray cleared the gap, landing on its front hooves, its rear hooves also just barely clearing the chasm, the rider’s face stretched into a victorious grin.
Light glinted in the man’s dark eyes. He started to raise his rifle. Colter’s Henry spoke first. Fear returned to the man’s eyes as the bullet punched through the middle of his chest and sent him howling and flying backward off the dapple-gray’s hindquarters. He turned a single somersault in the air before he hit the ground, bounced, losing his hat and rifle, and rolled backward. He disappeared into the canyon.
It was as though the grinning earth had sucked him into its mouth.
Colter ejected the spent cartridge, lined up his sights on a rider just then halfway across the gap on a lunging pinto, and blew the rider out of his saddle and into the gorge.
Colter racked another round and aimed at the man to the right of the one he’d just killed. He held fire as this man’s horse landed short of the ledge and plummeted into the chasm, horse and rider screaming fiercely.
Colter unseated another rider, another, and another, throwing those three men and, unfortunately, their horses into the earth’s jaws. He shot another man as that man’s horse gained Colter’s side of the chasm. That rider didn’t fall into the canyon. Instead, he rolled down the side of his horse and got a boot caught in his left stirrup.
The horse went galloping past Colter, the man screaming as the horse pulled him along beside it, the man bouncing violently. The ground ripped his duster off his shoulders and cast it into the wind, like a lover’s hastily cast-off cloak.
Colter ejected the last spent round, sent it smoking over his left shoulder, and seated a fresh pill in the breech.
Several riders, having seen what had happened to the first wave, were pulling their horses sharply back from the ledge on the chasm’s far side. At the same time, another horse and rider made the leap. The horse cleared the ledge but lost its nerve. Wide-eyed, it plummeted onto its knees and flipped over its left withers, throwing its rider into the air.
For a second, horse and rider were indistinguishable in the dust they kicked up, but in the next second, Colter saw the rider separate from the horse, rolling out away from it. Colter turned his attention back to the chasm as one more horse and rider disappeared into the earth’s mouth while another gained Colter’s side of the cleft.
Seeing Colter bearing down on him, the man leaned back in his saddle and raised his arm as though to shield himself from the bullet, shouting, “Nooo!”
Too late.
Colter’s .44 caliber chunk of death was already on its way. It drilled the man through his right eyebrow. Colter saw the blood spray out the back of his head as he tumbled down his galloping horse’s right hip and rolled off into the brush, limbs pinwheeling like those of a scarecrow torn out of a cornfield by a cyclone.
Rifles cracked from the chasm’s far side. Bullets plumed the dirt and red gravel and the rocks around Colter, several spanging shrilly.
Colter pulled his head down behind his covering rock as another round zinged past his right ear to slam into a rock behind him. When he edged another look around the rock to stare back across the chasm, he saw that the rest of the bounty hunters were sitting their restless mounts a good fifty yards back from the cut in the earth.
Their number had been winnowed appreciably.
The dust still sifted in the hot air before them, having been kicked up when, seeing that the odds of their making it across the chasm without becoming sacrifices to the dark gods at the earth’s bowels, they’d wheeled their mounts and literally hightailed it back to relative safety.
Suddenly, they stopped shooting. They milled for a time in a tight cluster. Colter could hear them conferring now in the heavy silence following the carnage.
A sound rose straight out across the bench, in front of Colter. He peered that way to see the last man to make it across the chasm alive lift his head up from a brush clump. He grunted and wheezed, his clothes in tatters, his dust-soaked hair hanging in his eyes, as he heaved himself to his feet.
He looked in Colter’s direction. His eyes found Colter swinging the Henry toward him.
“No!” the man cried, throwing up his hands.
Colter shot him. Why let him live only to come after Colter again? At one time, the young redhead would have done just that. But he was older now and, after three long years of being hunted across the frontier like a calf-killing coyote, he was wiser, too.
He hadn’t killed any calves. At least, none that hadn’t tried to kill him first.
His latest victim fell back in the brush, blood geysering from the hole in the center of his chest, painting the leaves and vines around him.
“Hey, Red!” a man called from the chasm’s opposite side.
Colter shuttled his gaze in the direction of the voice. The group, dwindled by half—Colter himself hadn’t ki
lled them all; several had been claimed when they’d imprudently tried the leap on horses that couldn’t make it—had drifted a hundred or so yards back from the chasm. Some were riding away with the air of disgruntled schoolboys. Several more were scattered across the bench, staring toward Colter, as was the man who’d yelled.
He was a lean man in a spruce duster on a blue roan. He held a Winchester on his shoulder as he stared toward Colter from beneath the brim of his high-crowned cream hat. A red bandanna buffeted around his neck in the wind.
“This ain’t over, Red!” he bellowed, rising up slightly in his saddle. “This ain’t over by a long shot!”
“Speaking of a long shot . . .”
Colter racked another round in his Henry’s chamber. He snaked his rifle around the rock’s left side and snugged his cheek up against the Henry’s stock.
“You hear me, Red?” the lean man yelled. He canted his head slightly sideways, vaguely puzzled.
Colter lined up his sights on the man’s chest. He slid the sights to the man’s right shoulder then to his arm. “Yeah,” he told himself. “Don’t kill him. Just put him out of commission. Give him a long-distance whuppin’. That’ll be good enough.”
The redhead smiled to himself and yelled, “You hear this?”
He squeezed the trigger.
The rifle bucked against his shoulder, smoke and flames stabbing from the barrel. The lean man continued to stare toward him. A full second after the Henry had bucked, the man jerked back and sideways.
He dropped his rifle and reached for his right arm with his left hand. He must have dropped his reins, too, because just then his horse pitched and swung sharply, and then man was flung off the roan’s right hip.
The Cost of Dying Page 3