“Damn,” Slash said, scowling toward where Pecos hung his head as though digging for worms beneath a log. “I do apologize, pard. I didn’t realize you were so sensiti—”
Slash stopped and lifted his head to the forested ridge rising steeply off the trail’s left side, far beyond where Pecos continued to retch. He’d heard something up there.
Something that had pricked the short hairs on the back of his neck.
Then it occurred to him.
A Gatling gun!
CHAPTER 15
Slash was still staring toward the eerie hiccupping sounds rising from the ridge when Pecos stumbled back toward the wagon, looking like a drunk after a three-day bender.
“Slash,” he said, spatting to one side, “I purely think you’re out to kill—”
“Shhh!”
“Huh?”
“Shut up.”
“Hey, don’t you—”
Pecos must have heard it then, too. Stopping a few feet from the wagon, he turned back around and lifted his gaze to the ridge. The distance-muffled rat-tat-tats of a machine gun continued to hammer away up there, somewhere near the ridge but on the near side of the mountain.
Pecos turned to Slash. “What’s up there?”
“The stage trail is up there. Comes up from the back side, then swings north toward Leadville. The freight trail follows the easier-to-negotiate valleys to the south and across the Arkansas toward Colorado Springs.”
“You think it’s . . . ?”
“What the hell else could it be?” Slash’s heart was thudding. “The stage must’ve gotten a late start on account of the rain.”
They both stared in stunned silence up the spruce-green forested slope. A shrill scream cut through the Gatling gun’s menacing belching. The high-pitched cry hung out over the shoulder of the mountain, echoing for nearly twenty seconds before it finally dwindled to silence.
When the scream died, the Gatling gun’s rat-tat-tats also died.
Pecos turned to his partner. “That was a woman, Slash.”
Slash just stared. He was thinking of the pretty young Pink who’d entered his and Pecos’s room the night before.
Could that have been her scream?
Again, Pecos turned to his partner. “What . . . what’re we gonna do, Slash?”
Slash grimaced as he stared up the now bizarrely silent shoulder of the mountain toward the unseen spot where the gold thieves must have hit the stage. He ran a perplexed hand down his unshaven jaw.
He glanced at the tarpaulin-covered box. He couldn’t see the strongbox underneath. But he could see it, all right. What’s more—he could see right into the box as though it was made of mere glass.
He could see all those ingots of high-grade gold all laid out like baby pigs in a blanket, pure and glinting and shinier than new brass. He could also see the big pile of greenbacks they would bring. More money than he’d ever seen in one spot in his entire life.
Half his own. The other half his partner’s.
Oh, what a life in Mexico and South America that money would make!
He turned back to the ridge.
Still, though . . . the girl.
Slash leaped down off the wagon, hitting the ground flat-footed, then reaching up under the seat for his Yellowboy.
“What’re you doin’?” Pecos said.
“Get the wagon off the road. Hide it behind those rocks over there.”
“What’re you doin’, dammit?” Pecos asked as he scrambled back aboard the freighter.
“What’s it look like?” Slash was untying their horses’ reins from the steel rings in the tailgate. “We’re gonna check it out.”
“That’s what I thought you was thinkin’!” Pecos said as he hazed the mules on off the trail. “I just wanted to be clear. Hy-yahhhh—Millie! Step it up there, Clyde!”
Slash had pulled both sets of reins free of the tailgate as Pecos swung the wagon off the road. Slash was sitting his own fleet-footed Appaloosa, and holding the reins of Pecos’s big buckskin when Pecos jogged back to the trail. The taller of the two cutthroats had draped his gut-shredder over his neck and right shoulder, and he was holding his Colt’s revolving rifle in both gloved hands.
When he shoved his rifle into its scabbard, Slash threw him his reins, then gigged the Appaloosa off the trail and through the shrubs on the other side.
“Wait for me, dammit, Slash!” Pecos bellowed as the big man heaved himself into his saddle.
“There may not be any time to waste, pard!”
Slash hunkered low over his Appy’s jostling mane as the horse lunged up the slope and began weaving through the forest, carefully avoiding low-hanging branches, just as Slash had trained it, so as not to dislodge its rider. The first seventy yards were a hard pull for even the Appy, but then they gained a gently sloping bench barren of trees but spotted with the bright, paint-like splashes of late-summer wildflowers. After the bench, they crossed a creek, beyond which was another hard climb up a second steep inclination through dense pines.
After a hundred yards, Slash reined the Appy to a stop on a slight shelf. The horse needed a breather, and so did Slash. Crashing brush and pounding hooves sounded from below. Slash turned to see Pecos and his buckskin, appropriately if unimaginatively named Buck, hammering up the incline, Pecos hunkered low and giving the big, beefy, but deep-bottomed beast a gentle rein, letting the sure-footed, experienced Buck pick his own way.
“Damn!” Pecos said, breathing hard. He spat to one side.
The buckskin shook and blew, switching its tail. Its blood was up, as was the Appaloosa’s, both horses likely remembering with some fondness the hell-for-leather, ground-thundering gallops from posses not all that long ago. Such dangerous excitement could get in a horse’s blood as much as in a man’s, and be hard to let go.
Pecos stopped the horse near Slash and the Appy and stared up the slope, obscured by more forest just as deep as that they’d just pushed through. “You hearin’ anything?”
“Haven’t for a while.”
The Appy whickered, then pulled at some grass.
“You sure that was a Gatling gun?” Pecos asked.
“Yep.”
“Maybe we’re just imagining things. You know—old timer’s disease.”
“Let’s find out.”
Slash reined the Appy around and booted it up the slope, the horse pushing hard with its hind feet and digging deep with its front hooves, kicking large gouts of moist, fragrant forest duff up behind it. Pecos galloped just off the Appy’s right hip, throwing one arm out for balance, while the big buckskin leaped over deadfalls and caromed around rocks and thick brush snags.
“Ahead,” Slash said after another hard pull. “I see somethin’.”
He checked the Appy down, swung out of the saddle, dropped the reins, and climbed a few feet farther ahead, pushing off his knees with each lunging step. He stopped and grimaced when he saw the dead man lying twisted on the slope before him, in front of a stout aspen. Slash eased the man over with one foot, and his grimace grew more pronounced.
He cursed.
Pecos had dismounted the buckskin and now moved up to stand beside Slash. “What is—” Following Slash’s gaze, he cursed, too.
The dead man was middle-aged and stocky and had a big, rounded gut. He also wore a beard. He’d lost his hat. His head was nearly bald. He was dressed in rugged trail gear, including canvas pants and a canvas jacket over a wool shirt and suspenders, and gauntleted gloves. Staring skyward and with an expression of agonized astonishment still twisting his mouth, he was either the driver or the shotgun messenger, Slash silently opined.
The most startling thing about him was that he’d been shot at least six times. Possibly twice that many. It was hard to tell because of all the blood.
Looking up the slope, Pecos pointed. “There’s another one.” He climbed the slope a ways, jerking his chin to indicate the incline, and then glanced over his shoulder at Slash. “Ah, hell—look at that!”
&n
bsp; Slash stepped up beside him and sucked in a sharp breath.
The stagecoach lay on its side about a hundred feet up the slope. Apparently, it had either turned over on the trail and then slid down the slope, or had rolled down the slope to come to rest against a cabin-sized granite boulder. The team must have broken away from the wagon when the shooting had started, because there wasn’t a horse in sight, only a tangle of leather ribbons.
The Concord was honeycombed with bullet holes, and it was liberally splashed with blood. Four men lay in bloody heaps along the slope between Slash and Pecos and the carriage, which lay up the slope and to the right. The dead men, all dressed in various costumes corresponding to whatever part the Pinkertons were playing in their ill-fated charade, lay spread out across the mountainside, some higher up on the incline than the others.
They all appeared to have been shot as many times as the first man had.
“Yep,” Pecos said, raking a gloved hand down his face. “You had it right, Slash. It was a Gatling gun, all right.”
“Do you see the girl?”
“Huh?”
“The girl? Operative One. You see her?”
Slash and Pecos moved on up the slope, looking around. They continued past the dead men and the battered, blood-splashed Concord to the graded trail that curved around the shoulder of the mountain. They saw a large spruce lying across the trail about thirty yards ahead, effectively blocking it. The tree had been chopped down within the past couple of hours with an axe. Cursing, looking for the girl, they thrashed around in the brush on the trail’s upslope side.
All Slash found was the Gatling gun perched in a nest of rocks and brush about twenty feet up the slope on the opposite side from where the Concord and the dead men lay.
“They left the machine gun,” Slash said, running a hand down the brass barrel that still felt warm.
Pecos walked along the trail and stared up the slope at the Gatling gun still mounted on its tripod and looking like a giant steel and brass mosquito there in the rocks, partly hidden by the wild currant and chokecherry shrubs.
“Why in the hell do you suppose they left it?”
Slash shrugged. “It did the job. Why carry it?”
“But . . . they didn’t get what they came for.”
Something bothered Slash about that last statement, but he didn’t have time to ponder it. Just then something moved down the slope behind Pecos.
No, not something. Someone!
A person stepped out from behind some rocks and brush about ten feet down the decline from the trail. At first, Slash had thought it was an animal of some kind. A badly injured animal, because of all the blood covering it. Or at least mostly covering it. But then he saw that it was the young woman, Operative Number One, swinging around to face the trail and raising a stubby little pistol in both her bloody hands.
Slash wanted to say something to Pecos, but his breath got stuck in his throat. Pecos must have seen the shocked look in his partner’s gaze, and that Slash’s jaw had dropped nearly to his chest, because he muttered incredulously, frowning, and turned around to face the young woman, clad in a torn and bloody dress, moving up the slope toward the trail, aiming the derringer at him and Slash.
Her brown eyes looked like two animal eyes staring flatly out from behind the tangle of her blood-sodden hair that had fallen from what had likely been a very prim and stately bun arranged atop her head. The dark green bonnet she’d been wearing hung down her shoulder. It was also soaked in blood.
“Whoa, now,” Pecos said, slowly raising his hands, palms out. “Easy . . . easy, there, now . . . little lady.”
“Put the gun down, Operative One,” Slash said, suddenly finding his voice.
Raising his own hands shoulder high, he walked slowly down the slope, the brush and grass crackling beneath his boots. “Easy, Oper—” What had the tall man called her. Hattie? “Easy, Hattie. It’s us—Slash an’ Pec—”
She didn’t let him finish. As Slash stepped down onto the trail, ten feet to Pecos’s left, the young woman gained the far side of the trail and said, “Stop!” Her voice was deep and guttural. It was raked with so much emotion that she sounded like a badly abused piano chord down in the lower registers.
She stretched her lips back from her teeth, and her eyes glinted savagely. “Stop right there or I’ll blast you!” She drew a sharp breath through fluttering lips and gripped the derringer tightly in both hands, lowering her chin to aim down the stubby barrel. “I’ll blast you both!”
“Easy, darlin’,” Slash said. “It’s Slash ’n’ Pecos. Your freighter friends.”
“Cutthroats! You were in with those . . . those butchers!”
CHAPTER 16
“No, no, no!” Pecos said, shaking his head. “We didn’t have no part in that.”
“We were below,” Slash said. “We heard the Gatling gun. Rode up here to check it out. Put the gun down now, darlin’. You got no reason to be afraid of us.”
She continued to aim down the little peashooter for almost another minute, sliding her gaze between the two former cutthroats. Then, gradually, doubt shone like a shadow across her retinas. She frowned, removed one hand from the gun to wipe blood and sweat off her forehead, and said, “You . . . promise you weren’t one o’ them?”
Suddenly, her voice had lost its guile.
Slash walked over to her, extending his hand for the pistol. “Cross our hearts, Hattie.”
Fire returned to her mouth as well as her gaze. “It’s Operative Number One, damn you!”
“All right, give me the gun, Operative Number One.” Slash reached out and closed his hand around the derringer, gently pried it from her hand.
As he did, the young woman gazed up at him, a sheen of emotion washing across her eyes. Her upper lip trembled, and then she flung herself forward against Slash, roping her arms around his waist and sobbing.
“It was awful!” she said, trembling in Slash’s arms. “They bushwhacked us, opened up on us with that machine gun! They blocked the trail with that tree, and Donnally hadn’t even got the coach stopped before they started shooting. They didn’t shake us down! They didn’t threaten us! They didn’t demand the gold! None of those things!”
She tipped her head back to stare up at Slash, the tears mingling with blood and streaming down her cheeks and down her neck. “They just opened up on us with that Gatling gun!”
Pecos walked toward them. “Easy, girl—where you hit?”
The girl turned to him. “They shot us like ducks on a millpond. I don’t think any of us . . . any of the others . . . even had a chance to draw a pistol!”
Slash lowered one arm and, keeping the other arm wrapped around her waist, led her over to a tree in the shade along the trail. “Come on—you’d best sit down over here, Operative Number One. You look mighty beat up.”
Slash eased her down against the tree and raked her blood-soaked body with his eyes. “Where you hit? We’re gonna have to—”
She shook her head. “I’m not hit.”
“Huh?”
“I’m not hit. This is not my blood.” She gave another sob and then, lips trembling, said, “I was sitting on the opposite side of the coach from that savage gun, facing forward. When those cowardly ambushers opened up, I was shielded by the other four Pinkertons in the coach. Somehow . . .”
She looked down at herself, swept her bloody hands across her bloody thighs. “Somehow, I don’t believe I even caught a burn. When the horses headed down the slope, the coach broke away from the hitch and rolled. The door on my side opened, and I was thrown clear. I must’ve been knocked out. I remember hitting the ground . . . hearing that awful din! . . . and then I regained consciousness in those shrubs over there . . . and . . . and I saw you two . . . up here on the trail . . .”
Pecos was on one knee beside Slash. He looked at his partner and said, “How do you fathom them not stopping the coach to rob it but just shooting it off the road?”
Slash scooped up a handful of d
irt, let it sift slowly to the ground, pondering. “Maybe they . . .”
“Knew it wasn’t on the coach,” the young woman finished for him. Her voice rising, she said, “They must have known the gold wasn’t on the coach! They must have known only Pinkertons were on that coach, and they were out to kill us! To keep us off their trail! They shot us so fast . . . so fast . . . we didn’t even have time to pray!”
Slash and Pecos exchanged dark glances.
“How in the hell could they have figured out our plan?” Pecos said.
Sitting up straight, a flush rising into her cheeks behind the crusted blood, Operative One said, “Where’s the gold?”
Slash and Pecos winced, sheepish. Neither one said anything for a few stretched seconds. Then Pecos cleared his throat. “It’s, uh . . . it’s, uh—”
“Back down in the valley,” Pecos finished for him, looking sharply, dubiously, at Slash.
They both suspected what they knew the young woman suspected.
Slash rose quickly. “I reckon we’d best get down there, partner. An’ check on the gold, an’ hope like hell what we think might’ve happened ain’t what happened!”
“Wait!” Pecos grabbed Slash’s shirt. “How could they know we’re carryin’ the gold?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Come on!”
“Hold on.” Hattie rose heavily, grunting, breathing hard now, anxiously. She extended her hand. “You still have my derringer. Give it back.”
Slash looked down at the derringer poking out from behind his cartridge belt. He’d forgotten about it. He pulled it out and set it in her hand. “Here you go, darlin’.”
“I’ll be riding with you.”
“Oh, no,” Slash said. “We just got two horses. We’ll check out the wagon an’ come back for you later.”
Hattie raised her pistol in both hands and clicked the hammers back. “You either take me with you now or I blast you both right here and take your horses!”
Pecos scowled at his partner. “That was a real swift move, Slash.”
A Good Day for a Massacre Page 12