Ambush

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—

NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

Ambush

Luke Short

Chapter I

He had seen the smoke below an hour ago, a lifting pennant, gray against the mottled brass-bright desert. Because it came from a mesa top and not from the valley, it read to him and also to Diablito's Apache lookouts on the mountain behind him, “A white man just passed.”

He had gone quickly into the tunnel, and packed his saddlebag with food and with the three pokes of coarse gold dust, his summer's work. Along with the canteen he had been saving for just this emergency, he placed it near the mouth of the tunnel. His saddle and rifle he had lugged out the tunnel mouth, and by that time the faraway smoke was dispersed by the vaulting updrafts of the late afternoon's furnace hot air.

Up and over the ridge behind him, his picketed horse lay in the shade of a piñon, waiting for nightfall and grazing. He had saddled him, tied him just short of the lip of the ridge, and returned for his saddlebag and canteen.

Now, with the thick piñon screening him from the dry boulder-strewn canyon below, he was hunkered down on his heels, rifle across his lap, a tall, dirty, ragged, and unshaven man, who occasionally scratched his knee through a rent in his trousers. Remembering the smoke and its import, he thought,
Whoever they sent from the post will never make it to me. Even if he does, he'll pull the whole swarm of them down on us both
.

The edgy scolding of a jay down the stream-bed presently broke the late-afternoon silence. Softly, his glance still downstream, he turned his rifle over and levered a shell into the chamber with a big, large-knuckled hand, thinking,
I wonder who I'll see first—the messenger or the 'Pache?

The silence came again, and was broken only minutes later, when he heard the ring of a shod hoof on a rock. His upper lip—long and thin, in a tranquil, alert face—lifted in an expression of weary disgust.

Presently the horseman came into view, and Ward Kinsman, swearing softly, came erect from behind the piñon. In moving, he dislodged a pebble. As it rolled down the slope, the rider's head tilted up; in the same movement he slipped out of the saddle on the far side of his horse, and, in still the same movement, his rifle came across the neck of his halted mount. Only his battered hat and a pair of frosty and faded gray eyes beneath thick roan eyebrows showed above the mane of his horse.

Ward stepped out from behind the tree, rifle dangling from his long arm, and came down the slope in a loose-limbed, long-stepping haste. The tail of his sweat-faded shirt was out. The horseman, seeing him, put up his rifle and came around the head of his horse. Ward stopped in front of him and, after a second's bitter pause, said, “You damned fool, Holly. You travel in open daylight and you don't even bother to ride a barefoot horse. What does it take to scare you?”

“I'm scared now,” Frank Holly said. He was an undersized man, shrunk with years and sun-blackened, and his cheekbones, barely visible under his short-cut ragged beard, were as cross-hatched with lines as leather. His glance barely touched Ward and shuttled to the near slope and then the far slope and then the back trail, before it settled again on Ward.

“Why'd you come?” Ward asked.

“Major Brierly sent me for you,” Holly said. “Wondered if you'd come back and work as guide again. Seems some trouble is shapin' up.”

Holly looked closely at Ward, frankly gauging his temper. It lay deep below the surface, Holly saw, but it was in the hard set of the wide mouth and the muscles of his blunt beard-stubbled jaw; it burned bright and hot in the deepset amber eyes beneath the salt-rimmed chestnut eyebrows. It was, Holly decided, a mature man's anger, controlled, fully diluted with disgust, but holding neither hurt nor condemnation.

So Holly asked, “How about it? Will you come?”

“One sure thing,” Ward answered grimly, “I won't stay here.” Without waiting longer, he turned up the slope, his long legs driving into the climb. He'd already talked too long, he knew. Chances were that Holly, if he'd pushed, was only minutes ahead of the Apache lookout who'd signaled. And a half-dozen of Diablito's band, reading the smoke, were already on their way down to investigate, patiently setting a trap.

He mounted his horse, and set him down the slope, and a hot resentment was in him. For a month now, he'd lived and prospected in the heart of this country, claimed by Diablito's band, working under their noses, using the same waterholes that the band used. True, you couldn't call it living; he hadn't built a fire, hadn't shot a gun, and hadn't left even a moccasin track. He had faked enough bear tracks in this stretch of canyon for the Apaches to avoid it. His horse, unshod, had watered and grazed as any loose horse owned by the band. He had existed, hungry, thirsty, always alert, always careful—but he was alive.
Up to now
, he thought grimly.

Holly was still afoot when he reined in. “Where to, Ward?”

“I don't know. Get going.”

Ward turned up the dry stream-bed now, and Holly mounted and dropped in behind him. The time for decision was close, he knew. As soon as the Apache trailing Holly came to the tunnel mouth, saw the new set of tracks, and read the story, he would call in the others for the kill. They would learn his identity soon enough from the gear he'd left behind, and after that hell would pop. Any Apache hated ridicule, and the fact that an enemy had lived among them for a month would gall them. But the fact that he, their personal enemy, had been the man would infuriate them. Yet, the thought of Diablito's rage did not amuse him now. He looked at the sun and judged there would be another two hours of daylight. He must spend that desperately, staking everything on the reprieve of darkness.

Holly's voice cut in on his thoughts. “Ain't you heading right at 'em?”

“So were you.”

Bailey's Peak, whose north slope they were climbing, was a vast, mashed-down cone whose base lay on New Mexico's desert floor and whose summit was smothered with vaulting dark conifers. Between sand and pine, mile upon weary mile of waterless canyon maze leached out the mountain, giving reluctantly to altitude until, two thirds of the way up, a tougher rock took over to pinch the canyons tight and hold the soil for the trees. A city could be lost in any of a hundred canyons and the sum of the peak's sprawling elephantine mass smothered an area the equivalent of two eastern counties. In the forest coolness near its summit was Diablito's camp—the direction in which Ward was heading.

He rode alertly now, watching the scattered pine on each side of him, his rifle slacked across his saddle, not liking this. The clatter of Holly's shod horse sawed at his nerves; each time the metal rang on the rock, he imagined the sound of it carrying to infinity.

The cracks of the distant twin gunshots behind them, when they finally came, were almost welcome. He heard Holly say softly, “Oh-oh,” and he reined sharply right, taking the slope of the canyon. Only when he was deep in the screening timber did he rein up and wait for the older man.

Ward held up his hand for silence and turned his head. His horse swung its head around slowly, ears pivoting forward, listening. Off in the timber, above and to the right, they heard the pounding of a horse running full tilt. The sound swelled in volume, passed them, and was lost below.

Wordlessly then, Ward wheeled his horse and headed west. Now that he had let Diablito's men pull past him, he had gained, at the most, twenty minutes grace. With any luck, that would be enough.

They rode hard then, for fifteen minutes, making no attempt to cover their tracks in the scattered piñon and pine timber. Only when Ward came to long stretches of surface rock did he take to them, thinking grimly,
With those shoes on Holly's horse, they won't even have to dismount to track us
.

Later, when he paused to blow his horse, Holly pulled alongside him. They looked at each other in hostile silence, and Holly said uneasily, “You know this country bettern' me, Ward, but ain't we headin' for the Wall?”

“That's right,” Ward said curtly, and again put his horse in motion. Another pair of shots, far behind them, signaled the pursuit was on. In the next hour, if he could spend his advantage wisely, he would win his reprieve. For, as Holly had said, he was heading for the Wall, and once Diablito's men were certain of that, they would be sure he was cornered.

His course turned more westerly now, and ahead of him the timber thinned, giving way to a long reach of broken upthrust granite. The sun was directly in his face, and as he picked his tortuous way through the rocks, he was occasionally in cool shadow.

He studied the tilt of the land then, and twice pulled off in a southerly direction, and finally, after the sun was full down, he came to the Wall.

Here he swung out of the saddle as Holly rode up to him, and now Holly hauled up and said dryly, “It's a long jump.”

Some few yards behind Ward, the land fell away sheer; hundreds of feet below, the desert floor, sponging up the last light of day, lay in a vast smear of blue and gray and fawn, reaching far into Arizona.

“Sit there,” Ward jibed. “Get an arrow in your back.”

Holly swung down, saying, “You ever get a horse down here?”

“Nobody has,” Ward was slipping the bridle from his horse, watching the back trail.

“Boxed yourself, hunh?”

“And you too,” Ward said grimly. “Now get your horse out of sight.”

While Holly dismounted and led his horse behind one of the big granite thrusts, Ward chose his spot. It was a fairly large thicket of greasewood, and he found a stick and quickly beat the brush for snakes before he bellied down in it. Thumbing out a handful of cartridges, he laid them beside his gun and glanced over at Holly. The older man had chosen one of the granite upthrusts. Dusk was lowering now, and Ward lay still, carefully watching the back trail, considering this closely, considering behind that his own foolishness.