Brian Garfield (22 page)

He turned his horse to the right and lashed it to a gallop, running along the flats parallel to the edge of the forest. Behind him he saw Stryker's crowd veer left to cut across the triangle on an interception course.

He eased closer to the trees, still at a dead run; he reined in after a quarter mile and wheeled the long .40-90 out of the boot and put it to his shoulder. He wanted to sting them beyond hesitation so he put the whole magazine into their midst and he saw one horse go down; he doubted he'd hit any men but you couldn't expect much accuracy shooting from the saddle.

He lifted the saddlebags off the horse, the saddlebags he'd packed with blasting powder. He lit the hanging fuse and dropped the saddlebags on the ground and cut back into the trees.

Low branches whipped at his face. He laid himself flat and rammed on through. He reached one of the fingers of the cutbank gully and galloped into it just as he heard the explosion behind him. He wondered if any of them had been near enough to get hit by it; it was doubtful.

He was galloping full out and the hoofs were throwing a lot of dust in the air and it would still be hanging there when Stryker reached that point. Boag wanted them to know where he was; they had to follow him.

He took big breaths and held them deep and long, storing up oxygen for the coming climb. Those old battered legs had to make one more effort, that was all; he willed it into them.

Riding fast through the bends he finally came in sight of the Gatling gun and he could see vaguely on either side the rifles aiming down from the brush above the banks.

He stopped the horse and ran through the tripwires and got onto the log ladder he'd made; he started to climb but his legs just weren't going to make it.

“God damn it Boag,” he muttered through his teeth. He pushed and shoved and forced his legs to lift him and when he rolled onto the top of the bank he reached over and hauled the log up after him so they wouldn't be able to follow him.

Then he emptied the hand bombs out of his pockets and dropped the .40-90 beside the Gatling gun. Yanked the corks out of the kerosene jugs and poured the fluid down the trenches he'd dug, and into the log that flumed across to the far bank.

Over his own hard breathing he heard the angry hammering of the approaching horsehoofs.

Just don't let them stop to think.

He emptied the last jug and felt around for his oilskin pouch of matches.

He found the sulphur tips and then Stryker was drumming into sight in the bend.

Boag dropped flat on his belly behind the Gatling gun and hoped he had enough brush piled around so that they wouldn't spot it too soon.

The riders came in like Cavalry at full charge and it was good to watch: Boag felt the skin tighten around his grin.

They hit the tripwires and Boag lit a handful of matches and threw them into the kerosene trenches. The horses tumbled and flipped and began to scream. One rider vaulted out of the saddle and his horse went right over on its back with a bloody foreleg dangling broken.

Kerosene flames raced down the trenches on top of both walls. The fire leaped a yard or more in the air and made a bright stockade fence along both banks. Boag felt the sudden dry heat of it.

Up in a crouch he swung the Gatling onto them and began to wield the firing crank. The gun set up a steady chugging stutter of fifty-caliber fire and he saw the rawhiders and Mexicans wheeling and yelling in confusion. Some of them had been unseated and some had dismounted voluntarily and a few were still on horseback trying to find something to hide behind but the racketing yellow flames rushed past them and around behind them.

When the fire hit the creekbed pool at the bottom behind the rawhiders it went up like explosives with a roaring bellow of ten-foot-high flame. Most of the kerosene had run down into the pool and collected there and it was better than a solid wall of entrapment because it not only contained them, it drove their horses to madness.

Boag yanked on wires and his fixed rifles opened up into the gully floor, shooting from all directions through the yellow flames.

The banging of rifles and the stink of kerosene smoke filled the rawhiders with panic; there was no sense of organized defense down there, they were all scrabbling frantically in circles and the smart ones were digging in behind the corpses of horses which in most cases they shot themselves to create parapets. He saw Ben Stryker's head rise up behind a dead horse and turn quickly to survey the ambush and Boag picked up the .40-90 but by the time he fired Stryker had dropped out of sight. Boag swiveled the long sights toward the glisten of a mercury cap ten yards to the left of Stryker's position; he fired twice and the second bullet hit the cap and set off the blasting charge.

Stryker disappeared under the explosion of sand and clay, horse and all.

Boag sighted on another blasting charge in the far bank. It brought tons of cutbank clay down on two crawling men.

He found another blasting-cap to shoot at and it went off right under a horse. Boag saw the rider throw up his arms and begin to pitch from the saddle before the rising cloud of sand absorbed him.

He jammed a new magazine into the ten-barrel gun and swiveled the muzzles and worked the crank. He saw the bullets make spouts in the creekbed; he corrected the aim and sewed a stitch of bullets across a tangled knot of men.

It was the most confined concentration of battle Boag had ever experienced and he had never known anything like the stink and earsplitting racket of it.

Boag kept moving as fast as his arms would work. He pulled more rifle-trigger wires, he shot another blasting charge that blew up like a geyser and knocked four men over, he raked the gully with an X-pattern of Gatling fire.

Ben Stryker had pawed his way out of the dust; Boag heard him yelling somewhere in the smoke, summoning men, trying to organize a rush on the Gatling gun position; Boag tried to find him but the cloud of sand and smoke was billowing through the length of the gorge and he could hardly see the opposite bank.

He pulled trigger wires and discovered these were the last rifles; he had fired them all now. There were no mercury caps left to shoot at except the one immediately beneath his gun position. The kerosene was making more smoke now, the flames shrinking; he had vague glimpses of flitting motions through the gully. He counted the remaining Gatling magazines—two loaded ones, fifty rounds in each; after that he would be down to his sidearms.

He had made a lot of noise and violence but he hadn't done enough real harm to destroy their effectiveness: maybe he'd killed five of them and maybe ten but there'd been two dozen men to start with and at least half of them were still shooting at phantoms through the roiling smoke. Ben Stryker's heavy voice rolled through it all and Boag knew they would charge him quickly now. When they did they would probably overrun him. They weren't fools; they'd come at him from both sides at once and he couldn't cover both directions simultaneously with a Gatling gun or anything else.

So it was time to cut and run. That was what the small voice told Boag.

He never did listen to that voice.

He knew how it had to go; he had to get away clear and he couldn't do that with a dozen of them still armed and on their feet right behind him. He had to put Ben Stryker out of the way and most of Stryker's old rawhiders. The Mexican hired guns he didn't care about because they were only in this for gun wages and when they thought their side was losing they'd get themselves away. They had no loyalty to Mr. Pickett. But Ben Stryker and the rest of those old timers wouldn't quit until they were dead.

It had a chance of working because it wasn't the Mexicans who would have the stomach for a head-on charge. Nobody would follow Ben Stryker except the old hands. That was why Boag didn't run. He stayed put and waited while the smoke began to settle and when he saw the first bunch crawling toward him, close under the overhang of the near bank, he swung the Gatling gun that way and held it silent until they were good targets through the patchy smoke and then he opened up as fast as he could swing the crank.

As soon as the gun began to stutter the rawhiders split up and went running at full sprint in a crazyquilt of directions that looked lunatic but made sense: they were scattering to charge from all directions at once.

Boag swept the gun back and forth in a half circle and saw three of them go down but they were coming too fast from too many angles and he wasn't going to be able to hold them. When the magazine ran empty he didn't reload the Gatling. He put a match to the fuse of his canteen-bomb and heaved it toward the bunch that was closest to him, the bunch sliding along the near wall; he didn't wait for the explosion, he swung his revolvers onto the farther group across the gully and while their bullets whined off the barrels of the Gatling gun he aimed under its belly and slammed bullets into them. While the bomb exploded and rained sand on him, the .45's bucked and roared in his fists; he fired alternately right and left even though he had always been an indifferent left-handed marksman.

They were closing in at the foot of the bank beneath him and the barrels of the Gatling gun wouldn't depress that far even if he still had ammunition in it. That had been Ben Stryker's plan all along: get underneath the ten-barrel gun's field of fire and attack from below.

They were going to scale the bank by clinging to roots. Boag could see the sweat shine on their oily faces: five of them and Ben Stryker coming up fast from the left.

Boag fired a .45 into the blasting charge he had buried at the foot of the slope.

The explosion knocked him back on his left arm. It blasted the Gatling gun off its tripod and the damn thing fell across Boag's butt like a tumbling safe.

He couldn't tell if he was hurt and it was no time to stop and find out. He heaved the thing off him and scooped up a revolver and dragged himself forward on his belly to look down over the blown-up lip of the bank.

Four of them had got it. One had nearly been blown in half; three lay asprawl; the fifth one was reeling away into the smoke holding his ears.

The rolling echoes of the explosion still caromed down the canyon. And Ben Stryker was still coming at him from the left but Stryker hadn't seen Boag yet and Boag lifted the revolver and took a good bead on him.

He never knew why, but at the last instant he pulled his aim. When he fired he put the bullet deliberately into Ben Stryker's shoulder. It was a .45 with point-blank velocity and it knocked Ben Stryker clean off his feet and hurled him out onto the gully floor.

The Mexicans were shooting fast, bullets were all over the woods and Boag got the hell out of there.

9

In the woods he stopped to make an inventory of his bones.

All the articulated functions seemed to be in fair working order. But his legs felt like jagged stakes that somebody had driven up into his hips with a hammer.

He would have been worried by that if they hadn't felt exactly the same way before the explosion.

He was stone deaf and didn't know if it was temporary or if the concussion had cracked his eardrums, but he found no blood in his ears and that was a fair sign.

He came by the clearing where Sweeney and the others were gagged. They watched him with round red eyes.

They could be trouble. If he left them alone and somebody cut them loose there were plenty of guns lying around to arm them with. He had no way left of fighting them.

But he hadn't much option. He wasn't gaited to shoot all of them cold.

He'd just hope to be away from here by the time they got loose and organized.

He went right past them and didn't stop to talk. He was traveling light now; he had one of the hand bombs left and he had the .40-90 rifle in his fist and two .45's in his belt. He remembered his promise to Captain McQuade about the Gatling gun but first things had to come first. He cinched up one of the rawhiders' saddle horses and unfixed the pack ‘horses' picket line and rode back into the woods leading the string of gold-packed animals.

It would take them a while to quit fighting shadows back there. There were maybe ten Mexican gunslingers and a couple of Ben Stryker's rawhiders left unhurt, and maybe half a dozen more with injuries. Ben Stryker would be too busy keeping himself alive to worry about revenging himself on Boag, and the Mexicans had probably lost the belly for a fight. Most of them would scatter and go looking for other smoky jobs. Ben Stryker might find his way back up the mountain sooner or later with Sweeney and those others, and Mr. Jed Pickett would spend however long it took to find Boag and kill Boag and get his gold back.

Therefore this was not the time to take the gold and ride away. There was one thing left to do.

Boag hid his tracks and cached the pack animals and at the end of the cloudy afternoon began the slow ride back up the road toward Mr. Pickett's mountain.

chapter nine

1

There was rain.

It came down steady and gentle in the night; it matted the shirt to Boag's wedge-shaped back. It was a friend and Boag thanked it.

He left the horse at the foot of the gorge and walked up the road cut. Mr. Pickett might have a lookout posted up there but it wasn't going to do him any good, nobody was going to see Boag walking up the road in this. A black man in dark clothing at night in a rainy canyon? Boag had to feel his way and twice he tripped over big boulders he hadn't seen.

Not far along his legs began to give out. The climb was not terribly steep—it had been designed for the passage of heavy wagons—but it had not been built with bullet-crippled legs in mind. Several times Boag had to stand still while spasms of agony wrung him out and all his muscles knotted up in cramp. The weight of the gold brick in his left hand increased steadily and so did the weight of the long rifle in his right.

He kept climbing, taking his time. Toward the top the light became fractionally better and he could vaguely make out the box shape of the
hacienda
and the darknesses of several outbuildings and the workings of the old mine. The rain slanted steadily across the mountain and little gullies ran down the road past his boots.