Brian Garfield (23 page)

If there were sentries they hadn't seen him. They'd have heard a horse approach; that was why he'd had to accept the anguish of the climb.

There were no lamps burning anywhere. Mr. Pickett wouldn't be that stupid.

Boag moved slowly and without sound. He reached the corner of the dark house and tipped his head back to look up. Rainwater runneled out of the trough of his sombrero and splashed down his back. He didn't blink at the drops that hit his upturned face.

A narrow staircase edged its way up the outside wall; wooden handrails ran up both sides of it. There was a landing at the top, a door, a row of windows with rain beating on the panes.

Boag walked around the
hacienda
and found the horse barn attached to the side of the house. He slipped inside with caution; there might be a stable keeper.

He found nobody. He counted eleven horses but what was more interesting was the saddle count. Three wooden pack saddles and five riding rigs, of which two were Texas saddles and the other three Mexican. It was doubtful anybody who came this far to work for Mr. Pickett would be without a saddle of his own; so it told Boag what he wanted to know about the size of Mr. Pickett's force up here.

Mr. Pickett, Gutierrez probably, and three others. It stood to reason. Mr. Pickett had committed most of his force to his second in command for the attack on Boag's shadow army. Greed for the gold had made them take that risk.

Boag saddled up one of the horses with the big Texas stock saddle that was probably Mr. Pickett's own. Boag enjoyed the idea. He found a bridle, working mainly by touch, and when he had the horse ready to go he spent a very bad ten minutes getting himself up into the saddle.

In the ticking silence of the flooding night he ducked low to clear the barn doorway and rode out of the stable. He walked the horse around the front of the house and stopped it square in front of the big adobe steps that went up to the main doors. There were windows beside the doors. Boag tested the weight of the gold bar in his hand. There was no note tied to this one; there didn't need to be. Boag hurled the brick through the window and before the clattering of crashing glass had subsided he was moving at a gallop toward the head of the road.

When he hit the top of the sloping cut he was half sure he heard a door slam back there.

Somebody yelled at him from out on the cliff but Boag kept going right down the road.

2

From the edge of the trees he watched the dawn pink up Mr. Pickett's mountain.

What was it going to take to make them mad enough? Boag had waited all night in the pouring rain and they hadn't stirred from the mountain. When the rain stopped and the first premonition of dawn came, Boag had moved back from the foot of the mountain to the forest and continued his vigil from there.

But finally they came. Because it was easier to act than to wait.

Boag watched them ride down the cut. Five of them. The big buckskin horse in the lead, that had to be Mr. Pickett.

Boag put his horse out of the trees, showing himself. He had rehearsed the whole thing in his mind during the night, over and over again, and there was only this one way to do it.

He rode straight toward them, not hurrying; the horse had an easy-gaited walk. Mr. Pickett reached the bottom of the cut and came trotting out away from the foot of the mountain, staying on the road, coming right down toward Boag with his four outriders in a pack right behind him. There was no dust in their wake because of the six-hour rain.

The ruts were a little muddy and Boag put the horse along the side of the road in the grass, still walking it. His eye measured the distance as it closed between him and Mr. Pickett. The stretch from the base of the mountain to the edge of the trees was almost exactly a half mile; so he had distance yet to cover.

They would watch him coming and assume he wanted to talk; they would have heard all the tumult and thunder of battle yesterday and they would know by Boag's appearance that Ben Stryker had been whipped, and they would have to assume that Boag had a lot of guns covering him from the edge of the forest behind him. Still they had come down to see what he wanted—and to kill him if they could.

Boag stopped his horse about two hundred yards out from the woods. He did that because it was what Mr. Pickett would expect of him. He was staying within easy rifle range of the pine forest, where his “army” of rifles could cover him.

Mr. Pickett came on at a grinding deliberate trot, not hurrying it up and not slowing it down; moving forward like an engine.

Regardless of what Mr. Pickett believed about the army behind Boag, the fact was that there was Boag on one side and five of them on the other. His plan didn't have much chance, not really, because once the ruckus began they'd realize quick enough that Boag was all alone out here.

But there weren't any alternatives that made sense so Boag just played it out.

They came along and then they stopped about halfway out from the mountain. The low sun was behind Boag's right shoulder. In its light the ground fog lifted gently off the dewy meadowland and the breeze made ripples in the shining grass. Mr. Pickett sat on his horse a little better than a quarter of a mile away, not moving, and Boag knew he was too far so he gigged his horse and advanced at a slow walk with both hands resting on his saddle horn like a man who wanted to talk a deal.

Mr. Pickett put his horse in motion again and now Boag recognized Gutierrez behind him and a rawhider who went by the name of Hooker, riding bareback. The other two were Mexican gunslingers with rifles across their saddlebows.

His eye kept ranging the distance.
Four-fifty,
he estimated, and he let the horse carry him on closer to them.

Four hundred. All right now.

He steeled himself against the pain and made his moves in quick synchronized coordination. Turn the horse crosswise to the road. Stop the horse. Loop the reins over your left fore-arm. Lift your right leg over the cantle behind you and step down onto that right foot. Pull the left boot out of the stirrup and set it firm on the ground a couple of feet away from the right boot. Lay the .40-90 across the saddle. Aim.

They were in motion of course but he wanted Mr. Pickett only, he didn't care about the rest of them; and they weren't moving so very fast because they didn't credit anybody with much luck at four hundred yards' range. That was one thousand, two hundred feet and a lot of things could happen to a bullet in that distance, starting with the inaccuracy of the shooter.

It was Gutierrez who fired the first shot but that was from the back of a moving saddle and Boag ignored it. He had Mr. Pickett in his sights. Mr. Pickett was yanking the horse around to the left and Boag gave it the lead he thought it needed and squeezed the shot, holding both eyes open and maintaining the focus of his vision not on the target but on the front sight of the rifle because that was the important thing to watch.

The bullet went home. He knew it had, but Mr. Pickett was still on the saddle out there and the horse was still wheeling. Gutierrez had overcome his surprise and was ramming away to come in at Boag from a circle; Gutierrez was flat on top of the horse, making a low silhouette, firing a left-handed revolver at Boag merely as a diversionary thing, not expecting to hit. Boag had to ignore it, had to keep his sights on Mr. Pickett while he jacked a fresh shell into the chamber and settled the sights and waited for his God damned horse to still its feet. If he lost his horse he'd have to get down on the ground to shoot and he'd never get back up on his feet again so he kept the reins wrapped tight around his forearm and spoke softly:

“Gentle down, now. Gentle down.”

Mr. Pickett was riding in a dazed circle and one of the Mexicans was leaning over to reach for the reins of Mr. Pickett's horse. Boag shot Mr. Pickett again and this time it did the job. It knocked Mr. Pickett off his horse.

The Mexicans split in opposite directions and broke into dead gallops. They weren't giving it up, they were doing what Gutierrez was doing: attacking circularly. In the meantime Hooker was stopping his retreat to find out what had happened.

Gutierrez was closest and it was Gutierrez Boag picked on.

But Guttierrez was down flat across the withers and Boag only knew one way to handle that. In the Cavalry you had it drilled into your bones.

Shoot the horse.

He gave it a lead and squeezed, and missed completely.

But there was time. The next one took the horse somewhere in the forequarters and it shuddered, breaking stride in mid-run, and when Gutierrez fell off the saddle Boag had the clear view he needed.

But Gutierrez came up with revolvers snapping and Gutierrez was damned good. Boag felt a half-spent slug ram into the horse; Boag was firing then and he got his shot off but when he went to jack the rifle the horse just slid over against him and Boag had to windmill back away from it before it fell on him.

That's all then.
He was standing right out in the bare-ass open with no shooting rest, and Gutierrez was out there wounded but still shooting and the two Mexicans were circling in and now Hooker, riding bareback, was barreling straight down the road at him.

3

He didn't have to stop and calculate the loads; he was a soldier, he always knew how many rounds he had left. There were two in the magazine and one in the chamber.

Gutierrez was out there in the grass reloading his revolvers. Two hundred yards and he'd downed Boag's horse with a six-gun.

But Gutierrez had a slug in him and he was afoot. He wasn't the one to worry about.

Boag did the only thing possible. He laid himself down behind the dying horse and braced the rifle along his left hand and watched Hooker drum straight at him and shot Hooker spinning out of the saddle.

The Mexicans had galloped out in a V to straddle Boag's position. He picked the one to his right because the other one was getting close to Gutierrez's position and at least that would put the two of those where Boag could watch them both at once.

The rider to his right was going at a dead run on a course straight across Boag's line of vision. That meant he was moving fast and Boag gave himself a long lead before he fired. It was three hundred yards or better and he was bleakly unsurprised when the bullet did nothing visible. He used the last shot and that one missed too, and then he slid down flat on the ground and wondered as he thumbed cartridges out of his pocket if he had time to reload the long gun.

4

When Boag looked up, the Mexican on his right was within forty yards of the trees behind him. It left Boag no time at all. He leveled the rifle, only four cartridges loaded so far, and jacked it and aimed with painful slow care and squeezed it.

A little too much of a lead but it creased the horse on the forehead; at least that was the effect Boag observed. The horse's head snapped to one side under the impact and the Mexican made the mistake of trying to get the horse under control when he should have jumped clear. It gave Boag time to sight on a fairly motionless target and in two shots he had the Mexican.

Back to one bullet left. He swiveled toward Gutierrez and the other Mexican and reached for cartridges.

There wasn't anything in sight but a riderless horse wandering away.

He knew what it meant. The Mexican had dismounted somewhere near Gutierrez and they were both out there in the grass, worming their way toward Boag.

He didn't know how bad he'd hit Gutierrez. He knew he hadn't hit the other one at all. And he knew one other thing: he was at the end of his capacities and he had no strength for a drawn-out stalking game. They would shoot him to pieces before he had time to react.

Boag didn't care about them now. He wanted to get out.

He had one of the hand bombs left but it might have got too wet last night to work. He might as well try it. He opened his packet and struck a match, got the fuse sputtering and hurled the thing as far as he could into the grass on a line with Gutierrez's horse. It didn't go more than sixty feet. All he hoped for was that it would make noise and encourage them to hesitate.

But it didn't go off, so that was that.

He took the rifle and eeled into the grass. It would be sensible to crawl back into the woods. That was what a smart man would do. That was what Gutierrez and the other one would expect him to do.

So it was what Boag didn't do.

He headed up through the grass parallel to the road. Heading straight up toward the foot of the mountain.

Because that was where Mr. Pickett had fallen and Mr. Pickett's horse was still standing there waiting for his rider to get back up and ride him.

5

The wind rubbed itself against the damp grasses. Boag's legs were all gone now and he was hitching himself along on his elbows with the rifle across the crooks of his arms. He'd left his sombrero behind and the sun beat against the back of his head. That was all right because he was wet and chilled clear through and the warmth was comforting.

He doubted there was any flesh left on his elbows. He lifted his head and saw the horse wasn't far away now. Another fifty feet to cross.

He found Mr. Pickett almost by accident; he parted the grasses and there was Mr. Pickett lying on his side looking right at him.

There' was a heavy smear of blood glistening on Mr. Pickett's shirt. His face bulged, thick with blood and anger; the pulse throbbed at his throat and he worked his lips around a word:

“Boag.”

“You keep quiet now, Mr. Pickett. This bullet comes out your back it'll make a hole as big as a coconut.”

Mr. Pickett just stared at him.

Boag thought of a lot of things he ought to say to Mr. Pickett. All the agony that had led up to this. But there wasn't anything left to say, the guns had said it all. Boag brought himself around until he was lying parallel to Mr. Pickett and then he used his arm to sit up. He looked out across the waving grass. Nothing stirred except the grass itself. They were still there but he had the feeling they were nowhere near him.