Long Road to Cheyenne (11 page)

“Here they are,” he shouted. “I almost rode past ’em. They came out on this bank of grass, right up through these rocks.”

Leach quickly crossed over to the south side of the river to see for himself. “Yep,” he gloated, “that ol’ boy’s pretty slick, all right, but he’s gotta be slicker’n that to throw us off for very long. There better be a good load of dust in them packs, ’cause he’s puttin’ us to a helluva lot of trouble.”

Fuller, who fancied himself an expert tracker, dismounted and studied the tracks carefully. “We ain’t that far behind ’em, Leach. Look at where they stomped down the grass here. Half of it ain’t sprung back up yet.”

“Our horses ain’t in that bad a shape,” Leach decided. “We’d be smart to push ’em on past dark, catch up with them folks tonight.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Fuller replied. “They’ve been ridin’ mostly in a straight line for the last few miles.” He glanced up at a clear sky overhead. “And if there’s a moon tonight, shouldn’t be no trouble a’tall to follow ’em.”

They hesitated for only a few seconds more to follow the direction of the tracks with their eyes before starting out after them again. Both men sensed the end of the hunt and the excitement of the kill, for they felt their prey was at hand.

The spot they picked for their camp seemed to offer some protection from two sides, with a gulch formed by a huge column of rocks on each side of the river. Not a wide river in the open prairie, the North Laramie was compressed even more as it was squeezed through the narrow pass. There was grass for the horses just beyond the pass and a good sheltered spot to build a fire on the narrow riverbank. It was doubtful anyone could see the camp from the lower prairie below them. The travelers were tired, so little time was wasted as Cam took care of the horses and Mary busied herself with preparing something for their supper. Since there was not a great deal of room between the river and the rocks on the side, they laid their bedrolls in a line, with Cam’s closest to the path they had ridden into the gulch. “Looks like a snug little camp, doesn’t it?” Cam commented when they finished just as Mary announced that supper was ready.

“I’ll be so glad when I can fix a meal like a normal human being,” she remarked as she spooned the boiled beans onto each plate. “I’m really beginning to wonder if that day will ever come.”

“I hope you invite me to supper when it does come,” Cam remarked. The meal he was eating was more like what he was accustomed to, beans and bacon, unless he had had an opportunity to kill some fresh game. He nudged Emma, who was sitting close to him as usual. “These beans are pretty good, though. Ain’t they, Skeeter?”

She wrinkled her nose to make a face. “I don’t like beans,” she complained. “When we get back home, I’m never gonna eat another bean.”

“I like beans,” Grace announced, and stuck another spoonful in her mouth.

“Grace knows,” Cam told Emma. “Beans make you strong.”

“I still don’t like beans,” Emma said as she chewed on a piece of bacon.

Cam chuckled at the precocious child’s protest. Mary sat quietly eating, listening to the wordplay between Cam and her daughters. She knew what he was doing. The girls were showing the strain of their flight, and he was attempting to take their minds off the hardships of the last few days. She appreciated his efforts, but she was not convinced they would do much good. They still had so far to go, and there was the constant worry about the two outlaws who might or might not be right behind them. She shook her head to rid her mind of the negative thoughts and told herself she would sleep close with her children tonight and trust the Lord would see them through to another dawn—and hope Cam knew what he was doing. Later, when the girls had crawled under a single blanket to sleep, Cam built up the fire while Mary washed the dishes in the river.

“You remember how to use that rifle?” he asked when she came up from the river. She nodded. “Good. I hope you don’t have to, but it can’t hurt to know how just in case.”

•   •   •

Two riders approached the North Laramie River under a bright three-quarter moon. The tracks of five horses were easily seen on the bank. “What did I tell you, Leach? They’re still ridin’ in a straight line, and look at them tracks. Might as well be in the middle of the day.” He nudged his horse and entered the water; however, he reined back on the horse upon reaching the other side. “Uh-oh, lookee here. There’s tracks on this side, but they turned and followed the river up yonder way.” He pointed toward the narrow gulch through a hill covered with scrub pines and a lot of rocky outcroppings.

“Looks like they were fixin’ to make camp,” Leach said. “It’d be about the right time when they got here, and they’d likely camp by the river.” He looked upstream and down. “If they know we’re trailin’ ’em, they mighta tried to throw us off. They coulda started out that way, and then gone in the water and turned around.” He stared downstream again. “They wouldn’t likely camp out in the open. They’d be lookin’ for someplace they could hide. I’d bet they rode up toward those hills there.” He pointed upstream.

“Yeah,” Fuller replied, a wicked grin on his face. “I expect you might be right. We mighta run ’em to ground. Let’s take a look in them hills.”

They followed the obvious tracks along the river, watching carefully to make sure the tracks didn’t lead back into the water, as Leach had speculated. When within fifty yards of the rocks that stood like columns on each side of the river, they dismounted. Leaving their horses tied to some bushes near the water’s edge, they proceeded on foot, carefully. “They picked a good place to camp, if they’re in that gulch,” Fuller whispered. “We can’t hardly walk in there without them seein’ us.”

“Yeah,” Leach answered, also in a whisper, “if they’re in there. They mighta just rode right on through, followin’ the river.”

“They’re in there,” Fuller remarked confidently, and pointed toward the darkened shadows in the gulf where a few sparks from a campfire drifted up to become invisible again in the bright moonlight above the gulch.

Since walking straight in along the narrow confines of the gulch was a bit too risky, even if chances were good that the camp was asleep at this late hour, they paused to study the sides. Two small hills with rocky outcroppings protected the camp from sight, but there was no reason why they couldn’t climb up and see if the camp was visible from the top. The way the gulch was formed, it gave the impression that it had been one big hill in the beginning. The river might have carved a notch right through the middle, leaving cliffs next to the water, but gentle slopes on either end. That appeared to be the easiest option, so they went back for their horses. Leach rode up one side and Fuller the other. Their thinking was that one of them had to have a shot.

Leach rode partway up the relatively gentle slope of the hill on the east side of the river before dismounting and going the rest of the way on foot. From the top, it was a more difficult task to make his way back down through a maze of boulders facing the river in an effort to find a place near the edge. Working his way farther down the face of the clifflike side of the gulch, being careful not to dislodge any smaller rocks, he finally reached a point where he could see the camp below him. He looked toward the other side of the gulch and saw that Fuller had also reached a vantage point. As he returned his gaze to the sleeping camp, a slow smile crept across his face. Owing to the tight confines of the gulch, his victims had been forced to make their beds along the narrow riverbank.
All lined up in a row,
he thought. It was almost too pretty a picture to disturb, he was thinking, and he took another moment to anticipate the pleasure it was about to bring. But his eagerness to open the packs lying beyond the bodies quickly overcame his desire to savor the moment. On the opposite side, Fuller, evidently even more eager to begin the massacre, opened fire.

Before splitting up, the two assassins had agreed on the order of execution. The primary target was, of course, the man, quickly followed by the woman. The two little girls were not as important, and could come last. “That’ll add a little sport to it,” Fuller had remarked. “If them two young’uns get to runnin’ around half crazy like chickens, it’ll give you some target practice.” As he and Leach discovered, they had given them better targets than they expected. The girls were bundled up in one blanket, with the daddy and the mama close on each side, providing the assassins with easy targets, all within a small space.

As soon as Fuller opened fire, the narrow gulch was ablaze with rifle fire coming down from above, the sleeping targets soon riddled with bullet holes, and no chance to run for cover. “Whoo, mercy!” Fuller cried out in the excitement of the massacre. The victims had had no opportunity to move a muscle before all hell rained down upon them, much less return fire. Such was the volume of rifle fire between the rock walls that the silence that suddenly followed was nearly as devastating as the uproar that preceded it until broken by Fuller’s shout. “I’m goin’ down! They’re done for!”

Every bit as anxious as Fuller to rip open the packs that had tantalized them for days, Leach scrambled down the rocky slope, sliding over the loose gravel, half the time on the seat of his pants, while grappling with his rifle to keep from losing it. It soon turned into a competition between the two of them to see who could get to the packs first. It was almost a tie, with both partners reaching the river bank at virtually the same time. The edge went to Leach because Fuller had to cross over to his side of the river.

With no interest in the dead at that moment, Leach hurried straight toward the packs stacked one upon the other against the wall of the gulch. Dripping wet from the chest down, Fuller ran to catch up, almost colliding with him when Leach suddenly stopped dead in his tracks and dropped to one knee. “What—” was as far as he got before the report of the Winchester and Fuller doubled over and dropped, shot in the stomach. Leach got only a glimpse of the rifle lying across the top of the packs and protruding between two fancy suitcases before the next shot ripped into his chest, knocking him over backward. Stunned, but still able to get on his feet, he opened fire on the packs, cranking the lever on his rifle as fast as he could, while backing slowly away.

Cam levered another cartridge into the chamber of the Winchester, but Leach had backed far enough to hinder his line of sight. He pushed the packs away to give him enough room to get out of the hole he had carved out of the gravel between two large rocks, and stepped out in the open to be met with a rifle slug low in the shoulder. Unwilling to go down, he returned the fire as rapidly as he could manage, but his accuracy was impaired by the painful wound, and he was not able to prevent Leach from escaping.

Cursing himself for the carelessness that caused him to get shot, he ignored the pain and the loss of blood to warily approach the body left writhing in agony on the ground. Fuller was gut-shot and had little chance of surviving. The burning pain in his innards was scalding his insides to the point of desperation. When he opened his tightly closed eyes to see Cam standing over him, he cursed. “Damn you! Finish it, damn it. Don’t leave me gut-shot.” Cam cocked his rifle and held it over the suffering man. Fuller looked up at him, his eyes pleading. He spoke once more before Cam sent him to hell. “There was gold in them packs. I gotta know.”

“Yes, there was,” Cam answered, “a lot of it.”

“I knew it,” he gasped, seeming to relax just as the Winchester spoke.

Cam continued to stare down at him for a moment longer, before taking a few steps back to drop to one knee. He looked toward the mouth of the gulch where Leach had fled, but there was no sign of the would-be assassin. Feeling that the threat was over, Cam called out to Mary, “You can come out now. It’s over. Might be a good idea to keep the girls there for a few minutes till I do somethin’ with this body.” She got to her feet then and left the girls where Cam had told the three of them to stay, in the grass of the bank, surrounded by the horses. He had stressed that she was not to come out until he told her it was all right. She carried the rifle he had shown her how to use, and as he had instructed, she had not fired it. He had insisted that she was to shoot it only in the event the two men got by him and came for her. There were not many places she could have hidden, but he had been convinced that the killers would not likely shoot at the horses. They were worth money.

“I’m gonna have to buy some new blankets,” Mary said when she walked up to him. She then stopped abruptly when she saw that his shirt was soaked in blood. “Cam!” she blurted. “You’re wounded!” She hurried to him then. “Oh my God! How bad is it?”

“Well, I ain’t sure. I mean, I guess I’ll live. It smarts a good bit, and I don’t feel like I could run up that cliff right now.” He remained on one knee while she tried to see how bad the damage was.

“I don’t know how you can stay upright,” she said, worrying over the wound. “You’ve lost so much blood, you need to be lying down. Once again, you’ve been wounded saving me and my daughters,” she said, thinking it her duty to express her thanks. “I can’t say how grateful I feel that you have taken it upon yourself to protect us.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, “but right now we need to get ourselves outta this open space. I don’t know for certain how bad that other fellow is wounded. I hit him in the chest, and I wouldn’t give him much odds of makin’ it, the way he was staggerin’ when he left here. But he might be climbin’ back up on that hill to take another shot at us.”

“They weren’t going to just rob us. They came to kill us,” she said when the sobering thought struck her. Looking at him, she feared that they might have succeeded in killing him. There was so much blood. “What will we do?” she asked.

He remembered how flustered she had been over the wound now healing in his thigh, so he expected even less from her on one he knew was far more serious.
Damn my carelessness,
he thought again. “Right off, I need a rag or somethin’ to stuff in this hole to see if I can slow this bleedin’ down. Then we need to find us a hole we can all get in, ’cause I don’t think I can get us all packed up to head outta here right now.”

He was interrupted then by a plaintive wail from Emma. “How much longer do we have to stay here? They’re gonna step on us with their big feet.”

“I’d best drag that body outta here before they see it,” Cam said, and struggled to his feet.

“I can do that,” Mary insisted, and quickly jumped to the task. Not without a great deal of effort, she managed to drag the deadweight over to a gully and rolled it in. Then she hurried back to help steady Cam as he made his way back to where the horses were tied.

With little choice but to find a place he and Mary could defend, Cam selected the first reasonable spot and pulled their bedding and packs back to form a barricade. Trying to move as fast as he could while he still had the strength, he helped Mary move the horses over closer to them. “We might be doin’ all this for nothin’,” he told Mary between grimaces of pain, “’cause I’m pretty sure he’s in worse shape than I am. But I don’t wanna take the chance. We can’t hide the horses in this gulch, but we can sure as hell shoot anybody that tries to steal ’em.” When he was satisfied that they were well protected, with his and Mary’s rifles ready, only then would he permit her to bandage his shoulder.