The Man from Shenandoah (30 page)

~~~

Waiting was pure agony. Carl bellied down in the pine needles and crawled to a fresh position from time to time before he sent a bullet singing into the hill above the cabin roof, but the time he spent waiting for return fire and for Rulon’s diversion was time spent chewing his cheeks in frustration.

James scooted around in the woods to his left, shooting above the roof each time he moved. Carl wasn’t sure where Sourdough was, but he knew the old man was somewhere on the right, shooting occasionally, and waiting for the ruckus Rulon had promised.

After his third shot at a dead branch overhanging the roof, Carl noticed that the debris knocked off by his bullets wasn’t collecting on the shingles. It disappeared each time, dropping into the cabin.

“James,” he hissed, when next James came close. “Look at this.” Carl threw lead into the dead branch, and a chunk dropped into the hole. “I’ll wager I can get up above there and drop through that hole into the cabin.”

“Yup, and wind up looking like a piece of Irish lace. That’s a sure way to an early grave. You keep down here and do what Rulon told you.”

“But if I’m up there, I can see down into the house, and find the girls. Then we won’t go in blind. It’s a good plan, James, and I aim to try it.”

“Where am I supposed to shoot if you’re in my sights?”

Carl pursed his lips for a moment. “Sometimes I get the idea you would favor putting lead into me,” he said, and compressed his jaw. “We don’t see eye to eye anymore.”

“I don’t stoop to murder,” his brother growled.

Carl nodded. “I’m mighty thankful for that,” he said, then slipped into the forest to circle around.

Moving warily, in case there was a guard in the forest, Carl crept through the pines, avoiding the sticks that littered the brown pine-needle carpet beneath his feet. Turning south, he walked toward James’s left, edging toward an arc of brush that might afford cover to his scramble up the slope.

He stopped at the edge of the clearing and glanced back at the cabin. The window on this side would show a fine view of him when he dashed into the open. He hesitated, and then James fired a volley of shots above the roofline.

“Thanks, little brother,” Carl muttered, and ran, doubled over, into the clearing as answering shots thudded around James’s position.

Carl hit the rise of the mountain going full blast, and his momentum carried him up the first ten feet. Then he flattened out on his belly, scooting the Spencer ahead of him, aware that his movements could be sensed through the thin brush between him and the cabin window. Being careful not to scrape the barrel and action along the rocks, Carl moved first the rifle, then himself, up the steep, rocky hill.

To get above the cabin, Carl saw that he would have to swing out onto a crumbling ledge above a sharp drop. The ledge gradually rose about fifteen feet before it angled down toward the roofline. There was one spot where he could probably be seen from the window, before he got high enough to be out of view, but there he would be on his own. James could not risk shooting then, for fear of hitting him.

Holding his breath, the young man eased out onto the ledge, praying that it would hold his weight. He clung to the rock face, slowly letting the air out of his lungs. One shard of rock tumbled off the ledge, but the rest held, and he moved, inch by inch, along the rising shelf of rotten rock.

Then he was at the spot where anybody looking through the window and glancing upward could see him plain as the wattles on a tom turkey. He stopped, feeling the skin of his exposed back crawling with raw nerves. One pebble, bounding down the face of the hill, might alert the inhabitants of the cabin and send a bullet into his back. One misstep, and he’d plunge down the sheer cliff face to his death.

There was no sound from the cabin, no gunfire and no voices, and the stillness made Carl’s palms clammy. He could feel drops of sweat trickling along the valley of his spine. Rulon had had plenty of time to find the mouth of the bear’s den and make his way with Bill through the tunnel.

The silence below was worrisome.
Maybe there is no tunnel after all
, he thought.
I’m up here, set for disaster, with no remedy close at hand.

Carl scrunched up his face, tight as he could, then let it go slack, hoping to slow his breathing. His left arm ached from the effort of keeping the rifle free of the rocks, safe from striking with the telltale clang of metal against stone. He elected to move now in short, deliberate progressions, and it seemed to him that eternity could not be as long as this trip across the field of fire from the cabin.

Slowly, Carl inched his way up the ledge. He thought his heart must be beating loud enough to alarm the ruffians below him. Then, slowly he turned his head and looked over his shoulder toward the cabin. He could no longer see the window, and knew that he was safe from view.

Now was the time for speed, and his bunched muscles cried out in agony as he took hurried steps down the ledge to the place where he had aimed his rifle so many times. He fingered the dead branch where the bullets had stripped off the back, then looked down, into the dark interior of the cabin.

There was not just a single breach spreading between two roof beams, but a large hole that gaped open to the sky where several of the beams had rotted away. Carl looked up and signaled to James the size of the hole, framing a circle in the air, then he peered down again, hoping to locate the girls.

The ruckus began with a mighty concussion beneath him, and Carl felt himself slipping into space, caught off guard as he tumbled into the void. He fell heavily on his left leg and collapsed. Debris from the rotted roof struck his head and shoulders, and when he tried to get up and back himself into the corner of the room, he knew by the way his leg folded up under him that it was broken.

Using his Spencer as a crutch, he crouched in the dim room and pulled the Smith and Wesson from his waistband, aware of the terrific din coming from the rear of the cabin. Rulon and Bill must have got through, for bullets were whanging and spattering behind a hanging blanket. A man yelled in pain, and the sound filled the hollow with echoes.

Then he saw the girls, tied together behind the overturned table by the front door, and heard them shrieking a warning to him. He half-turned, his pistol feeling like a living part of his hand, and heard Pete Dawes exclaim, “How’d that tenderfoot get in here?”

Carl shot across his body, and heard the thunk of his bullet entering Dawes’ chest. He recognized his own voice saying, “That’s for Chico, and this here’s for my pa,” as he fired again, his slug going into the bridge of Dawes’ nose.

Carl felt the jolt of the lead from Dawes’ last shot as it hit his left hipbone, and thought,
That leg’s gone
, as he spun around with the blow.

He landed up against the window that had worried him, while he was out there on the mountain. His rifle was gone from his hand, laying several feet from him on the floor. Knowing he couldn’t reach it, he shifted the Smith and Wesson to his left hand and drew the Colt from his holster.

Willy thrust away the blanket and threw himself across the room, trying to get behind the girls, but Carl’s shots stopped him, and Willy fell, sprawling on the dirt floor.

Now he had to find Acosta, but Carl couldn’t see him in the gloom of the fading light. Powder smoke hung heavy in the room, choking off the oxygen and blurring his vision. Shots still rang out from time to time in the tunnel, and the pounding of boots on the hardpan outside let him know James and Sourdough were on the way in.

Where was Berto Acosta? All the revulsion he had ever felt for the man rose in his chest, squeezing the breath out of him. He inhaled the putrid air of the cabin, shuddering as the numbness from his leg wounds wore off. His head felt like it was floating, and each time he moved, the bullet hole opened, gushing blood. He knew he had to find Acosta now, before he passed out.

The door splintered under the butt of James’s rifle, and fresh air moved into the room as he enlarged the hole. James wiggled through, lifted the bar, and swung open the shattered door. “Where are they?” he hissed, then grunted as he located the girls.

“Get them out!” Carl yelled, and heard his brother hustle the girls through the doorway. Now he had to find Acosta and make an end to the man’s corruption.

Carl holstered his Colt and, dragging his leg, using the rough furniture as props, he crossed the room and stumbled over Willy’s body. He avoided Dawes, whose surprised eyes would never take the measure of another man, and hesitated before the blanket that marked the entrance to the tunnel. The hair rose on the back of his neck. He drew his Colt again, then swept the blanket aside with the pistol in his left hand, and froze.

Berto Acosta stood beyond the blanket, the fingers of his left hand caressing the scar where Carl had split his cheekbone. His gun was leveled at Carl’s heart.

“You!” the man hissed. “You are just a
muchacho
, but you have spoiled the face of Berto Acosta, and kept from him the delights of the yellow-haired girl. No one, no one keeps me from having my way. Now you die.”

Carl saw the furious black eyes narrow and he brought down his left arm just before Berto fired, turning it to knock aside the barrel of the gun, and the bullet whizzed by under Carl’s arm.

Grunting, “I don’t die so easy as that,” Carl half tackled, half fell on the big Mexican, and felt the concussion of Berto’s second shot going off next to his head. Carl landed with the barrel of his right-hand gun tucked into the soft flesh of Berto’s throat, just where it jutted out to form the floor of his mouth, but he didn’t hear the shot. He knew he fired by the jump of the Colt in his hand, and by the sudden slackness of the Mexican’s body.

Rulon’s legs came into sight as Carl brushed the back of his left hand alongside his head. His hand came away from his head warm and sticky with his own blood. Then the gloom of the tunnel gathered around him, and he slumped into the darkness over the body.

Chapter 20

Carl opened his eyes to a blinding light and a fuzzy, isolated feeling. The side of his head throbbed with pain, and when he shifted his weight to get out of bed, his left hip and thigh answered the motion with a jolt and ache of agony that threatened to send him back into blackness. Catching his breath, resting a moment, he recognized his father’s house, and knew he was in his father’s bed. No one seemed to be in the room, and Carl lay back and drifted into the welcoming darkness.

When next he woke, it was night, and he was in his own bed, in his own cabin, with the same pain and fuzzy, cottony feeling inside his head. He became aware of a restraint on his left leg, and looked down over his beard to investigate. Someone had bound a set of narrow, thinly split cedar shakes to his thigh, from hip to knee, and his pants and shirt were gone.

The ache in his thigh told him that he had not been mistaken about breaking his leg. He tried not to shift his weight as he reached down to probe the sorest part. The leg was swollen and tender, and hot to the touch.

As he reached over to retrieve the comforter that had slipped off to one side, his elbow brushed against a bandage on his hip, and he gasped with the pain that came awake, brutalizing his nerves. Taking long, shuddering breaths to fight back the agony, he remembered the last bullet from Pete Dawes’ gun.

Gritting his teeth against the torment, squeezing his eyes shut to blot out the pain, Carl waited until the nerves he had awakened slipped off into a place filled with dull, scraping razors, and he could bear to open his eyes again.

James stood over him, candle in hand, face clean-shaven. His mouth moved, but no sound reached Carl’s ears.

“You don’t got to whisper just because it’s night,” Carl said, then frowned. “Am I talking out loud?” he asked.

James nodded and moved his mouth once more.

Carl put a finger into his ear and wiggled it, unsuccessfully, for there was nothing save the fuzzy, stuffed sensation. His head ached, and he raised his hand to find another bandage, bound on by a cloth wrapped around his head.

“Hush, I can’t hear my own voice. What happened to me?”

James frowned and put the candle on the floor. In the eerily flickering light, he pantomimed drawing a gun, aiming it and pulling the trigger. Then he put the pretended weapon alongside his own head, just above the left ear, and made his hand move as though it held a bucking pistol. Then he fell to the floor.

Carl recalled the struggle with Berto Acosta. “Did I kill him?”

James’s face appeared over the side of the bed, and he nodded emphatically, looking grim. He started to speak, then shrugged his shoulders and pointed to his throat with the imaginary Colt

Carl heaved a sigh, and closing his eyes, went to sleep.

~~~

Daylight brightened the room, and Carl sat up. Then he wished he hadn’t and he lay down again to wait for the pain to subside. A buzzing filled his head, and he shook it to clear away the annoyance, but it stayed with him.

“Shoot!” he said aloud, and thought he heard the word echoing faintly back to his right ear. He sat up again, ignoring the pain that jolted through him, and shouted, “Hey!” Again he heard a faint version of his voice. “Hallelujah, I ain’t completely deaf,” he chortled. Then he became very still, holding his breath and straining to hear any sounds through the cotton in his head. A thudding sound came through the window, and after a bit, he identified it as someone chopping wood.