Chapter 13

Since I couldn’t do much real work I spent the next week scouting and watching the trail. We’d made the stashes we talked about, weapons, ammo, a little grub and coffee, some rags for bandages, that sort of thing.

I wasn’t just ridin’ around. There were a few choke points on the trail in, and I had Gal and Eion help me loosen the base of a couple of big boulders, and rig a deadfall out of some mighty impressive logs. It probably wouldn’t hurt them but it would clog the trail and make them jumpy.

They hit three days later and I almost missed them. They’d gotten smart and hired three renegade Indians. I was watching from the ridge, staring at a cloud of dust and wondering how many they were when I felt more than heard something. I didn’t stop to think and rolled to the left. An arrow hit the rock where I was lying and the archer, seeing he missed, had dropped his bow and was trying to get his rifle to bear. I hit him three times the last in his head as he was falling. Another rose up almost in front of me, shocked beyond believing when I dropped the rifle and went for my shotgun. He was literally on top of me before I could get it to bear, the barrel almost against his chest. The shot knocked him backwards and he remained standing for a few seconds, looking down. I could see the woods behind him through the three inch hole.

The last fired as I was rising to my feet, nearly ripping my holster in two and knocking me down again. The brave must have thought he got me, because he rose up, his war cry echoing off the rocks. He stopped in mid yell, because I blew most of his jaw off. The next round took the rest of his head.

The sudden stillness was deafening and it took me a minute to recover. I was going to have a hellacious bruise on my hip where he’d hit my holster. I also had a shallow groove I didn’t remember getting on my left arm, right beside the one I got in Mexico.

Scrambling back to the ridge I dusted off my binoculars and focused on the dust cloud. Son of a bitch, there had to be thirty of them! Eion was coming across the valley and I waved a yellow scarf, the all clear signal.

He dropped beside me and I let him get a look. “That’s a lot of riders.”

“It is. Way more than we can handle alone. I don’t want any of us getting hurt, so we may have to give it up for a while. We’ll worry about getting it back when Zeke shows up. I need you to help me spring the traps, then we’ll dust them a bit and get the hell out. They’ll take this valley but it’s gonna cost them.

We slipped down to the first trap, a huge boulder standing right over a sharp rise in the trail. I always meant to push it back because it made me nervous, but now I wanted it there. We had dug carefully, undermining it until it was barely hanging on. It took them almost an hour to get close but as soon as most of them were in the gap we pushed. The sonofabtich didn’t move! We tried two more times and they were less than twenty feet away before it finally gave.