higher than the men on the side where The Kid was, giving them a small advantage.
Their numbers were also greater. Shots were coming from eight different places over there, and when The Kid bellied down and risked a look over the rim on his side, he saw only four men under attack. Two to one odds.
The men on his side of the canyon weren’t strangers. From up there, he could see behind the rocks where they were crouched. He recognized Enrique Kelly, Lupe Valdez, the man called Chess, and the Yaqui, Mateo.
Except for brief glimpses, the rocks on the opposite ledge concealed the riflemen over there. The Kid caught sight of leggings, blue and red shirts, and equally colorful headbands and sashes.
Apaches. No doubt about it, The Kid thought.
It was easy enough to figure out what was going on. The leaders of the war party, heading deeper into Mexico, might not have expected pursuit, but they hadn’t avoided extermination so far by being careless. Knowing that anyone coming after them would have to cross the canyon, they had left some men behind to watch the place and ambush anyone they regarded as a threat.
Kelly and the others had ridden into that trap, descending into the canyon until the Apaches opened fire on them.
The Kid felt no fondness for the men, and he knew Valdez hated him. He didn’t trust Kelly or Chess, and he had a hunch Mateo would slit his throat in an instant if it suited the Yaqui’s purpose ... or if he just felt like it.
But this was a chance to whittle down the odds that might be facing him later when he tried to rescue those prisoners, The Kid told himself. From where he was, he could take the Apaches by surprise, and he had a better angle at them than Kelly and the other men did.
The Kid edged the Winchester’s barrel over the rimrock. He nestled his cheek against the smooth wood of the stock, peered over the barrel, and lined the sights on a slab of rock where he had seen one of the Apaches poke his head up for a second a few moments earlier. He breathed slowly, steadily ...
The Kid squeezed the trigger.
Chapter 18
With all the shots and echoes of shots racketing around in the canyon, the blast of one more Winchester was lost.
But the results were startlingly evident. The Apache who had unwisely lifted his head flew backward as The Kid’s steel-jacketed slug bored through his skull and exploded out again in a pink, grisly shower of blood, brain matter, and bone fragments.
The dead warrior’s body hadn’t hit the ground by the time The Kid worked the Winchester’s lever, shifted his aim, and honed in on another rock. The Apache kneeling behind it, evidently startled by his companion’s sudden death, twisted around to look at the bloody corpse. One of his shoulders stuck out enough for The Kid to see it.
He fired again.
The Apache didn’t make a sound as the bullet shattered his shoulder, but the impact sent him rolling out from behind the rock. He tried to leap to his feet, but shots rang out from the other side of the canyon and he went down again, drilled at least twice through the body. He jerked a couple of times, then lay still.
In a matter of seconds, the odds had improved considerably. However, the Apaches couldn’t give up without a fight. If they left the shelter of the rocks, they would be easy targets. Even though they had set up the ambush, they were pinned down just as much as Kelly and the others were.
Both sides started firing with renewed intensity. Bullets flew back and forth across the canyon, and clouds of powdersmoke drifted through the air.
The Kid added to the hellish clamor by cranking off several rounds as fast as he could work the rifle’s lever. He concentrated his shots on the canyon wall behind the rocks where the Apaches were hidden. Ricochets whined and buzzed around them like angry hornets.
Those hornets had fatal stings. One of the warriors dropped his rifle and stood up, arching his back and trying to reach behind him to the place where he’d been hit. More slugs riddled him, driving him back a step before he pitched forward off the ledge. He turned over a couple times in the air before his limp body thudded to the sandy bottom of the canyon.
By now the remaining Apaches realized they were under attack from above. They lifted their rifles and started peppering the rimrock with slugs. The bullets threw grit into The Kid’s eyes and forced him to roll away from the edge.
He lay there for several moments, using the opportunity to thumb fresh cartridges through the Winchester’s loading gate. When the rifle’s magazine was full again, he tossed his hat aside and crawled toward the rim again. The Apaches seemed to have gone back to shooting at Kelly and the others.
But they had left one man watching for him, The Kid realized as a bullet struck the rim less than a foot from his head as soon as he poked it out. Tiny bits of gravel stung his cheek.
He forced himself not to flinch, and snapped a slug right back at the spot where the shot came from. An instant later he saw a rifle flung into the air and knew that was because of a dying spasm on the part of its owner. His bullet must have gone right over the barrel of the Apache’s Winchester and into his head.
Now that The Kid had personally accounted for half of the ambushers, the pendulum had swung the other way. The Apaches were the ones who were outnumbered. He pulled back a little and watched as Kelly and his friends picked off the other Indians one by one. Two of the Apaches fell off the ledge when they were fatally wounded, plummeting to the bottom of the canyon the way their companion had a few minutes earlier.
Even when the shooting stopped, it took several seconds for the echoes to stop rolling through the canyon. When silence finally settled, it had a grim, eerie quality after all the gun-thunder.
Enrique Kelly broke that silence by calling, “Hey, whoever’s up there on the rim! You sure as hell saved our bacon, mister!”
The Kid moved forward so he could look down at them. The men had emerged from their cover behind the rocks, but Chess and Mateo still had their rifles trained on the opposite wall just in case any of the Apaches were clinging to life and tried to resume the fight.
Kelly and Valdez peered up at the rim, each man using a hand to shield his eyes, and Valdez suddenly yelled, “It’s him! Morgan! The bastard who kicked me in the
He jerked his Winchester to his shoulder.
Before Valdez could fire, Kelly’s hand shot out, grabbed the rifle’s barrel, and forced it down. “Quit it, you fool! Morgan probably saved our lives just now.” He pulled the rifle out of Valdez’s hands and then tipped his head back to call up to The Kid again. “Morgan, come on down!”
The Kid’s instincts told him not to trust these men, but if he was going to convince them to help him free those captives, he had to make them think that he did. He waved his rifle over his head and said, “I’ll get my horse.”
He picked up his hat, slid the Winchester back in the saddle boot, and took the dun’s reins. It would be easier and probably safer to lead the horse down the ledge than to ride. As he started down, he saw that the others had already resumed their descent rather than waiting for him.
By the time he reached the bottom of the canyon, Valdez and Mateo had gone over to the bodies of the Apaches who had fallen off the ledge. Making sure the warriors were dead, The Kid thought, even though it was highly unlikely any of them had survived the fall on top of being shot.
Kelly and Chess stood waiting with the horses near the base of the trail. Kelly grinned at The Kid. “When somebody started shooting from the rimrock, I had a hunch it was you, Morgan. I knew you weren’t going to pay any attention to that stiff-necked lieutenant. You’re still on the trail of those Apaches, aren’t you?”
“That’s right,” The Kid said. “And from the looks of things, you are, too. You followed the tracks here, didn’t you?”
Kelly shrugged. “That’s right. We’ve got business to take care of.”
The Kid glanced across the canyon’s sandy floor. Valdez was hunkered on his heels next to one of the
