The Apaches were coming closer -- there must have been at least thirty of them.
Again I glanced at the slope, checking out the route, the possible cover, the quickest way to the hollow up under the rim. It was farther up there than it looked, and already the others were looking a lot smaller, but they still had a way to go.
One of the Apaches was trying to climb the slope behind us. Rocca tucked the butt of his Winchester against his shoulder, held his aim for an instant, and fired. We saw the Apache slip, half fall, then catch himself and turn his horse away from us.
We waited. The other Indians were scattering out now. We fired, choosing our targets, but we could not see whether we scored or not. But all the Apaches in sight went to the ground.
Rocca ducked back, running swiftly from rock to rock. He was an Apache again himself, swift and daring, yet sure. He paused once, shot quickly, then ran on.
I balanced my Winchester in my hands, took a quick glance toward a bunch of brush and rocks about thirty feet away, and ran for it. A bullet kicked dust just ahead of me ... another ricocheted off a rock with an angry snarl, a nasty sound, the flattened bullet could have made an ugly wound.
Crawling a dozen feet, and scrambling through the brush, I got up again, rounded a boulder, and was in plain sight of them. I brought my rifle up swiftly. An Apache was running straight toward me when I stepped out, but before he could stop or hunt cover, I squeezed off my shot.
He was not seventy yards away and was facing full toward me, and there was no way I could miss. The bullet caught him running, and he took two steps before he pitched on his face in the gravel of the slope.
Up the watercourse I could hear scrambling feet, and I ran that way. I was taking long strides, leaping from rock to rock like a mountain goat, with lead spattering around me. Once I lost my footing, my heel skidded off a water-worn boulder, and I was pitched into the sand. I came up fast and felt a bullet snatch at my hat as I fired ... and missed.
The Apache I'd seen was gone. The one I had killed was still lying back there on the gravel.
My breath was tearing at my lungs but I scrambled on up, crawling over boulders, pulling myself from rock to rock. From time to time I was out of their sight.
Suddenly Rocca was right ahead of me. He turned to speak and I saw the bullet catch him. It dusted him on both sides, and he squatted suddenly on his haunches with blood coming from his side, staining his shirt.
He let go of his rifle and started to fall forward, but I caught him.
Ahead of us was about sixty yards of talus slope, and then the hollow toward which we'd headed.
When I caught Rocca I just naturally let him fall across my shoulders, catching hold of his collar with my right hand. My Winchester was in my left, and I reached down and got a finger through the lever on his rifle and lunged up straight. Then I started up the slope.
That struggle up, with Rocca across my shoulders, my breath most gone, and those bullets coming toward us from behind ... I never want to do that again.
Somehow I made it, and then stumbled and sort of fell into the hollow. Somebody lifted Rocca off my back, and I saw he'd been hit at least one more time.
Gasping for breath, I stared around me. They were all there, Dorset, the children, Murphy, and Battles, and the horses. And now there was us two.
'The trouble is,' John J. Battles said, 'we're trapped. There's no way out.'
Chapter 13
The hollow was nowhere more than seventy or eighty feet across, and the side up which we had come spilled over in a slope of broken rock and gravel. Elsewhere the sides sloped up steeply in banks of blown sand and gravel, littered with broken rock from the escarpment above, and dotted with sparse brush. The sheer wall above varied from eight feet in height to twice that.
Our rifles could command the slope down to the canyon where the Apaches now were. With no trouble, one or two men could prevent them from reaching us. On the other hand, if they reached the top of the mesa above us, we could be picked off at their leisure.
My eyes searched the rim. It was cracked and broken, and there were places where a man might be able to reach the top, but no place where a horse could go up.
Dorset was working over Rocca, she had him resting as easy as he could, and she was stopping the blood. Harry Brook, needing nobody to tell him, had bunched our horses at the back of the hollow, out of rifle shot from below. The children were huddled together, watching with wide eyes. Nobody was saying anything, but our situation looked bad. We had water enough for a day, perhaps two.
Slowly, I got to my feet. I said, pointing to the rim, 'I'm going to find a way out of this hole.'
'Wings.' Rocca spoke around the cigarette Dorset had lighted for him. 'You would need wings.'
'Spanish,' I said, 'you an' Battles stand 'em off. I'm going up yonder.'
They studied the wall. 'That's more of a climb than it looks,' Spanish said.
'But we'd better have somebody up there to hold them back.'
I started up the slope, angling across it for easier going. It took all of ten minutes to get to the foot of the escarpment.
On the rock wall I came to one of the cracks I'd seen from below. It was a foot wide at the bottom, widening above to maybe three feet. Here and there a few broken slabs of rock had fallen into it and become wedged. A man could climb out of it all right, but he surely couldn't take a wounded man up that way, so I worked my way along the face.
First thing I saw was a lion track, or maybe it was a jaguar's. There were a lot of those big spotted cats in Sonora, you even saw one in Arizona or California time to time.
The tracks, which were several days old, led right along the face and I followed them, studying every break in the rock that I came to. When I'd gone almost around the basin, the tracks suddenly disappeared.
Now, even a cat, tricky as they may be, can not vanish into thin air, so I contemplated the problem.
That cat had come up from the canyon below, and he surely wasn't going back down. The last set of tracks showed the hind feet dug in a mite, and it looked as if the cat had taken a jump. Then I saw a rock where he might have landed.
From where I stood the rock's face was sheer, but the edge, about six feet above my head, was broken, and the cracks were filled with talus.
I realized I couldn't, even by jumping, reach the edge, but when I climbed up on a small rock I could see scratches on the big one I wanted to reach, and there were so many scratches that it looked as if that cat had used this trail a good many times.
Hunting for foot-holds, I found a couple and managed to scramble onto the big rock. There was a crack in the rock that led to the rim in a steep slide, filled with broken rock. In a few minutes I was up on top of the mesa, which stretched away for miles. Here there was thin grass, a few clumps of prickly pear, and the cat tracks, fading away to the northwest.
From where I now stood I could not see the hollow, but only the further rim of the canyon and some of the bottom. There were no Apaches in view, and it was likely none of them could see me.
I went back down into the crack and studied it. It would be a steep scramble, but I'd taken horses up worse places. If I could just get them over that first rock ...
As I was easing down bit by bit so as to keep out of sight of the Apaches, I heard a rifle shot from below. That worried me none at all. No Apache was going to climb up that slope with a rifle up there, no Apache was fool enough to try.
Chances were some Indian showed himself to test us out and Spanish or Battles let him have one to know we weren't asleep.
What I needed now was to be able to figure out a way to get the folks out of that hole. And it was surely up to me. Dorset and the children aside, the boys with me had come just because they were my friends and knew I needed some help.
That big rock was the thing. There were cracks in it, but none very deep that I'd noticed, so I worked my way back for a closer look. On one side it was cracked and broken, and I began digging at it, hoping to dig out enough so that a couple of horses might scramble up or be hauled up.
First, I pulled out several chunks of rock that were in the crack, big pieces of fifty or sixty pounds. With a call
