Pearlie wouldn’t have to hurt Ben. All he would have to do is point his gun at the driver, reach down into the boot, pick up the strongbox, then jump off the coach.
“No!” he said aloud.
“What?” Ben asked, startled by Pearlie’s unexpected outburst.
“Oh, nothing,” Pearlie replied. “I was just thinking aloud, that’s all.” Thinking thoughts he had no business thinking, Pearlie told himself. There was no way he would ever do anything like that. In fact, there was no way he would have ever done anything like that, even when he was at his wildest.
Still, if he wanted to foil a holdup attempt, it probably didn’t hurt to think like the outlaws. Take this route, for example. He knew that if anyone had a notion to jump the stage, the best place to do it would just ahead of where they were right now, where the canyon walls squeezed in so tight alongside the road that the coach would have to move at a snail’s pace.
Pearlie looked through a gap in the canyon ahead, and as he did so, he saw two men who seemed to have an intense interest in the progress of the coach. It also appeared that they did not want to be seen, as they would peek around the edge of a large boulder, then jerked back quickly, then peek again, repeating the process. The amount of time they were exposed to view was so brief that, to any but the most experienced eye, they would have gone unnoticed.
“Ben, I just saw them,” Pearlie said.
“You sure about that?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because they are watching us and they don’t want to be seen watching us. They are waiting up at the bend.”
“Damn, you are probably right. I’ve been thinkin’ all along that if they was going to hit us, more than likely they would do it here. We’re goin’ to be easy targets when we go through the pass.”
“Or
“What do you mean?”
Pearlie reached down into the boot for the rifle. “I’m goin’ to hop down here,” he said. “You go on through as if you don’t suspect a thing. I plan to cut across the top here while you keep goin’. Slow down just a little bit to give me time to get into position. If I’m lucky, they’ll be so busy keepin’ an eye out for the stage that they won’t see me comin’.”
“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea,” Ben said.
“I’ll climb up on that rock just ahead,” Pearlie offered.
“You keep your head down, young feller,” Ben said with genuine concern.
“Don’t worry, I will. And if everything goes all right, I’ll see you on the other side.”
“Right,” Ben answered.
Pearlie climbed up onto the top of the stage. Then as they passed particularly close to the canyon wall, he stepped off the stage onto a rock. From the rock, he climbed on up to the top, then crouched low as he ran across the top of the canyon wall. A moment later, he saw the two men exactly where he thought they would be. Both had their guns drawn, and both were looking toward the opening in the canyon where the stagecoach would appear.
“You two boys mind tellin’ me what you’re doin’ here?” Pearlie called out to them.
“What the hell? Who are you?” one of them yelled. When the two men turned around, Pearlie recognized one of them as the shotgun guard whose firing had led to Pearlie taking this job.
“Drop your guns, both of you,” Pearlie ordered.
It looked for a moment as if the two men considered shooting it out with Pearlie, but he had a bead on them and they knew that, at the very best, at least one of them would be killed. After a quick glance at each other, they dropped their pistols, then put their hands up.
“Get on down there on the road,” Pearlie ordered, motioning with the rifle.
As the two men climbed down onto the road, Pearlie went down behind them, all the while keeping them covered. In the distance, Pearlie could hear the whistles and shouts as Ben worked his team through the narrow pass and around the curve.
When Ben saw Pearlie standing in the road in front of him, with his rifle covering two men who held their hands in the air, he pulled the coach to a stop.
“I’ll be damn,” Ben said, as he saw the two men. “Dempster, is that you?”
“Hi, Ben,” the former shotgun guard said quietly.
“Pearlie, I reckon you remember Bob Dempster, don’t you?”
“I remember him,” Pearlie answered.
“Dempster, I can’t believe you would have robbed me.”
“I know you was responsible for me a-losin’ my job,” Dempster said. “I was just takin’ what I figure is owed me, that’s all.”
“You’re the one that caused you to lose your job,” Ben said. “You was drunk more times than you wasn’t. I kept warnin’ you. If I’m goin’ to have someone lookin’ after me, they damn well better be sober.”
Ben reached under the seat and threw down two pair of hand shackles. “Get these on ’em, Pearlie, then get ’em up on top of the coach. I’ve had these things for nigh on to five years, and I ain’t never had to use them
