“Can you run?” he asked.
By way of answer, Matt lurched toward the arroyo.
Sam ran alongside him, still leading the horse. Matt’s mount had bolted off somewhere. They could find the horse later—if they were still alive.
Sam’s horse let out a shrill cry and leaped ahead, pulling loose from Sam’s grip on the reins. As the horse galloped down the arroyo’s bank, Sam spotted the bloody streak on its rump where a bullet had creased it.
He’d been using the horse as makeshift cover. Now he and Matt were left out completely in the open. Sam slipped his arm around Matt’s waist and half-carried, half-dragged him toward the shelter of the arroyo.
Sam felt a bullet tug at his buckskin shirt as he and Matt reached the bank and tumbled over it. The slope wasn’t too steep, about a forty-five-degree angle.
When they reached the bottom, Sam lifted his head and looked to make sure the bank cut them off from the view of the riflemen on the bluff. He couldn’t see the bluff at all anymore, so that meant they were out of the line of fire.
Sam turned to Matt and asked, “How bad are you hit?”
Matt’s face was pale under the permanent tan. He had his hand pressed to his right side. A dark stain had spread beyond it on his shirt.
“Think the slug caught me at an angle ... and went on through without penetrating too deep,” he answered in a voice taut with pain. “I’m bleedin’ like a stuck pig, though.”
The booming of the rifles on the bluff had stopped. The men hidden up there must have realized they’d just be wasting bullets if they kept shooting. They couldn’t hit Matt or Sam from where they were.
Sam pulled up Matt’s shirt and saw the two puckered, bloody holes in his friend’s torso. The smaller hole was in Matt’s side, the slightly larger one that marked an exit wound on Matt’s back only a few inches away and a little lower.
Matt was right about the bullet going all the way through. The angle of its flight had been shallow enough that Sam hoped the slug had missed any vital organs.
Even if that were true, the bullet had still done plenty of damage. And Matt could easily bleed to death if Sam didn’t get those crimson streams stopped—soon.
Up on the bluff, Zack Jardine cursed bitterly again as over the barrel of his rifle he saw the two strangers disappear. From this height, Jardine could see the dark line of the arroyo zigzagging its way across the ground, and knew they had taken cover in it.
Jardine lowered his rifle.
“Get down there,” he told Braverman and Hilliard. “We’re gonna have to go after those two.”
“One of ’em’s hit bad, Zack,” Braverman said as he straightened from behind the rocks where he had been crouched. “Did you see the way he fell? He’s bound to be dyin’.”
Braverman was a short, quick man with red hair who never tanned in the desert sun, just blistered. He looked harmless, but Jardine had seen him kill more than one man in cold blood without batting an eye.
Hilliard was bulkier, with a drooping mustache and what seemed like a permanent week’s worth of beard stubble. “Those fellas ain’t worth gettin’ killed over, Zack,” he rumbled.
“Well, then, you shouldn’t have opened fire on them in the first place!” Jardine’s words lashed at the two men. “Why the hell didn’t you just let them ride on past? They probably didn’t even notice us over here.”
A number of boulders littered the ground along the base of the bluff, huge chunks of sandstone that had broken off and rolled down the slope in ages past.
The wagon and the horses were down there among those big rocks, easy to miss if somebody wasn’t looking for them. That was the main reason Jardine had picked this isolated place to deliver the rifles.
“They was actin’ funny, Zack,” Braverman said. “Lookin’ this way and all. I think one of ’em pointed. I was watchin’ ’em through my spyglass.”
Jardine’s jaw clenched in frustration. It was all he could do not to walk over there and stove in Braverman’s stupid skull with the butt of his rifle.
It wouldn’t do any good, he told himself. Braverman was too dumb to realize that a reflection off the lens of the telescope was probably what had alerted the two strangers that somebody was over here.
“Come on,” he ordered as he started down the trail.
Braverman and Hilliard fell in behind him, thumbing fresh cartridges into their rifles as they followed their boss.
When Jardine reached the parked vehicle, he snapped at the other men, “Put that crate back in the wagon with the others.”
“But we haven’t got the money yet, Zack,” Dave Snyder protested.
“And we’re not going to today. We’re calling off the swap.” The men didn’t look happy about that, so Jardine went on, “Don’t worry, we’ll get our payoff, and it’ll be just the first of many. But I don’t like the way this is playing out, so we’ll set up another meeting.”
The other men exchanged glances. They knew that Zack Jardine was something of a superstitious man by nature. If a deal didn’t
So there was no point arguing with him. Anyway, arguing with Jardine was dangerous, and they knew it. They were a hard-bitten bunch, but Jardine was the worst of the lot.
He knew that, too.
