nerve-racking, especially because he could hear the killers moving around only a few yards away.
His feet bumped against something. Carefully, he turned his head and saw that he had reached a cluster of large rocks at the base of the slope forming the northern wall of the gulch. Chloride crawled among the rocks, confident that they would offer him better shelter. He lay there on his belly for a long moment as his heart pounded furiously in his chest. He started breathing again, shallowly so it wouldn’t be too loud.
After a while he lifted his head. He had lost his battered old hat with the turned-up brim when he went flying off the wagon, so he didn’t have to worry about that. He stayed low, edging his head up just enough so he could see part of the trail.
The outlaws were moving the gold from the wrecked wagon. They had busted open the chests and were loading the pokes of gold dust into their saddlebags. The sacks of nuggets were slung onto the backs of a couple of pack animals and lashed in place. Chloride didn’t see the wagon team. The mules must have broken loose from the wagon when it crashed. They were probably still running toward Deadwood.
Those outlaws were crafty varmints, Chloride thought. They had dragged that deadfall up by the trail and then left it there as a distraction for the guards on the wagon, and all the while they were hidden in the trees on the other side of the creek, ready to ambush and hijack the gold shipment.
The old-timer counted eight men, all of them still masked and wearing their hats pulled low. He couldn’t see enough of their faces to have even a hope of recognizing them. They went about their business with swift efficiency, and when they had transferred all the gold to their horses and the pack animals, one of the men reached under the long duster he wore and drew out a knife. Even in the gulch’s gloom, the blade glittered.
The bodies of the three guards had also spilled out of the wagon when it overturned. They sprawled limply on the trail not far from the wrecked vehicle. In the concealment of the rocks, Chloride swallowed hard as he watched the man with the knife go over to Turley’s body. He hooked the toe of his boot under Turley’s shoulder and rolled the corpse onto its back, then knelt beside it. Sunlight flashed on the knife again as the man got to work.
And once again, Chloride closed his eyes tightly. He didn’t have to watch to know what the man was doing. The tip of that razor-sharp blade would slice through Turley’s forehead and cut a vertical line down it. Then, part of the way down that line, two more lines would be carved into Turley’s skin, curving up on either side of the first wound to form a symbol that looked roughly like a pitchfork.
It was the bloody mark of the Deadwood Devils, the calling card of the gang that had descended on the Black Hills. Chloride had seen it before on bodies brought into Deadwood after previous robberies.
When the old-timer forced his eyes open, he saw that the outlaw with the knife had finished his grim work. The bodies of the three dead guards lay on their backs, their eyes pointed sightlessly toward the sky and blood seeping from the grotesque markings on their foreheads.
“What about the driver?” one of the men asked as the one who seemed to be in charge wiped his knife on Mitch Davis’s shirt.
The man straightened and sheathed the weapon. “I told you, he’s probably dead.”
“But he might not be. We ought to take a look.”
Chloride held his breath.
“No,” the boss said. “If he’s alive, we’ll leave him that way.”
“But he’ll head for Deadwood and tell folks what happened.”
“They’ll find out soon enough. There’ll be another wagon or a rider come along this trail before the day’s over, more than likely. And it’s pretty obvious what happened here, don’t you think?”
The man who had wanted to search for Chloride shrugged his shoulders. “If you say so.”
“I do say so,” the boss snapped. “It might be better if the driver
After what he had seen today, Chloride Coleman didn’t doubt it a bit.
CHAPTER 2
“Place has changed quite a bit since the last time we were here,” Scratch Morton said to Bo Creel as the two Texans rode along Deadwood’s Main Street.
“What did you expect?” Bo asked. “The place was just a raw mining camp then. It had only been here a couple of months. It’s a real town now. Not only that, but I remember hearing something about a big fire they had here a year or so ago that burned down some of the buildings. They’ve rebuilt since then. The saloon where Bill Hickok was shot isn’t even there anymore.”
“Well,
Bo shrugged. “Everybody’s got to be somewhere.”
That was especially true of these two wandering sons of the Lone Star State. Best friends for fifty years, Bo and Scratch had met when they were both youngsters, so long ago Texas had still been part of Mexico . . . but not for much longer. That was during the middle of the Runaway Scrape, when Sam Houston’s ragtag army and most of the Texican civilians had been fleeing from the inexorable advance of the dictator Santa Anna’s forces. An even smaller and more ragtag group of volunteers had delayed the Mexicans by luring them into a siege of an old mission near San Antonio de Bexar, but a lot of scared people believed that was just postponing the inevitable.
Of course, it hadn’t turned out that way. Houston’s men, among them the barely-old-enough-to-shave Bo and Scratch, had won a stunning victory at San Jacinto, and Texas had become an independent republic for nine years before joining the Union.
Although they were still friends, Bo and Scratch had gone their separate ways after that monumental battle and might have lived out their lives like that if sickness hadn’t claimed the lives of Bo’s wife and their young children several years later. Heartbroken by the loss, Bo had wanted to be anywhere but Texas, and his friend Scratch, who hadn’t settled down yet, had been glad to go with him.
