another of the rugged canyons. The thin layer of snow on the ground was enough to muffle their horses’ hoofbeats, and Bo was thankful for that. If he was right about the hideout being up here, he didn’t want to ride right into the place without any warning, and he sure didn’t want the Devils to know they were coming.
The gray light in the sky was almost gone when they reached the head of the canyon without finding any sign of the outlaws. Bo was about to say that they would stop and look for a place to camp when he suddenly stiffened in the saddle. A faint, familiar scent had drifted to his nostrils.
“Scratch, do you smell that?”
The silver-haired Texan sniffed the air and nodded. “Wood smoke,” Scratch said. “Somebody’s got a fire goin’.”
“In weather like this, they’d have to. Let’s see if we can follow the smell.”
They set out across the rugged terrain, and after several hundred yards they came to another canyon that stretched across the landscape like a black, hungry mouth. Bo and Scratch reined in and dismounted.
They tied their reins to a scrubby tree and stole ahead on foot, carrying their rifles. When they came to the edge of the canyon, they knelt in the snow and looked over the edge of the rimrock. The smell of smoke was stronger now. Bo saw a faint glow off to his right and silently pointed it out to Scratch.
“That’s lamplight comin’ through the cracks around a shutter,” Scratch breathed in Bo’s ear. “The varmints got themselves a cabin down there!”
“Probably an old prospector’s cabin that was abandoned,” Bo said. “Like the one where Chloride was staying.”
“Maybe we ought to burn it down around ’em, like they tried to do to us!”
After all the death and havoc the Devils had wreaked, it was a tempting suggestion, but that would be cold- blooded murder, and besides, they didn’t know for certain that their enemies were in there, Bo thought.
“We’d better make sure it’s them,” he said. “Let’s see if we can find a way down there.”
He suspected there was a trail of some sort leading down into the canyon, since the gang had approached the place from this direction. The Texans cat-footed along the rim in the gathering gloom. They came to a pair of boulders spaced apart like a marker, and sure enough, Bo made out the faint beginnings of a trail between the big rocks. The trail turned into a ledge that zigzagged down the canyon wall.
Bo and Scratch were about to start along the ledge when they heard a voice and stopped short. Somewhere nearby, a man was cursing monotonously. His ire was directed at the fact that he was stuck up here in such miserable weather. When no one replied to him, Bo figured out that the man was talking to himself.
The Devils had posted a guard on this back door into their headquarters. That didn’t come as a surprise. It was a sensible precaution. Quickly, Bo motioned to Scratch, explaining in gestures what he was going to do. Scratch nodded his understanding.
Bo started down the ledge, which was just wide enough for one man on horseback. He would have to be careful. There was literally no room for error. In a struggle, it would be easy to fall off the ledge and plummet the thirty or forty feet to the floor of the canyon.
Bo spotted a little cleft in the rock up ahead to his left. That was where the muttered curses came from. He took a deep breath and walked right past it.
The muttering stopped abruptly. The guard stepped out behind Bo, rammed a rifle barrel into his back, and said, “Hey! Where the hell do you think—”
That was as far as he got before Scratch came up behind him and slammed a rifle butt into the back of his head. At the same time, Bo whirled and grabbed the barrel of the guard’s rifle, wrenching it up so that if the outlaw managed to pull the trigger, the bullet wouldn’t tear through him.
Scratch had struck too swiftly and efficiently for that to happen. The guard folded up without ever knowing what hit him. Bo’s other hand shot out and grabbed the man’s coat to keep him from toppling off the ledge. Scratch got the unconscious man under the arms and dragged him back up to the rimrock.
Once they got there, Bo checked the sentry for a heartbeat but didn’t find one. “I hope he was one of the Devils,” he told Scratch, “because he’s dead.”
“Reckon I hit him a little too hard and busted his skull,” Scratch said without sounding particularly worried about it.
“He stuck a gun in my back, so there’s a good chance he was one of the hombres we’re after. We’ll leave him here and get on down there, maybe see if we can find out what they’re planning.”
They could see the cabin now, squatting on the canyon floor at the base of the wall like some malignant toad. Built on to the side of it were a shed and a corral for the horses. Bo’s plan was to sneak up on the place and try to spy a glance through one of the crudely shuttered windows, maybe eavesdrop on what the outlaws were saying.
They were only about halfway down the ledge, though, almost directly above the ramshackle structure, when the cabin door suddenly opened, spilling light out onto the snowy ground. More than a dozen men in heavy coats and pulled-down hats walked out carrying rifles. There were more of them than Bo expected. Maybe all the gang hadn’t taken part in the ambush at the other canyon.
One man lingered in the doorway, and the last of the others paused to talk to him while the rest went to the corral to saddle their horses. Bo and Scratch flattened out on the ledge so they wouldn’t be as likely to be seen and listened to the conversation taking place in front of the cabin below them.
“When Lowell comes down from guard duty in the morning, you and him start packin’ up all that gold. I want it ready to go when the boys and me get back from Deadwood.”
The voice was familiar. Bo had heard it that night in Chloride’s cabin, when it gave the order to light the coal oil. Chloride had been convinced this man was the leader of the Deadwood Devils, the one who had carved pitchforks into the foreheads of the dead guards on the wrecked Argosy gold wagon.
The man standing in the doorway said, “Sure, Tom, I understand.”
