He was big and dressed like an American cowboy, with a black hat and denim trousers and jacket. He had bushy white side whiskers, and his face looked as if it had been carved out of a particularly rugged piece of sandstone.
Nor was he alone. Several other men clustered around the camp, and Joseph felt a sudden surge of fear for his sister. He jerked his head from side to side, looking for her as he exclaimed, “Charlotte!”
She cried out briefly, and a voice that was vaguely familiar to Joseph said, “Take it easy, Joe. Your sis is fine. Nobody’s going to hurt her.”
In the weak light, Joseph saw a man in a derby hat holding Charlotte’s arm. The man’s other arm was around her waist, pinning her to him. To his surprise, Joseph recognized the man holding Charlotte as Joe Palmer, the American who had been spying on their camp two nights earlier.
“I should have known you were with them,” Joseph said bitterly to Palmer. “You didn’t just stumble over us.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Palmer insisted. “It was just a coincidence, sure as shooting.” He grinned. “The woods are full of ‘em these days, seems like.”
The white-haired, craggy-faced man said, “He’s right. Stand up, boy. We got business to conduct.” He added, “Keep your hands away from your guns, though.”
Joseph obeyed the order, climbing stiffly to his feet and scowling at the strangers as he did so. He could see now that there were seven or eight of them, and they were all hard-faced, roughly dressed men who held their guns with an air of long and frequent use.
He and Charlotte were a pair of sheep in the company of ravenous wolves, Joseph thought.
But they had one advantage over sheep. They were the key to something these wolves wanted.
Gold.
“Let go of my sister,” he said to Palmer in a cold voice.
“I’m not hurting her,” Palmer insisted. “I just grabbed hold of her to keep her from running around and getting in trouble.”
The white-haired man made a curt gesture to Palmer. “Let her go.”
Clearly, Palmer didn’t like the order, but he followed it. He took his hands off of Charlotte and stepped away from her.
“Hope I didn’t offend you, Miss Marat,” he said as he reached up and touched the brim of his derby.
She looked away from him pointedly and didn’t acknowledge what he’d said.
The white-haired man faced Joseph and said, “Palmer tells me your name is Marat.”
“Joseph Marat. This is my sister Charlotte.”
“I’m pleased to make your acquaintance,” the man said with an attempt at gruff courtesy. Just then he seemed to realize that he was still holding his revolver. He slid the heavy, blued-steel gun back into its holster. “My name’s Lundy. Owen Lundy.”
“You are the one we came here to these mountains to meet?” Joseph asked. “We were not given any names.”
“We’re the fellas you came to meet, all right. We’ve got what you want.”
Joseph looked around. “I see no pack animals.”
A humorless grin etched even more lines into Lundy’s face. “You don’t reckon we’d bring the guns with us to the rendezvous, do you? That’s not the way we do business, Marat. Where’s the gold?”
Joseph was scared, but he forced himself to look and sound calm and cool-headed as he said, “That is not the way
Lundy’s features darkened with anger. He took a step closer to Joseph and snapped, “You didn’t bring the gold?”
Joseph steeled himself not to retreat in the face of the American outlaw’s wrath. “We can get the gold whenever we need it,” he said. “But not until we have examined the guns and found them to be everything you promised.”
“Oh, they’re everything I promised, all right,” Lundy said savagely. “They’ll spit out more slugs in the blink of an eye than you can count!”
“Show me,” Joseph said.
For a long moment, the two of them stared at each other. Finally, Lundy shrugged and motioned to a couple of his men.
“Bring up the mules.”
They hurried to obey his command. Within minutes, they returned through the thick woods leading several mules with long wooden crates lashed onto them by thick leather straps that ran over the backs of the animals. Other mules had what appeared to be wagon wheels strapped to their flanks.
“Break out one of the guns and set it up,” Lundy ordered.
Joseph watched with rapt attention as the men took down a couple of the crates and pried the lids off of them. From the packing straw inside, they lifted out bundles wrapped in oilcloth. When they folded back the oilcloth on one of the bundles, the gleaming barrels of a Gatling gun came into view. The barrels, arranged in a circle, had an aura of death and destruction about them, Joseph thought … or perhaps he was being too poetic.
“These weapons are mounted on wheeled carriages,” Lundy explained as the men began assembling the component parts of the Gatling gun. “The Army’s been experimenting with making them a little lighter in weight and easier to move around. They’ve taken out the cotton packing from around the barrels that had to be soaked in
