Meg interrupted him. “Frank, there’s another one!”
Frank’s head jerked up. Meg was right. A second rifleman had appeared on the rimrock. Frank knew that the men with the Gatling gun must have sent them up there to see what the situation was inside the canyon and ambush anyone who was still alive.
Frank reacted instantly, lifting his rifle to draw a bead on the bushwhacker, but he knew he was going to be too late.
The whipcrack of a shot split the air, but it didn’t come from the man on the rimrock. Instead, a bullet hit him from behind and drove him forward. Frank could tell that much by the way the man arched his back and threw his arms in the air. The rifle flew from his hands, unfired.
This man fell into the canyon, too, but he didn’t scream on the way down. He plummeted in silence, a grim silence that told Frank the man was probably dead already.
A figure appeared on the rimrock holding a rifle. Frank was about to snap a shot at him when the man lifted the Winchester over his head one-handed and waved it back and forth in a signal of some sort. With the way the light was, Frank couldn’t tell much about the man. He was mostly just a silhouette.
But he disappeared without firing again, fading back out of sight.
“What in Hades just happened?” Salty asked.
“I’m not sure,” Frank said, “but I think we’ve got a friend up there.”
“A friend? You just said we didn’t know nobody in Canada except Palmer, and he dang sure ain’t our friend!”
“Anybody who wants to keep those rascals from killing us is a pard as far as I’m concerned,” Frank said drily.
“Huh. Well, I can’t argue with that, I reckon.”
The Gatling gun started its fearsome pounding again, but after a moment, Frank heard a rifle bark and the rapid-firer stopped short.
Frank lifted his head. The rifle shot had come from somewhere up on the ridge, to the left of the canyon mouth.
“He’s up there somewhere,” Frank said. “He can see the Gatling gun, and he plugged the man turning the crank.”
“They’ll try to roust him out in a minute,” Salty predicted.
Frank’s grip on the Winchester tightened. “More than likely. When they do, I’m going to get up on the other rimrock.”
He nodded toward the right side of the canyon. The wall was steep, but a man could climb it if he was careful.
“Frank, you can’t do that,” Meg protested. “If they start shooting in here again while you’re halfway up there, you won’t have a chance!”
“I’ll have to move fast,” he said. “Anyway, once you’ve got one of those Gatlings set up, you can’t change the aim as quick as you can with a rifle or a handgun. You have to pick up the back of the carriage and turn the whole thing.”
The rifleman on the rimrock fired again; then two more shots cracked out from him.
“They’re probably trying to get the gun adjusted now, and he’s trying to pick them off while they’re doing it,” Frank said. He surged to his feet. “I’m going.”
Meg called after him to be careful as he ran toward the right side of the canyon. It took only a moment to reach the steep wall. He took his belt off and ran it through the rifle’s lever to make a crude sling that went around his neck.
Reaching up, he grabbed a projecting rock, found a toehold, and began to climb.
With every passing moment, he was aware that the Gatling gun could start up again at any time. If that storm of lead filled the canyon once more, the odds were that some of the screaming, ricocheting bullets would find him, would rake him off the canyon wall like a bug.
He didn’t let himself think about that. And when the hellish hammering of the Gatling gun filled the air again, he kept climbing, pausing only long enough to glance over his shoulder and catch a glimpse of the slugs throwing up dust and grit as they smashed into the rimrock on the other side of the canyon.
Just as Frank had expected, the attackers had swung the weapon’s revolving barrels toward their mysterious benefactor. In the face of that onslaught, the rifleman would have to withdraw if he could.
That gave Frank time to reach the top, though. He pulled himself up the last few feet and rolled over the edge into the boulders that littered the top of the ridge.
From there he could look across the narrow canyon and see that the other side was just as rocky. He caught a glimpse of a figure huddled in the lee of a rock slab that protected him from the hail of lead. A ricochet might still find the man, but he was relatively safe where he was.
Frank could see Salty and Meg from where he was, too. Meg was tying a bandana around Salty’s wounded arm as a crude bandage. The old-timer gestured up toward Frank with his other arm. Meg turned her head to look, and Frank gave them a wave and a grin to let them know he was all right.
Then he crawled forward, searching for a spot where he could look out into the valley and maybe get a shot at the murderous bastards manning the Gatling gun.
A few moments later, he spotted the rapid-firer. It was set up at the edge of a clump of trees. Flame licked from its muzzle as each of the revolving barrels lined up with it in turn and fired its cartridge. Frank pulled his rifle up where he could use it and tried to draw a bead on the man turning the gun’s crank. The wheels of the carriage and the body of the weapon itself gave him some cover … but there weren’t many better shots on the frontier than Frank Morgan. He lined his sights on an exposed shoulder and squeezed the Winchester’s trigger.
