He urged his horse up the snowy slope, resting the butt of his ten-gauge shotgun on his right knee. If anyone showed up in front of him, he'd cut them to shreds with his Greener shotgun and take off for Texas with the money.
Two hundred yards higher up the incline, a voice from the forest stopped him cold.
'Hold it right there, pardner. Drop that damn goose gun or you're a dead man!'
Cletus thumbed back both hammers, aimed, and fired in the direction of the voice. One barrel bellowed, spitting out its deadly load of flame and buckshot. His horse shied and almost lunged out from under him, until he finally got the animal under control.
'That was a mistake, pardner,' the same voice said.
Half a second later, a rifle barked from the pines east of him, he saw the yellow muzzle flash just as something popped in his right hip, sending tiny tufts of lint from the hem of his coat flying into the air.
'Shit!' Cletus cried, flung from his saddle by the force of impact from a ball of lead.
He landed on his side in the snow, wincing, and his fall caused the second barrel of his shotgun to go off harmlessly toward the treetops.
His horse galloped away trailing its reins, and Cletus understood the danger he was in almost at once. He was wounded, lying in a small clearing, with a gunman taking good aim at him from a spot Cletus couldn't see clearly.
'Bushwhackin' bastard,' he croaked, beginning a slow crawl toward a ponderosa trunk with blood running down his pants leg to his right boot.
The rifle thundered again, its slug missing him by mere inches, plowing up a furrow in the snow behind his head before he could make the tree.
Cletus made the ponderosa and looked down at his leg. He was bleeding badly.
Taking stock of his situation, he quickly realized how desperate his circumstances were. He was wounded in the hip, without a horse, trapped in a cluster of pines.
'How the hell could I have missed seein' the bastard,' he asked himself. Years of manhunting had given him good instincts for this sort of thing.
He knew he had to stop the bleeding from his wound. He took a faded blue bandanna from around his neck and gingerly tied it around the top of his thigh.
'I've gotta move ... he knows where I am.'
Painfully, yet carefully, Cletus began to crawl between the tree trunks, hoping he could find his horse. As he inched across the snow, he reloaded his shotgun.
* * * *
Buck heard the twin shotgun blasts and the rifle shot, and he jumped off his horse in a clump of small blue spruce trees not far from the spot.
'Morgan found him,' he whispered, leaving his pinto ground-hitched.
He crept forward with his buffalo gun cocked and ready, unable to see who Morgan was shooting at.
Then he saw a loose horse trotting back toward the valley floor, a saddle on its back.
'Morgan got him,' Buck told himself.
Looking uphill, he sought the place where the man in the derby hat had gone down. Whoever he was, he'd been knocked off his horse, but that was a long way from a sure sign that the man was dead.
And there was another thing to consider ... making sure he didn't mistake Morgan for the enemy.
Buck continued up the slope at a slow pace, pausing behind every tree to look and listen. He knew this country well, and he knew how easily a man could be fooled by what he thought he saw in front of him.
* * * *
Frank was blinded by tears by the time he made it out of the saddle. He tied off his bay, cradling his rifle in the crook of his good arm. The man he was after had gone down little more than a hundred yards away.
He sleeved tears of pain from his eyes.
'Time to be real careful,' he told himself, beginning a slow walk downhill, a bit of carelessness he allowed himself due to his injury, and the need for haste to get to Conrad before Pine and Vanbergen killed him.
A pistol shot roared from his left and he made a dive for his belly, tasting snow, feeling the shock of his fall all the way up to his sore shoulder.
Bitter bile rose in his throat. 'You missed me, you son of a bitch!' he cried, knowing how foolish it was to give his present position away.
His answer was another gunshot, coming from more than a hundred yards away.
'You're a damn fool, whoever you are!' Frank bellowed, making sure he had some cover behind the trunk of a thick pine tree.
' You're the damn fool, Morgan!' a distant voice shouted back at him.
Frank didn't recognize the voice. 'Who the hell are you, asshole?'
'What difference do names make? Where's all that goddamn money you're supposed to be bringin' to get that snivelin' kid of yours back?'
'I've got it right here. Come and get it!'
