busy guarding Shade.”
“Well, there’s a good reason to pay a visit to the Ten Grand tonight, don’t you think?”
“We’ll see,” Sam said with a shrug.
They were headed south by southwest, following the main trail from Arrowhead to Tucson. The judge would be traveling by buggy, Flagg had told them, so they were on the lookout for such a vehicle as the mountains fell into the distance behind them and they rode through rolling hills dotted with scrub brush and sparsely grassed.
Around mid-morning, they spotted some dust rising in the distance ahead of them. “You reckon that’s him?” Matt asked. “Whoever it is, looks like they’re movin’ along at a good clip.”
“Could be,” Sam replied. He was about to say something else, but then both young men reined sharply to a halt as they heard faint popping sounds.
“Gunshots!” Matt said.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” Sam said. He dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and sent the animal leaping ahead again. Matt was right beside him.
The dust came closer, and so did the gunshots. As Matt and Sam leaned forward in their saddles, they spotted a buggy bouncing and careening along the trail toward them, being drawn by a pair of black horses.
About fifty yards behind the buggy and rapidly closing the gap were four men on horseback. Smoke plumed from the guns in their hands as they fired after the fleeing vehicle.
“That must be the judge!” Sam called over to Matt above the rolling drum of hoofbeats.
“And I’ll bet those are some of Shade’s men after him!” Matt replied.
They shucked their Winchesters as they raced closer. Splitting up, Matt galloped down the left side of the road, Sam the right. As soon as they had swung out far enough so that they could fire past the buggy without any danger of hitting its occupant, they brought the rifles to their shoulders and opened up.
The pursuers tried to peel off from the chase, but they were too late. One man went backward out of his saddle as if punched by a giant hand as a slug from Matt’s rifle slammed into his chest. Another slewed around under the impact of one of Sam’s slugs, but he managed to stay mounted. The other two kept coming, firing frenziedly.
Matt and Sam flashed past the buggy, which hadn’t slowed down. They caught glimpses of the man at the reins, who wore a black suit and hat and had a jutting gray beard.
Then all their attention was on the two men still trying to kill them. Guiding their horses with their knees, they angled toward the middle of the trail again. Bullets whipped past their heads.
One of the gunmen suddenly rose in his stirrups and bent over at the middle, hunched against the burning pain of a bullet in his guts. He fell sideways. His right foot hung in the stirrup, and even after he slammed into the ground, the running horse continued to drag him.
The last of the would-be killers wheeled his horse around and tried to flee, giving up the fight. The turn was too sharp, though, and the horse lost its footing. With a shrill whinny of fright, the horse fell and rolled, and both man and animal disappeared in the cloud of dust that was kicked up by the fall.
Matt and Sam slowed their mounts and approached cautiously. As the dust settled, they saw the horse that had fallen struggle upright. The animal appeared to be a little shaken up but not seriously hurt.
The same couldn’t be said of its former rider, who’d had a couple thousand pounds of horse roll over on him.
“He’s gotta be busted to pieces inside,” Matt said. “We’d better check on the other varmints first.”
“Yeah, one of them got away,” Sam said.
“No, he didn’t.” Matt pointed, and Sam saw that the wounded man had ridden only a couple of hundred yards before finally toppling out of the saddle. He now lay motionless next to the trail while his horse cropped grass nearby.
It didn’t take long to confirm that three of the men were dead. The only one still alive was the unlucky gent whose horse had rolled over on him…and he probably wouldn’t be among the living for very long, Sam saw as he dismounted and knelt beside the man.
Crimson worms of blood had crawled from the man’s nose and mouth, and the grotesque, misshapen look of his body testified to how many bones were broken. His internal organs were probably crushed, too.
But somehow he managed to open his eyes, gaze imploringly up at Sam, and gasp, “H-help me!”
“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do for you,” Sam said.
“I…I’m dyin’!”
“More than likely,” Matt said from horseback. “But if you want to blame somebody, blame the son of a bitch who got you into this mess—Joshua Shade.”
The injured man blinked. “Sh-Shade?” he husked.
Sam frowned and leaned forward. “Aren’t you part of Shade’s gang? Weren’t you trying to stop the judge from reaching Arrowhead?”
“Didn’t know he was…a judge…and I heard of Shade…but never met him. My pards and I…we thought the old fella looked like…like he might have money…we figured to rob him…”
Sam’s frown deepened as he studied the dying man’s face. This hombre wasn’t much more than twenty years old, if that. The other three had been young, too. And the ragged trail clothes they wore made them look more like down-on-their-luck cowboys than hardened desperadoes.
“Matt, I don’t think they’re part of Shade’s bunch,” Sam said as he glanced up at his blood brother. “This was just a holdup we came along and interrupted.”
The young man struggled to say, “We never meant to…hurt anybody…just tryin’ to…scare the old man and
