shelf.
Dragging huge gulps of air into his lungs, Gabe Tanis fell beside Ike, who was cursing savagely.
“Goddamn it, I told you, Ike—”
But Ike wheeled on him and Gabe fell back before his rage. “I heard what you told me! I don't want to hear it again!”
Gabe Tanis' anger leaked out of him like air escaping from a punctured balloon. Ike stood in an animal-like crouch, holding his Winchester like a club, and Gabe threw up his arm as though to ward off a blow.
Perhaps the blow would have come. Perhaps, in his rage, Ike would have killed him if the second outcry of pain hadn't come between him and his anger. Ike suddenly straightened and said, “Who got hurt?”
“I don't know,” Gabe said nervously.
Ike shot him a withering glance and then crawled back to the lip of the shelf. He swore again, savagely, when he saw what those last forty yards had cost him. Herb Fowler, a leather-tough old-timer, crouched in the blackjack thicket some twenty yards away, clutching at his chest with both hands. As Ike watched, the old man let go and began to fall by slow degrees until at last he lay on his back, arms outstretched, motionless.
Ike wheeled, turning his anger on the hilltop. Not that he gave a damn about Fowler, but his death made the gang one man weaker than it had been before. That marshal! Ike thought darkly. That goddamn marshal! And for the first time the gang leader began to take a personal interest in Owen Toller.
Five men had started up that slope and only two had reached the shelf. Ike raked the base of the hill with angry eyes, but the two remaining men were not to be seen.
“What happened to Ross Kale and Sam Russell?” he demanded of Gabe Tanis. Then, without waiting for an answer, Ike leaped up and plunged down the slope again. He hit the ground with his chest and rolled end over end, clutching at his Winchester, as a shotgun blast tore away his footing. He did not know that he was hurt until he stopped rolling, and then he saw the bright crimson spreading over his trousers a few inches above his right knee. He crawled into the thicket.
Quickly he ripped his shirt sleeve with his teeth, tore it off at the shoulder, and bound his thigh. “Ross!” he yelled. “Sam! Where are you?”
There was no answer. The carbine spoke again from the hilltop and the slug ripped savagely through the brush. Goddamn it, why didn't the bunch on the other side of the hill start moving? He would kill them, every one of them, with his two bare hands, if they backed out on him now!
By sheer power of will Ike Brunner made himself calm down and think of the problem at hand. If Ross and Sam were dead... But he would not cross that bridge before he reached it. He called out again, and again his only answer came from the marshal's carbine.
He couldn't push his luck much further. He had to get out of this thicket. He calculated the distance from the thicket to the boulder and prayed that the boys on the other side would start moving soon. Then his hard face split with a satisfied grin. Far to his right a cluster of rifle shots mushroomed in the afternoon. Wade Jeffers had got them moving.
He waited until he was sure that Dunc and the marshal had moved over to resist the new advance, then lifted himself in the brush and limped toward the boulder. He was right back where he had started from, with the protecting shelf still forty yards away. But behind the boulder he found his missing men.
Ross Kale was a youngster in his late teens, a tough, straw-haired kid who had joined the gang after the raid at Bellefront. Sam Russell was a gangly, chinless farmer in his late thirties. At first Ike thought they were both dead. They crouched behind the boulder, their arms over their heads.
For a moment Ike did nothing. A red haze of rage clouded his vision.
He stepped up to Russell and kicked him savagely with his good leg, and the farmer fell back on his side, his eyes and mouth flying open as his breath left him. “Get up, goddamn you!” Ike said harshly. He hobbled over to Ross Kale and with a short, vicious swing of the Winchester clubbed the side of the kid's face with the walnut stock.
Ike turned to Russell. “I said get up!” he snarled.
But the gangly farmer was paralyzed with fear. He worked his loose mouth but only gibberish came out. “I can't! I just can't, Ike! Herb Fowler, he was standin' right beside me! We'll all be killed!”
Without another word Ike leveled his Winchester at the farmer's head and pulled the trigger. Russell was instantly dead, with most of his skull shot away, but he flopped and quivered for several seconds, and Ike watched without a flicker of emotion. At last he turned on Ross Kale.
“How about you, kid? You want to stay behind this boulder with Sam?”
The boy swallowed hard, his eyes popping. “Ike, for God's sake!”
“You want to go to the top of the hill with the rest of us?”
“Yes! Yes, anything you say!”
“Then get on your feet and act like a man!”
The numbness in Ike's leg was beginning to fade, and the pain put a new sharp edge to his anger. He grabbed the boy, jerked him to his feet, and shoved him into the open. “Up there where Gabe Tanis is! And don't stop.”
Ross Kale didn't stop. Ahead of Brunner, with Ike's Winchester at his back, the kid clawed blindly up the rocky grade to the shelf. Gabe Tanis was waiting near the ledge to pull them up.
“Where's Sam Russell?”
“Dead,” Ike said bluntly, “along with Herb Fowler.”
If Gabe had heard the shot from Ike's rifle, he did not mention it. “I think somebody got the Reunion marshal,” he said. “I haven't heard anything from the carbine since you reached the boulder.”
