of the horses. He didn’t like the job, but accepted it when Checker quietly explained they needed someone savvy there in case of trouble. Both Checker and Rule knew the man was hurting and unable to use his arm. This would be a good place for him.
Checker expected the Holt riders to come through this part of the road riding easily and unsuspecting. It was a good location for an ambush. The hardest for him was to leave Morgan in a firing site above him and Rule. The gunfighter told him that he had to do it—and to treat her like a man. She would insist on it.
Her shooting location was within a rock cradle above and to the left of where Checker and Rule intended to wait. In her hands was a rifle. A Colt rested in her belt. “Morgan, I…I’m not comfortable with you…being here,” Checker said, feeling awkward. His long black hair rustled along his shoulders.
“You don’t think I’m good enough, brave enough…what?” Her mouth twisted into a half smile. “Or do you want me beside you?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do. Don’t worry about me. This is my ranch. I don’t intend to let that awful Englishwoman have it.” Her face changed into a frown.
He made her promise that she would fire quickly and crawl away. Immediately. Then he suggested she cock the rifle now and ease the hammer back into place until needed. That would keep her gun from making a noise being cocked as the gang rode through.
“My daddy would’ve called this the rattlesnake code. Warn ’em first, he’d say, and then let ’em have it if’n they don’t leave.” She cocked her head.
“That’s about it. Only we’re the ones who are going to leave. Remember that,” Checker said. “If they don’t turn and run, we need to.”
“I understand.” She smiled. “Now I need something from you, John.”
“Anything.”
She gently insisted on a parting kiss, which he was happy to offer.
Reluctantly, he climbed down from her position to the main one where Rule waited.
“Wish it was darker, Rule. The darker, the better,” Checker observed as he joined the gunfighter.
Rule assured him a full moon favored them; the old Medicine Man Moon had told him never to fear Mother Moon’s gentle caring. He never did. Even during the war and the guerrilla fighting afterward.
“Still wish it was darker.”
Rule grinned and reassured him the evening would go well.
As she sat down to wait, Morgan Peale’s mind was wrapped around the man she had just kissed.
“He’s good-looking in a hard sort of way, isn’t he?” she said to herself. “I wonder where he got that arrowhead-shaped scar on his cheek. He almost looks like an Indian, doesn’t he?”
She couldn’t forget the longing in his eyes when they were close. It made her warm all over. Way down under his Ranger ways was a caring man, one who would back up a friend, regardless of the odds. The realization of this gentle core drew her to him as nails were drawn to magnets at the general store.
Her late father—and her late husband—she had understood. And men like them as well. She could almost read their thoughts. They were good men, or tried to be, as they saw goodness. Dependable. Stubborn. Yes, and narrowminded, too. Neither would have understood her hiring London Fiss—or allowed it. The three things they couldn’t stand were liars, cowards and people of a different color. Men like them would fight when pushed hard enough, but only then. From that point, the fight was your own, yours to handle, not asking for, nor expecting, any help. “Stand n’ git ’er dun, boy.” Or die trying. That was her father.
She was glad Checker had insisted on the same kind of warning her father would have done. But the Ranger was different from her father.
Men like John Checker—and Rule Cordell—she didn’t understand. They were a breed of men Texas needed now, or the worst kind of men—and women—would take over. But what kind of life could a woman have with a man like Checker and Rule? She knew the gunfighter was married and had a small family. How had he done it? Why was he here? She already knew the answer, to help his uncle. He was a wild-looking man with his stone earring, long black coat and many handguns. He was what she had expected him to look like. Yet he, too, had a gentle way about him. A caring way.
On her lap lay her rifle, cocked and ready. The hammer had been eased back into place as the Ranger had suggested. She moved her legs to relieve them of stiffness and studied the road below. Her thoughts returned to John Checker. He was a killer of men; a Ranger, but a killer nonetheless. Just like Rule Cordell. She could see Checker’s face with those penetrating eyes.
“We could never have a life together. Never,” she admonished herself.
A man like him was always drawing danger. Such a man could be killed at any time. Eleven Meade had already tried. God knows how many other men with a gun had. The thought of John Checker dying made her wince and shiver. She squeezed her eyes tightly to get that awful picture to go away. Seeing him lying wounded in bed was bad enough. She knew he shouldn’t be up so soon; she knew what the blood on the side of his shirt meant. He had to be weak from losing so much blood. Had to be. That stubbornness was just like her father, she admitted. Just like him.
She could see Checker and Rule below, setting up the barrage of guns below her to add to the appearance of a larger force. It was Rule’s idea. On the other side of the road, lower down, she could make out Emmett and Rikor setting up a similar fake barrage. She wanted to call out to the tall Ranger, to tell him to come and see her again. To hold her and kiss her. That was foolish, she told herself. All of them could be dead when the night was over.
This wasn’t the time; Checker had said that earlier. Still…
A sound behind John Checker! He spun with his cocked rifle in his hands. Standing twenty feet away was a calf. The wobbly animal looked at him and started bawling. From the darkness, the mother cow appeared and nudged her infant away, giving the Ranger a scornful look as she did.
“Well, I think you just got told off.” Rule laughed.
Checker smiled. “You take him on home, mother.”
He returned his attention to the trail. At least they had time to set up Rule’s idea.
He left his Winchester and a box of cartridges on a flattened area where he would return when finished. Rule had already begun work on the fake gun barrage. A lariat, Sharps carbine, shotgun, four pistols and leather strings lay on the hillside where he worked. In this crook of a broken rock slab angling skyward like a giant arrowhead, Rule had wedged the Sharps snugly into place. It had been A. J. Bartlett’s gun. A separate boulder was pushed against the gun butt to keep it from sliding backward when fired. The gun was aimed at a dark ridge guarding the far edge of the open trail.
About ten feet away, he found another rock holster for one of his backup pistols. Checker joined him in the placement of the guns. A few feet away was another small crevice for a Smith & Wesson revolver that had been Bartlett’s and another long-barreled Colt. The Ranger packed both in place with heavy supporting rocks. Rule inserted a fourth handgun a few feet away. These smaller weapons would be the most likely to pop loose when the triggers were pulled from a distance. Both checked the gun arrangement again, adding more rocks.
After a second review of the terrain, they decided the shotgun would fit nicely in the cradle of a small wiry bush, another four feet from the pistols. Tying the weapon with one of the leather strings ensured a steady placement.
Nervous sweat on the foreheads of both men told of battle anticipation more than of hard work. Rule laid out the rope two feet behind the row of guns and more or less in the middle of the row. Holding the loop itself, he tossed the other end uphill toward a half-burned mesquite tree with three wild-looking branches searching for the sky. Each trigger was now tightly knotted with a separate leather thong; his spittle on the knot would shrink the closure farther. The strings in turn were tied to the loop hole in the rope.
Checker told him to stop, as if hearing something in the distance. No. His imagination.
“Nothing. Just my nerves.”
“Yeah. I know the feeling.”
Across the way, Checker saw Emmett and Rikor creating a similar rig with extra guns collected from the group and from the Peale Ranch. There was a second Sharps, Emmett’s, and a shotgun Fiss carried regularly.
Wrapping the rope around the base of the tree would give them the leverage necessary to fire all of the guns
