It was going to be a cold night, but these were piney woods and the Texans had made comfortable beds by spreading their bedrolls on pine boughs. Brubaker tossed some blankets into the back of the wagon that the prisoners could use for warmth.
The deputy sat on a log near the fire as it burned down, and Bo and Scratch rolled up in their blankets and dropped right off to sleep with the innate ability of frontiersmen to grab some shut-eye whenever they had a chance. After a few hours Brubaker would wake up one of them to take his place.
Bo didn’t know how much time had passed when an unearthly shriek jolted him out of his slumber. He sat up sharply with his gun in his hand, unaware that he had even drawn it from the holster and coiled shell belt beside him.
A few yards away, Scratch was awake and sitting up, too, both hands filled with his Remingtons.
“Take it easy, you two,” Brubaker said from the log where he sat. The fire was just embers now, but their faint orange glow was enough for the Texans to see him. “That was just a big cat prowlin’ around somewhere.”
“Got panthers in these parts, do you?” Scratch asked.
“That’s right. He’s probably hungry. This time of year, the huntin’s not too good. A lot of the smaller animals are denned up for the winter.”
“Well, as long as he don’t try to feast on us ...” Scratch said. He slid one of the long-barreled Remingtons back into its holster, then the other.
Bo still sat there holding his Colt. He frowned as he looked toward the area where the horses were picketed. Something was wrong, and after a second he figured out what it was.
When another panther screech ripped through the night, he was even more convinced. The sounds came from the north, and so did the wind.
That meant the scent of the panthers should have been carrying to the horses, and there was nothing like the smell of big cat to spook a bunch of horses.
The team and the saddle mounts all stood quietly with their heads down, though.
“That’s not a panther,” Bo said quietly. “Those are signals, and I reckon they mean somebody’s in position.”
“Son of a—” Brubaker burst out. “You’re right! Everybody take—”
Before he could finish the order, shots blasted out of the darkness and tongues of orange muzzle flame ripped through the curtain of shadows.
CHAPTER 11
The walls that enclosed the back of the wagon were thick enough to stop a bullet, so the prisoners probably were safe in there. The narrow ventilation openings were set high in the walls so that even if a stray slug went through one of them, it wasn’t likely to hit Cara, Lowe, or Elam.
Bo, Scratch, and Brubaker were in much more danger because they were out in the open. Brubaker flung himself from the log in a dive that carried him close to the wagon. He scrambled underneath so that the wheels would give him some cover.
The Texans were on the other side of the fire from the wagon, so they couldn’t find protection there. Their only chance was to get into the trees.
Bo rolled out of his blankets, came up on one knee, and triggered three fast shots at the muzzle flashes. Then he leaped to his feet and dashed into the pines. Bullets thudded into tree trunks and whipped through the branches around him.
Scratch’s twin Remingtons boomed as he retreated into the trees as well. Brubaker’s Winchester cracked from underneath the wagon. The bushwhackers continued firing, too, and for several moments the racket was deafening as shot after shot blasted out from several different directions. Muzzle flashes tore holes in the darkness and lit up the night with their eerie, flickering glow, like bolts of hellish lightning.
Bo pressed his back to the trunk of a pine and thumbed fresh cartridges into his Colt’s cylinder, filling all six chambers. He knew that Brubaker was in a bad place. The wagon wheels didn’t provide enough cover to keep the deputy safe for very long. At any moment a lucky shot from the bushwhackers might zip between the spokes and find him.
“Scratch!” Bo called. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” the reply came from the silver-haired Texan. “You all right, Bo?”
“So far,” Bo said. “We need to circle. You go right, I’ll go left.”
“Keno!”
The shadows under the trees were thick. Bo slid to his left. With the uproar of all the shooting going on, stealth wasn’t as important as it might have been otherwise, but he tried not to make a lot of noise anyway. No point in giving away his position if he didn’t have to.
As far as he could tell, the bushwhackers were all to the north of the camp. From the sound of the shots and the muzzle flashes he had seen, he estimated there were at least five of them. If he and Scratch could flank the attackers and take them by surprise, the two Texans had a chance to fight off this terrifying assault.
If they couldn’t ... Well, he wasn’t going to think too much about that, Bo told himself.
Moving by feel as much as anything else, he made his way through the trees. Brubaker kept shooting, and so did the bushwhackers. Shouted curses came from the prisoners inside the wagon. They could keep that up as far as Bo was concerned. The commotion helped cover up any sounds that he made.
His hand tightened on the butt of his Colt when he judged that he was getting close to the area where the riflemen were hidden. He peered through the shadows, spotted a muzzle flash, and worked his way closer to it. The next time the rifle cracked, the sudden spurt of flame from its barrel was bright enough to reveal a man crouched behind a big, fallen pine tree.
Bo drew a bead and could have gunned the man then and there, but he held off on the trigger. If the attackers were Gentry’s men, as seemed likely, they were wanted, too. If they could be taken alive, Bo, Scratch, and Brubaker could deliver them to Judge Southwick in Tyler along with Cara, Lowe, and Elam.
Dropping to hands and knees, Bo crawled closer until he was only a few feet away from the rifleman, who had paused in his attack to reload. The man seemed completely unaware of Bo’s presence.
Bo waited until the bushwhacker thrust the barrel of his rifle over the log again, then struck with swift, brutal force. He reversed the Colt and brought the butt down on the man’s head. The smashing impact was enough to make the man drop his rifle and slump forward over the deadfall.
Bo hit him again, just to make sure he was out cold, then tossed the man’s rifle away into the brush. The bushwhacker wore a holstered revolver, too, Bo discovered as he ran a hand over the man’s body. He took that gun and threw it into the brush as well after emptying the bullets from it.
Bo ripped strips from the unconscious man’s shirt and used them to tie his hands and feet. That was the best he could do for now. He started stalking the next bushwhacker, sparing a thought for Scratch and a hope that his old friend was all right.
Scratch had understood what Bo meant by circling. They had done things like this many times in the past, splitting up so they could come at the enemy from two different directions. He just hoped they could deal with those bushwhackers before one of them ventilated Brubaker. The deputy had done the only thing he could when the shooting started, but now he was pinned down in a precarious position.
Scratch had holstered his left-hand Remington after reloading it. His right hand still clutched the ivory handle of the other revolver.
As he slipped through the shadows, he remembered a night more than four decades earlier when he and some other young Texicans had snuck into a camp of Santa Anna’s scouts while the vast Mexican army wasn’t far off. They were after supplies that night, since Sam Houston’s forces were half-starved by that point, and it would have been fine with Scratch if they could have gotten into the Mexican camp and back out again without being discovered.
