Things hadn’t worked out that way. One of the other fellas had done something to alert the enemy—after all these years, Scratch couldn’t even remember what it was—and suddenly muskets and flintlock pistols had been roaring and some of the Mexican soldiers lunged at the intruders with their bayonets.
Scratch had barely avoided getting skewered that night. He had grabbed a Mexican officer’s saber and done a little skewering of his own before he and his companions lit a shuck out of there with some bags of beans they had managed to snag. But ever since then, Scratch hadn’t been too fond of creeping around in the dark.
At least in the dead of winter like this, he didn’t have to worry about stepping on a snake. Timber rattlers were plentiful in these Arkansas hills at other times of year.
Scratch crouched lower as muzzle flame bloomed in the darkness only a few yards from him. He was closing in on one of the bushwhackers. He didn’t want to alert the others that they had intruders among them, so he waited until a whole flurry of shots rang out before leveling the Remington and squeezing off two swift shots. As the echoes of the blasts faded, he heard something crash in the brush and hoped that it was his quarry collapsing with some good Texan lead in him.
Scratch figured he would move on to the next bushwhacker he could find, but he had gone only a few feet when somebody exploded out of the shadows and crashed into him, fighting like a wildcat. A fist smashed into Scratch’s jaw. The punch landing so cleanly had to be pure luck. It was too dark under these trees for anybody to see where he was aiming his blows.
But luck or not, the punch packed enough power to stun Scratch for a moment and send him stumbling back into a rough-barked pine trunk.
He didn’t drop his gun. As more blows pounded his body, he slashed out with the Remington and felt it strike something with a glancing blow. That gave his attacker pause and provided a chance for Scratch to hook his left fist out in a blind punch.
His fist sunk in something soft. A man’s sour breath gusted in Scratch’s face. Knowing the man was close to him, he lowered his head and butted hard in front of him. He felt the hot spurt of blood across his forehead as his opponent’s nose flattened under the impact.
Scratch swung the Remington again, and this time the revolver’s barrel landed solidly. A heavy weight sagged against the Texan. Scratch shoved it aside. The man landed with a thump at his feet.
That made two of the varmints accounted for, he thought ... unless this fella who had jumped him was the same one he’d shot a few moments earlier. He couldn’t rule out that possibility. The bushwhacker might have been wounded, but not enough to put him out of the fight.
Scratch ran his fingers along the barrel of his revolver to make sure it hadn’t bent when he walloped the hombre with it. If you were going to hit a man with a gun, it was better to use the butt, but he hadn’t had time to turn the weapon around.
The Remington seemed to be all right. Scratch started working his way through the darkness again. It seemed like there weren’t as many shots coming from the trees now, and he wondered if Bo had already taken care of one or two of the varmints.
Crouched in the darkness, Bo waited for a muzzle flash to pinpoint the location of another rifleman. As slugs zinged through the trees around him, he smiled grimly as he wondered if some of the bullets came from Deputy Marshal Brubaker’s gun. Brubaker didn’t know what he and Scratch were trying to do. As far as he would be able to tell, huddled there underneath the wagon, the Texans might as well have deserted him.
Bo was willing to take his chances. He didn’t have any other choice.
Flame licked from the muzzle of a rifle in some brush about twenty feet to his right. He shifted in that direction.
And then suddenly there was nothing under his feet but empty air. He lost his balance and fell forward, crashing down on a steep slope. Branches clawed at him as he continued rolling, unable to stop his plunge. In some part of his mind, he knew that he had fallen into a gully or a ravine that he had never seen in the darkness. And he had no way of knowing how deep it was ...
CHAPTER 12
He found out a couple of seconds later when he crashed into something solid with such force that it left him stunned, breathless, and unable to move. He was on the bottom of the ravine.
Dirt and pine needles rained down on him from above, pelting his face and causing him to jerk his head to the side even though the rest of his body still wouldn’t respond to him. Bo knew what the little avalanche meant. Somebody was sliding down the other side of the ravine, coming down after him, and he was sure they didn’t mean him any good.
He willed his muscles to move, to send him scrambling away, but they were stubbornly unwilling for several seconds. He finally rolled onto his belly and with an effort pushed himself to his hands and knees.
Before he could start crawling, a great weight landed on his back, knocking the breath out of him again. An arm looped around his neck and jerked tight, cutting off his air as a knee pinned him to the ground.
“Thought I heard somebody fall down in this gulch,” a man’s gravelly voice said. “Thought ye could sneak up on me, did ye? You son of a bitch! I’ll choke the life out o’ ye!”
The man was doing a pretty fair job of it, too. The brawny arm across Bo’s throat threatened to crush his windpipe. The knee in his back bent his spine painfully. His lungs cried out desperately for air.
And he had dropped his gun when he plummeted into the ravine, so he didn’t even have a weapon.
His hands moved over the ground around him in the dark, searching for something, anything. His fingers brushed against a rough surface, lost it for a second, then found it again. He closed his hand on a piece of broken pine branch slightly bigger around than his wrist. He didn’t know how long it was, but when he lifted it, it felt heavy enough to work as a weapon.
A red haze from lack of breath began to settle over his brain. Knowing that he could pass out at any second, Bo struck upward and back with the makeshift club.
The blow landed with enough power to make the would-be killer grunt in pain. The pressure on Bo’s throat lessened but didn’t go away completely. He struck again with the branch.
This time the man’s grip slipped enough that Bo was able to writhe free. He drove an elbow up and back into the man’s midsection, even as he gasped and dragged air into his lungs. Twisting around, he held the club in both hands and swung it as hard as he could.
When the blow landed he heard something crack. At first he didn’t know if it was the pine branch or one of his opponent’s bones. But the howl of pain the man let out told Bo it was probably a bone. Bo swung again but didn’t hit anything this time.
He heard a scrambling sound, and more dirt cascaded down around him. The man was fleeing, climbing up the side of the ravine. That was confirmed when Bo heard him yell in a voice like ten miles of bad road, “Come on, boys! Let’s get outta here!”
A few shots still rang out, but the sounds of battle began to fade quickly. Bo braced himself with a hand against the steeply sloping side of the narrow ravine and heaved to his feet. He didn’t have his gun, so he continued gripping the pine branch in case he was attacked again.
That seemed unlikely, though, he thought as a swift rataplan of hoofbeats drifted through the chilly night air and began to fade. It sounded like the bushwhackers were taking off for the tall and uncut, all right.
Bo stood there, his chest rising and falling rapidly as he tried to catch his breath. When he thought he was up to the task, he started trying to climb out of the ravine.
It was tough going. The slope was steep enough that he had to catch hold of roots that stuck out of the ground to pull himself up.
He was still climbing when Scratch called softly from somewhere above him, “Bo! Bo, are you around here?”
“Down here!” he replied. “Better stop moving around, Scratch, or you’re liable to fall in this ravine like I did. I never saw it in the dark.”
