Several shots from a clump of trees on the other side of the trail drew his attention. He caught a glimpse of what looked like Scratch’s cream-colored Stetson and watched until he got a better look at his old friend. Scratch poked the barrel of his rifle around a tree trunk and squeezed off a shot. When he drew back, Bo called, “Scratch!”
The silver-haired Texan looked over, grinned, and waved. Bo returned the wave. Confident now that they were both all right, he turned his attention to the man on top of the bluff.
Large boulders lined the edge of that outcropping. The rifleman was probably firing through a narrow gap between a couple of the rocks, which meant it would be almost impossible for their return fire to hit him. He could sit up there and keep them pinned down all day.
Evidently that wasn’t his goal, because he shifted his aim to the wagon and started peppering it with slugs. Cara screamed and Lowe and Elam bellowed curses, making Bo wonder if some of the bullets had gone through the ventilation slits and whipped around the heads of the prisoners. That was possible, considering the angle from which the ambusher was firing.
Scratch must have been worried about the same thing, because he yelled at the wagon, “Cara! You and those boys get down as low as you can!”
The fact that the prisoners were being endangered probably meant that the man on the bluff wasn’t trying to free them. Indeed, he didn’t seem to care if he killed them. That ruled out Hank Gentry and his gang.
The most likely possibility was that the men being pursued by the Cherokee Lighthorse had left someone behind to slow them down. In that case, the man wouldn’t know who Bo, Scratch, and Brubaker were, nor why the wagon was traveling with Charley Graywolf and the others. But to him, they would all be enemies, anyway.
The bullets were coming too close to the team. The normally stolid draft horses finally spooked and lunged forward against their harness, desperate to be out of the line of fire. They bolted, taking off along the trail and pulling the wagon behind them. The prisoners inside the vehicle howled even louder.
Jake Brubaker yelled in alarm and broke out of the trees where he had taken cover. He ran after the wagon, ignoring Scratch’s shout of warning.
“Forty-two, no!”
“Let them go, Marshal!” Bo shouted from the other side of the trail.
Brubaker’s hat suddenly flew off his head, plucked from it by a bullet. Even more than the shouts from the Texans, that had to make him realize that he was out in the open ... and that was a bad spot to be in right now. Another bullet kicked up dirt at his feet as he whirled toward the side of the trail and threw himself behind a log that was lying there. Chucks of bark and splinters of wood flew in the air as slugs chewed into the fallen tree.
Bo opened fire on the bluff as the rest of the group resumed shooting. Brubaker was still in a bad spot. If they could keep the bushwhacker occupied for a few moments, it might give the deputy time to reach some better cover.
Brubaker surged up into a run. He made it behind some trees and rocks, where he slid to the ground. Bo watched him lie there panting heavily. As far as Bo could tell, the lawman wasn’t hurt.
The wagon careened around a bend in the trail and vanished from sight.
Bo wasn’t worried about the prisoners getting away. The runaway horses would slow down and stop as their panic wore off. The prisoners’ chains and the lock on the door were secure. The biggest problem was that the wagon might overturn and crash before the team came to a stop. If that happened, the prisoners might be injured, or even killed in the wreck.
Bo wondered if there was any way to reach that bluff, work his way up to the top, and take the ambusher by surprise. Even as he considered the idea, he saw that it wouldn’t work. The bluff commanded too broad a field of fire.
Knowing that his rifle wasn’t going to make a difference in the fight, he slid back down to the bottom of the rock and hurried to the spot where Duck Forbes lay. Dropping to a knee beside the wounded man, Bo leaned over to check on his condition.
The Texan’s face took on a hard, grim cast as he saw the way Duck’s eyes were staring sightlessly into the blue sky. He rested a hand on Duck’s chest to make sure and found that it was motionless. While Bo was up in the rocks trading shots with the man on the bluff, the young Cherokee Lighthorseman had crossed the divide.
“I’m sorry, Duck,” Bo said quietly. “If I can, I’ll settle the score for you. You have my word on that.”
But why just keep your enemies pinned down, Bo suddenly asked himself, when you could close the jaws of a trap on them? Scratch and the others were all concentrating on the danger in front of them, when something even worse could be coming up from behind.
That thought had just gone through Bo’s head when a bullet whistled past his head, struck one of the boulders, and ricocheted off with a whine like the wail of an evil banshee.
CHAPTER 16
Bo whirled around as another slug smacked into the rock nearby, flattening this time instead of glancing off. The attackers were in the trees behind the group of lawmen. Bo flung himself aside as he heard the wind-rip of yet another bullet past his ear. He wedged his body into a gap between boulders.
The killers couldn’t draw a bead on him, but from where he was, he couldn’t get a shot at them, either. The futility of that stand-off, along with the anger he felt at Duck’s death, gnawed at him. He suppressed the urge to lunge out into the open and start blazing away at the trees. That would just get him killed in a hurry and wouldn’t help the others at all.
Now it sounded more than ever like a small war was going on, as shot after shot rang out from all directions. Bullets whined and zipped menacingly. Clouds of powder smoke rolled through the air and stung men’s eyes and noses.
The stony gap in which Bo had taken cover was narrow enough that he thought he might be able to work his way upward between the two slabs of rock. He braced his back against one side, his feet against the other. When he shoved himself upward, his progress was maddeningly slow, but eventually he was high enough that he was able to pull himself on top of one of the slabs.
From here he could fire at the trees where the attackers were hidden, but his position also left him exposed to the man on top of the bluff. He rolled to his left as a bullet spanked off the rock only a few feet away from him. That put him behind a hardy bush that had forced its way through a crack in the rock in its eternal quest for sunlight.
The bush didn’t offer much real cover, but at least the man on top of the bluff couldn’t see him as easily now. Bo stayed as low as he could and took advantage of the respite to study his situation.
He seemed to be the only one on this side of the trail. Scratch and the others had taken cover in a small stand of trees to the left of the path. The gunmen who had come up from the rear were in some other trees on the same side of the trail as Bo. The bluff was on the opposite side.
So he was directly between the two forces, he realized, on an imaginary line that cut across the trail at an angle. Scratch, Brubaker, and the Cherokee Lighthorsemen were slightly off to one side but still effectively caught between two fires.
If there was some way for him to eliminate the man on the bluff, Bo speculated, then Scratch and the others could turn all their attention to the threat from the rear and would have a better chance of fighting them off. Bo parted the branches a little and squinted toward the bluff.
There was no way of knowing how long the boulders along the edge of the bluff had been perched there. Probably quite a while, Bo thought, judging by the way the earth was undercut beneath them, worn away by the elements. Sooner or later some of those big rocks would topple.
Why not today?
The odds of him being able to accomplish that were slim, he knew, but he couldn’t see any other options. If things continued like they were, eventually the attackers would pick off him and all of his friends.
