He thrust the Winchester’s barrel through the brush and waited for the man on top of the bluff to fire again. Bo wanted to pinpoint the ambusher’s location.
After a few seconds he spotted another jet of powder smoke from up there. The bullet rattled through the branches above his head, but he ignored that. Marking the exact site of the smoke, he was able to tell which boulder the rifleman was using for most of his cover.
Bo drew a bead on the bluff at the base of that rock and squeezed off a shot.
Dirt flew in the air as his bullet smacked into its target. The would-be killer probably believed Bo had just missed badly. He was probably smirking up there, Bo thought, or maybe even laughing.
Bo worked the rifle’s lever as fast as he could and sent shot after shot into the same place. He emptied the Winchester in what must have sounded like a futile expression of the frustration he felt.
He expected that when he paused to reload, the ambusher would take some more potshots at him. Instead, the man seemed to be concentrating his fire on the trees where Scratch and the other men had taken cover. He must have decided that Bo wasn’t a threat to be bothered with anymore.
Bo could only hope that the varmint was making a bad mistake about that.
The Winchester held fifteen rounds. Without rushing, Bo made sure of his aim and sent all fifteen shots, one after the other, into the same spot at the base of the boulder. He waited to see if it was going to move.
The big rock didn’t budge.
Bo had never been the sort of hombre to give up. If he had been, despair might have welled up inside him at that moment. He was convinced that his idea was a good one and would show some results sooner or later ... but would he have to lie here and keep shooting all day, firing off hundreds of bullets, before they did any good?
By that time, he and the others would probably all be dead.
He didn’t let that knowledge stop him. Instead he reloaded, reminding himself that while he had several boxes of cartridges in his saddlebags, he would have only a few more rounds in his pocket after he emptied the Winchester this time. That fact right there was enough to emphasize that he was running out of time.
They all were, he told himself grimly.
He aimed the Winchester at the bluff and started firing again. His shoulder was starting to get a little sore from the rifle’s recoil. He ignored that and continued shooting.
The boulder shifted. At first he didn’t notice and even squeezed off another shot before he saw what was happening. The big rock tilted forward, and once its mass shifted, that was all it took. Bo’s slugs had dug out enough dirt underneath it to destroy its balance.
The boulder toppled off the edge of the bluff, fell twenty feet or so to the slope, landed with a crash, and started to roll, taking brush, dirt, and smaller rocks along with it.
Bo didn’t pay any attention to the rock slide he had caused. Swiftly now, he centered the Winchester’s sights on the surprised man who suddenly was exposed as he knelt there where the boulder had been.
Bo triggered three more shots as fast as he could work the Winchester’s lever.
His aim was as deadly as ever. The slugs ripped through the ambusher’s body. He jerked to his feet, lurched to one side, and dropped his rifle as he clapped his hands to his bullet-riddled torso. For a second longer, he swayed there at the edge, and then he pitched forward and followed in the wake of the rock slide, bouncing and flopping like a rag doll as he tumbled down the face of the bluff.
From the trees on the other side of the trail came an unmistakably Texan whoop. Scratch must have seen the man on the bluff fall.
The attackers must have seen that, too, and now that their quarry was no longer pinned down, the odds appeared to have shifted. Bo swung around. He still had some shots left in his rifle, so he started spraying the trees where the men were hidden. That turned the tables even more.
When Bo ceased fire, he heard pounding hoofbeats. They were headed west, paralleling the trail but keeping the screen of trees between them and the lawmen.
Bo cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Hold your fire! They’re lighting out!”
The shots died away. After a moment, Scratch called, “You all right up there, Bo?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. How about you fellas?”
“Couple of nicks, but nothin’ to speak of.”
Brubaker emerged from the trees carrying his rifle.
“Blast it, we’ve got to get after that wagon! Creel, where’s your horse?”
Bo wasn’t just about to turn over his horse to Brubaker. He said, “Hold on!” and slid down the rock to the ground.
He cast a regretful look at Duck Forbes’s corpse, then caught his horse’s dangling reins and swung up into the saddle. Duck’s mount still stood there, too, so Bo led it out of the rocks and handed the reins to the eager Brubaker.
The deputy had the decency to ask, “What happened to the fella who was ridin’ this animal?”
“He was the first one hit,” Bo said. “He didn’t make it.”
“Duck Forbes, right? Damn it, I liked that boy, what little I knew of him.” Brubaker hauled the horse’s head around. “Come on!”
He galloped along the trail with Bo close behind him. They raced past the bluff where the ambusher had lurked, then rounded a couple of bends before abruptly reining to a halt.
The wagon was stopped as the team cropped grass at the side of the trail. As Bo had expected, the horses had run for a short distance and then forgotten to be scared anymore. All of them appeared to be unharmed, including Brubaker’s saddle mount that was still tied to the back of the vehicle.
“Well, it didn’t wreck, anyway,” Brubaker said. “That’s something to be thankful for.” He drew his gun. “Be careful, Creel.”
Bo could see that the door at the rear of the wagon was still fastened with the big padlock.
“They can’t have gone anywhere,” he told Brubaker.
“No, I reckon not, but I still don’t trust ’em.”
Bo didn’t, either, but he didn’t see any way the prisoners could have gotten free. He drew his Colt, too, as he approached the wagon alongside Brubaker.
“Hey, in there!” the deputy yelled. “Sing out and let me know you’re all right!”
“You don’t care whether we’re all right!” Cara replied through the ventilation slits. The thick walls of the enclosure muffled her voice a little. “You want us all dead!”
“I want you all to hang after a legal trial,” Brubaker replied. “There’s a big difference.”
“Not to us, you no-good, stinking—”
She continued with a vile tirade directed at Brubaker, his ancestors, and anybody he had ever known. Brubaker looked over at Bo and shrugged.
“Well, she sounds like she’s all right, anyway,” he said. He dismounted and approached the wagon. Reversing his gun, he rapped on the wall with the revolver’s butt and bellowed, “Shut up in there, woman! I want to know if Lowe and Elam are all right, too.”
“You damn near got us killed!” That was Elam’s familiar whine.
“Who was doin’ all that shootin’?” Lowe asked in his rumbling voice. “Couldn’t have been Hank and the rest of the boys.”
Brubaker gave Bo a nod, indicating that he was satisfied all three prisoners were alive. He didn’t answer Lowe’s question. Instead he handed the reins of Duck’s horse to Bo and said, “You can lead this one back to the others.”
He holstered his Colt and climbed to the driver’s seat to swing the wagon around. That wasn’t an easy job in the narrow trail, but Brubaker managed.
Bo led the extra horse, and Brubaker followed with the wagon. By the time they reached the scene of the ambush, Scratch and the Cherokee Lighthorsemen had emerged from the trees.
Some of the men had fetched Duck’s body from the rocks. It was laid out now at the side of the trail. The young man’s face was oddly peaceful.
“That had to be Nat Kinlock and his bunch who jumped us,” Charley Graywolf said. His face was darker than ever with fury. “Stinking murderers.”
Bo said, “You told us Kinlock has relatives in this area, so you must have a pretty good idea where to find him.”
