CHAPTER 31
Well, at least the killers’ ultimatum eased the tension a little, Slash thought as he and Pecos positioned the jail wagon in a horseshoe of a mostly dry, sandy wash. He didn’t doubt the killers would keep their word and not attack until after midnight. That had made the ride through the long, hot, sunhammered afternoon less nerve-wracking if not peaceful. He and the other members of their party didn’t find themselves tensely, constantly scanning the horizon in all directions, looking for signs of the stalking human wolves.
Oh, they were out there, all right, keeping just out of rifle range. But the threat had been postponed. Around midnight and afterward would be the time to start worrying again, and watching for them again . . .
It was a miserable damn country to hold off a dozen savage killers.
The terrain out here, roughly forty miles north of Cheyenne now, was flat and featureless. An endless carpet of green and purple sage, buck brush, and prickly pear swept away in all directions. There were bluffs in the distance that would offer a better, safer camp than the one Slash and Pecos had ended up choosing now, out on the flat by the wash, but reaching them in the wagon would be a longshot. The terrain was relatively flat, but it was also rough with knee-high sage and rocks, and cut with shallow washes made perilous by deep sand and alkali.
They had little cover here except the wash itself, but they would be easily surrounded and shot to ribbons. Here, they didn’t stand a chance. At least the wash offered a slender trickle of water, and they needed water now after the long, hot, miserable day.
Lacking cover from the killers, there was really only one thing to do. Slash didn’t even discuss it with Pecos. His partner knew what needed to be done as well as he himself did. They finished setting up camp, building a low fire for coffee and supper, emptying the three jailed killers’ slop buckets, and shoving food to the surly-eyed savages through the cracked door. The three coyotes, battered and bloody, smoked cigarettes and glared. Slash tended to them while Pecos stood back, holding his shotgun on the sullen trio. Talon Chaney was even more sullen than before since he was now, like Frank Beecher, sporting only one earlobe, thanks to Slash’s bullet through the bars earlier.
When Slash had tended the killers, quickly locking the door again and pocketing the key, he and Pecos set to work cleaning and loading their pistols and rifles. Pecos took special care with his sawed-off ten-gauge, snapping it back together, shoving a fresh wad into each barrel, and snapping the big popper closed.
“What’s going on?” Jenny Claymore asked them, casting her puzzled gaze between the two ex-cutthroats.
She and Glenn Larsen had been sitting back against their saddles, eating their bowls of beans and fatback with fried corncakes, the fire’s low flames flashing in their eyes as they’d watched the two strangely silent and purposeful older men.
Slash and Pecos looked at each other.
Slash sucked on the quirley dangling from a corner of his mouth as he ran his oiled rag down his Winchester’s forestock. “We’re takin’ it to them.”
Jenny and Larsen looked at each other as though waiting for the other to translate.
Pecos translated for them. “The war. We’re takin’ it to them.”
“What’re you talking about?” Larsen asked.
Slash shrugged as he glanced around the fire. The sun was down, but a weak green and salmon light lingered over the land. “Look around. We got no cover out here. If we let them come here . . . bring the battle to us . . . we wouldn’t have a chance.”
“So we’re going to take the battle to where they’ve camped,” Slash said.
“You’re gonna what?” Chaney exclaimed from inside the jail wagon, parked fifty feet to the north of the campfire, near where Slash and Pecos had tied the horses to picket pins.
“Shut up over there or I’ll shoot you in the kneecap,” Slash said. Turning to Larsen and Jenny, he said, “You two stay here with the wagon. Don’t go near it. Remember, they can grab you through the bars if you get too close. Ignore them no matter what they say or do. I’m going to keep the key to the cage with me.”
Larsen said, “Listen, fellas, that just sounds crazy to me. You’re only two men. Two against a dozen.”
“Here, we’d be four against a dozen with damn little cover,” Pecos pointed out. “Slash and me have chosen the hand with the best odds. Not that either one is a royal flush. Far from it.”
“Two pair, maybe,” Slash said with an ironic snort. “Just remember to stay away from that wagon.”
“What happens if you don’t come back?” Larsen asked.
Slash and Pecos shared a look.
Slash turned back to Larsen and said, “Kill them.” He cast his gaze toward the jail wagon. “Throw your saddle on one of the geldings and ride south as fast as you can. We’ll likely be able to thin their ranks a little, before . . .”
Again, he glanced at Pecos, who glanced back at him, flushed, then looked at the ground.
“What’d he say?” asked one of the prisoners. It was a whisper, so it was hard to tell which one had asked the question.
One of the others muttered a response too quietly for Slash to hear.
“To what?” The exclamation was from Black Pot.
Pecos scowled and said, “One more word from the jail wagon, and I’m gonna let Slash come over there and blow a couple toes off.”
A couple of softly whispered curses were the only response. Slash could see the prisoners’ slumped silhouettes and the orange coals of their cigarettes.
Jenny looked anxiously up at the ex-cutthroats and said, “How will you ever find them? They could be anywhere out there.” She cast her gaze into the thickening darkness beyond the camp.
“We already know where to find them, Jenny,” Pecos told her in a gentle voice. “They’re camped at the base of a bluff to the northwest. We seen the smoke from their cook fire earlier.”
“How can you be sure they’re all in one group?” Larsen asked. “They could be spread out, keeping an eye on us from several different locations.”
Slash grabbed his saddle and blanket up off the ground and started carrying the tack toward his horse. “We can’t be sure.”
“Just a chance we have to take,” Pecos said, swinging his shotgun’s lanyard over his head and right shoulder, letting the big Richards hang barrel down behind his back. He grabbed his own saddle and headed toward his horse. “Give us a few hours. If we’re not back by midnight, shoot the prisoners and light a shuck for Cheyenne.”
* * *
Since there was no cover out here, and the quarter-moon was on the rise, Slash and Pecos decided to take every precaution to keep from being seen as they approached the killers’ camp. They rode northeast, in the opposite direction of the outlaw camp, for a good three-quarters of a mile. They swung east and rode roughly the same distance before swinging to the south for another mile, then west for another mile and a half.
That put them nearly due south of the two bluffs they could see hulking up darkly against the northern sky, roughly a half mile away.
“This is where it gets tough,” Slash said quietly, keeping his voice low.
Pecos glanced at him. “What do you mean?”
“We walk,” Slash said, swinging down from his saddle.
“Ah, hell.”
“Yep.”
“You know I hate walkin’ worse than bathin’.”
“I know, partner, but the hosses would make too much noise. Damn quiet night.” Slash dropped his Appaloosa’s reins, ground-reining the mount, and slid his Winchester from his scabbard.
Pecos cursed and slid his own rifle from his saddle sheath. “You’d think we could at least get a breeze.”
“Don’t count on it.” Slash removed his spurs, dropped them into a saddlebag pouch. He shouldered his rifle and began tramping north through the sage.
Pecos removed his own spurs, then patted his buckskin’s neck, saying, “Stay now, Buck, and behave yourself,” and fell into stride beside Slash.
They walked steadily through the scrub, keeping roughly eight feet apart.
Pecos said quietly, “You got enough cartridges, partner?”
“Oh, I ’spect so.”
“You ready to do this?”
“No.”
“Yeah,” Pecos said. “Me neither.”
As they walked almost due north, the two dark bluffs grew steadily before them. The outlaws were camped on the other side of those bluffs. Slash and Pecos were sure of it.
“We climb to the top o’ them buttes?” Pecos asked, even more quietly than before as they walked. “That what you’re thinkin’?”
“Yep, shoot ’em like ducks on a millrace.”
“Sounds easy enough.”
Slash stopped. “Wait.”
Pecos stopped and looked at him. “What is it?”
“Down.” Slash dropped to his knees.
Pecos followed suit, lifting his chin and sniffing. He frowned as he turned to Slash again. “Is that smoke?”
“I think so,” Slash whispered slowly.
“They switch camps or what?”
“Maybe they broke up, scattered. Could be they figured we might make the play we’re out here tryin’ to make.”
“In that case . . .”
“We been hornswoggled.”
“How you wanna play it?”
“Let’s check it out.”
Slash dropped to his hands and, holding his rifle in his right hand, sort of dragging it along the ground, crabbed forward through the sage. Pecos did likewise, keeping well to Slash’s left. They split farther apart to avoid a nasty-looking patch of prickly pear, then came closer together again when they’d gotten beyond the low-growing cactus.
Ahead, a dull light grew. It was almost the color of a sunset.
It seemed to be radiating up out of the ground.
Slash stopped. So did Pecos.
Slash stared ahead. The light flickered dully, appearing to originate about fifty feet ahead. He glanced at Pecos, jerked his chin to indicate ahead, then, keeping very low to the ground, resumed crawling very slowly and quietly. Ahead the light grew until Slash could see that it was, indeed, radiating up out of the ground. From a wash cut into the prairie at the southern base of the two buttes.
The cut of the wash broadened as Slash crawled up to its edge. He peered down into the cut. The wash was roughly fifty yards wide, maybe thirty feet deep. The fire lay just ahead, beyond a fringe of willows and stunted cottonwoods. The fire appeared small, maybe only a coffee fire, a small blaze to ward off the night’s growing chill.
Two men sat around it. They were smoking—Slash could smell the peppery aroma of Durham tobacco—and talking in desultory tones. He couldn’t hear what they were saying. They were speaking too quietly. He couldn’t get a good look at them, either, through the screen of the growth between him and their fire. They were two blurred, partly lit, partly shadowed figures sitting Indian style on either side of the softly crackling fire.
One of the pair spoke a little loudly to say, “And then she told Ronnie he couldn’t have any ’cause he smelled like a dead javelina.”
The other man squealed a quiet laugh. “What’d Ronnie say to that?”
“He said ‘damn girl’ . . .”
The man must have realized he was speaking too loudly, for just then as he continued his bawdy yarn he lowered his voice considerably so that Pecos could no longer hear. That was all right. He wasn’t here to eavesdrop on the killer’s ribald tales.
He was here for other matters entirely.
He glanced at Pecos, who parted his lips slightly as though to say: “What’s the plan?”
Slash patted the breech of his Winchester, then jerked his head to indicate the two men in the wash. Pecos nodded once, slowly. Slash rose to a crouch and dropped first one foot and then the other over the lip of the wash. He moved slowly down the shallow slope. At the bottom of the wash, he waited for Pecos to make his own way down and to stand to his left, holding his Colt’s revolving rifle down low, where the firelight wouldn’t reflect off its octagonal steel barrel.
Slash canted his head to the left, then to his right.
Pecos nodded, then moved slowly, quietly ahead and swinging left. Slash moved ahead and right, gently nudging the willows and cottonwoods aside. His feet moved quietly on the wash’s sandy bottom. Ahead of him, the firelight grew. The two men sat where they’d been seated before.
What in hell were they doing out here? Were they on watch? If so, why the fire?
Maybe just stupid. Maybe they didn’t think Slash and his partner would try to sneak up on a such a large and savage gang—two men going up against a good dozen. So they’d built a fire to ward off the chill and were just lounging around out here, against their leader’s wishes, chewing the fat until their watch time was up.
Slash continued wending his way through the brush, nearly silently.
The fire and the two men took clearer and clearer shape before him.