Gil Brennan, Sandy Urbanski, and Rick Collins met in a deserted soddy just three miles off the Denver freight road, surrounded by the rolling grazeland of eastern Wyoming. It was a damp, chilly morning under an overcast sky the color of bog water. Brennan’s mood seemed to match the weather.
“I’m not being ‘womanish’ about it,” he told Urbanski coldly. “I don’t see what you’re acting so cocksure about, is all. Race is dead, and you two have had your horses shot out from under you. You made your brag, just a few days ago, how Hickok would be worm fodder by now and that gold in our hands. Remember?”
Urbanski’s dead, obsidian stare unnerved Brennan, and despite his anger he glanced away first.
“Race ain’t no loss,” Urbanski countered sarcastically. “Man was a useless drunkard—it leaves more swag for the rest of us. As for them two horses, we evened that score last night, and then some.”
Brennan’s voice yielded to his anger. “The horses aren’t the point, Sandy, can’t you grasp that? It’s control. I told you we want to make Hickok think he’s in control—that way we can catch him off his guard. But so far he really is in control.”
“Yeah, well, ‘so far’ won’t mean squat once we plug Hickok,” Urbanski insisted belligerently. “You best pull that pinecone outta your ass, Brennan. Out here your ‘authority’ ain’t worth a rusted trace chain.”
Brennan’s tight-lipped smile seemed to cost him an effort. But he suddenly realized the danger he was in here. These two men were both killers wearing the tie-down holsters of their profession and either man would gladly shoot him for his diamond belt buckle.
“All right,” Brennan conceded. “Hell, you boys are right. Hickok’s clover is deep, but on this line his luck is bound to play out.”
“Damn straight,” Urbanski replied. “He can strut and bluff and bluster all he wants. But Bill Hickok is a done-for case.”
“Don’t keep selling him short like that,” Brennan warned, keeping his tone more reasonable. “I think you boys are being fooled by Hickok’s dandy appearance. He may wear perfume, but that man is rawhide tough.”
“Tough, my sweet aunt,” Rick Collins spoke up from the doorway, where he was keeping watch for any unwanted company. “He’s just sneaky, that’s all, see? One of them cowards who learns how to sneak so’s they avoid a fight.”
Brennan knew better but refused to push these two anymore—the derringer in his breast pocket was utterly useless against them, and he knew it. They were edgy and primed for action, especially Urbanski.
“Hickok’s sneaky, all right,” he conceded. “They say he learned his tactics from studying Stonewall Jackson: Always mislead, surprise, and confuse your enemy. But we’re going to turn his own tactics against him at Silver Wolf Pass. You boys remember what to do?”
Urbanski scowled even though he nodded. “We start to attack, then run like hell after they start some resistance. Sneaky,” he added sarcastically.
Brennan ignored the sarcasm. “That’s the gait. Both the soldiers are going to make it look like they’re fighting wildcats. You fade, then ride ahead to the rendezvous point at Miller’s Creek. No way in hell will Hickok and his crew be ready for a second strike only ten minutes down the road.”
“Now who’s sounding ‘cocksure’?” Urbanski demanded. He took off his old campaign hat and showed Brennan a bullet hole near the crown. “That buffalo soldier siding him is a helluva shot—he damn near tagged my brainpan at six hundred yards. From a moving coach.”
Brennan smiled like a magician with plenty more in his topper.
“I told you Hickok would select a crackerjack shootist for the box seat,” he told Urbanski. “That’s why we’re going to institute another plan before we pull the false heist at Silver Wolf Pass.”
“What plan? First I’ve heard of it.”
“That’s because it didn’t occur to me until last night when I was studying this,” Brennan explained, pulling an accordion-folded map from his pocket. “It’s a topography map made by the Army Corps of Engineers. I won it in a poker game out in Sioux Falls.”
Brennan nodded in the direction of the buckboard parked in the weed-choked yard out front. “Ricky! Pull back that canvas tarp so we can glom the load.”
Collins stepped outside, shunting his Sharps to his left hand and tugging back the tarp with his right.
Out loud he sounded out the warning painted in big green letters on the sides of three wooden crates: “Dan-ger high ex-plo-sives.”
“This map reminded me of a place I used to pass twice a week when I was a driver,” Brennan explained. “The dynamite’s been stored at my ranch since you boys boosted it from those miners near Pierre. If my plan works, it could all be over in about twenty seconds. We might have to do some digging, is all. I’ve got a steam-shovel crew standing by in Spearfish.”
“Hell, I take your drift,” Urbanski said, suddenly catching on. “Devil’s Slope. That’s how’s come you wanted them stuck with tired horses.”
Brennan nodded. “Can you picture it after one hundred pounds of dynamite has blown that rock dike away? And them below with exhausted horses in the harness?”
Collins liked it so much, he started laughing as if at a capital joke. And even the hard-bitten, cynical Urbanski gave a grudging nod of admiration.
“They’ll be like ducks on a fence,” he conceded. “Sometimes being sneaky is damned entertaining. But we best get humping if we want to get the charge planted. Way I collate it, we only got maybe two hours.”
~*~
Josh had a stiff, sore neck the next morning, and he could barely rotate his head. But the Denver-bound bullion coach rolled out just after daybreak, Wild Bill nursing a tired but still-plucky team. Plastered linen covered shallow yet painful glass cuts on his hands and forearms.
“The condition of these animals won’t matter a jackstraw either way,” he told his topside companions while they watched their three passengers board. “They rested one night on double grain rations, so they’ll hold up the forty-two miles to the next station, long’s they ain’t pushed too hard.”
He paused and nodded to Saville and Appling. “Morning, Reverend, Mr. Lawton,” he greeted them, still keeping up the ruse as they filed outside, Appling picking his teeth with a spent match.
They nodded, Rabbit-Face still unable to meet Bill’s frank gaze.
“And if we’re attacked,” Bill resumed quietly, “those horses won’t be running anyway. You two remember—the very moment an attack starts, we take the offensive. They’ll be expecting us to wage a running battle. Instead, go at ’em head-on like badgers.”
“And meantime watch the soldiers,” Josh put in quietly.
“’At’s right. All of us, but you especially, kid. You’re sorta our personal bodyguard.”
Josh nodded. “Still just a hunch, Bill?”
“It’s Appling,” Bill admitted quietly. “Saville is slick. But his pard has got a guilty mind.”
Wild Bill touched his hat as Charlene Durant came out last, her eyes shyly slanted away from Hickok’s gaze. Her hair was neatly coiffed, and she wore a blue knitted shawl against the bite of the morning air. As dust protection, she wrapped her head in a fancy scarf of poppy-colored silk sewn with sequins.
She looks good covered or uncovered, Bill realized. He took her left arm to help her up the folding step.
“Miss Durant,” he said quietly, detaining her a moment. “I have every reason to think we’ll be attacked again. You’re sure you won’t lay over here, take the next coach?”
“Attacked again?” she repeated in a fading voice.
“I b’lieve so, yes.”
But she shook her head in determination. “I must get to Denver, Mr. Hickok. I trust you.”
“Headstrong girl,” Wild Bill remarked when he’d climbed up onto the box.
Jimmy took out the makings and built a smoke. He looked up at Josh and winked. “Ask me,” he said, licking the paper, “she’s determined, all right. Determined to stay real near Wild Bill Hickok.”
Bill kicked off the brake and clucked at the team. “Well, nobody did ask you, old son. Keep your thoughts on the natural terrain.”
But Jimmy wasn’t quite finished roweling his friend. “Yeah, boy, a gal puts on fancy feathers like that, hell, she’s dressing for a cotillion ball, not a dirty old stagecoach ride. She’s preening for you, Mr. Billy.”
Hickok snorted, cracking the whip over the glossy rumps of the team. “You can just forget her motivations, Jimmy. You’ll bite your own teeth before you’ll ever figure out a woman. He-yah, he-yah!”
“She’s as cold as last night’s pudding,” Joshua scoffed.
Bill gave that remark a mysterious little grin. “What went cold last night can be heated up today. But both of you better quit dogging it and watch for trouble.”
The first ten miles went by quietly enough, the landscape folded into low, stark ridges by ancient glaciers that left heaps of moraine but little screening timber. At one point they left the trail to pass a long immigrant train.
“They’ll take the north fork at Silver Wolf Pass,” Bill explained. “We’ll take the south. Eyes to all sides, boys! They could hit us at any time now.”
Joshua saw Wild Bill loosen his ivory-grip Colt .44-40s in their holsters. That gesture, like the calm, expectant look on Hickok’s face, said it clearly: The readiness is all. Wild Bill learned that lesson early in life as a young deputy in the Kansas Territory, and he lived by that law with everything he did.
The terrain changed dramatically and quickly, showing the geologic ravages of some distant upheaval: buttes arose, scree piled at their bases, and the trail began to corkscrew around natural rock turrets. Soon cliff shadows engulfed the trail, and all three men watched in all directions.
Though gradually failing him, Wild Bill’s eyes were still good enough to sweep the terrain and pick out a spot, above and to their right, where a natural rock dike held back an entire steep slope of loose talus and scree. Thousands of tons of it.
Wild Bill had once protected railroad surveying crews, and he knew exactly how their surveyors marked spots like that on their maps: unstable landslide slope—demolish.
“Yeah, I see it, too,” Jimmy said, reading Bill’s frown. “You still think tired horses won’t matter today?”
Bill glanced at the trail ahead. Although it was straight again, it was now a long incline. Boulders and slag heaps blocked any escape left or right. Once again his “take the offensive” strategy seemed a pale consolation.
“Well, odds are it won’t matter,” Wild Bill announced, trying to convince himself.
The stagecoach climbed on, crawling across the base of the slope like a slow bug. Too late, Bill thought about hitching the saddle band onto the traces. But it would take more time now, exposed to danger, than they’d save.
When Joshua heard the first stuttering rumble he looked straight overhead, expecting another cloudburst.
But that first slow gathering of noise quickly escalated to a resounding explosion. Josh saw a huge dust cloud rise up fast like vented steam, blocking out the entire horizon. Then, in an eye-blink, it was as if the slope above them were a giant animal shaking itself off.
That impression, in turn, passed in a heartbeat, and the frightened youth saw the entire mass of rocks suddenly bearing down on them, gathering size and speed like an avalanche of gray snow. Then Charlene Durant’s piercing scream from inside the coach cut into his heart like a blade, and Joshua heard the words clearly inside his skull, death-goaded from memory: Tell me how you die, and I’ll tell you what you’re worth.