CHAPTER 34
Slash and Pecos cut across a sharp horseshoe curve in the canyon wall.
As they rode, crouched low over the billowing manes of their galloping mounts, they could hear the chugging of the train in the canyon as the Denver & Rio Grande flyer continued to make its way downstream along the Animas, its staid, purposeful chuffs likely belying the murderous chaos that was no doubt occurring inside those coaches as the gang plundered the Wells Fargo car and robbed the men and women in the three passenger coaches.
Robbed them and did God only knew what else to them...
“What you got in mind, Slash?” Pecos asked, the wind basting the brim of his hat against his forehead.
“I’m open to suggestions!”
“Well, it’s a dozen-plus against two!”
“Yeah, an’ the odds aren’t likely to get any shorter!”
As they fogged the sage and buck brush of the canyon rim, the canyon occasionally edged close enough to the riders that Slash could peer partway into it. The canyon wall was dropping gradually, putting Slash and Pecos closer to the canyon bottom as well as to the train that continued to snake along the cut of the opposite ridge.
As the ridge continued to drop, the two cutthroats now galloping downhill beside it, Slash saw a bridge inside the canyon—a bridge spanning the Animas that would bring the train over to his and Pecos’s side of the canyon.
A plan began to solidify and clarify in his racing mind.
He watched the train curve out away from the opposite canyon wall and head for the bridge. The flyer was roughly a hundred yards ahead and left of Slash and Pecos now. As the train crossed the bridge, its rumbling and chugging reverberating off the bridge’s stout timbers, Flash looked for a way into the canyon. After a few more of his tiring horse’s strides, he saw what appeared a game trail angling down the canyon wall, the rim of which was now only about a hundred feet above the canyon floor.
“This way!” Slash yelled as he reined the Appy sharply left.
He and Pecos dropped down along the narrow, switchbacking game trail littered with deer scat. Fifty feet ahead was a nest of boulders to the right of the trail. The riders stopped in the boulder nest, and Slash swung down from the Appy’s back.
He was sweaty, sunburned, and wind-burned, his heart racing.
“What’s on your pea-pickin’ mind, pard?” Pecos asked.
They could hear the train chugging toward them, from their left, along the same ridge they were on now, but maybe twenty feet below them and around a slight curve in the canyon wall. They couldn’t yet see it below the rocky bulge in the ridge’s shoulder.
Slash tossed Pecos the reins. “You take the horses. Head for the rapids. That’s likely where they intend to get off.” He stared ahead along the canyon. He could see the white of the rapids maybe a mile ahead, where the stony walls on both sides of the canyon jutted skyward once more.
Pecos eyed his partner uneasily. “What the hell are you gonna do?”
The train was huffing and puffing, iron wheels clacking on the rail seams. Slash could feel the reverberations through his boot soles. The big, black locomotive came into view nearly straight down the slope from Slash and Pecos, drawing the tender car behind it. It was moving maybe fifteen, twenty miles per hour, the steam and smoke filling the air with the smell of brimstone.
At his angle, he couldn’t see the engineer or the fireman inside the engine’s black iron housing. The gang might have already taken them out.
Slash looked at Pecos and grinned. “I’m gonna hitch a ride. Hope the conductor don’t mind I didn’t buy a ticket!”
“You’re loco!”
“Shut up!”
Slash stepped closer to the lip of the ridge they were on. He could see the gray tin roof of the second coach directly beneath him. In one of the cars below, a gun popped. A woman screamed. A man cursed loudly. Another shot followed, and another woman screamed.
“Stop tellin’ me to shut up, or I’ll pound your scrawny butt!”
“See you at the rapids, partner!” Slash stepped forward off the ridge, into thin air, stretching his Winchester out to one side and his free hand out to the other side for balance.
He bent his legs just before he hit the roof of the third car. He dropped to his knees and rolled backward, almost losing his rifle and clawing wildly at the corrugations in the tin roofing for purchase. His left hand slipped off the ridge he thought he’d had, and he continued rolling to the end of the car—rolling and sliding perilously toward the outside edge of the car, toward the canyon.
He cursed under his breath, heart pounding, as his legs dropped over the end corner of the car, one foot dangling toward the iron vestibule, the other toward the canyon. As he struggled to pull himself up, his hands slipping off the ridges in the corrugated roof, he heard several more gunshots in the very coach he was fighting to stay on.
Men were whooping and hollering. Women were screaming. A baby was crying hysterically.
“Fork-tailed devils,” Slash said, gritting his teeth and clawing his way back onto the coach roof. “That . . . ain’t. . . the way . . . we do it . . . boys!”
With that, he pulled his legs and feet back onto the roof and clambered up to the peak. He sat there for nearly a minute, catching his breath, the wind and high-altitude sun blasting against him. The Animas slid by on his left now as he faced the rear of the train; the stone wall of the ridge slid by on his right.
He doffed his hat, ran a hand through his thick, salt-and-pepper hair, then snugged the hat down tight on his head so it wouldn’t blow off. He considered a plan of attack.
“Think I’ll start at the end and make my way up toward the locomo—”
He stopped when he heard a shout from the express car flanking the coach car he was on. Answering shouts came from somewhere else. He glanced to his right. The rock wall had slid back away from the tracks, and now in the brush and rocks lining the canyon between the tracks and the wall he saw a half-dozen men and horses. Slash recognized members of his own gang.
They must have split up. Roughly half had leaped onto the train while the others had stationed themselves here to accept the strongboxes, which could only be opened with dynamite from the train itself, which they must have wanted to keep moving throughout the robbery for some reason.
Sure enough. There was a loud thud followed by another loud thud and then one more.
Slash turned to look toward the express car. Someone had just rolled three iron-banded strongboxes out of the express car’s door facing the ridge. The boxes rolled and bounced amidst the rocks, kicking up dust, and the half-dozen gang members ran toward them.
One of those running men recognized Slash riding the crown of the third passenger coach. Donny Landusky pointed toward Slash, yelling, “Hey, it’s him! It’s him! It’s Braddock! That’s Braddock up there!”
But then the men running down the strongboxes fell back away behind the ridge wall that had suddenly shoved up to within a few feet of the tracks again.
Had anyone on the train heard him identify Slash?
Slash slowly gained his feet. He’d forgotten how hard it was to maintain your balance on a train car that pitched and rocked like a baby’s cradle and continually shuddered as the iron wheels clattered over seams. He got close enough to the rear of the coach that he could see the coach car’s front door open. It was the small door opening onto the vestibule between it and the rear of Slash’s passenger car.
Slash ducked, dropped to a knee.
He waited. From his recent dangle over the passenger coach’s end corner, he knew that a ladder ran up the rear wall, on that side, which was on his left now as he faced the rear.
He pumped a cartridge into his Yellowboy’s action, pressed the butt against his shoulder. He aimed toward the rear left side of the car, waiting, staring at where the ladder poked up slightly from the rear wall.
Nothing.
He waited another couple of seconds.
The crown of a brown hat appeared. A bullet had nipped one side of the crown’s crease. That would be “Big C” Chuck Dawkins, who had joined the gang only a year ago, when they were down in Arizona. He’d come from another gang that had disbanded when its leadership had succumbed to the bottle and found itself without a rudder.
Not a bad hombre, Big C. At least, Slash remembered him as a good jake.
Slash waited, caressing the hammer of his cocked Winchester with his gloved right thumb.
The brown hat slid upward until a pair of dark-brown eyes set in sunburned sockets rose just above the level of the coach’s roof. The eyes snapped sharply to Slash, widened in recognition.
Slash smiled, nodded.
“It’s him!” Big C shouted, and raised a cocked Colt over the top of the coach, aimed at Slash.
Or it would have been aimed at Slash if, before he’d gotten it leveled, Slash hadn’t drilled a neat round hole through Big C’s forehead, just above his left eye. Big C’s Colt flared, the slug flying wide of its intended target.
Big C himself sagged backward off the ladder. There was a crunching thud as he fell off the train and apparently was smacked smartly by the front of the express car. The bullet-creased brown hat flew up over the coach car and then was whipped out over the canyon by the wind.
“Oh, boy,” Slash said, hearing men frantically shouting in the car beneath him, ejecting the spent cartridge casing and seating a fresh round in the Yellowboy’s action. “I do believe this dance is about to begin!”
He was right.
A gun barked behind him. The slug screeched over his right shoulder as he whipped around to face the man, Snook Dodge, aiming a Winchester over the top of the coach car at him. Slash threw himself flat against the car’s roof just in time to avoid another bullet exploding out the flame-lapping muzzle of Dodge’s Spencer repeater. As Dodge worked the repeater’s trigger guard cocking mechanism, Slash raised his rifle and fired—a hair too late.
Dodge had seen Slash bearing down on him and jerked his head down below the car’s roof. Slash cursed and pumped another round into the chamber.
Dodge jerked his head back up, swinging the Spencer around once more. Slash fed the man a pill he couldn’t digest, by way of Dodge’s mouth, which he’d opened to hurl a curse at Slash at the same time he hurled lead.
Only, he hurled neither.
Dodge’s head snapped back, eyes wide in shock at the bullet that had just drilled through the back of his mouth and out the back of his head, painting the panel of the car behind him with dark red blood.
He dropped the Spencer. Then he himself dropped away out of sight.
A gun barked in the coach below Slash, blowing a quarter-sized hole in the tin roof two feet to Slash’s right.
“Holy . . . !”
As Slash scrambled to his feet, the gun barked again.
Another hole appeared six inches to his left.
Slash wanted to fire back through the roof at the hombre triggering lead at him from inside the coach, but he could hear the terrified passengers in there, down beneath his boots, and he didn’t want to kill any of them by mistake. That wasn’t what he was about. Never had been. Under the leadership of Billy Pinto, the Snake River Marauders had become a pack of bloodthirsty wolves.
Slash ran forward, avoiding more bullets hammering up from inside the coach, drilling quarter-sized holes through the corrugated tin roofing just behind his boots.
Slash leaped off the front end of the third passenger coach, hurdling the gap between the cars. He landed atop the end of the second passenger coach and dropped to his knees.
He stood there at the rear of the second coach, waiting, staring toward the grated iron floor of the vestibule below, wondering from where the next threat would come. Only vaguely, he became aware of the train picking up more speed as the front end of the long iron caterpillar began dropping.
Only vaguely, he wondered who, if anyone, was at the controls....
Shouting issued from inside the third passenger coach. Slash stared at the closed door, waiting for one of the Marauders to emerge. Instead, there was a loud explosion. Like the triggering of both barrels of a double-barreled shotgun. A man in a blue wool uniform came plowing through the door, turning the door to splinters and smashing up against the rear wall of the coach Slash was on.
The man, a black man, lost his leather-billed conductor’s hat as he sagged to the floor of the vestibule, his entire torso a mass of blood from the buckshot that had torn through him. He groaned and sagged in a lifeless, bloody heap.
A man poked his head out the door and glared up toward Slash.
No, not really a man. A kid. A towheaded kid wearing a low-crowned, black, felt sombrero with a beaded band and holding a sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun in his gloved hands, gray smoke curling from both barrels. The face was lean and clean-shaven but the brown eyes were flat. As flat as a snake’s and twice as mean.
Billy Pinto laughed up at Slash, who snapped the Winchester to his shoulder. Billy drew his head back, laughing girlishly. He grabbed someone behind him—a young girl— and tossed her out onto the vestibule. Slash had been in the process of firing the Winchester at Pinto and couldn’t hold the bullet, but he managed to nudge the shot a hair wide so that it only grazed the girl’s temple before smashing into the wall of the coach over her right shoulder.
She dropped to the vestibule floor, holding her head in both hands, screaming. She was small and frail. She couldn’t have been over fourteen years old, around the same age as Bledsoe’s granddaughter.
Inside the coach, Billy Pinto yammered like a wolf on the first night of a blue moon.