THEY reached the old La Junta cut-off without incident worth mentioning. Danger to themselves began now as they headed north.
“We’ll walk our ponies,” Bill advised. “Don’t want any drummin’ of hoofs to give us away.”
Off to their right half a mile, the ridge began to rise. The trail paralleled it almost to the Kansas line. Cherokee flicked anxious glances at it. He was riding between Bill and old Bitter Root. They sensed his agitation.
“I wouldn’t begin worryin’ yet about anybody jumpin’ us from that direction,” the former remarked. “The night’s still black; if there’s anybody up there they can’t have seen us.”
“I reckon you’re right,” the Kid drawled. “If Smoke’s got us spotted he’ll let us git pretty well into the Grocery before he shows his hand.” He rolled a cigarette and stuck it between his lips. “We’ll be in a bad way if that happens; we’ll have hell front and rear—” He raised his hand to snap a match against his thumb nail.
“Don’t light that match!” Bill rasped. “That goes for the bunch of yuh!”
“Why, we’re still two miles from the Grocery,” Cherokee growled.
“That may be so,” Bill retorted, “but we ain’t strikin’ a light! It might be just as well to end the talkin’ too.”
They went on warily. Twenty minutes later they topped a low rise. Half a mile away yellow daubs of light outlined the windows of Black Grocery. To the east, beyond the ridge, the moon was giving evidence of its coming.
Little Bill got their attention with a whispered word.
“We’ll just go on easy as we have been,” he said. “It’ll be light enough to see a ways in a few minutes. We can size things up then.”
They had not proceeded a hundred yards when Cherokee flung his rifle to his shoulder and fired instantly at something off in the darkness just ahead.
“Damn your hide!” Bill cursed him. “Didn’t I tell yuh not to bang away like that?”
The Kid fired a second time. Below them they heard a man groan as he fell heavily. A horse dashed away.
“I dropped him,” the Kid muttered. “I knew what I was shootin’ at that time. I wasn’t any too quick.”
It put quite a different face on things. Bill forgot his anger.
“I reckon yuh couldn’t do nothin’ else,” he exclaimed. “No use tryin’ to creep up now. There go the lights! They know what it means!”
They saw that he spoke the truth. Upstairs and down every light had been extinguished. The Grocery and the barns across from it bulged blackly through the darkness. Along the ridge, however, the moon was touching the trees with silver.
“Come on!” Bill cried. “We’ll swing off to the left and come up behind the barns!”
The words were hardly uttered when a rifle spurted flame from a darkened window. As though answering a signal, a gun crashed, high on the ridge. In a second or two there was a savage burst of gunfire from the roof of the Grocery. They were shooting blindly, but they waited only for the moon to bathe the valley in its soft, silvery glow to give them a target.
“Don’t no one pull a trigger!” Bill shouted to his men. “They don’t know where we are and we don’t want ’em to!”
It was growing lighter every second. Even at a driving gallop it seemed to take them forever to get the barns between themselves and the store.
They made it, however. Bill glanced at them. They were all there.
“Scotty, you and Maverick hold these horses!” he barked. “The rest of yuh rip a board off this barn! We got to git through here!”
Prying the boards off with their rifle barrels, they made short work of getting inside the barn. They brought their horses in with them and stabled them alongside the Sontag string.
Across the away, a man bounced out of the door and started for the barns. Latch dropped him in his tracks. It brought a crashing fusillade from a dozen guns. Slugs screamed all about them, splintering the stable partitions and thudding dully into the timbers of the barn. Bitter Root cursed as one slapped the dust out of his vest.
“Push somethin’ up there and barricade that door!” Bill commanded hoarsely. “They’ll rush us any moment now!”
Bags of oats were stacked high in a corner. They toppled the pile over so it fell across the doorway. Link and Maverick grabbed one end of an old wagon box; Scotty and Tonto caught up the other end. Together they tossed it on top of the bags of oats. It made an excellent barricade.
Sprawled out behind it they began to pour a murderous fire into the store. It went unanswered for a moment. From around a corner of the building then eight men appeared. A little, bandy-legged man, a six-gun in either hand, led them in a concerted rush at the barn.
“It’s Little Arkansaw!” Bitter Root screeched. “Til handle him!” Disdaining the protection of the barrier, he stood up and began to pump his rifle.
From the rooms above the store came a rain of gunfire. A slug hit an iron strap on the wagon box and glanced off to tear a ragged hole through Bitter Root’s right shoulder. He shook himself like a terrier, and, undaunted, continued to blaze away. A blood-curdling yell burst from his lips as he saw Little Arkansaw go down and roll around in the dust.
Little Bill and the others were firing rapidly. The men who had dashed around the corner of the store held their ground doggedly for a minute or two, though it passed belief that any of them could escape being hit. Aside from Little Arkansaw, who had evidently been left in charge, they may never have figured importantly in Smoke Sontag’s plans, but they could fight. One of them bent down to pick up Little Arkansaw. A bullet smacked him. A leg buckled under him. He grabbed Little Arkansaw, however, and dragged him out of the line of fire. The others retreated with him.
“We stopped that!” Bill ground out fiercely. He looked his men over. Scotty Ryan lay stretched out on the floor. Bill flung himself down beside him. “Scotty —where did they git yuh?”
There was no answer. Scotty’s hair was matted with blood.
“He ain’t bad hurt!” Bill exclaimed after a hasty examination of the wound. “Somebody toss a bucket of water on him!”
It had the desired effect. Latch wrapped a shirt sleeve around Ryan’s head.
“See what yuh can do for Bitter Root!” Bill muttered.
“I don’t need none of yore fussin’!” the old man grumbled. “I’m still goin’ strong! It was a woman got me from thet corner window up there, damn her hide!”
“I noticed that,” Bill ground out. “There’s two or three of ’em up there. They been doin’ all that shootin’. I draw the line at turnin’ my guns on a woman, but “
“But nuthin’ I” Bitter Root growled. “The hissin’, spittin’ cats, they’re wus then any man yuh ever faced! Right when the shootin’ was the heaviest I saw one of ’em toss her empty rifle away and stand there and throw a water pitchur at us! Wimmen like them will cut yore heart out!”
“I’ll put a stop to that,” Bill promised. “It won’t take me long to git ’em out of there.”
“What do yuh aim to do?” Cherokee queried. The firing had ceased momentarily.
“I’m goin’ to smoke ’em out,” Little Bill snapped. Cupping his hands to his mouth, he shouted: “I’m givin’ yuh two minutes to git your women out of there! I’m touchin’ a match to the Grocery!”
“Go to hell!” a voice screamed back at him.
Bill had his watch out. His face was stony. The Kid wormed his way back to him.
“Say, you’re bluffin’ about this, ain’t yuh?” he snarled. “The Grocery is worth money to us!”
“Our hides is worth a lot more,” Bill answered him. “This thing has been a stand-off so far. The minutes are clickin’ away. First thing we know we’ll have Smoke’s bunch tearin’ into us. I said I’d give that crowd across the road two minutes—and I meant it!”
“That’s just two minutes too long!” Cherokee cried. “There’s a cellar under the rear of the store. Like as not they’ve got horses there. They can go out that way and give us the slip while we stand here gabbin’ “
“The Kid’s right!” Luther exclaimed. “They’ve pulled out and set the place afire themselves!”
“They have for a fact!” Latch cried. “That’s flames lickin’ along the roof!”
Bill put his watch away. The two minutes were up.
“Come on!” he ordered. “We’ll find out whether they’ve pulled away or not I Bitter Root, you stay here with Cherokee and Scotty. Luther and Maverick will go round one side of the store with Latch. The rest of yuh come with me.”
They darted across the road without a shot being fired at them. A few seconds later they met in the rear of the store. Two horses were tethered in the open cellar. Fresh droppings told them that six or seven horses had been quartered there a few minutes ago.
“They’re gone, all right!” Luther got out breathlessly. He started into the cellar only to have Bill stop him.
“There’s one of ’em that didn’t git away,” the red-haired one muttered.
“Yeh, he’ll never be no deader,” Latch declared, turning the body over with his boot. “By the looks of things some of the rest must be pritty well shot up.”
“Well, watch yourselves!” Bill exclaimed. “We’re goin’ in. If we can beat that fire out we’ll do it.”
“Why bother?” Luther demanded. “We ain’t no better off here than we are across the road as long as that barn stands there!”
“There’s nothin’ to stop us from burnin’ the barn down,” Bill told him. “She’ll go in a hurry. We can hold off fifty men then.”
Bill led the way up to the first floor of the store. The moonlight pouring in through the shattered windows enabled them to see well enough.
“What’s that?” Link gasped, freezing in his tracks.
From above came a thudding, scraping sound. It stopped for a moment and then began to move down the stairs.
“Stand back!” Bill warned tensely as he stuck out a foot and pushed the door open. A low gasp of astonishment broke from his lips as a woman backed down out of the smoke-filled stairway. She was dragging Little Arkansaw’s dead body.
She straightened up with a scream of hatred as she caught sight of them.
“You wolves,” she cried viciously, “you killed my man! I hope you rot in hell for it!”
Without warning she sprang at Luther and tried to wrest his rifle out of his hands. Latch pulled her away.
“Give her a hand with that thing, Maverick, and git her away from here!” Bill ordered. “Look out she don’t pull a knife on yuh!”
He ran up the stairs to the second floor. The others followed. One corner of the roof was ablaze, the flames eating down through the ceiling and one of the side walls.
“We can put that fire out on the roof!” Bill told them. “Soak some blankets and crawl up this ladder with me; Luther, you git an axe or two and knock down that side wall! You’ll have to move fast!”
In a few minutes they had the blaze on the roof under control. As they worked, the firelight made them easy targets. Not a shot was fired, however, those of Smoke’s men who had not been wounded having evidently ridden off to meet him.
“How yuh makin’ it down there?” Bill called to Luther.
“We got the fire blocked off!” Luther answered. “If yuh can spare a man or two we’ll beat it out!”
“I’ll git the boys from the barn!” Bill ran to the front of the building and got Cherokee’s attention. “Git the horses out of there and set that barn afire!” he shouted. “Yuh can put our string in back of the store! Git up here then! We need yuh!”
He stood there a moment, wondering whether Scotty and Bitter Root were in any shape to give the Kid a hand. He had almost instant proof of it as the three men hustled the horses out of the barn. Bitter Root and Scotty rode out then, leading Six-gun and the rest of their own ponies. The Kid was evidently busy firing the barn.
The two men did not wait for him. As they disappeared around the side of the store it was still for a moment. With a start, Bill realized that here was a chance for Cherokee to pull out. His jaws clicked together grimly as the thought burned into his brain. Rifle trained on the barn door, he waited.
The Kid seemed to be a long time about it if he were only firing the hay.
“He could slip out the back way,” Bill muttered.
He listened intently. A sound reached his ears. At first he thought it came from directly to the rear of the barn. He caught it again, however, and realized that it was the distant drumming of driving hoofs. He narrowed his eyes in a piercing squint but could see nothing. It was not necessary to have the proof of his eyes to know what it meant.
“It’s Smoke!” he droned.
Suddenly below him the barn burst into flame from one end to the other. Cherokee ran out into the road. The roaring flames crowded out all other sounds.
“Come on, git up here, Kid!” Little Bill yelped at him. “I’m waitin’ for yuh!”