Brian Garfield (20 page)

He led it back to his little clearing and tied it up. Had a quick look at the gold and checked the lashings on his prisoners. He didn't answer any of their questions or threats. He went back to the road and hiked up the blankets and tightened the tripwires and waited for the next bunch.

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He had nearly a two-hour wait. He heard them coming; one of them was whistling
Dixie
and it made Boag's lip curl.

Only two of them this time, a team like Jackson and Smith: a fat one and a thin one. Otherwise they had the same stamp of the other rawhiders: the short-brim Border hats, the double-cinch Texas saddles, the flannel shirts and beat-up Levi's and scuffed Missouri boots and the same hard half-shaven faces. As they came up the road he recognized Sweeney, the one who was whistling.

When they hit the wire he dropped the blankets on them and stepped out into the road with a .45 in his fist. With his free hand he grabbed the lead-rope of the pack horse.

He couldn't find a head to beat on; he just waited for the rawhiders to get untangled.

Sweeney's partner rolled out from under the blanket; he'd been hurt—maybe hit by a horse's hoof. Boag watched him for a second and then holstered his gun and bent down to pluck the man's gun from his holster. The man didn't even notice; he'd been clipped on the elbow and was holding it cupped in his other hand, rolling around in a silent agony, too hurt to scream.

Holding the man's gun Boag turned to look for Sweeney and found him coming up from the blanket trying for his gun.

Boag would have been dead there if Sweeney's fall hadn't hitched his gun belt around. The holster was somewhere behind Sweeney's butt and he was still trying to find it when Boag cocked the revolver and leveled it.

“Quit that, Sweeney.”

“You.”

“Yeah me. Unbuckle that thing and leave it drop.”

So now he had five men neutralized and two pack-horse loads of gold.

When he got Sweeney and his partner wired up to trees in the clearing he rigged up the blankets again and inspected the wires. One of the tripwires had snapped and he replaced it.

Assume these loads were the same size as the one Jackson had cached. If all the gold was split up this way, there'd be maybe six more loads on the way in. But most likely Mr. Pickett had already spent some of it and had kept some more. Mr. Pickett had got a lot of paper scrip from Don Pablo of course and he'd probably used that, rather than the gold, to pay off the corrupt officials of the Pesquiera regime; but he wouldn't have let all the gold out of his reach. Boag expected that if he managed to shanghai two more loads it would do the job; three more would guarantee it.

He got another installment somewhere around one o'clock. Two riders again, the pack on a mule this time. One of the horses got through the first line of tripwires but fell over the second line. The blankets were getting ripped up by now and one of the men showed an inclination to fight but then like the others he discovered he was looking into the black orifices of two steady forty-five caliber muzzles and he thought better of it. You didn't fight the drop; that was a first rule of anything.

That made seven prisoners and close to a hundred-thousand dollars U.S.

It was a lot of hard men to be leaving off by themselves in the woods. He kept re-checking their wire lashings at close intervals because it only took one loose wire to bring all seven of them down on him.

He made a cache of all their weapons and kept it close to his position by the side of the road. Most of their saddle horses had drifted off somewhere and perhaps some of them would wander up into Mr. Pickett's fortress. That was all right, that was fine. He wanted Mr. Pickett to get nervous.

Mr. Pickett had to be nervous by now anyway. No gold had showed up yet. Mr. Pickett was going to get angry and worried.

That was part of the idea.

He hadn't bothered to try putting gags in his prisoners' mouths. Right now they could yell all they wanted to; nobody except Boag was going to hear it. They wouldn't have any way of knowing when their friends were approaching— he had them tied up beyond earshot of the road—so they couldn't warn the approaching gold riders. There wasn't much they could do with their mouths right now except complain.

Then at half past two he was in trouble. He could see them coming up the road toward him and they were too many. Five men and two pack horses.

Obviously it was two groups who had met on the way in. They'd joined up and now they were spinning yarns happily and Boag didn't see what the hell he could do about it because in one minute they were going to hit the tripwires.

3

They were strung out along a forty-foot patch of road and when the leading pair of riders hit the tripwires Boag dropped the blankets on them and spun his guns onto the other three, stepping out in plain sight and talking loud:

“Now freeze. Right now.”

But it was no good, they were fighting men and they'd been ambushed before; they were yanking reins and ducking before the words were out of Boag. Boag shot one of them out of the saddle and dived back into the trees and their guns opened up; Boag wheeled behind the pines and saw one of the rawhiders lift his leg over, light on both feet and fire from a crouch under the horse's belly. The bullet hit the tree right by Boag and drove wood splinters into his left hand; he almost lost his grip on the revolver.

He answered the shot but the horse got in the way and he heard the horse scream; the man was dodging into the pines.

The other one was somewhere in the trees on the opposite side of the road; Boag could hear his horse crashing through the brush. The pack horses were still in the road, rearing.

Boag moved ten feet through the trees and put his attention on the tangle of blankets and horses and men in the road where he'd netted the first two; the men were getting out from under it now and the shooting had told them what was happening. Boag got down on one knee and laid the righthand pistol barrel across his left forearm and when the first man batted out from under the blanket Boag shot him in the chest.

The other one came out shooting, throwing the blanket off him in violent rage. But he made the mistake of looking at his wounded partner and that gave Boag plenty of time. Boag's first shot hit him somewhere in the upper chest and the second one a little lower.

He still had one on each side of the road, both of them in the woods.

Boag moved fast. He didn't care about the noise because the rawhiders were just as deaf as he was now: you didn't hear much of anything for a little while after firing off guns close to your own ears.

He went back into the woods looking for the one he'd last seen afoot. The man would be advancing on Boag's roadside position; Boag got away from there as fast as he could and then began circling back so that he might come up behind his stalker.

He'd fired five out of the right-hand gun. It was one of the revolvers he'd taken off a rawhider; he had four of them stuck in his belt. It was a Smith & Wesson .44 and he had no more cartridges for it so he dropped it and drew out a .45 and slowed his swing through the trees now; he kept swiveling his head fast to pick up movement in the forest shadows but he couldn't see anything stir and his ears were still jangling from all the hard racket.

This was when you got fully scared. There just wasn't any way to know when the other fellow would spot you and take a bead on your back.

Then he spotted the movement. Back close to the road; the man was moving up the road just inside the trees.

Boag didn't run after him; Boag settled down on one knee and took steady aim on the spot where the man would next appear.

But the man was too smart for that; in a stalk fight you never traveled in a straight line, it gave the enemy a chance to set you up in advance. The man never showed up in that hole in the trees and Boag was back where he'd been before with two of them out against him.

A horse broke through the trees with a lot of noise; there was an instant when the noise stopped abruptly and all Boag heard was the thunder of hoofbeats, and then the crashing started up again and subsided as the horse slowed down.

He knew what it meant. The man on the far side of the road, the one still on horseback, had made his run to get himself back onto this side of the road. So now they were both here in the woods not far from him.

Then over the ringing in his earshe heard dimly the call of a man's voice which quickly became a chorus of yelling.

That was Boag's seven prisoners back in the clearing, calling to their friends.

It gave Boag his solution; he broke into a run.

4

Watching the horseman approach, Boag held his fire. He wanted both of them in sight.

He had a stitch in his ribs; he had run like a son of a bitch all the way to the perimeter of the clearing. He'd stopped there in a jungly tangle of brush where the seven prisoners couldn't see him. They were still bellowing for help and Boag let them go right on yelling; they were a beacon for the two rawhiders to home in on. It would draw the rawhiders and Boag would wait for them.

It had worked with the one on horseback. Boag saw him stop the horse a hundred feet away and scan the forest with patient care, gun up. If he came too close Boag would have to nail him but he wanted to wait for the other one, the one on foot.

Boag's legs felt as if they'd been attacked by a red-hot cross-cut saw. He was in no condition for sprinting; practically a cripple and here he was trying to outrun a horse. The whole damn thing was madness.…

He saw the horse stir and he watched out of a corner of his vision while the horseman proceeded cautiously toward the yelling. Boag put most of his attention on the woods to his left because that was where he expected the dismounted one to show up.

The shifting shadows were uncertain; twice he thought he saw something but it turned out to be branches roughed up by the breeze. Grey clouds were drifting over the woods and starting to mass; there might be rain later on and he didn't want that, it would soak all his blasting powder apparatus. But there was no time to worry about that.

He let all the air out of his lungs and whooshed in a massive breath and held it a while before he exhaled all of it and filled his chest again close to capacity. It was an old trick he had learned; it kept you from panting after fast exertion. It wouldn't do to be all out of breath when you had to have a steady aim. But the big black body was beat-up and he didn't have the reserves he'd had before the injuries; blood flowed in his eyes and pulses throbbed all through him. He couldn't tell how well he was going to be able to shoot even if he wasn't out of breath.

The horseman was taking his time, moving forward a few yards and stopping to keen the forest, then walking the horse a few paces and stopping again to search. When he got a little closer he'd spot Boag easy.

There was no more time. Boag locked down his aim the best he could; he'd just have to hope the shot didn't pinpoint him for the other man in the woods.

There was a red haze across his eyes and the gunsights wouldn't hold still. He took a huge breath and let some of it out and held the rest in his chest; he gripped both hands on the revolver's handle and laid his right thumb up along the recoil plate the way you did on the handgun range at Fort Lowell but it still wasn't enough; the pulsebeat made the muzzle jump off target every time. He felt like an old man with palsy and he got very angry with himself.

The horseman slowly lifted his right leg across the saddle-horn. He was going to drop to the ground and proceed on foot. Some sound arrested him that way and he sat precariously on top of his saddle, turning his head in a slow half circle trying to figure out what had alerted him.

He was looking right at Boag when Boag squeezed the trigger. The explosion startled Boag, as it should; but he knew he'd missed and when he went to cock the gun he saw the rider gather himself to dive off the saddle. Boag emptied the gun as fast as his thumb would slip the hammer; the shots roared like a string of giant firecrackers.

One of the bullets hit the rider somewhere, not mortally; he spilled awkwardly to the ground and started to crawl. Boag pulled a fresh gun and poured the whole cylinder at him in desperation.

The man fell flat with his gun splayed out from an outstretched hand but Boag still wasn't confident he'd hit him again; the man could be playing. Boag dropped the two empty revolvers and pulled his last pair and moved through the trees, approaching the downed man by stages, keeping near cover and watching the whole world for a sign of that other man.

The man on the ground began to struggle with his elbows and toes, trying to crawl. He was hit pretty bad but Boag got twenty feet closer to him and deliberately shot him twice, killing him, because a dead man wouldn't get up behind him and shoot him.

When the bullets started spraying at him the only thing that saved Boag was the thickness of the timber. Branches deflected the first ones—he heard them scream viciously—and by that time Boag's sluggish reflexes caught up and he was diving into the brush, curling himself behind the bole of a pine mindless of the twigs that raked his face and hands and laid his skin open.

He saw the faint muzzle-flash of the sixth shot and felt the tree jar a little when the bullet slammed into it. He knew where the man was but there was no point answering the fire; underbrush would do the same thing to his bullets that it had done to the rawhider's.

It was one of the few times in his memory that Boag wished he had his hands on one of the .45-70 Springfield carbine single-shots that every soldier in the Army hated. The big ball of lead would cut through any amount of brush and keep right on going until it hit something big enough to stop it.

But all he had was a pair of revolvers and two legs that were giving out on him, and blurred vision and a sense that the last cards had just been turned over and he'd lost the game.

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