With a speed and abruptness that startled Blade nearly out of his wits, the Indian leapt for cover, crying out sharply as he went. Neither Blade nor Doke got off a shot. Indeed, for the small space of a second, there was no reason to shoot. A man had simply come into their camp and left it hurriedly. You can’t kill a man for that—not unless you enjoy the work.
But as soon as the Indian disappeared, there was a crash of shots from what seemed to be all round the camp. Blade heard several slugs thud into the wagon. Several more tore at the foliage around Blade. He ducked down instinctively and, just as instinctively, fired at a muzzle-flash to the south of the camp. He heard Doke’s gun crack once.
The utter silence held the camp while the gunsmoke drifted lazily and the smell of burned powder filled the air.
Blade began to cautiously change his position, in case any of the enemy had marked his position from his gun-flash. Even though to his mind he made not a single sound, somebody behind him must have heard him for, almost at once, two shots came his way. One hit a tree trunk, the other struck rock and howled like a banshee off into the night. Blade swore. He was up against at least one man who knew his business.
I have a notion, thought Blade, that nobody tried to rape the girls at all. This shooting don’t mean these men want the girls. It means they want something the girls have and I don’t mean what you’re thinking, Blade, you dog. If he got himself out of this alive, he would surely find out what they had hidden under that false floor in the wagon.
A twig cracked faintly under a human foot.
Blade held his breath for a count of ten and listened intently, heard nothing and gently released his breath. Something was moving through the brush about thirty yards to the west. He reckoned that was his own horse moving uneasily. But the twig had cracked nearer to him. He cursed the horse and the faint sounds it was concealing.
There came a sudden rush of movement. His nerves, keyed tight as they were, responded instantly. Whirling and driving forward, he kicked hard. His ankle connected with the shins of a charging man. The fellow gave a short soft gasp of dismay and pitched forward. Blade snapped to his feet and drove at a dark shadow with the butt of the Winchester. The weapon connected with some soft part of the man’s body, hard, but the man did not give way under the blow, nor did he cry out. Blade sidestepped the shadowy shape as it came head first towards him. His eye caught the dull glitter of the long knife blade. He knew it missed him by no more than a fraction of an inch. He thrust out the Winchester hard to the fullest extent of his arm. This time the man expressed pain, but the expression only took the form of a low grunt. The blow did not stop him. Almost before Blade could realize it, the man was inside his guard. The man tried a short upward stab with the knife and Blade managed to parry it with a sharp downward cut with the edge of his hand so that the weapon was jarred from the man’s grasp. But Blade met a small disaster at the same time. The weight of the man’s body drove against him and caused him to stumble back. He tripped on some brush and went down with a crash. As soon as he tried to rise, he felt the man drop on him, his hands searching for his throat
Blade now realized that he had lost his carbine. The man’s two thumbs were pressing remorselessly on Blade’s windpipe. Blade rolled violently, but the man held to him like a limpet. To add pressure to his action, the man strained back from Blade’s body. Blade had only one chance and he took it. Even as he felt his strength going from him, he brought both his arms up between the other’s arms and forced them apart This dropped the man forward on to Blade, who, at the same instant rammed the top of his head into the man’s face. He heard the man’s nose crack. For a moment, the body on top of his seemed to go limp. This gave him the opportunity of hurling the fellow aside.
Blade tried to get up. Something very hard caught him in the throat. He was never sure what it was, but he guessed it was the toe of a boot. It didn’t much matter what did it—only the result was of any interest to him then. He fell deep into the brush and he lay choking there, fighting with a kind of frantic desperation to pull some breath into his lungs. He was seized by a terrible fear that he would never take in air again. The danger from the man near him, the safety of the two girls, everything paled beside his need to take in air. It seemed that the struggle was endless as he fought to get the life-giving air into his body.
He never knew how long he lay gasping there as desperate as any landed fish. He received a heavy blow in the chest from a fist and looked up to see Doke’s worried face above him in the gloom.
Doke said: ‘Joe,’ in a scared voice.
Tm all right,’ Blade said and realized with the utmost astonishment that he was breathing almost normally. Doke took him by the wrist and pulled him to his feet where he stood swaying a little and clinging to the trunk of a slender tree.
‘My God,’ Doke said, ‘for a minute I thought you was dead there.’
‘The girls?’ Blade said.
‘Sassy as ever,’ said Doke.
Blade screwed his head around to take a better look at him. Even in the dim light, there was something jaunty about the man.
Blade walked back to the camp. The two girls were standing talking together in low urgent tones. They broke off as the two men approached them.
‘Well,’ said Blade, ‘this shows us one thing for sure.’
‘What?’ demanded Salome,
‘From here on in, one of us stays awake the whole time. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to move camp.’
Roxanne said: ‘They’ll hear us and follow.’
Blade agreed she was right. ‘Doke hitches the mules while I take a scout round.’
To Blade’s surprise, Doke did not oppose the suggestion, but straightaway went to catch up the animals. Blade circled the camp several times and discovered nothing. They pushed forward a mile through the darkness with Doke driving the team and Blade riding guard. When they halted in what Blade considered to be a good spot, they put the mules on a picket line, they bedded the girls down in the wagon, Doke rolled up in a blanket underneath it and Blade played the part of a roving picket. Two hours before dawn, Doke relieved him. In the first light of dawn they looked like four people who had not slept much.
As they filled the water barrel at the nearby creek, Blade asked Doke, ‘Were you scared in that fight last night?’
To his further surprise Doke answered evenly: ‘No, I wasn’t scared. Should I of been?’
Blade looked at him and saw that Doke was changing character before his eyes. Maybe, he thought, that he had misjudged Doke. He hoped so.
He said: ‘I have a drink cached away if you could use one, Doke.’
The man swallowed and looked at Blade owlishly.
‘What makes you think I want a drink?’ he demanded. There was a slight shake in his voice.
‘Just wondered if you did, is all,’ said Blade.
Doke ignored him and got to work with the barrel. He sweated with the strain of rolling it and Blade knew that almost any physical effort was hell for him. It would take a good many weeks of hard work before the whiskey was sweated out of him.
They cursed and pushed the mules into the traces and were ready for another day on the trail. The girls seemed quiet and withdrawn. Blade reckoned the night attack had shaken them badly. They weren’t the kind to scare easily, but they were fully aware that they were in acute danger. Neither of them doubted that the men who had attacked them would be back again. The next time, they would be more cautious, would find a spot where resolute armed men could easily overpower the two men and two girls with a wagon.
Next time they come, Blade thought, they’ll make sure they don’t start anything till Doke and me’re in their sights. All he could do was to make sure that they did not ride near any good cover that could conceal an ambush. Beyond that, all he could do was somehow think of a counter-trap. He thought hard as he rode along. When they stopped at noon, he inspected the interior of the wagon. There were two mattresses in there and a number of blankets. He test
ed the mattress with his hands. They felt as if they were close-packed with something like horse-hair. Using some rawhide rope, he lashed them in position on each side of the wagon-bed, inside the vehicle. Then he soaked the blankets with water and hung them from the tops of the canvas cover. He did not secure the bottoms of the blankets, for he wanted them to move when struck by flying lead. Not at all a bad shield against flying lead. That done, he felt a little less apprehensive for the girls. They watched him with some curiosity.
Salome said icily: ‘Do you expect that to stop a bullet, Blade?’
‘I know it will,’ he said and walked away.
Roxanne ran after him and caught hold of his arm.
‘We’re not ungrateful,’ she said. ‘Don’t think that.’
He said: ‘Just earning my hundred dollars is all.’ She didn’t care too much for that and turned back to her cousin who said in an unladylike fashion: ‘He gives me a pain in my ass.’
Roxanne said: ‘I think I have him going, Sal. By the time we get to Denver he won’t know which way up he’s walking.’
Salome said: ‘You’re welcome. Me—I think that Doke has a kind of subtle charm.’
Roxanne said: ‘Like Blade said, he’s a drunken bum.’
‘Some of the cutest men we ever knew were drunken bums and don’t you forget it.’ They burst out laughing and they laughed so much they had to cling to each other or they would have fallen down.
Before they set off after the noon halt, Doke said quietly to Blade: ‘Joe, that Salome is sure gettin’ to me.’
Blade gave him a quick look.
‘They’re grapes for plucking, guapas, as the Mexicans say. But that don’t stop them both from being con artists.’
‘Careful how you talk careless,’ said Doke, flushing up. ‘I’m sure thinking of sparkin’ that gal serious. Yeah, I’m contemplatin’ it.’
‘Contemplate all you want,’ said Blade. ‘Let’s put it this way—you do what you like below the waist, but keep the few brains you have out of it.’
Doke thought that was fighting talk, but Blade walked away to mount his horse and Salome was calling him to drive the wagon.
When he had settled himself on the driving seat and was preparing to persuade the mules to hit their collars as one, Doke turned to the girls who were lying down in the bed of the wagon and said: ‘Be my witness, I’ll fix that Blade so he don’t talk so smart.’
Roxanne giggled rather charmingly and said: ‘Leave him in one piece, Doke darlin’, I could maybe put him to good use.’ Doke thought that was a funny kind of remark from a young lady who hired men to protect her against rape. She could have saved two hundred dollars if she could persuade herself to lie back and enjoy it.
He didn’t mind driving the wagon one little bit. In fact, he found, when he could forget that there might be a bunch of blood-thirsty bushwhackers lying in wait around the next corner, that he enjoyed it. So would any man with red blood in his veins if all he had to do to see two beautiful women was to simply turn his head. He did it fairly frequently on the smoother stretches of the trail. He was gazing down into Salome’s eyes when the shot came.
Chapter Five
The nigh wheeler of the team seemed to attempt to leap into the air out of the traces. When it came down on its four feet, its legs collapsed under it as if they were made of sodden bread. Blade did not have to glance at it twice to know that it was dead before it went down.
‘Six goddam mules,’ he exclaimed in disgust, ‘and it has to be mine that’s shot.’
The wagon came to a staggering halt. The mule team went crazy. Animals kicked over their traces. The two leaders tried to make a break in opposite directions. It did not seem possible that one wagon and five mules could constitute so much chaos.
Doke showed sense. He got himself back into the wagon before the echo of the shot had died away.
Now other guns sounded and Blade knew that he was a sitting target out there in the open on a horse. It was not easy with lead singing viciously about one’s ears to assess a situation such as that. All Blade knew was that it felt as if he were surrounded entirely by rifles that were all intent upon his demise. He had, it seemed, two choices—to get in the wagon or to get in the rocks. He stood to be shot which way he went. So he swung the horse for the nearest rocks which were no more than a dozen jumps away.
The law that caused his mule to be shot must have been the same law that produced a rifleman among the very rocks for which Blade was headed. He saw the head and shoulders of a man, the outstretched arm and the very thumb that pulled back the hammer. There was no time to do anything but keep on going. So that was what he did.
The fellow fired and missed. The fellow’s head almost disappeared in gunsmoke. Then Blade was past him and the horse started to stumble among the rocks. Blade threw himself from the saddle as he ripped his Winchester from its boot. He heard the man shoot again as he himself flung himself down. He heard the bullet strike a rock and whine away into the blue.
His mind told him: Blade, my son, you’re in a cleft stick. Try and get out of this one.
Still flat, he looked around hastily. His vision was limited by the rocks and brush around him. He heard the rattle of loose rocks. A man shouted. Guns seemed to be going off all around him. He knew that the only thing that would get rid of the enemy would be several deaths among their ranks. It didn’t look like a very bright prospect to him.
There was a dark figure between him and the sun. No detail was distinguishable. He raised his shoulders from the ground and fired the Winchester one-handed. The range was short enough for a child, but he missed. That was the way it went sometimes in the excitement of fights such as this.
Calmly does it now, Blade.
The man above him suffered from the same weakness. He too missed. The shot chipped rock splinters into Blade’s face. Blade levered the Winchester, consciously slowing his movements a fraction. The other man fired twice and missed with both shots. As he thumbed for his next shot, Blade drove a shot into the center of the target.
The man seemed to go very still for a moment. Then he slowly fell backward out of sight.
There were shouts near him and on the far side of the wagon.
Now he knew he had to be careful. The girls were handling rifles as they had in the first attack and Blade and Doke had rescued them. So there were three rifles in the wagon and Blade in his present position could run into a bullet from any one or possibly all of them. To be shot by his own side would come under the above-mentioned law. The thought did not inspire him. He decided to play the game with his head down.
A man was shouting: ‘Get that bastard in the rocks. Goddam you, get him.’
Blade started to crawl on hands and knees as fast as he knew how. He covered about a dozen yards when he halted and listened. There was a sudden lull in the shooting. Gunsmoke drifted and sound-stunned ears still heard the rattle and slam of gunfire. Blade thought he heard the clink of metal on rock. Raising his head very cautiously, he saw a man not more than six paces away from him, showing him his profile. He was a tall man with a black beard neatly clipped. He wore a high-crowned Stetson with four finger-pinches in the crown. It was new. He held a repeating carbine and at his hip he packed a new Colt’s gun in an old greasy holster that was tied down on his right thigh. That was about all Blade could see. But when one gunfighter looks at another, it is not so much what physical facts he sees that count, so much as those facts which he feels. Blade could feel the utter calm and self-possession of this man.
‘I’m over here,’ Blade said.
The man did not turn quickly. He knew that when a man spoke that way, he had you covered. He turned his head slowly and his eyes met Blade’s.
He smiled ever so gently.
‘Joe Blade,’ he said in a kind of mild wonder. ‘I should have known.’
‘Lister,’ Blade said. ‘How’ve you been?’
‘Tolerably well,’ said the other. ‘What’re you at, Joe? You’re on the wrong side
this time. What brought the change about?’
‘There’s no change,’ Blade said. ‘I’m still my own man.’
‘So you may think,’ said Lister. ‘Now, get up, you look kind of foolish lyin’ there.’
Blade said: ‘I’ll do well enough. You always thought you were faster’n me, Harry. Now’s your chance to prove it. Put the rifle down.’
‘All right.’ Lister laid his rifle on a nearby boulder and slowly turned to face Blade, saying: ‘Start the ball, Joe.’
As the man spoke, Blade heard the faint sound behind him, the soft scrape of hide on rock. As sure as God made little green apples that Indian was behind him.
He heard one of the girls scream.
Two distant shots.
His hand dropped the Winchester and swept the Colt from leather. His position was awkward, yet his confidence was complete. So far as Lister was concerned, but not the Indian behind him. As soon as he fired the first shot, he half-rolled hard, thrust out his right arm and triggered the second. Only as he fired did he find the Indian, poised on a large boulder above him, ready to leap down on him. The shot missed, but he at once thumbed and triggered again. The Indian hurled himself off the boulder. Blade rolled hard to the right, then, assuming that he had hit the Indian, he rose to his knees and turned to face Lister.
Lister had gone from sight. Blade could almost have laughed, the action was so characteristic of the man. He swung back to the Indian to find the fellow slipping away silently through the rocks. Now he knew he had winged him from the trail of blood left on the rocks.
He started going south through the rocks, now and then catching a glimpse of the wagon. Shooting ceased. The mules had quietened somewhat and now only showed their nervousness by the tossing of heads and rolling of eyes. They would have run if they could, but they were held back by the weight of their dead team-mate added to that of the wagon.
Blade 5 Page 4
