Ghost Valley

by William W. Johnstone

  “I’m not goin’ to sleep tonight,” Slade said.

  “Why’s that?” Ned asked.

  Slade grinned. “I want to make damn sure I see the sun come up tomorrow mornin’.”

  Ned was fuming now. Even his two best gunmen, Lyle and Slade, showed signs of fear.

  “You ride back a ways, Billy,” Ned said. “Just a mile or two.”

  “I won’t do it, Ned.” Billy was certain it was a death sentence.

  “Are you disobeying a direct order from me?” Ned demanded as he opened his coat.

  “Yessir I am,” Billy replied. “If Morgan’s back there, he’ll kill me from ambush someplace.”

  Ned snaked his Colt from a holster. He aimed for Billy’s stomach. “Get on one of those horses and ride southwest to see if you can find Rich and Cabot. If you don’t, I’ll damn sure kill you myself.”

  Billy’s eyes rounded. “You’d shoot me down for not goin’ back?”

  “I damn sure will. Get mounted.”

  Billy backed away from the fire with his palms spread wide. “You let this Morgan feller get stuck in your craw, Ned. I never seen you like this.”

  “Get on that goddamn horse. See if you can find their tracks.”

  Billy turned his back on Ned and trudged off to the picket ropes.

  “You may have just gotten that boy killed,” Slade said tonelessly.

  * * *

  Bud felt something pierce his chest, pinning him to the ground. The last thing he saw before his eyes batted shut was the Indian, holding a bow with a quivering bowstring.

  Was the Indian Morgan’s sidekick? he wondered.

  But the Indian, who called himself Anasazi, wasn’t carrying a rifle.

  Bud felt his body rising off the ground, spinning in lazy circles.

  “What the hell is goin’ on?” he mumbled, then fell silent.

  * * *

  A slender figure dressed in deerskin leggings and a deerskin shirt bent over Bud, jerking his arrow from Bud’s rib cage with one savage pull.

  “Sleep, white-eyes,” he said, turning away quickly with the bloody arrow in his fist.

  He mounted a piebald pony and disappeared into the pine forest as dawn brightened the eastern horizon.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Show me where you found the three men,” Frank said, clinging to his saddle horn, shivering inside his coat from the fever from his wound and the below-freezing temperatures at this high elevation.

  “It’s a mile or so,” Buck said. “Can you stay on your horse that long?”

  “Yeah,” Frank whispered, thinking about Conrad and this second attempt by Ned Pine and Victor Vanbergen to hold him for ransom. “I can sit this saddle for a spell.” Clouds of swirling steam came out of his mouth when he spoke even though his lips were pressed tightly together, a mark of the anger welling inside him.

  Dog trotted out in front of them as they crested a ridge above Ghost Valley. Early rays of sunlight cast eerie shadows on the snowy forest floor, while a curious silence surrounded both horsemen.

  “Some of ’em will be comin’, lookin’ for the two I shot,” Buck said.

  “Let them come,” Frank snarled, fighting back the pain racing through his shoulder and chest. He wanted to end things between himself and the gunslicks, but he had to remember that Conrad’s safety was the most important thing and he couldn’t let personal grudges get in the way.

  Buck shrugged. “I’ll get as many of ’em as I can, Morgan, only it’s gonna be a helluva fight if they all come at us at once.”

  “I’ve never been in a fight that wasn’t hell,” Frank told him. “Never had an easy one in my life. But you don’t have to take a hand in this. I can handle it myself.”

  “In the shape you’re in? You’d have a hard time swat-tin’ a fly.”

  “I’ve never had an easy road through life.”

  “Don’t reckon I have either,” Buck recalled, guiding his pinto around a snowdrift. “Gettysburg was the worst. Never saw so many dead men in my life. I coulda been one of them. Took a ball in my leg. Ain’t been able to walk quite right ever since, but I was always thankful I didn’t wind up dead like so many of ’em did.”

  “No such thing as an easy war,” Frank said, keeping his eyes on the trees below as they rode over the lip of the valley to begin a steep descent.

  “Hold up, Morgan,” Buck said quietly, jerking his pinto to a halt.

  “What is it?” Frank asked, unable to see any movement in the trees.

  “Way down yonder, maybe half a mile or so. I just saw a man on a horse.”

  Frank reined his bay to a stop, trying to find the movement Buck had seen. “I don’t see a damn thing,” he said a moment later.

  “He’s gone now. Coulda been one of them Injuns, I suppose, or it might be one of Pine’s boys.”

  “Will the Indians bother us?” Frank asked.

  Buck shook his head. “They stay to themselves. A year can go by when me an’ Karen don’t see hide nor hair of ’em. Once in a while they’ll show themselves, but it’s only when they take a mind to.”

  “Are they the Old Ones, the Anasazi?”

  “Can’t say for sure. Main thing is, they don’t bother nobody.”

  “I hope they stay that way until this business between me and Pine and Vanbergen and his damned hired guns is over. I don’t need any Indian enemies now.”

  “Most likely they will stay out of it. All these years I been up here, we ain’t had no trouble out of ’em. Hardly ever see ’em, matter of fact.”

  “Let’s keep moving,” Frank said, heeling his horse forward. “I don’t see anything down there.”

  Buck merely nodded and urged his horse alongside Frank’s to continue their slow trek toward the snow-laden floor of Ghost Valley.

  Suddenly, Frank saw the outline of a man on a horse—he was wearing a bowler hat. Frank swung his horse into the trees and said, “I see one of them.”

  “I seen him too,” Buck said softly. “Looks like an Easterner wearin’ that derby.”

  “He’s real careful,” Frank observed. “He’s no Easterner by the way he uses cover to hide himself.”

  “I’ll flank him,” Buck suggested, easing his pinto away to the east. “Remember, there could damn sure be a bunch more of ’em somewheres.”

  “I don’t need a reminder,” Frank said, pulling his Winchester from its saddle boot.

  He jacked a shell into the firing chamber and sent his bay down the slope at a slow walk. The pain in his shoulder seemed less.

  * * *

  Cletus knelt over the bodies of Bud and Coy, examining the blood and footprints in the snow. What puzzled him most was the pair of moccasin prints near one of the bodies.

  He glanced around him. Maybe Frank Morgan wore moccasins when he was out in the wild.

  “Don’t make no damn difference to me what’s on his feet,” Cletus muttered.

  A moment earlier he’d thought he’d saw a pair of riders on one of the high ridges, but now they were gone. In the light of early morning, it was hard to tell. He supposed it could have been a couple of those Indians he saw when he found this hideout of Pine’s and Vanbergen’s.

  “A man’s eyes can play tricks,” he said, moving back to his horse to climb in the saddle. “But if it is Morgan, I’ll kill the son of a bitch an’ take that money. He’d damn sure better have that money with him.”

  Cletus mounted, collecting his reins, listening to the silence around him, watching everything.

  “It’s damn sure quiet,” he said to himself. “Downright unusual for it to be so quiet.”

  He urged his horse up the snowy slope, resting the butt of his ten-gauge shotgun on his right knee. If anyone showed up in front of him, he’d cut them to shreds with his Greener shotgun and take off for Texas with the money.

  Two hundred yards higher up the incline, a voice from the forest stopped him cold.

  “Hold it right there, pardner. Drop that damn goose gun or you’re a dead man!”


  Cletus thumbed back both hammers, aimed, and fired in the direction of the voice. One barrel bellowed, spitting out its deadly load of flame and buckshot. His horse shied and almost lunged out from under him, until he finally got the animal under control.

  “That was a mistake, pardner,” the same voice said.

  Half a second later, a rifle barked from the pines east of him—he saw the yellow muzzle flash just as something popped in his right hip, sending tiny tufts of lint from the hem of his coat flying into the air.

  “Shit!” Cletus cried, flung from his saddle by the force of impact from a ball of lead.

  He landed on his side in the snow, wincing, and his fall caused the second barrel of his shotgun to go off harmlessly toward the treetops.

  His horse galloped away trailing its reins, and Cletus understood the danger he was in almost at once. He was wounded, lying in a small clearing, with a gunman taking good aim at him from a spot Cletus couldn’t see clearly.

  “Bushwhackin’ bastard,” he croaked, beginning a slow crawl toward a ponderosa trunk with blood running down his pants leg to his right boot.

  The rifle thundered again, its slug missing him by mere inches, plowing up a furrow in the snow behind his head before he could make the tree.

  Cletus made the ponderosa and looked down at his leg. He was bleeding badly.

  Taking stock of his situation, he quickly realized how desperate his circumstances were. He was wounded in the hip, without a horse, trapped in a cluster of pines.

  “How the hell could I have missed seein’ the bastard,” he asked himself. Years of manhunting had given him good instincts for this sort of thing.

  He knew he had to stop the bleeding from his wound. He took a faded blue bandanna from around his neck and gingerly tied it around the top of his thigh.

  “I’ve gotta move . . . he knows where I am.”

  Painfully, yet carefully, Cletus began to crawl between the tree trunks, hoping he could find his horse. As he inched across the snow, he reloaded his shotgun.

  * * *

  Buck heard the twin shotgun blasts and the rifle shot, and he jumped off his horse in a clump of small blue spruce trees not far from the spot.

  “Morgan found him,” he whispered, leaving his pinto ground-hitched.

  He crept forward with his buffalo gun cocked and ready, unable to see who Morgan was shooting at.

  Then he saw a loose horse trotting back toward the valley floor, a saddle on its back.

  “Morgan got him,” Buck told himself.

  Looking uphill, he sought the place where the man in the derby hat had gone down. Whoever he was, he’d been knocked off his horse, but that was a long way from a sure sign that the man was dead.

  And there was another thing to consider . . . making sure he didn’t mistake Morgan for the enemy.

  Buck continued up the slope at a slow pace, pausing behind every tree to look and listen. He knew this country well, and he knew how easily a man could be fooled by what he thought he saw in front of him.

  * * *

  Frank was blinded by tears by the time he made it out of the saddle. He tied off his bay, cradling his rifle in the crook of his good arm. The man he was after had gone down little more than a hundred yards away.

  He sleeved tears of pain from his eyes.

  “Time to be real careful,” he told himself, beginning a slow walk downhill, a bit of carelessness he allowed himself due to his injury—and the need for haste to get to Conrad before Pine and Vanbergen killed him.

  A pistol shot roared from his left and he made a dive for his belly, tasting snow, feeling the shock of his fall all the way up to his sore shoulder.

  Bitter bile rose in his throat. “You missed me, you son of a bitch!” he cried, knowing how foolish it was to give his present position away.

  His answer was another gunshot, coming from more than a hundred yards away.

  “You’re a damn fool, whoever you are!” Frank bellowed, making sure he had some cover behind the trunk of a thick pine tree.

  “You’re the damn fool, Morgan!” a distant voice shouted back at him.

  Frank didn’t recognize the voice. “Who the hell are you, asshole?”

  “What difference do names make? Where’s all that goddamn money you’re supposed to be bringin’ to get that snivelin’ kid of yours back?”

  “I’ve got it right here. Come and get it!”

  “I’m gonna kill you, you old bastard.”

  “Make your play. I’ll be waiting for you. . . .”

  Another soft sound reached Frank’s ears, a movement in the snow.

  “Keep coming,” he said. “Keep thinking about all this money I’ve got in my money belt.”

  Now there was silence.

  * * *

  Cletus belly-crawled toward the place where he’d seen Morgan go down. In his mind’s eye, he could see a leather money belt filled with gold coins. He told himself that Morgan wasn’t as good as they said he was . . . if his own aim had been just a little bit better a moment ago, Morgan would be dead and all the ransom money would be his.

  He continued to inch forward on his elbows, his Greener shotgun clenched in one fist, his Colt in the other. He could almost feel the gold in his hands.

  Then he heard a whispering sound. A short arrow with a feathered shaft entered his side, penetrating his liver with a suddenness he’d never known before.

  “What the hell . . . ?”

  He rolled over just in time to see an Indian moving away from him among the pines.

  Blood pumped from Cletus’s wound. He dropped both of his guns to reach for the arrow shaft, and found it buried in his flesh almost all the way to the hilt.

  Shooting pains, like hot branding irons, raced down his body and across his chest. He tried to breathe, and couldn’t.

  A moment later, Cletus Huling, bounty hunter from Texas, was dead, never knowing who it was that killed him.

  * * *

  Victor went to a window of the shack. “Those were gunshots I heard,” he said, turning to Ken and Harry Oldham, brothers from the Texas Panhandle. “You boys ride up there. Maybe Huling got Morgan, but I’m gonna make damn sure Huling don’t double-cross us. If you find him, bring him down here with that money.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ken Oldham was riding his horse up a steep incline when he heard the thud of a gun. Something entered his abdomen like a hot knife.

  “I’m shot!” he shrieked, toppling out of the saddle into a snowdrift.

  Another gunshot blasted from a ridge above the lip of the valley.

  “Holy shit!” Harry bellowed, gripping his belly as a piece of hot metal passed through him, exiting next to his spine. He threw his rifle into the snow to hold onto the saddle horn with both hands.

  Harry jumped off his horse, gripping his wound with one hand. A sharpshooter from above was taking potshots at them in the shadows of dawn.

  “Help me, Harry,” Ken called from a dark place between two lines of trees.

  Harry didn’t answer him. Only a fool would give his position away now.

  Ken began to groan somewhere in the forest. “You gotta help me.”

  “Not now,” Harry muttered. The shots had come from more than two hundred yards away. It would take a hell of a marksman to make that kind of shot, and a very large-bore rifle to boot. But he had to go to the aid of his downed brother.

  * * *

  “Morgan,” Ken wondered aloud, gripping the stock of his rifle with gloved hands.

  He’d been sure they were following Frank Morgan’s trail of blood out of the valley, but now he wasn’t so sure. Who the hell was shooting at them? Morgan was supposed to be mortally wounded.

  “You gotta help me,” Ken cried again. “I’m shot through the gut. I’m bleedin’ real bad.”

  From another spot in the pine woods, Harry began coughing until his throat was clear. “Jesus.”

  Ken crawled over to a pine trunk. He was out of breath, and wheezed softly as
his gelding galloped away to escape the bang of guns.

  “I’m dyin’ over here,” he croaked. “You’ve gotta help me, Harry.”

  Harry was only thinking of surviving the sharpshooter himself. He lay still for a moment.

  “Where are you at, Harry?” Ken wondered, pain in his voice.

  Harry wasn’t about to answer him, making a target of himself, even though the cry came from his brother.

  The boom of a rifle came from above.

  “Damn! Damn! Damn!” Ken screamed, flipping over on his back.

  It was proof that Harry had been wise to remain silent until he knew where the rifleman was.

  “Please help me,” Ken called. “I’m hurt real bad. I don’t think I can move....”

  Harry wanted to make sure his legs would move as he made his way back down the slope. He said nothing, closing his ears to Ken’s cries.

  He could hear Ken choking. Under better circumstances he would have offered his brother some assistance, but not now. He knew with certainty that his life was at stake if he made the wrong choice.

  “Where’re you at, Harry?” Ken shouted. “You gotta come help me.”

  Harry squatted behind a tree with his rifle ready. His belly wound was bleeding badly.

  Moments later he felt himself losing consciousness, and when he looked down at the snow around him it was red with blood . . . his blood.

  He fell over on his chest and took a shuddering breath, wondering about his brother.

  * * *

  Dog led Frank over to two bloody bodies stretched out in the snow. Both men appeared to be dead. Dog growled and looked down the slope, a sure indication that someone else was close to the spot.

  Buck came up behind Frank, making almost no noise in spite of the new-fallen snow.

  “I got one more, maybe another,” Buck told him.

  “I heard them yell,” Frank said. “I still haven’t found the bastard wearing the bowler.”

  “Last I saw of him was down yonder.”

  “Yeah, but he isn’t there no more.”

  “Maybe you got him, Morgan.”

  “I missed. I saw bark fly off a tree when I had my best shot at him.”