From the warrior’s expression, it was obvious he thought Sam was completely loco.
“Look, you can go back,” Sam went on. “I never expected you to come this far with me. I’ll handle things from here on out.”
“You are being foolish.”
“Maybe, but it’s my choice to make, isn’t it?”
Juan Pablo scowled.
“If you die, what will happen to the man in my hogan?”
“If I don’t come back, as soon as Matt has recovered he’ll come looking for me. And if they’ve put me under, he’ll avenge my death. You don’t have to worry about being stuck with Matt.”
“Do what you want,” Juan Pablo snapped. “I am going back.”
He stalked over to his pony, leaped on the animal’s back, and galloped off, soon vanishing except for a thin pillar of dust that rose in the west.
Sam was glad to see him go. He was glad for Juan
Pablo’s help, but the warrior wasn’t the best company in the world.
Several hours of daylight were left. That was enough time for Sam to cover some of the ground between here and Flat Rock.
He rode back to the arroyo and picked up the trail there. He could have followed the wagon tracks, but there was still a slim possibility that the wagon and its escort weren’t the same bunch that had jumped him and Matt.
He hadn’t gone more than half a mile, though, when the two trails merged. The men who had fled from the battle at the arroyo had rejoined the wagon, and all of them had headed southeast toward the settlement called Flat Rock.
Sam’s eyes constantly searched the barren landscape around him as he followed the tracks. He didn’t expect to run into an ambush ... but he and Matt hadn’t been expecting the one several days earlier, either. Out here on the frontier, it was always a good idea to be alert.
From time to time, Sam even checked behind him to make sure Juan Pablo hadn’t changed his mind and started following him. He didn’t know of any reason the Navajo warrior would do that, other than sheer contrariness, which Juan Pablo seemed to have in abundance.
The trail didn’t deviate much from its southeastward course, just enough now and then to avoid natural obstacles, like the scattered red rock mesas and stone chimneys that thrust up from the plains around them.
From time to time Sam came to narrow creeks that were little more than trickles, but in this dry, dusty land, that was enough water to cause lines of green where mesquites and stunted cottonwoods grew on the banks. The countryside wasn’t what anybody would call pretty, but Sam had been in worse places.
When the sun was touching the western horizon behind him, he began looking for a place to make camp. He settled for a place beside one of those narrow streams, so he and his horse would have water and he could refill his canteens.
Quickly, he picketed and unsaddled his horse, then gathered buffalo chips and used them to fuel a small fire just big enough to boil some coffee.
As soon as he’d done that, he scooped sand on the flames to extinguish them and sat back to make a meager supper on the venison and dried corn he’d brought from the Navajo canyon.
When Sam had finished eating, he stood up and plucked a large handful of bean pods from the mesquites. He scattered them around the area where he intended to spread his blankets.
If anyone approached those blankets in the darkness, they would either step on the pods, causing them to crunch under the skulker’s boots, or kick them and set the beans to rattling. Either way, the noise would serve as a warning.
He spread the blankets and set his saddle where he could use it as a pillow, then placed his hat on the saddle. Then he took his Winchester and stepped across the creek. It was narrow enough that he didn’t even get his boots wet.
He walked along the stream for about fifty yards to a place where the bank had caved in some and formed a little hollow. After poking in that space with the rifle barrel to make sure no rattlers were lurking in it, Sam settled down with his back in the hollow. He could sleep sitting up when he had to, and tonight his gut told him that might be a good idea.
The heat of the day lingered as night fell, although it would cool off some before morning. Sam’s eyelids grew heavy as he sat there with the Winchester across his lap. He let himself doze off. He knew there was probably no need for so much caution, but better to be careful than dead.
When he woke up, sometime far in the night, at first he didn’t hear anything and wondered what had roused him from slumber. A couple of seconds later, mesquite pods rattled. There was no wind, so he knew they weren’t swaying on the trees.
That was confirmed an instant later when a man’s voice ripped out a curse and ordered, “Ventilate him!”
Six-guns began to roar. Sam leaned forward as he saw orange flashes stab from the muzzles of two revolvers. He knew they were pouring lead into his blankets, saddle, and hat, and he wasn’t happy about the damage they’d be doing to those items.
Better than putting holes in his hide, though.
He brought the Winchester to his shoulder, levering a round into the chamber as he did so. The rifle cracked as he aimed just above one set of muzzle flashes.
Sam triggered half a dozen swift rounds, shifting his aim to the other bushwhacker in the middle of the volley.
He heard yells of pain that told him some of his bullets had scored, but the gunmen didn’t stop firing. They just shifted their aim to his sanctuary along the creek.
Sam pulled back as far into the hollow as he could as slugs smacked into the dirt wall next to him. He waited for a lull, then cranked off another four rounds, spraying the shots along the opposite side of the creek bank where the men had believed him to be camped.
That was enough for them. They held their fire and retreated. Sam heard them running, followed a moment later by the clatter of hoofbeats as the bushwhackers galloped away.
Wary of a trick, he stayed where he was and took advantage of the opportunity to reload the Winchester, thumbing cartridges through the loading gate until the magazine was full again. Once he had done that, he waited some more, until finally he stood up and made his way cautiously toward the campsite.
He had picketed his horse a short distance away, hoping the animal would be out of the line of fire if any trouble broke out. That was the first thing he checked, and he was relieved to see that the horse appeared to be fine, other than being a little spooked by the racket and the stench of powder smoke in the air.
When Sam approached the spot where he had spread his blankets, he saw several dark splashes on the ground. Kneeling, he touched a finger to one of those splashes, then rubbed it against his thumb.
Blood, he was pretty sure. So he had winged at least one of the men, no doubt about that. Not fatally, though, and possibly not even seriously, because both of the bushwhackers had been able to flee like they had wings on their feet.
He straightened and went over to his bedroll. His hat lay off to one side where it had been thrown by the bullets that hit it.
Sam picked it up and held it over his head. Stars shone through the holes ripped in the hat. He grunted. He could always buy another hat, but not another head.
The leather on his saddle had been torn, too, and slugs had gouged grooves in the wood underneath it. That damage could be repaired, and his blankets could be patched and mended.
He gathered his gear, stuffed the ruined hat in one of his saddlebags, and saddled his horse. He was moving his camp in case the bushwhackers came back with reinforcements.
Sam followed the creek for a couple of miles before he found another place to settle down for the rest of the night. In the morning it would be easy enough to come back to the site of the ambush and pick up the trail again.
In other ways, though, the situation had become much more complicated. As he lay looking up at the stars, he asked himself how the bushwhackers had known where to look for him. He supposed it was possible the leaders of the bunch, whoever they were, could have posted men to watch the trail and a
mbush anyone who seemed to be searching for them.
It was also possible that the two men who’d snuck up on his camp tonight had nothing to do with what had happened several days earlier. They could have been a pair of drifting outlaws bent on murder and robbery.
But if they weren’t ... if they were connected to the men who had tried before to kill Sam and Matt ... now they knew one of their intended victims was on their trail.
That meant if they were in Flat Rock, they would be on the lookout for him when he rode into town. This was going to make his job even more difficult and dangerous.
But that was nothing new, Sam told himself. He and Matt didn’t go looking for trouble, but it seemed to find them anyway. This was just one more instance of that happening.
He would deal with whatever was waiting for him in Flat Rock when he got there, Sam told himself. He rolled over and went to sleep.
Chapter 12
Zack Jardine was in a bad mood when the pounding on the door woke him. He sat up in the tangle of grimy sheets and muttered a curse.
The woman who lay beside him shifted a little and muttered in her sleep. Jardine couldn’t remember her name. Dolly, Dotty, something like that.
It didn’t matter. She was a whore, and that was more important than what her name was.
Somebody was still hammering on the door with a fist. Dolly had taken a nip of laudanum when she and Jardine were through with their business, so it wasn’t likely she was going to wake up anytime soon.
That racket was liable to rouse anybody else who was sleeping, though, so Jardine swung his legs off the bed and stood up.
If that was one of his men at the door, drunk as a skunk, Jardine intended to whip him within an inch of his life.
Wearing only the bottom half of a pair of longjohns, Jardine fumbled around on the little table beside the bed until he found a match. He snapped the lucifer to life and held it to the wick of the candle that sat on the table as well.
Then he turned to the ladderback chair where he had hung his gunbelt. He pulled the Colt from its holster and looped his thumb over the hammer.
With the candlelight shining on the heavy slabs of muscle on his chest and shoulders, he went to the door.
“What the hell is it?”
As soon as the question was out of his mouth, Jardine took a quick step to the side, just in case whoever was in the hall fired a slug through the door.
Of course, if somebody wanted to kill him, the varmint might figure he would do that. In that case it would be a matter of the man guessing whether Jardine moved left or right.
Fifty-fifty odds. Jardine could live with that. He’d faced worse odds before and was still alive.
No shot sounded in the hallway. Instead a man called through the thin panel, “Zack, Joe Hutto just rode in with Three-Finger Smith. Three-Finger caught a bullet.”
Jardine jerked the door open. He had recognized Dave Snyder’s voice.
“How bad is he hurt?”
Snyder shook his head.
“I don’t know. That Englisher woman’s takin’ a look at him now. She claims to know somethin’ about doctorin’. I think he’ll live, though.”
“Joe’s still downstairs?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be down in a minute to talk to him. I want to know what happened.”
“I got a pretty good idea what happened, Zack,” Snyder said. “Somebody’s on our trail.”
“That’s what I think, too,” Jardine said. “Tell Joe not to go anywhere.”
“You bet,” Snyder said as Jardine swung the door closed.
Jardine went to pull his clothes and boots on. The night was warm, and Dolly—if that was her name—had thrown the covers aside. Jardine glanced at her naked body.
She was young and still relatively pretty, with a lot of curly blond hair, and under other circumstances he might have tried to wake her up enough to have another go with her ... or maybe not even bothered waking her.
But he had more important things to worry about now, such as the potential threat to the deal for those stolen rifles.
Jardine buckled on his gunbelt and left Dolly sleeping there. He clattered downstairs to the main room of the Buckingham Palace, the saloon and whorehouse that was the biggest building in the relatively new town of Flat Rock.
According to the banjo clock on the wall behind the bar, it was nearly two o’ clock in the morning. The place was still open but not very busy at that hour. Only about a dozen men were in the barroom, and more than half of them were Jardine’s men.
Including the one stretched out on the bar, bleeding onto the hardwood from the bullet hole in his side.
The auburn-haired woman who called herself Lady Augusta Winslow looked up from examining the wound and said coolly, “I charge extra for medical services, Mr. Jardine. I assume you’ll cover the expenses incurred for the care of your man here.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jardine replied, not bothering to try to keep the irritation out of his voice. “How’s Three-Finger doing?”
“With the proper treatment, he should survive. The bullet’s still inside him, so it will have to be removed. If he lives through the surgery, he’ll be fine.”
Jardine gave the woman a curt nod.
“Go ahead. But be careful. He’s a good man.”
That was one of the rare occasions when someone had used the term “good man” to refer to Three-Finger Smith, so called because he had only three fingers on his left hand.
A lot of hombres on the frontier were missing fingers, but usually the loss was the result of an accident, like getting a finger caught in a rope while taking a dally around the saddlehorn.
Three-Finger had lost his index and middle fingers when the husband of a married woman caught him with those fingers where they shouldn’t have been. Faced with the choice of getting a bullet in the head or laying his hand out flat on a table, the man previously known as plain Hal Smith had chosen the table, whereupon the offended husband had promptly chopped off the offending digits with a Bowie knife.
The man would have been smarter to chop fingers off Smith’s gun hand, because as soon as Three-Finger, as he was newly dubbed, had the injury wrapped up, he returned and shot the luckless cuckold in the back.
The man was on top of his wife at the time, trying to mend the fences of her straying, and the bullet went all the way through him and killed her, too.
Jardine had heard Three-Finger tell that story numerous times, and it always provoked Three-Finger to such laughter that he had to slap his thigh with his mutilated hand.
Snyder, Joe Hutto, Angus Braverman, and Doyle Hilliard were among the man clustered around the wounded Three-Finger now. Lady Augusta reached behind her to the backbar, picked up a bottle of whiskey, and handed it to Snyder.
“Pour as much of that as you can down his throat,” she instructed. “It’ll be a lot easier to operate on him if he’s soused to the gills.”
Snyder nodded.
“Angus, you and Joe grab on to him. Doyle, pry open his mouth.”
Jardine countermanded that order.
“Just give him the bottle. Nobody ever had a problem getting Three-Finger to drink. Joe, come with me.”
Hutto nodded. He followed Jardine to a table in the corner while Smith grabbed the bottle away from Snyder, tilted it to his mouth while Braverman and Hilliard helped him sit up, and let the who-hit-John start gurgling down his throat.
“What happened?” Jardine asked when he and Hutto were seated at the table. “I left you out there to make sure nobody picked up our trail after that foul-up the other day. I’m guessing somebody did.”
Hutto nodded. On the gang’s way back to Flat Rock, Jardine had dropped off him and Smith at one of the little buttes that overlooked the trail about fifteen miles from the settlement, ordering them to stay there until he told them otherwise.
The next day, he had sent a rider out there with enough supplies to last the two sentinels a week. A few days had passed since
then, long enough so that Jardine had become convinced the two men they had bushwhacked had crawled off and died or moved on somewhere else.
Either way, he didn’t think they were a threat anymore.
Judging by the way Three-Finger was bleeding on the bar, he’d been wrong about that.
“We spotted one of those hombres ridin’ toward town,” Hutto explained.
“You’re sure it was one of the men we had that run-in with the other day?”
Hutto nodded.
“Yeah. I got a good look at him through the spyglass. It was that big fella in the buckskin shirt, looks sort of like a redskin.”
“What did you do?”
Hutto rubbed a hand over his angular, beard-stubbled jaw.
“We saw where the son of a buck made camp, so we figured if we snuck up and killed him, there wouldn’t be anything to worry about. But he pulled a fast one on us and was holed up waiting for somebody to jump him. Three-Finger caught a slug while we were tradin’ shots with the varmint.”
Jardine said wearily, “You were supposed to light a shuck back here to town and warn me if you saw anybody like that following our tracks.”
“Yeah, I know, but we thought—”
“And that was your mistake right there,” Jardine cut in as he leaned forward. His face was dark with anger. “You’re not supposed to think, damn it! I handle that!”
He flung a hand toward the bar, where Three-Finger had polished off the whiskey and now lay there with a cherubic smile on his face, cradling the empty bottle against his chest.
“Now I’ve got another man with a bullet hole in him, and that fella you ambushed may be smart enough to figure out why somebody tried to kill him ... again.”
Lady Augusta poured more whiskey over a knife with a keen blade that glittered in the lamplight.
“Now you’ll have to hold him down, gentlemen,” she told Jardine’s men who were still gathered on the other side of the bar. “Hold him tightly. I won’t be responsible for what happens if you don’t.”
At the table, Joe Hutto shook his head.
“I’m sorry, boss. We thought we were doin’ the right thing. What happens now?”
Blood Bond: Arizona Ambush Page 6
