Sidewinders:#3: Cutthroat Canyon

by Johnstone, William W.

  After they had eaten, the men settled on shifts for standing guard. The ones who would be sleeping first spread their bedrolls on the ground and circled them with ropes to keep snakes from crawling up and trying to share their blankets. Despite the heat of the day, the thin, dry air would cool off rapidly as night settled down.

  Bo and Scratch had deliberately volunteered for separate shifts on guard duty. They didn’t trust the other men completely—they didn’t trust Jim Skinner at all—and thought it would be best if at least one of them was awake most of the night.

  Bo rolled up in his blankets first and dropped off to sleep immediately, a skill he and Scratch had both learned more than forty years earlier when they were both members of Sam Houston’s army during the Texas Revolution. He didn’t know how long he had been asleep when he came awake instantly at a light touch on his shoulder.

  “Roll out, pard,” Scratch whispered. “We got trouble comin’.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Bo pushed his blankets aside and reached for his coiled gunbelt and holstered Colt, which he had placed beside him before he went to sleep. As he got up from the ground, he strapped the gunbelt around his hips and then quickly thonged down the holster.

  “What is it?” he asked, keeping his voice as quiet as Scratch’s.

  “Ain’t sure, but I heard some horses out there in the darkness. Just a hoofbeat or two, and then a little whinny that stopped short, like somebody’d clamped a hand over the critter’s nose. That’s all, but it was enough to tell me that somebody’s skulkin’ around out yonder.”

  Bo agreed. The lurkers might be Indians or bandits or maybe even some innocent vaqueros who were just passing through the area—although that last possibility wasn’t very likely.

  “Who’s on guard with you?” Bo asked.

  “That Britisher, Lancaster.”

  “Did you tell him what you heard?”

  “Nope. Figured I’d roust you out first.”

  “Go tell him about it now, while I wake up Davidson and the others.”

  “Be careful around Skinner,” Scratch warned. “A hydrophobia skunk like him is liable to lash out and bite anybody who gets too close.”

  Bo nodded. He had already thought the same thing about Skinner.

  He went over to Davidson’s bedroll first and knelt beside the mine owner. “Mr. Davidson,” Bo said quietly.

  Davidson rolled over fast and sat up with a gun in his hand. Bo saw the light from the half-moon in the sky overhead glint on the barrel. “Easy,” he said. “It’s just me, Bo Creel.”

  “Bo,” Davidson said as he lowered the revolver. “Sorry. I guess I was dreaming. I thought there was some sort of danger out there—”

  “Dreams sometimes come true. Scratch heard something suspicious a minute ago. He and Lancaster are checking it out.”

  Davidson pushed his blankets aside and stood up, still gripping the gun. “Wake everyone else,” he said in a brisk voice. “We need to be ready in case—”

  Before he could go on, a man yelled and a gun suddenly blasted in the darkness, followed instantly by the slamming reports of two more shots. Bo saw the muzzle flashes from the corner of his eye, and knew they came from the general area where Scratch had gone. Fearing for his trail partner’s life, he broke into a run as behind him Davidson shouted for the rest of the men to get up.

  Whoever had snuck up on the camp wasn’t the only danger, Bo knew. In the dark like this, and roused out of sleep, if the men Davidson had hired started firing blindly, they’d be just as likely to shoot each other as anybody else.

  Not to mention the fact that a snake-blooded varmint like Jim Skinner might not-so-accidentally take a few potshots at somebody he didn’t like—such as Bo and Scratch. If he killed them, he could always claim that he had mistakenly thought they were Apaches or bandits or whoever the attackers turned out to be.

  That thought flashed through Bo’s head as he ran toward Scratch, but he didn’t have time to do anything about it. More Colt flame bloomed in the night like crimson flowers as shots roared out.

  Bo spotted a couple of struggling figures, and from the moonlight reflecting on the silvery hair of one of them, he knew it was Scratch. The other man still wore his hat. It was a high-crowned sombrero, telling Bo that the lurkers were Mexican bandits. He stepped up behind the hombre wrestling with Scratch and brought his Colt crunching down on the man’s head. The sombrero absorbed some of the blow’s force, but it was still powerful enough to unhinge the bandit’s legs and drop him to his knees. Scratch laid him out from there with a roundhouse right.

  “Thanks, pard,” he told Bo as he bent to pick up the Remingtons he must have dropped when the bandit attacked him. “They come up out of the arroyo and jumped Lancaster before I could warn him.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Don’t know.” Scratch wheeled in that direction. “Let’s go see.”

  They started toward the spot where Lancaster had been posted, crouching as bullets whined overhead. Some of the shots came from the lip of the arroyo, while others originated in the camp. The battle lines had been drawn pretty quickly.

  And Bo and Scratch found themselves trapped between the two forces.

  “Get down!” Bo said as a bullet tugged at his sleeve. “Those slugs are coming too close for comfort!”

  Both of the Texans hit the dirt and crawled behind some good-sized rocks that offered at least a little cover. From there they could fire at the bandits who had crept up to the camp along the arroyo. They aimed at the muzzle flashes, because they couldn’t see anything else in the darkness.

  After a few minutes, someone yelled in Spanish over the thundering gunshots. Bo caught enough to the words to recognize them as an order to fall back.

  “They’re lighting a shuck,” he told Scratch as he paused with his thumb on the hammer of his Colt. Sure enough, the shots from the arroyo began to dwindle, and then stopped completely a moment later. A ragged rataplan of swift hoofbeats drifted through the night.

  Bo turned his head and called toward the camp, “Hold your fire! They’re pulling out!”

  Davidson added to the order, shouting, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

  An eerie, echoing silence fell over the landscape as the shooting stopped. After a moment, Davidson broke it by asking, “Are they gone?”

  “I think so,” Bo replied. “Better lie low for a few more minutes, though, just to be sure. Scratch and I will check out the arroyo.”

  “We will?” Scratch said.

  “We’re the closest to it,” Bo pointed out.

  “Yeah, I reckon,” Scratch agreed with a sigh.

  After reloading their guns, they darted out from behind the rocks. The arroyo was only a few yards away. They covered that ground quickly and slid down the sloping bank to the sandy floor of the arroyo. There was enough moonlight for them to see as they made their way along the jagged gash in the earth.

  “The varmints are gone, all right,” Scratch said after he and Bo had searched for a few minutes.

  “They figured to take us by surprise and wipe us out before we knew what was going on,” Bo said. “They hadn’t counted on those keen ears of yours, partner.”

  He lifted his voice and called to the rest of the men, “All clear down here!” The words were barely out of his mouth when a shot blasted up above.

  “Now what the hell?” Scratch muttered as he and Bo charged up the slope, climbing out of the arroyo as fast as they could.

  They found Davidson and a couple of the other men standing around a dark shape on the ground. Bo recognized it as the man he had knocked out with his pistol, the one who had been struggling with Scratch.

  “What happened?” he asked as he and Scratch came up to the others.

  “This bandit was still alive,” Davidson said. “I thought he was dead, but he tried to get me with a knife as I walked by. I had to shoot him.”

  “Good thing you were quick about it, Boss,” Jackman said as he picked up a long, he
avy-bladed knife from the ground beside the dead man. “Bastard would’ve gutted you with this if he’d gotten the chance.”

  “It’s a shame you had to kill him,” Bo said. “I’m the one who knocked him out. I was hoping we could ask him some questions, maybe find out who’s behind the trouble you’ve been having down here, Mr. Davidson.”

  The mine owner grunted. “It doesn’t matter what their names are. They’re all just damned Mexican bandits, like this one. And you could’ve gotten me killed by not finishing him off when you had the chance.”

  Bo heard the anger in Davidson’s voice, and knew the fear the man felt at the realization of how close he had come to dying probably prompted it. Not seeing any point in aggravating the situation, Bo just said, “Sorry,” and let it go at that as he knelt beside the corpse.

  The wide-brimmed sombrero hid the bandit’s face. Bo pulled it aside and studied the dead man’s features in the moonlight. He was surprised to see how young and unlined they were.

  Scratch saw the same thing. He said, “Hell, he ain’t much more’n a kid.”

  “That’s right,” Bo said. He put the dead bandit’s age around twenty.

  “He was plenty old enough to use a gun and a knife,” Skinner pointed out. “Little greaser got what was comin’ to him.”

  Davidson said, “We’ll bury him in the morning before we ride on.”

  Skinner spat. “Waste of time. Throw him in the arroyo. The zopilotes will take care of him.”

  “I won’t leave any man for the buzzards,” Davidson snapped. “Not even a bandit.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that,” Bo said.

  “Do what you want,” Skinner said. “Just don’t expect me to help dig the grave. The only effort I’ll go to for scum like that is pullin’ a trigger.”

  He stalked back to the camp and started straightening up his bedroll.

  “Clearly, they spotted us and followed us,” Davidson mused. “I guess they thought this would be a good chance to get rid of me. If I was gone, they could take over the mine.”

  Bo frowned in thought and ran a thumbnail along his jawline. “Operating a mine seems like more work than a bunch of bandidos would want to do,” he said. “It strikes me that they’d be more likely to want you and your workers to dig out the gold, then steal it from you.”

  “Maybe. Whatever their motive, it didn’t work.”

  “Was anybody else hurt?”

  Lancaster spoke up. “I’ve got a bullet crease on my arm where the first shot hit me. Nothing serious, but it hurts like the bloody devil. I was able to return the man’s fire and downed him. That’s what started the whole fray.”

  “I didn’t see any other bodies layin’ around,” Scratch said.

  “Neither did I,” Bo agreed. “The bandits must’ve taken everybody who was wounded or killed with them except for this one fella, and they couldn’t get to him. From the looks of it, he and the hombre who jumped Lancaster were trying to sneak all the way into camp before the shooting started. Might have made it if Scratch hadn’t heard their horses.”

  Davidson grinned and clapped a hand on Scratch’s shoulder. “Good job, my friend. You probably saved all of us from a very unpleasant death.”

  “Can’t think of a death that’d be all that pleasant,” Scratch commented. “No, wait a minute, I reckon I can, if a fella was to—”

  “That’s enough talk about dying,” Bo said. “Let’s get some sleep instead. We’ve still got a long ride in front of us tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Bo and Scratch dug the grave for the dead bandit the next morning, starting while the sky was still gray with the approach of dawn. Hansen helped them, and so, to their surprise, did the cold-eyed kid called Douglas. Bo gave up one of his blankets to wrap the body before they lowered it into the ground.

  Hansen explained that his father had been a Lutheran minister. He volunteered to say a prayer before they filled in the hole. It was in Swedish, but Bo didn’t figure that really mattered. El Señor Dios could probably speak all sorts of lingos.

  “If we’re done here, we need to get started,” Davidson said as Scratch tamped down the last shovelful of earth. Skinner, Lancaster, Jackman, and Tragg had all mounted their horses already. Lancaster’s bullet-creased arm had a rag tied around it as a makeshift bandage.

  Scratch tied the shovel back onto one of the packhorses where they had gotten it, and the rest of the group swung up into their saddles. They took the horses down a caved-in bank and along the wash for fifty yards or so before finding a place on the other side where they could climb out easily.

  Bo checked the ground in the arroyo as they crossed it. He saw several dark splotches on the ground and on the rocky banks that were probably bloodstains. The bandits had suffered other casualties during the brief battle the night before besides the young man Davidson had killed. It was impossible to tell, though, just how serious the other injuries had been.

  Bo still regretted not being able to ask questions of the bandit he had knocked out, but there was nothing that could be done about that now. He put the matter out of his head and concentrated instead on keeping a close eye on the landscape around them, just in case the bandits tried to ambush them again.

  That wasn’t going to be easy, considering how flat and open so much of the terrain was. In broad daylight, no one could approach them without being seen. There wouldn’t really be a good spot for another ambush until they reached the mountains.

  “You may not have any more trouble,” Bo mused as he and Scratch rode alongside Davidson that morning.

  “What makes you think that?” the mine owner asked.

  “The bandits know now that you’re bringing in reinforcements. They’ve seen us, swapped shots with us, and might just decide that it’ll be too risky to hit those gold shipments in the future.”

  Davidson laughed. “I’d like to think that’s true, Bo, but you don’t know how determined those bastards are. They know I’m bringing high-grade ore out of the mine. I can’t imagine them just turning their backs on it.”

  “Well, I reckon we’ll see.”

  “Yes, we will. And I bet it won’t take long to discover that they’re still out to ruin me.”

  That was sort of an odd way to put it, Bo thought. Stealing gold shipments wasn’t exactly the same thing as trying to ruin Davidson, although that might be the end result if the robberies continued.

  The ride that day was long and hot and tiring, but they didn’t run into any more trouble. Gradually, they drew closer to the mountains. Even after it seemed as if the gray-green peaks were close enough to reach out and touch, hours went by before the riders actually reached the foothills. Once they began climbing, the air was a little cooler, and that was a welcome relief.

  By late afternoon the mountains towered above them. Pine trees covered the slopes, and the valleys between the mountains were lush with grass. The riders passed occasional farms with garden patches and small herds of sheep and oxen.

  No one was moving around, though, and Bo wondered if the Mexican farmers had retreated inside the adobe huts with their families. Despite the beauty to be found in many places south of the border, Mexico had a history of being a violent, unstable land where the common people had plenty of reason to be leery of Indians, bandits, revolutionaries, and the government alike. No wonder they hid when they saw a group of hard-faced gringo strangers coming.

  Davidson led them through a pass and into another valley. This was a long, flat area between two mountain ridges. A stream meandered along the middle of the valley, and cultivated fields bordered it. About halfway along the valley’s length, buildings clustered to form the village Davidson had mentioned. Most were humble adobe huts, but Bo could see a good-sized church with a square bell tower that had a cross mounted on top of it. There were some frame buildings as well, constructed of rough-hewn planks sawn from pine trees brought down from the mountains. It looked like a nice place, nothing fancy about it, but still a good home for the pe
ople who lived in the valley.

  At the far end of the valley, the mountains came together to form a steep, rugged wall. The only breach in that wall appeared to be a canyon about a hundred yards wide. Davidson pointed to it.

  “Cutthroat Canyon, gentlemen. The mine is about half a mile up it.”

  “Is that a box canyon,” Bo asked, “or is there another way out?”

  “It extends another mile or so into the mountains and then comes to a dead end,” Davidson explained. “At least, as far as horses and wagons are concerned it does. A man could probably climb out, but then he’d just find himself in the middle of those mountains with nowhere else to go.”

  The sun had dropped down nearly behind the peaks to the west. Even so, some of its rays still slanted into the valley, and Scratch pointed toward the church and said, “Sun’s reflectin’ off something in that bell tower, Bo.”

  “It’s the bell, of course,” Davidson said. “A big brass thing, a hundred years old or more. The old Spanish padres brought it here when they established the mission many years ago. Or so I’ve been told.”

  That was a reasonable explanation, Bo thought—but he had seen the reflection, too, and it hadn’t really looked to him like the sun shining on brass. He had seen glints like that before—too many times, in fact—and they had nearly always come from rifle barrels.

  “Maybe we’d better circle around that village,” he suggested. “Those bandits could have set a trap for us there.”

  “I doubt that,” Davidson said. “Like I told you, they’ve always left us alone around here. They’ve only struck out on the trail between here and El Paso. Besides, it’s the shortest way to the canyon.”

  Bo shrugged. “You’re the boss.” He looked over at Scratch, and the glance they exchanged carried a clear message. The Texans would be riding wary as they passed through the village.

  It appeared that Davidson was right, though. No shots rang out as the riders entered the settlement. In fact, it was oddly quiet. No dogs barked, and no children ran out of the huts to follow the men along the road. Bo might have thought that the inhabitants had abandoned the village if not for the cook smoke that rose from several crude chimneys.