Sidewinders:#3: Cutthroat Canyon

by Johnstone, William W.

  “Feels like…it’s working.” Heat gripped Bo like a giant, blazing hand. He didn’t have the energy to talk much, but he managed to ask, “Teresa…?”

  “She got away,” Scratch said, and relief flooded through Bo. “I heard ’em talkin’ about it. Davidson sent Lancaster and Douglas to look for her, but I got my doubts about ’em bein’ able to find her.”

  If Teresa had any sense, Bo thought, she would keep running until she had put this canyon and the evil it held far behind her.

  But if she’d had any sense, he reminded himself, she wouldn’t have come back here in the first place. She would have left it to him and Scratch to do something about Davidson. Now that possibility was gone. They couldn’t work against the mine owner from within. They would be extremely lucky just to stay alive. Bo was surprised they weren’t dead already.

  He hung there silently in the heat for several minutes, as still as a lizard, gathering the feeble remnants of his strength. When he felt a little better he asked, “Was I wounded?”

  “Yeah, a slug nicked you on the side of the head,” Scratch replied. “Bled like a stuck pig, too. I thought you were a goner for sure. Reckon it just knocked you out, though. Another inch to the left and your brains would’ve been splattered all over that corral fence.” He chuckled. “You ought to see yourself. You got so much dried blood on your face you look like somethin’ out of a nightmare.”

  “You’re not what I’d call pretty as a picture yourself.” Bo turned his head again to look around. “Where are we?”

  “Up the canyon from the mine, not far from the powder shed Teresa tried to blow up. Say, what do you think made that gal come back down here instead of stayin’ at Luz’s place like we told her to do?”

  “Old as I am, I still haven’t lived long enough yet to figure out how a woman thinks,” Bo said. “My guess is that she got tired of waiting, or she just felt like it was her fight, too, and had to do something about it. Or maybe something happened at Luz’s to upset her and make her leave. We’ll have to find her and ask her about it…when we get loose from here.”

  “You sound pretty sure we ain’t gonna just hang here until we die,” Scratch commented.

  “Damn right we aren’t,” Bo said. “We’ll get out of this somehow.”

  But for the life of him, he sure couldn’t see how.

  That day was an eternity long, but thankfully, Davidson had miscalculated when he told his men where to hang Bo and Scratch on the canyon wall. By the afternoon, when the sun was at its hottest, the blazing orb had moved far enough west in the sky so that the canyon itself gave the Texans a little shade. Midday had been the worst, with the sun beating down fiercely from directly overhead.

  The heat had been helpful in a way, though, because it had numbed some of their other aches and pains. Bo dozed off from time to time, even though he didn’t want to and fought against it. In the back of his mind lurked the fear that if he went to sleep, he might not ever wake up again.

  He couldn’t tip his head back far enough to see his own wrists, but he had studied the way Scratch was tied and hung from the spike. For a while, Bo had thought that if they could somehow start their bodies swinging back and forth, they might work up enough momentum to slip the ropes off the spikes. That wasn’t going to happen, though, because of the way the ropes were tied to the spikes themselves, not merely looped over them as Bo had thought at first.

  The only way they would get down was if someone cut them down, and that seemed mighty unlikely to happen.

  Bo’s mouth felt like it was filled with cotton. In fact, it seemed like all the moisture in his body had been leeched out by the sun. His tongue swelled, filling his mouth until it threatened to choke him.

  If they could make it until nightfall, he told himself, things would get better. The air cooled off considerably at night in these parts, and that would help soothe their blistered skin.

  But another day like this would kill them. Bo had absolutely no doubt about that.

  Sometime during the afternoon, curiosity prodded him to ask Scratch, “Do you know if you killed Hansen when you shot him?”

  “Yeah, he crossed the divide,” Scratch answered. “Damn shame, too. I sort of liked that big Scandahoovian. He wasn’t such a bad hombre for a hired gun. Wish we hadn’t wound up on opposite sides.” With his arms tied above his head as they were, Scratch couldn’t shrug, but the shrug was in his voice as he added, “Not much you can do about it when a fella starts shootin’ at you, though. You got to shoot back. At least I do.”

  “Yeah,” Bo agreed. “Me, too. But like you say, it’s a shame. What about Skinner and Lancaster and Douglas?”

  “They all came through the fight without gettin’ ventilated. Skinner took particular delight in kick-in’ the hell outta both of us, after Davidson told his men to work us over before we was strung up here.”

  “Lancaster and Douglas get in on that?”

  “Nope. It was the hombres who run the mine for Davidson, along with Skinner.”

  That made Bo feel a little better. The Englishman and the kid hadn’t struck him as the sort who would take part in torturing a helpless enemy. They preferred to fight their battles straight up and out in the open.

  “Remember we talked about Lancaster’s Gardner gun?” Bo asked.

  “Yeah. Just what Davidson needs,” Scratch muttered. “A newfangled way to run roughshod over these poor folks.”

  “If we could get our hands on it…”

  “Right after we get loose from here, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know what? If you keep studyin’ on it, Bo, I really do believe you’ll come up with a way to do it.”

  More time dragged by. Shadows covered the whole wall of the canyon now, although the air was still stiflingly hot. Bo’s hands and arms were completely numb by now, which was a relief in a way because he could no longer feel it where the rope had chafed and bloodied his wrists. He dozed again, and when he jerked awake, he saw two people coming along the canyon floor toward him and Scratch.

  Bo glanced over at his partner, saw that Scratch’s head lolled forward loosely on his neck. For a terrible second, Bo thought that his old friend had died, but then he saw the faint movement of Scratch’s chest that told him the silver-haired Texan still lived.

  “Scratch,” Bo croaked. “Scratch, wake up. Somebody’s coming.”

  They were close enough now for Bo to make out who they were. Rosalinda came first. Trailing behind her was Alfred, who carried a bucket with a long-handled dipper in it. Bo’s parched and blistered lips stretched in a half-smile, half-grimace as he saw that. A desperate yearning for water filled his entire being.

  Scratch muttered something unintelligible and slowly lifted his head. “Wha…Is that…Teresa?”

  “No,” Bo told him. “It’s Rosalinda. And Alfred.”

  “Thought maybe…Teresa had come back…to let us loose.”

  Rosalinda looked sorrowful and horror-stricken as she came to a stop in front of the prisoners and gazed up at them. Alfred kept his eyes averted, as if he was too ashamed of what was going on to look at them.

  “Señor Creel…Señor Morton…I am so sorry,” Rosalinda began.

  “Not your fault…Señorita,” Bo told her.

  “But if you had not been trying to help me, and the people of the valley—”

  “Shoot, don’t…worry about it,” Scratch broke in. “We just got…a natural dislike for…varmints like Davidson.” He summoned up a grin. “No offense, Alfred.”

  The young man finally looked up with a tormented expression on his face. “For God’s sake, don’t apologize to me!” he cried. “It’s the man I work for who’s responsible for the terrible things that have happened to you! I swear, he wasn’t always that way. The gold…it changed him somehow. He used to just speculate in mining claims, but then he heard about Don Alviso’s mine somehow…We came down here to look it over, and when Mr. Davidson saw the quality of the ore…But even then, I never d
reamed he would…would…”

  “Murder Don Alviso and take over the mine for himself?” Bo asked.

  A shudder ran through Alfred. “I tried to tell myself at first that it must have been an accident when the gun went off. I didn’t think Mr. Davidson would do such a thing. But then I saw how he began to treat the people around here…the sort of men he brought in to run things for him…I hoped it wasn’t as bad as it looked…”

  “I’m sure you did, son,” Scratch said. “And it ain’t that I’m not sympathetic. But if that’s water in that bucket, I’d be powerful obliged if I could have some.”

  “Oh, Lord, of course!” Alfred pulled the dipper full of water out of the bucket and raised it to Scratch’s mouth. Even though it was awkward, Scratch gulped down as much as he could. Bo was next, and he didn’t think anything had ever tasted sweeter than the water that spilled from the dipper into his mouth.

  His body was so dry that it sucked up the moisture immediately, leaving him still thirsty. He figured he could drink for a week without quenching his thirst. But he knew if he guzzled down too much water, he was liable to get sick and throw it back up, and he didn’t want that. So he settled for running his swollen tongue over his lips to get every last drop he might have spilled, and he then asked thickly, “What’s Davidson going to do with us?”

  “I…I don’t really know,” Alfred said. “He told me to bring you some water so that you wouldn’t…wouldn’t die too fast. Maybe he’ll let you go later.”

  Scratch chuckled. “You know better than that, son. He’s gonna leave us out here and let the sun bake us again tomorrow. We’ll be dead ’fore the day’s over.”

  Rosalinda put her hands over her face and sobbed. “Why did Teresa have to come back? Why?”

  “You told Alfred about her?” Bo asked.

  “Sí. I told him everything, all about how you said you were going to try to help me and my people. I did not think it mattered now if he knew the truth.”

  Scratch said, “I don’t reckon it does. What do you say, Alfred? Now that you know what’s goin’ on, are you gonna keep helpin’ that polecat?”

  “There’s nothing I can do,” Alfred said, looking and sounding miserable as he did so.

  “You could cut us loose,” Bo suggested.

  Alfred shook his head. “No, I can’t. Mr. Davidson told that man Skinner to keep an eye on us while we brought the water to you. He told Skinner that if we did anything besides give you the water…if we tried to help you in any way…Skinner was to shoot me. And then Rosalinda would be sent to the brothel.”

  Bo turned his head enough to look back down the canyon toward the mine. His vision had gotten better since the sun hadn’t been shining directly into his eyes for a while, and he could make out Jim Skinner’s lean form as the gunman lounged on the porch of the headquarters building.

  “He has a pair of field glasses,” Alfred went on. “He’s been watching us. I can feel his eyes following us, like…like…”

  “A snake’s?” Scratch suggested.

  “Exactly.” A shudder went through Alfred.

  “How about Lancaster and Douglas?” Bo asked. “Maybe they could do something for us.”

  Alfred shook his head. “Mr. Davidson’s already talked to them. He knows they’re upset about what’s happened. But he promised them a bonus if they go along with what he’s doing to you, and they’re going to take it.”

  “That ain’t surprisin’,” Scratch said. “Hombres like that, dinero means more to ’em than anything else.”

  Bo said, “It looks like there’s nothing you can do without risking your life, Alfred, and I reckon Rosalinda here is going to need you to look out for her. So that’s what you need to do. Don’t worry about Scratch and me.”

  “If there was any way I could help…”

  “No, you run along,” Scratch told him. “Might give us a little more of that water before you go, though.”

  “Of course.” Alfred used the dipper to give each of them another drink. Then he and Rosalinda headed back down the canyon toward the mine, both of them glancing back from time to time.

  “Reckon the boy’s gonna do the right thing?” Scratch asked when the young people were gone.

  “I don’t know,” Bo said. “I don’t know what to hope for. Alfred’s no fighter. If he tries to help us, he’s liable to just get himself killed. Might be better in the long run for him and Rosalinda if he just turned his back on the whole thing.”

  “You don’t believe that,” Scratch said. “It’ll eat away at him the rest of his life if he does.”

  Bo sighed. “Yeah. You’re probably right about that.”

  They fell silent again. Exhaustion caught up to Bo a while after that, and he drifted off to sleep again, even though he didn’t really want to.

  When he awoke, darkness had descended once more over Cutthroat Canyon. With it had come a chill. During the heat of the day he had looked forward to cooling off, but now it quickly became a bone-numbing cold that settled into him. He shivered, and his teeth began to chatter. A clicking sound from beside him told him that Scratch was having the same reaction to the lower temperature.

  That was when something hit him on the head. It felt like a pebble, and it was followed by several more tiny rocks that struck his head and shoulders as they fell, along with some dust and grit that drifted into Bo’s eyes and made him blink. He heard a faint scraping sound above him.

  He twisted his head as far as he could in an attempt to look up the canyon wall. Stars were visible against the ebony sky, but then some of them were blotted out by a moving patch of darkness.

  “Scratch!” Bo whispered. “Scratch, wake up! Somebody’s climbing down into the canyon!”

  CHAPTER 19

  Another shower of rocks pelted down around them. Scratch stirred and lifted his head, muttering, “Wha…what the hell?”

  Bo watched as the shadowy form lowered itself toward them. The canyon walls were too sheer for anybody short of an ape to climb them, so whoever it was had to be using a rope to let themselves down.

  Maybe it was an ape, Bo thought wildly as he saw how big the figure was. Feet pushed against the rock face, the shape swung out from it, and then dropped to the ground between them with surprising grace for someone so bulky.

  “Señor Bo! Señor Scratch! Caramba! Tell me that you are alive, and we are not too late!”

  “Pepe!” The whispered exclamation burst from Bo’s cracked lips. “What in blazes are you doing here?”

  Starlight penetrated the canyon and winked on the blade of the knife the massive bodyguard from Luz’s place in El Paso pulled from behind his belt. He reached up with a long arm and started sawing through the rope that bound Bo’s wrists to the spike in the canyon wall.

  “Thanks be to El Señor Dios that you are still alive,” Pepe said in a low, rumbling voice. “There will be time for explanations later, once you and Señor Scratch are safe.”

  Pepe put his left arm around Bo’s waist and held him up easily as the rope parted. Gently, he lowered Bo to the ground and finished the job of freeing the Texan’s wrists. Then, as Bo sat slumped at the base of the canyon wall, leaning against it, Pepe went to work freeing Scratch.

  A million tiny knives stabbed into Bo’s shoulders, arms, and hands as the blood began to flow freely again into the numbed extremities. In its own way, the pain of that was as bad as anything else Bo had experienced in the past twenty-four hours. He clenched his jaw to keep from groaning in agony, and rolled his shoulders in an attempt to speed up the process. He looked down at his hands and tried to clench and unclench the fingers, but the muscles refused to work just yet. Those hands might as well have belonged to someone else, for all the good Bo did in trying to control them.

  Pepe lowered Scratch to the ground beside him. Scratch husked, “Gracias, amigo. If you weren’t such an ugly ol’ varmint, Pepe, I reckon I’d kiss you right about now.”

  “Save your kisses for Luz, Señor Scratch,” Pepe advised. �
��I think she will appreciate them much more than me.”

  “Well, I’ll settle for sayin’ thanks then.”

  Bo said, “I never expected to see you here, Pepe.”

  “I will tell you about it later. Are there guards nearby?”

  “There haven’t been any guards out here all day. I reckon Davidson figured we were in such bad shape and in such a bad fix that he didn’t need to post any.”

  “Then he will be very surprised in the morning when he finds that you are gone, eh?”

  “Very,” Bo said. For a second, he worried that Davidson might blame Rosalinda and Alfred for their escape, but then he recalled that Skinner had been watching those two as they came back to the mine headquarters late that afternoon. The gunman would know that the youngsters hadn’t had anything to do with Bo and Scratch getting away.

  Of course, they hadn’t gotten away yet, Bo reminded himself. This canyon was a dead end, and he thought it was highly unlikely they could sneak out past the mine without being discovered.

  Pepe hunkered in front of them and said, “How do you feel? Your arms are not as numb, yes?”

  “That’s right,” Bo said. All those little knives hadn’t gone away yet, but at least they weren’t jabbing as deeply or as painfully as they had been a few minutes earlier.

  Pepe reached over and grasped the rope he had used to let himself down into the canyon. “Can you climb?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Bo replied. “I reckon it might be a little too much right now.”

  “That is what we thought. Let me help you stand. I will tie the rope around you, and Luz and Teresa can pull you up.”

  “Teresa is with you?”

  “Sí. It was she who persuaded us that we should come down here from El Paso and try to help you drive that hombre Davidson out of the valley.”

  Bo didn’t mention the fact that Teresa’s “help” had come mighty close to costing him and Scratch their lives. All that could be hashed out later.

  “I’m not sure a couple of women can lift me,” he said as Pepe helped him to his feet and passed the rope under his arms, knotting it in front of his chest.