Ambush Valley

by Johnstone, William W.

  No doubt about it, Cicero McCoy thought as he looked around. Ambush Valley was about as close to being a true hell on earth as anywhere could be. As close as you’d ever want anywhere to be.

  “We’re following you, Cortez,” he said to the half breed, who was riding a few yards in front of him. “I hope you know where you’re going.”

  “I do,” Cortez said with a confident nod as he looked around. “I’ve been through here before, Boss. Don’t worry.” He frowned. “But I thought we were going to hide the loot and go back to help Travis and Newton hold off that posse.”

  “Travis and Newton are fine,” McCoy snapped. He could still hear the shots falling farther and farther behind them. “Just keep going until I tell you to stop.”

  Cortez just looked at him for a second, then shrugged in acceptance of McCoy’s decision. Splitting the loot three ways was better than splitting it in fifths. It didn’t take a genius at ciphering to figure that out.

  The little group’s progress into Ambush Valley was slow. If you rushed your horse in a place like this, chances were you’d wind up with a lame horse, at best. At worst, the animal would fall and break a leg, and then a rider would be in a terrible fix. So McCoy, Cortez, and Beck took their time. When the shooting in the distance to the rear came to an abrupt halt, they looked at each other but didn’t stop, and sure as hell didn’t turn back.

  They didn’t stop until the sun went down and it grew too dark to keep going. “Reckon it’s safe to build a fire?” Beck asked.

  McCoy looked to Cortez for the answer. The half breed said, “As far as I know, all my mother’s people are below the border now, holed up in the mountains. But a war party could have ridden up here.”

  Beck gave a grim laugh. “I’d rather keep my hair than have a hot cup of coffee. I can do without a fire.”

  They found a good level place to stop for the night. A few blades of hardy grass poked out of the rocks and gave the horses a little graze. McCoy sloshed the water in his canteen back and forth and said, “We’re gonna need to find a water hole in the morning, Cortez.”

  “We’re not far from one. We may have to dig down a little for water, but it’ll be there,” Cortez promised.

  “I sure as hell hope you’re right.”

  If Cortez was wrong, then the three men faced a long, thirsty-and possibly fatal-day in this hellhole of a valley.

  Earlier, while there was still some light, the bounty hunters gathered at the mouth of the canyon and peered into it. Because of the high walls, shadows had already gathered thickly in the canyon. Jack Coleman rubbed his jaw, his fingers rasping on the beard stubble, and said, “I ain’t sure I want to ride in there, Abner. Ain’t no tellin’ what might be waitin’ for us.”

  “Ten thousand dollars reward, that’s what waiting for us,” Hoyt snapped. “If you don’t want to be part of that, Jack, it’s your decision. Always has been.” Hoyt looked around at the other men. “You’re all free to drop out of the hunt anytime, just like always.”

  “Now, I never said I wanted to quit,” Jack muttered. “All I meant was that I don’t like the looks o’ that place very much.”

  “Neither do I,” Hoyt said, “but I’m going in there anyway.”

  He heeled his horse into motion and rode into the canyon.

  One by one, the rest of the bounty hunters followed him. Bob Bardwell brought up the rear, not because he was hesitant, but rather because he was the most watch ful among them and didn’t want any enemies coming up behind them. There shouldn’t be anyone back there except the posse from Tucson, Bardwell knew, but you didn’t survive in this business by taking unnecessary chances.

  They had followed the meandering canyon for about a quarter of a mile when Hoyt reined to a sudden halt and lifted his rifle. The others came up behind him and saw what had made him stop. A figure lay sprawled on the floor of the canyon, unmoving. It was already too dark in here to make out any details.

  “Check him out, Deke,” Hoyt said to Mantee. “We’ll cover you.”

  The saturnine Mantee didn’t protest. He dismounted and strode forward with his revolver in his hand. When he reached the fallen figure, he hooked the toe of a boot under the man’s shoulder and rolled him onto his back. There was still enough light in the canyon for the bounty hunters to see the dark stains all over the front of the man’s shirt.

  “Dead,” Mantee announced, somewhat unnecessarily. “Looks like several of those ricochets got him. He was able to get on his horse and start through the canyon, but this is as far as he got before he fell off and died. Or died and fell off.” A humorless smile creased Mantee’s lean face. “Doesn’t really matter which, does it?”

  “No,” Hoyt agreed. “He’s dead either way. I don’t see his horse.”

  “The other hombre probably took it with him,” Bard well suggested.

  “One of us can carry his body back to the opening of the canyon where the other bodies are and turn them over to the sheriff. Don’t know how much we can get for them, but something’s better than nothing.” Hoyt looked at the men. “Jack, load him up and take him back.”

  “Them bodies ain’t goin’ anywhere,” Coleman pointed out.

  “No, but I don’t want any coyotes to come along and mess them up so bad that we can’t identify them.”

  Coleman nodded. “All right. The rest of you goin’ on?”

  “That’s right.” Hoyt hitched his horse into motion again.

  They rode on to the end of the canyon without seeing any sign of the second outlaw. As they reached Ambush Valley itself, Escobar pointed to the ground and said, “Look there.” The bounty hunters all saw the dark splash on the rocks.

  “He’s hit, too,” Hoyt said. “No telling how far he was able to go, though.”

  The six men sat there on their horses and peered out over Ambush Valley. Nothing was moving anywhere, probably because there wasn’t much life in this place. A few lizards might come out at night, and there were probably some snakes denned up here and there. Some rats around the isolated water holes, maybe, and tarantu las in the cracks in the rocks. That would be about it.

  The last of the day’s sunlight slanted along the canyon from the far end. Hoyt squinted against it and thought that he had never seen an uglier, less inviting place in his life.

  “Are we goin’ in there, Abner?” Ben Coleman asked.

  Hoyt didn’t answer right away. He thought about it for a moment and then turned to Escobar. “Joaquin, what’s on the far side of this valley?”

  “About five miles of desert and then the border,” Es cobar replied. “There’s a little settlement on this side of the line called Hinkley.”

  “If we went around, how long would it take to get there?”

  “To Hinkley?” Escobar shrugged. “If we pulled out first thing in the morning, we might be able to get there by nightfall.”

  “And how long will it take what’s left of that bunch to get through Ambush Valley and make it to the border?”

  “They can get to Hinkley before us, Abner.”

  “By how much time?”

  “An hour? Two?” Escobar shook his head. “The im portant thing is, they can get across the border before we can catch up to them that way.”

  “What about if we ride all night?” Hoyt suggested.

  Leaf said, “I daresay our mounts will collapse from exhaustion if we attempt that, old boy.”

  Hoyt reached a decision. “We’ll have to try it anyway. If we start through the valley and lose our way, we’ll never make it out of there alive.”

  “I could probably find the right trail,” Escobar said. “I’ve talked to some old Indians who’ve been through there.”

  Hoyt shook his head and said, “No offense, Joaquin, but I’m not going to risk all our lives on probably. We’ll go slow, rest the horses as often as we can, but we’re going around and try to beat those outlaws to the border that way.” He nodded toward Ambush Valley. “But if anybody wants to try that route on their own … “ />
  Nobody did. Hoyt nodded and turned his horse around, putting his back to Ambush Valley.

  Chapter 6

  By morning, it was obvious that Newton and Travis weren’t going to be catching up to McCoy, Cortez, and Beck. That came as no surprise to any of the three re maining outlaws. Even if the two men who’d been left behind had survived the battle at the canyon mouth, they would never be able to find their way through the part of Ambush Valley that the others had already put behind them. If the unlucky bastards were still alive, they would wander around in here until they died of thirst or exposure.

  They wouldn’t last long enough to starve to death.

  McCoy took only a small swig of the brackish water still in his canteen when he got up the next morning. His sleep had been restless, and the heat that began to build up as soon as the sun rose began to get on his nerves right away. “Let’s find that water hole,” he snapped as he threw his saddle on his horse.

  “What about breakfast?” Beck asked.

  “You should have some jerky left in your saddlebags. Chew on that.”

  All three men were in a foul mood as they set out. Their spirits lifted considerably about an hour later when Cortez led them into a little hollow with a sandy floor. “This is it,” he said.

  “I don’t see any water,” McCoy muttered.

  “I told you, Boss, we might have to dig for it.” The half-breed swung down from his horse and knelt to scoop up some of the sand with his hands. He continued digging for several minutes. His attitude became more frantic as he pawed up handfuls of dirt. “It can’t have gone dry,” he said under his breath, but McCoy and Beck heard him anyway and also grew tense.

  “Get down there and help him,” McCoy snapped as he gestured at Beck. The outlaw complied, kneeling beside Cortez and digging into the dirt with him.

  A few more minutes passed. Then Cortez let out a re lieved whoop. “The sand’s getting wet,” he told McCoy. “We’ll have to dig down a little deeper and then let it seep in for a while.”

  It seemed to take forever, but eventually they had a hole about a yard deep with a foot of muddy water at the bottom. Cortez scooped up the water in his hat and poured it through a bandanna to filter out most of the sand as he filled the canteens. Then he took the wet ban danna and wiped the noses and mouths of aU the horses before he put more water in the hat and let the animals drink sparingly. Other than the grittiness, the water tasted pretty good.

  “There’s another spring even better than this one, close to the far end of the valley,” Cortez explained. “This water will get us that far, and we can fill the canteens again there. That will take us across the desert on the other side of the valley to the border.”

  When they were finished with the water, McCoy nodded toward the hole and said, “Fill it back in.”

  “Why?” Beck asked. “After we went to all the trouble of digging it?”

  “If anybody’s following us, I don’t want them finding this place. And if they do, they’ll have to work for the water just like we did.”

  “I reckon that makes sense,” Beck admitted. The two men set to work, and it didn’t take long for them to fill the hole. Then they mounted up and rode away, once again following Cortez’s lead.

  McCoy could see where the mountains ran out and the valley ended, and it seemed tantalizingly close. He knew that distances were deceptive out here, though, so he wasn’t surprised when long, hot hours dragged by and they didn’t seem much closer to the end of their trek than when they’d started out. The sun reached its zenith and began its slow crawl down toward the western horizon.

  Around the middle of the hellishly hot afternoon, Cortez led McCoy and Beck down a rocky slope and into one of the ravines. They had been avoiding these slashes in the earth so far, but McCoy assumed that the half-breed knew what he was doing. Cortez had better hope so.

  The ravine wound around through the wasteland. In most places it was no more than a dozen feet wide, with sheer stone walls and a sandy floor. After the three riders had been down there for a long time, they rounded a sharp bend and Cortez let out a whoop.

  McCoy felt like whooping, too. The ravine opened out into a depression roughly forty feet wide. On the far side was a pool of water with a couple of mesquite trees shading it and some grass along its banks. The pool was fed by a spring that trickled out of a crack in the rocky wall of the ravine. The men had to hold the horses back to keep them from rushing across the clearing and plunging their muzzles into the pool. McCoy under stood the temptation all too well.

  The ravine continued beyond the pool. Cortez pointed at it and said, “All we have to do is follow that and it’ll bring us out only a few miles from the end of the valley.”

  “Then head due west across the desert to the border?” McCoy asked.

  Cortez nodded. “That’s right. We can stock up on sup plies and water at Hinkley and then head across the border.”

  “Yeah,” Beck said with a laugh. “We got plenty o’ money to buy what we need, that’s for damn sure.”

  McCoy had been thinking about that very thing. Now, as they let the horses drink a little, he said, “We’re not taking all the loot with us.”

  The other two men turned to look at him in surprise. “What are you talkin’ about, Boss?” Beck asked. “What else can we do with it except take it with us?”

  McCoy reached his decision. “We’re only going to take a few thousand, just enough to keep us comfortable in Mexico for a while. The rest of it stays here.” He pointed to a jumble of rocks next to one side of the pool. “We’ll bury it under those rocks.”

  Beck’s eyes narrowed. “Why in blazes would we want to do a thing like that?”

  McCoy felt anger well up inside him. He didn’t like having his decisions questioned. He snapped, “Who’s the boss of this outfit, Beck, you or me?” His hand edged closer to the butt of his gun as he spoke.

  Beck held up both hands in a conciliatory gesture. “You’re the boss, Cicero. Always have been, and I reckon you always will be. But after we’ve gone through so much to get this money, I don’t understand why you want to ride off and leave it here.”

  “We’re not leaving it for good. I just don’t want to carry that much money south of the border. I don’t trust the greasers. Things tend to happen down there, espe cially where dinero’s concerned.”

  Beck looked over at Cortez. “Those’re your people he’s talkin’ about.”

  Cortez shrugged. “The Mexicans hate the Apache side of me, the Apaches hate the Mexican side of me. I say to hell with all of them. I agree with you, Boss. We can come back here and dig up the rest of the loot when things have cooled down and nobody’s lookin’ for us anymore.”

  McCoy grinned. “You’re starting to think like me, Cortez. Just don’t get too ambitious.”

  “No chance of that,” the half-breed said with a laugh. “Part of me comes from manana-land, remember.”

  The men spent a while filling their canteens, washing their faces with wet bandannas, and letting the horses drink, but not so much that they’d founder. The shade of the mesquite trees was very welcome, and McCoy wouldn’t have minded spending some more time here … but he had things to do and places to go.

  Beck and Cortez rolled one of the rocks aside and began scooping out a hole in the sandy earth underneath it, while McCoy took some of the money out of one of the canvas bags and stowed it in his shirt. Then he spread his rain slicker out on the ground, piled all the bags on it, and rolled them up inside the garment into as tight a bundle as he could manage. He bound it closed with rope, pulling that tight, too.

  When McCoy judged that the hole was deep enough, he told Beck and Cortez to step back. He placed the bundle into the hole. “This place should be easy enough to find again,” he said. “And that rock’s got a distinctive shape. We’ll know that it marks the place where the loot’s buried.”

  “What if it floods down here?” Beck asked with a worried frown. “It sometimes does in these ravines, do
esn’t it?”

  “The money’s inside those canvas bags, and they’re wrapped up in my slicker,” McCoy pointed out. “That ought to protect it even if a little water seeps down there.”

  “Anyway,” Cortez added, “it’s probably been two or three years since there’s been enough rain in these parts to flood. Chances are it’ll be just as dry when we come back to get the money as it is now. We won’t wait too long, will we, Boss?”

  “Six. months,” McCoy said. “Maybe a year. No more than that.” He gestured toward the hole. “Now fill it up, like you did with that water hole back yonder, and roll the boulder back into place.”

  As Cortez and Beck got to work, McCoy eased around to the other side of the pool. His hand rested lightly on the butt of his gun. He waited until the other two men had finished filling in the hole and then rolled the boul der into its original position, grunting with effort as they did so, before he slipped the Colt out of itS holster.

  Cortez and Beck stepped away from the rock. Beck brushed his hands together, obviously satisfied with a job well done. He died that way, as McCoy shot him in the back of the head. The impact of the slug threw him forward and draped him over the boulder that marked the bank loot’s hiding place.

  Cortez tried to whirl around at the sound of the shot, but he wasn’t fast enough. McCoy shot him while Cortez’s gun was only halfway out of the holster. The weapon fell the rest of the way out as Cortez toppled onto the ground next to the pool.

  McCoy kept his gun trained on them for a long mo ment, but neither man moved. They never should have trusted him, McCoy thought. No matter what had hap pened in the past, once a man started double-crossing his friends, It got easier every time. He had discovered that as soon as he realized not splitting the money at all was even better than divvying it up three ways.

  He walked around the pool and checked Cortez first. The way Beck’s blood and brains had splattered all over that boulder, McCoy was pretty sure he was dead. So was Cortez. McCoy took hold of Beck’s shirt and rolled him off the rock, let him flop limply to the ground. The bullet had made a mess of Beck’s face when it came out.