Ambush Valley

by Johnstone, William W.

  A weak voice called him back, though. He paused and turned his head, saw that Gideon had fallen to his knees. The convict pressed a hand to his chest. Blood welled between his fingers. Gideon coughed and more blood welled from his mouth. He managed to grin and said, “Got hit … on the way up … looks like I won’t be … gettin’ away. Have a … hell of a good time … for me, Fred.”

  Frank realized that Gideon must have already been mortally wounded when he was helping push those boul ders over the edge of the bluff. Even though he was dying, he had still pitched in to do his part in the escape plan. One of these days, Frank might feel a little bad about the man’s sacrifice.

  But there wasn’t time right now. Gideon groaned and toppled forward on his face. Frank grimaced and turned back to the slope, stepping over the edge and sliding down to the road, raising dust and scattering gravel in front of him in a miniature version of the avalanche that had wiped out the Gatling gun.

  One of the guards trying to break up the fight heard him coming and turned around just in time for Frank to smash clubbed fists into his face. The man went down, out cold, and Frank snatched up his rifle. He put the barrel of the Winchester against the chain that ran be tween his leg irons and pulled the trigger. A shot blasted out. The chain parted as the slug fired at such close range tore through it.

  Frank’s legs were free now. Carrying the rifle, he ran along the fringes of the melee and looked for McCoy, who was supposed to be making his way toward the horses. He spotted the bank robber. McCoy had the chain attached to his wrist shackles looped around the neck of a guard from behind. The guard’s face was al ready purple as McCoy choked the life out of him. Before Frank could do anything, McCoy heaved hard on the chain, and the guard’s neck snapped. He went limp all over.

  McCoy dropped him and snatched up the dead man’s rifle. Frank trotted up and told him, “Pull back on the chain attached to that ball!”

  McCoy did so, and Frank blew the chain in half with a single shot. McCoy blasted his ankle chains apart. Now both men could move around much more freely.

  They still had to grab a couple of horses and stampede the others, though, and by now the guards were begin ning to realize what was going on. They left the brawl ing prisoners alone and started to regroup. The men who were in on the plan broke for the horses, too, getting in the way and complicating matters.

  Frank and McCoy were the only ones who had man aged to get their hands on rifles and partially free them selves, though, so they had an advantage. They reached the horses first. A guard sprang in front of them, trying to block their way. McCoy swung his rifle toward the man, but before he could fire, Frank had lunged forward and smashed the stock of his Winchester into the guard’s face. The man went down, possibly with a broken jaw, but that was better than being dead, as he would have been if McCoy had shot him.

  McCoy grabbed the reins of a spooked mount and swung up into the saddle. Frank was reaching for one of the animals when a heavy hand came down on his shoul der and jerked him around.

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” Jessup bellowed as he threw his tree-trunk-like arms around Frank in a crushing bear hug. “You ain’t gettin’ away, Morton!”

  Jessup cared more about avenging himself on Frank than he did anything else. That much was obvious. Frank groaned as he tried to pull free, but it was like being caught in a bear trap. He felt his ribs creaking, and knew that in another few seconds they would begin to snap under the awful pressure. He did the only thing he could. Since he had levered another round into the Winchester’s firing chamber after using the weapon to blast apart one of McCoy’s chains, he pressed the muzzle against Jessup’s left foot and pulled the trigger.

  Jessup screeched in agony but didn’t let go. Frank head-butted him in the face and felt the bald man’s nose flatten under the blow. The combined pain was too much for Jessup to withstand. His arms fell away and he col lapsed. Blood spouted from his foot where Frank had shot it.

  McCoy was already on the move, galloping back and forth, shouting, and firing his rifle in the air to stampede the other horses. Frank made a desperate grab for one of the animals as it lunged past him and managed to get hold of the saddle. He leaped, shoved a foot in a stirrup, and hung on for dear life. Bullets ripped through the air around his head as he finally managed to clamber aboard the horse and get settled in the saddle.

  McCoy shouldn’t suspect there was anything phony about this escape, Frank thought grimly as he leaned for ward over the racing horse’s neck. The amount of lead flying around in the air made it seem all too real. Hell, it was all too real!

  The other horses had scattered. McCoy headed north, banging his heels against his mount’s flanks to get as much speed out of the horse as he could. Frank followed. He glanced back over his shoulder to see that the other men who’d been part of the plan were running around aimlessly. They had hoped to grab horses, too, but they hadn’t known that Frank and McCoy were going to stam pede the other mounts. Even if a few of them managed to escape, they would be rounded up quickly.

  Frank might feel a little bad about that, too, one of these days, like he would about Gideon, but that would have to wait. Anyway, those men were all hardened crim inals and didn’t deserve much sympathy.

  He wouldn’t forget, though, how Gideon had helped him roll those boulders, even with a bullet hole all the way through him.

  Not far north was the spot where the Gila River flowed into the Colorado from the east. When Frank and McCoy reached that confluence of streams, they turned and rode east along the bluff that overlooked the Gila, which ran through a narrow, twisting canyon. They slowed their horses to a walk, knowing that they couldn’t afford to run the animals into the ground.

  “We did it!” McCoy said with a savage grin oftri umph on his face. “We’ll never see the inside of those damned walls again, Morton.”

  “That’s right,” Frank said, “because I figure on making the bastards kill me before I’ll ever let myself be taken prisoner again.”

  “You won’t have to worry about that. If we can stay ahead of them long enough to get to that cache of mine, we’ll have enough money to get across into Mexico and spend the rest of our lives there, sipping tequila and pat ting senoritas on their fat little rumps.”

  Frank chuckled. “Sounds good to me.”

  So far McCoy had shown no signs of pulling a double cross. Maybe the outlaw was playing things straight for once in his life. Frank wasn’t going to fully believe that until he saw it with his own eyes, though.

  “We’ve got to do something about these chains and prison uniforms,” McCoy said after they had ridden along in silence for a while. “Anybody who sees us will know right away that we’re escaped convicts.”

  “I don’t know what we can do about the chains,” Frank said. “Since we don’t have the keys, it’d take a hacksaw to get them off.”

  “We’ll find a place where we can get a hacksaw,” McCoy declared. “And some normal clothes. There are bound to be some ranches out here somewhere. They’re probably pretty few and far between, since it takes a whole hell of a lot of ground to support any stock in this godforsaken territory, but if we can find one, we can take what we need.”

  Frank was careful not to allow the concern he felt at McCoy’s words to show on his face. He didn’t want to put innocent people in harm’s way any more than he had to. And a rancher and his family would definitely be in harm’s way if Cicero McCoy paid them a visit. As McCoy had said, he would take what he needed-and probably kill anybody who got in his way.

  Frank told himself to cross that bridge when they came to it. Maybe McCoy wouldn’t hurt anybody. If he tried to, Frank would stop him, even if that meant aban doning the plan. Conrad might not like it, but the lives of innocent folks meant more to Frank than eighty thou sand dollars worth of bank money. As he had told his son, that loot could be replaced. Frank would never miss it. He had gotten involved in this only because of the spirit Conrad had shown and the desire to truly bring McCoy to just
ice, which included recovering the money.

  They pushed the horses to a fast trot again. Frank and McCoy both looked behind them on a regular basis. McCoy was checking their back trail for signs of pursuit. Frank didn’t have to do that. He knew the pursuit was back there, in the form of Abner Hoyt and the other bounty hunters working for Conrad. What Frank wanted to be sure of was that Hoyt and the others weren’t crowd ing him and McCoy.

  “We gave the bastards the slip,” McCoy said around the middle of the afternoon. “That plan we hatched worked like a charm, Morton.”

  “Except that Gideon got killed,” Frank said.

  “Yeah, well, that’s too bad. But we weren’t really going to bring him with us, anyway, now were we?”

  Frank shook his head. The man he was pretending to be wouldn’t show a great deal of concern over Gideon’s fate—wouldn’t really even give a damn, probably—so he told himself not to say anything else about it.

  A few minutes later they were both distracted, anyway, when McCoy suddenly reined his mount to a halt, stood up in the stirrups, and pointed. “Look yonder,” he said.

  Frank looked and saw black smoke coiling into the air. There was too much of it for the smoke to be coming from a chimney. Yet it had to be coming from some where.

  “Must be some sort of trouble,” Frank said. Out here in this rugged country, so close to the border, that much smoke couldn’t mean anything else.

  “Let’s go find out,” McCoy said, and he heeled his horse into a run.

  Frank didn’t have any choice but to ride after him and hope that they weren’t waltzing into something they couldn’t get out of.

  Chapter 16

  They topped a rise a few minutes later and looked down across a shallow valley where a creek meandered into the Gila River from the south. The stream had to be spring-fed because there was water in it even at this dry time of year. A few scrubby cottonwoods grew along its banks, and a sparse carpet of grass covered the valley floor. There was enough graze here to support a small herd of cattle. The animals cropped peacefully at the grass on the far side of the valley.

  There was nothing peaceful about the scene on the near side of the valley, though. The roof of the adobe cabin that had been built there in the shade of a cotton wood was on fire. Flames leaped from the windows of the cabin as well. The adobe walls wouldn’t burn, but the roof and the interior would.

  Nearby in a corral made of peeled poles, a milk cow lay on its side, arrows bristling from its body. In the yard between the corral and the cabin were the bodies of a couple of dogs, big shaggy curs that reminded Frank of Dog. They had been skewered by arrows, too, and the sight made Frank’s jaw tighten with anger.

  Likely, there was even worse to be found down there, though.

  McCoy kicked his horse into a run. “Come on!” he tossed over his shoulder. “Maybe we can save some of the clothes and find something to get these chains off of us!”

  Frank didn’t care about that right now. He was more concerned with the possibility that some of the settlers might still be alive down there, remote though that chance might be.

  He rode hard down the hill with McCoy. They reined in when they reached the yard. Frank saw a huddled shape lying just inside the cabin’s open door. He swung down from the saddle and hurried closer. The heat of the flames beat against his face. The fire was blazing away inside the cabin. Anybody trapped in there had to be dead. But the man in the doorway might still have a chance. Frank crouched, sidled closer, and reached out to grasp the man’s shirt. He backed up, hauling the dead weight out of the cabin.

  Unfortunately, deadweight was exactly what it was. The rancher lay facedown, and the back of his shirt was dark and sodden with blood. When Frank had pulled the man about ten yards from the cabin, he stopped and rolled him onto his back. The rancher’s eyes stared up sightlessly at the brassy Arizona sky, marred now by the clouds of smoke rising from the cabin.

  “You reckon Apaches did this?” McCoy asked from the back of his horse.

  Frank nodded. “No doubt about it. I tangled with them a few times, back in my younger days.”

  “I never was much of an Indian fighter myself. Used to ride with a fella who was half-Apache, half-Mex. He said the Apaches down in Mexico still raid up here across the border sometimes.”

  “That’s right. That’s what happened here. They killed everybody, set fire to the cabin, and ran off the horses.”

  McCoy nodded toward the other side of the valley where the cattle still grazed. “They didn’t bother the cows.”

  “An Apache doesn’t have much use for a cow,” Frank said with a shake of his head. “You can’t ride cattle, and Apaches prefer horse meat to beef.”

  McCoy turned his horse. “I’m going to see if there’s a hacksaw or anything else we can use over there in that shed. I reckon all the extra clothes are probably burned up already in the cabin.”

  “Look for a shovel, too.”

  McCoy glanced back. “What for? We’re not going to take the time to dig any graves. Check the man’s pockets for extra ammo. We’re going to run out soon.”

  Frank nodded, although it made him sick inside to not bury the man. He found a large handful of cartridges for the rifles that he transferred to his pocket.

  The adobe shed was separated from the cabin by about forty feet of open ground. McCoy rode over to it and dis mounted. A door hung crookedly on leather hinges. He swung it open—

  Then jerked back as a shot blasted from inside the shed. Frank saw the crimson bloom of Colt flame in the shadows. .

  “Son of a bitch!” McCoy yelled as he swung the Win chester up.

  “No!” Frank shouted. He lunged toward the outlaw, grabbed the barrel of the rifle, and wrenched it up as McCoy pulled the trigger. The shot blasted harmlessly into the air. Frank shoved McCoy to the side, out of the line of fire, and ducked the other way himself. “Don’t shoot!” he called to whoever was inside the shed. “We’re friends!”

  McCoy glared at him, but didn’t fire again. He kept his rifle trained on the open door from his side Of the shed, though, as did Frank.

  “Come on out of there,” Frank urged. “We won’t hurt you, whoever you are.” Had to be a member of the rancher’s family who had taken shelter in the shed when the Apaches attacked, he thought.

  There were no more shots, but a weak voice said, “H-help me, mister …. I’m hurt awful bad …. Sorry I tried to … gun you … thought you was some o’ them … redskins come back to … to … “

  The voice trailed away as if the speaker had passed out. Frank thought it belonged to a young man. He took a step toward the doorway, but McCoy snapped, “Care ful! I reckon it could be a trick.”

  “I don’t think so,” Frank said. “The boy sounded hurt pretty bad to me.”

  But he kept his rifle ready anyway as he stepped into the doorway.

  He saw the pistol lying on the ground where it had fallen from the youngster’s hand. The gun was a cap-and ball revolver that was old enough to have belonged to the boy’s grandfather. It still worked, however, as the young man had proven by nearly ventilating McCoy with it.

  Frank dropped to a knee next to the bloody shape lying on the ground inside the shed. Enough light came through the open door and gaps in the ceiling for him to see that the unlucky young fella was shot to pieces. He must have been wounded several times as he ran for the shed. It was a little surprising that he was still alive. Frank knew there was nothing he could do for the boy.

  But he lifted him anyway and pillowed his head against his thigh. “Take it easy, son,” he said. “You’re going to be all right now.”

  The young man was sixteen or seventeen, with sandy hair and blue eyes that were revealed as his eyelids flick ered open. Those eyes were filled with pain, too, but there was nothing Frank could do about that.

  “It was … ‘Paches,” he gasped. “They come outta … nowhere. Pa! Ma! Are they … are they … “

  “They’re fine,” Frank told him. Th
e lie was a mercy. The rancher, this boy’s pa, was dead, and his mother was prob ably inside that burning cabin. If she wasn’t, then the Apaches had taken her with them, so she was as good as dead. But Frank didn’t really think that would turn out to be the case. A small raiding party from south of the border likely wouldn’t want to be bothered with taking prisoners. They were just out to kill settlers and steal horses and cause as much terror and destruction as possible.

  The boy found the strength somehow to lift a hand and clutch at Frank’s arm. “You got to … help them!”

  “Don’t worry, son,” Frank told him. “We’ll take care of your ma and pa, too.” That meant burying them, since it was all that was left that anyone could do for them. McCoy rolled his eyes at the idea, but Frank ignored him for the moment. “Was there anybody else here? You got any brothers or sisters?”

  “N-no didn’t mean them … meant the Sorengaards…..Injuns were … headed for their place … when they rode out.”

  A chill went through Frank. If there was another ranch in the area, as the youngster’s words indicated, it would probably prove too tempting a target for the Apaches to pass up.

  “Gotta … help Ingrid … don’t let … ‘Paches get her,” the boy was muttering. His eyes had slipped closed.

  Frank leaned closer, and urgency was in his voice as he asked, “Where’s the Sorengaard spread? How do we find it?”

  “East … east o’ here … ‘bout three miles … help Ingrid!”

  Frank didn’t know for sure who Ingrid was, but he could make a pretty good guess. The Sorengaard family probably had a daughter about this boy’s age, and he was sweet on her. Now he was scared that the raiding party would hit the Sorengaard ranch next, and he was proba bly right about that, too.

  “We’ll head over there right now,” Frank told the youngster. “You’ll be all right until we get back—”

  He stopped short as he realized that the boy was al ready all right … or as all right as he ever would be again. His chest had stopped rising and falling, and the peacefulness of death had smoothed away the lines of pain and terror on his face.