Ambush Valley

by Johnstone, William W.

  “I’m sorry, Mama.” Sven looked at Frank again. “But I still want to know if you’re going after them.”

  McCoy answered instead. “Not likely, kid. Why? You thinking about coming with us?”

  “Tim was my friend. His death should be avenged.”

  “You’re right about that, Sven,” Frank said, “but we’re not in the business of chasing down Apaches. If we happen to run into them again, that’s one thing, but unless we do … ” He shrugged. “Sooner or later, one way or an other, they’ll get what’s coming to them. I know that’s not much comfort, but it’s the best we can do.”

  “You’re right,” Sven said. “It’s not much comfort.” The horses had been unsaddled, rubbed down, grained, and watered. As Zeke was putting the saddles back on them in the shade of the barn, he said to Frank and McCoy, “I reckon you fellas stole these horses. Those brands on ‘em mean they belong to the territorial government.”

  “What business is that of yours, mister?” McCoy asked in a hard, dangerous voice.

  “Not a bit,” Zeke replied without hesitation. “I don’t know what you done to get yourselves throwed in Yuma Prison, and I don’t want to know. Just as soon not even know your names. But I’ve had some friends who wound up behind bars, and they weren’t such bad fellas. I just hope neither one of you did anything too awful terrible, so I won’t feel too bad about us givin’ you a hand like this.”

  “Just think of us as a couple of strangers who pitched in to help fight off the Apaches,” Frank advised, think ing that there was no need for anyone on the Sorengaard ranch to know that McCoy was a bank robber and cold blooded murderer.

  “I got to tell you,” Zeke went on, “when the law dogs show up lookin’ for you, the boss will tell ‘em that you were here. He’ll tell ‘em which way you went, too. Don’t expect any favors along those lines.”

  McCoy frowned, and Frank suddenly knew what he was thinking. It might be better if they didn’t leave any witnesses alive behind them to tell the law anything. Frank hoped that McCoy wouldn’t try to act on that thought. If he did, Frank would just have to stop him, no matter what the cost.

  There wasn’t any posse on their trail … but McCoy wouldn’t know that. The only ones following them were Abner Hoyt and the other bounty hunters, and they al ready knew where Frank and McCoy were headed. The manhunters might not even stop at this ranch.

  “Let’s just get moving,” Frank said. “We’ve stayed here long enough.”

  “Yeah,” McCoy agreed. Frank was relieved when the bank robber swung up into the saddle and turned his horse toward the east. Over his shoulder, McCoy said to Zeke, “Maybe if you went back in the barn, you wouldn’t see which direction we rode off in.”

  “That’s right,” Zeke said. “I surely wouldn’t.” He re treated into the cavernous adobe structure as Frank mounted up as well.

  Then the two riders put the Sorengaard ranch behind them and continued east along the Gila River.

  They didn’t travel in that direction for very many miles, though, before McCoy veered to the south, paral leling a range of small but rugged mountains.

  “Is this the way to Ambush Valley?” Frank asked.

  The question caused McCoy to shoot a sharp, suspi cious glance toward him. “What do you know about Ambush Valley?” the bank robber asked.

  “I told you, I heard about that loot you’re supposed to have hidden somewhere. The newspaper stories all said that you’d been captured in a little wide place in the road called Hinkley, near Ambush Valley. Speculation is that you cached the money somewhere in there.”

  McCoy didn’t say anything for a long moment, then finally replied, “Well, since we’re riding together now, I reckon it won’t do any harm to tell you. The money’s in Ambush Valley, all right. I had planned to leave it there for six months, maybe a year, and hide out in Mexico until things had cooled down enough for me to come back and get it. But I hadn’t figured on getting caught before I ever got across the border. I’m not taking a chance on anything like that happening again. I want to get my hands on that money, light a shuck for Mexico, and never come back.” He grinned. “I reckon eighty grand will keep me in fine fashion down in Mafiana-land for the rest of my life.”

  “Fifty-six thousand,” Frank corrected. “Remember that thirty percent of the loot is mine.”

  “Yeah, sure,” McCoy said with a casual wave of his hand. “I just forgot.”

  I’ll just bet you did, Frank thought. McCoy’s-slip told him that the outlaw had no intention of honoring their deal. McCoy would ride with Frank and pretend to be partners with him until they reached the money, just in case he needed Frank’s help in getting out of some other jam, but once McCoy had his hands on the loot again …

  Well, Frank would be expendable then. As in bullet in-the-back expendable.

  Frank didn’t intend to let that double cross take place. But he would have to be mighty careful. McCoy was tough as nails and good with a gun. McCoy probably thought that Frank intended to double-cross him and take all the money, too. Crooks always believed that every body was just as crooked as they were.

  So even though they might fight side by side against shared dangers, in McCoy’s mind they were just waiting for the right moment to try to kill each other. That meant Frank would be on hair-trigger alert once they reached Ambush Valley and recovered the loot.

  A few hours after turning south, they came to a set of railroad tracks. The shining double line of steel ran east and west, shimmering into the distance as far as the eye could see in both directions.

  “This is the Southern Pacific track,” McCoy said as he reined in beside the rails. He nodded toward the east. “There’s a water stop over yonder, just this side of the mountains. We’ll ride over and refill our canteens, be cause it’ll be a long, thirsty trek from there to where we’re headed.”

  “What if a train comes along?” Frank asked.

  “What about it? We don’t have to worry. We’re not convicts anymore, Morton. We’re just a couple of saddle tramps. Nothing the least bit unusual about us.”

  They turned their mounts and started riding along beside the tracks. “You ever hold up a train?” Frank asked after a few minutes.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just curious, that’s all. I know you pulled a lot of bank jobs, but I’m not sure about the other.”

  McCoy laughed. “Yeah, I’ve held up trains. Not very many, though. Never liked it. Sometimes the express car is almost empty, and when there is money there, you have to dig through a bunch of mail and other worthless junk to find it. Then there’s the business of cleaning out the passengers. That’s usually a penny-ante haul, and you run the risk of some pilgrim deciding to be a hero and going for a gun. Too much risk and not enough reward, unless you happen to get a tip that a particular train is hauling a lot of money. I’d rather hit a bank because you know there’ll be cash there. And the sort of hombre who works in a bank isn’t as tough as a trainman, either.” McCoy looked over at Frank. “How about you?”

  Frank shook his head. “Never robbed a bank or a train, either. Or a stagecoach, for that matter. Until I shot that sheriff and his deputies, my lawbreaking was confined to dabbing a loop on other men’s cows and slapping a new brand on them.”

  “You’re plenty tough, though,” McCoy pointed out.

  “Maybe instead of splitting up, we ought to ride together for a while after we get that money. I might want to put together a new gang.”

  “I thought you were going to Mexico and retiring from being an outlaw.”

  “Oh, I am, I am.” McCoy grinned. “But a fella likes to keep his hand in. And there are banks in Mexico, too.”

  “That there are,” Frank agreed with a chuckle. He grew more serious as he went on. “Mighty tough, getting all your partners killed like they were.”

  McCoy frowned over at him again. “How do you mean?”

  “Wiped out by that posse the way they were. From what I read, they must’ve
all been wounded before you got to Ambush Valley and died while you were in there.”

  “That’s what happened, all right,” McCoy nodded. “Damn shame, too. They were good men.”

  But not good enough to keep you from double-crossing them. Frank was more sure than ever now that McCoy had murdered at least some of the members of his gang. Some might have died from wounds received at the hands of the posse, as Frank had said, but not all of them. Frank was certain of it.

  The elevated water tank that sat beside the railroad tracks appeared in the distance ahead of them. It took a long time to get there, since distances were deceptive out here, and night had fallen by the time they did.

  “We’ll camp here,” McCoy decided. “Not right beside the tracks, but there’s probably an arroyo not far off. Let the horses drink their fill and rest for the night, then fill the canteens in the morning.”

  “Sounds like a good idea. How long will it take to reach Ambush Valley?”

  “Couple of days, I reckon.”

  They pulled down the sluice attached to the water tank and filled their hats, then let the horses drink from them. McCoy stuck his head under the stream of water and let it soak and cool him. Frank did likewise. It had been a hell of a long day. When they woke up that morning, they were still behind the walls of Yuma Territorial Prison. Now they were a good twenty-five miles away-and they had fought Apaches since then, to boot!

  They found a gully—it wasn’t even worthy of being called an arroyo—about a quarter of a mile south of the tracks. They didn’t have bedrolls or even any blankets, so they would just have to shiver through the chilly desert night. Frank had put up with much worse in his life. Anyway, it beat being stuck in prison, didn’t it?

  They hobbled the horses and made a cold supper on some biscuits and jerky that Mrs. Sorengaard had put in a sack for them. Then they took turns standing watch, and when it came time for Frank to sleep, he dozed off without worrying about what McCoy might do. He was confident that the bank robber wanted to keep him alive … for now.

  Exhaustion caused Frank to fall into a deeper sleep than he might have otherwise, so it was nearly dawn when he awoke. And he might not have roused then had it not been for the rumble of a locomotive and the clanking clatter of a train coming to a stop nearby. He opened his eyes and lifted his head to see Cicero McCoy crouched just be low the lip of the gully, peering off to the north in the gray light.

  “Train stopping for water?” Frank asked.

  “Yeah,” McCoy replied without looking around. A cold laugh came from him. “Bastards don’t have any idea that somebody’s around. If you threw down on the engineer and fireman, I could hit the express car ….” He laughed again. “No, that’s crazy. Just the two of us couldn’t pull it off. Anyway, like I said, I don’t like to rob trains. I reckon old habits are just hard to break.”

  Old habits like robbing and killing? Frank supposed so. That was all that a man like Cicero McCoy really knew.

  The train crew filled the boiler on the locomotive from the water tank, and then the brakeman, who had climbed onto the scaffolding around the tank, pulled the sluice back up and swung it into place. He was ready to climb down when a shot suddenly rang out, loud in the early morning stillness. The brakeman staggered, clutched his belly, doubled over, and fell off the scaffolding, plunging to a hard landing on the ground under the tank.

  Frank glanced at McCoy, thinking for an instant that McCoy had killed the brakeman, even though he knew logically that the shot hadn’t come from the gully. Then, a second later, he knew what had happened.

  Because with shrill yips and cries and a flurry of gun shots, renegade Apaches on horseback suddenly plunged out of the concealment of some nearby brush and at tacked the train.

  Chapter 18

  “Oh, hell!” McCoy burst out. “Them again!”

  As Frank leaped up, grabbed his Winchester, and joined McCoy in crouching at the lip of the gully, he looked at the Apaches and supposed that the outlaw was right. It was possible, of course, that two separate war parties of renegades had slipped over the border from Mexico, but not very likely. And the number of attackers looked to be right, the same as the band Frank and McCoy had encountered at the Sorengaard ranch the day before.

  The train crew scrambled for safety as the Indians charged. Such a small number of Apaches couldn’t hope to take over the train, but they could kill some of the crew and passengers and terrorize the others before flee ing. Glass flew from some of the windows in the passen ger cars as the renegades shot them out.

  Puffs of powder smoke came from those same cars as the passengers fought back. More shots came from the engine and the express car. Even though none of the In dians were hit, at least not badly enough to make them fall from their horses, they peeled back, curving away from the train.

  In the gully, McCoy asked, “Are we going to take a hand in this?”

  “I don’t see any real reason to,” Frank said. “It looks like those renegades are already starting to be a mite sorry that they decided to attack a train.”

  “Yeah, they didn’t do much damage, did they? Killed that brakie up on the water tank and broke a few win dows, but that’s about it.”

  Still whooping as if they had just experienced the biggest triumph for the red man’s cause since the Little Big Horn, the Apaches dashed away from the railroad tracks, raising a cloud of dust that moved off to the south. While Frank and McCoy watched unseen from the gully, the engineer and fireman climbed out, retrieved the body of the brakeman who had been shot off the water tank, and placed it in the caboose. Then they returned to the engine and a few minutes later, the locomotive’s drivers engaged, smoke boiled from its diamond-shaped stack, and the train lurched into motion. It rumbled and rattled off to the west.

  “I’m glad we didn’t have to get mixed up in that fracas,” McCoy said as he stood up, once the train was out of sight. “I don’t want anything else slowing us down.”

  Frank got to his feet, too, and commented, “There’s one thing we might have to worry about.”

  “What’s that?”

  Frank nodded toward the south. “Those Apaches took off in the same direction that we’re going. We’re liable to run into them again if we keep going toward Ambush Valley.”

  “We’re going on, all right,” McCoy said with a determined scowl on his face. “And if those redskins get in our way, it’s their own damned lookout.”

  One thing McCoy wasn’t lacking for, Frank thought, was confidence.

  If the renegades got between McCoy and that loot … well, he’d just kill ‘em. That was all there was to it.

  Frank was glad they had made a cold camp the night before. Those Apaches had been hiding in the brush only a couple of hundred yards from where he and McCoy had spent the night. They were fortunate that the war party hadn’t stumbled over them in the darkness. If that had happened, the two white men probably would have been wiped out.

  They finished the last of the biscuits and jerky for breakfast, let the horses drink at the water tank again, topped off their canteens, and headed south, keeping the mountains to their left.

  “Ambush Valley is down at the tail end of this range,” McCoy explained. “We have enough water to get there if we’re careful, but we’re liable to get a mite hungry.”

  Frank nodded toward the mountains. “We might be able to find a deer or some other game in the foothills.”

  “I don’t know if we want to be shooting, though. Not with those Apaches around.”

  That was a good point. Well, it wasn’t like Frank had never gone hungry before.

  The heat increased as the sun rose higher and the men continued their trek. When the blazing orb was directly overhead, the blistering heat forced them to veer over into the foothills and find some shade, so that they could wait out the worst of the inferno. They took shelter be tween a couple of massive slabs of sandstone that looked like they had been leaned together by a giant hand. The shadow under the rocks was blessedly coo
l after the blast furnace they’d experienced out in the open.

  Frank and McCoy sat down on the sand to rest. “Wish I had a smoke,” McCoy mused.

  “You can buy all the tobacco you want after we get our hands on that money,” Frank pointed out.

  “Yeah.” McCoy chuckled. “I wish I could’ve been there when that pasty-faced runt found out that I’d es caped from Yuma, too.”

  “Pasty-faced runt?”

  “Yeah. The Eastern dude who owns that bank I robbed in Tucson.”

  Conrad, in other words. Frank kept his face carefully neutral as he asked, “What do you know about him?”

  “Not much, except he was there in Tucson when we hit the bank. If he hadn’t been, if he hadn’t posted that reward on my head, those bounty hunters wouldn’t have come after me and I’d be in Mexico now. So all this is his fault.”

  “You wouldn’t have the eighty grand,” Frank said. “You cached it before you got caught.”

  “I took enough money with me to live comfortably for a while, like I told you I planned to do. It would have worked out, if it hadn’t been for that bastard Browning.”

  Conrad wasn’t a bastard, Frank thought, but of course he couldn’t say that. As far as McCoy was aware, Frank had no connection at all with Conrad Browning.

  “Only thing better than seeing the look on his face when he found out I’d escaped would be putting a bullet right between his beady little eyes,” McCoy went on. “Don’t reckon I’ll ever get a chance to do that, though.”

  Damn right you won’t, Frank vowed. I’ll kill you myself before that happens.

  As the sun began to lower in the west and the worst of the heat was over, the two men left the shelter of the rocks and rode south again. Hunger gnawed at Frank’s belly, but there was no food. They stopped for a little while at dusk to let the horses rest, then pushed on as night settled down. With the mountains looming on their left to guide them, they didn’t have to worry about losing their way in the darkness.