Ambush Valley

by Johnstone, William W.

They didn’t make camp until about midnight. Frank slept fitfully when it was his turn, haunted by cold and hunger. He was just as glad to hit the trail again early the next morning, when the sky was barely gray enough for them to see where they were going.

  There had been no further sign of the Apaches. Frank hoped the war party had headed back to the border and wouldn’t complicate things any further for him.

  McCoy noticed Frank looking back over his shoulder at one point and said, “Don’t worry. Nobody’s behind us. We would’ve seen them by now if they were.”

  That was where McCoy was wrong. Abner Hoyt and the other bounty hunters were back there, staying far enough behind so that they wouldn’t be spotted by the two fugitives.

  But what if they weren’t? Frank suddenly wondered. What if something had happened to Hoyt’s party? Those Apaches could have doubled back, circled around, and attacked them. Hoyt and his men were tough, but they would have been outnumbered by more than two to one and the Apaches were fine fighting men, too. Or some other accident could have befallen them. Frank thought it was unlikely, but he had to admit that it was possible he was out here on his own with McCoy, deep in these Arizona badlands that were about to get even worse when they reached Ambush Valley.

  If that proved to be the case, he would deal with it when the time came, he told himself. He wasn’t afraid of McCoy. It had been a good many years since he had wasted time being afraid of any man.

  Around midmoming, McCoy reined in abruptly and dismounted, drawing his gun as he stalked toward some small rocks. Frank started to ask him what the hell he was doing, but McCoy motioned him to silence. McCoy crouched next to the rocks, reversed his gun, and waited. After several minutes, he struck with blinding speed at something, bringing the butt of the revolver down on some target Frank couldn’t see.

  When McCoy straightened, he had a large lizard dan gling from his left hand as he held the creature’s tail. The lizard’s head was smashed. That was what he’d walloped with the gun butt.

  “Not much meat on one of these scaly little bastards, but it’s better than nothing, I reckon.”

  Frank’s stomach clenched in revulsion. “Some of those critters are poisonous, you know,” he pointed out.

  “Yeah, but not this one. Fella I used to ride with named Cortez grew up in this country. He taught me what you can eat and what you can’t.”

  Frank wondered briefly what had happened to the outlaw called Cortez, but he didn’t ask McCoy. Chances were, Cortez had either been killed by the bounty hunters … or by McCoy himself.

  McCoy scrounged around, gathered some sparse grass and twigs, and built a small, almost smokeless fire. He skinned the lizard and roasted it over the tiny flames, and Frank had to admit that the smell of cooking meat, even lizard meat, made him even hungrier.

  “Want some?” McCoy asked.

  “Yeah, I guess,” Frank said. He took the small hunk of meat that McCoy tore off the roasted carcass and chewed it. The lizard was tough and stringy, with a rank taste to it, and there wasn’t much of it. But what little Frank ate helped to alleviate his hunger, at least for a while.

  After that grisly meal they pushed on, and McCoy set a hard, demanding pace. “We can’t afford to waste any time,” the bank robber explained. “The lawdogs might figure out that I’m heading for Ambush Valley and try to get there ahead of me. They’d like nothing better than to be there waiting when I rode up.”

  Frank knew that wouldn’t happen, because Conrad and Warden Townsend wouldn’t allow it to. The trail to Ambush Valley was clear of any interference, at least from the authorities.

  But that didn’t mean there was no danger. No one in volved in formulating the plan had known that an Apache war party was going to be prowling around the area. It was those unexpected things, impossible to ac count for, that often wound up costing a man his life.

  Frank saw concrete evidence of that a few moments later when a lone mounted figure appeared on a rise sev eral hundred yards away. In the clear desert air, the rider’s blue shirt and red headband were visible.

  McCoy saw the man, too, and let out a bitter curse. “That’s one of those damned renegades!” he said. “They’re still around. I was hoping they’d gone back to Mexico!”

  Frank had shared that hope, but obviously both he and McCoy were going to be disappointed. The distant Indian suddenly wheeled his pony and disappeared.

  “He’s gone to tell the rest of the war party about the two foolish white men who are riding out here alone,” Frank said.

  “Yeah. That means we’ll have company as soon as they can get here.” McCoy yanked his horse toward the foothills. “We’d better find a place to fort up.”

  Frank galloped after him. Before they reached the hills, he looked back and saw the line of riders that had come into sight. The Apaches were pounding hard after him and McCoy. The two white men were closer to the foothills and would reach them before the renegades could catch up; Frank had no doubt about that.

  But once they made it to the hills, they would have to find a place they could defend against long odds, or else the Apaches would overrun them. That meant, at best, a quick death in battle. At worst … a slow, lingering death by torture, a pastime that the Apaches loved so much.

  Frank couldn’t hear anything except the thunder of hoofbeats as he and McCoy raced for cover. But as they entered the hills and reined in to look around for a suitable spot to defend, the sound of gunshots came to Frank’s ears, accompanied by whoops and yells. The Apaches were nothing if not enthusiastic in their savagery.

  “Over there!” McCoy called as he pointed to a knoll that was dotted with medium-sized boulders. He and Frank reined their mounts behind the little rise, then leaped from the saddles and hurried behind the rocks, carrying their Winchesters.

  Frank dropped to a knee and steadied the barrel of his rifle against the rock. He and McCoy had kicked up a lot of dust with their mad dash toward the hills and some of it still hung in the air, obscuring his view of the charg ing Apaches. As the renegades emerged from the dust, Frank settled the rifle’s sights on one of the warriors who was in the lead. He had already levered a round into the chamber, so all he had to do was press the trigger.

  The Winchester cracked and bucked against his shoul der. The Apache Frank had drawn a bead on jerked backward, but grabbed his horse’s mane and managed not to fall. Still, Frank could tell that the man was badly hurt from the way he slumped over the animal’s neck. The horse slowed to a stop as the charge continued around it.

  McCoy fired as Frank worked the lever of his Win chester. “Let’s whittle’ em down!” the bank robber called from his position behind another rock about twenty feet from the spot Frank had picked to defend.

  Frank selected another target. The Apaches were only a couple of hundred yards away now and closing fast. He and McCoy wouldn’t have time to kill all of them before they reached the rocks, no matter how fast and accurate their shots were.

  But like McCoy had said, all they could do was try to cut down a little on the odds against them. Frank fired again, and this time the renegade he drilled left his horse, spun in the air, and landed facedown on the ground.

  The bloodcurdling yelps were loud now, and cal culated to strike terror into the hearts of the Apaches’ enemies.

  Frank Morgan didn’t feel terror.

  He felt anger that he had endured so much and come so far, only to have the success of his mission threatened by the random savagery of these renegades.

  “Come on, you sons of bitches!” he growled as he jacked the Winchester’s lever again. “Come on and eat lead!”

  Abner Hoyt heard the faint, distant popping of gun shots for several seconds before he realized what it was. When he did realize the truth, he reined in and uttered a disgusted curse.

  “What now?” Deke Mantee asked as he and the other men brought their horses to a halt.

  “Shooting,” Bob Bardwell said. “I hear it, too.”

  “And it’s coming from
the direction Morgan and McCoy went,” Hoyt said with a curt nod. “What the hell have they gotten themselves into now?”

  Joaquin Escobar leaned forward in the saddle and thumbed his sombrero back on his head. “Sounds like quite a fight,” he commented. “Maybe they ran into those ‘Paches again. Quien sabe?”

  For the past couple of days, Escobar and Bardwell had been riding ahead of the main group several times a day, pushing their horses and getting close enough to the men they were trailing to make sure that Morgan and McCoy were still up there ahead of the bounty hunters, without approaching close enough to be easily spotted. The scouts had returned to the group a short time earlier and reported that they were still on the trail to Ambush Valley, just as they were supposed to be.

  Now several of the men cast worried glances toward Hoyt, and Bartholomew Leaf asked, “What are we going to do, old boy? If McCoy is killed, we’ll never find that bank money.”

  “And never get the rest of the reward,” Ben Coleman added in an angry growl.

  “You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know,” Hoyt snapped. “But what can we do? If we ride in and rescue Morgan and McCoy from whatever trouble they’re in, McCoy will figure out what’s going on. We’ll be left trying to torture the loot’s hiding place out of him—and that didn’t work before, now did it?”

  The bounty hunters had to admit that it hadn’t.

  Hoyt grimaced as he stared off into the distance in the direction of the shots. “I don’t like it, but we’re gonna have to just hope that those two bastards can get them selves out of whatever fracas they’ve gotten in, so that McCoy can finish leading us to that money.”

  “And if they can’t?” Mantee asked.

  “Then I hope that McCoy dies slow and hard, at least,” Hoyt said.

  Frank and McCoy shot three more Apaches off their horses during the renegades’ charge toward the rocks. That still left about a dozen of them, and they evidently decided that they didn’t want to continue their attack right into the face of those deadly guns. The riders whirled their horses around and dashed away. The two men holed up in the rocks sent more rounds whistling after them, but the dust made it impossible to see whether or not they hit anything.

  “What the hell!” McCoy exclaimed when he finally lowered his Winchester. “They had us! Why’d they turn tail and run?”

  “Don’t know,” Frank answered as he took advantage of the opportunity to shove fresh cartridges into his rifle. “Maybe the ones who are left decided we aren’t worth dying over.”

  “Think again.” McCoy nodded toward the flat desert landscape in front of them. “They’re regrouping out there.”

  It was true. The remaining Apaches had ridden hard until they were out of effective rifle range, then stopped and milled around. Frank saw several of them gesturing angrily with their rifles. They probably wanted to attack again, but wiser, cooler heads prevailed. The group split up into twos and threes, spreading out over the flats and circling toward the foothills, except for one group that parked themselves right in front of the spot where the two white men had taken cover.

  “Son of a bitch!” McCoy said. “They’re trying to keep us pinned down here while the others spread out and come at us from different directions!”

  It was a plan that might well work, too … if the in tended quarry stayed right where they were.

  “Let’s pull back through the hills,” Frank suggested. “We can slip out of this trap before it closes around us.”

  “No, damn it! If we do that, it’ll slow us down too much. We’ll never make it to Ambush Valley before the law wises up and gets there ahead of us. And I’m not gonna get this close to that loot and then lose it!”

  They could have taken a week to get there, Frank thought, and they still wouldn’t find a posse waiting for them. But McCoy didn’t know that and there was no way Frank could explain it to him without giving away the game. All he could do was appeal to McCoy’s sense of self-preservation.

  “If they keep us bottled up here until dark, they’ll close in and get us,” Frank warned. “Apaches don’t mind fighting at night. We won’t see them coming.”

  “I know, blast it.” McCoy snatched his hat off, ran his fingers through his thick, snowy hair, and sighed in dis gust. As he clapped his hat back on, he said, “There’s only one thing to do.”

  “What’s that?” Frank started to ask, but the words were hardly out of his mouth before McCoy was stand ing up and running for his horse.

  “We’re busting out!” McCoy called over his shoulder.

  Frank leaped up and ran after the bank robber. McCoy was acting on impulse, but his reckless plan actually stood a chance of working. Most of the Apaches were scattered, and a head-on attack against the warriors who had been left to keep them pinned down was a desperate but possibly successful move. Frank and McCoy would have to strike hard and fast, though.

  McCoy jammed a foot in the stirrup and hauled him self onto his horse. He wheeled the animal and banged his heels against its flank. Frank was right behind him. He wished he had Stormy or Goldy underneath him. He would have trusted either of those powerful mounts to carry him to safety. He would have to make do with this horse stolen from a prison guard, though.

  The riders burst out of the rocks. The horses bounded down the knoll in long, ground-eating strides. Puffs of smoke came from the rifles of the three Apaches who were now hunkered down out on the flats. The range was still a little long. Frank saw dirt kick up from the ground in front of him as the renegades’ bullets fell short.

  That wouldn’t be the case for very long, however. Frank and McCoy were closing the gap with every pass ing second. They weaved their mounts back and forth to make themselves slightly more difficult targets.

  Frank shoved his Winchester back in the saddle boot since there was no way he could draw an accurate bead from the hurricane deck of the galloping horse. When they got closer, though, he might try a shot or two with his six-gun.

  The Apaches had to think that the white men had lost their minds. Well, maybe they had, Frank reflected grimly. That hidden loot meant more to Cicero McCoy than anything else in the world. And right now, helping his son by recovering that money meant more than any thing else to Frank. He drew his Colt as a bullet from one of the Apache rifles sizzled past his ear.

  From the corner of his eye he saw that some of the other renegades had realized what was going on and had turned back to try to cut him and McCoy off. But they were going to be too late. The three Indians blocking their path leaped up and kept firing, The revolver bucked in Frank’s hand as he loosed a shot at them. One of the Apaches went down, and a second later so did another one, courtesy of a bullet from McCoy. The third rene gade turned and tried to run for his horse.

  McCoy rode him down.

  The Apache fell forward as McCoy’s galloping horse slammed into him from behind. His body jerked under the impact of steel-shod hooves. Frank grimaced as he saw the Apache’s head explode like a melon as the horse stepped on it.

  It was just one gruesome glance, though, and then the two men flashed on past. They had broken out of the trap, and now it was up to their horses to keep them ahead of the remaining renegades. Frank leaned forward over his mount’s neck and urged the horse on to greater speed. He didn’t look back until he had galloped for sev eral hundred yards. When he did, he saw that the rene gades had regrouped and were coming after him and McCoy, a dust cloud boiling up behind them.

  Now it was a race, with Frank and McCoy. against the Apaches.

  A race where the stakes were life and death.

  Chapter 19

  What saved them, eventually, was the fact that the Apaches were such poor horsemen. An Apache could run all day without his lean, muscular body tiring, but he would rather eat a horse than ride one, and he wasn’t the best judge of horseflesh in the world, either. The an imals Frank and McCoy had stolen from the prison guards were big and strong, not the fastest mounts but with plenty of stamina. One by o
ne, the Apaches dropped out of the chase until, finally, all of them had turned back.

  McCoy let out a triumphant laugh when he looked back and saw that all the pursuers had vanished. “How about that?” he said. “We outran them!”

  “We were lucky,” Frank said as he slowed his ex hausted mount. “As strong as these horses are, they’re wearing out. We couldn’t have pushed them much longer at that pace.”

  “Yeah, but those red skins didn’t know that.” McCoy frowned. “We sort of got off course. We’re too far west. That’ll slow us down some.”

  “Well, we can’t try to make up the time. We’ll ride these horses right into the ground if we do.”

  “You’re right,” McCoy agreed with a reluctant nod. “I reckon we’ll just have to hope that the law doesn’t beat us to Ambush Valley.”

  That wasn’t going to happen, Frank thought. Unless those blasted Apaches showed up again, nothing was going to prevent him and McCoy from reaching Ambush Valley.

  Dusk was beginning to shroud the landscape when Frank spotted some lights winking into existence in the distance, south and west of where he and McCoy rode.

  The bank robber saw the lights, too, and pointed them out. “That’s Hinkley, where those damned bounty hunters caught up to me,” McCoy explained. “Actually, they had gotten ahead of me and were waiting for me, the bastards. I didn’t think it was possible that any pur suit could get around the mountains that fast. They had some sort of Mex tracker with them and he must’ve known about some passes that I didn’t.” McCoy sighed and shook his head. “Another hour and I’d’ve been across the border in Mexico, where the law couldn’t touch me.”

  “No offense, McCoy, but I can’t feel too sorry for you,” Frank said with a grin. “If you hadn’t been sent to prison, I never would have met you … and I wouldn’t be on my way to a twenty-four-thousand-dollar payoff.”

  “Yeah, you’re going to come out ahead on this deal, Morton.”

  Frank didn’t believe that for a second. McCoy wasn’t planning to pay him anything for his help except a few ounces of lead, in the form of a bullet, preferably in the back. But as they rode through the gathering shadows, Frank indulged his curiosity by asking, “How did you come to be a bank robber, anyway?”