Kelly screamed and fell down, pitching face-forwards over the grass in a sliding skid that tossed his carbine away to the side and dipped his face in the surging water of the stream.
‘I’m hit!’ he yelled. ‘Oh, God! I’m hit. He’s killed me.’
‘Bastard’s on the rim,’ shouted Dumfries. ‘Get him!’
Six guns opened up on Azul’s position, blasting a near-solid wave of flame at the rimrock. The half-breed rolled to the side, powering to his feet to launch into a sliding, skidding run back down the slope.
The gunfire ended and Dumfries’s voice rang out again.
‘Ned, Tansy! Get up the slope. Billy, you watch the horses. The rest of you wait here.’
Kelly went on screaming.
Azul got back to the trail and shifted across, moving on to the lower slope and stalking round, closer to the eastern edge of the bowl.
The moon was up high now, lighting the upper
rim so that he had a clear picture of the men grouped at the
entrance to the depression, could even see the two moving up
towards the rim.
Ned Braker was twenty-one years old. A Missouri boy who had grown up in the aftermath of the border fighting that followed the Civil War. He was handy with a gun, learning the trade at an early age when he defended his family farm from Kansas raiders bent on extracting revenge for the plundering that had gone on during the years of bloody struggle. He had killed three men, and twice fought off plundering Indians since hiring out to Amos Dumfries. And now he was rated with the best of Dumfries’s hands: a steady, reliable man who knew how to use a gun and how to obey orders.
His career ended with the .44-40 slug that broke his back and ruptured through his stomach to emerge in a thick welter of blood that splashed back from the tree before him and began to drip down his face. He felt an instant of awful pain; so hot, so agonizing, that he saw – quite literally – red dance before his eyes. Then there was only the blackness and the taste of blood and muddy earth in his mouth.
He twitched, sliding back down the slope. The bullet that had snapped his spine had torn a hole through his belly so that he was bleeding profusely — would have suffered a longer, slower death, had the nervous linkages of his backbone not been shattered, thus cutting off the directions of his dying brain. Instead, he just slumped in the mud and slithered down towards his companion.
The outpouring of his body was lost in the
shadows and the slime of the slope.
Tansy Beckenhaugh was older and wiser than Ned. That was why he had let the kid go ahead up the slope: he had figured the hidden rifleman was on the crest, and thus most likely to pick off the first face to show.
He hadn’t expected the bastard to move round to the downslope, and that left him with a problem. If he went on climbing he had to come clear into the marksman’s sights; but if he went back down, then he had to cross that area of open ground where the killer might take him as easily as he had shot Ned.
Tansy turned on his back and shuffled behind the bole of a big loblolly pine.
‘He’s below you, Mr. Dumfries,’ he yelled. ‘He went down the ridge.’
‘I know that,’ screamed his boss. ‘I got eyes an’ ears.’
Simultaneously, a fresh volley of fire blasted down the slope.
The bullets splintered branches. Fluttered through bushes. Blew chips of raw stone from the exposed boulders.
But none hit the target, because Azul was already shifting back to his original position, moving along the ridge to clamber upwards to cross the trail and emerge on the far side, upslope from the barrage.
Upslope, where he was hidden behind the bushes and the trees with a clear field of fire across the bowl of the meadow.
The torches were out now, doused after the first few shots, but the moon was still bright and the sky was clear, all hint of cloud blown away by the driving storm wind. Azul checked the far side of the meadow, spotting three of the pursuers. Two were crouched behind the slender shelter of a young pine, bellied down with carbines pointed across the clearing; the other was kneeling behind a boulder, angling a handgun across the stream. The half-breed made a fast calculation: there had been seven riders, now one was dead, one still under cover higher up the slope, and one still moaning beside the stream. One had been detailed to watch the horses, so the three in view were all that were left, and one had to be Dumfries himself.
‘I don’t want to kill you,’ yelled the half-breed. ‘Go back.’
‘Go to hell!’ The deep voice that answered was tinged with the same Scottish burr as flavored Azul’s English. ‘You shot my boy an’ you killed my top hand.’
‘They pushed the fight,’ shouted Azul. ‘They had guns out before I even turned on them.’
‘Don’t alter the facts, feller. They’re still dead.’ Azul pinpointed the voice as coming from behind the boulder. ‘Now I’m gonna see you follow them.’
The sentence was punctuated by a blast of fire that got picked up by the two riflemen. Azul backed out from the thicket and moved higher up the slope. He didn’t bother to articulate his reply, just acted on pure instinct: he had given Dumfries a chance the rancher had chosen to ignore. Now he would reply in kind, letting the Apache side of his nature dictate his actions.
He triggered the Winchester, emptying the
long gun in a blaze of fire that sent Dumfries and the two riflemen
ducking into cover. They answered when his gun clicked empty, but
by then he was moving further up the slope, heading back to the
crest. He got on to the rimrock and paused long enough to thumb
fresh loads into the Winchester. Then he moved on, cat-footing his
way over the slippery stone until he was on the far side, looking
down the slope to where Tansy Beckenhaugh crouched behind the
loblolly.
Tansy never heard the bullet that took his life away. It struck the left side of his skull as he peered warily out from behind the tree, trying to spot the hidden man. It shattered his left temple, driving shards of bone into the soft gristle of his brain along with the lead slug. The side of his face ruptured inwards, bursting the outer edge of his eye socket so that a single, massive hole extended from his nose to his ear. The eyeball popped loose, dangling down his bloodstained cheek and jouncing on the nerve linkages as his head jerked sideways and back. The slug pulped the center of his brain, bursting out below his right cheekbone on a sticky welter of blood and pulpy gray matter that was flecked through with chips of white bone. It imbedded in the trunk of the pine a fraction of a second before Tansy’s ruined face struck the bole, leaving a huge smear of dripping crimson on the wet bark.
And Tansy crumpled forwards, his remaining eye wide open so that it filled with mud as his face hit the ground; and the loosened eye caught on a root and was torn free of the bloody socket.
Someone shouted, ‘He’s got above us.’
And someone else yelled, ‘Tansy! You there, Tansy?’
Then the guns began to blaze at the higher slope.
The bullets blew long splinters from the trees. Several hit Tansy’s body, adding to the destruction of Azul’s shot so that the man’s head was mashed, his face unrecognizable.
But by then the half-breed was shifting fast to the east, slithering across and down the slope to hit the trail behind the horses.
He got down onto the flat and skirted through the trees in the direction of the meadow. The overgrowth was thicker here, the trail hidden under dense shadow from which came the nervous nickering of ponies.
He caught their scent before he saw them, and slowed his pace to a stealthy walk, drifting like a stalking puma towards the grouping of the seven animals.
There was still a breeze blowing, coming from the west so that his own scent was carried away and the horses smelled mostly the reek of cordite and black powder smoke. He moved along through the trees until he was above the man handling the nervous animals.
The cowboy called Billy was a kid, not yet twenty years old. He was dressed in faded denims and a blue corduroy shirt, his pants held up by the old gun belt spanning his narrow waist. The butt of a Colt’s .45 Peacemaker jutted from the holster, but both his hands were busy with gentling the frightened ponies.
