As quietly and carefully as he could he eased further back into the trees, until there were several thick trunks between himself and the place where the two outlaws lay. Only then did he start thumbing fresh loads into the Lefancheaux. He could do that by feel in the dark, and without needing to worry about getting his powder damp. The Remington would have to stay empty. The third weapon was still back there on the ground where he had dropped it after firing its last shot.
From somewhere up the river another gun boomed. Echoes played off the bluffs across the river, and cackled away into the distance.
Bobcat had to be involved in that. Who had he come across? They had seen three men on this side of the river, and Johnnie had already dealt with three men, so how many were there?
With his gun loaded again, Johnnie silently repeated the trick of getting downwind from his victims. Again he detected the smell of blood and urine, without any of the acrid odour of fear. His victims had nothing left to fear... on this side of the great divide anyway. Nonetheless, he approached them with care, and felt carefully around them to make sure they really were dead. They were. The grey man, though, was still not one of them.
Their weapons and ammunition, together with the gun from his first kill, when he found it once more, made quite a load. He didn’t want any other outlaws who might be about to find them, so he had to take them with him, unless he chose to throw them in the river. He thought about that, but dismissed the idea. It would be better for his own people to have more guns. The value of having an extra reserve of firepower had already been proven for him that night.
His best way of carrying the other weapons and ammunition was by taking the outlaws’ belts, holsters, and ammunition boxes, and draping them around his neck. The weight unbalanced him, making him doubly careful as he crept away into the night.
The vicinity of the three dead men wasn’t a place to linger. If there were any other outlaws to contend with, they would be looking for him there, and mightn’t be so gullible after hearing all the shots that had been fired. To be on the safe side, his best place was up on the mesa, and back some distance from the rim.
An arroyo leading the way he wanted to go was tempting, but he figured that others could reason that it was likely to be used by anybody coming away from the fire fight, so that was as good a reason as any not to use it. He chose instead to clamber up a place where the bluffs were a little less steep, where, by taking his time, he was able to reach the top without making any detectable noise, and equally importantly still had breath to spare.
The ground on top was short grass prairie with patches of bare dust, and odd clumps of bushes and scrubby weeds. Anybody who wanted to would have little trouble in following his tracks once the sun came up. He decided that his best course was to pick a suitable place, and lie up to see who might come sniffing along those tracks with daylight. A grouping of several yucca plants provided the cover he wanted, and also gave him a good view across the mesa in all directions.
When he stopped, his still damp clothes allowed the chill to creep in. By the time a suggestion of paleness tinged the eastern sky he was feeling the cold badly, and worried about the effect it might have on him. That didn’t, however, stop him from maintaining a careful watch.
A figure moving quietly on the edge of the mesa, where it dipped to the river, caught his attention.
Somebody there was trying to see what had happened down in the canyon during the night. It was still too dark to see who it was, though he suspected it wasn’t Bobcat. The Indian wouldn’t be so easily seen.
Whoever it was obviously decided against going down into the canyon, for shortly he moved away to the east, taking a path set back a short distance from the rim.
Johnnie slipped quietly after him.
For Johnnie, the other man was outlined against the lightening sky. If the outlaw looked back, Johnnie would be still hidden in the darkness. Both of them went on like that for some time, until the man in the lead came to where the main trail cut down to the river. Just over the rim at that point would be the mulberry bushes where the little hawk had called their attention to the waiting ambush. That seemed to be where the man was heading.
Johnnie watched him drop out of sight, and then crept up to the edge and peered over. Every minute the darkness was becoming less intense.
There were horses tethered behind the mulberry bushes, eight of them, and several saddles, both riding and pack saddles, were heaped nearby. Just the one man was there. He was busily saddling up one of the horses.
Johnnie withdrew a few yards back from the edge, and shrugged off his load of belts and weaponry. Then taking just his own guns, he returned to look down on the lone outlaw. The fellow was almost ready to mount up.
‘Stop right there!’ Johnnie yelled at him. ‘Put your hands up.’
The man did anything but! He ducked under his horse’s belly, and came up the other side with a gun blazing over the saddle. Johnnie stepped back as soon as he saw the gun coming up, and two bullets whirred over his head.
‘Problems, Johnnie?’ a voice said right behind him.
He whirled. Bobcat was nearly at his shoulder.
‘Hell!’Johnnie gulped. ‘Don’t do that to me.’
‘I thought you might like help,’ Bobcat grinned, all white teeth in the early morning gloom.
‘Yes, well, I think there’s only this one left,’ Johnnie told him. ‘There’s eight horses down there, and three of them are pack horses. I heard you fire, so I assume you shot one?’
‘Not shoot,’ Bobcat replied. ‘Use this.’ He touched the bone haft of the wicked knife sheathed on his hip. ‘Other man, he shoot at shadows.’
‘Well this fellow ain’t,’ Johnnie said. ‘He’s shooting at me.’
He approached the edge again further along, and peeped over. Bobcat slipped away along the rim in the other direction. The rustler was backing away toward the river, carefully keeping his horse between himself and where he thought Johnnie was up on the mesa.
Johnnie wished he had a rifle with him. The shot was a bit on the long side for a revolver. There was too much danger of hitting the horse.
Using both hands, Johnnie lined up the Lefancheaux on the outlaw’s feet where they showed under the belly of the horse. Wounding him would at least stop him from getting away. Johnnie knew that downhill shots tended to go high. Fear of hitting the horse caused him to aim lower still, and of course he missed. The boom of the gun made the horse shy away, and the outlaw went with it, trying to control the beast with one hand, while he took another shot at Johnnie with the other.
He missed too.
Bobcat didn’t. Turning away from Johnnie had exposed the outlaw to the Indian’s fire, and Bobcat made the most of the opportunity. The horse buckjumped aside, leaving the crumpled form of the outlaw sprawled on the ground. He didn’t move again.
‘That should be the last of them,’Johnnie called.
‘Then who are these people coming behind us?’ Bobcat called back.
Johnnie looked where he was pointing. Just visible in the growing light, something like a mile away, a large group of horsemen were coming over the plains from the south. They were following the line of the cattle drive, which now constituted a trail in itself.
‘We’d better get back across the river before they arrive,’ Johnnie decided. ‘They’d have us like rats in a trap here.’
‘Leave saddles, but take the horses,’ Bobcat advised.
‘Right,’ Johnnie agreed promptly, ‘but I’ll take these guns. You grab that fellow’s.’
The saddled horse was too nervy from the shooting to allow them near it, but the tied horses were more manageable. They loosed them all, retaining one each to ride bare-backed. Then they herded them all into the river.
As compared with the places they had swum in the night, the crossing there was relatively shallow. For most of the distance the horses were touching bottom, so that they arrived on the other side only a short distance below where they had entered. Both of them
were wet to the chest again, however, and some of the ammunition was spoiled from a wetting.
A grove of cottonwoods masked the entrance to a narrow draw, which led up to the mesa on the northern side. They tied the horses behind the trees. The saddled one, calmer after its journey through the river, was caught and put with them.
‘We’ll discourage these fellows from crossing for a while,’Johnnie said.
‘Won’t be able to hold them all day,’ Bobcat argued.
‘No, but perhaps we can leave them not knowing whether we’re here or not,’ Johnnie suggested. ‘That should give us a longer start when we do ride off.’
Together they gathered together some driftwood from the riverbank, and piled it into a rough barricade from which they could command the river crossing, while leaving themselves an easy retreat into the cover of the cottonwoods behind them. They expected the group of horsemen to appear at any minute, and attributed the fact of them not having arrived already to the other party’s caution in approaching the scene of the shooting they must have heard.
‘That grey horse isn’t here,’ Johnnie observed while they waited. ‘Is that who you killed up the river there?’
‘Not that man,’ Bobcat replied. ‘Grey horse, his marks are on ground behind us. Two other horses also. When we cross river up there, grey man, he cross river down here.’
‘He’d better not come back then, while we’re facing this way,’ Johnnie commented. In his mind, though, he was thinking over the possibilities of where the man in grey might have gone. It was likely that he and his two companions would have gone north along the river seeking Johnnie’s party at the place they had last been seen. Surely, even so, all the shooting on the south bank should have brought him back to the river. He was just considering leaving Bobcat to watch the crossing alone, while he went up to the mesa above in case the grey man was up there somewhere, when the party of horsemen arrived across the river.
They appeared suddenly, all at once, lined up along the rim of the canyon on the other side of the river, near on forty of them, all mounted, and with a great many packhorses in tow. Rifles at the ready showed plainly against the early morning sky.
‘Who are you fellows down there?’ a voice bellowed, a very welcome voice. Johnnie knew it well.
‘It’s me, Dad. Johnnie,’ he shouted back, standing to his feet.
Prominent among the men silhouetted on the skyline was Johnnie’s father, Ding Dong. The men with him had to be the citizens’ band he had raised from the other squatters who had settled on the high plains.
‘You stay there,’ his father called. ‘We’re coming across.’
‘I’ll meet them, and bring them up to date,’ Johnnie said to Bobcat. ‘How about you taking a look to see where the grey man, and the other two rustlers, might have gone.’
While Bobcat slipped away, taking the saddled horse with him, Johnnie went down to meet his father coming across the river.
‘We heard the Cheyenne have gone,’ Ding Dong reported, while he was still in mid-river. ‘I decided it was time we came ahead, eh. We couldn’t wait for the governor’s okay any longer.’
‘I was just on my way back to get you,’ Johnnie agreed.
‘What was all the shooting we’ve been hearing?’ Ding Dong asked as his horse scrabbled for a footing on the wet river bank.
While he watched his father’s party streaming across the river, Johnnie explained about the ambush the rustlers had tried to set to prevent him carrying word southward.
‘Wouldn’t have done them much good,’ Ding Dong commented. ‘We were camped less than three miles down the way. We heard your guns in the night, but thought we’d better wait to arrive in daylight, so’s we could see what we were letting ourselves in for.’
As men came out of the river, Ding Dong named the ones Johnnie didn’t already know. There was little hope of him remembering all the names right off, but he determined that he’d make a point of doing so as soon as he could. All of them were in one way or another cattlemen from the high plains, their cowhands, or people connected with them through trade. One of them was a cattle buyer. Another was a mule driver who sold household goods, cutlery and tinware from ranch to ranch.
‘How’s Eb?’ Johnnie asked after the black cow- puncher he had last seen bedridden at the ranch.
‘On his feet, but a mite wobbly yet,’ he was told.
When his men were all assembled, and had heard what Johnnie had to say, Ding Dong took charge. ‘We’ll collect Mrs Edison, and push straight on north then,’ he ordered.
By that time Bobcat had been gone a good half hour. Johnnie wasn’t particularly worried. It probably meant that the three rustlers were keeping their distance, and Bobcat had had to go a fair way to find any sign of them. The likelihood of them coming across Mary-Lou out on those broad plains was slight. She should have been much further to the east than they were likely to go, and they’d have been unable to find her tracks until daylight.
He changed his mind when he rode on to the mesa top himself. Bobcat was coming across country at a full gallop.
‘That man, those outlaws,’ Bobcat puffed, when he skidded to a stop in front of the party, ‘they gone after Mary-Lou, eh. Their tracks in night go that way.’ He pointed eastward.
‘They wouldn’t know she was there,’ Johnnie objected. ‘They wouldn’t be able to see her tracks tillhalf-an-hour ago.’
‘They hear her,’ Bobcat said. ‘They find her. You see.’
FOURTEEN