A sharp-eyed cowpuncher, riding in front of Ding Dong’s group, had picked up a glint of sun on metal beside a rock buttress overlooking the riverbed. A branch of sage moved against the wind. Somebody there was preparing a reception for the three-man patrol down closest to the river. When the cowpuncher reported his sighting, Ding Dong called everybody to a halt while he studied the position.
‘They’ve made a mistake there, I think,’ he said with a broad grin. ‘Their cover’s only good against us coming up the river in a bunch. Once we spread around them, we’ll have them trapped.’
Before he ordered the men with him into the attack, he first told the cowboy who had made the sighting to take a shot at the place, even though he couldn’t see who was there.
‘I won’t hit anybody at this distance,’ the man complained.
‘No matter,’ the rancher replied. ‘I just want you to warn our own folk.’
The Sharps breech loader the man carried had a reputation for range and accuracy. It also made a very loud bang when it was fired. One way or the other, nobody for miles around failed to note that the fight had started, when that first bullet raised red-brown rockdust from right where the movement had been seen.
The replies blasted out from several places among the rocks by the river, as the hotheads gave away their positions with jets of blue-black powder smoke.
‘Spread wide men,’ Ding Dong called. ‘Don’t forget the rest of our people are over on the other side of them. We don’t want to go shooting our own folk.’
Before his men could disperse far, Ding Dong called several of them back. ‘I want you fellows with me,’ he explained.
Drawing back a way, and then keeping beyond range of the outlaws’ rifles, he led his small band in a loop far out on the plains to come in on the river again upstream of the ambush.
‘Those fellers can see what we’re a doin’ of,’ a rancher noted.
‘Sure can,’ Ding Dong agreed blandly. ‘I don’t want them thinking they can pull back up the river. If we miss any of them, I don’t want them anywhere where they can give Johnnie any more trouble.’
From the ambush site, and from the rising ground out to the east, a continuous crackle and popping of gunfire marked the position of the people so far engaged. Powder smoke drifted between the two sides. Accurate shooting at any distance was becoming more and more difficult by the minute, and still Caleb Moore’s main party hadn’t made their presence known.
In the dead ground under the shelter of a rock outcrop Ding Dong had his people ground-tie their horses, while they made their way downstream on foot. Their only cover then was the rising ground in the curves, where the river swept first one way, and then the other.
Past the first curve they came in sight of the outlaws’ horses, twenty or more of them, ground tied on the righthand side of the river. They were milling nervously, upset by the gunfire. A man guarding them was crouched under the lip of the riverbank, only his head and shoulders showing. Three more of the rustlers were running up the edge of the river to join him, obviously sent to deal with the threat of Ding Dong’s group interfering with those horses.
Ding Dong went down to one knee, and rested his left elbow on the other to steady his shot, while he lined up his Sharps on the nearest outlaw. The other man fired first, but his bullet, fluttering end over end past Ding Dong’s head, failed to put the rancher off his aim. His reply threw the man back on his haunches, and tumbled him kicking into the river. Pink blood swirled away on the current. For a moment the victim tried to lift his head out of the water, but the effort was too much for him, and it disappeared again below the surface.
The other three outlaws opened up at the same time as Ding Dong’s companions began firing. A man next to him went down, and rolled groaning for the cover of the riverbank. Ding Dong tumbled over the lip close behind him, and checked to see where he had been hit. The fellow was bleeding profusely from a gaping wound in the upper back, and his arm on that side flopped uselessly. The entrance wound near the shoulder was a bluish hole from which leaked the merest trickle of bright red blood.
His shirt, rolled into a ball, made a suitable pad, which Ding Dong positioned against the bank.
‘Here lean back against that,’ he said gruffly. ‘It’ll hold the bleeding till we can tend to you properly.’
Rifle fire was skimming off the top of the bank, forcing him to keep his head down, but he could see that another of his men was sprawled unmoving out in the open. One of the others was emptying a revolver over the top of the bank in an attempt to disconcert the rustlers, while an attempt was made to bring the downed man into shelter.
‘Leave him!’ Ding Dong yelled. ‘He’s dead.’ He could see the hole in his head, and grey brain matter leaking over the exposed cheek.
For the horses, the racket was too much. They were bolting in a disorderly mob toward the open range out to the north-west. With them went the oudaws’ hope of any retreat from their thwarted ambush. All that was left for them now was fighting it out, or surrendering to face an almost certain hanging. A land without law was also a land without jails.
The three along the river began to pull back toward the tumble of rocks which sheltered their accomplices. Two failed to make it that far, but who they fell to was hard to say. Fire was also ranging in on them from across the river.
Far out to that side men had left their horses back out of range, and were working their way closer, often on hands and knees to present a smaller target. The wiser among them had pushed up small heaps of earth and chert pebbles to shelter behind. From Ding Dong’s position only the lip of the riverbank offered any protection, so his party began to edge in, carefully keeping close to the water.
The last man had a better idea. He pulled the dead body of the original horse minder from the water, and rolled it up on to the bank. It made a good breastwork. His weapon was a well-worn Henry rifle which was a little slow to load, the cartridges having to be introduced into the magazine at the front, but once loaded it could be used to wicked effect. Its projectiles slammed in among the rocks where the rustlers lay, ricocheting at sharp angles to create mayhem among the very men who had thought themselves best covered.
Caleb Moore’s party picked that moment to begin contributing their share. Leaving their horses back over the horizon when the shooting started, they had approached down a dry water channel, which debouched into the mainstream below the ambush site. From the rim of the channel they commanded the top of the outlaws’ rock outcrop, and all the outfall from the southern face of it.
From that moment the friendly fire became almost as dangerous as that from the desperate rustlers. What saved the situation was that everybody knew it, and made sure that their shots hit low among the rocks, and didn’t either overshoot them, or bounce off the top. That way, anything that did go through was at least almost spent before it reached as far as the besiegers on the other side.
Hopeless as the rustlers’ position was, they could do nothing but fight on. With enemies widely spaced around them, every time they tried to take a bead on one of their tormentors, they showed themselves to yet another. Hence their fire was wild. There was no time to aim properly. At best they could whip up, fire, and drop back again before anybody could get a line on them. It made little difference. Places where they could fire from were so limited in number, the outlying marksmen only had to keep throwing shots into them at random, and sooner or later a rustler bobbed up straight into an incoming shot. What was more, most of the hits were head shots. There were few wounded able to keep on fighting.
Now and then a muffled thump came from the rustlers’ position, a different sound to the sharp crack of their rifles and pistols.
‘A shotgun?’ a cowpuncher queried. ‘They cain’t hit anyone from there with a shotgun.’
‘Yes they can,’ Ding Dong told him. ‘It’s the coup de grace. They’re putting their wounded out of their misery.’
‘It makes sense,’ the other rancher agreed. ‘They do it for themselves, or
we do it for them.’
The hail of fire pouring into the rocks settled into a steady, almost rhythmic clatter. That coming out died away as one after another rustlers stopped shooting, lost the ability to shoot, lost the ability to even breathe.
For several long minutes nothing at all came from the rocks. Slowly the encircling posse allowed their own fire to die away.
Nobody moved. Gun smoke wafted away on the wind down the plains.
‘They’re finished!’ a cowboy called, and stood to his feet.
A bullet took him in the hip, and spun him to the ground. The crack of the shot was a shock even to fire-deafened ears.
More smoke showed over the rocks.
Fire from all directions poured into that one spot. A man there reared defiantly to his feet, trying to raise a rifle over his head. The weight was too much for him. He dropped it. Bullets were tearing his torso to shreds, but still be tottered there, a glare on his powder-scorched face. Then he folded forward, spread himself over the rock in front of him, and smothered it with his blood.
‘Is that it now?’ a voice called.
‘That’ll do,’ Ding Dong yelled in reply. ‘Everybody pull back. Come around upstream behind me.’
‘Ain’t we goin’ in there to clean ’em out? There might be some still alive.’
‘Good luck to them,’ Ding Dong bellowed. ‘I don’t want to risk any more lives finding out.’
‘He’s right,’ Caleb Moore’s yell supported him. ‘T’aint worth goin’ in there. Any still left ain’t of no account now. The buzzards can have ’em.’
All the same Ding Dong left a couple of his best shots keeping watch on the rocks, while the rest of his men pulled back. Unbeknown to him, until later, Caleb Moore had done the same around the other side.
The body count when they came together wasn’t good news, but could have been worse. Three good men were tied face-down over their saddles. The wounded were more numerous, eleven being too hard-hit to ride, and at least one of them not likely to last the day out.
‘We could send somebody up to Bent’s Fort for a wagon,’ Caleb suggested, himself standing braced while one of his men used a horse hair to stitch up a deep furrow in his upper right arm. Raw whiskey had left a clean patch around the wound, and had cut runnels in the dust on his forearm.
‘Good thinking,’ Ding Dong agreed. ‘I’ll leave you and some men here to attend to that, while I go on up-river to help Johnnie. I’ve got a couple of fellows keeping watch on where those rustlers were. I don’t want any trouble from any we might have missed.’
‘I’ve got a couple there too,’ Caleb grinned. ‘Yeah, you go on. I won’t be much use once this stiffens up.’
All those who still had whole skins sorted themselves out, and prepared to ride out with Ding Dong. The lightly wounded, and one who had managed to break a wrist while diving for cover, thought themselves able enough to care for their more seriously hurt comrades. The dead would be taken to the cemetery up at the fort.
Long after Ding Dong and the rest of his followers had ridden away, those who remained kept a wary eye on the rocks where the dead rustlers lay. Buzzards circled overhead, but none landed. The watchers wondered why. Two men, who were detailed to ride up to Bent’s Fort to fetch a wagon, and another who was going, back down country for Danny Long Knife, gave the rocks a wide berth when they left.
When night fell, still nobody had approached the scene of the failed ambush, apart from a lone coyote which snapped and snarled at something in the blackness, and then retreated to grizzle to the stars from somewhere out on the plain.
Only then did a movement come, a stealthy shifting from under a slab of rock near the bottom of the slope. A young fellow crept out, skinny, wiry, and quivering like a mouse in a cattery. Probably no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, he had revolvers holstered on both thighs, and loaded gunbelts crossed around his waist. In his hand was a Sharps rifle, loaded, and in his pocket rested a reserve of ammunition for it. Not one of the weapons had been fired. Not a shot had been taken from his belts or his pocket, not one.
Silent tears streaming down his cheeks, be unbuckled both belts, and lowered them, revolvers and all, quietly to the ground. Then he just walked away from them.
The rifle and the reserve of ammunition for it went with him. That was a hunting weapon. He couldn’t see that he would ever again have a use for the others.
Somewhere along the Santa Fe Trail he’d join up with a party of settlers heading west. Of all the people who listened to Dismal Dacre’s promise of an easy fortune, he was one of the few who actually gained anything out of the association. He had kept his life, and learned something about what he could and couldn’t do with it.
EIGHTEEN