‘My gun,’ Mary-Lou protested, ‘the Baby Colt, it’s here somewhere.’
She groped around in the blackness, and shortly gave a grunt of satisfaction. In a moment they heard her strapping it on.
Swiftly the three of them left the tent line and ghosted away into the trees. Any of the rustlers could have been in there also, so they had to move cautiously, but in the end came to the river terrace behind the copse without running into any further trouble.
‘Up top,’ Bobcat whispered. ‘You go up there. Wait for me.’
Unquestioningly, Johnnie accordingly led Mary- Lou up the slope of the terrace, and found a place to wait up on the open mesa above. Just as they were settling down, there came a burst of firing from the trees below them, half-a-dozen shots, followed by the thunder of horses’ hooves.
‘The rustlers’ horses,’ Johnnie said. ‘Bobcat’s driven them off. That should make it difficult for them to get away from us.’
‘They won’t be in too much of a hurry anyway,’ Mary-Lou replied.
‘Why’s that?’Johnnie asked.
‘The gold and the money they got for the cattle they’ve sold is all down there. They won’t be going far without that. There’s a fortune there. Sacks and sacks of it. They’ve sold our beef for ten and twenty times what we can get at Baton Rouge.’
Again gunfire came from the darkness below, but this time far out toward the river. Muzzle flashes showed fire from four or five guns opposed to two.
‘That’s some of our people, I think,’ Johnnie explained. ‘I have five more men out there somewhere. Some of the rustlers must have run into them.’
‘I hope they’re not shooting each other.*
‘That’s a definite possibility,’ Johnnie agreed, ‘either for our people or the rustlers. However, our ones have been told to stay together. If they’ve done that they should be all right.’
‘Fools if not,’ Bobcat’s voice came from out of the night.
‘What now?’Johnnie asked him.
Before he could answer another gun exploded some way down the river. There was just the one shot, and no sign of the muzzle flash.
‘Wait till morning,’ Bobcat advised. ‘The rustlers, they shoot at shadows.’
Waiting suited Johnnie. He had no wish to subject Mary-Lou to any other risks. Quickly he told Bobcat what Mary-Lou had said about the money and gold the rustlers had in their camp.
‘Good,’ the Indian commented. ‘Come morning, we take that from them.’
While Bobcat kept watch at the edge of the terrace, Johnnie quietly brought Mary-Lou up to date on what had been happening. She in turn told him about her capture, and imprisonment in the outlaws’ camp, where Dacre had intended to use her to keep her friends at bay until he had finished selling their cattle.
‘How many has he sold?’Johnnie asked.
‘About half of them,’ she said, ‘perhaps a few more. What’s left is still worth a king’s ransom if we sell them to the gold prospectors like Dacre’s been doing.’
‘That money, the gold down there already,’ Johnnie suggested. ‘If Dad’s willing, we should share that evenly with all the men in the citizens’ band, the men who’ve turned out to help us. We get back what’s left of the cattle for our part.’
‘That would suit me,’ Mary-Lou agreed. ‘If we sell them to the gold prospectors there’d be enough for me to re-establish our... my ranch.’
‘I’d see there was. Perhaps you’d let me help you,’ he offered.
‘I’d like that,’ she said simply, and her hand found his in the darkness.
Before he quite understood how it happened, she was wrapped in his arms, and his lips were pressed sweetly down on hers. After that the night slipped away almost too quickly.
It was hardly a peaceful night. Guns in nervous hands saw to that. Every now and then somebody fired at something, and guns racketed up and down the riverbed. All of the surviving rustlers appeared to have separated in their first panicked flight, and thereafter fired on anybody or anything that came near them. Apparently Johnnie’s half-dozen cowpunchers had stalked a couple of the rustlers who had been firing, but appeared to have found the exercise too dangerous. In the second half of the night they also had become content to wait for daylight.
With the first paling of the eastern sky, Bobcat informed them that he intended checking that no horses had returned for the rustlers to find.
‘Bad men not get far,’ he said. ‘When your father’s men come, we get them all.’
After the Indian had gone, Johnnie decided that his best course was to keep a watch on the tents where the money and gold was stored.
‘Dacre will be doing that too,’ Mary-Lou warned.
‘That’s what I thought,’Johnnie nodded.
‘You could wait for your father. All those men could help to capture Dacre.’
‘They could,’ Johnnie agreed, ‘but it’s really my job, I think. After all, I was in charge of the first herd he took. That makes him my responsibility.’
Mary-Lou couldn’t talk him out of it, but neither could he prevent her from following him down into the trees, and taking up a position not far behind him.
The place he found, while it was still dark under the trees, was between two stout hickory trunks, where a fallen limb gave him good cover from the front. Mary-Lou was under a dead tree, which was propped up by its own snapped-off branches. Both had a good view of the line of tents, and also of the grassy flats out towards the river.
Gradually sunlight crept up the eastern sky, and colour returned to the grass, the trees, the bushes, any of which could have concealed Dacre and his remaining men. They had to be somewhere there, making their last desperate try to collect their loot, and ride out with a fortune before the rest of the vengeful cattlemen caught up with them. They had to know that the few who had already found them would soon be followed by others. They couldn’t afford to wait long before they made their play.
Johnnie could. He only hoped his other men had worked that out too.
Quietly he lay and waited. Mary-Lou stayed low, hugging the ground under her sloping tree trunk. Both were wishing they had eyes in the backs of their heads.
The first movement came from far down the river. A horseman appeared on the rim of the eastern terrace. One moment there was just the blank skyline, bright and blue, and the next the pinto horse and its red-shirted rider were there, tiny in the distance; Cab Phillips, unless there was a rustler with an identical horse, and a shirt of that particular redness. They were too far away for most rifles, but somebody had to try. So far as any of the rustlers could see, the rider represented a force which had come between them, and the rest of their people who had gone down river to lay the ambush.
From a position in the trees, a couple of hundred yards downstream from Johnnie, a rifle thumped, its sound deadened by the tree trunks. Immediately four other rifles spoke from different places along the eastern skyline. Seconds later they all fired again.
Johnnie eyed that skyline worriedly, but he couldn’t distinguish the men under any of those four patches of drifting gunsmoke. Each had fired twice, and then drawn back from the edge. It was anybody’s guess where they would appear next.
All the same, the rustlers had now placed five of their opponents, the horseman and four others, as somewhere on the mesa to that side of the river. There was now no sign of the rustler who had been their target.
Johnnie waited some more. He glanced back at Mary-Lou, and smiled at her encouragingly. She smiled back, nervous but determined. A hell of a good partner that one. A man could do well with her beside him.
The next movement came, a stirring in the low growth across the river. Somebody was wriggling through the grass and scrub over there, trying to reach a draw leading up to the mesa on that side. One of the rustlers was trying to stalk his tormentors.
Johnnie lined up on the movement, prepared to take the first good sighting he got. Bobcat beat him to it, firing from almost the exact spot where the first rustler had
fired from. That outlaw, then, had to be dead, dealt with by Bobcat even if all eight shots from across the river had missed him.
Now Bobcat had eliminated the next one too. The man was jerking and shuddering, half-draped over a patch of blackjack oak, where he had reared up when the bullet took him in the head.
For a moment, another head came up not far from him, a confederate shocked into taking a thoughtless look. Johnnie swung his barrel that way, but again was too slow. Three shots came from different places along the eastern skyline, where three rifles had been poised for just such a showing. Another outlaw was gone, three so far, and none of them Dacre. Along with those killed in the night, they must surely by this time have taken out nearly all of them. Nearly, but not quite.
Johnnie wished there had been some way of checking Mary-Lou’s count of how many there had been in the camp to start with. Perhaps only Dacre himself was left.
Away down the river Cab Phillips continued to tease whoever might still be there to see him, bringing his pinto a short way along the terrace rim, and then turning away into the hidden plains beyond, offering himself as a target, but not too good a target. Nobody accepted his dare. The price had been shown to be too high.
On his next appearance, back at his original starting point, Cab was joined by another rider, the horse not one Johnnie remembered from the small group who had accompanied him. Soon another rider, and yet another drew up beside them. The newcomers could only be Ding Dong’s vanguard; the main party coming up the river behind them.
Opposite Johnnie, across on the eastern rim, a man stood to his feet waving, and moved back from the edge. No shot rang out, despite the easy mark he offered in those few seconds. Dacre had to be there to see him. So had any of the other rustlers still alive.
Further down river a second man stood and waved. Then further on a third, and a fourth. They were waving at somebody out of Johnnie’s view, right across the river on the western rim, showing themselves so as not to be fired on by their friends. The main party was coming up along both banks then. If they were evenly split, they constituted a considerable force. The ones Johnnie could see on the eastern side now numbered more than a dozen, Ding Dong prominent among them.
Dacre had to make a run for it soon.
He did.
Not, though, from among the trees or the scrub where Johnnie expected him to be.
There was tearing sound at the back of the third tent along, the one where Mary-Lou had been held. A knife blade protruded through the canvas at the top of the apex, and swept down to cut a long slit. Through it Dismal Dacre forced his way, knife back in its sheath, and revolvers in both hands.
A pair of bulky saddle bags hung down over his chest, the connecting strap passing around the back of his neck. They must have been heavy. He was tilted well back on his feet, and stumped weightily on the ground as he walked.
Johnnie had the rifle on him from just thirty yards away, an easy shot from safe cover... an easy shot for somebody else that is. Johnnie still couldn’t take it.
‘Drop them Dacre!’ he roared, lumbering to his feet with the rifle poked out.
Dacre whirled his way with no intention of dropping anything. The outlaw’s eyes blazed with hatred as he recognized his challenger.
Johnnie fired. His lead whacked into the righthand saddlebag just as Dacre fired. Both his shots went high.
As Dacre stumbled back a pace, gold coins spilling from a gash in his righthand bag, he threw down again, but Johnnie heaved the empty rifle at him, twisted away, and reached for his own ill-matched revolvers. Bark flew from the tree beside him. The blast of Dacre’s twin weapons was a physical force in itself.
Again Dacre fired. Still off balance, again his lead flew wild.
Then Johnnie fired, the Lefancheaux first, the Remington afterwards, each aimed separately. One shot went home between the bags. The other took Dacre fair in the throat. Both guns dropped from hands suddenly gone limp, and the outlaw chief fell back into the opening he had ripped in the tent.
Wide eyed, Johnnie stared at him falling, appalled at what he had done to the man, much and all as it had needed to be done. So intent was he on the collapse of his enemy, he failed to see the snout of another revolver appear through the hole in the tent at head height.
Not so Mary-Lou. She saw it. Five times she fired, past Johnnie’s shoulder, emptying her little Colt through the fabric of the tent. Every bullet hit the man still hiding inside. He pitched partly through the torn opening, and sprawled over the body of his dead leader. A bowler hat rolled free, and came to rest brim up.
‘That’s it,’ Bobcat called, appearing from the trees to their right. ‘That’s my count. Them’s the last two.’
‘Thank the dear Lord for that!’ Johnnie let his held breath go in a rush. He was standing there shaking, a smoking gun still in each hand. ‘I don’t think I could do that again.’
‘I could,’ Mary-Lou said, though she was no steadier, and he could feel her trembling when he holstered his weapons, and clasped her to his side. ‘I could,’ she said, ‘given the same reasons.’
‘You could too,’ Bobcat grinned at Johnnie. ‘Somebody kill your friends, threaten your family, you could. Somebody hurt Mary-Lou again, you will, eh?’
Johnnie looked down at her as they stood with an arm about each other. It was true. Anybody laid a hand on her again, he most certainly would.
When his father rode up, a few minutes later, with Cab Phillips at his side, and the rest of the posse on his heels, Dryfe Sands Johnnie and the Cumberland Belle were standing over their victims, calmly reloading their weapons. Their friend Bobcat was dragging sacks of coins out of the tent.
One way or another, the riders were quite impressed.
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