Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Caleb moved toward the sound of shooting until he reached a bend in the trail formed by an outcropping of solid rock. From here, he still couldn’t see the gun battle, but the sound of rifle fire was loud and close. Any farther and he’d be smack in the middle of things.
That wasn’t what he had in mind.
He looked around, considering his options.
Since midday, the trail had been winding in and out along the rugged hillside.
Its path had been dictated by the contours of the land as well as by shale and brush and rocks jutting up from grassy areas.
These boulders varied in size, some of them as big as a barn.
To his right, the land rose sharply into a forest of firs and brush, cutting off his ability to see more than a few paces.
To his left, the slope beneath the trail dropped away quickly, so steep that he looked down on the tops of full-grown trees.
Unless he wanted to backtrack for miles and find another way through the pass, Caleb realized, he wasn’t going to get around this confrontation easily.
“Best find out what this is all about,” he muttered to himself. To do that, the only way would be to get to a place above the shooting where he could see what was going on.
Turning away from the gunfire, he moved back the way he came until he found a spot where he could leave the trail.
Scaling a steep embankment, he began his climb through groves of evergreen and worked his way through patches of thick brush and rock.
His boots often slipped on patches of gravel or fir needles.
The going was made more difficult because he was carrying his Winchester and had only one hand free.
From the position of the sun behind him, when he could see it, he figured he still had an hour of daylight, maybe two, but he didn’t reckon going back down this way would be easy or even possible in the dark. He couldn’t waste much time up here.
A few minutes later, he reached a steep, narrow band of meadow grass.
A little higher and off to his left, a boulder that looked like an old man’s face jutted out from the side of the hill.
He was getting closer to the shooting. He decided that the old-man boulder would give him the best vantage point, and he started for it.
As he made his way, he found himself almost immediately at the base of a jagged bluff. It looked like a thirty-foot-high stack of flat rocks piled on top of each other by some giant hand. Around him, that same giant had buried dozens of similar rocks half in the ground.
Caleb decided to climb the bluff. From the top, he could get to the old-man boulder quicker.
He reached for the lowest ledge and then yanked his hand away. As he fell backward a step, a dried snake skin dropped to the ground in front of his boots.
Rattlesnake skin. The monster that shed that skin had to be six feet long.
Caleb cursed himself. Any greenhorn could tell you that only a fool would blindly stick his hand up where it could be bitten. Colorado was full of rattlers, but he rarely saw the damn things this high in the mountains.
That was what happened when a man let gunfire hurry his thinking. The mountains punished carelessness faster than any outlaw ever could.
Deciding against the climb, he worked his way along the face of the bluff until he found a break where he could continue his upward scramble.
Whoever was facing off, they were continuing to blast away at one another with rifles and pistols. Gunshots echoed back from across the wide chasm of the pass. From the sound of things, they wanted to finish it before sundown.
When he thought he’d climbed high enough, Caleb moved along the steep slope. Finally, forcing his way through brush, he found himself standing on a narrow ledge. The valley opened up in front of him.
Across the way and far below him, the forests and the river were already in deep shadow, and the golden sun was dipping quickly toward the mountain ridges.
The boulder that looked like an old man was just below him.
He dropped down onto it then crouched and edged out to the end.
Lying on his belly, Caleb took stock of the battle.
Five gunmen were strategically positioned along the slope face, hidden between rocks and trees. They were eighty yards or so above the trail, and anyone coming along would ride directly into their sights.
From where he was, Caleb could see only two of them clearly.
From this distance, there was nothing to distinguish them from most other cowpunchers, drifters, or miners.
One, wearing a wide-brimmed sombrero, was shooting an old Sharps carbine.
The other, sporting a battered stovepipe hat and a green coat, was raining down bullets with a Winchester.
They were firing down the steep hill and didn’t seem to be too concerned about running short on ammunition.
Though he couldn’t see the other three, he knew where they were from the crack of their rifles and the puffs of gun smoke each time they fired down on the men pinned down below. These fellows had deliberately positioned themselves to ambush someone coming along that trail.
There appeared to be a path, of sorts, running on an angle up from where the shooters were to a wooded ridge. Caleb decided they more than likely had left their horses there, in case things didn’t work out the way they planned.
Somebody in that bunch was thinking.
Caleb turned his attention to the carnage down the hill.
The carcass of a small sorrel stretched across the trail, its eyes open, a black circle of blood on its shoulder marring the handsome color of its coat. Not far from the dead horse, a man lay sprawled in the grass, motionless, half-hidden by a protruding rock.
Three others had somehow found cover, two behind rocks and a third behind the rotted trunk of a fallen fir tree.
Because of the angle that the tree had fallen, Caleb decided it didn’t afford the best protection.
In their scramble for safety, they apparently had no chance of grabbing their rifles out of their scabbards.
Their horses were nowhere in sight. They hadn’t come back down the trail toward him when he came upon the shooting, so he figured they must have run off ahead or gone down that steep slope.
If the slope was where they went, he didn’t hold out much hope for them surviving.
But then again, from the looks of things, their riders probably wouldn’t be needing them. Not in this life, anyway.
Not that the men weren’t putting up a good fight.
As he watched, somebody’s head or hand would pop up, and he’d empty a six-shooter in the general direction of the bushwhackers.
They didn’t have much chance of hitting any of them, what with the distance and the fear of catching a rifle slug in the eye.
But they were trying to keep the boys up the hill from moving around too freely.
And Caleb guessed they were praying that the sun would drop as soon as possible.
He considered staying out of it and letting the contenders play out the hand. He never liked getting in the middle of a brawl—whether it was a card game or a street fight—without knowing the bone of contention that started the fight. And even then, he’d made it a personal policy not to interfere.
One time, when he was wearing the tin star up in Greeley, he found a pair of newlyweds duking it out in the front parlor of the rooming house he was living in.
When he tried to separate them, the two turned on him.
No sooner had he subdued the husband than he had the new wife on his back.
He thought he’d have to shoot both of them before they calmed down.
These two gangs of fellas didn’t appear to be newlyweds, though, and that made Caleb even less motivated to pick a side.
He’d had enough killing in the last two days to last most men a lifetime. He had no wish to add to it without cause.
The bushwhackers above were keeping them pinned down, but it was only a matter of time before they realized the shooters on the far left and far right could move, get a better angle, and finish it.
Then, just as Caleb was starting to feel bad for those boys down by the trail, one of them raised a white handkerchief and started waving it.
The firing died down, and he stood, shouting that he didn’t know what they wanted, but he and his friends meant them no harm.
A second man stood as well, holding his revolver out to the side.
The third man, who’d been hiding behind the fallen log, started to stand too. Caleb recognized him.
That changed things.
The truce-seeker was still talking when Stovepipe Hat levered a cartridge into that Winchester and—easy as you please—put a bullet square into him.
The second man stood frozen, unable to move.
He didn’t stand there for long. Before that white kerchief floated halfway to the ground, the Winchester again spit fire, sending him spinning out of sight.
The blackguard then swung his rifle around and took leisurely aim at the third man. He figured he’d just drawn an inside straight.
But that was one card too many for Caleb, and his bullet was on its way before the dog could pull the trigger. The shot was rushed, but he didn’t miss. The stovepipe hat tipped up slightly on the man’s head, and the man dropped hard behind the rock.
The man in the sombrero spun around, looking for the new player in the game. Caleb fired again, catching him solidly and knocking him backward. The Sharps in the man’s hand tipped forward and dropped as the shooter slumped to the ground.
Caleb felt no satisfaction in it. Only the old, cold certainty that some men mistook mercy for weakness until someone stopped them.
As the echoes died away, Caleb turned his eye toward the remaining three shooters.
Suddenly, a bullet ricocheted off the boulder so close to him that a stone chip took a chunk out of his face. The shot had come from above and behind him. Whoever it was, Caleb wasn’t about to give him a second chance.
When he crawled out onto this rock, he hadn’t decided whether to get involved or whose side he was on.
Rolling for cover, he realized his decision had been made.