Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Bullets cracked off the stone walls and filled the canyon with a sound like glass breaking. Maddox pressed his back against the sandstone overhang and pulled his Winchester to his shoulder, sighting upward along the eastern ridge.
Muzzle flashes winked among the rocks and juniper, around ten shooters spread along a hundred yards of ridgeline, firing down into the canyon at angles that turned the narrow floor into a shooting gallery.
Harlan was the only one who had not dismounted. The old Ranger sat his roan with the Sharps braced against his shoulder and fired once.
The heavy rifle boomed, its report deeper than the Winchesters, and a man on the eastern ridge jerked backward and disappeared. Harlan worked the action with unhurried hands and picked another target.
The canyon walls channeled the gunfire into a roar of echoes that made it impossible to count the shooters or pinpoint their positions.
Bullets kicked up geysers of dust and stone chips from the canyon floor.
Maddox’s horse bolted down the draw, reins trailing.
He let it go. No use chasing a horse in a crossfire.
He steadied the Winchester against the sandstone and began returning fire. The targets were small, dark shapes against a bright sky; the angle was steep enough that his rounds hit rock more often than flesh. But that was the point.
Put lead near the muzzle flashes. Make the shooters duck.
Buy time to think. To his left, Danny was doing the same, rapidly firing at the western ridge.
To his right, Boone worked the eastern ridge with controlled three-round sequences, each burst spaced to let him track the effect before adjusting his aim.
The stench of gunpowder filled the narrow space. Spent brass clinked on stone around Maddox’s boots, catching the light. Somewhere behind him, a horse was screaming, the sound high and ragged.
“They’ve got us pinned,” Boone shouted between shots. “We sit here; they pick us off.”
“Take Cobb,” Maddox called back. “Work up the east slope. Hit them from the flank. Danny and I will keep them busy from down here.”
Boone looked at the eastern ridge. The slope was steep, broken rock and loose scree, maybe fifty yards of exposed climbing before the first cover. A man going up that slope under fire would be a target for every gun on the ridgeline.
He nodded once and tapped Cobb on the shoulder. “With me, boy. Stay low and move fast.”
Cobb’s face was white, but he followed. The two of them broke from cover and scrambled toward the base of the eastern wall, heads down, boots slipping on loose stone.
Bullets tracked them, stitching the ground at their heels.
Cobb stumbled, and Boone hauled him upright by the collar without breaking stride.
Maddox and Danny poured fire at the eastern ridge, emptying their magazines as fast as they could work the levers, filling the air with lead to force the shooters’ heads down. The barrage bought Boone and Cobb fifteen seconds of cover, enough to reach the base of the slope and begin climbing.
Then Harlan’s horse went down.
The roan screamed and collapsed sideways, hit in the neck by a round from the western ridge.
Harlan was thrown clear, but he landed hard on his back among the rocks.
He lay still for a moment, then pushed himself up on one elbow and reached for the Sharps.
Blood ran from a gash where his head had struck stone.
A volley from the western ridge hammered the surrounding ground. Harlan got one hand on the Sharps, brought it to his shoulder, and fired. The shot went wide. He tried to stand, and a bullet took him in the chest.
The impact drove him backward into the rock. He sat down hard; the Sharps falling from his hands and looked down at the dark stain spreading across his shirt with an expression of mild surprise. Then his eyes went flat, and he toppled sideways and did not move again.
“Harlan!” Cobb screamed from the slope.
“Keep moving!” Boone grabbed him and shoved him upward.
Maddox’s jaw tightened. He pushed the grief down where it could not interfere with his work. Harlan was dead. Grieving would not help the living. He sighted on the western ridge and put three rounds into the cluster of muzzle flashes.
Virgil was still firing from behind his horse, but the animal was dying, its breath coming in wet, shuddering gasps, and his position was shrinking as the horse settled lower. He shifted into a crouch and kept shooting, steady and methodical, each shot aimed and placed.
A bullet found him. It came from above, from the eastern ridge, a high-angled shot that struck the top of his shoulder and drove downward through his body.
Virgil stiffened. His Winchester clattered on the stone. He tried to reach for it, but his arm would not obey. He looked at Maddox across ten yards of open ground, and Maddox saw recognition and acceptance pass across his face in the same instant.
Virgil fell forward onto the rock and lay still. His hat rolled away in the dust. The tobacco tin in his pocket caught the sun with a small, bright flash.
Two dead. Two men who had ridden out from Piedras Wash three days ago, alive and capable and willing, now lay in the bottom of a canyon with their blood running into the sand.
Harlan Pratt, who had ridden with the Rangers since before Maddox was born, who could drop a deer at four hundred yards, whose steady hands had never shaken.
Virgil Dunn, who spoke ten words a day and made every one count, who chewed tobacco like other men breathed air, who had followed orders without a moment’s hesitation right until a bullet killed him.
Maddox could not afford to think about them. Not now. Not yet. He shoved the loss into the same place he shoved pain and fear and exhaustion, the hard, dark space inside his chest where things went to wait until there was time to deal with them.
On the slope, Boone reached the ridgeline. Maddox heard the sharp crack of his Winchester firing laterally along the ridge, hitting the ambushers from the side. Cobb was with him, firing wildly but firing, and the shooters on the eastern ridge shifted their positions to meet the new threat.
The gunfire from the east ridge slackened.
Maddox looked up and saw figures moving among the rocks, pulling back, retreating along the ridgeline in pairs, one covering while the other moved.
Coordinated withdrawal. Even under pressure from Boone’s flanking attack, they did not run. They withdrew in formation.
The western ridge gunfire stopped a moment later. Through the smoke and dust, Maddox saw the shooters on that side pulling back too, moving north along the ridge in a disciplined line.
Then new shots cracked from the south end of the canyon.
Maddox spun. Behind them, where the draw opened onto the desert, three riders had appeared, firing from horseback into the canyon mouth. Hidden shooters, held in reserve, completed the trap by cutting off retreat.
Danny was already returning fire, his Winchester barking from behind the fallen boulder. One rider pitched sideways from his saddle. The other two pulled back behind the canyon wall and kept shooting.
They were boxed in. East and west ridges above, shooters at both ends of the canyon. The trap had been set from four directions, and even with Boone disrupting the eastern ridge, the exits were covered.
Maddox reloaded. His hands were steady. His pulse was hammering, but he knew what to do: push cartridges into the loading gate, lever the action, put the stock to his shoulder.
“Danny, cover the south. Boone, push them off the ridge. We’re going forward, not back.”
He rose from cover and ran. The decision was not brave. It was arithmetic. They could not go back. They could not stay. Forward was the only option that did not end with all of them dead in this canyon. Forward, deeper into the draw, toward the south exit where more hidden shooters waited.
Danny laid down fire behind him, rapid shots that kept the riders’ heads down. Maddox reached a pile of tumbled boulders near the canyon mouth and dropped behind them. The riders were thirty yards away, firing from behind the canyon wall.
He put two rounds into the stone above the nearest rider’s head, showering him with fragments. The man flinched and ducked. Danny was beside him now, firing, and Boone’s shots from the ridge above drove the eastern ambushers further back.
“Move!” Maddox shouted.
They went through the gap at a dead run, Danny and Maddox firing as they moved, Boone and Cobb scrambling down the slope to follow. The remaining horsemen fired twice more and then wheeled their mounts and galloped south, disappearing into the desert.
The canyon spat them out onto open ground. Maddox dropped to one knee and swept the terrain with his rifle, breathing hard, his shirt soaked through with sweat and plastered to his back. The desert stretched south in a vast, empty expanse of scrub and hardpan, baking under the afternoon sun.
No riders. No dust. No movement.
He lowered the Winchester. His hands were shaking now, a fine tremor he could not stop. It would pass. It always passed. He flexed his fingers and waited until the tremor settled into steadiness.
Behind him, the canyon held the bodies of Harlan Pratt and Virgil Dunn and two dead horses, and the echo of a fight that had lasted less than ten minutes. Ten minutes to lose a third of his force. Ten minutes to turn a pursuit into a survival march.
Four Rangers left with no spare horses, half a canteen of water each, deep in hostile territory with an army ahead and ambushers behind, and the sun still three hours from setting.
Boone came down the eastern slope with Cobb, half-sliding on the loose scree, both covered in dust and rock fragments. Blood ran from a cut on Boone’s forearm where stone splinters had torn through his sleeve.
Cobb was limping, his left boot dark with blood from a graze across the calf, but he was upright, and his eyes were clear.
The terror that had frozen him at the start of the ambush was gone, replaced by something harder and older.
He had crossed a line up there on that ridge, and there was no going back.
Danny stood with his Winchester hanging at his side, staring back into the canyon where Harlan and Virgil lay. His face was still, but a muscle jumped in his jaw and his knuckles were white on the rifle’s stock.
Maddox wanted to go back for Harlan and Virgil. Wanted to carry them out, bury them right, give them the dignity of a grave instead of leaving them for the coyotes and the buzzards. But the ambushers could regroup. More riders could be coming.
“We keep moving,” he said. His voice sounded like someone else’s. “South. Stay off the trail, use the broken ground for cover.”
Nobody argued. Nobody spoke. They walked south into the desert, staying low, using the broken ground for concealment, four men carrying rifles and canteens and the weight of two who would not walk again.
The sun hung three hours above the western horizon, and the heat pressed down on them without mercy.
Behind them, the buzzards were already circling over the canyon, riding the thermals in slow, patient wheels. Maddox did not look back.