Jink whimpered but didn't answer. Brubaker bore down with his boot again.
“I understand!” Jink screamed. “I understand! You won't n-never see me again, Marshal, I swear it.”
“Good.” Brubaker looked up at the storekeeper. “Got any hot food in there?”
“Yes, sir, we sure do,” the man answered nervously. “Some nice roast beef.”
“Bread?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Slap some beef between bread, then, enough for the three of us. We'll get it when we're ready to pull out again.”
Bo asked, “What about the prisoners?”
Grudgingly, Brubaker nodded and told the man in the apron, “Enough for them, too, I suppose. And some coffee, if you've got it. I promised 'em something to eat and drink. Now let's all get busy. The sooner we're back on the road again, the better, as far as I'm concerned.”
CHAPTER 10
It took a while to get Lowe and Elam in and out of the privy. By that time the storekeeper had made the sandwiches. Bo, Scratch, and Brubaker ate first, then Scratch and the deputy covered the prisoners while Bo fed them and gave them sips of coffee from a wide-mouthed jug. The three outlaws were cooperative for a change, and Cara didn't even cuss at any of her captors.
Bo figured that hunger and thirst had gotten the best of their natural-born orneriness.
Finally Brubaker climbed to the seat and unwrapped the reins from the brake lever. He had his black hat resting on the back of his head so that it wouldn't rub against the welt where the bullet had grazed him. He had refused medical attention for the injury, insisting that it would be fine.
“If that slug had been a few inches to one side, it would've blown my brains out,” he said. “But it didn't, so that tells me I ain't fated to die from it.”
That seemed like pretty shaky reasoning to Bo, but Brubaker was in charge, so he didn't argue.
The wagon continued rolling southward all afternoon, with occasional stops so the team of horses pulling it could rest. Late in the day, which ended fairly early at this time of year, Bo asked Brubaker, “Are we going to try to find a settlement with a jail so we can lock up those three for the night?”
Brubaker shook his head.
“This wagon is sturdier than any back-country jail we're liable to find. They can stretch out on the floor to sleep. Judge Parker just said to get 'em there. He didn't say anything about keepin' 'em comfortable along the way.”
“You're a pretty hard-nosed hombre, aren't you, Marshal?”
Brubaker snorted. “Try keepin' the peace in Indian Territory for a while,” he suggested. “You'll learn right quick that gettin' sentimental is a good way of windin' up dead.”
Bo couldn't dispute that. He had seen firsthand evidence of it over the years. There were plenty of bad men in the West who would stop at nothing, including cold-blooded murder, to get what they wanted. If you misjudged the wrong man, it usually meant a bullet. It was a hard land, and it took hard men to live in it, and trust was a rare commodity.
As they set up camp in a clearing where Brubaker had pulled off the road, Bo said to the deputy, “We'll be taking turns standing guard?”
“That's right,” Brubaker said. “Think you can stay awake and alert enough to handle it?”
“We've stood many a night watch,” Scratch said. “You can depend on us.”
“Good. Because it's your lives at stake, too, not just mine. Hank Gentry and his men would kill you without ever blinkin' an eye.”
Bo didn't doubt it. He had seen the sort of men who rode with Gentry.
And the sort of woman.
There was no outhouse around here, of course, so before it got dark, Bo and Brubaker took Cara into the bushes near the camp and let her tend to her business. Brubaker warned her to stay where he could see her head, and he kept his Colt trained on her the whole time.
When they got back to the wagon, Cara pouted and said, “Why can't Mr. Morton take me when I have to go? He's nicer than you two.”
“He'd keep you covered just like I do,” Brubaker said. “At least he would if he's got any sense.”
“Yeah, but I'll bet he wouldn't leer at me.”
“Dadgum it, I didn't leerâ” The deputy stopped short for a second, then went on, “You're just tryin' to put a burr under my saddle. It's not gonna work.”
Cara laughed. Bo figured she already had a burr under the deputy's saddle, and she knew it, too.
Scratch volunteered to do the cooking. He fried some bacon and cooked cornbread and beans to go with it. The meal was simple but good. After everyone had eaten and Bo and Scratch had checked on the horses one more time, Brubaker said, “I'll take the first watch. You fellas get some sleep.”
It was going to be a cold night, but these were piney woods and the Texans had made comfortable beds by spreading their bedrolls on pine boughs. Brubaker tossed some blankets into the back of the wagon that the prisoners could use for warmth.
The deputy sat on a log near the fire as it burned down, and Bo and Scratch rolled up in their blankets and dropped right off to sleep with the innate ability of frontiersmen to grab some shut-eye whenever they had a chance. After a few hours Brubaker would wake up one of them to take his place.
Bo didn't know how much time had passed when an unearthly shriek jolted him out of his slumber. He sat up sharply with his gun in his hand, unaware that he had even drawn it from the holster and coiled shell belt beside him.
A few yards away, Scratch was awake and sitting up, too, both hands filled with his Remingtons.
“Take it easy, you two,” Brubaker said from the log where he sat. The fire was just embers now, but their faint orange glow was enough for the Texans to see him. “That was just a big cat prowlin' around somewhere.”
“Got panthers in these parts, do you?” Scratch asked.
“That's right. He's probably hungry. This time of year, the huntin's not too good. A lot of the smaller animals are denned up for the winter.”
“Well, as long as he don't try to feast on us ...” Scratch said. He slid one of the long-barreled Remingtons back into its holster, then the other.
Bo still sat there holding his Colt. He frowned as he looked toward the area where the horses were picketed. Something was wrong, and after a second he figured out what it was.
When another panther screech ripped through the night, he was even more convinced. The sounds came from the north, and so did the wind.
That meant the scent of the panthers should have been carrying to the horses, and there was nothing like the smell of big cat to spook a bunch of horses.
The team and the saddle mounts all stood quietly with their heads down, though.
“That's not a panther,” Bo said quietly. “Those are signals, and I reckon they mean somebody's in position.”
“Son of aâ” Brubaker burst out. “You're right! Everybody takeâ”
Before he could finish the order, shots blasted out of the darkness and tongues of orange muzzle flame ripped through the curtain of shadows.
CHAPTER 11
The walls that enclosed the back of the wagon were thick enough to stop a bullet, so the prisoners probably were safe in there. The narrow ventilation openings were set high in the walls so that even if a stray slug went through one of them, it wasn't likely to hit Cara, Lowe, or Elam.
Bo, Scratch, and Brubaker were in much more danger because they were out in the open. Brubaker flung himself from the log in a dive that carried him close to the wagon. He scrambled underneath so that the wheels would give him some cover.
The Texans were on the other side of the fire from the wagon, so they couldn't find protection there. Their only chance was to get into the trees.
Bo rolled out of his blankets, came up on one knee, and triggered three fast shots at the muzzle flashes. Then he leaped to his feet and dashed into the pines. Bullets thudded into tree trunks and whipped through the branches around him.
Scratch's twin Remingtons boomed as he retreated into the trees as well. Brubaker's Winchester cracked from underneath the wagon. The bushwhackers continued firing, too, and for several moments the racket was deafening as shot after shot blasted out from several different directions. Muzzle flashes tore holes in the darkness and lit up the night with their eerie, flickering glow, like bolts of hellish lightning.
Bo pressed his back to the trunk of a pine and thumbed fresh cartridges into his Colt's cylinder, filling all six chambers. He knew that Brubaker was in a bad place. The wagon wheels didn't provide enough cover to keep the deputy safe for very long. At any moment a lucky shot from the bushwhackers might zip between the spokes and find him.
“Scratch!” Bo called. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” the reply came from the silver-haired Texan. “You all right, Bo?”
“So far,” Bo said. “We need to circle. You go right, I'll go left.”
“Keno!”
The shadows under the trees were thick. Bo slid to his left. With the uproar of all the shooting going on, stealth wasn't as important as it might have been otherwise, but he tried not to make a lot of noise anyway. No point in giving away his position if he didn't have to.
As far as he could tell, the bushwhackers were all to the north of the camp. From the sound of the shots and the muzzle flashes he had seen, he estimated there were at least five of them. If he and Scratch could flank the attackers and take them by surprise, the two Texans had a chance to fight off this terrifying assault.
If they couldn't ... Well, he wasn't going to think too much about that, Bo told himself.
Moving by feel as much as anything else, he made his way through the trees. Brubaker kept shooting, and so did the bushwhackers. Shouted curses came from the prisoners inside the wagon. They could keep that up as far as Bo was concerned. The commotion helped cover up any sounds that he made.
His hand tightened on the butt of his Colt when he judged that he was getting close to the area where the riflemen were hidden. He peered through the shadows, spotted a muzzle flash, and worked his way closer to it. The next time the rifle cracked, the sudden spurt of flame from its barrel was bright enough to reveal a man crouched behind a big, fallen pine tree.
Bo drew a bead and could have gunned the man then and there, but he held off on the trigger. If the attackers were Gentry's men, as seemed likely, they were wanted, too. If they could be taken alive, Bo, Scratch, and Brubaker could deliver them to Judge Southwick in Tyler along with Cara, Lowe, and Elam.
Dropping to hands and knees, Bo crawled closer until he was only a few feet away from the rifleman, who had paused in his attack to reload. The man seemed completely unaware of Bo's presence.
Bo waited until the bushwhacker thrust the barrel of his rifle over the log again, then struck with swift, brutal force. He reversed the Colt and brought the butt down on the man's head. The smashing impact was enough to make the man drop his rifle and slump forward over the deadfall.
Bo hit him again, just to make sure he was out cold, then tossed the man's rifle away into the brush. The bushwhacker wore a holstered revolver, too, Bo discovered as he ran a hand over the man's body. He took that gun and threw it into the brush as well after emptying the bullets from it.
Bo ripped strips from the unconscious man's shirt and used them to tie his hands and feet. That was the best he could do for now. He started stalking the next bushwhacker, sparing a thought for Scratch and a hope that his old friend was all right.
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Scratch had understood what Bo meant by circling. They had done things like this many times in the past, splitting up so they could come at the enemy from two different directions. He just hoped they could deal with those bushwhackers before one of them ventilated Brubaker. The deputy had done the only thing he could when the shooting started, but now he was pinned down in a precarious position.
Scratch had holstered his left-hand Remington after reloading it. His right hand still clutched the ivory handle of the other revolver.
As he slipped through the shadows, he remembered a night more than four decades earlier when he and some other young Texicans had snuck into a camp of Santa Anna's scouts while the vast Mexican army wasn't far off. They were after supplies that night, since Sam Houston's forces were half-starved by that point, and it would have been fine with Scratch if they could have gotten into the Mexican camp and back out again without being discovered.
Things hadn't worked out that way. One of the other fellas had done something to alert the enemyâafter all these years, Scratch couldn't even remember what it wasâand suddenly muskets and flintlock pistols had been roaring and some of the Mexican soldiers lunged at the intruders with their bayonets.
Scratch had barely avoided getting skewered that night. He had grabbed a Mexican officer's saber and done a little skewering of his own before he and his companions lit a shuck out of there with some bags of beans they had managed to snag. But ever since then, Scratch hadn't been too fond of creeping around in the dark.
At least in the dead of winter like this, he didn't have to worry about stepping on a snake. Timber rattlers were plentiful in these Arkansas hills at other times of year.
Scratch crouched lower as muzzle flame bloomed in the darkness only a few yards from him. He was closing in on one of the bushwhackers. He didn't want to alert the others that they had intruders among them, so he waited until a whole flurry of shots rang out before leveling the Remington and squeezing off two swift shots. As the echoes of the blasts faded, he heard something crash in the brush and hoped that it was his quarry collapsing with some good Texan lead in him.
Scratch figured he would move on to the next bushwhacker he could find, but he had gone only a few feet when somebody exploded out of the shadows and crashed into him, fighting like a wildcat. A fist smashed into Scratch's jaw. The punch landing so cleanly had to be pure luck. It was too dark under these trees for anybody to see where he was aiming his blows.
But luck or not, the punch packed enough power to stun Scratch for a moment and send him stumbling back into a rough-barked pine trunk.
He didn't drop his gun. As more blows pounded his body, he slashed out with the Remington and felt it strike something with a glancing blow. That gave his attacker pause and provided a chance for Scratch to hook his left fist out in a blind punch.
His fist sunk in something soft. A man's sour breath gusted in Scratch's face. Knowing the man was close to him, he lowered his head and butted hard in front of him. He felt the hot spurt of blood across his forehead as his opponent's nose flattened under the impact.
Scratch swung the Remington again, and this time the revolver's barrel landed solidly. A heavy weight sagged against the Texan. Scratch shoved it aside. The man landed with a thump at his feet.
That made two of the varmints accounted for, he thought ... unless this fella who had jumped him was the same one he'd shot a few moments earlier. He couldn't rule out that possibility. The bushwhacker might have been wounded, but not enough to put him out of the fight.
Scratch ran his fingers along the barrel of his revolver to make sure it hadn't bent when he walloped the hombre with it. If you were going to hit a man with a gun, it was better to use the butt, but he hadn't had time to turn the weapon around.
The Remington seemed to be all right. Scratch started working his way through the darkness again. It seemed like there weren't as many shots coming from the trees now, and he wondered if Bo had already taken care of one or two of the varmints.
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Crouched in the darkness, Bo waited for a muzzle flash to pinpoint the location of another rifleman. As slugs zinged through the trees around him, he smiled grimly as he wondered if some of the bullets came from Deputy Marshal Brubaker's gun. Brubaker didn't know what he and Scratch were trying to do. As far as he would be able to tell, huddled there underneath the wagon, the Texans might as well have deserted him.
Bo was willing to take his chances. He didn't have any other choice.
Flame licked from the muzzle of a rifle in some brush about twenty feet to his right. He shifted in that direction.
And then suddenly there was nothing under his feet but empty air. He lost his balance and fell forward, crashing down on a steep slope. Branches clawed at him as he continued rolling, unable to stop his plunge. In some part of his mind, he knew that he had fallen into a gully or a ravine that he had never seen in the darkness. And he had no way of knowing how deep it was ...