Webb's Posse (19 page)

“What did he have to say?” asked Webb, nodding toward the old man as he descended down the slope behind the goats.

“He said the Peltrys pulled out in the night,” Will Summers replied. “Sounds like they're headed for the border.”

Teasdale and Webb both looked disappointed. “Well…then we stay on their trail,” said Teasdale. “At least, as far as I'm concerned.”

“Me too,” said Abner Webb. They both looked at Summers.

“Something doesn't feel right,” Summers said, staring down the slope after the old man.

“What do you mean?” asked Webb, exchanging a glance with Teasdale.

“I'm not sure….” Summers looked back at the rest of the men riding toward them. He looked forward along the trail to where it disappeared into a turn. He looked up along the high rocky line above them, then down at the old man just in time to see him break into a run toward the cover of taller rocks, shooing the goats out of his way.

“Oh no!” cried Summers, realization setting in and causing him to sit bolt upright in his saddle. “It's a trap!” He swung his horse out into the middle of the trail and yelled at the rest of the men as he jerked his hat from his head and waved it at them. “Get back! Stop! Take cover!” But the men did not stop all at once. Instead, they slowed behind Hargrove and Sherman Dahl as the two men raised their hands and checked their horses down.

“What's got into him?” Hargrove asked Dahl.

Sherman Dahl hadn't the slightest idea. Yet no sooner had he seen Summers waving his hat than he caught a glimpse of morning sunlight glinting off the end of a rifle barrel atop the rocky ledge above Will Summers. “It's an ambush! Don't ride in!” Dahl shouted, his reflexes sharp and already responding. His rifle came up from his lap as he spoke.

In the middle of the trail, Will Summers had done all he could. He'd warned the others. Now, seeing Dahl's rifle belch a streak of fire upward along the rocky ledge, Summers ducked low in his saddle as rifle fire began to explode above him. Just as he jerked his horse around and spurred it to where Teasdale and Webb had jumped down and taken cover in a rock crevice, a body thudded to the ground at his horse's hooves. Dahl's shot had nailed the gunman before he could get his shot off at Summers.
Even as Summers' horse reared and spun away, Summers caught a glimpse of Dahl's smoking rifle as the young schoolmaster levered a new round into the chamber.

“Get into the rocks! Protect your horses!” Hargrove bellowed at the men. They had broken into a run in every direction, diving for any cover they could find. Some of their horses had already bolted away. They ran back along the trail, whinnying loudly, escaping bullets that whistled past them.

Summers gigged his horse toward the safety of the crevice where Teasdale and Webb stood firing up at the ledge. “You're wasting your bullets!” Summers shouted, sliding down from his horse's back and jerking his rifle from his saddle boot. “We've got to get on the other side of the trail—get a better angle of fire!”

“I'll cover you both,” said Teasdale. “Make a run for it. Get over there, then cover me.”

“Ready when you are,” said Will Summers, shoving his horse farther back into the crevice and spinning his reins around a jut of rock.

“I'm ready right now,” said Webb, his gun barrel smoking from the shots he'd just fired upward at the riflemen.

“Go!” said Teasdale.

Summers and Webb darted zigzagging across the trail, their rifles in hand. Bullets kicked up dirt and rock at their feet. On the other side of the trail, the two lunged over the edge and rolled among dirt and rock until they stopped themselves and crawled quickly behind a low-standing rock terrace. “Here he comes—cover him!” shouted Will Summers, aiming and firing upward along the rock ledge where long drifts of rifle smoke wafted on the air.

The rifles concentrated their fire on Sergeant Teasdale
as he made his run for the rocky slope. When he came sliding in beside Will Summers, a shot sent his hat spinning from his head. “Are you hit, Sergeant?” asked Abner Webb.

“No, I'm fine,” said Teasdale without even checking himself. He began firing upward at the riflemen. “They've got our men pinned down over there—we've got to help them!”

“Damn it!” said Summers, stopping long enough to hurriedly reload his rifle. “If only I'd seen through this thing sooner. The old goatherder fooled me.”

“We're lucky you saw though it at all,” said Teasdale through the sound of rifle fire. “Another few feet and our men would have been stuck on the open trail with nowhere to hide.”

“Was that old man one of the Peltry Gang?” asked Abner Webb, firing as he talked.

“No,” offered Teasdale. “That old goatherder wasn't one of the Peltrys; they just made him come down here and stop us on the trail, hoping to bunch us up as much as possible. They're probably holding his family to make sure he did what he was told.”

“Either way,” said Summers, raising his loaded rifle and taking aim along the rock ledge, “they've caught us with our britches down around our ankles.”

“Then we better pull them up and get out of here quick,” said Teasdale, “before they cut our men to pieces.”

On the other side of the fifty feet of walled trail, Sherman Dahl and Trooper Hargrove had pushed and goaded Wild Joe Duvall, Trooper Doyle Benson, Edmund Daniels and Bobby Dewitt farther down the side of the steep rocky slope. But then, seeing where the men were headed, Sherman Dahl yelled, “No! Stop! Don't go out there!”

Not far from Dahl and Hargrove, behind a short rock barely large enough to protect them both, Campbell Hayes, Cherokee Rhodes and Junior the hound lay piled upon one another, watching “The damned mindless fools,” Hayes cursed as the other four men stepped out onto the footpath.

To get out of the rifle fire, Wild Joe, Trooper Benson, Daniels and Bobby Dewitt began to work their way down the narrow footpath, clinging to the rocks hand and foot. Wild Joe Duvall felt his rifle slip from his hand, but he dared not try to grab it or look down as it clattered away against the side of the rock wall. Rifle fire pelted down above them. Beneath them lay nothing but thin air for a distance of two hundred feet. Wild Joe grasped his stomach, then looked at his hand and saw that it was covered with his blood. “Oh Lord…” He swooned slightly. Behind him, Edmund Daniels helped to steady him. “I swear, I do believe I've been shot in the belly.” He let out a crazy, halfhearted laugh. “Ain't this the damndest thing?” He sank almost to his knees before he caught himself and stepped backward against Edmund Daniels.

“Hang on, Joe—damn your hide!” said Daniels. “You're going to cause us both to fall!”

Still on the slope, hunkered down behind a large, half-buried boulder, Sherman Dahl and Hargrove fired upward as shots pounded all around them. Dahl cut a glance to the line of men inching their way along the narrow footpath where Wild Joe had stopped and caused the others to come to a halt behind him. “They'll die out there if we can't stop them!” Dahl shouted above the gunfire.

“What have you got in mind?” asked Hargrove.

“I'm going up there,” said Dahl, nodding upward toward the line of steady rifle fire. “There's another
ledge thirty feet above them. If I get in there, I can do us some good.”

“You're crazy, young man,” said Hargrove. “You won't make it across the trail, let alone up the rock wall. They'll kill you!”

“I can make it,” said Dahl. “I've got to try…else we're all dead!” He ventured a look toward Summers, Webb and Teasdale sixty yards away. “If they can see what I'm doing, and all of you give me some support fire, I can get a good start up there. Once I'm tucked in above them, the Peltrys will have a devil of a time getting to me. It'll cost them some men, that's for sure.”

Hargrove considered it as he bit his lip and ventured a gaze along the higher ledge. Shots concentrated in his direction, forcing him and Dahl to flatten behind the rock. When the fire slackened, he turned to Dahl. “All right, schoolmaster. I'll cover you.”

“What the hell is he doing?” shouted Abner Webb, seeing Dahl leap forward and make a run across the trail.

“I don't know, but give him some help,” said Teasdale.

“Looks like our schoolmaster has more guts than he does good sense,” Will Summers said as he fired.

The three men fired as one, hard and steadily, sending a heavy barrage of fire in the direction of the riflemen above Sherman Dahl. Along the rocky ledge, Goose Peltry, Moses Peltry and Doc Murdock ducked back as bullets whistled past them from the trail below. “Whooieee!” Goose laughed aloud. “I love seeing Yankees trapped like bugs in a bucket!”

“Yankees?” Doc Murdock shook his head. “I'm starting to think that to you two a
Yankee
is any poor sonsabitch you happen to be mad at.”

“What's the difference?” said Goose. “Just be thankful you ain't one of them.” He ventured a peep down over the edge. When he stood back, he looked at Moses and said, “Most of them has taken cover along that footpath that winds around the mountain. If you want to really have some fun today, brother Moses, send a couple of men down below the trail and watch them pick 'em off like ducks in a shooting
gallery.” Goose spread a flat, evil grin at Doc Murdock and Moses Peltry.

“I believe that's a sterling idea, brother Goose,” said Moses with a bit of haughtiness to his voice, a bit of swagger in his stance. “Murdock,” he added with a smug tilt of his head, “you're getting an eyeful of how my men work. Pay attention: You might learn something.”

As the Peltrys and Murdock had been talking back and forth above the fray, Sherman Dahl had climbed hand over hand up the side of the rock wall with bullets slicing past him. The rifle fire from Summers, Webb, Teasdale and Hargrove partially protected him as he struggled upward. Soon he had flanked the gunmen and climbed up past them along a taller stand of rock wall fifty yards to their right.

“By damn, sir!” said Hargrove aloud to himself. “He's done it! He's climbed up above them!” He poured rifle fire up at the gunmen with renewed effort, seeing Sherman Dahl settle in on a short perch of rock from which he could easily fire down into the Peltrys without them being able to draw a bead on him. “Now let's give them hell, schoolmaster,” Hargrove whispered.

Goose, Moses and Doc Murdock stood talking, still safely back a few feet from the cliff's edge, when Sherman Dahl opened fire on the line of gunmen. The first man to take a bullet was one of the Catt brothers, Little Catt, who stood up laughing at the trapped man only to feel an impact like the blow of a sledgehammer atop his head. He twisted down to the ground like a corkscrew, a crazed look of surprise frozen on his dead face.

“Little brother! Little brother, wake up!” demanded Big Catt, grabbing Little Catt and slapping his limp face.

But Goose, Moses and Doc Murdock already saw that the man was dead. “What hit him?” shouted Moses. They looked all around quickly, not noticing in the heat of battle that the killing shot had been fired down from above them.

On the firing line, lying next to Flat Face Chinn, Frank Spragg let out a grunt and relaxed down onto his face as a fountain of blood rose up from between his shoulder blades. “What the hell is this?” Chinn said, looking baffled for a second. But then, realizing what had happened, he scooted back from the firing line just as a bullet thumped into the ground where he had been. “They're above us!” he shrieked, turning and firing blindly at the high wall of rock where Sherman Dahl sat well protected in his nest of solid stone.

“You're right about me learning something, Moses,” said Doc Murdock as he and the Peltrys ducked into a crouch and ran for cover. “I'm learning that one man with a rifle can send your whole gang packing.”

“What?” Moses asked, not hearing Murdock in the melee.

“Nothing,” said Murdock, dismissing it, grabbing his horse and pulling it away from the line of horses as another shot exploded down and nailed another gunman to the dirt.

“Damn it, pull back, men!” shouted Moses Peltry. “They've gotten the drop on us…the bushwhacking bastards!”

“There's only one man up there,” said Doc Murdock. “Send a couple of my scalp hunters up there—they'll tan him for you!”

“No…not now,” said Moses. “We've spent too long here as it is. We taught them a lesson…got them off our trail. It's time we cut out.”

“What about sending a couple of men down below the trail like you said you were going to do?” asked Murdock, already knowing the answer but asking it just to put the Peltrys on the spot.

“This ain't the time or place, damn it, Doc,” shouted Moses, grabbing his horse as another shot thumped into the ground near the animal's hooves.

Duckbill Grear and Andy Merkel ran in beside Doc Murdock, hearing Moses Peltry's words. “Doc, say the word,” said Duckbill. “Me and Andy will slip down there and kill every one of them sumbitches.”