CHAPTER 18
When Bo got around to checking his
watch, he saw that it was only an hour or so until dawn. No point
in trying to go back to sleep now, he decided, and Scratch felt the
same way, so they walked back to the trees where they had been
camped earlier and fetched their horses to the main camp. The
animals were unharmed, as Bo had hoped.
It was unlikely the Devils would come
calling again tonight, and if they did, all the troopers were alert
and on edge after the attack. They wouldn’t be surprised a second
time.
As a cold gray light appeared in the
sky, Bo saw that more clouds had moved in. The wind picked up,
blowing harder. Scratch gazed at the thick overcast and said,
“Looks like we might be in for a blue norther.”
“I don’t think they call them that up
here in Dakota Territory,” Bo said.
“Well, whatever they call it, could be
some rough weather on the way.” Scratch looked over at Bo. “Say,
what’s the date?”
Bo pondered that for a moment, then
said, “The twenty-fourth, I think.”
“Son of a gun. Tomorrow’s Thanksgivin’.
No turkey feast for us, I reckon.” Scratch shook his head.
“Although with that wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant in charge, I
reckon I’ll be plenty thankful if we’re still alive
tomorrow.”
Bo couldn’t argue with
that.
He and Scratch rode over to the trees
where the Devils had hidden to launch their ambush, and they had a
look around. There wasn’t much to see, just some empty shell
casings littering the ground. Any wounded outlaws had been taken
with the rest of the gang. The Texans dismounted and walked the
same direction the outlaws had fled the night before. Scratch
pointed out some broken branches and rocks that had been turned
over.
“They were in too big a hurry to cover
their tracks,” he said. “If we’re lucky, maybe they were that
careless all the way back to their hideout.”
Bo grunted. He didn’t think that was
too likely.
They found the spot where the outlaws
had left their horses. Hoofprints led away from there, following
the ridge to the southwest. Of course, there really wasn’t anywhere
else for the gang to go. The walls of the gulches on both sides of
the ridge were too steep for the horses to handle in all but a few
places.
By the time the Texans returned to
camp, the two troopers who were killed in the ambush had been
buried, and Gustaffson was getting the men ready to ride.
Lieutenant Holbrook came up to meet Bo and Scratch. He wore his
left arm in a black silk sling that Trooper Wilson had
rigged.
“Did you find the trail?” Holbrook
demanded.
Bo nodded. “It won’t be much trouble to
follow.”
“Good! I’d like to catch up to those
outlaws and deal with them today, if possible. There’s no need to
give them another chance to ambush us tonight.”
“Now that I
agree with, Lieutenant. Are you sure you’ll be able to handle the
ride?”
“What should I do?” Holbrook snapped.
“Go back to Deadwood with my tail between my legs and leave the
patrol under the command of Sergeant Gustaffson and a couple of
civilians?”
“Well—” Scratch began.
“We just don’t want you to get blood
poisoning, like Trooper Wilson warned you about,” Bo cut
in.
“I’m fine.” Holbrook made a curt
gesture with his right hand. “Let’s get on the trail of those
thieves and killers.”
The sky had lightened a little more,
but the clouds were so thick Bo figured the heavens would remain
gloomy and overcast the rest of the day.
Sergeant Gustaffson must have felt the
same way. As the patrol proceeded along the ridge, the non-com
brought his horse up beside Bo’s and said, “That sky looks so
threatening I expect old Odin to part the clouds at any minute and
glare down at us with his one good eye as he pronounces judgment on
us. He’ll have all the rest of those grim, gray gods with
him.”
“What are you talkin’ about?” Scratch
asked from Bo’s other side.
Gustaffson laughed and shook his head.
“Nothing. Folks in the part of the world where my family comes from
tend to be a mite down in the mouth most of the time. I reckon you
would be, too, if it was always cold and dark where you
lived.”
“Maybe,” Scratch said. “I like Mexico,
myself. Warm sun and good food and pretty little señoritas . . .
It’s plumb peaceful down there.”
“Yeah, that’s not what you thought the
last time we were there and all those hombres tried to kill us,” Bo
pointed out.
“Well, everywhere has its drawbacks, I
suppose.”
Something else occurred to Bo. Quietly,
he said to Gustaffson, “Trooper Wilson did a good job taking care
of those wounded men. Almost like he had medical
training.”
Gustaffson looked around to make sure
no one was riding very close to them before he said, “Yeah,
Wilson’s good enough at patching up wounds that it’s almost like he
was a surgeon back during the War Between the States. I’ll bet some
of those doctors who wore Confederate gray changed their names and
came west after the war. A cavalry troop would be mighty lucky to
have a fella like that join up with them.”
“As long as some of the men who still
hate Rebels didn’t know about it,” Bo said.
Gustaffson nodded. “Yeah. As long as
that was true.”
Satisfied now, Bo let the subject drop.
But it was good to know that they had a man with the knowledge and
skill to treat the wounded with them.
Because there was no doubt in Bo’s mind
that more blood would be spilled before this was over.
By late morning, the patrol reached a
spot where several ridges came together. Craggy cliffs rose above
them. A number of canyons cut into those cliffs, the walls leaning
toward each other like the jaws of a trap about to snap
shut.
Lieutenant Holbrook reined in and
signaled for the patrol to halt. He turned to Bo and Scratch and
said, “I suppose now it’ll become more difficult to follow the
trail, since there are several ways they could have
gone.”
“Yeah, they may have even split up,”
Scratch said.
“That wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” Bo
added.
The silver-haired Texan swung down from
his saddle. “Let me take a look around,” Scratch said.
For several minutes Scratch walked back
and forth, studying the ground. Large stretches of it were too
rocky to take a print, but there were other ways of following a
trail. Finally, Scratch rejoined Bo and the lieutenant and said,
“It looks like they stayed together and rode into that center
canyon.”
He pointed out the opening in the
cliffs he was talking about. It was twenty feet wide and ran
straight for perhaps fifty yards before it took a sharp
turn.
“Are you sure?” Holbrook asked. “I
don’t see any tracks at all.”
“Horses can’t travel over rocky ground
without turnin’ over some of the rocks, and their shoes leave
little nicks and scratches on the rocks, too,” Scratch explained.
“And there are places where there’s enough dirt to pick up part of
a hoofprint. I can see enough sign to tell that a bunch of riders
came through here in the past twelve hours, and there ain’t nothin’
pointin’ to any of those other canyons.” Scratch nodded. “That’s
the way they went, all right. You can count on it.”
“And if Scratch says it, you can
believe it,” Bo put in. “He’s a fine tracker. Always has
been.”
“All right,” Holbrook said. “That means
we go after them.”
“Hold on a minute,” Bo said. “I’m not
sure that’s a good idea.”
Holbrook frowned at him. “What do you
mean? We came out here to track down the Deadwood Devils, didn’t
we? Who else could it have been that attacked us last
night?”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t the Devils,”
Bo replied. “I’m saying it might not be a good idea to follow them
into that canyon. Can’t you see that it’s a perfect setting for
another ambush?”
Scratch added, “They haven’t gone to
any trouble to cover their trail, Lieutenant. It’s sorta like they
want us to follow ’em.”
“Nonsense,” Holbrook said. “They were
just in a hurry to get away once it became obvious that their
ambush wasn’t going to work.”
“I don’t know,” Bo said. “Maybe they
thought it would be easier just to lure you into a
trap.”
Sergeant Gustaffson had listened to the
conversation with great interest. Now he spoke up, saying, “Beggin’
your pardon, Lieutenant, but what these fellas are saying makes
sense. If those outlaws really wanted to get away, they could have
split up here and gone half a dozen different directions. Instead
they stayed together and rode into that canyon.”
“Which is probably where their hideout
is located,” Holbrook said with irritation and impatience in his
voice. “You men don’t seem to understand. This is our chance to
catch them all together and wipe them out. The best time to attack
is when the enemy is concentrated in one spot. You’d understand
that if you’d been trained in tactics like I have.”
Scratch and Gustaffson both looked like
they were about to lose their tempers. Bo was more than a mite
annoyed himself at Holbrook’s smug certainty that he was right.
Keeping a tight rein on his own anger, Bo said, “Maybe you’d better
let Scratch and me do a little scouting before you go charging in
there, Lieutenant. That’s why you brought us along, isn’t
it?”
Holbrook shrugged. “I suppose so. I
don’t want to waste this opportunity, though. I’ll give you a few
minutes to reconnoiter in that canyon, but then I’m leading my men
in pursuit of the enemy.”
“Just wait until we get back,” Bo
suggested.
“And if you hear shots, don’t come
chargin’ in there,” Scratch added. “We’ll get back to you if we
can. If we can’t, then you’ll know it was a trap and we’ve sprung
it.”
“Go ahead,” Holbrook said. Bo noted
that the lieutenant didn’t actually promise to go along with what
they had asked, and that left him with an uneasy feeling as Scratch
mounted up and the two of them rode toward the dark
cleft.
“I knew no good would come from gettin’
mixed up with some greenhorn glory hound,” Scratch muttered as they
approached the canyon mouth.
“Maybe he’ll wait,” Bo
said.
“You really think so?”
“Well, it depends on whether or not he
listens to Olaf.”
“He ain’t showed no signs of it so
far,” Scratch pointed out.
“Yeah, I know,” Bo said, and he
couldn’t keep a note of worry out of his voice.
The Texans drew their Winchesters and
rested them across the saddles as they reached the mouth of the
canyon. The wind that whistled down the cleft was bone chilling.
Steep, rocky walls rose fifty or sixty feet on both sides of them,
and the dark, overcast day meant that a thick gloom clogged the
canyon as they proceeded into it. They rode side by side, Bo on the
right and Scratch on the left, and each of them watched the rimrock
on his side, alert for any sign of an ambush. There were no sounds
except the slow, steady hoofbeats of their horses.
They reached the first bend and rode
around it. Now they could see another hundred yards or so ahead of
them. The canyon floor was empty except for some boulders and
stunted bushes here and there along the base of the
walls.
“This cut’s liable to zigzag along for
a mile or more, without ever runnin’ straight for more’n a hundred
yards at a time,” Scratch said. “And then it might run smack-dab
into a dead end.”
Bo knew his friend was right. Some
geological upheaval in the dim, distant past had created this
canyon, possibly at the same time the rest of the Black Hills had
risen. He had read about such things in books, and he had seen the
results many times with his own eyes.
That cataclysm had left a number of
large rocks broken and perched on the rims of both sides of the
canyon. Bo eyed them warily as he and Scratch rode
past.
“It wouldn’t take much to start an
avalanche along here,” he said quietly. “Get a log and lever one or
two of those boulders over the edge, and it would pick up plenty
more on the way down.”
“Yeah, this place gives me the
fantods,” Scratch agreed. “But the Devils came this way. I’m still
seein’ sign.”
“Yeah, me, too. Maybe the lieutenant’s
right. Maybe their hideout really is up here.”
Scratch grunted. “If that shave tail
was ever right about anything, it was a pure-dee accident. I got a
hunch that havin’ that old sarge around is the only reason the
young fella’s still alive.”
Scratch might be right about that, Bo
thought. Unfortunately, Olaf Gustaffson was just a sergeant. When
it came down to the nub, Gustaffson had to obey the orders of his
superior officer. Holbrook was so bound and determined to catch the
Devils and grab some fame and glory—and maybe a promotion—in the
process, he might not let Gustaffson continue to influence his
decisions.
The canyon continued to twist back and
forth, almost as sinuous as a diamondback rattler wriggling its way
across the ground. The walls became more sheer and rose even higher
by the time Bo and Scratch had penetrated half a mile into the
canyon. The shadows thickened even though the sun was high overhead
now. That was because the clouds were so thick and threatening. At
least they were past the area where the threat of a rockslide
loomed, Bo thought.
They reined in for a moment, and Bo
asked, “You reckon we ought to go back and fetch the lieutenant and
the rest of the patrol?”
“Everything looks clear so far,”
Scratch admitted. “Maybe it’d be a better idea if we split up. You
can go back and fetch the soldier boys, and I’ll keep headin’
deeper into—”
“Wait a minute,” Bo interrupted. “You
hear that?”
Scratch’s eyes narrowed in
concentration as he listened. Then they widened and he let out a
curse. “Horses comin’ up the canyon!” he exclaimed. “The dang
shavetail got tired o’ waitin’!”
It was true. The faint rataplan of
hoofbeats on the rocky ground echoed up the canyon toward the
Texans, growing slightly louder with the passing of each
second.
Bo started to wheel his horse. “I’d
better get back there with them—” he began.
He stopped short as he heard a new
sound. It was an ominous, deep-throated rumble, and both Texans
instantly knew what it meant.
“Avalanche!” Scratch
yelled.