CHAPTER 20
The snow was light and intermittent at
first, but it began to fall thicker and faster as Bo and Scratch
reached the spot where the avalanche had taken place. Scratch
dismounted long enough to retrieve his lasso, which he coiled and
fastened to his saddle again. While he was doing that, Bo located
the place where the Devils had left their horses during the ambush.
The temperature was below freezing and the snow was starting to
stick, resulting in a dusting of white on the piles of horse
droppings.
“We won’t be able to follow their trail
once the snow starts to pile up,” Scratch said.
“I know. It’s going to be dark soon,
too.”
Scratch sighed. “You reckon we ought to
just wait here for Gustaffson and those troopers and make camp for
the night?”
Bo thought about it for a moment and
then shook his head. “No, let’s give it a try,” he said. “One thing
about the snow, it’ll make it easier for Olaf and the others to
follow us. They’ll be able to see our tracks.”
“Yeah, I reckon. But where are we
goin’?”
“I’ve been thinking . . . Lieutenant
Holbrook might’ve been onto something. The Devils’ hideout wasn’t
up this canyon, but it could be hidden in one of the others. That
would be a good place. It’s isolated, and there aren’t any mines up
here this high.”
“You figure we should check the other
canyons?”
“It’s a place to start,” Bo
said.
They rode through the snow, which
whipped up in swirls around them. Cutting across the ridge, they
came to another of the rugged canyons. The thin layer of snow on
the ground was enough to muffle their horses’ hoofbeats, and Bo was
thankful for that. If he was right about the hideout being up here,
he didn’t want to ride right into the place without any warning,
and he sure didn’t want the Devils to know they were
coming.
The gray light in the sky was almost
gone when they reached the head of the canyon without finding any
sign of the outlaws. Bo was about to say that they would stop and
look for a place to camp when he suddenly stiffened in the saddle.
A faint, familiar scent had drifted to his nostrils.
“Scratch, do you smell
that?”
The silver-haired Texan sniffed the air
and nodded. “Wood smoke,” Scratch said. “Somebody’s got a fire
goin’.”
“In weather like this, they’d have to.
Let’s see if we can follow the smell.”
They set out across the rugged terrain,
and after several hundred yards they came to another canyon that
stretched across the landscape like a black, hungry mouth. Bo and
Scratch reined in and dismounted.
They tied their reins to a scrubby tree
and stole ahead on foot, carrying their rifles. When they came to
the edge of the canyon, they knelt in the snow and looked over the
edge of the rimrock. The smell of smoke was stronger now. Bo saw a
faint glow off to his right and silently pointed it out to
Scratch.
“That’s lamplight comin’ through the
cracks around a shutter,” Scratch breathed in Bo’s ear. “The
varmints got themselves a cabin down there!”
“Probably an old prospector’s cabin
that was abandoned,” Bo said. “Like the one where Chloride was
staying.”
“Maybe we ought to burn it down around
’em, like they tried to do to us!”
After all the death and havoc the
Devils had wreaked, it was a tempting suggestion, but that would be
cold-blooded murder, and besides, they didn’t know for certain that
their enemies were in there, Bo thought.
“We’d better make sure it’s them,” he
said. “Let’s see if we can find a way down there.”
He suspected there was a trail of some
sort leading down into the canyon, since the gang had approached
the place from this direction. The Texans cat-footed along the rim
in the gathering gloom. They came to a pair of boulders spaced
apart like a marker, and sure enough, Bo made out the faint
beginnings of a trail between the big rocks. The trail turned into
a ledge that zigzagged down the canyon wall.
Bo and Scratch were about to start
along the ledge when they heard a voice and stopped short.
Somewhere nearby, a man was cursing monotonously. His ire was
directed at the fact that he was stuck up here in such miserable
weather. When no one replied to him, Bo figured out that the man
was talking to himself.
The Devils had posted a guard on this
back door into their headquarters. That didn’t come as a surprise.
It was a sensible precaution. Quickly, Bo motioned to Scratch,
explaining in gestures what he was going to do. Scratch nodded his
understanding.
Bo started down the ledge, which was
just wide enough for one man on horseback. He would have to be
careful. There was literally no room for error. In a struggle, it
would be easy to fall off the ledge and plummet the thirty or forty
feet to the floor of the canyon.
Bo spotted a little cleft in the rock
up ahead to his left. That was where the muttered curses came from.
He took a deep breath and walked right past it.
The muttering stopped abruptly. The
guard stepped out behind Bo, rammed a rifle barrel into his back,
and said, “Hey! Where the hell do you think—”
That was as far as he got before
Scratch came up behind him and slammed a rifle butt into the back
of his head. At the same time, Bo whirled and grabbed the barrel of
the guard’s rifle, wrenching it up so that if the outlaw managed to
pull the trigger, the bullet wouldn’t tear through
him.
Scratch had struck too swiftly and
efficiently for that to happen. The guard folded up without ever
knowing what hit him. Bo’s other hand shot out and grabbed the
man’s coat to keep him from toppling off the ledge. Scratch got the
unconscious man under the arms and dragged him back up to the
rimrock.
Once they got there, Bo checked the
sentry for a heartbeat but didn’t find one. “I hope he was one of
the Devils,” he told Scratch, “because he’s dead.”
“Reckon I hit him a little too hard and
busted his skull,” Scratch said without sounding particularly
worried about it.
“He stuck a gun in my back, so there’s
a good chance he was one of the hombres we’re after. We’ll leave
him here and get on down there, maybe see if we can find out what
they’re planning.”
They could see the cabin now, squatting
on the canyon floor at the base of the wall like some malignant
toad. Built on to the side of it were a shed and a corral for the
horses. Bo’s plan was to sneak up on the place and try to spy a
glance through one of the crudely shuttered windows, maybe
eavesdrop on what the outlaws were saying.
They were only about halfway down the
ledge, though, almost directly above the ramshackle structure, when
the cabin door suddenly opened, spilling light out onto the snowy
ground. More than a dozen men in heavy coats and pulled-down hats
walked out carrying rifles. There were more of them than Bo
expected. Maybe all the gang hadn’t taken part in the ambush at the
other canyon.
One man lingered in the doorway, and
the last of the others paused to talk to him while the rest went to
the corral to saddle their horses. Bo and Scratch flattened out on
the ledge so they wouldn’t be as likely to be seen and listened to
the conversation taking place in front of the cabin below
them.
“When Lowell comes down from guard duty
in the morning, you and him start packin’ up all that gold. I want
it ready to go when the boys and me get back from
Deadwood.”
The voice was familiar. Bo had heard it
that night in Chloride’s cabin, when it gave the order to light the
coal oil. Chloride had been convinced this man was the leader of
the Deadwood Devils, the one who had carved pitchforks into the
foreheads of the dead guards on the wrecked Argosy gold
wagon.
The man standing in the doorway said,
“Sure, Tom, I understand.”
Tom . . . Reese
Bardwell’s outlaw brother was named Tom. As Bo looked down at the
men below him, he would have been willing to bet that one of them
had only four fingers on one hand.
“Good,” the leader went on. “I’m done
with this. Once we hit the bank in Deadwood and clean it out, we’ll
be back to pick up you and Lowell and the rest of the gold, and
then we’re puttin’ these damned Black Hills behind us. I don’t care
what the boss says.”
So Bardwell—if that’s who the leader of
the Devils was—was working for someone else. That went along with
Bo’s theory, too. He didn’t know who the boss was or if there was
anything behind the Devils’ reign of terror beyond sheer profit,
but at least some of his hunches had been confirmed.
“It’s a shame those blasted Texans had
to come along,” the man in the doorway said. “This was a sweet
setup until then.”
“Yeah, not knowin’ whether they’re dead
or not is the one thing that bothers me,” the leader agreed. He
laughed harshly. “But havin’ all that gold will help me get over
it.”
The man lifted a gloved hand in
farewell and headed for the corral, where one of the other outlaws
had saddled his horse for him. They all mounted up and rode away,
their horses’ hooves thudding on the snowy ground as they started
back down the canyon. They could follow it to the ridge that ran
between Deadwood Gulch and the canyon where the Golden Queen mine
was located. In weather like this, especially, it would take them
most of the night to reach Deadwood.
But once they got there, no one would
expect the raid on the bank they had planned. It was the finishing
stroke in this violent game. The Devils would sweep into town on a
cold, snowy morning and clean out the bank. Sheriff Henry Manning
would probably try to stop them, but the lawman wouldn’t be any
match for a dozen hardened owlhoots.
But if Gustaffson and the rest of the
cavalrymen, along with Bo and Scratch, could get there first, they
could have one heck of a surprise waiting for the Deadwood
Devils.
Once the outlaws were out of sight, Bo
motioned for Scratch to head back up the ledge. When they reached
the rimrock, Scratch said, “There ain’t no doubt about it now.
Those were the Devils.”
“Yeah,” Bo agreed, “and that dead guard
is the one the boss was talking about called Lowell. The other one
will probably find his body in the morning when he doesn’t come in
from guard duty, but by then it’ll be too late for him to warn the
others. They’ll be in Deadwood already . . . and so will
we.”
“We’re goin’ after ’em to put a stop to
that bank robbery?”
“Yeah, but we have to find Olaf and the
other troopers first. Let’s hope they were able to follow our
trail.”
It was dark as midnight now, even
though it wasn’t long after sundown. The snow still fell. When the
wind gusted particularly hard, it seemed to be falling
sideways.
“Gettin’ hard to see,” Scratch said as
he and Bo rode back the way they had come from. “I hope those
soldier boys don’t ride right off a cliff into a
canyon.”
That was a legitimate worry, Bo
thought. If the storm got much worse, they might not be able to
travel, even if they did manage to rendezvous with the survivors
from the cavalry patrol.
A few minutes later, dark figures
loomed up in front of them, made indistinct by the snow. Bo and
Scratch reined in and lifted their rifles. The other riders did the
same, and one of them called out the traditional military
challenge.
“Who goes there?”
Bo relaxed as he recognized Sergeant
Gustaffson’s voice. “It’s us, Olaf,” he called. “Bo Creel and
Scratch Morton.”
The cavalrymen prodded their horses
forward. “Thank God,” Gustaffson said fervently. “With this snow,
we were riding around blindly. I was able to follow your tracks for
a while, but between the darkness and the wind, we were
lost.”
“There’s only so much room up here on
this ridge,” Bo said, “so I was hoping we’d run into each other. We
have news.”
“You found the Devils’
hideout?”
“That’s right, but there’s only one man
there right now. They left him to guard the loot from their
previous robberies.”
“Where’d the rest of them go?”
Gustaffson asked.
“They’re headed for Deadwood,” Bo
explained. “They’re going to rob the bank there first thing in the
morning and then take off for the tall and uncut.”
Gustaffson let out a surprised curse.
“We’ve got to stop ’em! Nobody in Deadwood will expect the Devils
to ride right into town like that. It’ll be a
massacre.”
Bo nodded and said, “It could be. But
not if we can get there first.”
Gustaffson lifted his reins and turned
his horse. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go!”
With Bo and Scratch in the lead, the
little group started toward Deadwood. The Texans were relying on
instinct to guide them now more than anything else. Decades of
wandering had given them a built-in sense of direction, but even
so, they had to wonder if they were going the right way. It was
going to take a lot of luck for them to get back to Deadwood at all
in this storm, let alone get there before the outlaws reached the
settlement.
The wind blew harder and the snow fell
thicker. Every bone in Bo’s body was frozen and aching from the
cold, and he knew Scratch felt the same way. This late autumn storm
was becoming a blizzard, and there wasn’t a blasted thing they
could do about it. All the men hunched deeper in their coats, and
the horses plodded on.
Bo’s horse suddenly stopped and
wouldn’t go on. Trusting the animal’s instincts, Bo cried out over
the howling wind, “Hold it! Everybody stop!”
Scratch, Gustaffson, and the troopers
came to a halt. “What is it, Bo?” Scratch asked.
“I don’t know! Everybody hold on for a
minute!”
Keeping a tight grip on the reins, he
swung down from the saddle and walked forward, taking each step
slowly and carefully. After a couple of strides, when his booted
foot came down it didn’t find anything except empty air. Quickly,
Bo backed up a step.
He handed his reins to Scratch, then
reached into his coat to fish out a match. He cupped the lucifer in
his hands and struck it with a flick of his thumbnail, but the wind
snatched out the flame immediately. Muttering to himself, Bo got
another match and tried again.
It took three tries before he was able
to get a match to stay lit long enough for him to see anything. But
that time the feeble glow revealed a snowy brink with black
nothingness beyond it.
“We almost rode off a cliff,” Bo
reported to the others. He felt his heart sink as he continued. “We
can’t go on! It’s too dangerous! We’ll wind up falling into a
canyon or a ravine!”
“What should we do?” Gustaffson asked,
lifting his voice to be heard over the icy wind.
“Find a place to camp, maybe where we
can build a fire and thaw out a little!”
“But what about the Devils and that
bank robbery?”
Bo hated to say it, but the weather
left them with no choice.
“I reckon the people of Deadwood are on
their own.”