Dead Before Sundown

Chapter 18

Frank spun around, lifting the Winchester. He spotted a man on the rimrock, above the canyon. The man had a rifle in his hands and had already levered another shell into the chamber. Flame spurted from the weapon’s muzzle as he fired a second shot.

Frank’s Winchester blasted a split second later, the sound of the rifle’s report blending with a yelp of pain from Salty. The man on the rimrock doubled over as Frank’s bullet punched into his guts. He dropped his rifle, staggered to the side, and lost his balance.

With a scream, he toppled off the edge and plunged toward the canyon floor. The soggy thud of his body striking the rocky ground silenced the scream.

Gut-shot as he was, he would have died anyway.

The fall had just hurried things along.

Frank turned toward his friend, saying urgently, “Salty, are you all right?”

Salty was clutching his left arm, where blood stained the sleeve of his faded flannel shirt. “I’m fine,” he said. “Dang buzzard just nicked me.”

“Let me see—” Frank began.

Meg interrupted him. “Frank, there’s another one!”

Frank’s head jerked up. Meg was right. A second rifleman had appeared on the rimrock. Frank knew that the men with the Gatling gun must have sent them up there to see what the situation was inside the canyon and ambush anyone who was still alive.

Frank reacted instantly, lifting his rifle to draw a bead on the bushwhacker, but he knew he was going to be too late.

The whipcrack of a shot split the air, but it didn’t come from the man on the rimrock. Instead, a bullet hit him from behind and drove him forward. Frank could tell that much by the way the man arched his back and threw his arms in the air. The rifle flew from his hands, unfired.

This man fell into the canyon, too, but he didn’t scream on the way down. He plummeted in silence, a grim silence that told Frank the man was probably dead already.

A figure appeared on the rimrock holding a rifle. Frank was about to snap a shot at him when the man lifted the Winchester over his head one-handed and waved it back and forth in a signal of some sort. With the way the light was, Frank couldn’t tell much about the man. He was mostly just a silhouette.

But he disappeared without firing again, fading back out of sight.

“What in Hades just happened?” Salty asked.

“I’m not sure,” Frank said, “but I think we’ve got a friend up there.”

“A friend? You just said we didn’t know nobody in Canada except Palmer, and he dang sure ain’t our friend!”

“Anybody who wants to keep those rascals from killing us is a pard as far as I’m concerned,” Frank said drily.

“Huh. Well, I can’t argue with that, I reckon.”

The Gatling gun started its fearsome pounding again, but after a moment, Frank heard a rifle bark and the rapid-firer stopped short.

Frank lifted his head. The rifle shot had come from somewhere up on the ridge, to the left of the canyon mouth.

“He’s up there somewhere,” Frank said. “He can see the Gatling gun, and he plugged the man turning the crank.”

“They’ll try to roust him out in a minute,” Salty predicted.

Frank’s grip on the Winchester tightened. “More than likely. When they do, I’m going to get up on the other rimrock.”

He nodded toward the right side of the canyon. The wall was steep, but a man could climb it if he was careful.

“Frank, you can’t do that,” Meg protested. “If they start shooting in here again while you’re halfway up there, you won’t have a chance!”

“I’ll have to move fast,” he said. “Anyway, once you’ve got one of those Gatlings set up, you can’t change the aim as quick as you can with a rifle or a handgun. You have to pick up the back of the carriage and turn the whole thing.”

The rifleman on the rimrock fired again; then two more shots cracked out from him.

“They’re probably trying to get the gun adjusted now, and he’s trying to pick them off while they’re doing it,” Frank said. He surged to his feet. “I’m going.”

Meg called after him to be careful as he ran toward the right side of the canyon. It took only a moment to reach the steep wall. He took his belt off and ran it through the rifle’s lever to make a crude sling that went around his neck.

Reaching up, he grabbed a projecting rock, found a toehold, and began to climb.

With every passing moment, he was aware that the Gatling gun could start up again at any time. If that storm of lead filled the canyon once more, the odds were that some of the screaming, ricocheting bullets would find him, would rake him off the canyon wall like a bug.

He didn’t let himself think about that. And when the hellish hammering of the Gatling gun filled the air again, he kept climbing, pausing only long enough to glance over his shoulder and catch a glimpse of the slugs throwing up dust and grit as they smashed into the rimrock on the other side of the canyon.

Just as Frank had expected, the attackers had swung the weapon’s revolving barrels toward their mysterious benefactor. In the face of that onslaught, the rifleman would have to withdraw if he could.

That gave Frank time to reach the top, though. He pulled himself up the last few feet and rolled over the edge into the boulders that littered the top of the ridge.

From there he could look across the narrow canyon and see that the other side was just as rocky. He caught a glimpse of a figure huddled in the lee of a rock slab that protected him from the hail of lead. A ricochet might still find the man, but he was relatively safe where he was.

Frank could see Salty and Meg from where he was, too. Meg was tying a bandana around Salty’s wounded arm as a crude bandage. The old-timer gestured up toward Frank with his other arm. Meg turned her head to look, and Frank gave them a wave and a grin to let them know he was all right.

Then he crawled forward, searching for a spot where he could look out into the valley and maybe get a shot at the murderous bastards manning the Gatling gun.

A few moments later, he spotted the rapid-firer. It was set up at the edge of a clump of trees. Flame licked from its muzzle as each of the revolving barrels lined up with it in turn and fired its cartridge. Frank pulled his rifle up where he could use it and tried to draw a bead on the man turning the gun’s crank. The wheels of the carriage and the body of the weapon itself gave him some cover … but there weren’t many better shots on the frontier than Frank Morgan. He lined his sights on an exposed shoulder and squeezed the Winchester’s trigger.

The man flopped backward, howling from the pain of a broken shoulder as the Gatling gun stopped firing. Frank saw another man dart forward. He had already worked the rifle’s lever and fired again. The second man staggered back into the shadows under the trees.

Angry shouts drifted up to the top of the ridge. The attackers were arguing among themselves now, and that was always a good thing, Frank thought with a grim smile.

Their options were limited. They could turn the Gatling gun toward him and try to kill him … but if they did that, the rifleman on the other side of the canyon could open up on them again. They would be right back in the same spot they were in now.

Frank held his fire and waited to see what they were going to do.

After a few minutes, rifle shots began to crack. Bullets whistled and whined around the rimrock, forcing Frank to duck lower behind the rocks. He suspected the same thing was happening on the other side of the canyon, but he didn’t risk a look.

The men down in the valley were throwing a lot of lead up here, but nothing compared to what they had been doing with the Gatling. Frank figured this was just covering fire so they could move the rapid-firer. When he edged his head up for a look during a lull in the shooting, he saw that he was right.

The Gatling gun was gone.

A few more shots blasted, but they trailed away, to be replaced by the sound of horses moving off through the trees. The attackers were cutting their losses and lighting a shuck before they lost too many men to the unexpected resistance they had encountered.

Unless they were pulling some sort of trick, Frank reminded himself. He would have to give it some time before he decided about that.

The sun had climbed high in the sky by now, although it was still morning. The temperature had risen as well. It was actually getting hot up here on the rimrock. Frank sleeved sweat off his forehead, then leaned forward suddenly as he squinted into the distance.

Movement had caught his eye. As he watched, a whole line of men on horseback came into view heading east, away from the canyon. They were probably half a mile down the valley, Frank judged. Some of the men were leading what appeared to be pack mules.

His earlier hunch was right. They were leaving.

“Salty! Meg!” he called down to his friends. “The two of you all right?”

“We’re fine!” Meg shouted up to him. “What about you?”

“Yeah. I’m coming down. They’re gone!”

Before he started the descent, he looked across the canyon at the other side of the rimrock. The man he had seen there earlier was gone. Frank had never gotten a good look at him, and he couldn’t help but wonder where the hombre was now.

He could try to figure that out later. Right now, he wanted to get down from this rocky perch.

Climbing down was harder than getting up there, and by the time he reached the ground he was winded. Carrying the rifle, he walked across the canyon toward Salty and Meg, who were standing beside the log barricade. The logs had suffered a lot of damage during the attack, but they had done their job.

“What happened to that other fella?” Salty asked as Frank came up to them.

“Don’t know,” Frank replied with a shake of his head. “I lost sight of him, but he’s got to still be around somewhere close by.” He nodded toward Salty’s wounded limb. “How’s the arm?”

“Aches a mite, but it’ll be fine.”

“How about you?” Frank asked Meg. “Are you hurt?”

“Well, my ears are still ringing a little from all that racket, but other than that I don’t have any complaints,” she told him, returning his smile.

Salty asked, “What’re we gonna do now?”

Frank grew solemn. “I’d like to go after that bunch. I don’t much cotton to being shot at, so I reckon they’ve got a whole heap of marks chalked up against them right now.”

“Dang right,” Salty agreed with an emphatic nod. “Besides, if what we was sayin’ earlier is right, there’s a chance Palmer is with ‘em, and I still got a score to settle with that polecat.”

Frank looked at Meg. “What do you say?”

“I say I don’t like being shot at, either,” she answered.

“You know the odds are against us. We downed a few of them, but they still outnumber us.”

“And they got them devil guns,” Salty said. “But I vote we go after ‘em anyway.”

Meg nodded again, and Frank said, “I reckon it’s settled then—”

The sound of hoofbeats nearby made him turn toward the brush piled in front of the canyon. It had been shot up so much by the Gatling gun that it wasn’t much of a barrier anymore. They could see the rider reining in there. Frank covered the man as he swung down from the saddle and pushed through the branches into the canyon.

“Howdy,” the stranger said with a friendly grin. “Looks like you folks are all right. I’m glad to see that.”

“Well, I’ll swan,” Salty said in surprise. “What circus did you escape from, mister?”