Texas Bloodshed

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.

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 enemy—after all these years, Scratch couldn’t even remember what it was—and 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.

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 ...