Texas Bloodshed

CHAPTER 12

He found out a couple of seconds later when he crashed into something solid with such force that it left him stunned, breathless, and unable to move. He was on the bottom of the ravine.

Dirt and pine needles rained down on him from above, pelting his face and causing him to jerk his head to the side even though the rest of his body still wouldn’t respond to him. Bo knew what the little avalanche meant. Somebody was sliding down the other side of the ravine, coming down after him, and he was sure they didn’t mean him any good.

He willed his muscles to move, to send him scrambling away, but they were stubbornly unwilling for several seconds. He finally rolled onto his belly and with an effort pushed himself to his hands and knees.

Before he could start crawling, a great weight landed on his back, knocking the breath out of him again. An arm looped around his neck and jerked tight, cutting off his air as a knee pinned him to the ground.

“Thought I heard somebody fall down in this gulch,” a man’s gravelly voice said. “Thought ye could sneak up on me, did ye? You son of a bitch! I’ll choke the life out o’ ye!”

The man was doing a pretty fair job of it, too. The brawny arm across Bo’s throat threatened to crush his windpipe. The knee in his back bent his spine painfully. His lungs cried out desperately for air.

And he had dropped his gun when he plummeted into the ravine, so he didn’t even have a weapon.

His hands moved over the ground around him in the dark, searching for something, anything. His fingers brushed against a rough surface, lost it for a second, then found it again. He closed his hand on a piece of broken pine branch slightly bigger around than his wrist. He didn’t know how long it was, but when he lifted it, it felt heavy enough to work as a weapon.

A red haze from lack of breath began to settle over his brain. Knowing that he could pass out at any second, Bo struck upward and back with the makeshift club.

The blow landed with enough power to make the would-be killer grunt in pain. The pressure on Bo’s throat lessened but didn’t go away completely. He struck again with the branch.

This time the man’s grip slipped enough that Bo was able to writhe free. He drove an elbow up and back into the man’s midsection, even as he gasped and dragged air into his lungs. Twisting around, he held the club in both hands and swung it as hard as he could.

When the blow landed he heard something crack. At first he didn’t know if it was the pine branch or one of his opponent’s bones. But the howl of pain the man let out told Bo it was probably a bone. Bo swung again but didn’t hit anything this time.

He heard a scrambling sound, and more dirt cascaded down around him. The man was fleeing, climbing up the side of the ravine. That was confirmed when Bo heard him yell in a voice like ten miles of bad road, “Come on, boys! Let’s get outta here!”

A few shots still rang out, but the sounds of battle began to fade quickly. Bo braced himself with a hand against the steeply sloping side of the narrow ravine and heaved to his feet. He didn’t have his gun, so he continued gripping the pine branch in case he was attacked again.

That seemed unlikely, though, he thought as a swift rataplan of hoofbeats drifted through the chilly night air and began to fade. It sounded like the bushwhackers were taking off for the tall and uncut, all right.

Bo stood there, his chest rising and falling rapidly as he tried to catch his breath. When he thought he was up to the task, he started trying to climb out of the ravine.

It was tough going. The slope was steep enough that he had to catch hold of roots that stuck out of the ground to pull himself up.

He was still climbing when Scratch called softly from somewhere above him, “Bo! Bo, are you around here?”

“Down here!” he replied. “Better stop moving around, Scratch, or you’re liable to fall in this ravine like I did. I never saw it in the dark.”

“Son of a gun! Are you hurt?”

“Shaken up a little, and some bumps and bruises, that’s all,” Bo told his old friend. “Plus one of those hombres tried to strangle me. Reckon I’ll live, though.”

“Can you get out? Do I need to fetch a rope?”

“I think I can make it. Hold on.”

A couple of minutes later, Bo reached the top and rolled over it onto level ground. The exertion of the climb had made him sweat despite the cold. A shiver went through him as the night breezes hit his damp face and made him even chillier.

He sat up and said, “All right. I’m out of that blasted hole in the ground.”

Scratch followed his voice and came over to him.

“Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

“Yeah, but I lost my gun when I fell, and I’m not very happy about that.”

“Maybe we can find it later. Let me give you a hand. We better get back to camp and make sure ol’ Forty-two’s all right.”

“And the prisoners,” Bo added as Scratch bent, took hold of his arm, and hauled him to his feet.

Scratch snorted in response to his old friend’s comment.

“I ain’t worried overmuch about those three,” he said. “But I expect they’re fine, locked up in that box like they are.”

“Did you swap lead with any of those bushwhackers?” Bo asked as they tried to find their way back to the camp in the thick darkness. The fact that both Texans possessed superb senses of direction came in handy.

“I shot one of ’em and walloped another,” Scratch replied. “Or maybe it was the same one, I ain’t sure about that. We’ll have to get a torch and check.”

“I knocked one out and tied him up,” Bo said. “If he’s one of Gentry’s men, Deputy Brubaker will have himself another prisoner to deliver.”

“Heck, it might be Gentry his own self,” Scratch said. “Wouldn’t that be somethin’?”

It would indeed, but Bo wasn’t going to count on that. The man he’d tussled with at the bottom of the ravine had sounded like the leader of the bunch, and that gent had gotten away.

“Creel! Morton!” That was Brubaker, calling from the camp. “Are you out there?”

“We’re here!” Bo replied. “And we’re coming in!”

They followed the sound of Brubaker’s voice and a moment later came out into the clearing where the wagon was parked. The deputy hunkered on his heels next to the fire, stirring up the ashes and adding twigs and dried pine needles until flames began to leap up again and cast a circle of faint light around the camp.

“Where did you two go?” Brubaker asked as he straightened and looked at the Texans.

“Why, we’re just fine, thank you most to death,” Scratch said. “Appreciate you inquirin’ about our health.”

“I can tell you’re both up and walkin’ around, so I know you ain’t dead,” Brubaker snapped.

“We circled around and flanked those bushwhackers,” Bo explained. “We were able to drive them off.”

“Kill any of ’em?”

“We don’t know yet. We’ll have to get a torch and go have a look. How about you, Marshal? Are you hurt?”

“No, they made it pretty hot under that wagon for me, but I wasn’t hit.”

“Have you checked on the prisoners?”

“They all called out and said they were all right when I asked them,” Brubaker said. “If you’re asking if I unlocked that door to take a look at them, hell, no.”

“I imagine they’re fine,” Bo said.

The fire was burning strongly now, so he found a branch that was thinner and lighter than the one he had used as a club and set it on fire. That would make a good enough torch for him and Scratch to find their way around in the woods.

“We’re going to take a look around,” he said as he held the torch in his left hand and used his right to pull his Winchester from its sheath.

It was difficult to tell exactly where they had fought their battles a short time earlier. Everything looked different in the flickering light of the torch. After a few minutes, though, Bo was convinced he’d found the log where he had knocked out the ambusher. He could see the scuff marks of their struggle on the ground beside the fallen tree.

But the man was gone, and Bo was forced to come to the conclusion that one of his friends had found him and turned him loose.

They were luckier when it came to the man Scratch had shot. That hombre lay on his side in a pool of blood, dead.

“We’ll take him back to camp so Deputy Brubaker can look at him. If he’s one of Gentry’s gang, Brubaker ought to be able to identify him.”

Scratch bent and grasped the corpse’s ankles. He dragged the body roughly through the woods, not being disposed to worry about being gentle with the carcass of a man who’d just tried to kill him.

Bo had thought there was something oddly familiar about the man’s face, and once they reached the camp and he was able to study it in the better light from the fire, he was sure of it.

“I don’t know him,” Brubaker declared. “To the best of my recollection, I’ve never seen him before. That doesn’t rule him out completely from being a member of Gentry’s gang, but it’s pretty unlikely.”

“I’d say you’re right,” Bo agreed, “because I think there’s a definite family resemblance between this man and those Staleys who jumped us back at the trading post.”

Brubaker leaned closer to the dead man and frowned in concentration. After a moment he said, “By God, I think you’re right, Creel. This is another one of that bunch.”

Scratch said, “You reckon the rest of the family found out what happened at Clark’s, and they came after us with vengeance in mind?”

“That seems mighty likely to me,” Brubaker said. “Blood feuds are common in this part of the country.”

“They’re common just about everywhere,” Bo pointed out, while Scratch made a disgusted sound. In their drifting, they had run across several “to the last man” feuds, and such conflicts were usually bloody and senseless.

“That’s just what we need,” the silver-haired Texan said. “Not only do we have to worry about a bunch of bloodthirsty desperadoes wantin’ us dead, but now we’ve got a whole clan of ridge-runnin’ hillbillies after us!”

“Not everybody in Arkansas is a hillbilly, Tex,” Brubaker shot back at him.

“No matter what you call them, they’re trouble,” Bo said. “And that’s one thing we already had plenty of without this.”

Brubaker nodded as he looked down at the dead man.

“You’re right about that, Creel,” he said. “And come mornin’, I know damn well what I’m gonna do about it!”