Texas Bloodshed

CHAPTER 31

Bo grew more worried as he and Brubaker crossed the valley toward the fire. The column of smoke to the south was getting bigger all the time, and the original fire continued to rush eastward. Any sane man would turn his horse around and ride hell-bent-for-leather away from here.

Bo wasn’t sure that Brubaker was completely sane anymore, though. The deputy had a look of intense determination on his face, as if he wouldn’t let hell itself stand between him and the outlaws he intended to bring to justice.

And Scratch was still out there somewhere, too, threatened by the fiery onslaught. After all they had been through together, Bo wasn’t just about to abandon his old friend without making every effort to find him.

He had tried to keep his eye on the distant riders, but the terrain and the ever-thickening smoke made that impossible. Bo didn’t know where Scratch and the others were anymore. He and Brubaker were just riding blindly up and down the valley now, searching for any sign of them.

Brubaker hunched his shoulders and coughed several times before saying, “We ain’t gonna be able to stand this much longer, Creel. I hate to say it, but the fire’s probably caught up with ’em by now.”

“I don’t believe that,” Bo said.

“You don’t want to believe that. But it’s true.”

“Maybe Scratch is dead,” Bo said, although it hurt him to admit that. “But I’m not going to believe it until I see it with my own eyes.”

“And I ain’t turnin’ back as long as there’s still a chance I can corral Gentry and the LaChance gal and the others. So I reckon that means we keep goin’.”

Bo nodded. “We keep going,” he said.

They rode on warily, not wanting to run right into their quarry without any warning, although that was becoming more and more possible as the visibility worsened. Some instinct made Bo lift his head and look up at the top of the ridge. Flames danced among the trees there, giant flames that leaped and cavorted madly as the wind whipped them.

Hades had to look and feel something like this, he thought, and that howling wind might as well have been the devil’s laughter.

Like an army charging into battle, once the flames topped the ridge they rushed down the slope. Their speed was incredible. As the heat beat against their faces, Bo and Brubaker were forced to swing their horses around and gallop away from the tongues of fire reaching out for them.

“What the hell?!” Brubaker yelled. “It’s on all sides of us now! How did it—”

His voice was lost in the huge roar of the firestorm.

Bo spotted something in front of them that might represent a faint hope of survival. A line of trees marked what might be the course of a creek. He reined his horse closer to Brubaker’s and slapped the lawman’s shoulder to get his attention. He pointed to the trees.

Brubaker nodded and kicked his horse into a faster run. Both men galloped toward the trees, which would provide more fuel for the fire when the flames reached them but might also signify a place of sanctuary, perilous though it might be.

As Bo came up to the trees, he saw how the earth dropped away on the other side of them, forming a deep gully. At the bottom of it flowed a creek no more than five feet wide. From the looks of the banks, in normal times the creek was bigger and deeper than it was now, but the drought had shrunk it. It had to be fed by springs in the surrounding hills, or it would have gone dry entirely by now.

Bo was swinging down from his saddle by the time his horse came to a stop. He yanked his Winchester from the saddle boot and swatted the animal on the rump with the barrel. The horse let out a startled cry and leaped forward.

“The horses can’t get down there!” he yelled to Brubaker, who had also dismounted and was pulling his rifle from its sheath. “We have to let them go!”

Brubaker nodded. They might be consigning the animals to a fiery death, but there was nothing else they could do. Without the weight of their riders, the horses might be able to outrun the flames. That is, if they didn’t panic and turn around so that they raced right into the inferno.

Either way, the horses were on their own now, and so were Bo and Brubaker.

They half-climbed, half-slid down the steep banks of the gully until their boots splashed into the water. The banks were mostly dirt and rock, which was good. Only a few gnarled bushes that had grown there stubbornly would burn.

Cinders began to rain down around the two men.

“Get in the water!” Bo shouted. It only came up to his knees, but it would provide some protection. He set his Winchester on the ground next to the creek and stretched out on his back, letting the water flow over and around him. Just downstream, Brubaker did likewise.

Bo took his hat off and soaked it in the creek, then draped it over his face, which he lifted out of the water so he could breathe. He was starting to gasp. He had heard about men dying from breathing smoke, and also because the fire burned up all the air. The wet hat trapped a little air right over his face, but he didn’t know how long it would last.

The creek water was cold, and that helped because the heat of the flames was intense. Even with his ears underwater, Bo heard the inferno’s roar. His eyes were squeezed closed, but red sparks shot across his vision anyway. He felt the world start to spin crazily around him and knew he was on the verge of passing out.

“So ... long ... pard,” he managed to whisper, and he prayed that wherever Scratch was, he heard that farewell.

“Wait!” Cara screamed as they were about to make their desperate, doomed run. “Look! Up there!”

Scratch looked where she was pointing, and hope leaped in his chest. This was a different section of the ridge from the one where the gang’s hideout had been located, but the dark blotch on the side of the slope could only be the mouth of another cave.

“Come on!” Gentry yelled. “Bring those packhorses!”

Just like an outlaw, Scratch thought with a grim chuckle. Even caught in the middle of a hellish nightmare like this, Gentry wanted to save the loot.

The nearness of the fire made the horses more skittish than ever. The riders had to fight to control them and send them in the direction of the onrushing flames. They managed to do it, though, and climbed slowly but steadily toward the cave.

It wasn’t really much of a cave, Scratch saw as they came closer. It was more of an overhang with a sheltered area underneath it. But the whole area was rock, and that meant there was nothing there to burn.

Right now, that was mighty welcome.

The heat and smoke combined to make every breath searingly painful. Floating ashes filled the air and stung bare skin when they landed on it, as well as charring holes in clothing. If by some miracle he lived through this, Scratch thought as they crowded into the cavernlike space, he would never look at a campfire the same way again.

The area under the overhang was barely big enough for seven men, one woman, and ten horses. The panicky animals presented the biggest problem.

“Whatever you do, hang on to those packhorses!” Gentry ordered his men. “Let your saddle mounts go if you have to, but don’t lose that loot!”

Scratch found himself pressing his back against the rock wall at the rear of the protected space. The burly, gray-haired outlaw named Ryan was to his left. To his right were Gentry and Cara. The leader of the gang looped one arm around the blonde while he used his other hand to hang on to the reins attached to their horses.

Smoke drifted through cracks in the rock around them and made it hard to breathe. Coughing, Cara said, “Hank, I ... I have to know something. What made you ... come out here ... to the hideout ... instead of tryin’ to rescue me?”

“I was going to rescue you,” Gentry insisted. “You know I never would’ve let you hang, sweetheart. I planned to save Dayton and Jim, too, while I was at it, but you’re the one I really care about.”

“But Brubaker was takin’ me to Tyler! That’s more than ... a hundred miles east of here. And you weren’t followin’ us ...”

“I sent men to the crossings along the Red River, once I realized that lawman was cutting across Indian Territory,” Gentry explained. “I had to find out where you were.”

“I know ... about that. We ran into some kid named Nesbit.”

“Early Nesbit,” Gentry agreed. “He was working for me, Cara. I planned to go back and check with all those spies and find out which way you’d gone.”

“That’s what the kid said. But it doesn’t make sense, Hank. Even if you’d doubled back after you got the loot, you wouldn’t have had time ... to find us and get us away from that lawdog ... before we were locked up in Tyler!”

So she had figured it out, Scratch thought. Well, he wasn’t surprised. Cara was loco, but she was smart, too, and especially cunning when it came to saving her own hide.

And she had to realize now that Hank Gentry hadn’t had any intention of trying to rescue her and Lowe and Elam from the law. Oh, maybe at first that had been his plan, Scratch mused. Gentry might have even been sincere when he sent Early Nesbit and those other would-be owlhoots to keep an eye on the Red River crossings.

But sometime since then, he had decided that it just wasn’t worth the time and trouble. He had come to the conclusion that it would be better to let the three prisoners stand trial and hang while he and the rest of the gang lit a shuck for their old hideout, recovered the loot stashed there, and then shook the dust of this part of the country off their boots. Scratch had no doubt that if the fire hadn’t interfered with their plans, Gentry and the other outlaws would be riding west right now, headed for California.

A nervous tone had crept into Gentry’s voice as he said, “Don’t worry about any of that, Cara. We’re together now, and that’s all that matters. We were lucky enough to find this place, and as soon as the fire goes on past us, we’ll get out of here. Folks around these parts will be too busy trying to recover from this disaster to worry about us. We’ll be out of Texas before you know it.”

“Maybe,” Cara said, but Scratch thought she didn’t sound convinced.

All the outlaws were coughing now. Ryan suggested, “Better get your bandannas out and soak them with water from the canteens. Then tie ’em around your face and breathe through ’em.”

That was a good idea, Scratch thought. He soaked his bandanna and tied it on, and that helped with the smoke. The others really looked like outlaws now with their faces masked, and he supposed he did, too.

This cavelike area was about fifty feet up the face of the ridge. Down below, the flames had reached the valley. The grass and the trees and the brush were burning furiously, sending even more smoke into the air. Scratch’s lungs burned and ached. His hope now was that the wind would keep blowing as hard as it had been all day, because then the fire would move on quickly and burn itself out behind the leading edge of the flames, once all the dry vegetation was consumed.

Right now, though, it was still pretty bad out there. If Cara hadn’t spotted this sanctuary, they would all be dead by now.

Gentry suddenly exclaimed, “Cara, what are you—”

“Shut up, you lyin’ son of a bitch!” she screamed.

Scratch’s head jerked around. He looked over to see Cara holding a revolver in both hands and pointing it at Gentry. Gentry’s holster was empty, which told Scratch that Cara had snatched the weapon from it.

He had been pretty sure that Gentry hadn’t sweet-talked Cara out of her suspicion of him, and what was happening now confirmed that.

“Cara, stop it!” Gentry said. “Put that gun down, damn it.”

“No,” she said. “You double-crossed me, Hank. I never would have believed it of you, but you did. I kept tellin’ Creel and Morton and Brubaker that you’d be comin’ after me, and I knew with all my heart that you would. I knew you’d never let me hang.” Even with the heat from the fire making it almost unbearable under here, her voice was as cold as ice as she went on, “But you would have. You didn’t care if they hanged me, as long as you got your money.”

She had moved away from him a little and had her back pressed tight against the rock so that nobody could get at her. Gentry held out a hand toward her and said, “Cara, you’re not thinking straight. You know I love you. I’d never let any harm come to you.”

“If that was true, you wouldn’t have made a beeline for that loot,” she snapped. “You’d have come after me, instead. You’re a son of a bitch, Hank. I don’t like it, but it’s true.”

Gentry’s lip abruptly curled in a sneer.

“You think I couldn’t find a dozen more women like you, you little harlot? With my share of this loot, I could get a hundred women like you!”

“You’re wrong, Hank,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper now. “You don’t know how wrong you are, but you’re about to learn.”

Gentry looked around at the other outlaws and said, “Somebody take that gun away from her.”

Nobody made a move toward Cara.

“I don’t hold anything against these other boys,” she said. “They were just doin’ what you told ’em to. But you, Hank, you were supposed to come for me, and you didn’t. You let me down, and now you’re gonna pay for it.”

Gentry laughed wildly.

“You can’t fight all of us!” he said.

“I don’t have to.” Cara tossed her head defiantly, like Scratch had seen her do a dozen times before. “I’m the boss of this gang now. Ain’t that right, boys?”

Bouchard said, “All we want is our share, Cara.”

“You’ll get it,” she promised.

“You bastard!” Gentry screamed at Bouchard. He looked over at Ryan. “Chet, don’t let them get away with this!”

“I’m startin’ to wonder if we might not be better off workin’ for Cara,” Ryan said. “She planned most of our jobs anyway, didn’t she, Hank?”

“You ... you ...” Gentry looked and sounded flabbergasted, as well as outraged.

Scratch just watched. Whatever happened now, it was out of his hands.

Cara jabbed the gun toward Gentry.

“Get out of here,” she ordered. “I can’t stand the sight of you anymore!”

“But there’s nowhere to go!” Gentry protested. “The whole world’s on fire out there!”

“That’s your problem. Back away from me, Hank. I swear, if you don’t I’ll shoot you dead where you stand.”

Gentry looked around desperately and tried one last appeal.

“Fellas, I’ll give up my share. You can split it among you, just stop this crazy bitch.”

Bouchard smiled thinly and said, “I think you’re giving up your share anyway, Hank.”

Gentry backed toward the edge of the area under the overhang. He stared at the blonde and said, “Cara, you can’t do this. Not after all we’ve meant to each other. Please.”

Cara took a deep breath and said, “Oh, hell.”

A smile tugged at the corners of Gentry’s mouth. He believed that he had won her over at last, Scratch thought.

He found out a second later just how wrong he was as Cara lowered the barrel of the gun a little, squeezed the trigger, and blew his right knee apart.