Matt saw dust fly in the air as another bullet struck the ground to their right. The arroyo was about fifty yards away, and it wouldn’t take the racing horses long to cover that much ground.
Even so, several more slugs whipped past the heads of Matt and Sam as they leaned forward in their saddles to make themselves smaller targets. There had to be more than one rifleman up there on the bluff shooting at them.
Why they were being bushwhacked like this was a whole other question, one that didn’t really matter at the moment. They could worry about who the would-be killers were and why they wanted Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves dead once they were safely behind some cover.
The arroyo was only about twenty yards away when Matt was hit by what felt like a giant fist punching him in the right side. The terrible impact drove him so far to the left that he couldn’t stay in the saddle.
He was stunned, but a part of his brain continued working. He had been shot before, so he knew one of the rifle bullets had hit him and reacted accordingly.
When he felt himself slipping off the horse, he kicked his feet free of the stirrups so neither of them would catch and hang up when he fell. If that happened, he would wind up being dragged over the rough ground, and probably that would be just as bad or worse than being shot.
Suddenly there was nothing under him but air, and a split second later he crashed into the ground, landing on his left shoulder. Momentum tumbled him over and over as more bullets kicked up dust and gravel around him.
Chapter 2
Zack Jardine was down by the wagon, keeping an eye on the unloading, when rifle shots began to crash from the top of the nearby bluff.
Jardine’s head jerked up and he grated out a curse. He saw powder smoke spurting from the places in the rocks where he had posted guards to keep an eye on the semi-arid landscape around them.
The men seemed to be shooting at something southeast of the spot where the guns were being unloaded. Jardine swung around, looked in that direction, and saw two men riding hellbent-for-leather, several hundred yards away.
Rifle in hand, Jardine broke into a run toward the trail leading to the top of the bluff. He was a big man, heavily muscled and handsome in a rugged, cruel way, and he didn’t like running in the hot sun.
He glanced toward the men on horseback when he was halfway up the trail and saw one of them tumble off his horse, probably hit. The other one was still mounted, though.
Jardine reached the top. Angus Braverman was one of the riflemen, Doyle Hilliard the other. Jardine figured Braverman was the one who’d started shooting. He was impulsive, reckless ... a damned fool, some might say.
“You opened the ball,” he shouted at Braverman and Hilliard. “You’d better kill both of them. I don’t want either of them getting away!”
To help ensure that, Jardine lifted his own rifle to his shoulder. He sighted at the distant figures and started cranking off rounds as fast as he could work the repeater’s lever.
He paused only long enough to wave an arm at the men he’d left below and yell, “Kill them!”
Everybody forgot about the crate of rifles they had just lifted down from the wagon and got busy trying to ventilate those two unlucky hombres who had wound up somewhere they shouldn’t have been.
From the corner of his eye, Sam saw his blood brother go down. He hauled back on the reins as hard as he could, but by the time his horse skidded to a halt, he was already a good ten yards past the spot where Matt had fallen.
Sam threw himself out of the saddle and ran toward Matt, holding the reins and pulling the horse with him. Bullets thudded into the ground and kicked up dust.
As he ran, Sam felt a hot streak on the side of his neck and gritted his teeth. He knew a slug had just come within an inch or so of ending his life.
But the thought of abandoning Matt to his fate never entered Sam’s mind. Not even when Matt lifted his head and bellowed, “Blast it, Sam, get out of here!”
Sam ignored that and stooped to get an arm around Matt. He had been blessed with great strength, so he was able to lift Matt without much trouble.
“Can you run?” he asked.
By way of answer, Matt lurched toward the arroyo.
Sam ran alongside him, still leading the horse. Matt’s mount had bolted off somewhere. They could find the horse later—if they were still alive.
Sam’s horse let out a shrill cry and leaped ahead, pulling loose from Sam’s grip on the reins. As the horse galloped down the arroyo’s bank, Sam spotted the bloody streak on its rump where a bullet had creased it.
He’d been using the horse as makeshift cover. Now he and Matt were left out completely in the open. Sam slipped his arm around Matt’s waist and half-carried, half-dragged him toward the shelter of the arroyo.
Sam felt a bullet tug at his buckskin shirt as he and Matt reached the bank and tumbled over it. The slope wasn’t too steep, about a forty-five-degree angle.
When they reached the bottom, Sam lifted his head and looked to make sure the bank cut them off from the view of the riflemen on the bluff. He couldn’t see the bluff at all anymore, so that meant they were out of the line of fire.
Sam turned to Matt and asked, “How bad are you hit?”
Matt’s face was pale under the permanent tan. He had his hand pressed to his right side. A dark stain had spread beyond it on his shirt.
“Think the slug caught me at an angle ... and went on through without penetrating too deep,” he answered in a voice taut with pain. “I’m bleedin’ like a stuck pig, though.”
The booming of the rifles on the bluff had stopped. The men hidden up there must have realized they’d just be wasting bullets if they kept shooting. They couldn’t hit Matt or Sam from where they were.
Sam pulled up Matt’s shirt and saw the two puckered, bloody holes in his friend’s torso. The smaller hole was in Matt’s side, the slightly larger one that marked an exit wound on Matt’s back only a few inches away and a little lower.
Matt was right about the bullet going all the way through. The angle of its flight had been shallow enough that Sam hoped the slug had missed any vital organs.
Even if that were true, the bullet had still done plenty of damage. And Matt could easily bleed to death if Sam didn’t get those crimson streams stopped—soon.
Up on the bluff, Zack Jardine cursed bitterly again as over the barrel of his rifle he saw the two strangers disappear. From this height, Jardine could see the dark line of the arroyo zigzagging its way across the ground, and knew they had taken cover in it.
Jardine lowered his rifle.
“Get down there,” he told Braverman and Hilliard. “We’re gonna have to go after those two.”
“One of ’em’s hit bad, Zack,” Braverman said as he straightened from behind the rocks where he had been crouched. “Did you see the way he fell? He’s bound to be dyin’.”
Braverman was a short, quick man with red hair who never tanned in the desert sun, just blistered. He looked harmless, but Jardine had seen him kill more than one man in cold blood without batting an eye.
Hilliard was bulkier, with a drooping mustache and what seemed like a permanent week’s worth of beard stubble. “Those fellas ain’t worth gettin’ killed over, Zack,” he rumbled.
“Well, then, you shouldn’t have opened fire on them in the first place!” Jardine’s words lashed at the two men. “Why the hell didn’t you just let them ride on past? They probably didn’t even notice us over here.”
A number of boulders littered the ground along the base of the bluff, huge chunks of sandstone that had broken off and rolled down the slope in ages past.
The wagon and the horses were down there among those big rocks, easy to miss if somebody wasn’t looking for them. That was the main reason Jardine had picked this isolated place to deliver the rifles.