Suddenly, his feet went out from under him. With a bone-jarring thump, he sat down hard and started sliding. Realizing that he had fallen into a gully, he reached out blindly in an effort to grab something and slow down his slide.
His fingers hooked around the base of a bush. He closed them tightly, and as the bush's roots held, Longarm came to an abrupt halt. He lay there on the steep slope and looked around, blinking sweat out of his eyes. The gully was a deep one, about forty feet, and he had slid about halfway down the side of it. At the bottom of the gully, a small creek bubbled along over a narrow, rocky bed. The noise it made sounded loud to Longarm, but not so loud that he could not hear the voices shouting in the woods above him.
"He headed over this way! I heard him!"
"Be careful, damn it! He may be trying to set up an ambush."
"Ambush, hell! The bastard was half dead when he busted out of that hollow log. I saw him, and he could barely move."
A third voice said, "He moved well enough to kill Durkin."
Longarm felt a little tingle of satisfaction at the knowledge that he had downed one of the bushwhackers. Evidently there were three of them left, however, and they were in the process of hunting him down. If he stayed here, it probably wouldn't take them very long to find him, and he'd be an easy target perched here on the side of the gully like this.
Time to get moving again, he told himself grimly.
Now that he wasn't sliding out of control, he was able to slip down the side of the gully without crashing through the brush. After a moment, he reached the little stream, and he went to one knee beside it to scoop up some water and splash it in his face and over his head. Fed by snow-melt from the peaks of the Cascades, the water was icy cold and made Longarm gasp and shiver. It drove back some of the mental cobwebs that threatened to overwhelm him, however, and that was what he wanted. He cupped more of the water in his free hand and sucked it down thirstily.
Longarm pushed himself back to his feet. The creek was so narrow that he was able to step over it, even in his weakened condition. The slope on the other side of the gully was not as steep. He angled along it, gradually working his way upward, using the trees and brush that dotted the ground as cover. He heard the searchers moving around on the other side of the creek and stepped up his pace.
Catching a glimpse of movement from the corner of his eye, Longarm knelt behind a clump of underbrush and went motionless. His eyes followed a flash of color that he spotted on the other side of the gully, and after a moment one of the bushwhackers stepped into clear view. Longarm had had only a very fleeting look at them when he burst free of the log and traded shots with them before dashing into the forest. Now he saw that this man wore range clothes, including a high-crowned hat and a cowhide vest. Like the man who had opened fire on Longarm and Wing when they were on their way back to the Diamond K from Timber City, this gent was dressed like a cowboy. And also like that other fella, this one was a complete stranger to Longarm too.
The clothes didn't have to mean anything. Owlhoots, hired guns, were generally much more likely to dress like cowboys than like lumberjacks. These men could have been hired by Ben Callahan or even Aurora herself, though Longarm had come to the conclusion that his suspicions about her were unfounded. Aurora wouldn't hire gunmen to raid her own camp. That wouldn't accomplish a damned thing.
Callahan was a different story. If he was bound and determined to make things so difficult for Aurora that she would have no choice except to sell her company to him, then an attack by these cowboys and other hired guns like them might do the trick.
Personally, Longarm thought, Callahan--or whoever the boss was--had underestimated Aurora. She was a proud, stubborn woman. He knew that just by the way she had made the timber company she had inherited from her late husband into even more of a success.
But all the pondering in the world wouldn't mean a damn thing, Longarm reminded himself, unless he got away from these killers and made it to the timber camp in time to warn Aurora of the attack. He stayed absolutely still, watching the bushwhacker on the other side of the gully through a tiny gap in the screen of brush.
The man poked around a little, started trying to make his way down the slope, then changed his mind and pulled himself back up to the edge of the gully. Like Longarm, he had a gun fisted in one hand. Only about thirty feet separated the two of them, and Longarm was worried that his breathing would give him away. Despite his best efforts, the pain of his wound lent a harshness to every breath he drew. Evidently, though, the chuckling of the creek was enough to cover up the slight noises.
Longarm learned suddenly that he was wrong. Either that or the fella had spotted him somehow, because the gunman abruptly whirled toward him, jerked up the pistol, and yelled, "He's over here!" as he squeezed the trigger.
Longarm threw himself to the side, catching hold of the brush with one hand to steady himself as the bushwhacker's bullet ripped through the leaves about a foot away. Fighting off the blurriness that tried to take over his vision, Longarm fired twice. The first slug chewed bark off the trunk of a pine right behind the gunman, but the second bored into the man's chest and threw him back against the tree. The gunman bounced off the trunk, tried to stay upright, and failed. As the gun slipped from his fingers, he pitched forward, falling into the gully and tumbling head over heels down the slope until he came to a stop with his upper body in the creek at the bottom. He lay motionless, tendrils of red seeping into the water as it flowed around him.
That was two of them accounted for, Longarm realized as he pushed himself to his feet. This was no time to congratulate himself, though. Instead he turned and started for the top of the slope as fast as he could force himself to move, no longer worrying about any noise he might make. The bushwhacker's yell and the exchange of shots would bring the other two killers on the run.
Shots banged behind him. He heard the whisper of bullets through the leaves and the thud of slugs hitting tree trunks. Then he was at the top, powering over and throwing himself once more into the shelter of the thick forest.
In his pain-wracked state, it seemed like hours, even days, had passed since the initial volley of shots that had knocked him out of the roan's saddle. Surely he had been playing cat and mouse through these woods with the killers for at least that long. But his brain told him that no more than twenty minutes, half an hour at the most, had passed. He still had time to alert the Mcentire camp to the raid if he could get away from the remaining two gunmen.
And find his way out of the forest. That might not be easy, given the shape he was in. Normally he had an extremely good sense of direction, which had served to save his life on more than one occasion in the past. That might not be the case today.
He ran blindly, darting this way, angling off in another direction, zigzagging yet another way. He might even be running in circles for all he knew. Distantly, he heard the men coming after him. Occasionally, a shot resounded through the forest as one of them blazed away at something they thought was him, but as far as Longarm could tell, none of the bullets came anywhere close to him.
Unfortunately, his strength was deserting him. His run had turned into a stagger, and he had to keep clutching at tree trunks to keep from falling flat on his face. Once again, time was running out on him.
He stumbled forward, and it took him a moment to realize that he had emerged from the trees once more.