Don’t want to push us too close, thought Benton, exultantly, after what happened back on the other side of the ridge.
At the bottom of the slope, he was only a few yards behind Jingo Charley. Looking back, he saw the Anchor riders, plunging down the slope.
Got their nerve back, he told himself.
The canyon walls closed in around them, dark and foreboding. Boulders choked the tiny trickle of water that meandered down the stream bed. Brush grew thick against the banks.
Ahead of him Jingo Charley was dismounting, slapping the pony’s rump with his hat. Startled, the horse charged up the stream bed.
Jingo yelled at him. “Get off. We can hole up and hold them off.”
Benton jumped from his horse and the black went tearing after Jingo’s mount.
“You take that side,” Jingo yelled at him. “I’ll take this.”
“But you’re hit,” Benton told him. “Are you…”
“Fit as a fiddle,” Jingo told him. “Bullet went through my arm slick as a whistle. Nothing to it.”
Below them, down near the canyon’s mouth, came the clatter of hoofs on stones, the excited yell of riders.
Turning, Benton plunged into the brush, clambered up the talus slope beneath the grim wall of the canyon.
Behind a boulder he squatted down, gun held across his knee. Below him the canyon spread out like a detailed map.
Looking at it, he grinned. With him here and Charley over on the other side, not even a rabbit could stir down there that they couldn’t see. And with the canyon walls rearing straight above them, no one could get at them from any other direction. Anything or anyone that came into that canyon were dead meat to their guns.
The sun slanted down the canyon’s narrow notch and squatting by the boulder, Benton felt the warmth of it against his shoulders.
It made him think of other times. Of the tensed hush when a Yankee column was trotting down the road straight into a gun trap. Of the moments when he crouched beneath a ridge, waiting the word that would send him…and others…charging up the hill into the mouths of flaming guns.
This was it again, but in a different way. This was home without the peace that he had dreamed about in the nights of bivouac.
Far below a horse’s hoof clicked restlessly from a bush somewhere nearby, a rasping sound that filled the afternoon.
Something went wrong, Benton told himself. Some of them must have seen Ellen riding back to warn us and they set a new trap for us. Or it may have been the same trap all along. Maybe they meant for old man Madox and Ellen to see them…
But that was too complicated, he knew. He shook his head. It would have been simpler for them just to have waited at the Fork.
The minutes slipped along and the sun slid across the sky.
Benton fidgeted behind his boulder. There was no sign of the riders, no sound to betray their presence.
“Jingo,” he called softly.
“Yes, kid, what do you want?”
“I’m coming over.”
“O.K. Take it easy.”
Cautiously, Benton slid down the hillside. At the trickle of water in the streambed, he wet his handkerchief, clawed his way up the opposite bank.
“Jingo?”
“Right over here. What you got?”
“Going to fix up that arm of yours,” said Benton.
He slipped into the bushes beside the old man, rolled up his sleeve, baring the bloody arm. A bullet had ripped through a muscle. Not a bad wound, Benton declared.
Jingo chuckled. “Got them stopped, kid. They set a trap for us and now we got one set for them. And they ain’t having none of it.”
“What about our horses?”
“Blind canyon,” said Jingo. “Can’t get out less they grow wings.”
Swiftly, efficiently, Benton washed and bound the arm. It was not the first wound he had tied up and taken care of in the last few years.
“We better be getting out of here,” he said.
Jingo hissed softly. “Something moving down there.” He pointed with a finger and Benton saw the slight waving of a bush, just a bit more than the wind would stir it.
They waited. Another bush stirred. A stick crunched.
“It’s Indian Joe,” Jingo whispered. “Figuring to sneak up on us. Only one in the whole bunch that could of got this far.”
Squinting his eyes, Benton could make out the dark face of a crawling man on the opposite bank…a dark, evil face that almost blended with the foliage…almost, not quite.
“Flip you for him,” said Jingo softly.
Benton shook his head. “I got mine today. You go ahead and take him.”
Suddenly he felt calm, calm and sure. Back at the old business again. Back at the job of the last four years. Back at the work of killing.
Slowly Jingo raised his gun, the hammer snicked back with a soft metallic sound.
Then the gun roared, deafening in the bush-shrouded canyon, the sound caught up and buffeted about, flung back and forth by the towering walls of stone.
“Got him!” yelled Jingo. “Got him…no, by Lord, just nicked him.”
The bushes had come to life.
Jingo’s gun blasted smoke and flame again.
“Look at him go!” yelled Jingo. “Look at that feller leg it!”
Whipping bushes advancing swiftly down the bank marked Indian Joe’s going.
“Damn it,” said Jingo, ruefully, “I must be getting old. Should of let you have him.”
The silence came again, silence broken only by a tiny wind that moaned now and then high up the cliff, broken by the shrilling of an insect in the sun-drenched land.
They waited, hunched in the bushes, studying the canyon banks. No bush moved. Nothing happened. The sun sank lower and the shadows lengthened.
“Guess they must of give up,” Jingo decided.
“I’ll scout down the canyon,” said Benton. “You catch up the horses.”
Moving cautiously, Benton set out down the canyon, eyes studying every angle of the terrain before advancing.
But there was no sign of the Anchor riders, no sign or sound.
At the mouth of the canyon he found the hoof-trampled spot where they had milled their horses and leading out from it were tracks, heading back into the hills.
Something white fluttered in the wind and he strode toward it.
It was a piece of paper, wedged in the cleft of a stick that had been left between two rocks.
Angrily, Benton jerked the paper loose, read the pencil scrawled message:
Benton, we let you off this time. You got 24 hours to git out. After that we shoot you on sight.
Benton’s father was out in the yard, chopping wood, when they rode in. At the sight of them, he slapped the axe into the chopping block, left it sticking there, hobbled toward the gate to meet them. Benton saw there was worry on his face.
“I come back again,” said Jingo.
“Glad to have you,” Benton’s father said.
To Benton, he said: “There’s someone in the house to see you, son.”
“You go ahead,” Jingo told the younger man. “I’ll put up the horses.”
Benton vaulted off the black.
“How’s mother?”
“Some better,” said his father. “She’s sleeping now.”
The sun was slanting through the windows of the living room, making bars of golden light across the worn carpeting.
In the dusk of one corner, a woman rose from a chair, moved out into the slash of sunlight.
“Jennie!” said Benton. “Jennie…”
“I heard that you were back,” she told him.
He stood unmoving, staring at her, at the golden halo that the sunlight flung around her head, at the straightness of her, and wished that her face were not in the shadow.