You didn’t go in after the enemy. You made the enemy come out to you.
By sunup he was riding back around the perimeter of Coronado town. He got back to the wagon where he’d left it, hitched up and drove the wagon back along the same route to the forest that aproned Mr. Pickett’s mountain. Well back inside the trees where they couldn’t see him, and off a hundred yards to the side of the road, he stopped the wagon and walked out to the edge of the trees to get a view of the ground and pick his spots.
There was a long ridge that came down the western side of the mountain and sloped into the trees, breaking up into a number of tributary ridges and hogbacks and canyons. It might do; but the military axiom was not to fight with the sun in your eyes and if he set things up there, he’d be at a disadvantage in a morning fight. Boag might be able to influence their actions but he couldn’t force them to pick a time of day that was convenient to him. So he discarded that area and looked for another.
Trees gave a man good cover and it had occurred to him he might set up right alongside the wagon road itself. But there were too many corridors through a forest. You needed a spot where the numbers of routes and accesses was limited. Otherwise you couldn’t enfilade them all.
This was Thursday, about the middle of the morning, and he didn’t know for sure when the first of Mr. Pickett’s gold bearers would arrive but from what Jackson said it looked as if they were all due to show up some time tomorrow. To be on the safe side he gave himself until midnight to set up.
He got the saddle horse and rode a little way around the south perimeter. It took him more than an hour even though he was covering only a few dozen acres, mostly because he had to keep out of sight wherever he went but also because he had to be patient, he had to take his time and pick the best possible spot if he was going to have any chance at all of making it work.
Once he thought Why the hell am I doing this? But he didn’t dwell on it; he was keyed up and ready for the battle and at times like this you didn’t think about why, you thought about how. Working out the methods took all a man’s conception.
“Hey now.”
He said it to himself very softly and with considerable satisfaction; he backed the horse a couple of strides and mused upon the scene.
It was mostly cutbanks and rocks. The ridge came sprouting out of the base of the mountain and meandered its way south into the trees, and at this point there was a gravel-bedded dry creek with here and there a dried pool caked with cracked mud. Several groins led into it, like the fingers of an outstretched hand. Once you entered any one of the little canyons you were restricted by the high sharp-cut banks, confined pretty much to the creekbed while you rode upstream into the central canyon of it. A man might be able to climb out of it but a horse couldn’t; the sides were twelve or fifteen feet high and the rushing waters of rain-season flash-floods had eaten the banks away until they were not merely vertical cliffs, they were mostly undercut so that the tops overhung the gravel bed and shadowed part of it. Pine roots made tangles sticking out of the washed-away banks; a man could climb up that way, hanging onto the roots, but he’d make a hell of a target while he tried it.
Boag ground-hitched the horse and walked up into the little badlands. He kept his feet on the pebbles where he wouldn’t leave easy tracks. He walked several hundred yards up the canyon, following its twists; when he looked back he couldn’t see farther than the last bend. Overhead the forest crowded close along the top of either bank. In places the washouts had knocked the nearest trees over; several logs lay in the creekbed and a few deadfalls spanned the canyon like bridges. It was maybe forty feet wide.
At the head of the canyon there was a wall of limestone that had been eaten flat and discolored by flooding. You could see that in times of heavy rain it became a waterfall. Right now it simply boxed in the head of the canyon. It wasn’t prohibitively high; the waters had worn it down and right now a man sitting on a horse could just about see across the top of it. But his horse wouldn’t make the jump up onto it because the footing underneath was too soft: it was silt that had washed down in the floods and caked into a treachery of clots and pits.
Boag had about a quarter mile of canyon to work with. At this back end there was the box formed by the waterfall. At the other end, facing Mr. Pickett’s mountain but hidden from it by the pines, a half dozen sub-canyons splayed out from the main cut, and the whole thing got gradually absorbed into the system of wrinkles and heaves that the big mountain had at its feet.
“It’ll do,” Boag decided.
He went back to the wagon to get the big coil of wire.
It took him the whole day to make the place ready. He took his time because if you did it just a little bit wrong you could find yourself getting trampled to death by twenty horsemen. He had no way of knowing how much of a crew Mr. Pickett had with him up there but the size of the fortress implied a substantial phalanx of them and it was for certain that Mr. Pickett had all the money it took to hire as many gunmen as he wanted.
Picking the site for the Gatling gun came first because everything else had to be tied into that. He finally set the thing up on its swivel tripod at the top of the outside bank of the first bend below the waterfall. From here he could fire down into a hundred-yard length of the canyon and he could also swivel the gun around to cover the fifty yards between here and the waterfall. It gave him full command of the entire box end of the canyon and you couldn’t do better than that.
The next thing was to make a ladder that would get him from the creekbed up onto the bank. He used a fallen log for that and trimmed the branches until he had just enough knobs left on it for footholds. Then he jammed it securely at the bottom.
He had to decide on the placement of the tripwires. Not too far down the canyon because that would give them the opportunity to scramble back around the bend, behind cover, invulnerable to the Gatling gun. So he strung the wires not more than fifty feet downstream from his gun position. It meant they would be perilously close to him and if a few of them got through they might swarm right up the bank and overrun him; but then there was another way of looking at it: the closer they came, the harder they’d be to miss.
He tied the wires taut; his anchors were the exposed roots that stuck out of the cutbanks on both sides of the defile. He strung the wires at two levels. The first rank of them hung about six feet off the ground where it would catch a man right across the chest and knock him off his horse. The second rank he placed ten yards closer to the gun position; he strung them lower, just a couple of feet off the creekbed where they would trip the horses.
He thought about it a while and then he strung eight or ten wires across the canyon at both levels because if the light was good enough for shooting it would be good enough for men to see the wires; they would duck under the high ones if they had the chance but if there were enough wires it would be like a spiderweb, they wouldn’t get past all of them.
He counted the kegs of blasting powder. Four of them. Not enough.
“Well you don’t need to knock down the whole canyon, Boag.” He rummaged through his packs and found a can of coffee, which he emptied and filled with blasting powder, and Jackson’s canteen which was a spare now; he filled that too. He could make a couple more charges simply by packing the powder under rocks. The rocks would make good shrapnel but of course that wouldn’t work if it rained even a few drops. It didn’t look like rain but there was a feeling of weather in the air, a dampness that got into his nostrils and made his injuries creak.