Boag kicked the blanket off the third one, the one he’d hit on the head. The man was on his knees bent far over with his head almost touching the ground; he was holding his head in both hands and rocking back and forth in pain.
Boag said to the Mexican, “Get him on his feet and bring him.”
He prodded the three of them back into the woods to the little clearing where he’d left the lengths of cut wire. “You. Wire the Mexican’s hands behind his back. Do it tight, I’m going to check it.”
When the three of them were wired to trees too far apart for them to reach each other, Boag went after the scattered horses.
He kept listening for the approach of more riders. He didn’t know how close they’d arrive together; he was expecting to have to let some men get by him but he meant to intercept as many as he could.
He’d seen the pack horse bolt to the north; that was the only animal he was really interested in. He rode that way looking for sign and found plenty of it; the horse had crashed through the forest in blind fear but naturally it hadn’t kept that up very long. A quarter of a mile back in the woods he found the horse grazing.
He led it back to his little clearing and tied it up. Had a quick look at the gold and checked the lashings on his prisoners. He didn’t answer any of their questions or threats. He went back to the road and hiked up the blankets and tightened the tripwires and waited for the next bunch.
He had nearly a two-hour wait. He heard them coming; one of them was whistling Dixie and it made Boag’s lip curl.
Only two of them this time, a team like Jackson and Smith: a fat one and a thin one. Otherwise they had the same stamp of the other rawhiders: the short-brim Border hats, the double-cinch Texas saddles, the flannel shirts and beat-up Levi’s and scuffed Missouri boots and the same hard half-shaven faces. As they came up the road he recognized Sweeney, the one who was whistling.
When they hit the wire he dropped the blankets on them and stepped out into the road with a .45 in his fist. With his free hand he grabbed the lead-rope of the pack horse.
He couldn’t find a head to beat on; he just waited for the rawhiders to get untangled.
Sweeney’s partner rolled out from under the blanket; he’d been hurt—maybe hit by a horse’s hoof. Boag watched him for a second and then holstered his gun and bent down to pluck the man’s gun from his holster. The man didn’t even notice; he’d been clipped on the elbow and was holding it cupped in his other hand, rolling around in a silent agony, too hurt to scream.
Holding the man’s gun Boag turned to look for Sweeney and found him coming up from the blanket trying for his gun.
Boag would have been dead there if Sweeney’s fall hadn’t hitched his gun belt around. The holster was somewhere behind Sweeney’s butt and he was still trying to find it when Boag cocked the revolver and leveled it.
“Quit that, Sweeney.”
“You.”
“Yeah me. Unbuckle that thing and leave it drop.”
So now he had five men neutralized and two pack-horse loads of gold.
When he got Sweeney and his partner wired up to trees in the clearing he rigged up the blankets again and inspected the wires. One of the tripwires had snapped and he replaced it.
Assume these loads were the same size as the one Jackson had cached. If all the gold was split up this way, there’d be maybe six more loads on the way in. But most likely Mr. Pickett had already spent some of it and had kept some more. Mr. Pickett had got a lot of paper scrip from Don Pablo of course and he’d probably used that, rather than the gold, to pay off the corrupt officials of the Pesquiera regime; but he wouldn’t have let all the gold out of his reach. Boag expected that if he managed to shanghai two more loads it would do the job; three more would guarantee it.
He got another installment somewhere around one o’clock. Two riders again, the pack on a mule this time. One of the horses got through the first line of tripwires but fell over the second line. The blankets were getting ripped up by now and one of the men showed an inclination to fight but then like the others he discovered he was looking into the black orifices of two steady forty-five caliber muzzles and he thought better of it. You didn’t fight the drop; that was a first rule of anything.
That made seven prisoners and close to a hundred-thousand dollars U.S.
It was a lot of hard men to be leaving off by themselves in the woods. He kept re-checking their wire lashings at close intervals because it only took one loose wire to bring all seven of them down on him.
He made a cache of all their weapons and kept it close to his position by the side of the road. Most of their saddle horses had drifted off somewhere and perhaps some of them would wander up into Mr. Pickett’s fortress. That was all right, that was fine. He wanted Mr. Pickett to get nervous.
Mr. Pickett had to be nervous by now anyway. No gold had showed up yet. Mr. Pickett was going to get angry and worried.
That was part of the idea.
He hadn’t bothered to try putting gags in his prisoners’ mouths. Right now they could yell all they wanted to; nobody except Boag was going to hear it. They wouldn’t have any way of knowing when their friends were approaching— he had them tied up beyond earshot of the road—so they couldn’t warn the approaching gold riders. There wasn’t much they could do with their mouths right now except complain.
Then at half past two he was in trouble. He could see them coming up the road toward him and they were too many. Five men and two pack horses.
Obviously it was two groups who had met on the way in. They’d joined up and now they were spinning yarns happily and Boag didn’t see what the hell he could do about it because in one minute they were going to hit the tripwires.
They were strung out along a forty-foot patch of road and when the leading pair of riders hit the tripwires Boag dropped the blankets on them and spun his guns onto the other three, stepping out in plain sight and talking loud:
“Now freeze. Right now.”
But it was no good, they were fighting men and they’d been ambushed before; they were yanking reins and ducking before the words were out of Boag. Boag shot one of them out of the saddle and dived back into the trees and their guns opened up; Boag wheeled behind the pines and saw one of the rawhiders lift his leg over, light on both feet and fire from a crouch under the horse’s belly. The bullet hit the tree right by Boag and drove wood splinters into his left hand; he almost lost his grip on the revolver.
He answered the shot but the horse got in the way and he heard the horse scream; the man was dodging into the pines.
The other one was somewhere in the trees on the opposite side of the road; Boag could hear his horse crashing through the brush. The pack horses were still in the road, rearing.
Boag moved ten feet through the trees and put his attention on the tangle of blankets and horses and men in the road where he’d netted the first two; the men were getting out from under it now and the shooting had told them what was happening. Boag got down on one knee and laid the righthand pistol barrel across his left forearm and when the first man batted out from under the blanket Boag shot him in the chest.
The other one came out shooting, throwing the blanket off him in violent rage. But he made the mistake of looking at his wounded partner and that gave Boag plenty of time. Boag’s first shot hit him somewhere in the upper chest and the second one a little lower.