He took big breaths and held them deep and long, storing up oxygen for the coming climb. Those old battered legs had to make one more effort, that was all; he willed it into them.
Riding fast through the bends he finally came in sight of the Gatling gun and he could see vaguely on either side the rifles aiming down from the brush above the banks.
He stopped the horse and ran through the tripwires and got onto the log ladder he’d made; he started to climb but his legs just weren’t going to make it.
“God damn it Boag,” he muttered through his teeth. He pushed and shoved and forced his legs to lift him and when he rolled onto the top of the bank he reached over and hauled the log up after him so they wouldn’t be able to follow him.
Then he emptied the hand bombs out of his pockets and dropped the .40-90 beside the Gatling gun. Yanked the corks out of the kerosene jugs and poured the fluid down the trenches he’d dug, and into the log that flumed across to the far bank.
Over his own hard breathing he heard the angry hammering of the approaching horsehoofs.
Just don’t let them stop to think.
He emptied the last jug and felt around for his oilskin pouch of matches.
He found the sulphur tips and then Stryker was drumming into sight in the bend.
Boag dropped flat on his belly behind the Gatling gun and hoped he had enough brush piled around so that they wouldn’t spot it too soon.
The riders came in like Cavalry at full charge and it was good to watch: Boag felt the skin tighten around his grin.
They hit the tripwires and Boag lit a handful of matches and threw them into the kerosene trenches. The horses tumbled and flipped and began to scream. One rider vaulted out of the saddle and his horse went right over on its back with a bloody foreleg dangling broken.
Kerosene flames raced down the trenches on top of both walls. The fire leaped a yard or more in the air and made a bright stockade fence along both banks. Boag felt the sudden dry heat of it.
Up in a crouch he swung the Gatling onto them and began to wield the firing crank. The gun set up a steady chugging stutter of fifty-caliber fire and he saw the rawhiders and Mexicans wheeling and yelling in confusion. Some of them had been unseated and some had dismounted voluntarily and a few were still on horseback trying to find something to hide behind but the racketing yellow flames rushed past them and around behind them.
When the fire hit the creekbed pool at the bottom behind the rawhiders it went up like explosives with a roaring bellow of ten-foot-high flame. Most of the kerosene had run down into the pool and collected there and it was better than a solid wall of entrapment because it not only contained them, it drove their horses to madness.
Boag yanked on wires and his fixed rifles opened up into the gully floor, shooting from all directions through the yellow flames.
The banging of rifles and the stink of kerosene smoke filled the rawhiders with panic; there was no sense of organized defense down there, they were all scrabbling frantically in circles and the smart ones were digging in behind the corpses of horses which in most cases they shot themselves to create parapets. He saw Ben Stryker’s head rise up behind a dead horse and turn quickly to survey the ambush and Boag picked up the .40-90 but by the time he fired Stryker had dropped out of sight. Boag swiveled the long sights toward the glisten of a mercury cap ten yards to the left of Stryker’s position; he fired twice and the second bullet hit the cap and set off the blasting charge.
Stryker disappeared under the explosion of sand and clay, horse and all.
Boag sighted on another blasting charge in the far bank. It brought tons of cutbank clay down on two crawling men.
He found another blasting-cap to shoot at and it went off right under a horse. Boag saw the rider throw up his arms and begin to pitch from the saddle before the rising cloud of sand absorbed him.
He jammed a new magazine into the ten-barrel gun and swiveled the muzzles and worked the crank. He saw the bullets make spouts in the creekbed; he corrected the aim and sewed a stitch of bullets across a tangled knot of men.
It was the most confined concentration of battle Boag had ever experienced and he had never known anything like the stink and earsplitting racket of it.
Boag kept moving as fast as his arms would work. He pulled more rifle-trigger wires, he shot another blasting charge that blew up like a geyser and knocked four men over, he raked the gully with an X-pattern of Gatling fire.
Ben Stryker had pawed his way out of the dust; Boag heard him yelling somewhere in the smoke, summoning men, trying to organize a rush on the Gatling gun position; Boag tried to find him but the cloud of sand and smoke was billowing through the length of the gorge and he could hardly see the opposite bank.
He pulled trigger wires and discovered these were the last rifles; he had fired them all now. There were no mercury caps left to shoot at except the one immediately beneath his gun position. The kerosene was making more smoke now, the flames shrinking; he had vague glimpses of flitting motions through the gully. He counted the remaining Gatling magazines—two loaded ones, fifty rounds in each; after that he would be down to his sidearms.
He had made a lot of noise and violence but he hadn’t done enough real harm to destroy their effectiveness: maybe he’d killed five of them and maybe ten but there’d been two dozen men to start with and at least half of them were still shooting at phantoms through the roiling smoke. Ben Stryker’s heavy voice rolled through it all and Boag knew they would charge him quickly now. When they did they would probably overrun him. They weren’t fools; they’d come at him from both sides at once and he couldn’t cover both directions simultaneously with a Gatling gun or anything else.
So it was time to cut and run. That was what the small voice told Boag.
He never did listen to that voice.
He knew how it had to go; he had to get away clear and he couldn’t do that with a dozen of them still armed and on their feet right behind him. He had to put Ben Stryker out of the way and most of Stryker’s old rawhiders. The Mexican hired guns he didn’t care about because they were only in this for gun wages and when they thought their side was losing they’d get themselves away. They had no loyalty to Mr. Pickett. But Ben Stryker and the rest of those old timers wouldn’t quit until they were dead.
It had a chance of working because it wasn’t the Mexicans who would have the stomach for a head-on charge. Nobody would follow Ben Stryker except the old hands. That was why Boag didn’t run. He stayed put and waited while the smoke began to settle and when he saw the first bunch crawling toward him, close under the overhang of the near bank, he swung the Gatling gun that way and held it silent until they were good targets through the patchy smoke and then he opened up as fast as he could swing the crank.
As soon as the gun began to stutter the rawhiders split up and went running at full sprint in a crazyquilt of directions that looked lunatic but made sense: they were scattering to charge from all directions at once.
Boag swept the gun back and forth in a half circle and saw three of them go down but they were coming too fast from too many angles and he wasn’t going to be able to hold them. When the magazine ran empty he didn’t reload the Gatling. He put a match to the fuse of his canteen-bomb and heaved it toward the bunch that was closest to him, the bunch sliding along the near wall; he didn’t wait for the explosion, he swung his revolvers onto the farther group across the gully and while their bullets whined off the barrels of the Gatling gun he aimed under its belly and slammed bullets into them. While the bomb exploded and rained sand on him, the .45’s bucked and roared in his fists; he fired alternately right and left even though he had always been an indifferent left-handed marksman.