They were closing in at the foot of the bank beneath him and the barrels of the Gatling gun wouldn’t depress that far even if he still had ammunition in it. That had been Ben Stryker’s plan all along: get underneath the ten-barrel gun’s field of fire and attack from below.
They were going to scale the bank by clinging to roots. Boag could see the sweat shine on their oily faces: five of them and Ben Stryker coming up fast from the left.
Boag fired a .45 into the blasting charge he had buried at the foot of the slope.
The explosion knocked him back on his left arm. It blasted the Gatling gun off its tripod and the damn thing fell across Boag’s butt like a tumbling safe.
He couldn’t tell if he was hurt and it was no time to stop and find out. He heaved the thing off him and scooped up a revolver and dragged himself forward on his belly to look down over the blown-up lip of the bank.
Four of them had got it. One had nearly been blown in half; three lay asprawl; the fifth one was reeling away into the smoke holding his ears.
The rolling echoes of the explosion still caromed down the canyon. And Ben Stryker was still coming at him from the left but Stryker hadn’t seen Boag yet and Boag lifted the revolver and took a good bead on him.
He never knew why, but at the last instant he pulled his aim. When he fired he put the bullet deliberately into Ben Stryker’s shoulder. It was a .45 with point-blank velocity and it knocked Ben Stryker clean off his feet and hurled him out onto the gully floor.
The Mexicans were shooting fast, bullets were all over the woods and Boag got the hell out of there.
In the woods he stopped to make an inventory of his bones.
All the articulated functions seemed to be in fair working order. But his legs felt like jagged stakes that somebody had driven up into his hips with a hammer.
He would have been worried by that if they hadn’t felt exactly the same way before the explosion.
He was stone deaf and didn’t know if it was temporary or if the concussion had cracked his eardrums, but he found no blood in his ears and that was a fair sign.
He came by the clearing where Sweeney and the others were gagged. They watched him with round red eyes.
They could be trouble. If he left them alone and somebody cut them loose there were plenty of guns lying around to arm them with. He had no way left of fighting them.
But he hadn’t much option. He wasn’t gaited to shoot all of them cold.
He’d just hope to be away from here by the time they got loose and organized.
He went right past them and didn’t stop to talk. He was traveling light now; he had one of the hand bombs left and he had the .40-90 rifle in his fist and two .45’s in his belt. He remembered his promise to Captain McQuade about the Gatling gun but first things had to come first. He cinched up one of the rawhiders’ saddle horses and unfixed the pack ‘horses’ picket line and rode back into the woods leading the string of gold-packed animals.
It would take them a while to quit fighting shadows back there. There were maybe ten Mexican gunslingers and a couple of Ben Stryker’s rawhiders left unhurt, and maybe half a dozen more with injuries. Ben Stryker would be too busy keeping himself alive to worry about revenging himself on Boag, and the Mexicans had probably lost the belly for a fight. Most of them would scatter and go looking for other smoky jobs. Ben Stryker might find his way back up the mountain sooner or later with Sweeney and those others, and Mr. Jed Pickett would spend however long it took to find Boag and kill Boag and get his gold back.
Therefore this was not the time to take the gold and ride away. There was one thing left to do.
Boag hid his tracks and cached the pack animals and at the end of the cloudy afternoon began the slow ride back up the road toward Mr. Pickett’s mountain.
There was rain.
It came down steady and gentle in the night; it matted the shirt to Boag’s wedge-shaped back. It was a friend and Boag thanked it.
He left the horse at the foot of the gorge and walked up the road cut. Mr. Pickett might have a lookout posted up there but it wasn’t going to do him any good, nobody was going to see Boag walking up the road in this. A black man in dark clothing at night in a rainy canyon? Boag had to feel his way and twice he tripped over big boulders he hadn’t seen.
Not far along his legs began to give out. The climb was not terribly steep—it had been designed for the passage of heavy wagons—but it had not been built with bullet-crippled legs in mind. Several times Boag had to stand still while spasms of agony wrung him out and all his muscles knotted up in cramp. The weight of the gold brick in his left hand increased steadily and so did the weight of the long rifle in his right.
He kept climbing, taking his time. Toward the top the light became fractionally better and he could vaguely make out the box shape of the hacienda and the darknesses of several outbuildings and the workings of the old mine. The rain slanted steadily across the mountain and little gullies ran down the road past his boots.
If there were sentries they hadn’t seen him. They’d have heard a horse approach; that was why he’d had to accept the anguish of the climb.
There were no lamps burning anywhere. Mr. Pickett wouldn’t be that stupid.
Boag moved slowly and without sound. He reached the corner of the dark house and tipped his head back to look up. Rainwater runneled out of the trough of his sombrero and splashed down his back. He didn’t blink at the drops that hit his upturned face.
A narrow staircase edged its way up the outside wall; wooden handrails ran up both sides of it. There was a landing at the top, a door, a row of windows with rain beating on the panes.
Boag walked around the hacienda and found the horse barn attached to the side of the house. He slipped inside with caution; there might be a stable keeper.
He found nobody. He counted eleven horses but what was more interesting was the saddle count. Three wooden pack saddles and five riding rigs, of which two were Texas saddles and the other three Mexican. It was doubtful anybody who came this far to work for Mr. Pickett would be without a saddle of his own; so it told Boag what he wanted to know about the size of Mr. Pickett’s force up here.
Mr. Pickett, Gutierrez probably, and three others. It stood to reason. Mr. Pickett had committed most of his force to his second in command for the attack on Boag’s shadow army. Greed for the gold had made them take that risk.
Boag saddled up one of the horses with the big Texas stock saddle that was probably Mr. Pickett’s own. Boag enjoyed the idea. He found a bridle, working mainly by touch, and when he had the horse ready to go he spent a very bad ten minutes getting himself up into the saddle.
In the ticking silence of the flooding night he ducked low to clear the barn doorway and rode out of the stable. He walked the horse around the front of the house and stopped it square in front of the big adobe steps that went up to the main doors. There were windows beside the doors. Boag tested the weight of the gold bar in his hand. There was no note tied to this one; there didn’t need to be. Boag hurled the brick through the window and before the clattering of crashing glass had subsided he was moving at a gallop toward the head of the road.
When he hit the top of the sloping cut he was half sure he heard a door slam back there.