Somebody yelled at him from out on the cliff but Boag kept going right down the road.
From the edge of the trees he watched the dawn pink up Mr. Pickett’s mountain.
What was it going to take to make them mad enough? Boag had waited all night in the pouring rain and they hadn’t stirred from the mountain. When the rain stopped and the first premonition of dawn came, Boag had moved back from the foot of the mountain to the forest and continued his vigil from there.
But finally they came. Because it was easier to act than to wait.
Boag watched them ride down the cut. Five of them. The big buckskin horse in the lead, that had to be Mr. Pickett.
Boag put his horse out of the trees, showing himself. He had rehearsed the whole thing in his mind during the night, over and over again, and there was only this one way to do it.
He rode straight toward them, not hurrying; the horse had an easy-gaited walk. Mr. Pickett reached the bottom of the cut and came trotting out away from the foot of the mountain, staying on the road, coming right down toward Boag with his four outriders in a pack right behind him. There was no dust in their wake because of the six-hour rain.
The ruts were a little muddy and Boag put the horse along the side of the road in the grass, still walking it. His eye measured the distance as it closed between him and Mr. Pickett. The stretch from the base of the mountain to the edge of the trees was almost exactly a half mile; so he had distance yet to cover.
They would watch him coming and assume he wanted to talk; they would have heard all the tumult and thunder of battle yesterday and they would know by Boag’s appearance that Ben Stryker had been whipped, and they would have to assume that Boag had a lot of guns covering him from the edge of the forest behind him. Still they had come down to see what he wanted—and to kill him if they could.
Boag stopped his horse about two hundred yards out from the woods. He did that because it was what Mr. Pickett would expect of him. He was staying within easy rifle range of the pine forest, where his “army” of rifles could cover him.
Mr. Pickett came on at a grinding deliberate trot, not hurrying it up and not slowing it down; moving forward like an engine.
Regardless of what Mr. Pickett believed about the army behind Boag, the fact was that there was Boag on one side and five of them on the other. His plan didn’t have much chance, not really, because once the ruckus began they’d realize quick enough that Boag was all alone out here.
But there weren’t any alternatives that made sense so Boag just played it out.
They came along and then they stopped about halfway out from the mountain. The low sun was behind Boag’s right shoulder. In its light the ground fog lifted gently off the dewy meadowland and the breeze made ripples in the shining grass. Mr. Pickett sat on his horse a little better than a quarter of a mile away, not moving, and Boag knew he was too far so he gigged his horse and advanced at a slow walk with both hands resting on his saddle horn like a man who wanted to talk a deal.
Mr. Pickett put his horse in motion again and now Boag recognized Gutierrez behind him and a rawhider who went by the name of Hooker, riding bareback. The other two were Mexican gunslingers with rifles across their saddlebows.
His eye kept ranging the distance. Four-fifty, he estimated, and he let the horse carry him on closer to them.
Four hundred. All right now.
He steeled himself against the pain and made his moves in quick synchronized coordination. Turn the horse crosswise to the road. Stop the horse. Loop the reins over your left fore-arm. Lift your right leg over the cantle behind you and step down onto that right foot. Pull the left boot out of the stirrup and set it firm on the ground a couple of feet away from the right boot. Lay the .40-90 across the saddle. Aim.
They were in motion of course but he wanted Mr. Pickett only, he didn’t care about the rest of them; and they weren’t moving so very fast because they didn’t credit anybody with much luck at four hundred yards’ range. That was one thousand, two hundred feet and a lot of things could happen to a bullet in that distance, starting with the inaccuracy of the shooter.
It was Gutierrez who fired the first shot but that was from the back of a moving saddle and Boag ignored it. He had Mr. Pickett in his sights. Mr. Pickett was yanking the horse around to the left and Boag gave it the lead he thought it needed and squeezed the shot, holding both eyes open and maintaining the focus of his vision not on the target but on the front sight of the rifle because that was the important thing to watch.
The bullet went home. He knew it had, but Mr. Pickett was still on the saddle out there and the horse was still wheeling. Gutierrez had overcome his surprise and was ramming away to come in at Boag from a circle; Gutierrez was flat on top of the horse, making a low silhouette, firing a left-handed revolver at Boag merely as a diversionary thing, not expecting to hit. Boag had to ignore it, had to keep his sights on Mr. Pickett while he jacked a fresh shell into the chamber and settled the sights and waited for his God damned horse to still its feet. If he lost his horse he’d have to get down on the ground to shoot and he’d never get back up on his feet again so he kept the reins wrapped tight around his forearm and spoke softly:
“Gentle down, now. Gentle down.”
Mr. Pickett was riding in a dazed circle and one of the Mexicans was leaning over to reach for the reins of Mr. Pickett’s horse. Boag shot Mr. Pickett again and this time it did the job. It knocked Mr. Pickett off his horse.
The Mexicans split in opposite directions and broke into dead gallops. They weren’t giving it up, they were doing what Gutierrez was doing: attacking circularly. In the meantime Hooker was stopping his retreat to find out what had happened.
Gutierrez was closest and it was Gutierrez Boag picked on.
But Guttierrez was down flat across the withers and Boag only knew one way to handle that. In the Cavalry you had it drilled into your bones.
Shoot the horse.
He gave it a lead and squeezed, and missed completely.
But there was time. The next one took the horse somewhere in the forequarters and it shuddered, breaking stride in mid-run, and when Gutierrez fell off the saddle Boag had the clear view he needed.
But Gutierrez came up with revolvers snapping and Gutierrez was damned good. Boag felt a half-spent slug ram into the horse; Boag was firing then and he got his shot off but when he went to jack the rifle the horse just slid over against him and Boag had to windmill back away from it before it fell on him.
That’s all then. He was standing right out in the bare-ass open with no shooting rest, and Gutierrez was out there wounded but still shooting and the two Mexicans were circling in and now Hooker, riding bareback, was barreling straight down the road at him.
He didn’t have to stop and calculate the loads; he was a soldier, he always knew how many rounds he had left. There were two in the magazine and one in the chamber.
Gutierrez was out there in the grass reloading his revolvers. Two hundred yards and he’d downed Boag’s horse with a six-gun.
But Gutierrez had a slug in him and he was afoot. He wasn’t the one to worry about.
Boag did the only thing possible. He laid himself down behind the dying horse and braced the rifle along his left hand and watched Hooker drum straight at him and shot Hooker spinning out of the saddle.
The Mexicans had galloped out in a V to straddle Boag’s position. He picked the one to his right because the other one was getting close to Gutierrez’s position and at least that would put the two of those where Boag could watch them both at once.