The Edge of Hell Read online

  Slaughter shook his head and said, “Trying’s not good enough. You either do it or you don’t.”

  Santiago’s backbone stiffened. He gave Slaughter a curt, solemn nod and said, “I will not let you down, señor.”

  “That’s more like it.” Slaughter lifted his reins and got ready to heel his horse into motion again.

  Before he could do that, he heard a rumbling sound, like an approaching thunderstorm. The sky was clear, however, except for a few puffy white clouds against the crisp, startling blue.

  The other men heard it, too, and a worried mutter went through their ranks. Slaughter was about to tell them to settle down when a cow bolted around that bend in the canyon up ahead. Another animal followed it, then another and another . . .

  As the rumbling grew louder and a cloud of dust welled into the air, a solid line of spooked beef rounded that bend and thundered toward Slaughter and his companions. The herd they’d been chasing all day was now coming to them . . .

  In the form of a stampede!

  * * *

  Viola hurried to get John’s spyglass and then went back outside. Jess Fisher had told her that the strangers were coming from the northeast, so she climbed the ladder attached to the framework holding up the elevated water tank until she could see over the house.

  This certainly wasn’t a very ladylike thing to do, Viola thought as she wrapped an arm around the ladder to steady herself. She had never worried all that much about comporting herself properly, though. At heart she was still a wild cowgirl.

  She spotted the group of riders in the distance, then lifted the spyglass to her eye and squinted through the lens. It took a second to locate them through the glass, but then the face of the leader sprang into sharp relief.

  It was a beard-stubbled, hard-planed face. More details were hard to make out because the man had the brim of his hat tugged down fairly low. That threw a shadow over his features. Even so, it struck Viola as a cruel face.

  She caught her breath as she swung the spyglass to one side and saw the man riding to the leader’s right and just behind him. His face was cruel, too, and it was easy to see because he wore no hat, only a bandanna tied around his head to keep his thick mane of black hair back. The man was an Apache. He didn’t seem to be a prisoner. He looked more like an ally of the men approaching the ranch.

  Viola used the spyglass to take a look at the other men. They all had the stamp of the owlhoot on them. Tough, brutal, ruthless men who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted. There were at least a dozen of them.

  That meant the members of the crew John had left here at the ranch were outnumbered, but not by that much, Viola thought. And they had the advantage of being able to fight a defensive action, behind the thick walls of the house.

  She closed the spyglass and climbed down as quickly as she could. As she went back to the house, she met Dr. Neal Fredericks at the front door. The doctor had his coat draped over one arm and carried his medical bag in his other hand.

  “Doctor, you should get in your buggy and leave right now,” she told him. She estimated that the riders wouldn’t be here for another four or five minutes. That would give Fredericks time to get clear before any trouble started.

  He frowned and said, “What’s wrong, Mrs. Slaughter? You seem upset about something.”

  “There are riders coming in,” she said. “I think they may be some of the rustlers who stole that herd of cattle last night.”

  “They’ve come back for more?”

  “I don’t know,” Viola said. “I hope I’m wrong about them. But in case I’m not, you should leave while you still can, doctor, before there’s any trouble.”

  “You mean shooting,” Fredericks said heavily.

  “It could come to that.”

  “Then I’m not going anywhere,” he declared. “My services may be required here.”

  “It may not be safe—”

  “I didn’t swear an oath to help people only when it was safe or convenient. You may have more wounded, so this is where I need to be.” Fredericks grunted. “If it comes down to that, I know how to use a gun, too, not just how to patch up bullet wounds. It would go against my code to inflict them, unless it was absolutely necessary to prevent further harm.”

  Viola saw that it wasn’t going to do any good to argue with him, and she didn’t have time for that, anyway.

  “All right, doctor, but go back inside and stay away from the windows. And thank you. I have to admit, I do feel a little better knowing you’re here.”

  Fredericks disappeared inside the house as Jess Fisher emerged from the bunkhouse with eight more members of the crew. Each man carried a rifle, and most of them had holstered revolvers strapped around their waists as well.

  “These are all the fellas I could round up, Miz Slaughter,” Fisher reported as they trotted up to the fence. “You want us all inside, or should we spread out?”

  “Who’s the best marksman among you?” Viola asked.

  One of the men stepped forward and said in a Texas drawl, “That’d be me, ma’am. Joe Sparkman.”

  None of the other men disagreed with Sparkman’s assessment of his skills.

  “All right, Joe,” Viola said. “I want you to climb up on top of that water tank. You have plenty of cartridges for that Winchester with you?”

  “Yes, ma’am, a whole box of .44-40s.”

  “All right. I won’t lie to you, it’s a very dangerous position. You’ll be more exposed than anyone else. But you’ll have a better field of fire than any of the rest of us, too.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” A grin creased Sparkman’s leathery face. “I wouldn’t rather be nowhere else.”

  He hurried off toward the water tank while Viola led the rest of the men into the house.

  “There are too many windows and not enough of us,” she said as she took a Winchester down from a rack of rifles in the front room. “We can’t cover all of them. So you’ll have to spread out and do the best you can. We’ll try to cover all the approaches to the house. Luckily their numbers aren’t overwhelming. They can’t really hit us from more than one direction at once.”

  Yolanda stepped into the arched doorway between the front room and the parlor. She said, “Señora, do you need more people to fight? Some of the servants know how to shoot.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Viola said. She didn’t really expect any of the maids to hit anything, but they had plenty of rifles and ammunition. The women could make a lot of racket, anyway, and maybe the attackers would believe the ranch house’s defenses were stronger than they really were.

  She was getting ahead of herself, Viola thought. She didn’t know for sure those men intended to attack the place, no matter what they looked like. Even the fact that they had an Apache warrior with them didn’t have to mean they were hostile. Some Apaches worked as scouts for the army, didn’t they? Maybe this was one of them.

  She was like a little girl whistling on her way past a graveyard, hoping the tune would ward off evil spirits, she told herself. Reason and logic meant little in a situation such as this. Viola trusted her instincts a lot more, and they insisted that those men were trouble.

  She told Yolanda, “Bring any of the women who want to fight in here and let them get rifles. Then help the men cover the windows. The rest of you should help the wounded get as far out of the line of fire as possible.”

  The rifle Viola held didn’t have a round in the chamber. She worked the Winchester’s lever to rectify that and then strode toward the front door.

  From the window where he had taken up position, Jess Fisher said in an alarmed tone, “Ma’am, what’re you doin’?”

  “This is my house,” Viola said as she held the rifle at a slant in front of her, across her chest. “I’m going to go greet our guests.”

  Chapter 14

  “We gonna ride in shootin’, boss?” Herb Woodbury asked as they approached the ranch.

  “No need for that,” Becker said. “I’m sure they’ve sp
otted us by now. They know we’re coming. We’ll keep this as civilized as we possibly can.”

  From beside him, Bodaway said, “The woman knows.”

  Becker glanced over at the Apache and asked, “What do you mean?”

  “The woman climbed the ladder on the water tank and looked at us through a telescope. I saw her.”

  Becker laughed.

  “You’ve got better eyes than I do, amigo. I missed that. But I was right, they know we’re here, and if the gal you saw had a spyglass, she probably got a pretty good look at us. So she has a pretty good idea that we’re not friendly.”

  Woodbury muttered, “With this bunch o’ cutthroats, I reckon not.”

  “Still, I’m going to try talking to her first. You never know what people will agree to until you ask them.”

  Bodaway just grunted, but the sound was packed with skepticism.

  They came in past a row of cottonwood trees and a building made of adobe bricks that had two sides and a covered dogtrot in the middle, in the style of Texas cabins. It appeared to be empty at the moment.

  Becker reined in and signaled a halt. He said, “The rest of you stay here. I’m going on up alone.”

  “I don’t know how smart that is, Ned,” Woodbury said. “They could be holed up in there with a bunch of rifles.”

  “I’m sure they are. That’s exactly why I want the rest of you to stay here instead of riding right up into their gunsights.”

  “Yeah, but what about you?”

  “The Slaughters are law-abiding people. Hell, he’s the sheriff of Cochise County! Mrs. Slaughter’s not going to gun down a man who just wants to parley.”

  Woodbury grimaced and said, “I hope you’re right. If you ain’t, you’ll be just askin’ to get ventilated by ridin’ up there like that.”

  “I’ll take the chance,” Becker said. He hitched his horse into motion again.

  Despite his confident tone, he felt his nerves crawling as he rode toward the ranch house. He didn’t think anybody in there would start shooting without talking to him first and finding out what he wanted, but like everything else in life, there were no guarantees of that.

  He had just reined to a stop in front of the gate in the picket fence when the front door opened and a woman stepped out of the house carrying a rifle.

  Becker’s first impulse was to reach for his gun, but he stopped himself from doing that since the woman wasn’t pointing the Winchester at him. She held it ready in front of her.

  She was damned good-looking, too, with a trim figure and dark hair that at the moment was pulled back in a loose knot behind her head. Her chin lifted in a show of stubborn defiance. Becker could tell that she was cautious but not scared of him, not really.

  That was a mistake on her part. She needed to be scared of him—scared enough that she would cooperate and let him have what he had come here to take.

  The woman lifted her voice and said, “Normally when someone rides up to my gate, I tell them to get down from their horse and come inside. I think it would be better if you stay right where you are, though.”

  “You’re Mrs. Slaughter?” Becker asked.

  “I am. Who are you?”

  Becker didn’t answer the question. Instead he said, “I’m looking for Don Eduardo Rubriz, and his wife and son if they’re here.”

  “I didn’t ask who you were looking for,” the woman snapped. “I asked who you are.”

  He didn’t see how it would do any harm to tell her. He was going to have to reveal his identity anyway, in order to get the full measure of revenge on Rubriz. The don had to know it was Thaddeus Becker’s son who was responsible for the hell on earth that was about to descend on him.

  “My name is Becker, Ned Becker,” he said. “If you tell Don Eduardo that I’m here, he’ll know the name.”

  For the first time, he saw a trace of indecisiveness on the woman’s face. She was prepared for war, but she wanted to hope that maybe he had come in peace.

  That wasn’t the case, of course, but Becker was willing to let her think that for the time being.

  “Stay where you are,” Mrs. Slaughter said again. She turned her head slightly to speak over her shoulder without taking her eyes off of Becker. “Yolanda, go tell Don Eduardo that a man named Ned Becker is here.”

  A thin smile curved Becker’s lips. The woman’s words confirmed that Rubriz was here and still alive. Becker was sure the doña would be, too. She wouldn’t have gone with Slaughter and the others after the stolen cattle. Santiago might be a different story, but Becker would deal with that when the time came.

  “What do you want with Don Eduardo?” Mrs. Slaughter asked.

  “I reckon that’s between the don and me,” Becker drawled. “You can rest assured, though, Mrs. Slaughter, that I don’t mean any harm to you or your people.”

  “You don’t mean any harm,” she repeated. “But will you inflict it anyway if we get in your way?”

  Becker’s jaw tightened. He admired this woman for her beauty and bravery, but she was starting to annoy him.

  Again he didn’t answer the question she had asked him, choosing instead to ask one of his own.

  “I heard the don was injured. How bad is he hurt?”

  He knew that was a mistake as soon as the words were out of his mouth. The woman’s eyes sparked with anger. She said, “You wouldn’t know that unless you were here last night, or someone who was here told you about it. That Apache who’s riding with you and your men, maybe?”

  Anger of his own welled up inside him. He was wasting time here. He leaned forward in the saddle and said, “I don’t have anything against you, ma’am, but I’ll have what I came here to get, one way or another. If innocent folks get hurt, that’s on your head, not mine. Now bring Don Eduardo and his wife out here. You do that and we’ll go on our way and leave you in peace.”

  That was a lie, of course. Becker didn’t intend to leave any witnesses behind. When he was done here, when he rode away from this place, he planned to leave it burning. The flames would wipe out any trace that he had ever been here.

  Mrs. Slaughter suddenly leveled the Winchester at him. She wasn’t a large woman, but she held the heavy rifle rock-steady as she pointed it at him.

  Becker stiffened and sat up straighter in the saddle, but he kept his hand away from his gun. He had no doubt that she would drill him if he gave her the slightest excuse to pull the trigger.

  “Take it easy, ma’am—” he began.

  “You’ve made a bad mistake, Mr. Becker,” she said. “You think you hold the winning hand here, but you overplayed it. I don’t know what your plan is and I don’t care. All I know is that if you don’t throw your gun away, climb down from that horse, and come in here, I’m going to kill you.”

  * * *

  The herd of stampeding cattle filled the canyon almost from one side to the other.

  Almost.

  Some boulders littered the ground along the base of the canyon wall to the left, though. They were chunks and slabs of sandstone that had fallen from the wall in times past. Slaughter knew instantly that they represented the best chance for him and his men to escape the deadly onslaught of hooves and horns thundering toward them.

  “Come on!” he shouted to the others as he yanked his horse around and kicked the animal into a gallop toward the rocks.

  They might have been able to turn and outrun the stampede by heading back the way they had come. But they had been following this canyon for a couple of miles and Slaughter knew there was a good chance the runaway herd would overtake them before they could find a way out. If that happened, they were all doomed.

  As usual when faced with danger, he had made the decision instantly, with no hesitation. A lot of men had died on the frontier from dithering around, and John Slaughter wasn’t going to be one of them. If fate had finally caught up to him, it wouldn’t be from lack of action on his part.

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Santiago and the other men were close behi
nd him. They understood what they had to do. They rode hard, leaning forward in their saddles and slashing their mounts with the reins.

  Slaughter slowed as he neared the rocks. He pulled his horse aside and waved the others on. Like any good leader, his first concern was for the men who followed him. They raced past and crowded into the cluster of boulders.

  The leading edge of the stampede was less than twenty yards away. The billowing dust cloud from it was already starting to reach Slaughter and the other men.

  Slaughter swung down from the saddle and hauled his horse behind a sandstone slab. All the men were clear now. The stampede reached the rocks and flowed around them like a brown tide. The noise was deafening, a rumble that assaulted the ears. It sounded like the world was ending.

  The dust choked the men, clogged their throats and noses, stung their eyes, made it difficult to see anything. Their horses were all spooked, and they had their hands full keeping the animals under control.

  Faintly over the racket, Slaughter heard men yelling and shooting. That would be the rustlers, he thought, driving the cattle through the canyon and using them as living weapons.

  Those varmints were in for a surprise, Slaughter told himself grimly. They were about to discover that their would-be victims hadn’t been trampled into raw meat after all.

  The terrible rumbling diminished slightly. That told Slaughter most of the stampede had passed them already. The rustlers would be along very shortly. He called to Santiago, who crouched behind a nearby rock, “Get ready! We’ll hit ’em when they go past us!”

  Santiago nodded and turned to give the order to the next man. Slaughter hoped the command would spread to all the others in his group.

  He reached up and pulled his Winchester from its saddle sheath. The dust was thinner now. He began to be able to see out into the canyon.

  Several riders loped out of the sandy clouds, still yipping and shooting. Slaughter brought the rifle to his shoulder and drew a bead on one of the rustlers. It would have been easy to blow the man out of the saddle, and he was tempted to do just that.

  But he was a lawman, he reminded himself, even if he wasn’t wearing his badge at the moment, and there was a right way and a wrong way to do things. He raised his voice and shouted, “You men are covered! Throw down your guns and elevate!”