Dead Before Sundown Read online

  He lay there gasping, unable to get any air in his lungs. He knew he needed to get up and make a run for the trees. Out here in the open, he was an easy target.

  His muscles wouldn’t obey him, though. He tried to force himself up but slumped back down, helpless.

  A few feet away, his horse lay bleeding to death from the terrible wound a bullet had ripped in its throat. Its hooves thrashed madly in agonized panic.

  The horse’s body would give him a little cover, Palmer thought, if he could just get behind it. Gritting his teeth, he finally succeeded in forcing his body into motion. He began to crawl toward his stricken mount.

  Palmer had to circle around the wildly flailing hooves. The horse’s movements were less urgent now as death approached rapidly, but those slashing hooves were still dangerous.

  The horrible bubbling sounds the horse was making came to an end. The hooves stilled. Palmer pulled himself behind the carcass just as bullets began to thump into it.

  He huddled as low to the ground as he could and hoped that would be enough to protect him. What felt like a burning brand raked along his leg. He realized that one of the bullets had just grazed him. He pressed himself closer to the dead horse.

  From where he lay, he couldn’t see Lundy anymore, but he saw that one of the other men was down, knocked from his saddle by bushwhacker’s lead.

  Where was the pack horse with the two chests full of gold bars?

  That question suddenly filled Palmer’s mind. He desperately wanted to lift his head so he could take a better look around, but he knew that doing so would invite the bushwhackers to put a bullet through his brain. He clenched his teeth together and made himself keep his head down.

  The first man who’d been hit had been leading the pack horse, Palmer recalled. Shot in the head like that, he would have let go of the reins.

  A horse wasn’t like a mule. It would spook a lot easier when the shooting started. The pack horse could have bolted.

  Which meant that it—and its valuable cargo—could be anywhere by now.

  The ambushers continued firing from the rock for what seemed like an eternity to Palmer as he hunkered behind the dead horse. In reality, it was probably only a few minutes.

  Then the shots died away, leaving an eerie, echoing silence in their wake.

  Palmer knew better than to move. He stayed right where he was, convinced that if he popped up from behind his bloody cover, he’d be dead a second later.

  He heard horses moving down the valley, from the vicinity of the gap that the funny-looking rock guarded. The hoofbeats faded into the distance, but still Palmer didn’t move. This could be a trick. The others could have pulled out but left behind a sharpshooter to finish him off when he showed himself.

  But more time dragged past, and flies started to buzz around the horse’s carcass. The coppery stink from the pool of blood in which he sprawled filled Palmer’s nostrils and sickened him.

  “Owen?” he called. “Owen, can you hear me?”

  There was no response.

  “Anybody else? Anybody alive out here?”

  Nothing. Palmer’s teeth ground together as he tried to figure out what to do.

  When he judged that at least an hour had passed, he muttered, “The hell with it,” and heaved himself up from behind the carcass. Nobody shot at him. He climbed laboriously to his feet and staggered toward the two bodies he could see. They belonged to a couple of Lundy’s men.

  Palmer had never learned their names. He didn’t give a damn about that, either.

  He spotted another body lying at the edge of the trees. When he hurried over to it, he saw it was the third member of Lundy’s gang. This man was as dead as the other two.

  And sure enough, there was no sign of the pack horse as far as the eye could see. The saddle horses had stampeded and were gone, too.

  In utter disgust, Palmer asked aloud, “Now what the hell am I gonna do?”

  Somewhere not far off, somebody moaned.

  Chapter 22

  The sound made Palmer twist around and reach for his gun. His fingers found only empty air where the butt of the revolver should have been.

  Shocked, he looked down and saw that the holster was empty. The gun must have fallen out when he was thrown from the falling horse, he realized.

  His rifle was still in the saddle boot strapped to the carcass. He had been so stunned by crashing to the ground that he hadn’t been thinking straight. Otherwise he never would have gone wandering around this killing ground without any weapons except for a small knife hidden under his coat.

  The moan sounded again from somewhere in the trees. The timber grew so thickly that Palmer couldn’t see very far into the woods. He glanced at the horse and wondered if he could run out there and get his rifle.

  If he did, he would be turning his back to whoever was hidden in the trees, making him a perfect target.

  But there was only one logical person it could be, he told himself. When he heard a strangled cough, he knew he had to risk it.

  “Owen?” Palmer called. “Owen, is that you? Are you hurt?”

  The voice that responded was so low and weak that at first Palmer wasn’t even sure if he had heard anything. Then it came again, and he knew.

  “J-Joe …? Joe, I need … help … I … I b-been shot….”

  “I’m coming,” Palmer said. “Speak up. Where are you?”

  “H-here …”

  Palmer followed the voice into the shadows under the trees. A moment later he found Lundy propped up against one of the trunks. His hat was gone. Lundy had a gun in his hand, but that hand lay in his lap as if it was too heavy for him to lift.

  Palmer supposed it was, and he could see why. Lundy was weak from all the blood he’d lost. The right side of his shirt was soaked with it.

  Palmer knelt beside him and asked, “How bad are you hit, Owen?”

  “I … don’t know. Just know it … hurts like hell.”

  “I thought you’d gotten away clean,” Palmer said as he carefully moved aside the blood-soaked shirt in an attempt to see the wound in Lundy’s side.

  “I thought … I had, too…. One of the … sons o’ bitches … winged me … just as I got to the trees…. I fell off … my horse…. Don’t know where the bastard … ran off to.”

  “Neither do I. All the horses are gone except for mine, and he’s dead.”

  “What about … the pack horse?”

  “Gone, too. I’d be willing to bet those bushwhackers took it.”

  Lundy groaned. “The gold …”

  “Yeah,” Palmer said grimly.

  He had the hole in Lundy’s side uncovered by now. The bullet had torn through the outlaw’s flesh, but the wound didn’t appear to be too deep. Palmer reached around behind Lundy and brought his hand back with crimson smeared on the fingers.

  Lundy cursed in pain. “What’n blazes … are you doin’?”

  “Checking for an exit wound,” Palmer explained. “It’s there. The bullet went clear through, Owen. That’s good.”

  “Yeah,” Lundy said wearily. “It is.”

  “You’ve lost quite a bit of blood, and the shock of being hit by that bullet has knocked you for a loop. But I reckon you’ll be all right. I’ll clean the wound and bandage it up, and you’ll be fine.”

  As long as he didn’t get blood poisoning and fester to death, Palmer thought. He didn’t mention that possibility. All he could do was patch up the wound the best he could.

  “Fine … hell,” Lundy said. “We’re out here … set afoot … and our gold’s … gone.”

  “Yeah, but as long as we’re alive, we’ve still got a chance of finding the sons of bitches who stole it and getting it back,” Palmer said. “And that’s exactly what we’re gonna do.”

  Reb Russell’s horse was a big, good-looking sorrel, and he rode well, not surprising since he had won saddle-bronc-riding competitions. At least, according to Reb, he had won those contests. They had no way of knowing if that was actually true
, Frank mused as he rode along with the others, heading east toward the edge of the mountains.

  They rode four abreast, with him and Salty on the ends and Meg and Reb in the middle. Meg seemed quite interested in what Reb had to say and prompted him to talk more about his rodeo experiences.

  As it happened, Frank had been down in Pecos, Texas, a number of years earlier when the first official rodeo had taken place there. It had been quite a spectacle, with cowboys riding in from ranches all over West Texas to test their skills against each other. The contests were the same sort of things they did in their everyday work—roping, riding, throwing steers so they could be branded—but when you added spectators and an air of competition, it became something quite different from a chore.

  The practice had spread, and now there were rodeos all over the place, some fancy and some just simple get-togethers. But Reb Russell evidently made a practice of traveling from one to the next, earning his living from the prize money he won rather than working as a regular hand on any of the ranches.

  Something about that didn’t seem right to Frank. He had a hunch that Russell could have been a top hand if he’d wanted to, only the young man didn’t have any appetite for that much hard work.

  But how Reb Russell lived his life was none of his business, Frank reminded himself.

  Reb changed the subject from himself by asking, “Those fellas who had the Gatling gun, you didn’t get a good look at them?”

  Frank shook his head. “No, we were too busy ducking all those bullets that were flying around.”

  “And there was a whole heap of ‘em,” Salty added. “I never heard so many shots so close together.”

  “Yeah, a Gatling gun’ll spit out a lot of bullets in a hurry,” Reb agreed. “Or at least that’s what I’ve heard. I never actually saw one of the contraptions until today.”

  “You probably saw the men who had it better than we did,” Frank said. “You were up on the rimrock taking potshots at the ones trying to shoot it at the canyon.”

  Reb shrugged. “Just looked like reg’lar hardcases to me. Well, except for an hombre who was wearin’ one of those eastern dude hats.”

  “Dude hats?” Frank repeated.

  “Yeah, you know.” Reb made a circular motion over his head. “One of those derbies.”

  “Palmer,” Salty said with an angry vehemence in his voice.

  “So you do know one of the varmints.”

  “Maybe,” Frank said. “We’ve been on the trail of an hombre who started out as a crook somewhere back east before coming to Colorado and throwing in with an owlhoot named Soapy Smith. They wound up going to Alaska and taking over a town there called Skagway. They stole some of Salty’s money.”

  “No, they stole all my money, the dadblasted skunks,” Salty corrected. “Palmer’s likely the only one of the bunch left. We’re gonna try to get the dinero back from him if we can ever catch up to him. Seems like we’ve already chased him halfway across Canada and back.”

  Reb looked confused. “If Palmer’s the only one left, who’re those other fellas he’s with, the ones with the Gatling gun?”

  “Now that we don’t know,” Salty said. “But a former pard of his told us that Palmer’s acquainted with some bad men who’ve been raisin’ hell up here north of the border. Could be he met up with them.”

  “Must be,” Reb said with a nod. “Seems like there’s a lot goin’ on up here in these mountains.”

  “Yeah,” Frank said drily. “It does.”

  Late in the morning, they heard shots up ahead somewhere. Frank reined in, and the others followed suit. Most of the reports were the sharp whip cracks of rifles, but there were a few heavier booms from handguns as well.

  “Some sort of fracas goin’ on,” Salty said.

  “No Gatling gun, though,” Reb said. “Maybe it’s not the same bunch.”

  Meg looked over at Frank. “We’re going to find out what it’s about, aren’t we?”

  “It may mean riding right into trouble,” he said.

  She gave him a cocksure grin. “Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”

  She had a point there … but he was getting tired of risking her life over and over again.

  “You and Salty stay here,” he said as he reached a decision. “Reb, come with me. We’ll see what we can find out.”

  Reb looked a little surprised that Frank was giving him orders, but he didn’t argue the point. He just said, “Sure, Frank.”

  Salty looked as if he was going to argue, and so did Meg. Frank forestalled their protests with a hard look. He nodded to Reb and said, “Come on.”

  They heeled their mounts into a fast trot that left Salty and Meg behind. Once Salty thought about it, he would realize that Frank hadn’t wanted to drag Meg along into danger yet again, and he also didn’t want to leave her there alone with Reb Russell, even though they had known him for only a few hours.

  The shooting died away before they had covered half a mile. “Sounds like the battle’s over,” Reb commented.

  “For now,” Frank said.

  “That usually means one side or the other’s had all the fight knocked out of it and has given up.”

  Frank nodded. “Or else everybody on one side is dead. You sure you want to get mixed up in this?”

  “You bet I do,” Reb said. “This whole mess has got me plumb curious.”

  A short time later, Frank spotted something on the ground up ahead and reined in as he realized that the dark shape was a fallen horse.

  “Somebody over there, too,” Reb said, pointing.

  Frank looked and saw the bodies sprawled on the ground. Victims of the shooting they had heard, no doubt.

  He drew his Colt and sent his horse ahead at a careful walk. Reb slid his ivory-handled revolver from its holster as well. The way the young man handled the gun told Frank that he probably knew how to use it, too.

  When they came to the first body, Frank said, “Cover me while I take a look at him.”

  “Sure, Frank,” Reb replied easily. His eyes squinted slightly as he looked at the trees, searching for any signs of danger.

  Frank swung down from the saddle and hunkered next to the dead man. He appeared to be a hard-faced gunman of the same sort that had attacked them back at the canyon. In fact, Frank considered it pretty likely that this man was part of the same gang.

  “Ever seen him before?” he asked Reb.

  “Me?” The young man sounded surprised. “Why would I have seen him?”

  “I don’t know. There’s no telling who you might run into out here on the frontier.”

  Reb looked down at the dead man. “Well, I don’t reckon I’ve ever laid eyes on him until just now … unless he was one of those hombres I was shootin’ at earlier, at the canyon. I never saw any of them close up.”

  Frank straightened. “All right. Let’s take a gander at the others.”

  It quickly became obvious that the other two dead men were the same sort of hardcases. If these men had been part of the gang with the Gatling gun, they were getting whittled down in a hurry.

  Frank looked toward the far end of the valley at a big rock that sat there, then considered the positions of the dead men.

  “Looks to me like somebody ambushed them,” he said. “Put a few riflemen up on that rock, and they’d have clear shots back up the valley.”

  “The rock that looks like some sort of animal, you mean?” Reb asked.

  Frank saw the resemblance now and nodded. “Yeah. I figure these men were riding toward that gap when the men on the rock opened up on them. They tried to scatter, but the odds were against them.”

  “Where are their horses?”

  “Got spooked by all the shooting and ran off, I expect.” Frank rubbed his chin as he frowned. “I wonder if this is all of them.”

  “There might be more bodies, you mean?”

  “No. More men who escaped the ambush and are still out there somewhere, still alive and ready to cause more trouble.”


  Chapter 23

  “Who … who are they?” Lundy asked weakly. “Can you tell?”

  Palmer hesitated before answering. When he and Lundy had heard the hoofbeats, he had moved carefully to the edge of the trees so he could see who was coming, staying far enough back that he wasn’t likely to be spotted.

  He could see well enough that he recognized one of the men, though. He hadn’t seen Frank Morgan since they’d both been in Skagway the previous winter, but it would be hard to forget that son of a bitch.

  Lundy was already upset about the possibility of Morgan being mixed up in this, and even though the outlaw was wounded, Palmer was going to need him.

  “Two men,” he said. Then he lied, “I don’t know them.”

  Well, it was a half lie, anyway. He had never seen the gent who dressed like some Wild West show cowboy. Which meant it was a half-truth, too.

  “Stay away from that horse, damn you,” he muttered as Morgan and the other man took a closer look at the dead animal. What was left of the loot Palmer had brought with him when he and Yeah Mow Hopkins fled from Skagway was still in the saddlebags, and he didn’t want to lose it.

  “What’d you say?” Lundy asked from behind him.

  “Nothing,” Palmer said. He wanted Lundy to shut up. Right now they couldn’t afford to draw Morgan’s attention. Lundy was still too weak to be any use in a gunfight. “Just be quiet, all right? We’ll let them go on their way.”

  “They got horses,” Lundy said, ignoring Palmer’s request. “We need horses.”

  “And we’ll get ‘em,” Palmer said as he tried to control the irritation he felt. “Tonight when you’re feeling better, we’ll find their camp, kill them, and take their horses so we can get after that other bunch.”

  He had cleaned the wound in Lundy’s side, which started the bullet holes bleeding again, so he’d had to stop the bleeding before tightly wrapping strips of cloth cut from his own shirt around Lundy’s torso as makeshift bandages. Now Lundy needed to rest for a while before he started moving around much.

  “What if we can’t find their camp?”