Sidewinders Read online

  “Yeah. Less than a third of the patrol. And it was pure luck that we survived. The edge of the slide didn’t miss us by more than ten feet. Some of the smaller rocks pelted us.” Gustaffson gestured toward the cut on his head. “That’s how I got this. The other men are beaten up, too. But we’re alive, and that’s more than you can say for anybody who got caught under that. I told the men to look for more survivors, but between you and me, they’re not going to find any.”

  Bo had to agree with that grim assessment. He asked, “You have your horses?”

  “Yeah, our mounts got clear with us.”

  “Then you can get back to Deadwood. With the canyon blocked off, you may have to go a long way around, but you should be able to make it.”

  “What about the two of you?” Gustaffson asked.

  Bo and Scratch exchanged a glance. “I reckon we’re still goin’ after the Devils,” Scratch said.

  Bo nodded. “That’s right. They have even more to pay for now.”

  “Our orders were to find those outlaws and deal with them,” Gustaffson said with a scowl.

  “The lieutenant’s dead, and so are most of your troop.”

  “That doesn’t change the orders,” Gustaffson said. “I’m in command now, and I say we’re going after them. Some of them were killed, too. The odds ought to be close to even.”

  The sergeant had a point. Over the past week, the Deadwood Devils had been dealt considerable damage. If the remainder of the cavalry patrol could catch up to the gang now, they might be able to put the Devils out of commission permanently.

  “All right,” Bo said, “but if we’re going after them, we can’t waste any time. Your men might be able to recover some of the bodies and give them proper burials if they stay here, but they probably wouldn’t be able to catch up to the Devils.”

  Gustaffson heaved a sigh and nodded. “I know. And as much as I hate to leave the bodies, we don’t have any choice in the matter. I’ll tell the men to abandon the search and mount up.”

  While Gustaffson was doing that, Bo and Scratch retrieved their horses. Five minutes later, they rode up the canyon at the head of a small column that included Sergeant Gustaffson and seven of the cavalry troopers. Ten men in all, counting the Texans. The Devils couldn’t number much more than that after all the men they had lost in recent days.

  Quietly, Scratch said to Bo, “We may have another problem that ain’t been talked about yet. What if this canyon’s a dead end? We can’t go back the other way. It’d take a week to dig out enough of that rock slide for the horses to get through.”

  Bo nodded. “I know. We’ll just have to hope there’s a way out at the other end.”

  They followed the canyon on its twisting path into the hills. Bo kept an eye out for a place where the walls were gentle enough for horses to make it. Eventually the canyon petered out in a long slope where an avalanche had taken place sometime in the past. The ground was loose rock, and Bo could tell by looking that it would be easy to trigger another slide. But they had no choice except to try to get out of the canyon this way.

  “Have your men dismount,” he told Gustaffson. “We’ll take it slow and easy, one at a time, leading the horses. Everybody back off while I go first.”

  Bo picked his way up the slope, talking quietly and calmly to his horse as he did so to keep the animal from spooking. The climb was actually an easy one, only about a hundred yards and not very steep, but it took several nerve-racking minutes anyway before Bo finally reached the top. He had recovered his hat and coat earlier, so now he took off the black Stetson and waved it over his head to let Scratch know he had made it safely to the top. Scratch started up next.

  It took most of the rest of the afternoon, but Gustaffson and the other survivors from the patrol were able to climb out of the canyon without any mishaps. When they were all up, Bo said, “We’ll backtrack now and pick up the Devils’ trail at the place where they started that avalanche.”

  Gustaffson looked at the sky. “We’re going to run out of light,” he said. “I don’t like the look of those clouds, either. I think they’ve got snow in them.”

  Scratch chuckled. “You sound like old Chloride, Sarge. But I got a hunch you’re right.”

  Bo said, “You won’t have any trouble following the canyon from up here, Olaf. Scratch and I will go ahead and try to pick up the trail. We’ll leave markers for you to follow us.”

  Gustaffson looked like he was going to argue, but then he shrugged and said, “I hate to split up such a small force, but you two seem to know what you’re doing. We won’t be far behind you.”

  The Texans lifted a hand in farewell and then galloped ahead of the patrol. In the fading light, it wasn’t long before the troopers were out of sight behind them.

  It was only a few minutes later when Bo felt the first snowflake plant a cold kiss on his face.

  CHAPTER 20

  The snow was light and intermittent at first, but it began to fall thicker and faster as Bo and Scratch reached the spot where the avalanche had taken place. Scratch dismounted long enough to retrieve his lasso, which he coiled and fastened to his saddle again. While he was doing that, Bo located the place where the Devils had left their horses during the ambush. The temperature was below freezing and the snow was starting to stick, resulting in a dusting of white on the piles of horse droppings.

  “We won’t be able to follow their trail once the snow starts to pile up,” Scratch said.

  “I know. It’s going to be dark soon, too.”

  Scratch sighed. “You reckon we ought to just wait here for Gustaffson and those troopers and make camp for the night?”

  Bo thought about it for a moment and then shook his head. “No, let’s give it a try,” he said. “One thing about the snow, it’ll make it easier for Olaf and the others to follow us. They’ll be able to see our tracks.”

  “Yeah, I reckon. But where are we goin’?”

  “I’ve been thinking . . . Lieutenant Holbrook might’ve been onto something. The Devils’ hideout wasn’t up this canyon, but it could be hidden in one of the others. That would be a good place. It’s isolated, and there aren’t any mines up here this high.”

  “You figure we should check the other canyons?”

  “It’s a place to start,” Bo said.

  They rode through the snow, which whipped up in swirls around them. Cutting across the ridge, they came to another of the rugged canyons. The thin layer of snow on the ground was enough to muffle their horses’ hoofbeats, and Bo was thankful for that. If he was right about the hideout being up here, he didn’t want to ride right into the place without any warning, and he sure didn’t want the Devils to know they were coming.

  The gray light in the sky was almost gone when they reached the head of the canyon without finding any sign of the outlaws. Bo was about to say that they would stop and look for a place to camp when he suddenly stiffened in the saddle. A faint, familiar scent had drifted to his nostrils.

  “Scratch, do you smell that?”

  The silver-haired Texan sniffed the air and nodded. “Wood smoke,” Scratch said. “Somebody’s got a fire goin’.”

  “In weather like this, they’d have to. Let’s see if we can follow the smell.”

  They set out across the rugged terrain, and after several hundred yards they came to another canyon that stretched across the landscape like a black, hungry mouth. Bo and Scratch reined in and dismounted.

  They tied their reins to a scrubby tree and stole ahead on foot, carrying their rifles. When they came to the edge of the canyon, they knelt in the snow and looked over the edge of the rimrock. The smell of smoke was stronger now. Bo saw a faint glow off to his right and silently pointed it out to Scratch.

  “That’s lamplight comin’ through the cracks around a shutter,” Scratch breathed in Bo’s ear. “The varmints got themselves a cabin down there!”

  “Probably an old prospector’s cabin that was abandoned,” Bo said. “Like the one where Chloride was stayi
ng.”

  “Maybe we ought to burn it down around ’em, like they tried to do to us!”

  After all the death and havoc the Devils had wreaked, it was a tempting suggestion, but that would be cold-blooded murder, and besides, they didn’t know for certain that their enemies were in there, Bo thought.

  “We’d better make sure it’s them,” he said. “Let’s see if we can find a way down there.”

  He suspected there was a trail of some sort leading down into the canyon, since the gang had approached the place from this direction. The Texans cat-footed along the rim in the gathering gloom. They came to a pair of boulders spaced apart like a marker, and sure enough, Bo made out the faint beginnings of a trail between the big rocks. The trail turned into a ledge that zigzagged down the canyon wall.

  Bo and Scratch were about to start along the ledge when they heard a voice and stopped short. Somewhere nearby, a man was cursing monotonously. His ire was directed at the fact that he was stuck up here in such miserable weather. When no one replied to him, Bo figured out that the man was talking to himself.

  The Devils had posted a guard on this back door into their headquarters. That didn’t come as a surprise. It was a sensible precaution. Quickly, Bo motioned to Scratch, explaining in gestures what he was going to do. Scratch nodded his understanding.

  Bo started down the ledge, which was just wide enough for one man on horseback. He would have to be careful. There was literally no room for error. In a struggle, it would be easy to fall off the ledge and plummet the thirty or forty feet to the floor of the canyon.

  Bo spotted a little cleft in the rock up ahead to his left. That was where the muttered curses came from. He took a deep breath and walked right past it.

  The muttering stopped abruptly. The guard stepped out behind Bo, rammed a rifle barrel into his back, and said, “Hey! Where the hell do you think—”

  That was as far as he got before Scratch came up behind him and slammed a rifle butt into the back of his head. At the same time, Bo whirled and grabbed the barrel of the guard’s rifle, wrenching it up so that if the outlaw managed to pull the trigger, the bullet wouldn’t tear through him.

  Scratch had struck too swiftly and efficiently for that to happen. The guard folded up without ever knowing what hit him. Bo’s other hand shot out and grabbed the man’s coat to keep him from toppling off the ledge. Scratch got the unconscious man under the arms and dragged him back up to the rimrock.

  Once they got there, Bo checked the sentry for a heartbeat but didn’t find one. “I hope he was one of the Devils,” he told Scratch, “because he’s dead.”

  “Reckon I hit him a little too hard and busted his skull,” Scratch said without sounding particularly worried about it.

  “He stuck a gun in my back, so there’s a good chance he was one of the hombres we’re after. We’ll leave him here and get on down there, maybe see if we can find out what they’re planning.”

  They could see the cabin now, squatting on the canyon floor at the base of the wall like some malignant toad. Built on to the side of it were a shed and a corral for the horses. Bo’s plan was to sneak up on the place and try to spy a glance through one of the crudely shuttered windows, maybe eavesdrop on what the outlaws were saying.

  They were only about halfway down the ledge, though, almost directly above the ramshackle structure, when the cabin door suddenly opened, spilling light out onto the snowy ground. More than a dozen men in heavy coats and pulled-down hats walked out carrying rifles. There were more of them than Bo expected. Maybe all the gang hadn’t taken part in the ambush at the other canyon.

  One man lingered in the doorway, and the last of the others paused to talk to him while the rest went to the corral to saddle their horses. Bo and Scratch flattened out on the ledge so they wouldn’t be as likely to be seen and listened to the conversation taking place in front of the cabin below them.

  “When Lowell comes down from guard duty in the morning, you and him start packin’ up all that gold. I want it ready to go when the boys and me get back from Deadwood.”

  The voice was familiar. Bo had heard it that night in Chloride’s cabin, when it gave the order to light the coal oil. Chloride had been convinced this man was the leader of the Deadwood Devils, the one who had carved pitchforks into the foreheads of the dead guards on the wrecked Argosy gold wagon.

  The man standing in the doorway said, “Sure, Tom, I understand.”

  Tom . . . Reese Bardwell’s outlaw brother was named Tom. As Bo looked down at the men below him, he would have been willing to bet that one of them had only four fingers on one hand.

  “Good,” the leader went on. “I’m done with this. Once we hit the bank in Deadwood and clean it out, we’ll be back to pick up you and Lowell and the rest of the gold, and then we’re puttin’ these damned Black Hills behind us. I don’t care what the boss says.”

  So Bardwell—if that’s who the leader of the Devils was—was working for someone else. That went along with Bo’s theory, too. He didn’t know who the boss was or if there was anything behind the Devils’ reign of terror beyond sheer profit, but at least some of his hunches had been confirmed.

  “It’s a shame those blasted Texans had to come along,” the man in the doorway said. “This was a sweet setup until then.”

  “Yeah, not knowin’ whether they’re dead or not is the one thing that bothers me,” the leader agreed. He laughed harshly. “But havin’ all that gold will help me get over it.”

  The man lifted a gloved hand in farewell and headed for the corral, where one of the other outlaws had saddled his horse for him. They all mounted up and rode away, their horses’ hooves thudding on the snowy ground as they started back down the canyon. They could follow it to the ridge that ran between Deadwood Gulch and the canyon where the Golden Queen mine was located. In weather like this, especially, it would take them most of the night to reach Deadwood.

  But once they got there, no one would expect the raid on the bank they had planned. It was the finishing stroke in this violent game. The Devils would sweep into town on a cold, snowy morning and clean out the bank. Sheriff Henry Manning would probably try to stop them, but the lawman wouldn’t be any match for a dozen hardened owlhoots.

  But if Gustaffson and the rest of the cavalrymen, along with Bo and Scratch, could get there first, they could have one heck of a surprise waiting for the Deadwood Devils.

  Once the outlaws were out of sight, Bo motioned for Scratch to head back up the ledge. When they reached the rimrock, Scratch said, “There ain’t no doubt about it now. Those were the Devils.”

  “Yeah,” Bo agreed, “and that dead guard is the one the boss was talking about called Lowell. The other one will probably find his body in the morning when he doesn’t come in from guard duty, but by then it’ll be too late for him to warn the others. They’ll be in Deadwood already . . . and so will we.”

  “We’re goin’ after ’em to put a stop to that bank robbery?”

  “Yeah, but we have to find Olaf and the other troopers first. Let’s hope they were able to follow our trail.”

  It was dark as midnight now, even though it wasn’t long after sundown. The snow still fell. When the wind gusted particularly hard, it seemed to be falling sideways.

  “Gettin’ hard to see,” Scratch said as he and Bo rode back the way they had come from. “I hope those soldier boys don’t ride right off a cliff into a canyon.”

  That was a legitimate worry, Bo thought. If the storm got much worse, they might not be able to travel, even if they did manage to rendezvous with the survivors from the cavalry patrol.

  A few minutes later, dark figures loomed up in front of them, made indistinct by the snow. Bo and Scratch reined in and lifted their rifles. The other riders did the same, and one of them called out the traditional military challenge.

  “Who goes there?”

  Bo relaxed as he recognized Sergeant Gustaffson’s voice. “It’s us, Olaf,” he called. “Bo Creel and Scratch Morton.�
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  The cavalrymen prodded their horses forward. “Thank God,” Gustaffson said fervently. “With this snow, we were riding around blindly. I was able to follow your tracks for a while, but between the darkness and the wind, we were lost.”

  “There’s only so much room up here on this ridge,” Bo said, “so I was hoping we’d run into each other. We have news.”

  “You found the Devils’ hideout?”

  “That’s right, but there’s only one man there right now. They left him to guard the loot from their previous robberies.”

  “Where’d the rest of them go?” Gustaffson asked.

  “They’re headed for Deadwood,” Bo explained. “They’re going to rob the bank there first thing in the morning and then take off for the tall and uncut.”

  Gustaffson let out a surprised curse. “We’ve got to stop ’em! Nobody in Deadwood will expect the Devils to ride right into town like that. It’ll be a massacre.”

  Bo nodded and said, “It could be. But not if we can get there first.”

  Gustaffson lifted his reins and turned his horse. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go!”

  With Bo and Scratch in the lead, the little group started toward Deadwood. The Texans were relying on instinct to guide them now more than anything else. Decades of wandering had given them a built-in sense of direction, but even so, they had to wonder if they were going the right way. It was going to take a lot of luck for them to get back to Deadwood at all in this storm, let alone get there before the outlaws reached the settlement.

  The wind blew harder and the snow fell thicker. Every bone in Bo’s body was frozen and aching from the cold, and he knew Scratch felt the same way. This late autumn storm was becoming a blizzard, and there wasn’t a blasted thing they could do about it. All the men hunched deeper in their coats, and the horses plodded on.

  Bo’s horse suddenly stopped and wouldn’t go on. Trusting the animal’s instincts, Bo cried out over the howling wind, “Hold it! Everybody stop!”

  Scratch, Gustaffson, and the troopers came to a halt. “What is it, Bo?” Scratch asked.