The Devil's Crossing Read online

  She sure was shy. He had a sudden urge to lean down and kiss her on the cheek, but he kept a tight rein on the impulse. If he did that, he’d probably startle her so bad that she’d bolt like a runaway mule.

  Although that wasn’t a good way to think of it, he told himself as Alma moved off to help her ma with something. She wasn’t anything like a mule. More likely she’d fly away like a pretty bird . . .

  “What have you got on your mind?”

  Ethan Prescott’s deep voice cut into the young man’s thoughts and scattered them. He shook his head and said, “Oh, nothing important.”

  Prescott grunted. “Yeah, I’ll bet. I’ve seen looks like that on the faces of young men before. You’re sweet on one of the girls in this wagon train. You’d better be careful or her pa will dust the seat of your britches with buckshot, and I won’t do a blasted thing about it except stand there and laugh at your little predicament.”

  “I’m not going to do anything to make somebody come after me with a shotgun.”

  “You’d better remember that. And there’s a preacher among those pilgrims, too, if there’s any marrying to be done. You’d best not be forgetting about that.”

  Linford felt his face burning. “Won’t need no preacher,” he said shortly.

  “Good. Now ride on ahead and see how the river looks.”

  Linford swung up into the saddle and heeled his horse into motion. He followed the Sweetwater, his mount loping along until the wagons were almost out of sight behind him. His head moved almost constantly as he swung his gaze from side to side, searching intently all around for any signs of potential trouble. As he had told Alma, they had been lucky so far, but vigilance went hand in hand with luck.

  Nobody was going to sneak up on them as long as he was scout and had anything to say about it.

  * * *

  They drew the wagons into a circle and made camp that evening while they were still out on the plains, a few miles short of the hills. Tom Linford had supper with the Stockton family—Alma, her ma and pa, and her two little brothers. The fare was the same as always, beans cooked in an iron pot, bacon fried up in a big pan, bread that had been baked that morning in a Dutch oven, all washed down with strong black coffee, even for the kids. There was one extra treat, some dried fruit. Linford didn’t know if that was on account of him being a guest, but he enjoyed it.

  The whole evening was enjoyable. He and Alma were never alone, but they were able to sit next to each other on the lowered tailgate of the wagon and converse in low tones. Neither said anything of any consequence, just idle talk about the journey so far and the family’s plans for their new farm in Oregon, but it was the intimacy that counted. Linford curled up in his bedroll that night with thoughts of blue eyes and blond curls filling his head.

  All that was forgotten early the next morning, when Linford was up before the sun, getting his horse ready to ride. Ethan Prescott was up even earlier, though. Nobody beat the wagon-master when it came to working hard. First to start and last to quit, that was Prescott.

  The wagon train reached the hills in late morning. During a pause before they started following the winding trail, Prescott told Frank DeVries that he hoped to get through the challenging passage and make camp that evening on the far side of it.

  “Can we do that?” asked DeVries.

  “If nothing happens to delay us.” Prescott’s mouth tightened. “I’d just as soon not have to stop where we’re stretched out with no place to go. Just in case.”

  He didn’t have to say in case of what, thought Linford. He knew what Prescott meant. That would make them an even more tempting target for bandits.

  As he and Prescott rode a short distance in front of the wagons, the young man kept his eye on the beetling brow of the hillside. It kept looming closer and closer to the trail, the farther into the hills they penetrated.

  Another couple of miles fell behind them, then Prescott reined in and nodded toward the trail in front of them. A hundred yards ahead, it petered out into the steep, rocky hillside.

  “This is as far as we go on this side,” Prescott announced. “The wagons will have to ford the river.”

  He pointed, and Linford looked across the stream. There was room on the other side for the wagons to travel.

  “How far does the trail run over there?”

  “A couple of miles,” said Prescott. “Then we’ll have to cross back to the south bank. There’ll be one more ford after that, which will leave us on the north bank. We can go on from there without any more crossings, unless things have changed since the last time I came through here.”

  “It doesn’t seem that bad so far,” Linford commented.

  “We’re just getting started,” Prescott said. He turned in the saddle to wave at Frank DeVries, who had already halted his wagon without being told to. “It’s close enough to midday that we’ll stop here for a little while to let folks eat and rest the livestock.”

  “You want me to pass the word?”

  “Sure, go ahead. Thanks, son.”

  It made Linford feel good to have Ethan Prescott call him son.

  The women in the wagon train were in the habit of saving back some of the food from breakfast so it could be eaten cold for the midday meal. If there was time, they brewed coffee to go with it. In this case, though, there was plenty of good river water right there a few steps away, so the pilgrims filled their tin cups and drank it down. Even though it was summer, these streams that flowed down from the mountains still ran clear and cold, fed as they were by snow melt.

  Linford would have sought out Alma Stockton to spend a few minutes with her, but Prescott called to him and motioned for him to follow. The two men rode into the river, letting their horses pick their path, feeling out the bottom as they went along.

  “Feels pretty solid right here,” Prescott opined. “And the water’ll only come up to the wheel hubs, so there shouldn’t be any trouble with wagons starting to drift. Plenty have crossed here in the past.”

  “You must know just about everything there is to know about this part of the country,” said Linford.

  Prescott snorted. “Not hardly. There are other wagon-masters who’ve been at it even longer than I have, like my friend Simon Lash, and before them, other men were out here. I’m talking about the fur trappers, the mountain men. They were the first white men to explore these parts. Fellas like John Colter, Jim Bridger, Kit Carson.” Prescott grinned. “You ever hear tell of a man called Preacher?”

  “Preacher,” repeated Linford. “Yes, I think so.”

  “Preacher’s been over every foot of ground west of the Mississippi, they say, and probably knows it better than any other man alive. I’ve crossed trails with him a few times, and it was a real honor every time I did.”

  Linford had trouble comprehending that a veteran frontiersman such as Ethan Prescott would feel in awe of any other man, but he could tell that Prescott was sincere.

  “Maybe I’ll run into this Preacher sometime,” he said. “Is he an actual minister?”

  Prescott threw back his head and laughed. “Not hardly. But you can ask him to tell you the story of how he came to be called that. It’s a pretty famous tale out here.”

  “Yeah, I reckon I’ll do that,” Linford said. He had the feeling there was more to it than what Prescott had told him, but he didn’t press the wagon-master for details.

  Satisfied that this was a good place to ford the Sweetwater, Prescott turned back to the wagons after telling Linford to go on ahead and take a look around on the other side of the river. Linford did so, riding along the trail until he was out of sight of the ford. It began to narrow down again, just as it had done on the south side, and as he rode around a bend, he saw a sheer, towering granite bluff crowding close to the water. The trail was still wide enough for a single wagon, and it ran fairly straight for as far as Linford could see, which was a little unusual in this country where most paths twisted and turned quite a bit.

  He saw something else that made his eyes widen. The face of that granite bluff was covered with names. Hundreds, maybe thousands of names. Some written with hunks of charcoal, others daubed in axle grease. They ranged from crude, barely legible printing in block letters to elaborate, flowing script. Covering the rock wall for a hundred yards or more, they were crowded onto the rock from the ground up to as high as a tall man could reach while standing on a wagon seat. Some were faded with time, while many others looked relatively fresh and new.

  Linford knew he was looking at a record of the thousands of immigrants who had passed along here, bound for Oregon. He had seen similar places, back along the trail, where names were scrawled on rocks, but this was the most impressive such display he had come across so far on the journey. There was no way of knowing who had first given in to the impulse and written his or her name here, but others had seen it and thought it was a good idea. Time had passed, and the river of immigrants had flowed on, much like the Sweetwater, only in the opposite direction.

  As Linford stared at the names, he wondered how many of those people had made it to their destinations . . . and how many were lying alongside the trail in graves with markers that would collapse and decay and vanish, just as the graves themselves would flatten and new grass would grow, and flowers would bloom on them in the spring so that no one would ever know someone with dreams and hopes and passions lay there, slumbering forever alone and forgotten . . .

  Linford took a deep breath as he shook himself out of his reverie. Maybe Mr. Prescott would allow the wagons to stop here long enough for folks to add their names to the bluff. He thought about Alma writing her name on there, and if she did, he intended to add his right underneath it, so that from now on, anybody who passed along here might see the names and think that they were linked.

  That put a smile on his face, and he was still smiling when he heard three shots fired one right after the other, the reports echoing along the canyon between the hills in the universal signal for trouble.

  Chapter 3

  The trail beside the name-covered bluff was plenty wide enough for a horse to turn around, so Linford wheeled his mount sharply and jabbed his boot heels into the animal’s flanks. The horse leaped into a gallop that carried him back along the riverbank toward the ford.

  More shots blasted, a ragged volley, followed by a rolling wave of gun-thunder that echoed so loudly in the canyon it seemed like Linford’s head would explode from the racket.

  Or maybe that was the blood pounding inside his head, he realized as he felt his heart slugging so hard in his chest that it seemed on the verge of bursting from his body.

  The gunfire continued, and with every brief pause, Linford heard men shouting and women screaming.

  Alma.

  He told himself not to think of her, just to get back as fast as he could so he could help fight off the outlaws.

  Linford had no doubt in his mind that was what was happening. The wagon train was under attack by the desperadoes Prescott had warned the council about. The raid had taken place even sooner than Linford thought it might.

  The bandits must have struck while the wagons were fording the river. The drivers of the vehicles in the water would have nowhere to go. Those already on the north bank or still on the south bank wouldn’t be able to fort up in a circle, either. There wouldn’t be enough of them.

  At least those immigrants could take cover under their wagons. Those in the stream wouldn’t even be able to do that without submerging themselves in the cold water.

  The Stockton wagon was just about in the middle of the train. Linford had no way of knowing how far along the crossing had been when the outlaws struck.

  Alma might already be—

  He stopped that thought from forming fully in his head. He wasn’t going to allow himself even to think it.

  Linford leaned to the right and left to balance himself as his horse took the bends in the trail at breakneck speed. The gunfire continued hammering through the air, so fast and loud that it sounded like a battle in wartime. At least, Linford imagined a battle would sound like that. He had never been in one, had never fired a shot in anger.

  His mouth was so dry and puckered it felt like it was going to close up in his face and go away. He thought he caught the tang of powder smoke in the air, but he could have imagined that.

  The trail had widened considerably, so he knew he was getting close to the ford. He swept around another bend, and suddenly the terrible scene unfolded before him.

  Four wagons were on the north bank, another six were in the river with water swirling around the wheels and the legs of the livestock, and the rest of the wagons were still on the south bank.

  The Stockton wagon had been the last one to enter the river. It was only a few yards from shore. It would have been easy enough for Alma and her family to jump down and wade clear, but it also would have been suicidal because of the bullets flying through the air all around the wagons. They would be better off hunkering down behind the vehicle’s thick sideboards.

  Linford didn’t see Alma or any of the others, but as he hauled back on his horse’s reins, he saw the barrel of a rifle stick out from under the canvas cover at the back of the wagon. Flame and gray smoke spurted from the weapon.

  Men on horseback swarmed around the wagons, firing pistols and rifles. Linford’s first, shocked impression was that they looked like animals, but then he realized they were all wearing long, shaggy buffalo coats, despite the fact that the day was a warm one. Felt hats with broad, drooping brims obscured their features, which were further concealed by bandannas tied around the lower halves of their faces.

  Several men lay facedown in the river, floating and drifting slowly. Wagoneers who had been shot off their vehicles, Linford realized. He didn’t see any female bodies, only male, so maybe Alma was still all right.

  For a second, his anxious gaze searched for Ethan Prescott. He didn’t catch sight of the wagon-master anywhere.

  Only a few heartbeats had passed since Linford rounded the bend and reined in, but the time seemed longer than that. He couldn’t stand by and do nothing. He was armed with a Colt Navy revolver and a Sharps carbine. He hauled the carbine from its scabbard strapped to the saddle as he swung down.

  The Sharps was a heavy weapon. Linford pulled the horse around so the animal was between him and the battle. He rested the carbine’s barrel on the saddle and spoke softly to the horse so it would stay still and steady. The gunfire and the smell of powder smoke in the air had the mount a little spooked, but it calmed as Linford rested his cheek against the smooth wood of the carbine’s stock and eared back the hammer.

  He knew the horse wouldn’t stand still for long, so as quickly as he could without rushing, he drew a bead on one of the buffalo-coated outlaws. In those thick garments, they bulked larger than life. Linford settled his sights on a man who was facing away from him and firing toward the wagons.

  The thought that he was about to shoot a man in the back never crossed his mind.

  He took a deep breath, held it, and the whole world seemed to go still. Linford squeezed the trigger, and the Sharps went off with a tremendous boom and a kick that sent him reeling back a step. The horse jumped to the side, startled by the shot.

  Linford blinked to clear the smoke from his eyes and saw the outlaw he had targeted slowly toppling off his horse. Something looked odd about the man, though, and after a split second, Linford realized what it was.

  The man’s head was pretty much gone, and blood fountained up from the stump of his neck. The horrified youngster felt relief when the corpse splashed into the river and he couldn’t see it anymore.

  Linford had aimed for the biggest part of the outlaw’s body and tried to place his shot right in the middle of the man’s back. Instead, the .54 caliber round must have gone high. It could have missed entirely, but luck—good for Linford, bad for the outlaw—had guided it right to the back of the man’s head. It was an amazing shot, the likes of which Linford might not ever make again.

  He couldn’t think about that now. He grabbed the skittish horse’s reins, rammed the empty Sharps back in its sheath, and practically leaped into the saddle again. Then, holding the reins in his left hand, he used his right to pull the Colt Navy from its holster and banged his heels on the horse’s flanks. He charged into the fracas, waiting until he got closer to open fire with the revolver.

  Something hummed past his ear. That was a bullet, he realized, coming close enough for him to hear it. He had nearly gotten his head blown off just now.

  But he was still alive, still in the fight, and he headed for the lead wagon, knowing he was likely to find Prescott somewhere around there. Part of him wanted to charge directly to the Stockton wagon, but he figured he could do more to help Alma and her family in the long run by helping Prescott rally the immigrants to fight off the attackers.

  One of the outlaws spotted him heading in that direction and moved to intercept him. Linford saw orange muzzle flame geyser from the man’s gun. He ducked low in the saddle and thumbed off two shots from the Colt Navy. The outlaw’s horse suddenly collapsed, its front legs folding up as if they had been jerked out from under it. The rider sailed over the dying animal’s head, his buffalo coat flapping wildly behind him like a grotesque pair of wings.

  He crashed to the ground, rolled over and came up on his knees, obviously stunned and groggy. His hat had come off, revealing a shock of dark hair, but the bandanna still covered his nose, mouth, and chin.

  With hooves pounding nearby, he looked up just in time for Linford to shoot him in the chest while racing past. The .36 caliber bullet smashed into the outlaw and knocked him over backward. Linford didn’t even glance at the dead man as he rode by.

  He was close enough to Frank DeVries’ wagon to see the crumpled shape lying on the floorboards of the driver’s box. Linford groaned when he spotted the spreading pool of crimson in which the man lay. He recognized DeVries’ clothing. The wagon train’s captain was either dead or the next thing to it.

  Another mounted outlaw lunged around the back of the wagon and fired at Linford. The young man’s hat flew off his head. Again, he had come mighty close to dying. He had two shots left in the Colt. He jerked the weapon up and triggered one of them. The outlaw twisted in the saddle. Linford had hit him.