LITMIR.BIZ

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seen by any enemies lurking in the night. That was enough to boil their coffee and fry some bacon. Davidson promised the men that their next supper would be a better one, since they would have reached the canyon by then.

      After they had eaten, the men settled on shifts for standing guard. The ones who would be sleeping first spread their bedrolls on the ground and circled them with ropes to keep snakes from crawling up and trying to share their blankets. Despite the heat of the day, the thin, dry air would cool off rapidly as night settled down.

      Bo and Scratch had deliberately volunteered for separate shifts on guard duty. They didn’t trust the other men completely—they didn’t trust Jim Skinner at all—and thought it would be best if at least one of them was awake most of the night.

      Bo rolled up in his blankets first and dropped off to sleep immediately, a skill he and Scratch had both learned more than forty years earlier when they were both members of Sam Houston’s army during the Texas Revolution. He didn’t know how long he had been asleep when he came awake instantly at a light touch on his shoulder.

      “Roll out, pard,” Scratch whispered. “We got trouble comin’.”

      CHAPTER 5

      Bo pushed his blankets aside and reached for his coiled gunbelt and holstered Colt, which he had placed beside him before he went to sleep. As he got up from the ground, he strapped the gunbelt around his hips and then quickly thonged down the holster.

      “What is it?” he asked, keeping his voice as quiet as Scratch’s.

      “Ain’t sure, but I heard some horses out there in the darkness. Just a hoofbeat or two, and then a little whinny that stopped short, like somebody’d clamped a hand over the critter’s nose. That’s all, but it was enough to tell me that somebody’s skulkin’ around out yonder.”

      Bo agreed. The lurkers might be Indians or bandits or maybe even some innocent vaqueros who were just passing through the area—although that last possibility wasn’t very likely.

      “Who’s on guard with you?” Bo asked.

      “That Britisher, Lancaster.”

      “Did you tell him what you heard?”

      “Nope. Figured I’d roust you out first.”

      “Go tell him about it now, while I wake up Davidson and the others.”

      “Be careful around Skinner,” Scratch warned. “A hydrophobia skunk like him is liable to lash out and bite anybody who gets too close.”

      Bo nodded. He had already thought the same thing about Skinner.

      He went over to Davidson’s bedroll first and knelt beside the mine owner. “Mr. Davidson,” Bo said quietly.

      Davidson rolled over fast and sat up with a gun in his hand. Bo saw the light from the half-moon in the sky overhead glint on the barrel. “Easy,” he said. “It’s just me, Bo Creel.”

      “Bo,” Davidson said as he lowered the revolver. “Sorry. I guess I was dreaming. I thought there was some sort of danger out there—”

      “Dreams sometimes come true. Scratch heard something suspicious a minute ago. He and Lancaster are checking it out.”

      Davidson pushed his blankets aside and stood up, still gripping the gun. “Wake everyone else,” he said in a brisk voice. “We need to be ready in case—”

      Before he could go on, a man yelled and a gun suddenly blasted in the darkness, followed instantly by the slamming reports of two more shots. Bo saw the muzzle flashes from the corner of his eye, and knew they came from the general area where Scratch had gone. Fearing for his trail partner’s life, he broke into a run as behind him Davidson shouted for the rest of the men to get up.

      Whoever had snuck up on the camp wasn’t the only danger, Bo knew. In the dark like this, and roused out of sleep, if the men Davidson had hired started firing blindly, they’d be just as likely to shoot each other as anybody else.

      Not to mention the fact that a snake-blooded varmint like Jim Skinner might not-so-accidentally take a few potshots at somebody he didn’t like—such as Bo and Scratch. If he killed them, he could always claim that he had mistakenly thought they were Apaches or bandits or whoever the attackers turned out to be.

      That thought flashed through Bo’s head as he ran toward Scratch, but he didn’t have time to do anything about it. More Colt flame bloomed in the night like crimson flowers as shots roared out.

      Bo spotted a couple of struggling figures, and from the moonlight reflecting on the silvery hair of one of them, he knew it was Scratch. The other man still wore his hat. It was a high-crowned sombrero, telling Bo that the lurkers were Mexican bandits. He stepped up behind the hombre wrestling with Scratch and brought his Colt crunching down on the man’s head. The sombrero absorbed some of the blow’s force, but it was still powerful enough to unhinge the bandit’s legs and drop him to his knees. Scratch laid him out from there with a roundhouse right.

      “Thanks, pard,” he told Bo as he bent to pick up the Remingtons he must have dropped when the bandit attacked him. “They come up out of the arroyo and jumped Lancaster before I could warn him.”

      “Is he all right?”

      “Don’t know.” Scratch wheeled in that direction. “Let’s go see.”

      They started toward the spot where Lancaster had been posted, crouching as bullets whined overhead. Some of the shots came from the lip of the arroyo, while others originated in the camp. The battle lines had been drawn pretty quickly.

      And Bo and Scratch found themselves trapped between the two forces.

      “Get down!” Bo said as a bullet tugged at his sleeve. “Those slugs are coming too close for comfort!”

      Both of the Texans hit the dirt and crawled behind some good-sized rocks that offered at least a little cover. From there they could fire at the bandits who had crept up to the camp along the arroyo. They aimed at the muzzle flashes, because they couldn’t see anything else in the darkness.

      After a few minutes, someone yelled in Spanish over the thundering gunshots. Bo caught enough to the words to recognize them as an order to fall back.

      “They’re lighting a shuck,” he told Scratch as he paused with his thumb on the hammer of his Colt. Sure enough, the shots from the arroyo began to dwindle, and then stopped completely a moment later. A ragged rataplan of swift hoofbeats drifted through the night.

      Bo turned his head and called toward the camp, “Hold your fire! They’re pulling out!”

      Davidson added to the order, shouting, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

      An eerie, echoing silence fell over the landscape as the shooting stopped. After a moment, Davidson broke it by asking, “Are they gone?”

      “I think so,” Bo replied. “Better lie low for a few more minutes, though, just to be sure. Scratch and I will check out the arroyo.”

      “We will?” Scratch said.

      “We’re the closest to it,” Bo pointed out.

      “Yeah, I reckon,” Scratch agreed with a sigh.

      After reloading their guns, they darted out from behind the rocks. The arroyo was only a few yards away. They covered that ground quickly and slid down the sloping bank to the sandy floor of the arroyo. There was enough moonlight for them to see as they made their way along the jagged gash in the earth.

      “The varmints are gone, all right,” Scratch said after he and Bo had searched for a few minutes.

      “They figured to take us by surprise and wipe us out before we knew what was going on,” Bo said. “They hadn’t counted on those keen ears of yours, partner.”

      He lifted his voice and called to the rest of the men, “All clear down here!” The words were

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