“Hell, no—I didn’t hear a damn thing. I think you’re imaginin’ things, Slash. It’s probably old-timer’s disease.”
“Old-timer’s disease, my butt.” Slash’s brown-eyed gaze was perusing the stony ridge peppered with lodgepole pines and firs, all cloaked in sparkling, smoking gowns of high-mountain sunshine. “I heard someone insult us way out here on the devil’s hindquarters.”
A rifle cracked on the ridge. The bullet punched into the trail several feet ahead of the two lead mules and spanged shrilly off a rock. Instantly, the mules tensed, arching their tails and necks. The off leader loosed a shrill bray.
“Whoa!” Pecos said, hauling back on the reins. “Whoa there, you cayuses!”
As Pecos stopped the mules, Slash snapped up his Winchester ’73, pumping a live round into the action. He’d started to raise the rifle, to aim up the ridge, when another rifle barked—this one on his and Pecos’s left. The bullet cracked loudly into the wagon panel two feet behind Pecos. The sound evoked a low ringing in Slash’s ears; it made his heart kick like a branded calf.
Pecos flinched.
As men who’d spent over half their lives riding the owlhoot trail, robbing trains and stagecoaches and evading posses and bounty hunters, they were accustomed to being shot at. That didn’t mean they’d ever gotten comfortable with it.
“You were told to throw your weapons down, buckos!” said a man with a British accent from the pine-clad slope on the trail’s left side, on the heels of the rifle crack’s dwindling echoes. “You won’t be told a third time. You’ll just be blasted out of that wagon boot to bloody hell an’ gone!”
Slash glanced at Pecos, who sat back on the hard wooden seat, holding the reins taut against his chest. Pecos returned Slash’s dark look, then lifted one corner of his mouth, clad in a silver-blond goatee that matched the color of his long, stringy hair, in a woeful half-smile.
Slash cursed. He eased the Winchester’s hammer down against the firing pin, then tossed the rifle into some soft-looking brush to his right. Pecos set the wagon’s brake, wrapped the reins around the whip-sock, then tossed away his Colt’s revolving rifle, which had been leaning against the seat between him and Slash.
Crunching, scraping footsteps sounded to Slash’s right. He turned to see a man descending the steep, talus-strewn ridge on the trail’s right side, weaving through the scattered pines. He held a Spencer repeating rifle in one hand, aiming it out from his right hip while he used his free hand to grab tree trunks and branches to break his fall.
“Now, the hoglegs!” he shouted as he approached the bottom of the canyon.
He appeared to be a young man—whipcord lean and wearing a shabby black suit coat coppered with age over a ragged buckskin shirt unbuttoned halfway down his bony, hairless chest. A badly mistreated opera hat sat askew on his head, from which a tangled mess of lusterless, sandy hair hung straight down to his shoulders.
An old-model Colt jostled in a soft brown holster hanging loose on his right leg.
He stopped near the bottom of the trail, sidled up to a stout pine, and aimed the rifle straight out from his right shoulder, narrowing one coyote eye down the barrel at Slash’s head. “Ain’t gonna tell you old tinhorns again. Just gonna drill you a third eye. One you can’t see out of!”
He gave a crow-like caw of laughter, obviously pleased with his own joke.
“More insults,” Slash said, staring at the coyote-faced youngster. He couldn’t have been much over twenty. The scars from a recent bout of pimples remained on his cheeks and forehead. “First we’re old scalawags. Now we’re tinhorns.”
“You fellas are startin’ to hurt our feelin’s,” said the Pecos River Kid, looking from the younker on the right side of the trail to the Brit now descending the slope on the trail’s left side.
“We’ll hurt more than that, old man,” said the limey as he dropped down even with the kid, on the opposite side of the trail. He was older but not any better-looking. “If’n you don’t shed those shootin’ irons I can plainly see residin’ in your belt sheaths, you’re gonna be snugglin’ with the diamondbacks. The knives, too. Nice bowies, they appear. Might have to confiscate those. I’m a knife man, myself. Had to be in Five Points. I have quite a collection, and an ever-growin’ one, I might add.”
He smiled, showing large, horsey teeth the color of old ivory. “I keep ’em sharp enough to split hairs with, don’t ya know.” The smile grew more suggestive, menacing.
Slash exchanged another dark glance with Pecos. Slash carefully slid his two matched, stag-butted Colt. 44s from their holsters—one positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip, the other thonged on his right thigh—and tossed them away, again aiming for a relatively soft landing. As a man who’d lived his life depending on his guns to stay alive, he didn’t like mistreating them.
Pecos wore only one pistol—a big, top-break Russian. 44—in a holster tied down on his right thigh. He pulled the big popper free of its holster with two fingers and heaved it into some brush on the trail’s left side, near where the limey stood aiming his Winchester at him.
When he and Slash had both gotten shed of their bowie knives as well, the two ex-cutthroats and current freighters sat in uneasy silence, hands raised shoulder-high, palms out. Slash didn’t like this position. He wasn’t used to it. He was usually the one calling the shots and facing men staring back at him, warily, with their own hands raised shoulder-high.
He hadn’t realized what an uneasy feeling it was, having guns held on you, your life almost literally in the hands of someone else. Someone who might just have an itchy trigger finger, like the scrawny kid in the opera hat, for instance. The kid not only looked like he had an itch to sling some lead, but the maniacal glint in his coyote eyes told Slash he had a fondness for killing.
Or at least for inflicting fear.
The kid and the limey continued on down the slope, keeping their rifles aimed at Slash and Pecos. As they did, two more men appeared, stepping out from behind boulders on either side of the trail, thirty and fifty yards beyond, respectively, where the trail doglegged to the left.
One was a big, beefy Mexican in a shabby suit that was two sizes too small for him. He’d probably stolen the garb off some hapless wayfarer now feeding buzzards in a deep mountain ravine. He wore a bowler hat and two sidearms, and was wielding a Winchester Yellowboy rifle. A thick, black mustache drooped down over the corners of his mouth.
The other man was almost as big as the Mexican, but he was older, maybe in his forties. He had red hair beneath a black slouch hat. He was dressed in a paisley vest and sleeve garters, like a pimp or a gambler, and he carried a double-barreled shotgun at port arms across his chest—a grim, angry-looking gent with a large, wide slab of a face outfitted with small, gray eyes set too far apart, giving him the look of a demented mongrel. All four were likely riding a bout of hard luck in these remote mountains, probably having followed gold veins to nowhere. They’d probably thrown in together to make do, which meant haunting lonely trails for pilgrims to plunder and send nestling with the diamondbacks.
The redheaded mongrel’s thick lips were set in a hard line. His ratty string tie blew back over one shoulder as he caught up to the Mexican, and they stopped about ten feet out beyond the two lead mules, who shifted uneasily in their hames and traces.
“How much you carryin’?” asked the red-haired man, giving his chin a belligerent rise and shoving it forward.
“I’ll do the askin’, Cord,” said the Brit.
“Get on with it then,” Cord said, an angry flush blazing in his nose.
The Mexican grinned as though nothing thrilled him like dissension.
The limey turned to Slash and Pecos. “How much you carryin’?”
The