There was screaming bedlam all around him as he made his lightning decision.
He steadied the automatic and fired.
The first round frayed the cord and tore through the wag bed, knocking out a splintered hole. The second shot hit the rope with an ace on the line, severing it with a loud twanging sound.
“Get out!” Ryan yelled, trying to work his way around the bulk of the upright piano, held on the ravine side of the wag, the side that was already beginning to dip sharply down, ready for the big plunge.
He glimpsed Dean flying out the safe side, though he didn’t see him land.
The world was spinning.
With a desperate acrobatic twist and lunge, Ryan hurled himself off the tailgate, landing clumsily on his back and shoulder, the impact making him drop the SIG-Sauer. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the last of the wag as it slithered ponderously over the brink.
Ryan would never forget to the end of his days the noise as it fell, a noise that seemed to last forever and ever.
The mules, helpless, cried like children at their rushing doom, and then came the sickening crash of wood, flesh and bone, and the hideous jangle of the piano as it smashed to pieces among the sharp-edged boulders, spilling its last chords in a thunderous finale.
After the echoes had bounced their way into stillness, the morning was almost silent.
Ryan fumbled for his blaster and stood, brushing dirt off his coat and pants. He saw that Dean was also on his feet, gripping his own 9 mm Browning Hi-Power.
And their attackers?
Joey had finally stopped moving, thick clots of dark blood oozing from his open mouth, crushed to death by the iron wag wheels.
The bandit that Ryan had shot in the chest was also dead, lying spread-eagled in the rutted dirt, one hand clawed shut on a fistful of barren dust.
Which left the one survivor.
Trapped beneath his dead horse, the one-armed man had stopped wriggling, staring up at Ryan and Dean. His revolver had vanished, and his elegant sombrero had become trampled and bloodied and muddied.
“Let me go, mister. I can’t do you no harm. I just went along with them.”
“Man carries a gun and rides with coldheart killers, then he shouldn’t look for any other ending,” Ryan said. “You die with the company you kept.” He shot the young man cleanly through the forehead.
JOEY’S HORSE HAD FLED back up the trail, the sound of its clattering hooves fading slowly in the immense silence. Ryan stooped to slit the throat of the fallen bay mare, once he’d seen that it had shattered its fetlock in its fall.
“Shame,” he said. “If that horse had stayed around and the little mare hadn’t crippled herself, we could’ve been a good spell on our way to the school well before dark.”
“We leaving the bodies here, Dad?”
“I guess so. We could heave them down the ravine after Lemuel and the piano. Not much point, though. Leave it all like it is. J.B. and Jak should be able to read what’s gone down here. They’ll see our tracks heading southward, clear as day.”
The boy brightened, looking around him. “Wow, that was a triple-bright light, Dad. Shooting out the rope that got my leg caught was well, it was the greatest. I thought for a bit that we was all done for. But you was so cool and in control. You knew we’d be all right.”
“You should learn to say ‘we were done for,’ not ‘was done for,’ Dean.”
He didn’t reveal to his son his own mind-numbing fear that they had all been going remorselessly to hell with the piano.
IT WAS ONLY WHEN they were forced to resort to walking that they realized how fast they’d been going with the mule team.
“How long’ve we gone?” Dean asked, kneeling by a tiny stream that dashed its way across the tracks, cupping his hands to drink from the icy clearness.
“Since the ambush?”
“Yeah.”
“Hour.” He checked the chron. “Well, call it about an hour twenty.”
“That all?”
“Sure is. After you with the water.” The boy wiped his mouth on his sleeve and straightened, allowing his father to take his place by the bubbling stream.