Costello, who was a slim, oldish man with a shock of graying hair, got up and put on his hat.
“Here, now!” The Fetchen man standing up had gotten his senses back, and he was mad. “Costello, you come back and set down! The same goes for you Sacketts, unless you want to get killed. Black Fetchen is ridin’ up to this ranch right now.”
“We needn’t have any trouble,” I said calmly.
“I’ll get a horse,” Galloway said, and ducked out of the door, Costello following him.
“Black will kill you, Sackett. He’ll fill your hide with lead.”
“I doubt if he’s got the guts to try. You tell him I said that.”
“I hear tell you’re a fast man with a shootin’ iron.” I could just see the gambler stirring around inside him, and it looked as if it was gettin’ the better of his common sense. “I don’t think we need to wait for Black. I’d sort of like to try you on myself.”
“Your choice.”
Meanwhile I walked on into the room, and right up to him. Now, no man likes to start a shooting match at point-blank range, because skill plays mighty little part in it then, and the odds are that both men will get blasted. And anyhow, nobody in his right mind starts shooting at all unless there’s no other way, and I wasn’t planning on shooting now, if I could help it.
So I just walked in on him and he backed off a step, and when he started to take another step back, I hit him. It was the last thing he was expecting, and the blow knocked him down. It was one quick move for me to slip his gun from its holster and straighten up, but the other man hadn’t moved.
“You shuck your guns,” I told him. “You just unbuckle and step back, and be careful how you move your hands. I’m a man mighty subject to impressions, and you give me the wrong one and I’m likely to open you up like a gutted sheep.”
“I ain’t figurin’ on it. You just watch it, now.” He moved his hands with great care to his belt buckle, unhitched, and let the gun belt fall.
The man on the floor was sitting up. “What’s the matter, you yella?” he said to his companion.
“I’m figurin’ on livin’ a mighty long time, that’s all. I ain’t seen a gray hair yet, and I got my teeth. Anyway, I didn’t see you cuttin’ much ice.”
“I should’ve killed him.”
“You done the right thing, to my thinkin’. Maybe I ain’t so gun-slick as some, and maybe I ain’t so smart, but I sure enough know when to back off from a fire so’s not to get burned. Don’t you get no fancy notions now, Ed. You’d get us both killed.”
Well, I gathered up those guns and a rifle I saw in the corner by the door, then I just backed off.
Galloway and Costello were up in their saddles, holding my horse ready.
There wasn’t any move from the house until we were cutting around the corral toward the trail down which we had come, and then one man ran from the house toward the barn. Glancing back, I was just in time to see him come out with a rifle, but he took no aim at us; he just lifted the rifle in one hand and fired two quick shots, a space, and then a third shot … and he was firing into the air.
“Trouble!” I yelled. “That was a signal!”
Ladder Walker, who had hung back, wanting a shot at anyone who had helped to kill Briggs, now came rushing up behind us. The trail to the saddle over which he had come into the valley was steep, and a hard scramble for the horses, but much of it was among the trees and partly concealed from below.
We heard a wild yell from below and, looking back, I saw Black Fetchen, plainly recognizable because of the horse he rode, charging into the valley, followed by half a dozen riders.
Even as I looked, a man ran toward him, pointing up the mountain. Instantly there was firing, but shooting uphill is apt to be a tricky thing even for a skilled marksman, and their bullets struck well behind us. Before they had the range we were too far away for them, and they wasted no more shots.
But they were coming after us. We could hear their horses far below, and saw the men we had caught in the house catching up horses at the corral, ready to follow.
Deliberately, Galloway slowed his pace. “Easiest way to kill a horse,” he said, “running it uphill. We’ll leave that to them.”
Riding close to Costello, I handed him the gun belt and rifle I’d taken from the cabin. When I’d first run out I had slung the belt over the pommel and hung onto the rifle.
Up ahead of us we heard the sudden boom of a heavy rifle … Cap Rountree and his buffalo gun. A moment later came a second shot. He was firing a .56 Spencer that carried a wicked wallop. Personally, I favored the Winchester .44, but that big Spencer made a boom that was a frightening thing to hear, and it could tear a hole in a man it hit so that it was unlikely a doctor would do him much good.
Cap was in the saddle when we reached him, but he made us pull up. “Flagan,” he said, “I don’t like the look of it. Where’s the rest of them?”
There were six or seven behind us, that we knew, but what of the rest?
“You figure we’re trapped?” I asked.
“You just look at it. They must know how we got up here, and they can ride out their gap and block our way down the mountain before we can get there.”
I was not one to underrate Black Fetchen. Back at the Costello place that man had said Fetchen was due to come riding in at any moment, and at the time I gave it no credit, figuring he was trying a bluff, but then some of the outfit had showed up.
Ladder Walker turned his mount and galloped to a spot where he could look over part of the trail up which we had come in first arriving at our lookout point. He was back in an instant. “Dust down there. Somebody is movin’ on the trail.”
“Is there a trail south, toward Bronco Dan?”
Cap Rountree chewed his mustache. “There’s a shadow of a trail down Placer Creek to La Veta Pass, but that’s where you sent some of this outfit. Likely the Fetchens know that trail. If you try it, and they’re waitin,’ it’s a death trap.”
I gave a glance up toward those peaks that shut us off from the west, and felt something like fear. It was almighty icy and cold up there against the sky, up there where the timber ran out and the raw-backed ridges gnawed the sky. My eyes went along the east face of those ridges.
“What about west?” I asked.
“Well,” Cap said reluctantly, “there’s a pass off north called Mosca Pass. It’s high up and cold, and when you come down the other side you’re in the sand dunes.”
“We got a choice?” Galloway asked.
“Either run or fight,” Walker said, “and if we fight we’ll be outnumbered three or four to one.”
“I like the odds,” Galloway said, “but somebody among us will die.”
I looked over at Costello. “Do you know that pass?”
“I know it. If there’s any trail there from here, it’s nothing but a sheep trail.”
“Let’s go,” I said. Below us we could hear them coming – in fact, we could hear them on both trails.
Costello led off, knowing the country best. Cap knew it by hearsay, but Costello had been up to the pass once, coming on it from the ancient Indian trail that led down Aspen Creek.
We started up the steep mountainside covered with trees, and followed a sort of trail made by deer or mountain sheep.
Mosca Pass had been the old Indian route across the mountains. Later it had been used by freighters, but now it was used only by occasional horsemen who knew the country, and sheepherders bringing their flocks to summer grazing.
Beyond the pass, on the western side, lay the great sand dunes, eighty square miles of shifting, piled-up sand, a place haunted by mystery, avoided by Indians, and a place I’d heard talk of ever since entering Colorado, because of the mysterious disappearances of at least one train of freight wagons and a flock of a thousand sheep, along with the herder.
We didn’t have any choice. Black Fetchen undoubtedly had gone himself or had sent riders to look into the story of the Reynolds gold, but at the same time he’d kept riders close to Costello’s place to move in if we tried to rescue him. I thought the only thing they hadn’t guessed was the trail down the mountain from the saddle. Their missing that one was enough to get us a chance to free Costello; but now they were pushing us back into the mountains, leaving us mighty little room in which to maneuver.