“Jesse!” Dal shouted. “Gather the girls an’ get ’em away! Back to our last hide-out!”
Dal was firing steadily, then reloading his pistol with an extra loaded cylinder he carried.
Mac waved him back. “Let’s get back into the woods!” Firing was general now. “Jack! Get the horses!”
Mac moved along the edge of the woods. The fishing men had disappeared. Caught on the open beach, virtually without cover, they ducked and ran for any shelter they could find, dropping behind hummocks of sand, the wheels of the wagons, or anything else.
Yet there were perhaps a dozen of them left, and some were skilled fighting men. Without direction they broke into a rough skirmish line and started for the trees.
Happy Jack waited, studying the situation. The horses were in a rope corral running from one of the wagons, around a stunted pine, then on to the supply wagon and back to the first wagon. When all eyes were on the woods he stepped out quickly and knife in hand, slashed the rope. Instantly, he grabbed the nearest horse and riding Indian fashion drove the rest of them ahead of him into the trees, whooping and yelling,
Dal caught a horse and Jesse another. Mac retreated, pausing to slip one of the loaded tubes from his Blakeslee Quick-Loader into the butt of the Spencer in place of the empty.
Ducking swiftly among the trees and herding several horses before him, he headed for their last hide-out. It was a matter of seconds now. They had to get the girls mounted and out of here before the attackers closed in.
There would be no quarter now, for anyone. They would be killed on sight and the girls taken where they happened to be caught.
Mac turned, feeing toward the woods, backing swiftly away.
What about Kate? Where was Kate? What would happen to her?
Fourteen
Kate’s horse, feeling her excitement, had edged a little ahead, and they were almost to the small stream they must cross that emptied from a lake into Mission Bay. Beyond were some trees. Suddenly, ahead of them, there was an outburst of firing.
Instantly, she pointed out across Mission Bay toward the wider waters of Copano Bay. “Look!” she cried.
Ashford turned his head, saw the masts and sails of a ship, heard the firing, and was distracted only an instant. Kate leaped her horse into the stream, crossed it quickly, and turning at right angles, slapped the spurs to the horse and raced for the woods.
A rifle came up. “No! No! Take her alive! Don’t shoot!”
Gushing grabbed his sleeve. “Colonel! The camp! We’re being attacked!”
“It’s the Travens! Go in fast and we’ll get ’em!”
They went over the beach and up to the wagons at a dead run. The horses were gone, four dead men lay on the ground and three others wounded, one of them moaning for help. From inside the woods they heard an occasional shot.
Ashford pulled up at the wagons. “Gushing, see what you can do for that man. Hayden, Cutler … try to catch up some of the horses. They’ve been stampeded.” A glance into the girls’ wagon told him they were gone. Well, they wouldn’t get far. He had too many men.
They started for the woods, and he ordered them back. “There’s enough out there now. Get some coffee, get something to eat. If they come up empty you’re going to have to go out.”
Butler came toward him, explaining. “Came right out of nowhere, Colonel. Sudden attack. Some of the boys were fishing, an’ …”
“I left you in command, Butler. I depended on you.”
“Yes, sir. I am sorry, sir, but I was having trouble with some of the men. They wanted the girls.”
Kate … that damned Kate! He should never have trusted her, not for a minute. Yet he had not trusted her, just been a little careless.
He got down from his horse and looked around with a sudden feeling of emptiness, of loss. It was not Kate. It was simply that everything was getting away from him, and that damned Connery had seen it. Who was he to be so sure of himself? What had he ever done?
One of the soldiers had pulled a log up alongside the fire, and Ashford went now and sat down. He took his hat off and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. What had ever possessed him to kidnap those women, anyway? Nothing but trouble and more trouble. Trouble with his men, bringing the Travens down on him, and giving Connery the opportunity to make a fool of him.
He had to think … think! He had the hat, and there was a rabbit in there somewhere, if he could just lay hold of it. Somehow he could bring victory from … he started to say defeat but shied from the word. He could yet win. He had to win.
Butler came up to him with a cup of coffee. “Here, sir. You’re tired, sir, and you haven’t eaten.”
He accepted the coffee. “Thanks, Butler, you’re a good man.”
Butler turned sharply away and stood for a moment. No, damn it, Butler thought, he was not a good man! A loyal man, maybe, but nobody in this outfit was a good man.
He had been a good soldier. He had fought hard, but when the Confederacy lost, he lost, and he should have gone home like the others instead of following this wild-goose chase. Again, it was that sense of loyalty carried too far that had brought him here. Being loyal was not enough. One had to be loyal to the right cause, the right person. How many men and women, Butler wondered, had been trapped into trouble and even crime out of a sense of loyalty?
Or was it an unwillingness to recognize evil in one’s friends?
He remembered once when he was a boy he and several other boys had been egged on by the one who was their leader into abusing a smaller boy. He hadn’t wanted to but lacked the courage to say no. Was it the same now?
Butler walked away toward the sea, watching the ship, which had grown large on the bay as it drew nearer. What kind of a man was he, anyway?
What had happened down there at Connery’s ranch?
Whatever it was it had shaken Ashford, and they had obviously been unsuccessful. Gushing would tell him, if he asked.
Was he going to ask? After all, what difference did it make? This was over, anyway. They had played out their string and there was nothing left.
A horse … what he needed was a horse.
Two miles back from the coast Mac and Dal Traven rode up to where Happy Jack and Jesse had stopped with the girls. “Move out,” Mac said. “Don’t wait a minute longer. Right over there is Refugio. You know it, Jack. Take the girls there and find shelter for them, a home or a hotel, somebody who will put them up.”
“What about you?”
“Dal an’ me have got to find Kate. She’s out here somewhere. That outfit’s going to Hell in a handbasket. They’re falling apart, and as they do, they’ll get meaner.
“Don’t waste time, Jack. There’s the Mission River. Don’t try to follow it – it’s too crooked. But if you keep it in sight it will take you right to Refugio.”
“You don’t need to tell me. I know Refugio.”
Mac turned sharply. “Jack? You haven’t been in trouble there, have you? I mean you can go into town?”
“You make it sound like a feller’s been in trouble wherever he goes. No such thing. I got friends in Refugio, and it’s a right nice little place.”
When they were gone, Dal turned toward his horse. He stopped beside it, sat on a log, and began to clean his pistol. “Kate’s a good woman, Mac. She’s the best.”
“You get that gun ready, Dal, and we’ll go find her.”
He sat down on a log and leaned his head back. If he could sleep! Just for a minute …
Kate Connery had skirted some marshy ground and found herself pushed further north and a bit west. She walked her horse into the woods, looking for a place to hide. She was sure they would come looking for her, but … shots, a lot of shooting off toward the wagons.
Finding a small knoll she rode up it, and from among the trees she could look off in the direction from which she had come. She was in time to see the last of the detachment racing off toward the fighting.
So she was alone. Yet could she be sure? They might have sent somebody after her.
She got down and led her horse into the deepest, darkest patch of woods.
What now? The Travens were out there now, and one of them was Dal. When she had believed Dal was dead she had turned away from all men for over a year, then Frank Kenzie, who was a good, decent man, had started coming around, hat in hand, to see her. She liked him. He was nothing like Dal, neither as exciting nor as strong, but what was a girl to do? Dal was dead. At least, she had believed he was dead.