The young Mexican asked if he should ride after Muncie.

  “No.” Foster choked back the insult he wanted to hurl at the idiot. “I think Reese and Bateman will let us know if that’s happening. Get to the main road. If anyone’s coming or if anyone’s holding up and trying to figure out what caused those two shots, gallop back here.”

  He found another of his men and told him to fetch another bottle from Mariscos. “Put it on the wagon seat to replace the one just shattered.

  I don’t care what our sassy little witch thinks, Muncie’s an idiot and you can fool idiots all the time. Don’t drink too much of the gin or tequila or whatever you bring out. Or drink it all and fill it with water. I just want a bottle on all those wagon seats.”

  Captain Jed Foster walked across the dusty little street to the spot where Corporal Bowdre had fallen and died. The toe of Foster’s boot scraped the ground and covered the dark spot of drying blood. Foster thought of the irony, how he could have used a good man, a top gun, like that Rebel gunman, instead of having to rely on the fools he had hired to help him.

  On the other hand, if he commanded an army of mercenaries like the late Corporal Bowdre, it would be hard to get rid of them all and be in decent enough shape to make it to the port at Vera Cruz where he could pack up his fortune and sail away. To London, maybe. Or Paris. Or some island in the Mediterranean. Maybe the Sandwich Islands in the Pacific. Or deep down into South America.

  Anywhere would suit him.

  He twisted the sole of his boot over the blood of Bowdre, spit in the dirt, and crossed the street. A new bottle of gin was resting on the seat of the wagon, and the men under his command were going back to their usual business. He went inside Mariscos and ordered a bowl of green chile stew and a bottle of the best tequila in the town.

  He wouldn’t get drunk. Getting drunk would be more dangerous than facing a gunman like Corporal Bowdre. He found a seat where he could see the wagons and the door to The Cantina That Has No Name.

  The food was filling. The tequila was awful, but most likely, it was the best to be found in Rancho Los Cielos.

  He ate. He drank. He watched. Mostly, Captain Jed Foster thought.

  So far, he had anticipated everything—except Soledad Tadeo’s challenge. The hussy had not only challenged him, she had outthought him, and that was something he could not let happen again. It would not happen again.

  He wasn’t concerned that much with the Apaches. He brought the Apaches into the game to up the ante, make the Mexicans under Amonte Negro and Will Muncie and his Southern losers think more, raise more money, get a little bit scared at the competition they would have to deal with.

  Muncie had played into Foster’s hands exactly as expected. And those diehard Southern expatriates had scurried out of that border town with their tails tucked between their legs and their best gunman slung over his saddle with a .45 hole through the center of his body. Muncie would still be a nuisance, but Foster had never met a Reb he could not outfight or outsmart.

  And the Mexican bandit that little girl across the street worshipped? Foster had paid off Amonte Negro with some free Springfield rifles. He had gotten the bandit to do some of his fighting for him. And that was what concerned Foster at that very minute. Some of Negro’s boys were watching the back door to Rancho Los Cielos. Negro wouldn’t do anything until after that little set-to was over. Then he’d flex his muscles and show off his wares . . . and prove to everyone that he was just a stupid Mexican bandit.

  But that left the American Army. Foster expected whoever Colonel Carlton Smythe sent from Fort Bowie to rescue those stolen rifles and bring back Foster’s body or at least his head or scalp to have made the first play already.

  Had Smythe showed his yellow back? Had he even reported the rifles stolen and alerted the Mexican authorities? No, had that been the case, the Mexican army would be surrounding Rancho Los Cielos. So what was taking the Army so long? The little ambush in the hills above Rancho Los Cielos should have started.

  He heard the faint report, and he set the spoon in the bowl in front of him. Foster sucked in a deep breath. He listened again.

  The next pop sounded more definite.

  Foster glanced at the owner of Mariscos, who pretended to ignore the muffled echoes of a gunshot or two. Foster wiped his mouth and rose, crossed the room, and pushed his way into the streets.

  The men were listening too, and looking off to the northeast . . . exactly where Foster expected the Americans to try to sneak into Rancho Los Cielos.

  From The Cantina That Has No Name, Soledad Tadeo walked into the street. She also looked in the direction where Amonte Negro’s cowards were ambushing whoever Colonel Smythe sent to do his secret dirty work.

  Pop. Yes, that was a rifle. Winchester, maybe. Or a Henry. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Yes, that came from a repeating rifle.

  Then . . . Ka-boom! Ka-boom! Those had to be from Springfield .45-70 single-shots. Army issue. Foster had heard those guns fire many times, just not from this newer model.

  Another series of shots sounded too faint, too soft, to be from any kind of rifle. That had to come from a pistol, and counting how fast those shots had been fired, either more than one pistol or at the least a double-action revolver. Foster had to laugh at that. How could a pistol, even a self-cocker, be effective against the power and might of a Springfield rifle?

  The hussy with the dark hair and the brains of a white girl turned around. She understood what was happening in the canyon above her pathetic little village, too.

  Her eyes met Foster’s.

  Realizing he had taken a glass of tequila with him, he raised it in Soledad Tadeo’s direction and grinned.

  She had not thought of this little development, now, had she?

  CHAPTER 45

  Second Lieutenant Grat Holden, out of uniform and practically out of this man’s Army, eased his horse deeper into the canyon. The Schofield .45 remained holstered on his hip. The Winchester repeater was cradled in his arms. The only sound he should have been able to hear was the metallic ringing of the hooves of his horse on the hard-rocked ground. But Holden thought he could hear everything.

  His own heart pounding against his rib cage.

  The blood pulsing through his horse’s veins.

  The wind that blew.

  The sweat that dripped down his forehead and his cheeks.

  He knew his job. He was the sitting duck, sent into the canyon to draw the fire of the lookouts atop the canyon. He just had to figure out a way to live long enough so Sam Florence and Ben “Hard Rock” Masterson could do their jobs, which weren’t as dangerous as Grat Holden’s . . . but were anything but easy.

  He kept his head down as though he was looking straight ahead, just a casual traveler with no thought of being bushwhacked. His eyes, on the other hand, studied both sides of the canyon wall. He was looking for anything that would give away the location of the ambushers. Something that might just save his life.

  An instant later, he thought he saw a flash but could not be certain. It might have been sunlight reflecting off a rifle barrel, but it could very well have been the sun bouncing off a shiny stone. Even more likely, it could have been Grat Holden’s frightened imagination. That meant he had two choices.

  He dived out of the saddle and to a large boulder on his right, near the canyon’s thick, dark wall.

  As soon as he was in the air with his boots cleared of the stirrups, he heard the roar of a heavy-caliber rifle shot. He heard the bullet buzz over his falling body and whine into the rocky wall.

  He had guessed right.

  Holden hit the ground hard, and rolled over as the second shot shattered a small rock to his left and sent shards from the chunk of granite into his cheek and left arm. It stung like hell, but that didn’t hurt nearly as bad as a .45-70 slug tearing through his intestines.

  His horse thundered down the canyon.

  There was another shot, and he heard the horse scream. Holden just caught a glimpse of the horse as it somersaulted head over tail before coming to a rest in the middle of the canyon’s floor. He saw the horse, dead, and he had to fight back the anger. There was nothing he could do about that now.

  Leaning against the boulder, he brought the rifle’s stock to his shoulder and he aimed where he thought he had seen the reflection of the sun, where he guessed that first shot had been fired. He squeezed the trigger, cocked the lever, and fired again. Three more times he touched the trigger and jacked the lever. He was shooting uphill at a target he could not see, but that did the job he wanted.

  Bullets roared past him, slamming into the front, side, and top of the boulder. He sank back down to the dirt, wet his lips, and fished cartridges out of the bandolier that crossed his chest. He fingered them into the Winchester’s magazine and jacked a fresh load into the chamber.

  If he was guessing right, two rifles were shooting from above and to his left. Two more were firing above him and to his right. Shooters were on both sides of the canyon’s top, but that had been expected.

  Four men?

  That didn’t sound right. Four men wouldn’t be enough. There had to be at least one more, probably two or three more. Jed Foster was not an idiot, and he would have made sure the ambush worked. For that, Foster would have used more than four men. More than five.

  Voices called down into the canyon. Holden couldn’t make out the words, but the echoes that bounced across and down the canyon told him that the men above, the men trying to kill him, were Mexican. They were yelling in Spanish.

  So . . . he thought . . . what if the men upstairs were not Foster’s boys?

  He fired again to his right, cocked the rifle, swung around, and sent another round to his left. Then he retreated into his hiding place, pulling himself into as tight a ball as he could possibly contort himself. Bullets rang all around him.

  “All right, boys,” he said softly. “I’ve done my job. You damned well better do yours.” Another bullet smacked the rock across from him and sent shards of lead fragments into his cheek. This time, he tasted blood.

  “And you damned well better do it in a hurry.”

  CHAPTER 46

  The roar of the Springfield rifle took Ben Masterson by surprise. It had come a little earlier than the former Army sergeant expected. Sinking behind a juniper, he brought the Colt Lightning up and aimed through the twisted branches of the tree. The blast of the big rifle still rang in his ears. Whoever had started the ball with the first shot was pretty damned close. Masterson had to grin. He was supposed to be up there trying to save Lieutenant Holden’s life, but the little pup of an officer had drawn the first shot. And that shot had likely just saved Masterson’s hide. Had he not have been warned by the shot, he most likely would have stepped right up to the man . . . who could have blown a hole through the former sergeant’s belly big enough to send a Baldwin locomotive through.

  Another shot rang out from the other side of the canyon. A horse screamed, and Masterson frowned. Some dirty dog had just killed Lieutenant Holden’s horse, and that was the lowest thing a body could do. But that shot had been fired from the far side of the canyon, so it would be up to Sam Florence to kill that bushwhacker.

  More shots boomed. Masterson listened intently. So, two men were up there, one just a few feet from him and the other at least a hundred yards up the trail. Probably even farther than that.

  He concentrated on shots from the other side. If he could count right, that meant four men. Two for Florence. And two, Masterson thought with a grin, for me.

  Masterson backed away from the juniper and inched his way closer to the drop-off, staying low enough that he’d be hard to spot by some gunman on the other side. He spotted the dead horse then looked back and found where the bullets were hitting a boulder. That had to be where Lieutenant Holden was hiding. If those ambushers were worth a tinker’s damn, they would be working their way around to catch him in a crossfire, and rip him to pieces with the heavy slugs. They didn’t have to see him to kill him. If they knew how to shoot, they could perforate the shavetail’s body with ricochets. More often than not, ricocheting bullets did a more thorough job of producing a corpse than head shots or shots straight to the heart. A ricochet could cut a man to pieces.

  Even though his ears rang from the gunfire, Masterson could tell the man he wanted was in the rocks just a few yards ahead of him. He dropped to his stomach and began crawling to a little depression in the ground. Like a rattle-snake sneaking up on some unsuspecting jackrabbit, he moved quickly, but silently.

  Once in the hole, he waited. He listened. The Lightning remained in his right hand, but he did not bother cocking the pistol. That wasn’t because the. 38 he held was a self-cocker. Unlike a single-action Colt, all a self-cocking double-action pistol required was to pull the trigger. That cocked the hammer and released the hammer, while the older single-action Colts had to be cocked manually before they could fire.

  Cocking a revolver made noise. Masterson didn’t want the Mexican behind the rock to hear anything—until Masterson put a bullet in the man’s head or chest.

  The man behind the rock sent another .45-70 bullet into the canyon floor. Masterson heard him laugh, heard the metallic sounds of the breech of the Springfield being opened, a spent shell coming out, a fresh cartridge going in, and the breech closing. The hammer was cocked then the man called out across the canyon to one of his compadres.

  The killer farther down yelled out something. The man nearest Masterson laughed and shouted back at him. The gun roared. The bullet ricocheted off a rock, and two men on the far side of the canyon answered it with gunshots of their own.

  Down the trail toward Rancho Los Cielos, the farther gunman on Masterson’s side yelled again. The near Mexican busied himself with reloading his Springfield and did not bother to answer.

  Masterson looked at his .38 and frowned. If he used the pistol, chances were it would give away his location to the gunman down the trail. That wouldn’t be good for Masterson, and it wouldn’t be good for Grat Holden. Most likely, it would also let the killers on the other side of the chasm think somebody might be on the top trying to kill them . . . which wouldn’t be good for Sam Florence.

  So, Ben “Hard Rock” Masterson told himself, I’ll have to send this old boy to hell the old-fashioned way. I’ll just have to kill him with my own hands.

  That thought made him smile.

  He had not beaten a man to death with his bare hands in a few years, and that had been an Apache sentry on a patrol he had strangled to death.

  Except, it did not work out that way.

  The Mexican bandit had decided to move in order to catch Grat Holden from behind. He stepped around the rock and saw Ben Masterson lying in the small little hole just six feet in front of him.

  CHAPTER 47

  Sam Florence was leaning his Winchester against a rock and drawing the Bowie knife from its sheath when he heard the rapid reports of a double-action revolver across the canyon. He kept one hand on the rifle, and his left hand on the handle of the Bowie, as his keen eyes swept over the canyon to the far side.

  He watched the dark-shirted man, a fat man it appeared, stagger back, driven against a dead tree by multiple shots. The man dropped a rifle at his feet, stepped toward the edge of the canyon, and dropped over the side. He fell silently, dead already from the. 38 bullets Sergeant Ben Masterson had pumped into the killer’s chest. The fall appeared mesmerizing. The corpse flipped silently, head over boots, until it smashed into an overhanging mass of rocks.

  The sickening crunch made Florence cringe as the body bounced off and spiraled—no longer a graceful tumble—in a hideous dash to the ground. It landed in a heap of bloodied rags and smashed bones.

  “Miguel!” a voice shouted from the opposite side of the canyon. A Springfield roared. “Miguel!” the man yelled again.

  The name floated across the canyon, echoing the name repeatedly as if pleading for a response from the crumpled remains of a cold-blooded assassin that lay unmoving down below.

  When the echo died, Florence focused on his task. He couldn’t give any more attention to what had just happened across the gap. If the Mexican sharpshooter’s aim had been true and Ben Masterson was dead, well, there was nothing Florence could do about that. Nothing Grat Holden could do, either, stuck as he was behind a boulder on the canyon floor. Sam Florence had a job to do on his side of the canyon’s top. And that was to kill the two men he knew to be up there. One was just a few feet from him.

  Eliminating that man might have been easy. Florence had figured to sneak around the rock and drive the Bowie knife into the man’s heart. Or slice the throat, cutting as deep as possible to prevent any cry, any alarm, any noise the second sharpshooter might hear.

  Ben Masterson’s killing of the man dead on the canyon floor had ruined any element of surprise.

  The man had been shot multiple times with a fast-shooting pistol, and then—if that had not been enough of a warning, he had fallen over the edge to be seen by all of the killers.

  Even the biggest fool in Mexico and Arizona Territory would likely figure out the man trapped down below was a decoy. At least one man was on the other side of the canyon, and he had just killed one of the ambushers. The pair on Florence’s side had to be thinking that, most likely, the Americans had sent a man up there as well.

  Florence took his hand off the rifle. It stayed where it was, cocked and ready to fire, but he decided to stick with the Bowie. Its edge was so sharp, he could shave with it. He could have trimmed Abe Lincoln’s beard with it.

  He moved it up and close. He breathed silently as he listened for any noise. A twig snapping. A rock rolling. A sandal, a moccasin, or a bare foot touching the ground.

  The man he had to kill first was on the other side of the rock. But which way would he come? To Florence’s left? To Florence’s right? Or would he merely back away to find another hiding place where he could keep watching for Florence or wait for Grat Holden to make a mistake and be killed, all the while looking across the canyon and waiting for Ben Masterson to show himself. The bandit had one advantage. He had a Springfield rifle, a gun that could kill Holden down below or Masterson on the far side. At the close range, he could blow Florence in half.