Gunslingers Gold

By Maryk Lewis

Unless they had the protection of a regiment of soldiers, banks at that time were most reluctant to move large amounts of cash or bullion. Johnnie Bell and his friends had just sold a huge herd of longhorns to the hungry miners on the goldfields, and wanted to buy replacement stock at the cattle yards away down river. The soldiers were busy. If the cowboys wanted their money at the cattle yards, they knew they would have to take it there themselves. Trouble was every outlaw in a dozen western territories also knew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maryk Lewis
• Release date: Aug 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9780473323622

Maryk Lewis

Maryk Lewis is a retired secondary school teacher. His main subjects were Geography, English and Social Studies. Bushcraft was an optional extra for senior students. He sold his first published item to a children's magazine in 1954. For military service he served as a radio operator in an armoured car, but was never called to active duty. There are two tartans he is entitled to wear as of right.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Johnnie Bell would have died that day, if the wagon hadn’t got bogged in a Kansas creek bed. So would his sidekick, Eb de Lange. Drygulchers, a waiting band of outlaws, firing from the pine-clad cliffs that lined the river, had planned to gun down their whole party as they were struggling to get the heavy wagon up the crumbling bank. While they were stuck in the middle some hothead fired too soon, and instead of a murderous volley taking them all, the ragged scatter of shots got only half of them. The other six had time to dive for cover.

At the time all hell broke loose Johnnie was trying to fix the business end of a block and tackle to the front axle. He was kneeling in the water, groping under the body of the cart. The first bullet ricocheted off the iron wheel rim right by his ear hole causing an instantaneous reflex which carried him under the wagon. The marksman mistakenly thought he had scored a head shot, and shifted to another target, so that when Johnnie surfaced again, spluttering, he had time to look around.

He was panting, but more with shock than anything. The attack wasn’t entirely unexpected. That was why he had a dozen men with the wagon, but still when it came, he had been caught flat-footed. There should have been a warning from the three men he had scouting ahead.

The horses, tough little mustang crosses that were used for everything around the ranch, were tugging and fretting at the drawpole. The thunder of gunfire was driving them crazy. Mud from under their roughshod hooves swirled away in the current.

Above him on the edge of the stream Skip Pullan lay dead, his blood dripping into the water, the reins from the horses still in his hands. Nearby Hank Carter was down, but still trying. He had his revolver held unsteadily in both hands, while one bullet after another thudded into him. That one shot he got away could have been just a reflex action when he died.

The best effort came from Hernandez, an old man Johnnie had nearly decided to leave at the ranch. He was reining his horse around in circles, all the while loosing off shots until his magazine was empty. Only then did he slump from the saddle, weighed down by all the lead he had absorbed.

Johnnie feared for his other men. Apart from his offsider, the black cowpoke Eb de Lange, who had followed him under the wagon, he couldn’t see any of them, but he knew few could survive the murderous fire of their attackers. He feared even more for his wife, and he exchanged worried glances with Eb, who would also be fearing for his.

Both of their wives had been left an hour back where they had camped for the previous night. The ladies had wanted time to themselves to bathe, and wash their unmentionables. It had seemed perfectly safe to leave them at the time. Their party hadn’t seen a soul, not a hoofprint, in nearly three hundred miles of empty grasslands. Had another party come in from the sides, or come up behind them following their tracks, they should have had ample warning of their approach over the open Kansan prairies, and having fast horses, should have been able to rejoin their own party with time to spare.

The possible danger they had foreseen lay down plains in the country to the front of them, and as had now happened, the main party had to meet it first, supposedly forewarned by the scouts sent ahead.

That warning had never come.

At least, Johnnie thought, his wife Mary-Lou, and her companion Jasmine, would hear the gunfire, and not ride blindly into the trap as he had done.

He ran a gnarled hand over his head to squeeze the water from his hair, and knuckled his eyes to clear them. Blue-black against a clouded sky, powder smoke was jetting from a score of places around the rim of the canyon, perhaps fifty feet above him. The racket of the shots was echoing back off the pine smothered limestone cliffs behind him, and lead was raising dust off the banks, or plunking into the water all about him.

Against the twenty or so of them up there, four men were shooting back. He wasn’t one of them.

Neither was Eb. Both of them had left their weapons on the seat, before they’d stepped down into the water.

‘I’d sure ‘nough like to shoot back at the sods meself,’ Eb commented acidly, glaring out from under the other side of the wagon. He was shaking, and not from the chill of the river.

‘No chance of that,’ Johnnie said regretfully, himself in no better case. ‘They’ll have us cold if we try for our guns.’

‘How we agoin’a get outa this then, Johnnie?’

‘Swim, my friend, swim... under water,’ Johnnie replied.

‘Ah cain’t swim on the top,’ Ed complained. ‘Ah sure don’t know nothin’ about swimmin’ underneath.’

‘Then you’re sure going to learn in a hurry,’ Johnnie told him. ‘Keep your eyes open, and stay where its muddy.’

He suited his own actions to his words. Taking a deep breath, he submerged while still hidden by the body of the wagon, and slid out along the bottom to take advantage of the discoloured water downstream from the flailing hooves of the panicked team.

Letting the current carry him, he used his hands against the bottom to push himself along even faster. He kept his feet still. Kicking with his feet, he figured, would stir the water in a pattern the marksmen on the cliffs might notice.

Willow roots, protruding from the bank, nearly made him lose his breath at one point, but he managed to hang on. At least they indicated that he had reached the trees which leaned out over the stream a short distance below the crossing. There were more, he had noticed, further down, a long line of them.

By the time the current threw him against the second lot of roots, the pain in his chest was all but unbearable. Just one more stretch, he decided, the next lot of roots.

He almost didn’t make it. The world was going black, and although he knew he had hauled himself up to get his face out of the water, he couldn’t seem to breath in. Everything was fading away from him.

Then a second body bumped into him under the water. Eb! Johnnie grabbed at his partner automatically, and the effort forced him to grunt, releasing the pent-up foul air that was stopping him from taking any more in.

Eb surfaced, gasping, beside him.

Neither could speak. Both simply lay at the edge of the water clutching fistfuls of reddish root fibres.

Much of the shooting from upstream had died away, but not completely. At least two of Johnnie’s men were still answering back defiantly, though the men up along the rim had largely stopped. Most of them had nothing to shoot at any more. By the sound of it, the surviving defenders had got themselves in against the cliff face, where many of the outlaws couldn’t get a line on them.

Those who could were having to expose themselves to fire, and everybody was leaving the job to somebody else.

When three of the outlaws rode up they found the deserted wagon paused on the edge of the stream, and not having seen Johnnie and Eb’s quiet departure, saw no point in going any further. They seemed to have gained every thing they wanted.

In fact, not very far downstream the fugitives lay panting, listening to the sounds, and working out what was happening.

Eb, wheezing, pulled himself further out of the water.

So far as Johnnie could tell, nobody could see them in the deep shadows under the screen of willows. That was all very well for him and Eb, but was doing nothing for the men he had been forced to abandon. He tried to think of something they could do, without just committing suicide.

Eb’s thoughts must have been running along the same lines.

‘P’raps we could throw rocks at ‘em,’ he suggested sourly.

‘I’m bloody well going to try,’ Johnnie answered. ‘Come on. We’ll find some damned thing we can do.’

He hauled himself out of the water, and stripped down to his boots and longjohns. Whatever they did would have to be done quietly. Water running out of his outer clothing made too much noise, so he had to take the time to stop and wring things out. Eb nodded, and followed suit.

They made an odd pair. Johnnie, a mountain of a man, blue-eyed and fair of hair, stood six and a half feet in his boots. Muscles rippled in massive shoulders and arms when he moved, but he moved lightly, like the dancer the ladies down country would tell you he was. Eb was six inches shorter, a black bean pole, slim and sleek, except where a rustler’s bullet had left his midriff streaked with scar tissue. Like Johnnie though, he was an easy mover, so when, dressed again, they slipped away through the willows, no branches stirred to reveal their passage.

Between the willows and the foot of the cliffs a stand of cottonwoods gave them further cover, and they were able to stay under it, while they searched for a way of reaching the prairie above. A rockfall looked their best bet, offering a scrub covered scree slope, leading to the break in the rim from where the fallen rock had come.

On their way up, Johnnie picked up a sharp-edged fragment of brown limestone which fitted comfortably into his palm. As a weapon it was primitive, but better than nothing. Eb looked at it, grinned, and found a piece for himself.

A careful peep over the rim of the canyon showed that they had come up beside an extensive patch of sagebrush, which still hid them from the ambushers further along. Johnnie was about to wriggle over the edge into it, when Eb put out a hand and stopped him.

Somebody was coming through the bushes toward them, and would pass some distance back from the edge.

Casting a glance at Eb, Johnnie raised an eyebrow.

The cowpuncher gestured with a hand palm-down, indicating a movement along the rim, and sloping down into the canyon to come back along the bottom. One of the outlaws intended to outflank the two last survivors near the wagon, coming at them from the riverbank, because they couldn’t be got at from above.

Whoever it was out there was skirting the rim looking for an arroyo leading into the riverbed, not knowing that there was a break closer to hand.

Johnnie nodded. That was also his interpretation of the movement in the scrub.

He slid down from the rim again, and waved Eb in the direction of a large limestone slab that had come from the rockfall. There was room for them to crouch hidden behind it, still a good ten feet above the floor of the canyon.

Now and then the slam of a gun firing showed that matters were still at a stand off back at the wagon. For most of the outlaws, heroics were not the order of the day. All they had to do was keep their victims pinned down. If the sortie around the bottom failed to produce quick results, then sooner or later the defenders would run out of ammunition anyway.

Several minutes passed before Johnnie heard again the movement of the outlaw stalking his men. As expected, the fellow had found a way down into the riverbed, and was coming back along the bottom. His route would bring him below the slab where Johnnie and Eb were waiting.

Even their breathing seemed too loud. Surely their target would hear them before he came within their reach?

The scrunch of a boot on scattered dry twigs heralded the man’s appearance below them, a swarthy individual with twin Remingtons strapped to his thighs. In his hands he carried a Sharps breech loader.

At the last moment he sensed Johnnie’s attack, a split second before Johnnie launched himself in a headlong dive.

His rifle swung up, but it had been carried uncocked, because the outlaw still had some distance to go to the wagon.

The time it took to work the mechanism was all Johnnie needed.

With one hand he pushed the barrel away, and with the other he swung his rock, just as he crashed full tilt into the other man. The rock connected. There was a sickening crunch, and the sharp edge sank inches deep into the crushed temple.

Eb was right there beside him, grabbing at the rifle, pulling it away from the dying hands before the cocking action could be completed.

A heel rammed