William Johnstone - Dead Before Sundown

Frank looked at the horse Salty had been riding. The lame animal just stared back at him, uncomprehending.

“I wish you could talk, old fella,” Frank muttered. “Wish you weren’t lame, too.”

If the horse hadn’t been injured, they wouldn’t have stopped here, and whatever had happened wouldn’t have had the chance to take place.

Frank couldn’t use the horse that had been left behind to go after Salty and Meg, either. The animal couldn’t carry his weight, not without being ruined permanently. Frank wasn’t going to do that.

He patted the horse on the shoulder and said, “I’ll be back for you if I can.”

Then he waded out into the creek, feeling the tug of the current as the knee-deep water swirled around his legs.

When he reached the other side, he spotted a few hoofprints in the mud at the very edge of the stream. He couldn’t tell from them how many horses had crossed over here, but he estimated half a dozen or more.

Those were formidable odds, especially for a man who had no supplies and no extra ammunition except for the rounds in the loops on his shell belt and another handful of bullets stuffed in a pants pocket.

Frank didn’t hesitate, though. He picked up the trail, using bent and broken branches in the undergrowth to tell him which way the riders had gone.

Too bad he didn’t have Dog with him, he mused. The big cur’s keen senses would have led him right to his quarry.

Palmer could have doubled back, Frank supposed, and met up with some allies. That thought had crossed his mind earlier while he was looking for the men he and Meg had heard.

Those men had turned out to be the smugglers he had spied on. They didn’t have anything to do with kidnapping Salty and Meg.

Which meant there were two groups of strangers out here in this wilderness … three if you counted him and his two companions. Plus Joe Palmer, Frank reminded himself.

Damned if these Canadian Rockies weren’t getting as crowded as some of the cities back east, he thought grimly.

The brush was so thick that one man on foot could move just about as fast—or faster—than several men on horseback. Frank was counting on that.

But at the same time, he had to be careful not to rush. He didn’t want to go charging right up the backsides of these kidnappers without any warning. That might get him shot, and more importantly, it might get Salty and Meg shot.

From time to time he stopped to listen, and the third or fourth time he did that, he heard noises ahead of him. Horses moving through the brush, he judged. That meant he was close.

He picked up his pace. He wanted to get ahead of them if he could. Outnumbered like he was, an ambush was his best chance to free the prisoners. Hit the men before they knew what was going on.

The slope grew steeper as he circled to get ahead of the riders. That was good, Frank told himself. It would slow down the horses more than it would him.

He paused again to listen, heard them off to his right, maybe fifty yards away. Like a ghost, he started through the woods again.

The ground leveled off into a shoulder about a hundred yards deep. An almost sheer cliff rose on the far side of the open ground. The riders would have to go around it to one side or the other. From where he was, Frank couldn’t see a trail leading on up the mountainside, but there probably was one somewhere around here. A game trail, if nothing else.

There were several boulders clustered at the base of the cliff, but if he holed up in those to challenge the kidnappers, he would be in effect pinning himself down. They could turn and flee, and he couldn’t do anything to stop them.

Instead he abandoned the idea of getting in front of them and dropped behind a large deadfall at the edge of the slope instead. The fallen tree would make good cover, and he could see the whole stretch of open ground from here.

He waited.

But not for long. Only a few minutes had passed when the riders reached the top of the slope and emerged from the trees.

Frank’s mouth tightened in anger as he spotted Salty and Meg. The old-timer was riding double with the man in the lead, who was a big hombre with a black beard. The man wore buckskins and a wide-brimmed slouch hat.

Salty was in front of him on the horse, draped over the animal’s back like a sack of grain. That had to be a mighty uncomfortable position for the old-timer.

One of the other men had Meg in front of him on his horse. She was sitting up, but the man had an arm held tightly around her. She had lost her hat, and Frank could see that her face was pale with anger and strain. She seemed to be unharmed, though, and that was a relief.

The men were dressed like trappers or hunters, but Frank didn’t see any of the gear they would have had with them if they were after furs. They were leading the horses and the pack mules they had brought from the camp along with Salty and Meg, and they had another pack horse that was loaded down with what looked like a couple of small chests. Frank had no idea what was in those chests.

All he knew for sure was that his friends were prisoners, and he didn’t like that one damned bit. He waited until all seven of the riders had emerged from the trees and started across the open ground toward the cliff.

Then he laid the Winchester’s barrel across the thick log behind which he lay and sent a bullet whip-cracking over the heads of the riders. As they reined to a startled halt and the echoes of the shot rebounded from the surrounding mountains, Frank shouted, “Hold it right there! The next man who moves, I’ll blow him out of the saddle!”

Chapter 12

The big, bearded man in the lead wheeled his horse toward Frank. He hauled Salty up in front of him to use as a human shield. For a split second, Frank still had a shot past the old-timer, but he didn’t take it. The odds of hitting Salty were too high.

“Hold your fire!” the man shouted. Frank didn’t know if the man was talking to him or to the other riders. Either way, no more shots rang out.

“Frank!” Meg cried. “Get out of here while you can!”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Frank said as he squinted over the barrel of his Winchester. “Not without you and Salty.”

“Take it easy, mon ami,” the bearded man said, his accent and the French words giving away the fact that he was a French-Canadian. Frank didn’t know much about Canada’s politics, but he knew that some of the country’s population was descended from the French trappers who had been the first to explore its interior.

This man’s high cheekbones and the faintly coppery shade of his skin indicated that he might have some Indian blood as well. His companions appeared to share that ancestry.

“Who are you?” the bearded man went on.

“That’s my business,” Frank snapped. Palmer wasn’t part of this group, and they didn’t appear to be the sort of men that Palmer would throw in with.

That realization increased Frank’s puzzlement, but this wasn’t the time to ponder the matter. Salty and Meg were prisoners, and that was the only important thing.

“We have business here as well,” the bearded man said, “and we cannot afford for anyone to interfere with it.”

“My friends and I have no interest in you,” Frank replied. “Set them on the ground, leave our animals and supplies, and ride on. We’ll forget about this.”

“I regret to say we cannot. Throw down your gun and come out, or I will snap this old man’s neck.”

The coldness of the man’s voice told Frank that he probably meant the threat. Frank wasn’t used to letting himself be bluffed, though, and there was a chance of that.

Of course, it was Salty’s life he was betting…

“If you do that, you’ll have a bullet through your brain before the old-timer hits the ground,” Frank said.