He suspected there was a trail of some sort leading down into the canyon, since the gang had approached the place from this direction. The Texans cat-footed along the rim in the gathering gloom. They came to a pair of boulders spaced apart like a marker, and sure enough, Bo made out the faint beginnings of a trail between the big rocks. The trail turned into a ledge that zigzagged down the canyon wall.
Bo and Scratch were about to start along the ledge when they heard a voice and stopped short. Somewhere nearby, a man was cursing monotonously. His ire was directed at the fact that he was stuck up here in such miserable weather. When no one replied to him, Bo figured out that the man was talking to himself.
The Devils had posted a guard on this back door into their headquarters. That didn’t come as a surprise. It was a sensible precaution. Quickly, Bo motioned to Scratch, explaining in gestures what he was going to do. Scratch nodded his understanding.
Bo started down the ledge, which was just wide enough for one man on horseback. He would have to be careful. There was literally no room for error. In a struggle, it would be easy to fall off the ledge and plummet the thirty or forty feet to the floor of the canyon.
Bo spotted a little cleft in the rock up ahead to his left. That was where the muttered curses came from. He took a deep breath and walked right past it.
The muttering stopped abruptly. The guard stepped out behind Bo, rammed a rifle barrel into his back, and said, “Hey! Where the hell do you think—”
That was as far as he got before Scratch came up behind him and slammed a rifle butt into the back of his head. At the same time, Bo whirled and grabbed the barrel of the guard’s rifle, wrenching it up so that if the outlaw managed to pull the trigger, the bullet wouldn’t tear through him.
Scratch had struck too swiftly and efficiently for that to happen. The guard folded up without ever knowing what hit him. Bo’s other hand shot out and grabbed the man’s coat to keep him from toppling off the ledge. Scratch got the unconscious man under the arms and dragged him back up to the rimrock.
Once they got there, Bo checked the sentry for a heartbeat but didn’t find one. “I hope he was one of the Devils,” he told Scratch, “because he’s dead.”
“Reckon I hit him a little too hard and busted his skull,” Scratch said without sounding particularly worried about it.
“He stuck a gun in my back, so there’s a good chance he was one of the hombres we’re after. We’ll leave him here and get on down there, maybe see if we can find out what they’re planning.”
They could see the cabin now, squatting on the canyon floor at the base of the wall like some malignant toad. Built on to the side of it were a shed and a corral for the horses. Bo’s plan was to sneak up on the place and try to spy a glance through one of the crudely shuttered windows, maybe eavesdrop on what the outlaws were saying.
They were only about halfway down the ledge, though, almost directly above the ramshackle structure, when the cabin door suddenly opened, spilling light out onto the snowy ground. More than a dozen men in heavy coats and pulled-down hats walked out carrying rifles. There were more of them than Bo expected. Maybe all the gang hadn’t taken part in the ambush at the other canyon.
One man lingered in the doorway, and the last of the others paused to talk to him while the rest went to the corral to saddle their horses. Bo and Scratch flattened out on the ledge so they wouldn’t be as likely to be seen and listened to the conversation taking place in front of the cabin below them.
“When Lowell comes down from guard duty in the morning, you and him start packin’ up all that gold. I want it ready to go when the boys and me get back from Deadwood.”
The voice was familiar. Bo had heard it that night in Chloride’s cabin, when it gave the order to light the coal oil. Chloride had been convinced this man was the leader of the Deadwood Devils, the one who had carved pitchforks into the foreheads of the dead guards on the wrecked Argosy gold wagon.
The man standing in the doorway said, “Sure, Tom, I understand.”
Tom . . . Reese Bardwell’s outlaw brother was named Tom. As Bo looked down at the men below him, he would have been willing to bet that one of them had only four fingers on one hand.
“Good,” the leader went on. “I’m done with this. Once we hit the bank in Deadwood and clean it out, we’ll be back to pick up you and Lowell and the rest of the gold, and then we’re puttin’ these damned Black Hills behind us. I don’t care what the boss says.”
So Bardwell—if that’s who the leader of the Devils was—was working for someone else. That went along with Bo’s theory, too. He didn’t know who the boss was or if there was anything behind the Devils’ reign of terror beyond sheer profit, but at least some of his hunches had been confirmed.
“It’s a shame those blasted Texans had to come along,” the man in the doorway said. “This was a sweet setup until then.”
“Yeah, not knowin’ whether they’re dead or not is the one thing that bothers me,” the leader agreed. He laughed harshly. “But havin’ all that gold will help me get over it.”
The man lifted a gloved hand in farewell and headed for the corral, where one of the other outlaws had saddled his horse for him. They all mounted up and rode away, their horses’ hooves thudding on the snowy ground as they started back down the canyon. They could follow it to the ridge that ran between Deadwood Gulch and the canyon where the Golden Queen mine was located. In weather like this, especially, it would take them most of the night to reach Deadwood.
But once they got there, no one would expect the raid on the bank they had planned. It was the finishing stroke in this violent game. The Devils would sweep into town on a cold, snowy morning and clean out the bank. Sheriff Henry Manning would probably try to stop them, but the lawman wouldn’t be any match for a dozen hardened owlhoots.
But if Gustaffson and the rest of the cavalrymen, along with Bo and Scratch, could get there first, they could have one heck of a surprise waiting for the Deadwood Devils.
Once the outlaws were out of sight, Bo motioned for Scratch to head back up the ledge. When they reached the rimrock, Scratch said, “There ain’t no doubt about it now. Those were the Devils.”
“Yeah,” Bo agreed, “and that dead guard is the one the boss was talking about called Lowell. The other one will probably find his body in the morning when he doesn’t come in from guard duty, but by then it’ll be too late for him to warn the others. They’ll be in Deadwood already . . . and so will we.”
“We’re goin’ after ’em to put a stop to that bank robbery?”
“Yeah, but we have to find Olaf and the other troopers first. Let’s hope they were able to follow our trail.”
It was dark as midnight now, even though it wasn’t long after sundown. The snow still fell. When the wind gusted particularly hard, it seemed to be falling sideways.
“Gettin’ hard to see,” Scratch said as he and Bo rode back the way they had come from. “I hope those soldier boys don’t ride right off a cliff into a canyon.”
That was a legitimate worry, Bo thought. If the storm got much worse, they might not be able to travel, even if they did manage to rendezvous with the survivors from the cavalry patrol.
A few minutes later, dark figures loomed up in front of them, made indistinct by the snow. Bo and Scratch reined in and lifted their rifles. The other riders did the same, and one of them called out the traditional military challenge.
“Who goes there?”
Bo relaxed as he recognized Sergeant Gustaffson’s voice. “It’s us, Olaf,” he called. “Bo Creel and Scratch Morton.”
The cavalrymen prodded their horses forward. “Thank God,” Gustaffson said fervently. “With this snow, we were riding around blindly. I was able to follow your tracks for a while, but between the darkness and the wind, we were lost.”