beat Krysty through it despite her shorter legs. But just barely. Then Krysty plunged between the splintered vine stumps and the hastily cut-up tangle beyond.
The ground suddenly sloped away beneath her. The thin top layer of clay mud acted like oil beneath her boot soles. She lost all purchase, fell on her rear and slid down into a gully they hadn’t even seen was there, thanks to the exuberant growth of the vines that had hemmed them in.
At the bottom ran a thin trickle of a stream. Ryan was on his feet; J.B. bounced right up beside him. He still clutched his inevitable fedora to his head with his right hand.
He helped Mildred up as Krysty slid down into the tiny stream with a splash. “What the hell did you do, John?” Mildred demanded.
As Krysty stood, still a little dizzy, she saw the Armorer give Mildred a quick grin.
“I happened to have a quarter-block of C-4 stashed away in case of emergency,” he said. “I always say, there’s few problems in life that can’t be settled by a proper application of high explosives.”
Doc slid down on his heels, surprisingly nimble, his stork legs bent and the black coattails of his frock coat flapping. Ricky followed far less gracefully, sliding on his belly, raising quite a pink-slurry wave.
“Tsk, tsk,” Doc said, bending down to grab a strap on Ricky’s backpack and haul him sputtering out of the water. “Young people these days have so little fortitude.”
“It’s not fortitude,” Ricky said, spitting out water. “It’s bad luck. I tripped, okay? Nuestra Señora! Cut me some slack, here.”
Krysty took quick stock of their new surroundings. As they had seen before, the narrow gulch was clear of the thorn vines. It ran down, none too steeply, toward her left, when her back was to the blown-up section. Vaguely northwest, she reckoned.
“Uh, guys,” Ricky said. “We got a new problem.”
She turned to see the youth pointing a mud-dripping arm up the small ravine.
Up toward the top of the cut, not thirty yards away, a gigantic hog stood glaring at them with enraged red pig eyes and shaking a head full of tusks like rusty sickles.
“Nothin’, boss,” Scovul called. The black marshal was riding his black gelding back down the road through the thicket. Its white-stockinged feet were kicking up geysers of thin red mud at every step.
“No way they took the road,” the chief deputy marshal said. “We’da caught ’em up by now, sure as shit.”
Cutter Dan grunted. “Ace.”
His two trackers were half Choctaw and Wild raised. They had confirmed that the scumbags who rescued the white-skinned mutie from Judge Santee’s justice had headed west initially. But they hadn’t made it away with enough horses to carry all of them; Mort and Old Pete had found several of the animals grazing near an old burned-out farmhouse that the thicket hadn’t reclaimed yet. The wag was abandoned there, too. They might’ve piled the extra perps into it, but would never have been able to outpace the swift mounted pursuit they surely knew would follow.
He turned back to the miserable cluster of people standing in the rain by their horse-drawn covered wag with their hands up.
“Can we go now, Marshal?” the older man asked. “Whoever you’re looking for, you gotta know by now we had nothin’ to do with ’em.”
In a way it was a relief they had headed off into the Wild. Had they had enough horses and just kept riding west down the road, they’d’ve cleared the mutie thicket in a day or two. Then the odds of Cutter Dan and his sec men ever catching up with them would have become small, indeed. Bashing through the thorn vines would take them days.
It was a pain in the ass following them, of course. Old Pete and Mort would pick up their trail eventually. But Cutter Dan’s posse couldn’t move much quicker than they could. If they could even go as quick.
“Marshal,” the bearded wagoneer said. “Can we please be on our way? Or at least let us put our hands down. My arms are getting tired. And the womenfolk are bound to catch their death, standing out here in the drizzle like this—”
Without even a glance his way, Cutter Dan drew his huge Bowie knife, flipped it into the air, caught it by its tip and threw it. Hard.
He heard a thunk. The wag dude’s words trailed off.
Cutter Dan looked at him then and nodded. The fat blade had caught the bearded man right in the chest, with enough velocity to punch through his sternum and cut his heart in two. The trader coughed once and collapsed like an empty sack.
The women screamed. The younger man yelled, “Pa!”
He jumped to cradle the older man’s head in his lap, plopping his skinny rear right down in the road mud. The older man’s eyes were rolled up in his head. Instant chill.
“You still got the touch, C.D.,” his deputy drawled.
The women clung to each other and screamed. The younger trader raised a reddened face running with tears. His mousey hair was plastered to his head. His features were all knotted up like a gaudy-man’s bar-rags.
“You bastard!” he shrieked at Cutter Dan. “You murdered my pa in cold blood!”
In a wave of reddish spray he hurled himself off the roadway at the sec boss, his fingers clawed. Cutter Dan met him with a hard boot heel to the chest. The younger man flew backward, landing in an even bigger splash within a foot of where he’d started out.
“Assaulting an officer of the peace,” Cutter Dan said, shaking his head. “That’s a capital offense, you taint.”
“We take him back for the Judge to string up, Dan?” Hammer asked.
“Not this trip. We travel light. We gotta catch these coldheart pricks.”
A gunshot cracked. The kid’s head jerked to the side as a dark spray gushed out the temple. He fell across his father’s cooling corpse.
“Why’d you go and waste a good round on the taint, Yonas?” Cutter Dan asked the marshal with the eye patch, and a smoking Ruger Old Army .44 in his hand.
“It’s just black powder, C.D.,” Yonas said, gesturing with the handblaster.
“Bullets cost jack,” Cutter Dan said. “So do caps and even the powder. Oh, well, smokeless or smoke-pole, can’t ever get the bullet back in the blaster.”
Like their now-deceased menfolk, the two female captives showed an age split that hinted strongly they were mother and daughter. Oddly enough, the mother was the better-looking of the two, with dirtwater blond hair streaming like waterweeds down her back and big jugs in her homespun dress. She was sturdy in the hips but not any kind of sow. The daughter had a crossed eye and a hint of black mustache, though otherwise she was put together pretty decent. She was slim built but clearly hadn’t missed many more meals than her mother. Apparently being traders had worked out well for them.
Until today, anyway.
The
