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snarl, a nasty sound, the flattened bullet could have made an ugly wound.
Crawling a dozen feet, and scrambling through the brush, I got up
again, rounded a boulder, and was in plain sight of them. I brought my rifle
up swiftly. An Apache was running straight toward me when I stepped out, but
before he could stop or hunt cover, I squeezed off my shot.
He was not seventy yards away and was facing full toward me, and
there was no way I could miss. The bullet caught him running, and he took two
steps before he pitched on his face in the gravel of the slope.
Up the watercourse I could hear scrambling feet, and I ran that
way. I was taking long strides, leaping from rock to rock like a mountain
goat, with lead spattering around me. Once I lost my footing, my heel skidded
off a water-worn boulder, and I was pitched into the sand. I came up fast and
felt a bullet snatch at my hat as I fired ... and missed.
The Apache I'd seen was gone. The one I had killed was still lying
back there on the gravel.
My breath was tearing at my lungs but I scrambled on up, crawling
over boulders, pulling myself from rock to rock. From time to time I was out
of their sight.
Suddenly Rocca was right ahead of me. He turned to speak and I saw
the bullet catch him. It dusted him on both sides, and he squatted suddenly on
his haunches with blood coming from his side, staining his shirt.
He let go of his rifle and started to fall forward, but I caught
him.
Ahead of us was about sixty yards of talus slope, and then the
hollow toward which we'd headed.
When I caught Rocca I just naturally let him fall across my
shoulders, catching hold of his collar with my right hand. My Winchester was
in my left, and I reached down and got a finger through the lever on his rifle
and lunged up straight. Then I started up the slope.
That struggle up, with Rocca across my shoulders, my breath most
gone, and those bullets coming toward us from behind ... I never want to do
that again.
Somehow I made it, and then stumbled and sort of fell into the
hollow. Somebody lifted Rocca off my back, and I saw he'd been hit at least
one more time.
Gasping for breath, I stared around me. They were all there,
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Dorset, the children, Murphy, and Battles, and the horses. And now there was
us two.
"The trouble is," John J. Battles said, "we're trapped. There's no
way out."
Chapter 13
The hollow was nowhere more than seventy or eighty feet across,
and the side up which we had come spilled over in a slope of broken rock and
gravel. Elsewhere the sides sloped up steeply in banks of blown sand and
gravel, littered with broken rock from the escarpment above, and dotted with
sparse brush. The sheer wall above varied from eight feet in height to twice
that.
Our rifles could command the slope down to the canyon where the
Apaches now were. With no trouble, one or two men could prevent them from
reaching us. On the other hand, if they reached the top of the mesa above us,
we could be picked off at their leisure.
My eyes searched the rim. It was cracked and broken, and there
were places where a man might be able to reach the top, but no place where a
horse could go up.
Dorset was working over Rocca, she had him resting as easy as he
could, and she was stopping the blood. Harry Brook, needing nobody to tell
him, had bunched our horses at the back of the hollow, out of rifle shot from
below. The children were huddled together, watching with wide eyes. Nobody was
saying anything, but our situation looked bad. We had water enough for a day,
perhaps two.
Slowly, I got to my feet. I said, pointing to the rim, "I'm going
to find a way out of this hole."
"Wings." Rocca spoke around the cigarette Dorset had lighted for
him. "You would need wings."
"Spanish," I said, "you an' Battles stand 'em off. I'm going up
yonder."
They studied the wall. "That's more of a climb than it looks,"
Spanish said. "But we'd better have somebody up there to hold them back."
I started up the slope, angling across it for easier going. It
took all of ten minutes to get to the foot of the escarpment.
On the rock wall I came to one of the cracks I'd seen from below.
It was a foot wide at the bottom, widening above to maybe three feet. Here and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]