Chapter 7 - Blood in the Dust Bowl
The first shot came before they reached the second crossing of the wash.
It wasn't a pistol crack; it was the heavy, flat roar of a Sharps buffalo gun from four hundred yards out. The slug passed between Ethan’s shoulder and the bay's neck with the sound of a tearing canvas sail, then hit the dry dirt bank to their right, throwing a shower of stinging caliche pebbles into their faces.
The bay reared, its iron shoes clattering on the shale. Ethan brought his quirt down hard across the horse's flank, wrenching its head around toward the shadow of the bluffs.
"Left!" he shouted. "Get into the boulders!"
Nahimana didn't wait. She slipped from the sorrel while the mare was still at a dead lope, hitting the shale shoulder-first, rolling three times through the spiny prickle pear, and coming up behind a waist-high granite slab with the skinning knife already between her teeth.
A second slug smashed into the empty saddle of the sorrel. The mare shrieked, lunged forward twenty yards, and went down in the gray scrub, her legs thrashing the brush until the dust rose like smoke.
Ethan vaulted off the bay, dragging the Winchester with him, and dove into the rocks beside Nahimana. He landed hard, the wind knocked out of his lungs, the taste of rust and copper rising in his mouth.
Fifty yards down the wash, three men came out of the mesquite at a walk, spread thirty feet apart. They weren't wearing cowboy woolens. They wore long duster coats of gray canvas, their hats pinned back with round silver conchos.
"Ethan Miller!" the center rider called out. His voice was gravelly, carrying the flat twang of the Missouri bottomlands. "You're holding property belonging to the Santa Rita Mineral Trust! Stand out with your hands up and you walk back to Tucson on your own two feet! Keep your head down, and we'll leave your carcass for the ants!"
Nahimana leaned against Ethan’s shoulder. She was bleeding from a long scrape along her cheekbone, but her eyes were bright, almost yellow in the moon’s reflection.
"That is Silas Kane," she whispered, her breath hot on his neck. "He is the one who held the iron while the Mexicans held my arms."
Ethan levered the Winchester. "How many men does he have?"
"Six," she said. "Three are behind the ridge. They want you to shoot at him so they can see your flash."
Ethan lowered the barrel from the granite crest. "Smart girl."
He reached into his pocket, pulled out three loose cartridges, and dropped them into his mouth, holding them under his tongue the way the old rangers did during the brush fights. He took off his hat and shoved it onto the muzzle of his rifle, then eased it up six inches above the stone.
A rifle cracked from the ridge behind them. A .44-40 slug tore through the felt crown, spinning the hat into the ditch.
Ethan didn't flinch. In the three seconds Kane’s man took to cycle his lever, Ethan swung his rifle around the left side of the boulder, forty feet lower than where the hat had been, sighted on the gray puff of smoke lingering in the cedar tops, and pulled the trigger twice.
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A human scream cut through the sagebrush. A body crashed through the dry scrub oak, rolling twenty feet down the embankment before coming to a stop against a dead log, face down in the dirt.
"That's one," Ethan growled, spitting out a brass shell and shoving a fresh round into the loading gate. "Now let's see how much Kane wants that gold."
