Chapter 25 - The Midpoint Shift: Ambush on Granite Creek
The shot was followed instantly by a volley of rolling thunder.
"Dismount!" Caleb roared, throwing himself from his saddle into the scrub oak beside the ditch. "Morrison’s outriders! They took the ridge trail!"
Silas yelled as a bullet tore through his mule’s pack, showering us with shredded canvas and surveyor’s notes. I grabbed Zora by the arm and dragged her off her pony just as a heavy slug slammed into the pommel of her saddle, splintering the rawhide tree.
We tumbled into a dry wash behind a boulder of gray granite. The smell of black powder drifted thick down the draw, acrid and sulfurous.
Above us, on the rim of the cut, three men in grease-stained canvas coats were working the levers of their Winchester repeaters, methodically pinning us against the creek bank. I recognized the lead shooter instantly: it was Cole Vance, Morrison’s chief enforcer, a man whose left eye had been taken by a knife fight in Tucson and whose cruelty was legendary from Red Creek to the Gila.
"Jesse!" Vance yelled down, his voice echoing off the canyon walls between rifle reports. "Morrison says you can keep the Indian girl’s scalp if you drop that leather ledger in the road! But that traitor brother of yours stays here for the buzzards!"
Beside me, Caleb was already firing back with a long-barreled Remington revolver, the heavy smoke pluming around his gray coat.
"He’s got four men on the high ground, Jesse!" Caleb yelled over the roar of the gunfire. "Give me the ledger! If I slide behind the boulders to the western notch, I can flank them with the saber! But I need the papers in my coat so they don't burn them if we get overrun!"
Zora reached into Silas’s pack, which lay half-spilled in the dirt between us. Her fingers closed around the battered, leather-bound volume—the ten-year-old ledger that held the fate of every soul in Red Creek.
She didn't give it to Caleb.
She turned, pressed her back against the granite rock, and looked straight into my eyes. Her skinning knife was in her teeth, her Spencer carbine cocked in her hands.
"They are thirty yards up the slope," she said, her voice eerily calm amidst the crashing gunfire. "If you climb the eastern scree, Jesse, you can take Vance from behind. If you give the book to your brother, you will never see it again. Choose."
Caleb reached out, his scar white with fury. "Jesse! I am your blood! You listen to a savage over your own flesh?"
The gunfire overhead intensified, chipping shards of granite that rained down on our hats like hail. Silas was curled in the dirt, muttering prayers in Latin. Vance’s men were moving down the slope, their boots sliding on the scree.
I looked at Caleb’s outstretched hand, then down at Zora’s unblinking, dark eyes.
May you like
I didn't take the book. I drew my Colt, kicked off the boulder, and threw myself directly toward the steep eastern scree, running straight into the teeth of Vance’s rifle fire.
***
