Chapter 5 - The Ambush at Red Rock Seep
Clay dropped the oilskin packet into his shirt pocket and snatched his Marlin rifle off the rock in a single fluid motion. Beside him, Kea was already moving, dropping low into the shadows behind the boulder where Tomás was sleeping. She shook the boy awake with one hand while clamping her palm over his mouth to silence the startled cry in his throat.
Clay crept toward the narrow mouth of the box canyon, hugging the sheer granite wall. The moon had dipped behind a bank of high clouds, plunging the gorge into absolute, pitch-black shadow. He could hear them now—two horses picking their way carefully up the dry creek bed, their hooves sliding on the loose gravel.
“I’m tellin’ you, Crowe, nobody’s up this high,” a rough voice hissed from the darkness below. “Even the Apaches stay down in the washes when the wind’s blowing like this.”
“Shut your mouth, Miller,” a second voice replied, cold and flat as a butcher’s knife. Silas Crowe. “The girl went this way. And where the girl goes, the tin box goes. The boss wants that paper before the circuit judge gets to Tucson next month, or none of us get paid.”
Clay pressed his back against the rock face, thumbing the hammer back on his rifle. Two men. Dismounted, probably, to lead their horses up the steep, treacherous trail. That meant they were carrying carbines in scabbards, slow to draw in close quarters, but dangerous if they managed to find cover.
He glanced back. Kea had pushed Tomás up into a narrow cleft in the rock wall high enough to be out of the line of fire. She was crouching below him, her knife gleaming dully in the dark, her body coiled like a spring.
Clay took a slow, deep breath, letting the pain in his side fade into the background. He stepped out from the deep shadow of the canyon wall, right into the narrow throat of the pass where the moonlight cut a pale silver ribbon across the dirt.
“Looking for someone, Crowe?”
The two figures froze thirty yards down the trail. A match flared—brief, foolish, giving away their exact positions—as Silas Crowe tried to light a cigarette before freezing mid-motion.
“Mercer,” Crowe snarled, his voice tight with sudden, venomous surprise. “I should’ve put a bullet through your head back at the ranch when I had the chance.”
“You missed your window,” Clay said, his voice level and cold. “Turn the horses around and ride back down. You aren't coming up this canyon.”
“Kill him, Miller!” Crowe shouted.
A rifle barrel flashed in the dark. A bullet slammed into the granite wall a foot above Clay’s head, showering his face with hot stone chips.
Clay didn’t flinch. He tracked the muzzle flash, squeezed the trigger, and sent a .45-70 round crashing into the darkness. A heavy grunt echoed off the canyon walls, followed by the sound of a heavy body collapsing against the scree and a horse whinnying in panic.
“Miller?!” Crowe roared. “Damn you, get up!”
“Miller’s done,” Clay called out, working the lever of his rifle with a metallic clack-clack that sounded like a death knell in the narrow gorge. “You’re next, Crowe. Unless you drop your iron right now.”
Silence fell over the canyon, heavy and suffocating. For five long seconds, the only sound was the wind hissing through the high pines and the nervous stepping of Crowe’s surviving horse down in the wash.
Then, a cold, bitter laugh drifted out of the darkness.
“You think you’ve won something, farmer,” Crowe’s voice echoed, shifting to the left. “You and your savage whore. But you’re sitting on dead land. The whole territory belongs to the men with the gold, and men like you end up in the dirt with your dead wife.”
A shot cracked from the darkness—blind, fired in pure rage—and the bullet clipped the brim of Clay’s hat. At the exact same instant, a dark shadow detached itself from the rocks above the trail.
Kea dropped silently from the ledge straight onto Crowe’s back like a panther falling from a limb.
A startled curse broke from Crowe’s throat, followed by the heavy thud of two bodies hitting the gravel. Clay lunged forward through the dark, rifle raised, ready to finish it—when a sudden, blinding flash of light erupted from the lower ridge behind them, accompanied by the sustained rattle of three more rifles opening fire from the mouth of the canyon.
Reinforcements. Crowe hadn't ridden alone.
Clay skidded to a halt, grabbing Kea by the arm as she scrambled back from the struggling heap on the trail. Crowe was already scrambling backward into the brush, bleeding from a shoulder wound, swearing wildly as his new riders swarmed up the lower trail.
May you like
“Fall back! Into the rocks!” Clay shouted, dragging Kea and the boy deeper into the box canyon as a hail of lead chewed the granite walls around them.
The trap had snapped shut, but they were inside the fortress now—and as the first shots echoed off the high peaks of the Dragoon Mountains, Clay knew the real war for the valley had finally begun.
