It was mostly cutbanks and rocks. The ridge came sprouting out of the base of the mountain and meandered its way south into the trees, and at this point there was a gravel-bedded dry creek with here and there a dried pool caked with cracked mud. Several groins led into it, like the fingers of an outstretched hand. Once you entered any one of the little canyons you were restricted by the high sharp-cut banks, confined pretty much to the creekbed while you rode upstream into the central canyon of it. A man might be able to climb out of it but a horse couldn't; the sides were twelve or fifteen feet high and the rushing waters of rain-season flash-floods had eaten the banks away until they were not merely vertical cliffs, they were mostly undercut so that the tops overhung the gravel bed and shadowed part of it. Pine roots made tangles sticking out of the washed-away banks; a man could climb up that way, hanging onto the roots, but he'd make a hell of a target while he tried it.
Boag ground-hitched the horse and walked up into the little badlands. He kept his feet on the pebbles where he wouldn't leave easy tracks. He walked several hundred yards up the canyon, following its twists; when he looked back he couldn't see farther than the last bend. Overhead the forest crowded close along the top of either bank. In places the washouts had knocked the nearest trees over; several logs lay in the creekbed and a few deadfalls spanned the canyon like bridges. It was maybe forty feet wide.
At the head of the canyon there was a wall of limestone that had been eaten flat and discolored by flooding. You could see that in times of heavy rain it became a waterfall. Right now it simply boxed in the head of the canyon. It wasn't prohibitively high; the waters had worn it down and right now a man sitting on a horse could just about see across the top of it. But his horse wouldn't make the jump up onto it because the footing underneath was too soft: it was silt that had washed down in the floods and caked into a treachery of clots and pits.
Boag had about a quarter mile of canyon to work with. At this back end there was the box formed by the waterfall. At the other end, facing Mr. Pickett's mountain but hidden from it by the pines, a half dozen sub-canyons splayed out from the main cut, and the whole thing got gradually absorbed into the system of wrinkles and heaves that the big mountain had at its feet.
“It'll do,” Boag decided.
He went back to the wagon to get the big coil of wire.
7
It took him the whole day to make the place ready. He took his time because if you did it just a little bit wrong you could find yourself getting trampled to death by twenty horsemen. He had no way of knowing how much of a crew Mr. Pickett had with him up there but the size of the fortress implied a substantial phalanx of them and it was for certain that Mr. Pickett had all the money it took to hire as many gunmen as he wanted.
Picking the site for the Gatling gun came first because everything else had to be tied into that. He finally set the thing up on its swivel tripod at the top of the outside bank of the first bend below the waterfall. From here he could fire down into a hundred-yard length of the canyon and he could also swivel the gun around to cover the fifty yards between here and the waterfall. It gave him full command of the entire box end of the canyon and you couldn't do better than that.
The next thing was to make a ladder that would get him from the creekbed up onto the bank. He used a fallen log for that and trimmed the branches until he had just enough knobs left on it for footholds. Then he jammed it securely at the bottom.
He had to decide on the placement of the tripwires. Not too far down the canyon because that would give them the opportunity to scramble back around the bend, behind cover, invulnerable to the Gatling gun. So he strung the wires not more than fifty feet downstream from his gun position. It meant they would be perilously close to him and if a few of them got through they might swarm right up the bank and overrun him; but then there was another way of looking at it: the closer they came, the harder they'd be to miss.
He tied the wires taut; his anchors were the exposed roots that stuck out of the cutbanks on both sides of the defile. He strung the wires at two levels. The first rank of them hung about six feet off the ground where it would catch a man right across the chest and knock him off his horse. The second rank he placed ten yards closer to the gun position; he strung them lower, just a couple of feet off the creekbed where they would trip the horses.
He thought about it a while and then he strung eight or ten wires across the canyon at both levels because if the light was good enough for shooting it would be good enough for men to see the wires; they would duck under the high ones if they had the chance but if there were enough wires it would be like a spiderweb, they wouldn't get past all of them.
He counted the kegs of blasting powder. Four of them. Not enough.
“Well you don't need to knock down the whole canyon, Boag.” He rummaged through his packs and found a can of coffee, which he emptied and filled with blasting powder, and Jackson's canteen which was a spare now; he filled that too. He could make a couple more charges simply by packing the powder under rocks. The rocks would make good shrapnel but of course that wouldn't work if it rained even a few drops. It didn't
look
like rain but there was a feeling of weather in the air, a dampness that got into his nostrils and made his injuries creak.
He buried the charges in the banks and in the floor of the canyon. One of them he put in the ground at the bottom of the canyon wall just beneath his gun position; he relied on the overhang to protect him from the blast and he wasn't planning to set that one off unless things went bad and they swarmed too close to him.
The next thing to do was to make damn sure they stayed down in the canyon where he wanted them; it would get uncomfortable if they got over the banks. Even the ten-barrel gun wouldn't chop down trees and if they got behind him he'd be finished. He had to prevent that; he had to keep them down in the creekbed where they'd be as exposed as a baby's butt.
He did it with trenches and a log. He measured the log to make sure it would span the canyon from the Gatling gun to the far bank. He cut a deep groove in the log from end to end and he laid it across the gorge like a bridge, with the groove side up like a flume. Then he scratched trenches from both the near end and the far end of the log; the little trenches were maybe a foot wide and six inches deep and they ran down an easy pitch along the crests of both banks, all the way down to a point near the approach bend where the creek bottom had a wide rock depression in it. He fed both trenches down into that dry pool. Then he tested it by pouring water from his canteen into the grooved log.
The water ran across the log and followed Boag's trench along the far bank. There wasn't enough water in the canteen to get all the way to the dry pool, but he saw it would work and that was all he needed to know.
He wired the blasting charges with fulminate-of-mercury detonating caps and wedged the caps where he could see them from the gun position. You couldn't string a fuse that long; some of the charges were nearly a hundred yards from the Gatling. He had brought the kerosene and the lassos because he'd expected to unravel the ropes, soak them in kerosene and use them for fuses; but that wasn't going to work and he would have to explode the charges by shooting at the mercury blasting caps. They had to be in plain sight.
But now he had a better use for the kerosene and he might find a use for the ropes too.
The last thing to set up was the rifles.
There hadn't been any .38-56 in camp but Captain McQuade had got him a .40-90 repeater and Boag would keep that for his saddle gun; it had enough wallop to knock down a horse and enough range to do it at four hundred yards if you were good enough to hit what you aimed at that far away. Boag was good enough. He still had to sight it in, but that would be later.
The rest of them were assorted rusty junk. Mostly rolling-block carbines, a few old rifles. One Springfield single-shot .45-70. He plugged a cartridge into its trap-door breech and loaded the rest of them and went around looking for places to put them.
Most of them he tied fast to trees with pieces of rope. He aimed them generally down into the canyon. They weren't supposed to hit anybody, they were just supposed to make noise. He tied them very firmly and ran wires from their triggers to the Gatling gun position. Then he went around cocking them all and reminding himself not to trip over any of the God damn trigger wires.
Finally he made hand bombs by packing fistfuls of blasting powder tight into two saddlebags, a gunpowder pouch, and the horns of a cow skeleton that lay bleached at the edge of the trees. He melted down his candle and sealed the horn bombs with wax that had frayed bits of rope sticking out for a fuse. He put all these things except the saddlebags into his pockets and made sure the sulphur matches were handy in his shirt pocket; he checked the box of .40-90 cartridges and loaded the repeater's magazine full and rammed the rifle into the saddle boot. He still had three revolversâthe two he'd stolen from guards in the Ures jail and the one he'd taken off Jackson's partnerâand he loaded them all with six cartridges and dropped the hammer pins between the rims. With the seven in the repeater's magazine it gave him twenty-five shots without having to reload. That ought to make enough noise to stir them up a little; it was all he needed.
He ate his meager supper sitting by the Gatling gun in the twilight and considering the setup, trying to think of what else to add, trying to decide whether he'd made any mistakes. If it was going to work at all it had to work completely; he couldn't afford any casualties to his army because if they ever got near enough to put one bullet in the right place the whole war would be over.
After he ate he rode two hours back into the mountains and found an open stretch along the side of a razorback ridge with a southwest exposure and enough light for him to sight in the long rifle. He used up thirty rounds satisfying himself with his knowledge of it, where its bullet would fall at fifty yards and where it would fall at two hundred and roughly four hundred, and then he bellied down and got a good steady hold and laid his cheek against the stock to squeeze off four shots at a full paced-off five hundred yards.
He walked it off to see where the shots had landed and found that they had all punctured the log within a circle that he could span with the brim of his big Mexican hat. The circle was a couple of feet higher than he'd expected it to be; he put that bit of information back in a part of his mind where it wouldn't get lost.
He cleaned the rifle and built a little fire. He had retrieved the lead from a few of his practice shots and he had a bar of lead from Captain McQuade; he spent an hour melting and molding and crimping, reloading the cartridges he had fired.
Finally he rode back to the foot of Mr. Pickett's mountain. His legs hurt like fire and he was rocking with groggy fatigue; it was weak in his muscles and gritty in his eyes, the burning starvation for sleep.
He lay back and went limp, eyes drifting shut.
chapter eight
1
The first gold bearers showed up on the wagon road in the middle of the morning and Boag was ready for them.
There were three of them and a pack horse. They must have been riding all night; they looked half asleep in the saddle. The same detailing of men Mr. Pickett had employed back, in Arizona, Boag noticedâtwo reliable old rawhiders and a young Mexican gunman festooned with pistols.
Boag had strung wire across the wagon road down in the weeds where nobody was going to cotton to it in advance. The two riders hit the wire abreast and when their horses stumbled and went down on their chins the Mexican plowed into the tangle because he and his horse both were too sleepy to react fast enough.
Boag pulled the overhead rope and the blankets dropped on them.
The blankets fell curling like fishing nets. The looming shadows terrified the horses. Boag dodged a panicking horse and stepped out of the trees on the edge of the road with cocked .45's in both hands. The three rawhiders were batting at the blankets and Boag found the outline of a hatted head under a blanket and swatted it with his gun barrel. There was a moan from under the blanket.
The Mexican pawed clear and spotted Boag but Boag was close enough to make it suicidal and the Mexican just put his hands up in the air. Boag whipped around behind him and shucked the guns out of the Mexican's holsters and when the third rawhider crawled out from under the tangle Boag had a bead on him.
“Don't get notions now.”
The rawhider blinked in baffled incomprehension. His sleepy brain hadn't caught up with the things that were happening to him. “What the fuck?”
“Gun belt off,” Boag said.
The rawhider had to absorb it and stare at Boag for a minute before he squeezed his eyelids tight and popped them open as if to clear his head. But Boag was still there and the rawhider nodded bleakly and disarmed himself.
Boag kicked the blanket off the third one, the one he'd hit on the head. The man was on his knees bent far over with his head almost touching the ground; he was holding his head in both hands and rocking back and forth in pain.
Boag said to the Mexican, “Get him on his feet and bring him.”
He prodded the three of them back into the woods to the little clearing where he'd left the lengths of cut wire. “You. Wire the Mexican's hands behind his back. Do it tight, I'm going to check it.”
When the three of them were wired to trees too far apart for them to reach each other, Boag went after the scattered horses.
He kept listening for the approach of more riders. He didn't know how close they'd arrive together; he was expecting to have to let some men get by him but he meant to intercept as many as he could.
He'd seen the pack horse bolt to the north; that was the only animal he was really interested in. He rode that way looking for sign and found plenty of it; the horse had crashed through the forest in blind fear but naturally it hadn't kept that up very long. A quarter of a mile back in the woods he found the horse grazing.