Sidewinders. William W. Johnstone

west by a meandering line of washed-out green that marked the course of a stream. A dusty road ran from the east toward that creek, and along that road, bouncing and careening from its excessive speed, rolled a stagecoach.

      The driver had whipped his six-horse hitch to a hard gallop, and for good reason. Thundering along about fifty yards behind the stagecoach were eight or ten men on horseback, throwing lead at the coach. Even in the bright sunlight, Bo and Scratch could see spurts of flame from the gun muzzles. A cloud of powder smoke trailed after the pursuing riders.

      As if the circumstances of the chase weren’t enough to convince Bo and Scratch that the men on horseback were up to no good, the fact that they had bandannas tied across the lower halves of their faces to serve as crude masks confirmed that they were outlaws bent on holding up the stage. The two drifters brought their mounts to a halt at the top of the hill as their eyes instantly took in the scene.

      Scratch reached for his Winchester, which stuck up from a sheath strapped to his saddle. “We takin’ cards in this game?” he called to Bo.

      “I reckon,” Bo replied as he pulled his own rifle from its saddle boot. He levered a round into the Winchester’s firing chamber and smoothly brought the weapon to his shoulder. As he nestled his cheek against the smooth wood of the stock, he added, “Since we don’t know the details, might be better if we tried not to kill anybody.”

      “I figured you’d say that,” Scratch grumbled as he lined up his own shot.

      The two of them opened fire, cranking off several shots as fast as they could work the levers on the rifles. The bullets slammed into the road in front of the masked riders, kicking up gouts of dust. The men were moving so fast it was hard to keep the shots in front of them, and in fact one of the bullets fired by the Texans burned the shoulder of a man’s mount and made the horse jump.

      That got the attention of the outlaws. They reined in briefly as Bo and Scratch stopped shooting. It was their hope that the masked men would turn around and go the other way, but that wasn’t what happened.

      Instead, the gang of desperadoes split up. Three of them dismounted, dragging rifles from their horses as they did so, and bellied down behind some rocks. The other seven took off again after the stagecoach.

      “Well, hell!” Scratch said. “That didn’t work. We should’a killed a couple of ’em.”

      “Come on,” Bo cried as he wheeled his horse. “They’re going to try to pin us down here!”

      Sure enough, the three men who had been left behind by the rest of the gang opened fire then. Bullets whined around the heads of the Texans like angry bees, one of them coming close enough so that Bo heard the wind-rip of its passage beside his ear.

      They heeled their horses into a run again, following the crest of the hill as it curved to the west. The outlaws continued firing at them, but none of the bullets came close now.

      The hill petered out after about three hundred yards. Bo and Scratch started downslope again, angling toward the wide flats and the road that ran through them. They glanced over their shoulders and saw that the three men who had tried to neutralize the threat from them had mounted up again and were now fogging it after the rest of the gang, which had carried on with its pursuit of the stagecoach.

      In fact, the outlaws had cut the gap to about twenty yards, and from the way one of the men on the driver’s box was swaying back and forth and clutching his shoulder, he looked like he was wounded. The other man, who was handling the reins, looked back and appeared to be slowing the team.

      “He’s gonna stop and give up!” Scratch shouted over the pounding of hooves. “Those owlhoots got their blood up! They’re liable to kill everybody on that coach!”

      “They might at that!” Bo called in agreement. He had rammed his Winchester back in the saddle boot. Now he unleathered the walnut-butted Colt on his hip and said, “We won’t hold back this time!”

      Scratch whooped. “Now you’re talkin’!” He drew one of the long-barreled, ivory-handled, .36-caliber Remington revolvers that he carried.

      Both men opened fire as they veered toward the road. The hurricane deck of a galloping horse wasn’t the best platform for accurate marksmanship, but Bo and Scratch had had plenty of experience in running gun battles like this. Their flank attack was effective. A couple of the outlaws were jolted by the impact of the drifters’ slugs and had to grab for the horn to keep from tumbling out of the saddle.

      Despite having a heavy advantage in numbers, the masked outlaws began to peel sharply away from the road. They threw a few shots at Bo and Scratch, but didn’t put much effort into it. The Texans slowed their horses as the would-be robbers abandoned the chase, picked up the three stragglers, and galloped off to the east.

      “We goin’ after ’em?” Scratch asked.

      Bo’s forehead was creased in a frown. “Have you gone loco? With five-to-one odds against us, I plan on thanking my lucky stars that they decided it wasn’t worth it to rob that stagecoach after all!”

      “We winged at least a couple of ’em. I saw the varmints jump.”

      Bo nodded. “Yeah, I did, too.” He inclined his head toward the coach, which had rocked to a halt by now, with thinning swirls of road dust rising around it. “Let’s go see how bad that fella on the stage is hurt.”

      The wounded man was still conscious. They could tell that from the furious cussing they heard as they approached. The driver had climbed down and was helping the other man to the ground. As the hoofbeats of the Texans’ horses rattled up, the driver turned and pulled a gun.

      “Hold on there, son!” Bo called as he reined in. “We’re friends.”

      Scratch brought his bay to a halt alongside Bo’s dun. “Yeah,” he said. “In case you didn’t notice, we’re the hombres who got those owlhoots off your tail.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction that the gang had fled.

      The driver nodded and holstered his gun. “Yeah, I know that,” he said. “Sorry. I’m just a little proddy right now.”

      “You’ve got reason to be,” Bo said as he swung down from his saddle. “How bad is your friend hurt?”

      The driver was a young man, probably in his mid-twenties. He wore a brown hat and a long tan duster over denim trousers and a blue bib-front shirt. A red bandanna was tied around his neck. His wounded companion was considerably older and sported a brush of bristly gray whiskers. He had lost his hat somewhere during the chase, revealing a mostly bald head.

      He answered Bo’s question by saying, “How bad does it look like I’m hurt, damn it? Them no-good buzzard-spawn busted my shoulder!”

      The right shoulder of his flannel shirt was bloody, all right, and the stain had leaked down onto his cowhide vest. Crimson still oozed through the fingers of the left hand he used to clutch the injured shoulder.

      “Take it easy, Ponderosa,” the younger man told him. “Sit down here beside the wheel, and we’ll take a look at it. It might not be as bad as you think it is.”

      “Oh, it’s bad, all right,” the old-timer said. “I been shot before. Reckon I’ll bleed to death in another few minutes.”

      “I don’t think it’s quite that serious,” Bo said with a faint smile as he tied his dun’s reins to the back of the coach. Scratch had dismounted, too, and tied his horse likewise. Bo went on. “My partner and I have had some experience with gunshot wounds. We’d be glad to help.”

      “Much obliged,” the young man said. “If you’ll give me a hand with him…”

      Bo helped the driver lower the old man called Ponderosa to the ground. Ponderosa leaned back against the front wheel while Bo pulled his vest and shirt to the side to expose the wound. Under Ponderosa’s tan, the bearded, leathery face was pale from shock and loss of blood.

      While Bo was tending to the injured man, Scratch glanced