Buzzard Bait by Brett Cogburn

Author:Brett Cogburn [Cogburn, Brett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2017-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

The outlaw bunch was caught in a bad position. They were on low ground and out in the open, and they had no idea how many men they faced. They most likely thought it was an Apache war party that had ambushed them, exactly as Newt had intended. They could take to the brush on one side of the road or find cover along the riverbank on the other and fight it out, but the last thing any man but a fool wanted was to have an Apache war party able to use that same cover to close on them.

Newt watched it all and knew this was the gamble he had taken. There was no way they were going to get all of the gang, and his plan had been to separate the Hatchet’s forces and weaken him to the point that he would leave the children behind. Sounded good when you said it, but he wasn’t sure if the whole damned thing wasn’t about to backfire on him.

The Hatchet’s men had disappeared to the sides of the road, whether intending to fight from there or simply getting out of sight of Horn’s rifle while they talked things over, Newt didn’t know. The children remained in the road. Maybe they were too scared to move, or their captors wouldn’t let them leave it. And that was one more problem. It was going to be hard to smoke that gang out for fear of hitting the kids.

Newt began to work his way along the riverbank toward the children. It was slow going, and despite the dense cover provided by the vegetation along the river, he expected any second for one of the outlaws to spot him and take a shot at him.

It took him the better part of half an hour to work his way upriver, moving low and sometimes on hands and knees. All the while, the children remained in the road. Some of them were even sitting on the ground. Horn fired a shot from the mesa, purposely aiming high at the riverbank side of the road opposite the children. His shot wasn’t returned.

Newt was barely ten yards from the children. He saw something move on the far side of the road, closer to the children, and immediately assumed it was some of the slave-trading trash who had stolen them. He raised his rifle and waited.

Gok appeared from the brush and knelt beside one of the children, a girl. The Apache was tense and constantly scanning around him while he spoke to the little girl. She was obviously Chiricahua or some other kind of Apache, for Newt could hear enough of their murmuring to tell the sounds of the dialect.

Gok whispered orders to the rest of the children while he tried to pull the girl to her feet. Frightened and confused, the children were slow to respond. Some of them smiled at the sight of Gok, but most of the others only gave him blank expressions or cringed from him.

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