Sons of Thunder by William W. Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Published: 2022-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Slash shouldered up against a boulder on the canyon’s right side as he gazed down toward where Winter’s men, having seen him dismount, now hurried to cover on both sides of the canyon. One man released his horse’s reins to scamper down behind a wagon-sized, flat-topped boulder in the ravine’s dead center, which likely churned up a good bit of white water during the spring snowmelt floods.

Winter had given Slash an idea.

Now he grinned as he fired three shots off the ravine’s wall to his left, down around where Winter’s men had scurried to ground, their horses retreating back down the ravine toward the river. Slash’s rifle’s screeching reports echoed raucously.

Grinning, he fired three more rounds off the canyon’s right wall and grinned even more broadly when he heard one of Winter’s men give a painful yelp.

One of the devils had apparently been at least nicked by a ricochet.

Winter poked his mustached mouth and cream-hatted head out from behind a boulder maybe fifty feet back down the ravine and on its left side and shouted, “Braddock, you SOB!”

Slash saw the man cock and level his rifle.

Slash popped a cap toward him, but in his haste, his bullet only puffed rock dust off the side of the boulder behind which Winter was partially concealed, only the very front of his hat brim showing. Winter cursed again, bunching his mouth with an enraged grimace, and extended his rifle toward Slash.

Slash drew back behind his own covering boulder as Winter sent three rounds hammering the boulder’s far side. Then the others followed suit, and Slash could feel the reverberations of the men’s bullets through the rock against which he pressed his back. As he stared up the canyon, he just then saw Pecos and the girl and the girl’s and Slash’s horses disappear around a bend in the canyon wall, Slash’s Appaloosa giving an angry swish of its tail, not happy with the gunfire erupting behind it.

Slash didn’t blame it. He didn’t much care for it himself, since each and every one of those bullets hammering the backside of his boulder was meant for him. More than a few ricocheted off the walls to either side of him, nearly giving him as good as what he’d given the man who’d yelped only a minute ago.

Slash waited for a lull in the gunfire.

When it came, he drew a breath and started to snake his rifle around the boulder’s right side, intending to send a little more lead of his own ricocheting at Winter’s bunch. He forestalled the rifle’s slide when a low rumbling sounded. Through the soles of his boots, he could feel a trembling.

He’d be damned if it wasn’t the ground that was trembling!

That trembling grew as the rumbling grew louder. Both sensations felt and sounded as though a train were approaching. But Slash was not standing on a cobbled train platform, dammit.

What the hell . . . ?

One of Winter’s men shouted, “Look!”

Slash slid his right eye around the side of his covering boulder.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.