We Got Them!
The steady plod of Sam’s gate woke me, as it sent a sliver of pain through me where the bullet was lodged in my back. How I had managed to last this long was anyone’s guess.
Vaguely, I remembered, as I had drifted out into unconsciousness in the night that it was going to be the last thing that I ever experienced. Guess not.
Cracking my feverish eyes open I gazed down to where I had tied my hands to the saddle horn the night before. Sluggishly I worked at untying them all the while Sam just moved on along the trail completely unguided by me.
I really wasn’t going to make it. With what remaining strength I had I should really get down off of Sam and if I could, at least manage to unsaddle him.
That way he would be at least free to move on with life. He was a good horse, the best that I’d ever had.
It was the least that I could do for his faithfulness over the past several years to me.
Just then a gunshot rang out and almost instantly I felt the smack of the rifle bullet.
It wasn’t me that had been hit though. It was Sam.
Half rearing up he started to pitch over onto his side. Instinct had me kicking my feet out of the stirrups.
As he fell to the ground with a neighing shudder I rolled away with a cry of pain myself. My back felt like it was on fire and as a whole it felt like I had been suddenly thrown into hell.
Despite the agony threatening to cause me to black out I forced myself to crawl forward on my elbows as my legs didn’t seem to want to work. Reaching Sam’s head I saw that it was all over for him.
Feeling a wellspring of emotion rise up for one of the few friends that I’d had in life I reached out my shaking hand, as tears fell, to slowly close his eye. Letting my forehead fall forward on to him I choked out, “Goodbye old friend. I.... it shouldn’t have been this way for you. You deserved more than this.”
I seemed to phase out for a moment and then consciousness came flaring back to me as I heard the sound of horse hooves. Five maybe seven riders were approaching.
They were undoubtedly the dry-gulchers, who had ambushed me three days back. I’d taken two of them out in the ambush, even though the shot to my back had knocked my aim off some.
Normally, I’d have stayed to fight it out as it was my nature to not back down from a fight, but I’d been hurt bad and Sam had known it. He’d done his best to get me out of there and it had been all I could do to hold on since then, as I’d clumsily dropped my hand gun.
It had been two days of hard riding since then till last night when with infection setting in to a wound that I couldn’t reach to treat that I’d pretty much given into the inevitable. My time had finally come.
It had taken some doing though. By rights I should have been dead a long time ago.
I’d always pulled through somehow. Some said it was the devil’s luck, others that I was just too mean of a son of a b**** to die.
Whatever it was I was about to cash it all in. But I wasn’t going out without a fight.
Some of these horse murdering scum that had just killed one of the finest horses to have ever lived were going to go with me.
I still had my rifle, but I doubted in my ability to do much account with it right now. I didn’t want just one of the murdering cowards to bash continually to death in hell for all of eternity. No, I wanted all of them.
Thankfully, I had some extra insurance that I had picked up a while back that might actually come in handy for this situation. I forced myself to lay over onto my back and immediately I saw stars as white lightning ran up and down my spine.
Sweating profusely I could hear voices now. I didn’t have much time.
Biting my teeth down I gritted out the strength it took me to just move my arm. It felt like every movement to be made meant that a ton of weight had to be shifted about.
My helplessness was almost intolerable. As beads of sweat broke out all across my forehead my grasping hand found what it was blindly searching for. My saddlebag.
Reaching into it I tunneled through the contents, until my hand found the clump at the bottom of the bag. The object was wrapped up in an old shirt.
I brought the shirt wrapped object up out of the saddle bag. Sam’s fallen body was between me and the approaching riders. For the moment it gave me some cover, but I still had to be careful if I wanted to take as many of the bastards out as I could.
Fumbling with the shirt I managed to unroll the object out if its folds. My eyes widened as my gaze took in the clump of five strapped together dynamite sticks linked together by a single fuse.
The sticks of dynamite were heavily sweating out nitroglycerin!
Good Lord, Sam and I could have been blown sky-high at any point during the last several months, as it had been that long since I had checked on the condition of the sticks in the bottom of the saddle bag.
Gingerly I held the sweating sticks of dynamite in one hand hoping against hope that they didn’t go off prematurely. We’d come this far together, just a little further.
My other hand came up out from my pants pocket with a box of matches. Fumbling one-handed with the box of matches I attempted to open it.
Finally with a match in hand I stroked it against the nearby saddle. The match broke into pieces.
I silently cursed and went searching for another match. The horses had drawn up and I heard the jingle of spurs as riders got down.
“Eh, he’s some tough hombre this one.”
“Yaw, I saw where he got shot. Ain’t one of us that would have rode three days with a wound like dat.”
A third individual spoke, “Yeah, but we get paid just the same. We make sure he be dead now. More money for us anyways with Sam and Hadero dead.”
There was an audibly sounded out accent from the rest of the group to his declaration.
Quietly, I was biting bullets in half, as match after match broke or failed to strike. I was out of time!
They’d be on top of me at any second and I needed at least ten seconds on account of the length of fuse I had attached to the dynamite. I heard the close by jingle of their spurs sound out on the hard ground I lay on.
I simply had no more time. Then the obvious hit me like a bucket of cold water to the face.
My head turned to look at the dynamite sticks slick with nitroglycerin.
What an idiot I was! I didn’t need a match.
“Hey hombres. It looks like he’s still alive. I put a bullet in him now.”
To that statement I responded by mustering all I had to come up over onto my side and fling the sticks of dynamite in a downward arc low over Sam’s body. My only hope was that the impact with the ground would be a hard enough force to jar the nitroglycerine into going off as an instant detonator.
They were long odds to say the least given how things had been recently playing out for me. Sometimes; however, there were those moments when the long odds actually play out and this was one of them.
The world erupted around me in smoke and flame even as dust and rocks went flying. Coughing on the smoke and dust sent such a flurry of mind-numbing pain coursing through me that I was brought back to life with alarming clarity for a moment.
My one pressing thought was, ’Oh God, please don’t cough again!’
I was laying stretched out on my front now and as I lay in the dust next to Sam I listened in the sudden silence that had followed after the explosion.
I heard nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Grimly, I smiled into the dust.
I reached out to pat Sam’s mane and whisper, “We got them old buddy.”
That was the last thing I remembered.
