Scorpion Read Free Page A

as soon as he came to rest. He waited to take the shot he was determined not to miss.
    The ground leveled out and Red Hair came to rest lying flat on his back against the slope. The world settled into place as rubble continued to rain down around his shoulders. The slope had clawed his shirt to tatters, but somehow he had managed to hold onto the pepperbox. The Patterson Colt was still holstered at his side. A quick assessment of his arms and legs told him he was bruised but not broken, though his rear end hurt like hell where he’d slid over a prickly pear cactus. Still, he was alive, and that was good. He grinned, realizing he had cheated death again. He didn’t have long to relish his victory. A Comanche war whoop shattered the silence.
    Bullets fanned the air near his head. A geyser of dirt erupted inches from his thigh. He flattened against the earth as the leader of the trio, the man in the serape, snapped off a shot from a double-barreled pistol. The braves on the left came forward at a run, ignoring their intended victims behind the wagon in the creek for this new threat. It was plain to see they intended to quickly dispatch him before returning their attention to the besieged travelers below.
    Red Hair moved instinctively. His bleeding fingers curled around his holstered gun while he raised the Allan pepperbox in his left hand and squeezed off a shot. The two Comanches were short, with sloping shoulders and dark features framed by stringy black hair that hung in ponytails past their shoulders. Though on horseback they were without peer, afoot the two seemed devoid of any natural grace. And the time it took them to traverse the hillside and reach Red Hair proved their undoing. The first shot from the pepperbox missed by a yard. Red Hair turned and fired his Colt at the man in the serape, just to keep him honest.
    The leader of the ambushers howled as a lead ball creased his thigh. He changed his course and leaped back behind the limestone ledge he had so foolishly abandoned when he thought he had an easy kill. This unwanted intruder lying on his back on the slope was nothing like Carlos, the ranchero who had tried to escape. No, Carlos had been a coward at heart, and it had taken little enough effort to follow him up the hill, shoot him in the back, and leave him to die in his own juices.
    A second bullet from the Patterson Colt wasn’t as lucky as the first, but it kept the gunman on his right pinned down, allowing Red Hair to return his attention to the Comanches. The path they followed across the slope bunched the two of them together, the older of the two braves in the lead. He carried a brace of double-barreled percussion pistols. The scowling warrior a few paces back brandished a pepperbox revolver that spewed gun smoke as he fired past his companion.
    Red Hair rose up to snap off another shot from the .32 caliber pepperbox. The pistol seemed to explode in his hand. A blinding flash of fire erupted from the muzzle as the remaining five barrels ignited almost as one and loosed their loads in a deafening blast. The recoil tore the gun from his grasp and nearly dislocated his shoulder. It was a miracle the pistol didn’t explode and blow off his hand. Even so, the simultaneous discharge of the remaining five gun barrels left the man’s arm numb. Bullets from the pepperbox trimmed the spindly outstretched limbs of an ocotillo and ravaged flesh and bone. The Comanche in the lead went flying backward through the black smoke as if hurled from a catapult, trailing an arc of crimson from his ravaged chest. He slammed into his companion, who managed to brush the dying man aside and press his attack. The two combatants were scarcely a stone’s throw apart when a bullet from Zion’s musket buzzed the Comanche and distracted him from his intended prey.
    From his vantage point behind the wagon, the segundo had seen enough to realize the “bricktop” who had stumbled into the fray was not of the war party. Zion tossed