One of his slugs took the leading man in the hip, spinning him sideways into the current, but the second man—a wiry border ruffian in a red flannel shirt—cleared the gravel and threw himself into the narrow fissure where Hesper was crouched.
Maverick felt a cold hand squeeze his heart. "Hesper!"
Inside the dark cleft of rock, the night erupted with the roar of two pistol shots, followed by the wet, sickening crunch of steel striking flesh.
For three terrifying seconds, there was no sound from the northern spire except the rush of the river.
Then, the body of the red-shirted gunman came tumbling out of the crevice, rolling down the scree slope and landing face-down in the water. A heavy iron skinning knife was buried up to the hilt between his shoulder blades.
A second later, Hesper leaned out from the fissure, her face smudged with black powder, her dark eyes blazing with an unholy light. She picked up the dead man’s Winchester, cocked it with a single vicious snap of her wrist, and fired two rounds into the boulder where Silas Vance was hiding, forcing the foreman to pull his head back with a bellow of curses.
"I have his rifle, Maverick!" she screamed across the chasm, her voice triumphant, wild, and untamed. "Keep firing!"
Maverick let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "Good girl," he growled under his breath, his hands slamming three fresh cartridges into the loading gate of his Henry. "God almighty, what a woman."
Down in the riverbed, the situation was turning desperate for the raiders.
Out of the twelve men who had entered the notch, four were dead, two were badly wounded and groaning in the brush, and the remaining six were pinned down in a three-foot depression between the river and the canyon wall, with cold lead raining down on them from both sides whenever they showed an inch of hair.
"Vance!" one of the surviving gunmen shouted, his voice cracking with panic. "We can't hold this gap! They’ve got the high ground, and there’s more than two rifles up there! We’re getting chewed to pieces!"
"Shut your face, Pete!" Vance roared back from behind his boulder. He was clutching his ribs, spitting blood into the sand. "Bring up the dynamite from the pack-saddles! We’ll blow the base of that southern ledge and bring the whole damned cliff down on his head!"
"The pack-horse bolted back through the gap when the shooting started!" Pete screamed. "The dynamite’s half a mile out in the flat!"
Vance cursed with an intensity that seemed to curdle the night air. He looked up at the two ledges where the gun barrels were still smoking in the moonlight. He was an experienced killer, and he knew when a position was lost. To advance through that notch without artillery or heavy dynamite was suicide.
"Fall back!" Vance finally bellowed, the words tasting like gall in his mouth. "Drag Miller and Jackson with you! Back through the gap! Move, you bastards, move!"
The surviving gunmen began to retreat, crawling on their bellies through the river shallows, using the dead horses and the giant boulders as shields, firing wild volleys into the rocks above to cover their withdrawal.
Maverick did not waste his remaining ammunition on fleeing shadows. He kept his rifle trained on the dark exit until the splashing of water and the groans of the wounded faded away into the vast, dry silence of the eastern desert.
The silence that returned to the gorge was heavy with the smell of sulfur, blood, and cold river silt.
Maverick waited on his ledge for ten minutes, his eyes straining against the darkness, watching for any twitch of brush that might signal a sniper left behind to cover the retreat. Nothing moved except the cold current of the river, which washed around the bodies of the three dead men lying among the boulders, turning the eddies a dark, rust-red color under the starlight.
Maverick eased the hammer of his Henry down, wiped the blood and stone dust from his forehead with his sleeve, and climbed down the rock face.
His knees were shaking slightly—not from fear, but from the brutal release of adrenaline that left a man’s limbs feeling like wet sand. He splashed across the knee-deep shallows to the northern bank, his boots slipping on the slick river stones, and climbed up to the crevice where Hesper stood.
She was leaning against the sandstone wall, the captured Winchester hanging from her left hand, her right arm pressed tightly against her ribs. Her face was deathly pale beneath the powder smoke, and her breath came in short, ragged gasps.
Maverick dropped his rifle and grabbed her shoulders. "You hit?"
"No," she whispered, though she leaned into his chest for a second before catching herself and pulling back with her old, stubborn pride. "The man with the red shirt... he threw a rock before he jumped into the crevice. It caught me on the side. It is only bruised bone."