With a roaring, grinding sound that drowned out the screams of the wounded men below, fifty tons of limestone and basalt crashed down into the dry channel. An avalanche of great rocks, each the size of a flour barrel, smashed down onto the rear of the column, crushing the second ammunition wagon, sealing the entrance to the channel with an impassable barrier of stone, and trapping the surviving thirty raiders in a vertical slaughter pen.
"Fire!" Maverick shouted, bringing his Henry rifle to his shoulder.
From the rim of the thirty-foot cliffs, twenty Winchesters, fifty Springfield carbines, and forty ash bows opened up in a devastating, plunging crossfire that swept the dry riverbed from end to end.
The trapped regulators had nowhere to run.
The limestone walls were too steep to climb; their horses were either dead or thrashing in panic; their second cannon was buried beneath five feet of tumbled rock, and the first had been blown to scrap. They threw themselves behind their dead mounts and the wreckage of the wagons, firing their revolvers and repeating rifles wildly toward the rim above, but they were shooting almost vertically into the sun, blinded by smoke and choking on black powder grit.
Maverick worked his lever with ruthless, mechanical precision. Every time a gunman raised his rifle to aim at the warriors above, Maverick’s .44-40 slug found him.
Beside him, Hesper was firing her captured Winchester with deadly accuracy. She did not aim for the ordinary hirelings; her eyes searched the swirling smoke until they locked onto a figure crawling through the red gravel near the shattered wagon wheel.
Goyathlay.
The renegade had survived the blast, though his horse was dead and his shirt was torn to bloody ribbons. He had lost his rifle, but he was dragging himself toward the cover of a narrow crevice in the western wall, an ivory-handled Colt clutched in his right hand.
Hesper stood straight up on the edge of the limestone parapet, fully exposed to the stray lead that whined off the rocks around her boots.
"Goyathlay!" she cried, her voice piercing the roar of the battle like an arrow.
The wounded warrior stopped. He rolled onto his back in the bloody dust, looked up thirty feet into the clear morning air, and saw her.
He saw the unmasked woman he had burned five years ago. He saw her face lifted to the sun, radiant, terrible, and unyielding, looking down at him with the cold judgment of an executioner.
"Die in the white man’s dust, traitor!" Hesper shouted.
She raised the Winchester to her cheek, aligned the front bead with the red bandana around his forehead, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet struck Goyathlay between his eyes. His head snapped back against the red sandstone wall, his revolver slipped from his lifeless fingers, and he rolled forward into the river gravel, dead before his face touched the earth.
Down in the center of the trap, the battle was ending in butchery.
Silas Vance, his bandages torn away, his face blackened with soot, tried to rally six surviving men around the corpse of his stallion. He raised his massive Sharps rifle toward Lobo Negro’s position on the southern rim, but before his finger could touch the trigger, four heavy arrows fletched with eagle feathers drove through his buffalo coat, pinning his arms to his chest. He staggered three steps back, coughed a fountain of crimson blood into the sand, and collapsed across his saddlebags.
Only one man remained standing.
Vance McCall had scrambled into a natural hollow beneath an overhanging slab of rock. His beaver hat was gone; his fine broadcloth suit was torn and soaked with muck; his hands were shaking violently as he tried to jam cartridges into the loading gate of an empty Winchester.
Maverick Cole slung his rifle over his shoulder, caught the knotted hemp rope that was anchored to an iron eyebolt in the parapet, and slid down the thirty-foot cliff face to the floor of the channel, his boots striking the bloody gravel ten paces from McCall’s hiding place.
McCall looked up, his bloodshot eyes widening in terror as he saw the tall, broad-shouldered Texan stepping through the smoke toward him.
McCall raised his half-loaded Winchester. "Stay back! I’m Vance McCall! I own forty miles of the San Pedro! I can write you a draft for ten thousand dollars in gold—"
Maverick did not stop. He did not draw his gun.
He closed the distance in two long strides, kicked the barrel of the Winchester aside with the toe of his heavy work boot, sending the weapon flying into the river shallows, and seized McCall by the lapels of his ruined coat with both hands.
Maverick hoisted the heavy cattle baron off his feet and slammed him against the limestone cliff wall with a force that knocked the breath clean out of the man’s lungs.
"Look at me, McCall," Maverick said, his voice dropping to a harsh, gravelly whisper that was deadlier than the roar of the cannons.