A Texas Hill Country Christmas by William W. Johnstone Read Free Book Online Page B

reached the crest. Charging blindly into the middle of a Comanche raid wouldn’t accomplish anything except to get him killed. His long legs carried him quickly to the top of the ridge, where he stopped and stood with the rifle in his hands as he surveyed the scene below him.
    The ranch house was about three hundred yards away, a double log cabin with a covered, open space known as a dogtrot between the two halves of the structure. A barn with an attached corral and a smaller outbuilding that was probably a smokehouse stood not far off. There was a vegetable garden, bare at this time of year, behind the cabin. It was a nice-looking spread, nothing fancy about it, but a place where a family could live and work and build something worthwhile.
    Whoever had built the cabin had cleared all the trees for about fifty yards around it, leaving only short stumps. That was a wise move, because it meant attackers had to cross that open ground to reach the cabin. A sprawled, unmoving figure in a buckskin shirt and wool trousers showed that one of the renegades had tried and failed to do just that.
    Puffs of powdersmoke came from loopholes cut into the cabin’s thick walls, as well as from gaps between heavy wooden shutters that had been pulled mostly closed over the windows. The settlers were putting up a good fight. Matt wasn’t sure how many defenders were in there. Five or six, he estimated.
    They were outnumbered, though. At least a dozen raiders were scattered around the place, some crouched behind trees, others firing from the barn as they poured lead at the cabin. Black Moon and his renegades were well armed with stolen Winchesters and Henry rifles. It wouldn’t be easy to root out the defenders, but if the Comanche warriors had plenty of ammunition they could lay siege to the cabin and eventually force the settlers to come out and die.
    Or maybe they would try to hurry things along by setting fire to the place, Matt thought. If they could get a torch onto the wooden shingles on top of the cabin, the defenders wouldn’t have any choice other than staying inside and burning to death—if they didn’t choke on the smoke first—or fleeing right into the bullets of the enemy.
    From where Matt stood, he could see several of the renegades. They didn’t know he was up here, so he was confident he could pick off two or three of them before they were aware of what was going on.
    If he did that, however, he would lose the advantage of surprise.
    It might be more effective to go right down there among them and try to kill as many as he could, hand to hand, before they realized he was there. That was what Preacher would have done....
    Then the decision was taken out of his hands as one of the raiders did something Matt never would have expected. The man stepped out into the open where the people in the cabin could see him.
    They didn’t fill him full of lead, though. In fact, their guns fell silent, because the renegade stood there with a prisoner held tightly in front of him. A boy, probably around twelve, skinny and ungainly, with a shock of fair hair that stood out sharply against the Indian’s dark buckskins.
    Someone inside the cabin screamed. A woman, Matt thought grimly. Probably the boy’s mother.
    Sunlight flashed on the heavy blade of the knife the renegade held at the captive’s throat.
    â€œCome out or the boy dies!” the warrior called in good English he had probably learned on the reservation.
    One of the shutters flew open. A woman looked out in bug-eyed horror and cried, “Tommy!”
    Somebody inside the cabin grabbed her and dragged her away from the window as rifles blasted outside. A man’s arm came in sight as he tried to reach out and pull the shutter closed again. Blood flew as a bullet hammered through the back of his hand and made him howl in pain. Even wounded, though, he managed to grab the short piece of rope attached to the shutter as a handle and