Strongheart by Don Bendell Read Free Book Online

the west end of the plateau, the stage road dropped down sharply to the river in a serpentine route. The driver had to hold back on the team and used his brake a lot down the steep, winding, twisting wagon road. At the bottom, a large wooden bridge crossed the river. Crossing it, the passengers looked east along the river and saw the roaring foamy flume of water charging into the high-walled canyon like a liquid avalanche crashing and plunging into a giant rocky funnel. To their right, the west, they saw the river snake its way through a broad valley, which narrowed into a similar rocky canyon that stretched for miles to the west, with numerous herds of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep and Rocky Mountain goats inhabiting its impassable granite walls.
    They turned southwest and left the river canyon behind them. The big red stage crossed a narrow, fairly flat valley as it wound its way toward another high-walled canyon, which had inspired the name of the route they were traveling on, Copper Gulch Road. The road would wind for miles, slowly climbing uphill. The coach would stop in ten miles so the passengers could take a break and the team of horses could be watered at Sunset Gulch, where there was a spring and a tank among the trees back up the very narrow gulch.
    Unfortunately, Jeeter and Harlance McMahon were planning to hold up the stage at Sunset Gulch, where they were now hiding among the trees. They had tied up the stage employee who manned the watering spot at the spring, and they had him tucked back safely in the scrub oaks.
    Orville Reichert’s eyes darted all about the scrub oak thicket, as he lay there, gag wrapped tightly around his mouth. A silvertip grizzly had frequently watered at this spring, as well as a number of black bears and mountain lions. Orville was tied up and gagged, so he was even prey to coyotes if they chose to attack him, which he sensed would be in their predatory nature. There was one very small spring, which only had water part of the year, farther up Copper Gulch Stage Road, before it topped out at the intersection of Road Gulch Stage Road, but even in good years the spring did not produce enough water to provide for more than a few deer or bighorns. The spring at Sunset Gulch was a good one and was the main watering place for a number of miles for most of the wildlife in the area, especially larger animals. All these thoughts went through Orville’s mind as he lay there petrified about getting mauled and eaten alive.
    The Copper Gulch Stage Road wound up through very steep, narrow passes like a giant rock- and piñon-encrusted serpent, but just below Sunset Gulch it opened up a little into an elongated bowl, surrounded by wooded rocky ridges. It was in this bowl that Sunset Gulch poured out, and the spring would be on the left side of the coach. Most of the highwaymen were assembled there in the cover of the evergreens and cottonwoods growing near the spring. It was a great place for them to pull off a holdup because Sunset Gulch ran uphill from there one ridge over from Copper Gulch Stage Road, paralleling it, but actually made a sharp right turn up on top and came out onto Copper Gulch. They could travel the rugged gulch when escaping and come out farther up on the stage road and then turn onto Road Gulch Road and head downhill about ten miles and come out on the Arkansas River. Or they could stay on Copper Gulch and come out a little north of the town of Westcliffe and head south or east from there. They planned to hold up the stage, move up the gulch a mile or so to a good ambush site, quickly divide up their spoils, then continue on toward the Arkansas River, the same direction the stagecoach was destined. First, they would scatter the team from the coach, so the horses would not be available for anybody from the stage to trail them on.
    Across the road, one of the outlaws, Long Legs Westbrook, was standing lookout on one of the rocky outcroppings rising high above the canyon