He kept inside the fringe of the trees because he didn’t want them to spot him. The route took him along a ragged line, bulging and doubling back with the trees, so that it consumed most of the remaining hours of the night. He found that the trees came up reasonably close to the bottom of the mountain on its back side, to the north, but that was no use because the cliff was too sheer to scale. The mountain was shaped like a stump, as if it had once been the base of a tree forty miles high. Ridges ran out from its base like the roots of a stump and some of them climbed pretty close to the top; but there was always at least twenty or thirty feet of sheer cliff above the ridges, and there was a man-made stone wall above that, and he was sure the rawhiders had rifles in the gunports up there. By the time he got back to his starting point at the foot of the wagon road it was nearly dawn and he hadn’t seen any way in or any way out except for the road cut. Mr. Pickett had got himself a choice spot.

Boag thought of a few ways he might smuggle himself inside, aboard one of Mr. Pickett’s arriving wagons for instance, but the idea didn’t have any real strength to it. You didn’t go into the enemy’s camp when he had you that badly outnumbered.

The main purpose his tour had served just now was to confirm an expectation: Mr. Pickett had found himself a fortress that was damn well nigh impregnable.

But it was also damned hard to escape from. It could nicely be turned into a trap.

A prison for Mr. Pickett?

The idea made Boag grin for a while but in the end he gave up on it. He had no patience for a siege and it would be practically impossible for one man to keep that road bottled up for any length of time. A man had to sleep some time. All they had to do was wait him out and slip past him when he slept and stick a knife in him.

Boag had made a kind of a plan before he’d ever seen this place. Now that he’d reconnoitered and discarded a couple of alternative plans, he saw that his original plan was still the right one.

It was the only one, in fact.

You didn’t go in after the enemy. You made the enemy come out to you.

By sunup he was riding back around the perimeter of Coronado town. He got back to the wagon where he’d left it, hitched up and drove the wagon back along the same route to the forest that aproned Mr. Pickett’s mountain. Well back inside the trees where they couldn’t see him, and off a hundred yards to the side of the road, he stopped the wagon and walked out to the edge of the trees to get a view of the ground and pick his spots.

There was a long ridge that came down the western side of the mountain and sloped into the trees, breaking up into a number of tributary ridges and hogbacks and canyons. It might do; but the military axiom was not to fight with the sun in your eyes and if he set things up there, he’d be at a disadvantage in a morning fight. Boag might be able to influence their actions but he couldn’t force them to pick a time of day that was convenient to him. So he discarded that area and looked for another.

Trees gave a man good cover and it had occurred to him he might set up right alongside the wagon road itself. But there were too many corridors through a forest. You needed a spot where the numbers of routes and accesses was limited. Otherwise you couldn’t enfilade them all.

This was Thursday, about the middle of the morning, and he didn’t know for sure when the first of Mr. Pickett’s gold bearers would arrive but from what Jackson said it looked as if they were all due to show up some time tomorrow. To be on the safe side he gave himself until midnight to set up.

He got the saddle horse and rode a little way around the south perimeter. It took him more than an hour even though he was covering only a few dozen acres, mostly because he had to keep out of sight wherever he went but also because he had to be patient, he had to take his time and pick the best possible spot if he was going to have any chance at all of making it work.

Once he thought Why the hell am I doing this? But he didn’t dwell on it; he was keyed up and ready for the battle and at times like this you didn’t think about why, you thought about how. Working out the methods took all a man’s conception.

“Hey now.”

He said it to himself very softly and with considerable satisfaction; he backed the horse a couple of strides and mused upon the scene.

It was mostly cutbanks and rocks. The ridge came sprouting out of the base of the mountain and meandered its way south into the trees, and at this point there was a gravel-bedded dry creek with here and there a dried pool caked with cracked mud. Several groins led into it, like the fingers of an outstretched hand. Once you entered any one of the little canyons you were restricted by the high sharp-cut banks, confined pretty much to the creekbed while you rode upstream into the central canyon of it. A man might be able to climb out of it but a horse couldn’t; the sides were twelve or fifteen feet high and the rushing waters of rain-season flash-floods had eaten the banks away until they were not merely vertical cliffs, they were mostly undercut so that the tops overhung the gravel bed and shadowed part of it. Pine roots made tangles sticking out of the washed-away banks; a man could climb up that way, hanging onto the roots, but he’d make a hell of a target while he tried it.

Boag ground-hitched the horse and walked up into the little badlands. He kept his feet on the pebbles where he wouldn’t leave easy tracks. He walked several hundred yards up the canyon, following its twists; when he looked back he couldn’t see farther than the last bend. Overhead the forest crowded close along the top of either bank. In places the washouts had knocked the nearest trees over; several logs lay in the creekbed and a few deadfalls spanned the canyon like bridges. It was maybe forty feet wide.

At the head of the canyon there was a wall of limestone that had been eaten flat and discolored by flooding. You could see that in times of heavy rain it became a waterfall. Right now it simply boxed in the head of the canyon. It wasn’t prohibitively high; the waters had worn it down and right now a man sitting on a horse could just about see across the top of it. But his horse wouldn’t make the jump up onto it because the footing underneath was too soft: it was silt that had washed down in the floods and caked into a treachery of clots and pits.

Boag had about a quarter mile of canyon to work with. At this back end there was the box formed by the waterfall. At the other end, facing Mr. Pickett’s mountain but hidden from it by the pines, a half dozen sub-canyons splayed out from the main cut, and the whole thing got gradually absorbed into the system of wrinkles and heaves that the big mountain had at its feet.

“It’ll do,” Boag decided.

He went back to the wagon to get the big coil of wire.

It took him the whole day to make the place ready. He took his time because if you did it just a little bit wrong you could find yourself getting trampled to death by twenty horsemen. He had no way of knowing how much of a crew Mr. Pickett had with him up there but the size of the fortress implied a substantial phalanx of them and it was for certain that Mr. Pickett had all the money it took to hire as many gunmen as he wanted.

Picking the site for the Gatling gun came first because everything else had to be tied into that. He finally set the thing up on its swivel tripod at the top of the outside bank of the first bend below the waterfall. From here he could fire down into a hundred-yard length of the canyon and he could also swivel the gun around to cover the fifty yards between here and the waterfall. It gave him full command of the entire box end of the canyon and you couldn’t do better than that.