This actually isn’t going too badly. I think.
Right now we had five guys trying to grab the stagecoach. I figured I should work that out first.
Now, I’m not saying that the ambushers were green, or anything. They weren’t Free State Recon or anything like that, but as bushwhackers go they knew their stuff. And I could tell they had a plan. Get one of their guys on top of the coach, shoot the driver, take the reins, and then it was all over. It was one of the reckless plans, but when you live on the frontier recklessness is sometimes all you got to work with.
The only problem with the plan was, it assumed two things. One, that I wasn’t reckless enough to push back. Two, that I gave a damn about their horses.
I swear to God, one of the ambushers actually looked outraged as I shot a bolt right into his horse’s belly. The horse itself screamed, but more importantly it bucked and kicked and knocked itself into another ambusher’s horse, which meant that they both went down in what I hoped was a mass of broken bones. But even if I only wrecked one horse the other one wouldn’t be catching up any time soon, so I turned to see the other side.
And… Wilkinson wasn’t doing too badly, yeah. He was aiming at the ambushers, not their horses, but that made sense. You can kill a man with a sling-shot easy enough, but you have to work at it with a horse. Right now he had one ambusher swaying in her saddle and looking about ready to fall off, and another clearly unready to push his horse too close to us. And who could blame him? The odds for our attackers weren’t nearly as good as they were a minute ago.