Offdike hit him between the shoulder blades with the butt of his carbine and drove him on. There followed now a curious sequence of events which stretched McAllister’s credulity to its limits.
When they had reached the far side of the plateau, Joe halted and seemed to look around as if he was searching for a way down. Stevenson could not miss the hesitation.
‘Old man,’ he shouted, ‘you lied. You ain’t never been here before.’
Joe jumped with fright, but he stood his ground. ‘I been here. I know this country like the back of my hand. I’ll show you. I ain’t never took horses down here before. I was looking for a place where they can find a footing. Even a son-of-a-bitch like you don’t want to see a horse break a neck. Even if you do shoot ’em when they pull stages.’
Stevenson would have struck him, but the old man, in spite of age and his hands being tied behind his back Jumped nimbly out of the way and over the edge of the plateau. There was a great cloud of dust and McAllister knew he’d struck shale. When he reached the edge, he could see the old man rolling and sliding down the slope. Stevenson was forced to go after him. He also lost his footing and went down with a great yell of protest. McAllister would have followed to make the most of the situation, but Offdike was behind him and rammed the muzzle of the repeater into his back, saying: ‘Stay still.’
They all somehow negotiated the slope, though Lindholm had the greatest difficulty with the horses and had to be helped by Carla and Stevenson. Nothing would take Offdike from his position at the rear. They came now to an old Indian trail. Old Joe led the way along this at a brisk pace, as if he wanted to rid himself of his gold and get the whole business over and done with. They came down in scrub timber, and this helped to break the wind. For the first time that day, Allison’s teeth stopped chattering. McAllister gave her a smile and she managed a smile back. Her nerves were strung tight, as he could see, but she wasn’t in the blue scare she’d been in last night. Which was better. There was one right moment ahead of them and McAllister had to recognize it when it came. It might be in a minute or an hour’s time. He might be offered no more than a small part of a second by a reckless fate. However small, he had to recognize it and act. He had the lives of the old man and the girl in his hands. Not to mention the fact that his own life was also in the balance. A matter of no small consideration to him.
But you can always rely on life to offer you the unexpected.
Suddenly, Stevenson stopped in his tracks. Lindholm, following behind with the horses, ran into him.
Joe did not halt, but trotted on. He stopped quickly enough when the big man, suddenly into one of his unaccountable furies, bellowed: ‘You pull up, old man, or by Christ I’ll blow the top of your head off.’
Joe halted as if he had run into a stone wall. He turned and faced Stevenson, his eyes suddenly terrified.
Stevenson walked up to him and caught him by the front of his coat. He jerked at him so that the old man stood on tiptoe.
‘You old bastard,’ Stevenson yelled into his face, ‘you lying old bastard. You think I don’t know where I’m at?’
Joe gobbled a bit. Finally, McAllister made out that he said: ‘How the hell do I know if you know where you’re at?’ Stevenson hurled the thin old body away from him. Joe took three whirling tripping steps like a drunken dancer and fell down.
McAllister started forward, but behind him Offdike said: ‘Another step, McAllister, and you’re dead. I reckon we don’t need you any more, anyway.’
McAllister halted. He said: ‘What the hell goes on here?’
Offdike said: ‘How should I know? Hank, what goes?’
Stevenson looked blind with rage. His face was almost unrecognizable when he turned it to them. Hoarsely, he shouted: ‘Don’t you see where we are, for God’s sake? We came at it another way. Don’t you see?’
Lindholm said in a rather weak voice: ‘I’ve never been up here before in my life.’
‘Not you,’ Stevenson shouted. ‘Offdike.’
But Offdike was paying no attention. He was looking out over the immense valley which lay far below them. He pointed.
‘What is it?’ Lindholm demanded.
‘There’s the posse,’ Offdike told them. ‘And if I ain’t mistaken, they’re headed this way.’
Stevenson seemed to forget the old man. He hurried up the slope of the trail and joined Offdike. His gaze followed the pointing finger and now he seemed suddenly subdued as if he had been dropped into a pool of ice-cold water.
He swallowed. McAllister could see that he was sweating. ‘How could they know?’ he said.
Offdike said: ‘It don’t matter a goddam how they know. They’re there, and before too long they’ll be here.’ He looked at McAllister and the girl and added: ‘The damn fools. They’re making sure you all die.’
McAllister said with a calm he did not feel: ‘Stevenson, now’s the time not to lose your head. You knock anybody off now, you’ll hang for sure.’
In spite of the distant sight of the posse, however, Stevenson’s rage was still turned on the old man. He walked to him, caught hold of his collar and hauled him to his feet. Then he dragged him, struggling, to Offdike.
‘Offdike, when you open your eyes and look around you,’ he said, ‘you’re going to want to kill this old bastard the same as me.’
Everybody there seemed to go still as Offdike looked around him. Before the truth hit the lank man, it hit McAllister. Or part of it. He was thinking … they must be near the Eagle’s Nest. They were also near where Joe had hidden his gold, if the old man was telling the truth.
‘Offdike’s lean face was blank for a moment. Then slowly the heavy jaw dropped. He turned to look at Stevenson. Then at Joe Ramage.
‘It can’t see so,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it, Hank.’
He started to laugh.
Stevenson said: ‘Cut it out, Offdike.’ The tall man’s laughter increased. He held one side and turned in the helplessness of his mirth. Then, as they listened, the note of his laughter changed. It began to sound with a note of hysteria.
Now Stevenson shouted: ‘For Crissake, stop it.’
Offdike stopped. With hunched shoulders, he turned away and walked to a boulder. He sat down and stared at them with a curious listlessness.
‘We wasted all these months,’ he said. ‘We got Carla there all the way from Chicago. Two of our men’re dead. I killed the Kid myself. We thought we were rich.’
Lindholm said: ‘I don’t understand a thing about this. Shouldn’t we move? I mean how long is it going to be before the posse reaches here?’
‘Four, five hours,’ McAllister said. ‘The air’s thin up here. They ain’t as close as they look.’
Carla said: ‘For God’s sake tell us, Hank.’ She was starting to look worried and a little scared.
Offdike’s strange outburst seemed to have calmed Stevenson wonderfully.
‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he said. ‘And I can’t blame you. I can hardly believe it myself. Maybe my imagination has over-reached itself.’
Joe Ramage said: ‘You don’t have to kill us now. You know the truth. I can’t tell you anything you don’t know already. There ain’t no point in harming us now.’
Stevenson said: ‘When we stopped the stage and took the gold off it, we were not robbing Joe Ramage here.’
Lindholm exclaimed: ‘Who were you robbing then?’
Very quietly, Stevenson said: ‘We were robbing ourselves.’
‘What?’
McAllister reckoned he had never seen a man more surprised in his life. The banker looked shocked, horrified and stricken.
Carla said: ‘Are you trying to tell us?’
Offdike said: ‘There’s an old saying “A wise man don’t never shit on his own mudsill.” We did our road jobs elsewhere. We lifted gold up in Montana. We stopped pack trains carrying the stuff in Idaho. We been shipping gold in here for years. The cash we took, we used for spending money. The gold we cached. We wer
e ready to move on, so there wasn’t any harm in us stopping the Black Horse stage. Our last job and we were clearing out. We’d heard about old Joe here and his gold. There ain’t no ore in these hills. Only ours. Joe’s been bringing out our gold. There was enough in Eagle’s Nest to keep at least three of us as millionaires for the rest of our lives.’
McAllister was smiling hugely. ‘Sweet, ain’t it?’ he said. He knew this was the moment.
Stevenson’s control snapped again. He almost screamed: ‘Shut your mouth, you stinking lawman, or I’ll-’
McAllister said with cold intent, his eyes measuring and assessing: ‘You’ve lost your nerve, Hank.’ This was the only moment. Offdike was no longer behind him and could not see his hands, the bound hands which Allison had worked on all night and which had broken all her finger-nails. As he spoke his last word and Stevenson started towards him, he managed to get the last throng free. As the big man swung his carbine to smash the brass-bound butt into McAllister, the sheriff flicked the tough rawhide into his face like a whip lash. For that precious fraction of a second, Stevenson was caught in the small, sharp pain. McAllister hit him with all the power of his body. The edge of his hand caught Stevenson in the throat. Now the big man was between McAllister and Offdike.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Allison move. The girl was no more than a breath behind his own action. The couple of seconds it all took seemed like an eternity, for three lives hung on it.
The girl did exactly as he had told her.
First, she hurled herself at Joe’s legs and knocked the light-weight old man from his feet. Second, she rolled out of the action and went clear off the trail. Then she had gone from sight and he heard her crashing noisily and no doubt painfully down the steep slope.
The only advantage they held over the man with the gun was the fact that they knew what they were going to do and he did not. They had also taken him by surprise. And now luck came into it. Offdike, on sitting down, had propped his Spencer carbine against the boulder beside him.
He was a mover. As soon as McAllister made his first move, he snatched at the weapon. By the time McAllister had felled Stevenson, the carbine was in his hands and he was jacking a round into the breech. He fired hastily, too hastily, as McAllister hurled himself down. By the time he had put another round into the breech, he saw McAllister disappearing over the edge.
Offdike was on his feet, running, shouting at Lindholm. The banker seemed as frozen to the spot as much as the girl Carla.
Offdike reached the edge of the trail and fired several shots into the scrub and brush below. Once, he turned with angry ferocity to Lindholm and bellowed: ‘Can’t you use a gun?’
Lindholm caught him by the arm. ‘You’ll bring the posse down on us with all this shooting.’
Offdike knocked him aside. He went on levering and triggering furiously until the carbine was empty. Then he stood, staring blankly at the weapon. When at last he looked round, he saw that Stevenson was propped up on one elbow, vomiting. Lindholm stood with his revolver pointed at the prostrate and bewildered Joe Ramage.
Lindholm said with a desperate brightness: ‘We still have one hostage.’
Offdike started looking around.
Carla asked: ‘What’re you looking for?’
Offdike said in a dead voice: ‘Stevenson’s carbine. McAllister took it.’ This fact seemed to be more than he could bear. For a moment, utter hopelessness showed on his face. Finally, he pulled himself together and said: ‘Lindholm, you and the girl catch up the horses. Move it now.’ He walked over to Stevenson and said: ‘Hank, get on your feet. This ain’t no time to be sick. We have to cut our losses. I don’t aim to cut down timber out of here without as much gold as the horses’ll carry.’
Slowly, Stevenson hauled himself to his feet. His great bulk seemed shaken. He had shrunk a little. His complexion was grey and his eyes had a dead, stricken look about them. Very softly, as much to himself as Offdike, he said: ‘I’ll kill McAllister. Nobody ever laid a hand on me before.’
Offdike said: ‘I daresay you’ll get the chance.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Those first few moments after they were free of their captors were painful and uncomfortable ones for McAllister and the girl. It was one of those times when they were willing to risk physical pain which ordinarily they would have shrunk from. Both knew that the chances were that they had leapt to their deaths; if the mountainside did not kill them, there were still the guns above.
Allison must have trusted McAllister’s judgment, for she had thrown herself blindly from the trail, having no idea what awaited her. If she had known what she risked, maybe she would have stayed on the trail, where death was almost certain. As it was, she hit a slope so steep that it would have been impossible to stand on. Quite inexperienced in such activity, she was immediately completely out of control of herself. Rocks and brush tore at her, ripping clothes and flesh. Instinctively, as she bounced and was thrown onward, as she struck again and again, she tried to do two things at once. She wanted to protect her face and she wanted desperately to clutch at some firm object to halt her ever increasing downward progress. Those moments were so full of violence and hurt that she did not feel any terror, just nature’s protective instinct to save herself any way she could.
Once, her hands closed on the small gnarled trunk of a scrub oak which had somehow subsisted through the cold winters and on rocky terrain. She thought she was saved, but the downward pull was still too strong and her hands failed her. She rolled with dizzying speed and struck a small ledge, which seemed to toss her weightlessly into the gossamer top branches of a tiny stunted birch, which cushioned her, bent under her weight and then failed to stop her. She seemed to fall a long time. When she hit a grassy slope, her body seemed to disintegrate under the impact. She clutched at the coarse stems of the grass, found purchase and tried to rise; but here her body itself surrendered to the harsh treatment and collapsed.
She heard herself call: ‘McAllister.’ Whether she called loudly or softly, she did not know.
McAllister, when he went over the edge, knew, as much as any man could, what he was doing. But not even he could know what lay immediately below him. The evidence of his eyes was that he dived head-first into a sea of small tree-tops and brush.
He went through this with a crash that told him that they were more substantial than they looked. No sooner was he through them than he hit rock, and it felt as if his whole body had been smashed in half by a giant blow. He began to roll violently, apparently out of control, and was aware that within seconds he might pitch out into space to be dashed to pieces on the rocks hundreds of feet below. Desperately, he turned the sideways roll into a shoulder roll and thus came out full length on the slope, head downwards. This brought his shoulder up hard with a small and twisted birch tree. His weight tore it almost from its roots, but the growth which had survived by clinging to almost bare rock through a dozen winters was not to be uprooted so easily. Only now did he realize that somebody was shooting downhill from above. He could hear the crash of a carbine, and the slugs tearing through the foliage. Once, a round hit a rock ten feet from him and whined away into the thin high air. Holding on to the tree, he allowed his body to slide downhill so that he could crane his head back to look in the direction of the trail. The brush and trees made it invisible to him.
He lay still, getting his breath and assessing the damage. The shooting stopped and he could hear the men’s voices. He felt as if he had broken at least one rib. His clothes seemed to be ripped to shreds. In several places he could see blood where his flesh had been tom. He reckoned he would live – though in some discomfort.
First things first. He looked around for Stevenson’s carbine and failed to see it. He swore, knowing that the weapon was essential to him. He heard the girl below, calling his name. At least she was alive. He started crawling back up the slope to search for the rifle. He did not enjoy that climb, because he ached considerably and every movement hurt, and
because he expected any moment to be sighted from above and fired on.
Luck again came to his aid and he found the Spencer repeater, comparatively unharmed, a dozen feet above him. He rested and listened to the sounds from above. The horses were moving; a man shouted. He started down the hillside with enormous care. Once, he started a small cascade of rocks-and stayed still with held breath, waiting for the shot. But nothing came. Constantly twisting his head to look up, he went on down. Ten minutes later, he found the girl and was amazed to see her still alive. She had fallen a considerable distance. Her breathing was shallow and jerky, but there was no blood or froth on her lips. She was ashen, and her body lay twisted in an unnatural position.
He started to swear obscenely. The last thing he wanted was an injured girl to add to his difficulties. Very gingerly, he lifted her in his arms and started to walk with great difficulty down the slope. Taking several rests, he at last reached a narrow, steep ravine and clambered along it till he came to a rushing mountain torrent of crystal-clear ice-cold water. There was just enough fiat ground to lay her down.
Thanks to the barbiquejo, he had not lost his hat. He filled it with water and bathed the girl’s face. Then he trickled a little into her mouth. Shortly, she stirred and opened her eyes. For a moment, she stared blankly into his eyes, but when he smiled, she smiled back.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you did pretty good back there.’
She said: ‘Are we both still alive or is this heaven?’
‘Heaven for me,’ he said.
She said: ‘This is no time for flirting, McAllister.’
‘I never flirt, ma’am,’ he said, and offered her his hand. ‘I’m always dead serious about women. Anything else would be an insult. Let’s see if we can get you on your feet. We should keep moving, and it’s bad for my presence of mind to keep carrying you.’
She was hurt and she winced when she tried to get up, but his voice had reassured her. When she was on her feet, she leaned against him and he put an arm around her. He could have wished Joe and his gold and the villains a hundred miles off. When he kissed her gently on the temple, her sigh changed its note. She leaned back in his arms and looked up at him.
McAllister 7 Page 15
