Appaloosa vcaeh-1

by Robert B. Parker

  “Everett,” he said.

  “Virgil.”

  “Might as well get down,” Cole said. “We can camp here. Water’s good, and”-he nodded at the outcropping-“we can shelter a fire if we stay by the stone.”

  I unloaded the mule and unsaddled the horses and put them on a loose tether so they could drink and forage for food among the scrub. Then I built a fire against the outcropping and put out food for supper, and squatted on my heels and started to cook. Cole never moved from where he sat with his feet in the water, until the thick slices of salt pork began to hiss in the frying pan. Then he put his boots on and came to the fire with a limp that barely showed. He poured himself some coffee.

  “Whiskey in that saddlebag,” I said.

  He got the bottle and poured some in his coffee.

  “You?” he said.

  I held out my coffee cup, and he poured some whiskey into it. Each of us took a sip, first blowing on the surface of the coffee so we wouldn’t burn our lips.

  “Stringer getting a posse up?” Cole said.

  “Talking about it when I left Yaqui,” I said.

  “You found my stones.”

  “Yep.”

  “Scatter the arrow?” Cole said.

  “Yep.”

  Cole sipped more of his coffee.

  “Good,” he said after he swallowed. “Don’t want no goddamn herd of cowboys and hardware clerks stampedin’ around out here. Getting in our way.”

  When the salt pork had cooked nearly through, I dropped some biscuit dough into the grease and let it fry, and turned it once, and took the fried biscuits and the salt pork and put them into tin plates.

  “They ahead of us?” I said.

  “Yep. Probably widened the gap today. Me walking and all.”

  “Twelve,” I said, “fifteen hours.”

  Cole nodded.

  “They know we’re behind them?” I said.

  “Sheltons know me,” Cole said. “They know I’ll be coming.”

  “We plannin’ on stayin’ the night here?” I said.

  “Got to sleep,” Cole said. “We ain’t going to catch them today.”

  I leaned back a little and stretched out my legs and drank some more coffee. Cole looked at the mule and the horses.

  “Must have been tiresome,” Cole said, “draggin’ them three animals on a lead.”

  “Some,” I said. “Mule caught on pretty quick, and the horses got the idea in time.”

  “Be easier now. I’ll lead her horse, you lead the mule.”

  I nodded. We ate our meal and drank coffee with whiskey and didn’t say much. When it was dark, we let the fire die and settled to sleep between it and the rock, wrapped in strong-smelling saddle blankets.

  “Got any thoughts where they might be headed?” I said to Cole.

  “South,” Cole said.

  33

  It was just after dawn on our third day, and the trail had turned straight west. Now and then, Cole would see a hoofprint in among the ground cover. But mostly, we were able to follow them through horse droppings and the signs of campfires.

  “I been thinking,” I said to Cole.

  “Un-huh.”

  He rode with his eyes on the ground, leading the saddle horse, with me trailing the mule.

  “We’re all the law there was in Appaloosa,” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “And now we ain’t there.”

  “Yep.”

  “So,” I said. “Now there ain’t no law there.”

  “Yep.”

  “And that don’ bother you?” I said.

  Cole looked up from the tracking for a moment.

  “No,” he said. “It don’t.”

  We rode on: Cole, head down, looking at the ground; me riding beside him, looking at the landscape. The saddle horse trailing placidly behind him, the mule behind me. Neither of us said anything. When we kicked up a jackrabbit, my hand went to my handgun, before I caught it. Cole never flinched. I’m not even sure he saw the rabbit. We kept on. We didn’t hurry, but we didn’t stop. Ahead, past the horizon above where our present direction would take us, there was a circular movement in the sky.

  “Buzzards,” I said.

  Cole looked up. His face showed nothing. We kept on. In maybe an hour, we came to where the buzzards were feeding. It was the carcass of a young buffalo, mostly bones now, and hooves. Most of what could be eaten had been. The buzzards flew up as we rode up, and landed again a few feet away. Cole ignored them. He got off his horse and went and squatted on his heels and looked at the remnants. The buzzards hopped restlessly just out of his reach. He paid no attention.

  “Hide’s gone,” he said.

  I sat my horse and waited, looking at the landscape. Cole didn’t need my help with the buffalo.

  “Scapula’s broke,” he said.

  I looked down and could see that it was. Cole rummaged a little among the bones and the blood-soaked grass where the buffalo had fallen.

  “Shot,” he said.

  Cole opened his hand and showed me two big lead slugs, misshapen from shattering the scapula.

  “Bigger’n a forty-five,” Cole said.

  “Fifty, maybe.”

  “Maybe one of them old Sharps buffalo guns,” Cole said.

  The vultures edged closer. There were still a few scraps on the bones.

  “I didn’t see no sign of one,” I said, “with the Sheltons.”

  “Nope. Wouldn’t take the hide, either.”

  He was looking at the ground.

  “See the horse tracks?” he said.

  I rode nearer and wheeled around the dead animal, scattering the buzzards as I went.

  “Not shod,” I said.

  “And they bothered to skin it and take the hide,” Cole said.

  “Indians.”

  “Yep.”

  I rode out a little way from the carcass, and in a slow wider circle, which infuriated the buzzards who had just lit there, after I’d scattered them in closer. On foot, Cole walked out toward where I was. I leaned forward in my saddle.

  “Here’s the shod hoofprints,” I said. “And the unshod, mingled.”

  Cole squatted, looking at the smudges in the dirt. Then he got down on his belly and put his face barely an inch away from the prints and looked, and slithered along like that, looking.

  “Shod prints are older,” he said. “Sides have begun to crumble a little. Unshod prints are over them. Fresher.”

  I looked at the landscape again. Nothing moved but the unhappy buzzards.

  “Kiowa?” I said.

  “No way to say. There’s some out here.”

  “Could be hunters,” I said.

  “Could be, but if they was just huntin’ they’d take bones, ligaments, horns, teeth, everything. Here they just took the hide and meat.”

  “No squaws,” I said.

  Cole nodded.

  “When you was with the Army,” he said, “was the Kiowas hostile.”

  “They were,” I said. “But you know Indians. Yesterday they were, today maybe they ain’t.

  “Can you tell how far behind the Sheltons they are?”

  “Ain’t that good,” Cole said.

  “Can you tell how far ahead of us they are?”

  “Carcass don’t smell yet,” Cole said.

  “Ain’t much left that would smell,” I said.

  “Blood would,” Cole said. “Soaked in the ground.”

  He stood and swung back up onto his horse.

  “Best keep moving,” he said.

  He kept looking at the ground as we rode on. I kept looking around us.

  34

  We camped without a fire that night, in the bend of a small river, so that the water was on three sides. And we tethered the animals close.

  “No coffee,” I said. “But I still got whiskey.”

  “It’ll do,” Cole said.

  We ate some beef jerky and cold fry biscuits and drank some whiskey.

  “Indian sign tu
rned off about five miles back,” Cole said. “Sheltons are still going straight.”

  “So they give up on the Sheltons.”

  “Or they had to stop and jerk that buffalo before it started to rot,” Cole said. “Or they had something to do wherever they went and they’ll come back. Them Kiowas know there’s something ahead of ’em, and how many. It’s just if they want to chase them down.”

  “Sheltons got three good gun hands, plus Allie. You know how many Indians?”

  “Can’t say. They’re riding too close, and we don’t have time for me to get down and look close enough for long enough. There’s more than two.”

  Cole passed me the whiskey bottle and I drank some.

  “You know if Allie can shoot?”

  “Anybody can shoot,” Cole said. “And hit something if it’s close enough.”

  “Think they’d give her a gun?”

  “I don’t think nothing,” Cole said. “Can you stay awake until midnight?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I can stay awake from then to dawn,” Cole said. “Wake me up.”

  He rolled up in his saddle blanket and, as far as I could tell, went to sleep right away. I put the whiskey away and wrapped my saddle blanket around me, sat in the dark under the high stars with the shotgun across my lap, and listened to the sound of the river, and the smell of the water and the grass mixed with the smell of horse blanket, and the night went its way. Halfway to dawn, I woke Cole. He came awake as instantly as he’d fallen asleep.

  In the morning, the mule woke me up, nudging at me for its morning feed. We fed the stock and washed in the river and had a cold breakfast and moved on.

  “Sheltons got to be heading someplace,” I said. “They probably got some money before they started, but nobody’s fool enough to pay them all. They got to deliver Bragg to collect the rest.”

  “Be my suppose,” Cole said.

  “So they’re headin’ someplace, and we’re behind them,” I said. “Good to know we ain’t just wandering.”

  Cole nodded, his eyes on the ground.

  “ ’Course it’d be even better to know where the someplace was.”

  “Would,” Cole said.

  It was late morning when Cole halted and bent out of his saddle, looking at the ground.

  “Indians are back,” he said.

  I moved up beside him and saw them, too. They had trailed in from the west and cut the Sheltons’ tracks.

  We moved on that way for a little, slowly, with Cole hanging out of the saddle, studying the tracks.

  “They’re following,” Cole said.

  “Any better sense of how many?”

  Cole studied the tracks as we rode.

  After maybe a mile of silence, he said, “Can’t really tell much. Might be quite a few.”

  By midafternoon the trail turned west, and by late afternoon we were climbing. We had to move the animals slower and rest them some. By dark, we were in the foothills of some mountains and the temperature was cooler. We camped under an overhang against the hillside, near a spring. There was grass. We let the animals graze on a long tether. We sat in the dark again that night and ate jerky and hardtack and drank some whiskey.

  “We ain’t going to be able to follow these tracks much more if they keep heading up,” I said.

  “We can look for broken branches,” Cole said. “Campfire ashes, the leavin’s from a meal, horse droppings, maybe some human waste.”

  “If they keep going straight,” I said. “You got any idea where we are?”

  “Two days southwest of Chester,” Cole said.

  “You know what mountains these are?”

  “Nope.”

  “You think we’re closing on them at all?” I said.

  “Can’t say, but I know Allie ain’t much of a rider. She may slow them down.”

  “What are we going to do about her?” I said.

  “We’ll figure that out when we get there,” Cole said.

  “They’ll use her as a shield, Virgil, why they brought her.”

  “ ’Course they will. Wouldn’t you?”

  There was no moon. The sky was clouded. With our blankets around us, we sat in near absolute darkness. We couldn’t see each other. We didn’t know where we were. There was only the sound of the animals eating grass, and trickling water, and our voices. It felt like being the only living human thing in the universe.

  “Hard business,” I said. “Hard business.”

  “It’s all hard business,” Cole said, “what we do.”

  “You all right?” I said.

  Cole was silent for a time and then he said, “All right?”

  “How you feel,” I said. “ ’Bout Allie and all.”

  Cole was silent again, and the silence seemed so long that I thought maybe he’d gone to sleep.

  Then he said, “Everett, we been together now awhile. Can’t exactly say how long, but long. And there ain’t anyone I’d rather do this work with. You’re as good as anybody I seen, ’cept maybe the Shelton boys… and me.”

  “That’s pretty good,” I said.

  “And the reason you ain’t as good as the Sheltons or me ain’t got nothing to do with steady, or fast, or fortuitous.”

  I knew he meant fortitude.

  “The reason the above-named folks are better’n you,” Cole said, “is ’cause you got feelin’s.”

  “Hell, Virgil, everybody got feelin’s.”

  “Feelin’s get you killed,” Virgil said.

  “You tellin’ me you don’t care about Allie right now?”

  Again, there was silence. I could hear one of the horses snort, as if maybe he’d gotten an insect up his nose. It was a comforting sound in the vast, black silence. It sounded familiar and calm.

  After a while Cole said, “I cared about Allie in town. And I’ll care about her when I get her back.”

  “But right now?” I said.

  I could feel Cole thinking it over.

  “Gimme that bottle,” he said, and put his hand out and touched my leg so I knew where to hand him the bottle. I put the bottle in his hand and heard him drink. Then the bottle touched my leg again and I took it back and drank some.

  “Right now,” Cole said, “there’s something runnin’, and I’m trying to catch it.”

  I heard him stir around as if to get more comfortable, and then he was silent. I had the first half of the night. I shifted my back a little against the boulder where we were, and sipped some whiskey and sat in the thick darkness and listened.

  35

  The next morning, we went mostly on foot, leading the animals. We looked for any sign that would tell us they’d been there, and the sign was sparse. About midmorning, we worked our way around a side of ledge to the top of a valley. In the bottom of the valley was a river that led out into the foothills and, beyond that, to the flatlands. In the flatland, on the south side of the river, was movement. We stopped at the top of the valley and looked at it.

  I got a spyglass out of my saddlebag and handed it to Cole. He telescoped it open and looked down at the movement. His eyes weren’t no better than mine. But it was his woman they took.

  “Four riders,” Cole said after a while. “And a pack animal. One of the riders is a woman.”

  He handed me the glass and I looked. They were too far to make out that it was Allie, but who the hell else would it be.

  “Picked up a third man,” I said. “Musta been waiting someplace with the packhorse.”

  Cole didn’t answer. He sat motionless on his horse, staring down at the plain.

  “We can work our way down to the river easy enough,” he said, “without them seeing us.”

  I lowered the glass.

  “Then we can sit tight and rest the animals, and us, until the sun goes down and they make camp. Then we can ride out and get close.”

  Below us, in the foothills to the north of the river, there was movement.

  “That way, we can lay flat and get the lay of how things are,” Col
e said. “ ’Fore we go in.”

  I put the glass back up to my eye and looked at the movement in the foothills. It was Indians, riding close together among the pine trees, staying behind the hills. It was too hard to count through the glass with much accuracy. But I guessed twelve. I handed the glass to Cole and pointed. He studied the Indians without expression.

  “Southern Cheyenne?” he said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe Kiowa. I think they’re carrying them little medicine shields like Kiowas have.”

  Cole looked some more.

  “Might be,” he said. “Make any difference?”

  “Nope. Neither one of ’em likes us.”

  “Got no reason to,” he said. “How many you count?”

  “Twelve.”

  “About what I count,” Cole said. “Maybe a few more.”

  “They’re doggin’ those folks,” I said.

  “Yep,” Cole said.

  “They’ll be a problem.”

  “Speculate that they will,” Cole said. “Nothin’ we can do about it.”

  “No,” I said.

  “So we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing,” Cole said, and moved his horse forward and let it begin to pick its way down the side of the valley, with the extra saddle horse behind him.

  I followed with the mule. As we got down into the valley, the Indians were out of sight behind the hills. We wouldn’t see them again until we got out of the valley. Then we might see more of them than we wanted to. If the thought was bothering Cole, he didn’t mention it. Nor did he show any sign of being in a hurry. He was going where he was going to go at the pace he needed to go at, and he was taking me with him.

  36

  We camped at the bottom of the foothills, just before we reached the plain, next to the river, in a grove of trees. It was still daylight, and we had an early, cold supper. No whiskey this day.

  “I need some coffee,” I said.

  “Yes,” Cole said.

  “We get through with this and I’m going to drink ten cups,” I said. “For breakfast.”

  “Won’t be dozin’ much that day,” Cole said.

  The animals grazed in the shade. We took turns washing ourselves and our clothes in the river, and spread the wet clothes on the grass at the edge of the trees, away from the river, to dry in the sun. I had a change of clothes. But Cole didn’t. While his clothes dried, Cole walked around in a pair of clean drawers I gave him, with his gun belt on.