by Jory Sherman
Wild appeared out of the timber as Aikens’s horse scampered downward. The horse made a lot of noise. And Wild looked at the horse, the empty saddle.
Then Aikens’s pursuer disappeared for a second or two as Aikens put the stock of his rifle against his shoulder and took aim.
He saw Wild head for a pine tree.
He squeezed the trigger of his rifle and the butt bucked against his shoulder. Bark flew off the tree just inches from where Wild had been.
Missed, damn it, Aikens said to himself soundlessly.
Then he heard nothing but silence. He jacked another shell into the chamber and looked for his target.
Wild was still behind the tree. But Aikens was ready for any sign of him. His rifle was in his grip, nestled against his shoulder. He lined up the front blade with the rear buckhorn sight and waited.
He was sure of himself now.
He had the advantage.
If Wild showed any part of his body, Aikens had it covered. He was a patient man.
His eyes were hooded. He could sense death a few yards away.
Wild was pinned tight against that tree.
In a sense, he was Aikens’s prisoner.
It was only a matter of time before Wild showed himself.
And when he did, he was a dead man.
Aikens waited, his pulse steady, his eyes glittering like a diamondback’s.
His finger was snug against the trigger of his rifle.
One tick was all it would take.
One little tug of his forefinger.
One tick of a clock.
THREE
Cord spit out the mashed lump of rhubarb in his mouth.
Deerflies swarmed to the shredded remains of the stalk on the ground. Their bluish gray bodies glinted in the sun and their diaphanous wings zizzed like sizzling bacon in the fry pan.
He held his rifle upright in front of his body and his back hugged the tree.
His quarry had reloaded and was waiting for him to show himself.
He knew he was in a bad spot, but as long as he stayed behind the tree he would shed no blood. His mind riffled through thoughts of possible solutions to his predicament. As each solution materialized, he rejected it.
He could not outwait Aikens. The man could sneak farther upslope, if he was careful enough, and find Cord exposed. One shot might be all it would take to put out his lamp.
Cord could not attempt a similar tactic. Once he left the safety of the tree, he would be out in the open for at least a second or two. Long enough for Aikens to squeeze the trigger and dust him off.
How long did it take a man to fire a round and reload? One or two seconds, at least. Would that be long enough for Cord to step away from the tree and catch Aikens in the open, aim, and shoot back?
Cord didn’t know.
Aikens was an experienced killer. A dead shot, with several notches on his gunstock.
It was a gamble. But what was the risk?
His life, he thought.
Still, Cord knew he had to do something. This kind of a standoff was, in itself, a gamble. And Aikens held all the aces in his hand. Four aces against a busted straight.
Cord reached up and lifted his hat from his head, careful to hold his arm close to his body. He slid the hat down to the muzzle of his rifle. It was a dusty Stetson with a wet sweatband. It lay cocked atop the barrel of his Winchester.
He was cocked and loaded. And he had a trick up his sleeve against the four aces.
Not a royal flush, but a filled straight perhaps.
He would have a second, maybe two, after Aikens fired to step out, aim, and fire himself.
One or two breaths away from death.
More of a chance than Aikens’s previous victims had had, Cord reasoned.
How trigger-happy was Aikens? Would he fall for the trick, the crude ruse? There was only one way to find out, and Cord went over his tactics. He played the game before he got to the playing field. That was the way champions did it.
That’s what Cord did.
Aikens’s horse crashed through the last fringe of brush and reached the game trail. The horse snorted and pawed the ground with its left front hoof. Then it lifted its head and looked up at its master. It whinnied and then was silent. It stood there on the trail, hipshot, one left foot cocked, the toe of its hoof braced against the ground.
When Cord was satisfied, he drew in a deep breath, held it, then shoved the rifle barrel with his hat hanging on the muzzle straight out, just past the tree trunk.
Almost instantly, he heard the crack of Aikens’s rifle.
The bullet plowed through air with a whooshing sound and ripped into Cord’s hat. It went straight through and caromed off a rock with a whistling whine.
Cord crouched, stepped away from the tree, and turned to face Aikens.
His barrel dropped and came level just below his hip. He aimed with dead reckoning as Aikens swore and took his rifle away from his shoulder. Aikens grabbed the lever and was about to pull it down when Cord’s rifle exploded. The Winchester belched smoke and sparks and the rifle cracked and echoed its whiplike report off the mountainsides.
Cord heard the bullet smack into flesh, then stepped back to the tree and cocked his rifle again just as he heard his bullet smack into flesh.
Aikens let out a grunt and his hand slipped from the lever as pain shot through his body in a rush of muscle contractions and screaming nerve endings.
He doubled over as the bullet ripped through his abdomen and smashed a cup-sized hole out his back. His brain flashed with pain signals and he expelled air from his mouth in a guttural grunt. The timber spun in a dizzying swirl of green pine and spruce needles. The ground threatened to rush up to him and topple him backward.
He staggered a half step and stood up, fighting against the pain that surged through his innards. He smelled the contents of his large intestine as it split in a blood-soaked mass of tissue and muscle.
He let the butt of his rifle strike the ground and he leaned on the barrel, using the weapon as a cane. Then his mind fuzzed over and he felt a dizziness assail his senses.
His legs turned to mush and it seemed that his knees no longer locked in place to hold him erect. He slumped down, braced by his legs, and his rifle fell from his hand. He clawed for his pistol as Cord approached.
“You might think a second or two before you draw that pistol,” Cord said.
“Damn your hide,” Aikens growled.
His fingers wrapped around the butt of his pistol, but he struggled to tighten them or draw his weapon. Blood spurted from his abdomen and he showed signs of weakening.
Cord kept his rifle aimed at Aikens as he strode ever closer to him.
“You gutshot me, Wild.”
“You were out to bushwhack me.”
“Who says?” Aikens’s voice was turning to a wheezing whisper as he tugged on the butt of his pistol.
“I do,” Cord said. “That pistol clears your holster, you won’t have time to pray before you die.”
“Go to hell,” Aikens spat. There was a trace of blood in his spittle.
Cord’s finger wrapped around the trigger of his rifle. It would take only a flick of his finger to blow off Aikens’s head. He was less than thirty feet away now, still closing the distance.
The pistol began to slide upward from Aikens’s holster. Another inch and the gun would clear it.
“I warned you, mister,” Cord said.
The pistol slid from the holster. Just barely. Aikens started to raise the barrel to point it at Cord.
Cord squeezed the trigger of his rifle from ten feet away. The barrel jumped when the powder exploded. Smoke and sparks spewed from the barrel.
The bullet slammed into Aikens’s chest and sprouted a crimson flower on his shirt. His eyes widened for a moment and his
gun hand went slack. The pistol fell from Aikens’s grip as he reached up to the hole in his chest.
Blood spurted out and his eyes glazed over with a deathly frost. A gobbet of blood bubbled from his mouth as he crumpled into a heap and pitched forward, his eyes fixed.
“Too bad,” Cord said as he stood over the heap that had once been Aikens. “You might have lived another five minutes.”
He ejected the hull from his rifle and set the hammer to half cock.
Cord took no satisfaction in killing Aikens. He just felt empty inside, as if a deep hole had opened up somewhere in the region of his stomach. But he shed no tears for the man who had dry-gulched him. The man deserved to die and he had made the choice to end it quicker than he had to that day.
Cord walked away from the corpse and down the slope toward the outlaw’s horse. He spoke to the animal, then picked up both reins.
The horse whickered softly as Cord stepped out along the game trail.
“Be all right, boy,” Cord said. “I’ll find you another home by and by.”
His horse was waiting for him.
And there was still one more horse thief to catch left on his list of things to do that day.
He mounted up and led Aikens’s horse alongside as he started down the game trail toward the creek.
One man and four stolen horses.
That one could not make good time and the day was still young enough for Cord to catch up with him.
He hoped it would not take too long. He was on the verge of tiring in the thin mountain air. He saw a hawk fly over and trail its wrinkled shadow through the trees until it vanished from sight.
Like me, he thought, the hawk is still hunting.
FOUR
Larry Dolan heard the gunshots from a distance. He stiffened in the saddle and instinctively turned to look back up into the phalanxes of timber higher on the slope he had descended. He was tempted to smile, since he had faith in Lester Aikens. But he suppressed the smile because, in truth, he really did not know whether Wild was now wolf meat or if he would have to elude Wild.
There was a long period of silence and then he heard another shot, the crack of a rifle. Just one shot. It could mean anything. A steel wire tautened in his brain, and along it ran electrical charges of doubt that surged through his head.
He wondered what that last shot meant. Was it Lester putting a last bullet into Wild’s head? Or had Wild killed off Aikens?
Doubt flooded his mind and it was the not knowing that made his senses tingle. Not knowing. He spurred his horse down the trail toward the creek. Distance was now his friend, no matter what the outcome of a duel in the timber might be.
The horses could smell water and they nickered and tossed their heads as he drew closer to the creek. Once he forded it, he could ride down to the flat and have a clear look at his back trail. And he would be ready if Wild had been the victor and was coming after him.
His nerves were taut and his horse was chomping at the bit to get to the water. Those he had stolen were tugging on the lead ropes, and it took all his strength to hold them in check with the single strand that connected to all of their halters.
“Steady, boy,” he said to his horse, and gave him his head.
Below, he saw the shining waters of the creek. They shimmered in the sunlight, wavelets shot with silver, a bellowing of dark water that rippled and changed shape and color as the creek surged toward lower ground.
Dolan looked back over his shoulder. He was not overly worried. He still had a trick or two left. He was just sorry Aikens was not with him, because they had planned all this perfectly, long before they had stolen the horses from the JB Ranch.
He reached the creek and found the ford he and Aikens had previously scouted. It was on a bend where the creek widened and streamed over pebbles that he could see beneath the water. It was shallow there and fairly good footing. He let the horses drink, then urged them on to the opposite bank. He made a sharp left turn into a maze of arroyos and rode over rocky ground, the remnants of an ancient moraine. He kept looking back at his tracks. They were wet for a while, then, as the horses shook off the water from the creek, his tracks were dry and invisible.
He rode over a wide plain that was almost pure shale and flint. This had been a place where the Cheyenne and Arapaho had gathered much of their flint for their arrowheads and hatchets.
Again, he left no tracks since he moved slowly and picked a careful path across the flat.
Beyond the plain there were arroyos spreading out in several directions, like the spokes on a wagon wheel. His eyes sought out the small blazes he and Aikens had made previously to guide them through the maze. Weathering had dulled the slashes in the aspens so that they were barely noticeable. He smiled.
They had thought this out, he and Aikens, and had made several forays into the foothills to find just the right place in case they had to elude a posse or a tracker. They had worked hard to build a pole corral in a small box canyon where they could store stolen horses and hide in ambush, just in case.
He passed several arroyos with traces of water that had run to the creek after every rain and snowmelt in the spring. The Cheyenne and Arapaho had left traces of their hunting camps in many of the arroyos, and he and Aikens had found whitened bones of deer and elk, along with broken flint arrowheads and other signs of temporary habitation.
He rode over loose talus from the limestone outcroppings, through a defile bordered by rugged hills, limestone bluffs, and signs of ancient flash floods. It was a wild and baffling place for anyone not familiar with that part of the Rockies.
He listened intently for any signs of pursuit, but heard nothing but the caw of crows and the peeps of chipmunks, the rustle of leaves in the gentle breeze that blew through the small canyon. The horses’ hooves clacked on the talus. Anyone following him would make the same sound, and such a sound carried far up and down the corridor where he rode.
Finally, he turned left again, back toward the higher mountains, and crossed the creek. Then he made a right turn where he saw a blaze high on an aspen tree and continued into the small box canyon. He and Aikens had built the corral just inside it at a narrow aperture where boulders had rolled down over past centuries and created two walls. The gate was simple and it was open.
He ran the stolen horses into the small corral, then dismounted outside and picked up poles that made a crude gate across the entrance. There was grass inside and a small concave rock that was filled with rainwater. The horses could stay there for days and survive. When he took the rope off their halters, they all bowed their necks and began to nibble on the tall grasses that flourished all over that box canyon.
Satisfied, Dolan rode around the entrance to the box canyon and up one of its side slopes. There, in a copse of fir and spruce, was a place he had picked for himself. It concealed him and gave him a good view of the terrain below, the entrance to the small canyon.
He dismounted, ground-tied his horse to a scrub pine, and pulled his rifle from its scabbard, along with a box half-full of cartridges. He stuck those in his pocket and sat on a flat rock between a pair of spruce trees that joined branches just behind him.
He pulled a blade of grass from the ground and put the buried end in his mouth, rinsed away the dirt with saliva, and spit it out. Then he chewed on the sweet stalk and looked down the long canyon. He could see for a good five hundred yards.
And this was the only way in and the only way out of the canyon labyrinth. He smiled in satisfaction.
If Wild came after him, Dolan had a bullet in his rifle with Wild’s name on it.
Perfect.
FIVE
Cord noticed that Aikens’s horse was well-fed and well-behaved. He would need him later when he packed the outlaw’s body out of the timber, collected his rifle and pistol.
For now, his plan was to secure the horse near water and grass, then get on w
ith his business. As far as he knew, there was only one horse thief left to track down, Larry Dolan. If Cord had to follow him all the way to the 2Bar2, he was determined to get those valuable horses back to their rightful owner. Come hell or high water.
The horses both smelled the creek water. Their rubbery nostrils gobbled the air and their ears stiffened as Cord descended the game trail. He patted Windmill’s neck. His horse was thirsty, too. There were streaks of sweat striping his shoulders. The sun and the high altitude took moisture out of man and horse on such a day.
He saw the shining waters of the creek and had to hold Aikens’s horse in check when it bunched up its muscles, ready to bolt toward the water. Windmill snorted and whickered, but held fast under the pressure of the bit in its mouth.
He reached the creek and let the horses drink while he scanned the ground for Dolan’s spoor. And there it was, five sets of hoofmarks on the path that led along the creek on his side.
He knew the man was looking for a ford. The water was swift where he was, since the creek was bordered by high banks and they kept the stream narrow.
When the horses had slaked their thirst, Cord rode away from the creek looking for a spot where he could use Aikens’s rope to tie up his horse on good grass and give him access to creek water. He found such a spot in a grove of aspen a few yards down the creek. There was a low point in the bank where deer and elk had left a jumble of cuneiform tracks when they had come there to drink.
Cord dismounted and took Aikens’s lariat off the saddle, looped it through the horse’s bridle, and secured the bitter end to an aspen. He left the saddle and saddlebags on the horse, patted its withers, and climbed up on Windmill. Aikens’s horse whinnied at them as they rode off, heading upstream.
Cord was tempted to dig out another stalk of rhubarb and chew on it, but he stifled the urge. Those horse tracks were still fresh and he didn’t want anything to distract him. Somewhere upstream, there was a shallow ford, and that was likely where Dolan would cross and perhaps head out of the hills and onto the prairie.
