It cracked alight and was still fizzing when he tossed it down into the little runnel of gasoline that had trickled downslope from the woodpile.
The spark caught with a sedate whump of sound and burst into a pale yellow-blue flame that ran uphill instantly into the pile of brush and logs. There was a louder thud of noise and Watchman kept one eye closed, the other slitted, guarding against night-blindness in the face of the sudden high daylight blaze, while the horse bunched itself and whickered in fear and went three feet straight up into the air and came down running.
He kept his seat. Clamped his free hand down on the pommel and fought the horse down to a semblance of control: reined down from dead run to gallop to canter and went crashing into the scrub, branches whipping at his legs.
Down to a trot by the time he caught up with the others. Behind them the fire was a magnificent beacon, showing up the two silent trucks in hard silhouette. Even at this distance the heat touched the back of his neck and his own shadow on horseback splashed out across the trees and earth ahead.
There was a little streak of grey-pink on the eastern horizon; opposite, toward the storm, the sky was dark and wild. Watchman tugged his hat down and pointed the horse toward the high country.
CHAPTER 6
1
They rode across a tilted clearing dusted with threadbare snow. At the upper end Walker hipped around in his saddle to look back. He could still see the glow of the bonfire but it was slowly being overwhelmed by the spreading sunrise.
At the head of the column the Major looked back. “Come on-come on. Keep it closed up.”
“Just looking to see if they’re still following us.”
“Of course they are. What difference does it make? Three yokel cops with their noses to the ground. Come on, Captain.”
They moved on. The woman on the sorrel gave Walker a brief glance and then turned her face away; her heavy rope of hair swung forward and masked her.
The storm was starting to move. He could feel it, it made him hunch his neck into the collar of his coat; he could see it, higher mountain peaks being absorbed into its scudding blackness as he watched. The wind began to whip little flurries of powder snow off the surface of the ground. Walker’s blue could feel it too: he had to hold in the nervous prancing horse.
All the vibrations were bad, he thought. When you found yourself absurdly and unexpectedly on horseback in a stormy wilderness you began to think in simplistic truisms and it occurred to him for the first time that he was one of the Bad Guys. He hadn’t thought badly of himself until that moment back at the farm when Baraclough had stayed behind, inside the house with the doomed deputy, and Walker knowing what was going on had not lifted a finger to stop it. That was the point at which it had all crumpled. Up till then, even though they were things he was doing himself, they seemed more like things that had been happening to him-the preparations, the caper, the escape-as if he had been in an audience watching himself, an actor in a movie, acting out events that had no reality. But now it was real enough and the reality was pain. They were the real Bad Guys and in the end the Bad Guys always got killed by the Good Guys. In these chilly mountains he convinced himself that he was about to die.
Once you started thinking about your own death it was hard to stop thinking about it. He kept seeing himself on a mountain rock somewhere with the blood draining out of him, going cold and without life.
The wind dropped. They crossed a bare slope and penetrated the pine forest. The big trees shut out a great deal of light. The wind died altogether; the horse laid its ears back along its head and hoofs crunched softly in the silent pine needles. Goosebumps ran along Walker’s arms; the flesh of his chest quivered. Jingle of bit chains, squeak of saddle leather-the gray air hung cold and motionless.
Back in these mountains it felt as if civilization was a thousand miles and a thousand years away. The heaped-up summits loomed vast above them, timber and boulders and loose shale slides. They climbed the side of a long S-curving ridge and stopped briefly while the Major got out the topographical map and held it up with both arms wide, glancing up from it at intervals to check his bearings. The temperature was dropping sharply all the time now: the horses’ breath had begun to steam. The air was getting thicker, more gray, and it was getting noticeably more difficult to make out the outlines of the peaks against the sky. But the still silence persisted.
The Major checked his pocket compass and snapped it shut and turned around to look them over. Eight horses, six riders. The Major’s heavy beard stubble had grown perceptibly overnight.
Baraclough finished field-stripping the stub of his menthol cigarette and put the butt filter in his pocket, not for neatness but for security.
Eddie Burt’s thick waxy face was upturned as if to pray: Burt was watching the sky.
Jack Hanratty’s pitted face was averted, pointed meaninglessly toward the trees to the left: Hanratty wanted to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes for fear of what he would find there.
The Major said, “Captain, let’s have the clothesline.”
Walker dismounted, holding the blue by the reins, walked back to the pack animals and hunted for the coil of nylon line. He had forgotten where he’d put it and it took a while to find it.
The Major said, “Run the line through the bridle bits.”
“All of them?”
“All eight horses.”
“What for?”
“In a little while you won’t be able to see the horse in front of you, Captain.”
Walker’s eyes jerked toward the sky. Most of it was a seething obscurity.
The Major said, “Now we’ll have a little lecture in survival. Pay attention. You’ve all been up for twenty-four hours and you’re tired. That’s too bad. Fall asleep in this weather and you’re dead. Think about that and remember it. When you feel yourself starting to fall asleep, or when you begin to feel a funnybone tingle in your feet, get off your horse and walk. Stamp your feet when you walk, keep the circulation going. I recommend you tie your horse’s reins to your wrist with a slipknot so that if you happen to trip and fall you won’t get lost. If you haven’t seen mountain weather you may find it hard to credit this, but take my word for it you won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face at noon today. Just hang onto your horse and let the horse lead you. I’ll be at the point, breaking trail, and I’ll have a rappel rope running from my belt to the saddle horn on my horse, so if I happen to walk over any cliffs you won’t lose me.”
Walker said, “If we’re traveling that blind how will you know where you’re going?” He was threading the line through Mrs. Lansford’s bridle and he caught the edge of the woman’s bleak glance before it whipped away.
“Dead reckoning,” the Major said. “I’ve got a compass.”
Eddie Burt said, “Don’t fret it none. The Major’s never got lost in his life.”
Walker ran the nylon through Baraclough’s bridle and handed the free end up to the Major, who threaded it through his bridle bit and ran a double hitch around his saddle horn; he had about a dozen feet of slack left over and he let most of it go, coiling it and hanging the coil over his saddle horn, tying the butt end through the belt-loops of his trousers and knotting it around his hips. It was a three-eighths-inch nylon clothesline from the Lansford barn and it probably would test out at five hundred pounds or more.
Walker didn’t go back to his horse just yet. He stood beside the Major’s horse and tried to sound calm. “I wouldn’t mind knowing what our plans are, Major.”
Eddie Burt snapped at him from the rear of the line: “The Major’s kept you alive this far.”
“Nobody said he hasn’t.” But Walker kept his eyes on the Major, as stubbornly as he could.
“You have a right to know.” Major Hargit’s hatbrim lifted: he had everyone’s attention. “We’ll keep moving as long as we can, and then we’ll keep moving a while longer. The map shows a ranger station on that peak up there-a fire-lookout tower. I’d like to get at least th
at far but if it becomes impossible we’ll just have to rig shelter and wait it out. At least the pursuit won’t be gaining on us-they’ll be stalled in their tracks. If those are ordinary hick cops back there they won’t have enough woodcraft among the three of them to build a Boy Scout fire-maybe they’ll die out there. Maybe they won’t. Whatever they do they’ll be too busy staying alive to worry about catching us for a while.”
Walker’s mouth twisted.
“As soon as this lifts,” the Major went on, “we’ll cross the range. The storm will have covered our tracks and if the weather clears enough to permit aerial search sweeps they won’t see us as long as we’ve got the sense to stay under the trees. By the way forget those trucks we saw back there. That’s a trap.
“Once we’ve crossed into Utah we’ve got four or five roads to choose from. There’ll be roadblocks. We’ll raid one of them, confiscate their patrol cars, make our way into one of the villages over there. We’ll have plenty of opportunities to mail the bank money to ourselves in a series of small first-class packages, after which we’ll separate and find our way individually to Reno. The police are looking for five men and several hundred pounds of loot-if we travel separately without large quantities of cash we ought to be able to survive a few stop-and-search checkpoints. Bear in mind that the secret of a successful escape operation is not to hide but to blend into your surroundings. We’ll become ranch workers, itinerant mechanics, cafe dishwashers for a few days if we have to-by the time we get down there we’ll look disheveled enough.
“But first we’ve got to get there. Steve, you might tie the lady’s hands together and leash her to her horse. Then let’s get moving.”
2
Walker felt the numbness of his ears and nose and hands and feet. The wind almost tore the hat from his head and he tied it down around his chin with a ripped-off concho thong. The wind was a swirl of snowflakes and foaming mist; he batted his gloved hands together.
The wind was a sound now, he could hear it frothing through the pines, beating the branches together. It wasn’t yet carrying very much snow; most of it had vaporized into a whirling chalk-dust fog. Walker’s flesh trembled inside the coat: he tried to hunch himself down inside it for warmth.
Burt and the packhorses trailed him on the nylon rope; the woman was in front of him-then Baraclough, then Hanratty, finally the Major in the lead. He could barely make out the Major’s grayish shape swaying in the mist.
The Major had assigned the order of placement and it was easy to see why. It put Hanratty between the Major and Baraclough; it put the woman between Baraclough and Walker; it put Walker between Burt and, at one remove, Baraclough. All the unreliable ones accounted for-and Walker right behind the woman, responsible for her: the Major had told him in a mild voice, Anything that happens to her happens to you. Bear that in mind. It she tries to break for it you had better bring her back. If she gets away from you don’t bother to return-you can forget your share of the money.
Baraclough had wound coat-hanger wire around Mrs. Lansford’s wrists and twisted the ends together with a pair of pliers. Not tight enough to cut the skin but too tight to be slipped. The nylon rope ran from Walker’s bridle through Mrs. Lansford’s wrist bindings to the bridle of her horse. She could get down and walk but she couldn’t get free of the rope.
The wind was against his left shoulder and the horse wanted to turn; Walker had to fight it with the reins. The white horse’s coat had a curious pigmentation that he had seen on a few horses before: when it was wet the white hair turned pale blue-some kind of secretion in the hide underneath. It came up dappled, like drops of blue ink on a white background; that was why this sort of white horse was called a blue roan.
He scrubbed his ears and tied the scarf up around his nose and mouth. An arm of cold wind got into him and shot dry agony through the tooth cavity in his upper jaw.
There was no reckoning the passage of time. The sun was gone, light was draining out of the day. The only way to tell direction was by compass and the Major had the only one of those. Walker closed his eyes up to slits and blinked back the tears of icy wind. They were climbing steadily along the side of a steep slope that seemed endless, doing switchbacks now and then when the Major decided it was time. Walker could feel the shifts by the changes in wind direction. Probably the Major was tacking-so many steps right, so many steps left, trying to keep a balanced compass course somewhere between. But the wind hit the exposed face of this south slope with wicked fury and Walker wondered when they would get behind something that would help break its force.
A swift blast of gale swayed him to one side and he grabbed the saddle horn wildly and when he righted himself he could only just see the whipping tail of Mrs. Lansford’s sorrel four or five feet ahead. The mottled pointillism of whipping snow enfolded him that quickly: now he could only see the blue’s ears, he couldn’t even see the ground, and he bent forward low over the withers in a useless try at evading the hard clout of the blow. Disoriented, he couldn’t tell if they were still climbing or if they were descending. He clung to the saddle and closed his eyes and tried to hide his head between his shoulders.
3
He blinked sluggishly and jerked himself upright. No good going to sleep. No good. His legs felt rubbery and he was having trouble keeping his knee-grip on the saddle. He tested the knot with which he had tied the reins to his right wrist. He couldn’t see it until he brought it up within a few inches of his face.
He lifted his right leg over and slid to the ground. Almost fell; kept his grip on the saddle, straightened, felt his way along the reins to the bit and found the nylon rope. Took a grip on that and staggered ahead.
He kept his eyes closed because there was no point in trying to see anything. His nose and lungs burned with the in-and-out rasp of frigid air. All the layers of clothing didn’t seem to help: the wind came up inside his cuffs, inside the sleeves of his coat, under the coat skirt, down the back of the neck.
His feet burned and tingled when he stamped them on the ground. He would put a foot out and test his footing and then stomp down hard and bring up the other foot. It got to be like that: you thought about each step and you took time executing it. It meant the others were going just as slowly. But that made sense: the Major had to find the way, had to keep from blundering into trees, keep from falling over precipices.
The earth seemed to change its tilt underfoot but it was impossible to tell which way it had shifted until he detected an almost imperceptible drop in the force of the wind. They must be on the backside of a slope now. Going down, or at least going around something. He kept walking into the rump of Mrs. Lansford’s horse and in a dulled way he began to worry that he might do it once too often and get kicked in the belly by the horse.
He kept the reins wrapped around his glove and whacked his hands together with energetic sweeps of his arms.
He stumbled over something and went down. The horse made a vague sound that was whipped past and away on the wind; he felt a jerk of reins against his hand and scrambled for footing, got one leg under him and tumbled forward, dragged by the reins. Terror hit him: the rest of them were going on regardless, they couldn’t see him or hear him, he’d get dragged to death. His feet spun and scrabbled and finally he got upright after a fashion and lurched forward: found the saddle, hooked his arm around the horn and let the horse carry him along a little way while he sawed icy air in and out of his laboring lungs and fought down panic.
The wind tumbled and howled, beating at him like fists. He walked alongside the horse’s head with his grip on the reins choked up tight: if he fell again he would be able to pull himself up.
His boots were sliding a little; feathery soft snow on slippery pine needles made a treacherous footing. The wind was a vast pounding thunder in his ears; it flayed at him willfully. He knew what it was like to be a blind man now. Tingling pinpricks of sensation burned in his feet and hands. His ears hurt him with a sharp agony; he took a long clumsy time untying the scarf and snu
gging it down over the top of his hat, tying it under his chin, tucking the ends into his coat and wrapping the collar around.
4
It was madness. Every animal had the sense to get shelter and hide out a blizzard.
No way to judge the passage of time but his extremities were almost without sensation and fatigue had set in; he could hardly lift his knees. And then the tilt of the ground changed again, for the fiftieth time, and the wind almost knocked him off his feet. The noise was earsplitting. He had a handkerchief wadded in his mouth and he was breathing through it but it was beginning to clog with ice. He kept one hand clutched over his nose. He couldn’t feel his fingers.
He walked into the sorrel’s rump again and stopped, waiting for it to go on, but it didn’t move away. The line had stopped. Something wrong. The Major-had he fallen down? Not Hargit; nothing knocked Hargit down.
Something tugging the nylon rope. He turned, afraid, puzzled. Something banged into him and he recoiled; a hand gripped him and Baraclough’s voice rasped an inch from his ear.
“We’re here. Follow the rope inside. There’s room for the horses.”
And Baraclough was gone, finding his way back along the rope toward Burt.
The rope stirred again; the sorrel was moving. He took the blue by its headstall and felt his way forward. Bruised his fingers against a wall, felt around and found the doorway. And led the blue inside out of the wind.
5
He didn’t hear the door slam but the thunder of the wind dropped away abruptly and the cold air became still. A voice-the Major’s, but hoarse: “Everybody hold still.”
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