Carmody 5

by Peter McCurtin

  After he finished, Carmody turned her over on her back so she’d be comfortable but mostly so she wouldn’t smother in the sand. He smiled at her and her eyes sent back hate. Suddenly, Carmody decided he liked her. After a slide down a cliff that scared her, then a belt in the jaw, and now a gag, there still was some fight left in the green eyes. If Carmody had been a gentleman he would have snatched off his hat by the brim, like a ruined but still elegant cotton planter in a travelling play about the Old South. He didn’t. He told her to stay quiet, that he’d shoot her through the head if she made a sound. When he asked her if she knew what he was talking about she nodded her head. The one he said he’d shoot her through.

  Carmody smiled and pulled the rifle from where it was stuck through his belt. They were well back from the tail, rocky side of the bluff, well covered by rocks and thickly growing ash, and there was a clear shot at the first man who came down that rope.

  It was worth waiting a bit to kill one of Garrison’s men, he decided. There might be another one after the first. The first one wouldn’t be Garrison and the second, if there was to be a second, wouldn’t be, either. Garrison was too smart for that, too smart to be taken in. Come to think of it—it was a possibility—they might not even know about the cliff, or that they’d even climbed down it. Carmody knew Frank Garrison and he waited.

  The girl made a mumbling noise. Carmody patted her with the rifle barrel, and she was quiet. To pass the time, he sighted on the top of the bluff. The junipers up there grew close to the edge. While he waited, squinting along the barrel of the Winchester, the sun came up and so did the wind. The wind stirred the juniper leaves, making it harder to see and to shoot at anything that might be behind them.

  Carmody figured he would give them another thirty minutes. Knowing Garrison, that was all he could give. Anything else and Garrison, his old pard, could be making a wide sweep on both sides, to get in there behind him.

  Carmody gave them thirty minutes and, because of the hunch he had, another ten. Only a strong hunch would have caused Carmody to gamble ten valuable minutes. Carmody knew he had been wrong before in his hunches, but not often. There was always a reason when he was wrong, he liked to tell himself.

  He put the muzzle of the Winchester under the Yates girl’s chin and winked at her when he heard them, after another five minutes had dragged by. He knew he should put her to sleep for awhile, at least while the business at hand was being transacted. The one trouble with that—he might not be able to wake her when it was time to move. “I wasn’t fooling before,” he reminded her in a whisper.

  Taking the muzzle of the rifle away from the girl, he put it on the top of the bluff. There wasn’t much to put it on, the way the junipers were stirring. There was no clear sign of Garrison. There were other shapes moving behind the restless juniper leaves, but nothing of Garrison. Carmody decided on a straight, clear shot—the first man to climb down the rope. All the time he’d wasted had to count for at least one man.

  It was Emmett O’Bryan, the quiet, wild man from Alabama. Carmody saw the rifle barrels pushing through the juniper leaves, scanning the bottom of the bluff. O’Bryan stuck his rifle through his belt, jammed his hat down hard on his head, and swung himself over the edge of the cliff.

  Carmody let him get down most of the rope, hoping another man would come out to get ready. Nobody moved. Carmody put the front sight on O’Bryan’s spine and squeezed the trigger. There was a scream and O’Bryan was dead before he hit bottom like a sack of meal. The rifles poking through the junipers started blasting. Carmody couldn’t see Garrison, couldn’t see anybody, but he could hear him yelling. The shooting stopped.

  Covered by the ash clumps, Carmody dragged the girl to her feet and pushed her forward, away from the bluff. The sandy floor sloped downhill after that. When they got to a break in the trees, Carmody looked back at the top of the cliff. It would be a little time before they started down that rope. Maybe they’d start looking for another way down. Either way he had to move out fast.

  The girl began to claw at the gag. Carmody cracked her across the back of the hand with the rifle barrel. “Later,” he said.

  They made their way through a narrow draw choked with rocks and twinberry bushes. After that, travelling was fast and easy for a while across an open meadow that sloped down, then dropped off into space. Carmody kept the girl moving until they came to a break in the rock face. Rain and snow had caused a recent earth slide and deep cracks ran from the edge of the drop back into the meadow. There might be another way down if they had the time to look for it. There was a good chance that a new earth slide would come crashing down on top of them long before they reached the bottom.

  If the girl knew the danger she didn’t say anything about it when he took the gag out of her mouth. He uncorked the canteen and let her drink. The gag was out of her mouth, but there was no back-talk. Could be she was beginning to get the idea. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t turn on him the first chance she got. For the moment, the absence of back-talk and dirty names was a decided improvement.

  “Start down easy,” he told her. “Don’t panic if it starts to slide a bit. Don’t thrash about. Try to dig in and stay where you are till the rocks and dirt stop sliding. It’s wet so it shouldn’t be too bad.”

  Carmody crouched at the top of the cliff, watching the wide meadow behind him. If they came out and saw the girl wasn’t with him they’d start shooting. The girl was more than halfway down, moving faster than she should. He yelled at her to take it easy. Rocks rattled down after her, picking up sand and dirt. If she panicked now the whole side of the cliff could slide down on top of her.

  “Dig in,” Carmody called out. He could feel the ground shaking under his feet. He watched while the sliding dirt rose high around the girl’s legs, like flood water. There was panic in the way the girl raised her hands, but she got hold of herself and stiffened her body against the push of the slide. A month from now, after the sun had dried out the dirt and sand, there would be no stopping the slide. Now it was still wet. That gave them a chance—maybe.

  “Not yet,” Carmody said after the dirt stopped moving. “Give it time to thicken up. When I tell you, lift one leg out slowly, wait a minute, then move the other leg. Don’t try to push through it.”

  A bullet sang past Carmody’s head. Crouched low, he looked along the barrel of the Winchester. They were coming out of the draw at a dead run. Garrison was out in front. Garrison dropped down on one knee and fired at Carmody again. Even a sure-shot like Garrison had trouble shooting downhill. The next shot went wider than the second.

  Shooting uphill wasn’t much better. Carmody tried to kill Garrison with the first shot. When it missed he levered and fired fast, scattering the shots at Garrison and the other men, trying to drive them back into the cover of the draw.

  Flat in the waving grass, Garrison yelled at them to come on. The two Hatten boys started out running. They were mad after what had happened back at the hideout, and they wanted to look good. Carmody had to fire three more rounds before he hit one of them. He didn’t know which one of them it was. The bullet aimed for his chest took the running man in the thigh. He went down and the other man threw himself flat on the ground.

  Thumbing in a fresh load of shells, Carmody looked down the cliff. The girl was free of the dirt and close to the bottom. A wide, rocky stream ran along the bottom of the cliff, then turned after a bit into a V-shaped valley heavily grown from rim to centre with pine. If she made it into the mouth of the valley before he got down the cliff, he would have a hell of a time digging her out. Once he got separated from the girl the stick of dynamite wasn’t going to do him much good.

  It was time to get out of there. With his legs hanging over the edge, Carmody took the stick of dynamite out of his pocket and snapped it in half. He put one half back in his pocket. He tied the other piece in his neckerchief and hung it on a bush growing out from the edge.

  The shaley dirt ran and shifted under his feet, but he moved down fas
t, disregarding all the advice he’d given the girl about earth slides. He heard them yelling the moment he went out of sight. The saddle bags and blanket roll were down there ahead of him. They weren’t far enough and he cursed as the dirt in front of him crumbled and slid, burying the goddamned things. The dirt behind him was rolling fast. The weight pushed against his back. He tried to brace himself, but he fell forward and started to roll. A shower of rocks crashed against the back of his head, stunning him. When he fell to the bottom and rolled away from the slide, the rifle was still in his hand but his holster was empty.

  There was a yell at the top of the cliff and bullets kicked up the water as he stumbled across to the other side of the stream. A bullet tore away the top of his boot without touching the leg. Another bullet burned a hot crease across the top of his right arm. He made it into the pines and threw himself flat.

  He didn’t know the arm was just creased until he felt it. Sweat and dirt stung his eyes and he gave himself a minute to get set. The bullets were still coming, but not close. From where he was he could see Garrison yelling at the others at the top of the cliff. He tried to draw a bead on Garrison. Garrison kept moving around. Carmody figured the distance, the fact that he was shooting high from a prone position. The neckerchief with the dynamite in it hung there on the bush. It stirred a little in the wind. He allowed for that too. When he had it all figured he squeezed the trigger.

  The dynamite exploded. It was only half a stick. It was enough to cause the cliff to shake and then to slide. Hundreds of tons of dirt and sand peeled away from the bare rock and went crashing down. The man nearest the edge went with it. It wasn’t Garrison. The man was still on top of the slide, still screaming, halfway down. Then the dirt rolled over him.

  Carmody ran through the pines toward the mouth of the valley. He thought he saw the girl running fast up ahead. But he wasn’t sure.

  He kept going.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was the best part of a mile before he caught up to her. The pines were too thin to hide behind: she tried it anyway. When he started toward her, she threw a rock at him. It missed. It was quiet in there in the pines; cold, too. The wind died down. A squirrel ran up a tree and began to complain.

  Carmody had the rifle, but the girl swung at him. All he had to do to make her fall down was to step aside. Carmody sat down close by. “That’s the way, honey,” he said. “Rest up while you have the chance.”

  The green eyes were more defeated than mad. “Water,” she said. “A drink of water.”

  Carmody said, “Sorry, honey, the canteen’s gone. So is the whisky and the blankets. So is the food. All we got left is my trusty old rifle. But we’ll make out— you’ll see.”

  It was kind of mean to tease the girl like that. Carmody liked it. Anyway, she didn’t take it that way. The green eyes brightened up again, this time with malice, not rage, “Maybe it’s time you turned me loose,” she said quietly. “Maybe Frank won’t even bother to go after you. Think you can make it with nothing but your trusty rifle, Mister Carmody?”

  Carmody grinned. “It’s going to be kind of flat without the whisky,” he said. “Maybe we can think of something else to pass the cold nights. Now, Miss Yates, you just get your ass moving down that valley.”

  For a moment she was still the tycoon’s daughter. “You can’t talk to me like that, you saddle tramp. My father’ll kill you when he hears ...”

  Carmody fished out a cracked cigar and put a match to it. While the girl glared at him, he tried to mend the crack with spit. The crack was too wide and he had to break the cigar in two to make it draw. There was no water, no whisky, no food, but the broken cigar tasted good.

  “Why the hell don’t you just let me go?” she asked, the anger fading into hopelessness.

  “You want the other half of this cigar?” Carmody said.

  “You know what you are, Carmody?” Katherine Yates said.

  “Don’t you know any good names besides son of a bitch?” Carmody answered, pushing her ahead of him.

  Katherine Yates mentioned several other possibilities.

  They were pretty good, Carmody thought. He complimented the girl on her bad mouth. “Shows you got spirit, honey. Just keep moving.”

  They moved back to the stream to drink, then away from it. At least some of Garrison’s men would be following the stream. Carmody figured they were more than twenty miles into the mountains. Everything considered, they hadn’t done so badly. Two of Garrison’s men were dead, one wounded; that sort of compensated for the loss of the supplies. He had enough shells for the rifle and the half-stick of dynamite would come in handy if a bullet didn’t take him any place near the left shirt pocket.

  With the cliff stripped clean by the last slide, it would take Garrison and his men some time to climb down. But they would be along; there was no doubt of that.

  Carmody had chewed on jerky the night before. Jerked beef kept you alive; it didn’t do much for the hunger feeling. He listened to his belly rumble. Too bad it wasn’t fall. There would be chokeberries to eat. Right now the best they could hope to eat was maybe wild honey or the eggs of a ground nesting bird.

  The valley was about six miles long. Halfway into it, he told the girl to rest. “Oh God, my feet,” she complained, sitting down in the soft grass under the trees.

  Carmody told the girl to shut her damned mouth.

  “Leave the boots on,” he warned her. “If your feet are that bad you’ll have a time getting them on again.” He was listening for sounds. There weren’t any. But he could feel them coming. After digging around with the long blade of the Bowie knife, he found a cluster of wild onions. He wiped off the dirt with his sleeve. “Eat them,” he said, throwing some of the small, bitter tasting onions to the girl.

  “You’ll be sorry you did that,” he advised Katherine Yates when she bit into an onion and spat it out. “Now you eat the rest of your breakfast, like a good girl.”

  Ignoring the rank taste, Carmody chewed the onions up fine and swallowed. “Like a cow chewing the cud,” he told the girl. “Just like a picnic, ain’t it?”

  “I’d like to kill you,” she said.

  “Wait till you know me better,” Carmody answered.

  The promise of wild honey later in the day didn’t cheer her up one bit. Carmody could understand that. It didn’t excite him either. The girl excited him, tired and hungry as he was, but that would have to wait. It would be a shame if they travelled all this way together without something happening.

  It was still some distance to the end of the valley when three spaced shots sounded. That would mean they had found the place where he’d rested with the girl. “Come on,” Carmody prodded the girl.

  All the way from the hideout the going had been pretty easy. The bad part of the trip, the last twenty or twenty-five miles, was up ahead. Out from the end of the valley the mountains rose up, jagged and tall. There wouldn’t be much wild honey up there, or much of anything.

  They followed the stream out of the valley. After another two hundred yards the stream disappeared into a split between two huge rocks. Only a fish could get through the mountain that way.

  Climbing the first ridge the girl slipped and fell. The rock was wet and she would have fallen all the way to the bottom if Carmody hadn’t caught her. Her face twisted with pain. She started hopping on one foot. “My ankle,” she said. “My goddamned ankle.”

  Carmody jerked her to her feet when she tried to sit down. “Put your arm around my neck,” he ordered. “Keep the weight off the foot. We’ll take a look at it later.”

  Slowed down, they were only part way up the first ridge when Garrison and three men cleared the mouth of the valley. Garrison and two men were coming fast; the man some distance behind would be the Hatten he’d wounded back at the meadow.

  Carmody dragged the girl higher up the ridge. He pushed her down behind a rock and slid out the rifle. Garrison dropped behind a rock as Carmody fired at him. The little man with the big hat didn’t m
ove fast enough and Carmody got him in the chest. The first bullet didn’t knock him down. Carmody sighted again and shot him again.

  The others were all out of sight; Carmody held his fire. Carmody heard Garrison yelling something. It sounded like he was talking to him.

  “Carmody,” Garrison yelled louder, not showing himself. “You hear me, Carmody?”

  “Yeah, Frank,” Carmody yelled back.

  “Let her go,” Garrison shouted. “You can’t make it. This is the last chance you’re going to get, Carmody. Let her go.”

  Carmody kept down. “Not a chance,” he yelled.

  Garrison was yelling again when Carmody told the girl to get set. The wind rasped in his throat as he started to drag the girl away from the rock. The rock protected them for another twenty feet, then they were exposed again. Another twenty feet and still no shooting. Carmody thought about the half-stick of dynamite in his pocket.

  Suddenly they started blasting from down below. The dynamite had no more magic. Finally, Garrison had come to the kill-crazy stage. They got to the top of the ridge without being hit, the bullets singing past them like hornets. The girl was limping badly. A bullet broke itself to pieces on a rock near her head, stinging her face with fragments of hot lead. Blood began to trickle from a small wound in her forehead. Behind another rock Carmody yanked out the girl’s shirt, tore a strip off the end, and tied it around her head to keep the blood out of her eyes.

  Katherine Yates looked at Carmody. “He doesn’t care if he kills me,” she said.

  “What else can he do?” Carmody asked her.

  He had figured to keep the half-stick of dynamite for later. It wouldn’t do much good here unless he was lucky. Maybe it could buy them some time. He stuck the dynamite in a cleft in the rock and dragged the girl away from there. They climbed up through the rocks. There was no more shooting. Garrison and the two Hatten boys would be climbing the first ridge.