by Luke Short
Carol screamed. Amy looked down at Ted with horror and then at Riling.
“Good-by, girls,” he said placidly, a kind of amused malice in his tone. “I’ll marry you both after I find Garry.”
He kicked out the window that opened on to the veranda, stepped out and was gone.
Amy knelt by Ted and turned him over. He’d been shot high in the chest, and his wound was bleeding fast.
“Help me get him on the bed,” Amy said.
Wordlessly Carol helped her. They lifted him onto the bed, and Amy looked at him. Then she looked at Carol, who was watching her.
“Now you know,” Carol said bleakly. “Ted knew too. That’s why he did it.” Carol came over to her, and Amy folded her in her arms. Carol was fighting tears, trembling like a frightened colt.
“I won’t cry,” Carol said. “Oh, baby, I’ve done everything wrong—everything. Help me to make up for it! What can I do?”
“You can help the man who loves you,” Amy said quietly. “Red, he’s hurt badly. We’ve got to get a doctor.”
And then for the first time in her life Carol forgot herself and thought of someone else. “What are we standing here for?” she said abruptly. “Let’s get help.”
Chapter Thirteen
The man hunt was on. Jim knew it the day after the deadline when, around dusk, he and Pindalest slipped down into a canyon they had camped in three days ago. Pindalest was riding ahead, sunk in a gloomy stupor which had lasted since the morning in the pass. Jim had kept him in the saddle long and punishing hours, so that at their evening camp the agent was so weary he could scarcely finish eating before rolling into his blankets.
He was weary now, Jim knew, for he had passed the ashes of their old camp and saw nothing there worth stopping for.
Jim did. He slipped out of the saddle and looked at the fresh tracks in the light snow. They’d been made today by four horses, three of them shod and one barefoot. They had come up the canyon, paused at the old fire and then slanted off to the north, following the tracks Jim and Pindalest had made three days ago.
When he rose he had read all he could. Three whites, with an Indian guide on the barefoot horse, were on his trail. That would likely be Riling, probably with Shotten and a man who knew the mountains.
Jim whistled sharply to Pindalest down canyon and then set about gathering wood. He left camp with perfect assurance, knowing that Pindalest would have no surprises for him on his return. Jim had spent long hours planning this and he knew his man. He’d made two concessions to Pindalest’s guile: he had no gun of any kind with him and he slept close to the horses. The first precaution was only sense. If he’d brought a gun it meant that his sleep would be fitful and uneasy, with the threat always hanging over him that sooner or later the agent might steal the gun. The second precaution wasn’t so necessary, but he took it just the same. Somehow, he couldn’t picture Pindalest rousing in the night, stealthily saddling his horse and slipping out without waking the camp. And whenever it became necessary to use force Jim had concluded that his fists would do.
He came back and built the fire and started the meal. As always, Pindalest didn’t help. Jim went about his business, whistling cheerfully, occasionally looking at the agent.
These last days had done something to Pindalest. With several days’ growth of sandy beard stubble on his ruddy cheeks he had lost his air of dandified pomposity. His eyes were glassy with weariness, and Jim could almost pity the look in them. Exhaustion didn’t account for it entirely, Jim knew; he was watching a drinking man suddenly deprived of liquor and he could imagine the hell Pindalest had lived through these last days. The man had lost weight; his pouting lips were drawn tightly across his teeth now. But more than anything else, he was hungry.
Jim regretted that part. His grub was in the high canyons. He could get to it, but it meant traveling the deep snow, and once he was cornered in the high reaches he was done for. The heavy snow had made the difference, forcing him down into the lower slopes where he might go hungry but where he had freedom of movement.
He dished out their thin rations, and Pindalest wolfed his down in silence, afterward lying down on his bedroll close to the fire.
Jim piled wood on the fire and sat close to it, staring into it. This week had gaunted him, too, but in a different way. His senses were sharper and his eyes brighter, and sometimes Pindalest, who would watch him at night with baleful eyes, thought he was part wolf.
Tonight Jim smoked placidly and took stock of his situation. It was good. Finding these tracks so early was a piece of luck. He wondered idly how the roundup was coming. He judged it was coming along fine, else Riling would have spared more men to hunt him.
Pindalest’s voice, which Jim had not heard all day, suddenly broke the silence.
“Garry, I’m through,” he said. He cleared his throat afterward, trying for his normal voice, and looked at Jim.
“That so?”
“I won’t move out of here tomorrow.”
Jim smiled and said nothing. Pindalest waited for him to say more, and when he didn’t the agent pulled off his boots and rolled into his blankets. Jim finished his smoke, picked up his bedroll and moved upcanyon to where the horses were picketed. This was the first trouble he had had with Pindalest. He didn’t think it would be serious.
Before he went to sleep that night he thought of Lufton and then, inevitably, of Amy. She had been right, dead right, that night he’d lined out for Texas. If he’d kept on he would have regretted it until his dying day. Somehow, what he was doing now was making up for a lot of the other. If he succeeded in this, if he made it stick until Lufton’s herds were safely shoved off the reservation, he could face himself again. He wondered, before he slept, how Amy Lufton had known it would be like this.
Next morning after breakfast Jim brought the horses into camp. Pindalest watched him warily, challenge in his weak face. Jim saddled both horses and then went over to the fire where he rolled a smoke, picked up a coal and lighted his cigarette.
He squatted there on his haunches, worn Mackinaw unbuttoned, and shoved his hat back off his forehead. The fire was welcome in this bitter dawn, and he held his hands out over it and began to talk.
“We hit it lucky,” he said. “I don’t know if you noticed it last night, Pindalest, but there’s three whites and a Ute on our old trail, starting from this camp.”
He looked at the agent, who said nothing.
“We’ll follow their tracks,” Jim said placidly. “That ought to keep them off our trail for two more days before that Indian thinks of it.”
Still Pindalest said nothing.
“Ready to go?”
“You know I’m not.”
Jim smiled. “If I take your horse, the grub and the bedroll, then what?”
“I’ll try and make it afoot to the Basin.”
Jim said gently, “I’m givin’ you your chance to change your mind. Will you?”
“No.”
Jim rose and walked over to him. “Stand up,” he said gently.
“No.”
Jim reached down, bunched Pindalest’s sheepskin in his fist and hauled him to his knees. The agent’s arms flailed wildly, ineffectively. Jim clipped him across his receding chin. Pindalest went limp, and Jim gently rolled him off his blankets.
Then he rolled Pindalest’s bedroll, lashed it to the saddle and cleaned up camp. By the time he was finished Pindalest had come to. He was standing up, weaving on his feet.
Jim came over to him and asked mildly, “Ready to go?”
“No, damn you!”
Jim hit him again, this time at the base of his ear, and Pindalest went down again. Jim hoisted him onto his saddle, tied his feet together under the horse’s belly and started out, leading Pindalest’s horse.
A half mile beyond camp Jim saw Pindalest rouse. He pulled his horse around and said, “The only trouble is, Pindalest, I can lick you, and you know it.” He grinned disarmingly. “If you want to keep this up all day you’ll get a
damn sore jaw out of it, and that’s all. Suit yourself.”
“You win,” Pindalest muttered. “Untie my feet. They’re cold.”
That was Pindalest’s first revolt, and he was quiet that day. Jim clung steadily to the trail of the four riders, not pushing fast because his old trail was obscure and the Ute would need time to read it. That night he figured that he had played this out as long as he dared. Tomorrow, still following his old trail, Riling and the others would swing up the slopes, and when the Indian saw the trail swing back south again he would be too smart to follow it. He would understand then that all Jim’s old tracks in the light snow had been made to throw him off. The four of them would split up then and do what they should have done at first: strike downslope until they came across fresher tracks. Inevitably they would come across the tracks Jim had made today.
Lying in his blankets that night, Jim was satisfied. By the time they found his fresh sign they would have lost two precious days. He thought he had a way to make them lose two more.
Next morning he and Pindalest rose before daylight and traveled hard, heading north and downslope, careless of the trail they left. Around midday he moved into the country where Cap Willis was rounding up the south herd. During that afternoon he clung faithfully in the tracks of the punchers who were rounding up the beef.
When he came to a stream he waited for Pindalest. The agent came up, face sullen and dispirited.
“See what I’m trying to do?” Jim asked.
Pindalest nodded. “Then get ahead of me and you try to do it,” Jim said. “I’ll be watching you. For a start we’ll drop downstream until we pick up fresh tracks. Line out.”
They spent hours at it, Jim watching the agent to see that he followed closely the tracks, any tracks, that Willis’ crew had made. And during those hours they wove a maze of tracks that crossed and recrossed, always clinging to the trail already made by the puncher before them. Toward dark Jim dropped back to the creek and ordered Pindalest to head up it. They traveled five hours of darkness then, never leaving the stream, and when the horses began to tire Jim called a halt in a thick stand of spruce.
Both of them were so saddle weary that night that they didn’t eat, tumbling into their blankets without even bothering with a fire.
That night it snowed. When Jim woke next morning and shook the two inches of snow off his blanket and looked around he almost laughed aloud at his luck.
They spent two days in this camp, not stirring from it, never building a fire except when darkness came. On the third day they heard a gunshot downslope and to the south, and Jim pondered it a long time. It came from above the roundup ground, and Jim guessed it would be the Ute, summoning help to unravel the riddle of tracks.
He made a quick decision then. “Saddle up,” he said to Pindalest. “We’re hitting for our grub cache.”
The agent was too dispirited to argue. He had made his stand and it had failed, and now he reminded Jim of a sulky schoolboy, cowed and sullen.
That day they worked their way up into the higher slopes, bucking a depth of snow that was hard on the horses. Jim’s main reason for returning to the cache was that both grub and his grain had given out, and the snow made it difficult foraging for the horses.
At dark they camped in one of the shallow redrock canyons in the high country, and it was bitter cold. Jim fixed the last of their grub because tomorrow they would reach the cache. For the first night in six he felt utterly safe, convinced that Riling and his men were still down below.
He counted the days and was satisfied. Already Lufton should have moved his herds across. Whatever trouble he had had was past now, and Jim wondered if he had made it. As for himself, if he could hang on three more days with Pindalest, then he would have done all Lufton could ask and more.
Pindalest sat shivering by the fire, staring at it with bleak, musing eyes. The dirty collar of his sheepskin was almost the color of his beard stubble. The riding had done him good, had worked the alcohol out of his system, the soft flesh from his waist, the loose sag from his jowls. But Jim knew Pindalest hated him with a deep and profound passion.
Jim said suddenly, “Three days more, Pindalest.”
The agent raised his gaze to Jim’s face, spat and looked back at the fire.
Jim took his bedroll up the canyon a way where the horses were staked out and turned in under a ledge of rock that gave some shelter against the frost.
It was the uneasy nicker of a horse that wakened him. He raised up on an elbow and peered out into the night, senses alert. It was late, for the fire was dead, the camp silent with a winter stillness. He listened until he heard his own blood pounding in his ears and then he came silently out of his blankets, silently drew on his boots.
He rose, standing beside his blankets, back to the ledge. And at that moment a force drove into his back with a ton weight, driving him to his knees. A bare arm lashed around his throat from behind, and then the other arm drove down over his right shoulder across his chest. When it hit, Jim felt an agonizing pain under his ribs as a knife tore into his chest, seared along a rib and then buried itself in his flesh.
Through that pain Jim acted instinctively. He held the arm and hand with the knife tight to him, clamped across his chest, and humped his back. His head smashed into the ground, but he felt the man on his back sail over him, carried by the momentum of his jump. He clamped the arm with a furious grip, felt the arm straighten with the weight of the body pulling against it, and then the man screamed. The elbow bone snapped sickeningly, and Jim let go, not even hearing the body land on its back as the knife was dragged out of him by the clenching fist. Jim clung desperately to the arm, feeling the blood gush hotly out of his side. He clawed frantically at the knife in the nerveless hand, wrenched it free and struck out at the form on the ground before him. Twice he felt the knife sink in flesh and twice he raised it and plunged it in again.
Then he bent over across the still-struggling figure, holding his hand over his wound, listening to the shouting downcanyon.
“Stone Bull! Sing out!” It was Riling’s voice, calling the dead Ute beneath him, Jim knew.
For a still and dismal moment, bent almost double with pain, Jim knew cold and stark fear. And then the old dark lust of combat rose in him and he staggered to his feet, still holding his side.
Men were running toward him; he could hear them, could hear Pindalest screaming, “He’s up there by the horses! The horses!”
Jim stumbled over to his horse and tried to vault astride him. He barely made it, pulling himself up by his pony’s mane. Pain seared through his whole side. He reached down then and yanked out the picket pin by a savage wrench of the rope and drove his heels deep into his horse’s flanks.
It was the smell of blood and the shouting that sent the horse stampeding off toward the mouth of the canyon.
Jim saw a dark figure before him and he kneed the horse over toward it. The man shot wildly just as the horse hit him, knocking him rolling under its hoofs.
Lying close along the neck of his horse, Jim rode over the dead campfire. He saw Pindalest flattened against the canyon wall, heard him scream, “There he is, Riling! There he is!”
Jim was dragging in the rope with the picket pin on the end of it as a horseman appeared out of the gloom, coming toward him. Jim kneed his horse toward the oncoming rider, and a shot slashed out into the night, so close that it blinded him. Savagely Jim swung the heavy picket pin at the man in the saddle, and he felt it hit. The man howled into the night, and Jim was past him. Over to the right someone opened up frantically with a six-gun. Now Jim was in the timber, his horse crashing through the brush in panic. Jim lay on his neck, giving him his head, gouging him in the flanks with his heels.
Minutes later, deep in the timber, Jim hauled up and listened. He could hear distant shouts and cursing, and off to his right a rider was beating the brush in frenzy.
Jim held his left hand tightly to his side and patted his horse’s neck, speaking gently and soothi
ngly. Then he put him on into the timber, and when he judged he was out of hearing he stopped again.
The pain had become something constant now, and Jim sat still, waiting to see if it would quiet. He knew that if it were light enough to see, his immediate world would be pinwheeling. Slowly he explored the wound with his fingers. There was a deep gash along his lowest rib, starting toward the center and flaring out and then diving deep into his side. A steady seep of blood ran out between his fingers, and he breathed lightly, easily, so that his chest wouldn’t move, and still he felt the hot, leaden burning deep, deep inside him.
Could he sit his horse, and for how long? he wondered calmly. “I’ve got to ride and ride hard, and the chances are I won’t make it because they’ll be hunting me.”
He hung his head there in the black night and let pain take him. All he could think of was Blockhouse. Slowly from the dark depths of pain he knew that he was going to try to make it. Try to make the flats and then the river and then Blockhouse, one at a time.
When, still astride his horse, he had fashioned a hackamore from his picket rope and tried to slip it on his horse and failed he set off into the night. At the first jarring step of his horse he clamped his jaw against vomiting.
But he rode.
Chapter Fourteen
Anse Barden knew if it were daylight he could recognize where he was, but not in the dark. He’d never been a man to do much riding off his own range or the range he’d worked on and he didn’t know the Bench very well. But the Bench was where he was. He knew that because this morning he’d come off the Long Reach west of Commissary and was heading homeward in a ramrod-straight line.
When he thought of it now he didn’t smile at his old foolishness. It wasn’t foolish when he’d done it. At first the change had been like medicine, something new to look at, something to keep him from thinking. But there had been too many desert nights. A man shouldn’t be that lonely. He’d never thought of it before, but given a week’s solitude, a man can live his whole life over.
