McAllister 5

by Matt Chisholm

  McAllister—totally dedicated to the hunting of one man

  The Quarry—a man with no name, only a reputation for violence and evil

  Ana—young, beautiful, and tragically caught in the crossfire of the two antagonists

  Week in and week out, McAllister remorselessly followed his quarry across the Wind River Country and down into the arid flats of the Humboldt Basin.

  Their final duel would be a clash of giants, one master pitting his skill against another’s. For they were two men at the peak of their professions—one a lawman, the other a thief and killer.

  Cunning against cunning...

  Gun against gun ...

  Totally without pity.

  CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  About the Author

  Copyright

  One

  Villains come in different shapes and sizes—just like other kinds of men.

  Without either of them knowing it, this villain was very like McAllister himself, but showing the other side of the coin. He knew his trade as McAllister knew his. He was cool and self-contained, just as McAllister was. He was confident of being the winner in this game—just as McAllister was.

  The only difference was that McAllister knew that he was down there and he did not know that McAllister was up here in the rocks, watching. And yet … and yet … McAllister was forced to face the possibility that the man he watched knew perfectly well that he was there and had already planned what to do about it. Always at such times, you had to face the fact that not only was your opponent as good as you, he might be better.

  Waiting there in the intense heat, McAllister had time to ponder on the peculiarities of fate that made that man what he was and made him, McAllister, what he was. Maybe something small; some tiny, long-forgotten incident that nobody consciously noticed at the time. A wrongly spoken word, an unjustly delivered blow.

  One dispensed death and the other justice.

  Time to think that often those two were not far apart. Time to be tempted to jack a round into the breech of the Henry rifle and kill the transgressor there and then, thus saving the tax-payer money and McAllister endless days of anxiety and grief. The temptation was great, for McAllister’s circumstances were precarious—food and water low, ammunition almost gone, his horse worn down with hard travel and little bait.

  There was a distance of three hundred paces between himself and his quarry; three hundred paces of bare and open ground. McAllister thought coldly: Kill him and have done. But he knew that he could not. It was within his terms of reference, but not in his nature. A man could go against one, but not the other. If he killed the man, he would be merely acting as that man did. There would be nothing to choose between the two of them and the difference between them was what McAllister valued. You might say that it was the end-all and be-all of life itself. McAllister had little else but pride left, but he had that aplenty.

  McAllister reviewed the situation.

  The man had now taken to open country and, by doing so, had gained an advantage. McAllister was still able to kill him, but now he would not find it easy to get near enough to take the man alive. From being in a losing position, the man had changed the circumstances. By going out into the open, he had lengthened his vision. He could now entice McAllister into the open and kill him.

  After the blinding heat of noon had passed, the man rose and started to walk, taking long unhurried strides and never once glancing back. Just the same, McAllister knew that he had taken long looks from under the brim of his hat.

  McAllister let him go, knowing that if the worst came to the worst he could mount and ride him down. He crawled back from his concealment until he reached the barranca, then rose to his feet and walked to his horse. It was a mare, tall for her sex and her kind. She was a canelo, a cinnamon and white roan of Spanish breeding. McAllister had found her in Sonora, Mexico, two years before when he had been down there buying horses. She had been in poor condition through being kept on poor grass, but the northern feed had brought her on to her present state or what had been her state before she had embarked with McAllister on this long and pitiless ride.

  Seeing her now, McAllister felt guilty. He hated to treat a good and willing horse this way. He rubbed her ears, which she loved, but knew that was no substitute for good bait and water. He found his canteen now and dampened her mouth, no more, with the lukewarm water. He denied it to his own parched mouth, but instead cut a wad of tobacco and thrust it into a cheek. Picking up a line, he started down the barranca with her walking quietly behind.

  He looked at the sky. To save himself and his horse he wanted rain. To catch his man he wanted the desert to stay as it was, showing a telltale set of tracks.

  He followed the dry water course for a half-mile, then climbed cautiously out of it, not wanting to reveal his presence to the man. He might suspect that McAllister no longer followed him, but he must never be allowed to be sure. Let doubt walk with him as his constant companion. When doubt left him and he became convinced that McAllister no longer followed, then was the time to swoop. The trick was to know when that time had come.

  Out on the flat, McAllister found that there was a ridge between himself and his quarry. He rode forward at a trot for a couple of miles, intending if possible to keep abreast or ahead of the man. When he considered that he had covered sufficient ground, he closed in on the ridge, dismounted, ground-hitched the mare and crawled up the ridge on his hands and knees. Removing his hat, he took a cautious look over the top.

  At first he could not see the man. The surface of the desert was cut and divided by the heat haze, it danced and jerked crazily in it. After a patient wait the man appeared, distorted as though by a fairground mirror, elongated and cut in half, eerie. A hundred more paces and he shrank and a normalized figure stepped abruptly from the shimmering dream into forbidding fact. A small hunched figure, walking wearily through an endless desert. Had it been anybody else, McAllister would have known pity for him. But not for this one, not ever.

  I don't want to walk this fellow into the ground, because when I take him I want him to walk out of this desert. I'll be damned before he rides my horse while I walk.

  He went back to Sally and talked to her in Spanish. She had grown up hearing Spanish and she liked it. When he loosened the cinch, she turned her head to look at him out of one soft eye. He removed the saddle and allowed her to roll, hoping that she would not give voice and betray their presence. He squatted on his hams and watched, making an inventory of what he had left of supplies. A couple of handfuls of jerky and some corn, six small chews of tobacco, a couple of cupfuls of water and some iron-hard biscuit. When he was through that he knew that to go on was madness; but he knew that he would go on and wait for a small portion of McAllister luck to come along. Where luck would come from in this God-forsaken country he had no idea. Deep down, he was convinced that there was no luck whatsoever lying in wait for him.

  Maybe he was already having more than his fair share of luck—just by being alive and in good health, by having the water and the horse. The man out there possibly had even less. He carefully wiped the dust from the mare’s back and resaddled her. She blew out her belly to fool him into not tightening the cinch enough—the only trick she had and she never tired of playing it. Maybe one day he would be fooled. She lived in hopes. He butted
his shoulder into her and when she drew in, he quickly tightened the cinch. She turned and looked at him reproachfully.

  He mounted and rode on a mile, carefully watching how he went in relation to the walking man, so that he would not be seen. When he halted, he found a deep gully in which to conceal the mare. Then he walked towards the line of march he thought the man had taken. He did not immediately find him and he got that little sick feeling in the pit of his stomach when he suspected that he had lost him. Lying against a ridge, he took a long sweep with the glass over the flat in front of him, searching for tracks and failing to find them.

  Had the man collapsed further back?

  Think. All the possibilities had to be studied. He suspected for the first time that the lack of water and food and the intense heat was beginning to affect his brain. The thought scared him a little.

  What if the man was harder and fresher than him? What if the man had a clear brain and was thinking of possibilities which were now beyond McAllister?

  He called himself a fool. He had been longer than this without water. My God, there had been the time on the Mohave Desert when … Had the man swung north for the river? Had the man …? McAllister put a hand over his eyes. They felt as if there was burning sand behind his eyeballs. He was tempted to fetch the mare and ride down onto the flat and search for the man’s tracks—but that would mean that they would have changed places. Then the man could be in cover and have McAllister at his mercy in the open. He did not want to take McAllister back alive; he wanted to leave him here, dead. He would take the mare and ride to freedom. His freedom, not anybody else’s. He would carry on as if McAllister had never existed.

  McAllister’s thoughts wandered; not only did they wander, they became shapeless and without purpose, something less than thoughts. Through his haze of confused half ideas, there came a sudden cold shaft ... the mare!

  If the man had changed course and was out of sight, the possibility was that he was after the mare.

  McAllister stood up and began to walk. The ridge was not very steep, yet abruptly the gradient was too much for him. Gravity conquered his suddenly weakening knees, the blindingly azure sky reeled like a drunkard’s heaven and pitched, it heaved and tossed, and suddenly McAllister’s head was in the soft surface of the ridge, brown dust choking him, his heels reaching out for the same reeling sky, and he rolled helplessly to the bottom of the slope.

  He did not know how long he lay there. When he tried to open his eyes, the sun prevented it with shafts like the hot blades of sharp knives. The hand that came up to protect them was too heavy for his strength and struck his face and he shrank from the brutality of it.

  The mare . . .

  He tried to sit up and get to his feet and failed, so he rolled over and came up on his hands and knees, looking through slitted eyes so that the sun reflected by the ground would not blind him. Slowly, concentrating hard, he first raised his body upright, then lifted a foot so that he knelt on one knee and finally, with an effort of will that nearly finished him, he reared himself into a standing position. His head was a throbbing agony. His skull must surely burst. When he tried to swallow, his tongue was too thick in his mouth to allow it. His canteen was on the horse and he must reach it. But the man would also be trying to reach it.

  He thought he heard a scream and stopped.

  How could there be a woman in this barren wilderness to scream? Maybe he was going crazy.

  He thought: My God, it was the mare that screamed.

  That could mean only one thing—the man had reached her and tried to mount her.

  That was why the man down in Sonora had been so willing to part with her—she had nearly killed him. He thought that McAllister did not know, but he did. McAllister had wooed her for months after he bought her, gentling her, ridding her of her fear of him. But only him. She had never liked anybody else to mount her. Such horses were rare, but you heard of them every now and then.

  Had she killed this man?

  He tried to hurry forward, but the pace was too much for him and he tripped on his own feet and fell. His body was suddenly now too weak for such falls and he lay there hurt, all the wind knocked out of him, spitting the dust from his parched mouth, wiping it from his burning eyes. He started to crawl, dragging the Henry and finding it a terrible effort. He was tempted to abandon the rifle and the heavy Remington gun at his side, but he dare not with the man still alive.

  He did not see the gully when he came to it and almost fell into it.

  He shaded his eyes by pulling his hat low over his face and glared down-gully. The mare was not where he had left her and was even now trying to run, but was stumbling on her trailing line. The man was nowhere in sight. Just the same, something had scared Sally out of her wits. Her ears were flat and she looked like a killer mustang. She seemed to be almost whimpering with rage and terror.

  Her desperation touched him deeply and he rolled himself over the edge of the gully to reach her the more quickly. The side of the gully seemed to be loose dust; he rolled and slid in a blinding cloud of it and, when he hit bottom, it felt as if every bone in his body had parted company with a neighbor. But the urgency of the moment somehow kept him moving. He fought himself to his feet and tried to call her, but his tongue fought back the words. He stumbled forward and the mare battled towards him, trying to sidestep the dragging line.

  When he reached her, he found that she was caked with sweat and dust. He made inarticulate noises of comfort with his wordless mouth. When he put an arm around her neck his hand met something wet and sticky. Ducking under her neck he saw the wound. Something sharp and wide had been driven into her shoulder.

  Oh, Christ, McAllister thought in wordless anguish. Oh, Jesus Christ. The bastard.

  He could now see as clearly as if he had witnessed it what had happened. The man had tried to mount her and she had fought him. Finding that he could not steal her he had attempted to kill her. But still she had fought him and he had run off, maybe on hearing McAllister return.

  Even in his distress, McAllister had room for the thought: He stuck a knife in her because he didn’t have anything else to hurt her with. He green-rivered her because he’s out of ammunition. If he wasn’t, I’d be dead by now.

  The blood was running down the mare’s shoulder, down her leg into the parched dust. He looked at the great gash and wondered how much of the muscle had been cut. Was she lamed beyond saving? He did not want to believe that. Would he have to shoot her?

  His saddle-pockets were unlatched. He looked inside and saw that his meagre supplies were gone. The canteen was gone from the saddlehorn.

  Utter hopelessness dropped on him. He and the mare were as good as dead.

  Wait. Think.

  There must be one thing he could do to save them both. Just one simple thing: He knew there was no hope in finding drinkable water on this stretch of the alkali flats. There was no water between here and the river.

  So the river it had to be.

  That was like saying all he had to do was fly. He looked at the mare and her one soft eye was looking at him, waiting for him to do something about her hurt. He walked around her to the other saddle-pocket and reached inside, searching for the bear-fat which he never went without. It was rolled up in a strip of rawhide. Leaving the grease on the rawhide, he pushed the mass of it into the open wound. She stood with infinite patience and trust while he worked, turning to look at him every now and then. He took ever-present pegging strings from his pocket and tied them to the tie-strings of the grease container. Using the saddle as an anchor, he secured the crude dressing in place.

  Now, he thought, if she could get him to the river he would save her.

  Meanwhile, his quarry was not far off with a knife. He slid the Henry back into the saddle-boot and started to lead Sally up out of the gully. He comforted himself with the thought that if the man came near the mare would know. When they were out of the gully he turned her in the direction of the river. She was walking with a limp and s
he had that sad, pathetic look horses assume when they are hurt, but she was willing to walk for him. He put one hand on the saddlehorn and urged her forward. She looked back at him once, puzzled perhaps that he was not on her back, and started to walk.

  Two

  Time is not something to be measured, it is something to be felt.

  Joy speeds it, suffering prolongs it. McAllister’s hours were days, his days years, his life a dragging eternity. The living world was an all-embracing hell and the furnace was the sun. In a watered land, the sun brought life; in a waterless land it became a pitiless executioner. It drew the air from a man’s lungs and sucked the life-water from his flesh. McAllister knew that he was walking towards the great river and, at the same time, towards death. The choice would be made by him or the mare, depending on whether they stayed or failed to stay on their feet. Man and animal seemed to be locked together in a desperate embrace, clinging one to the other for mutual support and comfort, neither able to survive without the other.

  Clinging to the saddlehorn with the mare doggedly pacing towards the north, McAllister was rather like a drunkard, his brain confused and made derelict by drink, but with a small particle of his mind still working. As the mare dragged him on, this tiny core seemed to reside there cool and ever-watchful, echoing through him a small voice that bade him continue, demanding that his hand maintain its hold on the leather-bound horn all the time that the mare continued to walk. Sometimes his hand disobeyed that inner mind and he fell; then the mare stopped and waited patiently for him to rise, turning her head so that she could watch him.

  In these moments of defeat he heard two things: the voice of the mare pleading in a whisper for him to get up and go on, and the voice of the man begging him to stay right where he was, very still, so that he could plunge his knife into his heart. That was the signal for McAllister to reach up blindly with a hand in search of the wooden stirrup and begin the awesome effort of hauling himself laboriously to his feet.