by Nelson Nye
8. BACKLANDS CAMERA MAN
WHEN REIFEL heard the roan horse call he froze in his tracks, every nerve end screaming with the dread of impact. Some sixth sense, shared by all hunted creatures, warned of hidden danger until need for flight was like a taste in his mouth.
Yet he crouched there, frantic, and nothing happened. Ears cocked, Bugler watched with an unwavering regard. Like a thing of paint brushed onto canvas the roan horse stood. Like a dog at point. And all the roundabout shadows turned rigid. The wind fell away to a stealthy whisper, the owls quit calling and only the sound of the creek was unchanged.
There were driven hollows beneath Reifel’s cheeks and sweat lay in beads on the backs of his hands. He could scarcely breathe in that unnatural quiet and fear was like a rock in the bottom of his belly. But he would not let himself be stampeded — he dared not. All too vivid in his mind was the desperate knowledge of how far he would get in this country afoot. Wounded, feverish, deathly close to exhaustion, trapped and hemmed in as he was by enemies and with every man’s hand raised against him, escape would be impossible without the aid of a horse.
It just didn’t make sense. Bugler didn’t belong in this picture. The sight of him only increased Reifel’s panic.
After what Chet had said the sheriff — regardless of personal opinion — could not have been so foolish as to turn Reifel loose without further questioning. The posse wouldn’t have let him. Afraid to pass up the tip he’d been given he might have pressed on to Paradise to look into that tale of the yellow-eyed gunman — he might even have felt a certain urgence about it and, because of this, left Reifel here to insure speed. But he would never have left him here unguarded with no ropes on him and a horse waiting handy for him to throw a leg over.
No one could be that much of a fool.
Reifel’s glance raked the motionless shadows. He saw no evidence of a guard, nor any evidence either that the horse had been tied. He wasn’t tied now. You could see the reins hanging down from his bridle.
He wondered if it were possible that when he’d pitched from the saddle Bugler had bolted.
It was possible, perhaps, but it didn’t look a heap probable. Lafe’s men would have gone after him. Even if they hadn’t caught him the sheriff wouldn’t have left Ben Reifel unbound. He hadn’t realized, of course, that he had caught the gang’s leader, but after all that chin music Chet had flung around only a moron would have gone off and left him without also leaving someone else around to make damn sure he didn’t pull his freight.
It would have been hard to decide which bothered him the more, the absence of a guard or the presence of Bugler.
Anger heightened the flush of Reifel’s cheeks. None but a dimwit would fool around here when each passing instant might be fetching that posse nearer. Though he’d no way of knowing how long he had been unconscious the length of the shadows proved it had been a whole lot longer than he’d first imagined.
He felt of his bandage and received another jolt when he discovered someone had changed it. Was it possible the sheriff had some obscure purpose that would best be served if the prisoner got away? But that was crazy — even more fantastic than the presence of the roan. The whole deal smelled of trap and his strongest impulse was to flee while he was able.
But he had to have the horse.
The wind was getting up again now and the round-about brush was filled with movement. The hoot of an owl drifted out of the darkness and someway, immeasurably, increased the feel of danger. He dropped a hand to his holster and the smooth cold grip of the long-barreled pistol went a long way toward reviving his confidence. Recollecting he hadn’t reloaded the weapon after that brush with Breen in Turner’s stable he slipped it from leather and, meaning to replace the spent shells with fresh loads, broke it open.
He knew right then he’d got to get the hell out of here.
Like most men accustomed to carrying belt guns it was Ben Reifel’s habit to pack his Colt with the hammer on an empty; this gave him five chances to get in the last word. He’d fired four shots in that argument with Breen. Yet when he shook the cartridge cases into his palm all five of them were empties.
He ran shaking fingers over the loops of his belt but someone had fingered those loops before him. There were no cartridges.
With a muttered curse, wet with sweat, Reifel straightened. His hands were still shaking when he flung the shells away. His eyes were wild. He whirled clear around to search the moon-gilded darkness without seeing anything he hadn’t seen before. The wind-tossed shadows of the willows seemed to laugh at him. He almost screamed in his frustration and then, except for the gnawing pain in his chest, he was cool again, accepting this as part of the price he had to pay for his blundering.
He believed he was beginning to glimpse the shape of this pattern. He’d been partially right. The sheriff had gone with his posse to check Reifel’s story — perhaps he’d even hoped to come up with the man whose encounter had resulted in Reifel’s wound. They could not hope to make good time toting Reifel so, having examined the hole in his chest, they’d felt safe enough in leaving him here, knowing if he’d been lying he could not get very far away without a horse. The roan, of course, must have bolted when he’d fallen. The sheriff evidently wanted to believe Reifel’s story but, in the face of Chet’s suspicions, he had decided to play safe by leaving Ben Reifel with an empty pistol — which he probably wouldn’t discover if he’d been telling the truth.
And now the roan had come back.
Staring at the animal Ben couldn’t quite believe it. It all seemed reasonable except the part about the horse. Ben had gotten this roan from Cy Turner at Paradise and if the horse had really bolted why hadn’t he headed for home?
Reifel growled beneath his breath, not liking any part of it. One thing, however, wasn’t open to question. Once the posse got to Paradise it wouldn’t take the sheriff’s men long to discover he’d been lying — he ought never to have mentioned having seen Bo Breen at Turner’s. They’d probably check with Turner first to find out if Breen had been there and Turner, with that busted arm, would see quick enough how he could even things with Reifel.
Ben started for the roan.
All about the moon-bathed center of that thicket the wind-harried shadows loomed black as a stack of stove lids. He felt an awful reluctance to go anyplace near them. The closer he got the more nervous he became. He wished he had some oats to coax the animal out of there — even a can would have been welcome with a couple of pebbles in it. He dared not lift his voice because he still more than half believed there was a guard around here someplace.
He tried beckoning. He bent down like he was filling a bucket. The gelding whinnied softly but he didn’t come out of the thicket.
With sweat standing out upon his forehead like drops of rain Reifel moved in closer. He had to force himself to take each step and he was into the shadows before he saw it — the dark dull wedge of a Winchester’s stock above the gelding’s saddle.
Reifel shuddered when he saw it. Trap smell almost stifled him. There had been no Winchester on that saddle when he’d left it; Turner hadn’t included any saddle gun with Bugler. His flesh began to writhe and crawl, but he’d gone too far to back out now.
The empty pistol was still in his hand and he made himself keep going. He must have died a thousand deaths while he took those twenty steps through the ink-black shadows that closed in around him. Once, when a wind-fluttered branch brushed his cheek, he almost snarled in his outrage so tight-stretched were his faculties with listening for the click of a pulled-back hammer. He expected each step he took to be his last. It was torture to be throttled to this slow gait when every cringing muscle of his aching body longed to hurl him forward and put an end to this nightmare. He dared not let himself make the least motion which might spook that horse. For no matter how Bugler came to be in this thicket, Reifel knew that unless he could mount him he was done.
But nothing happened. No one sprang from the shadows. No one called on him to
halt. He reached the gelding, seized its bridle and commenced to shake so hard he couldn’t get into the saddle and had to cling there, clutching it, until the paroxysm passed. He damned near cried he was so weak but finally, without quite knowing how he did it, he found himself aboard the horse.
He neck-reined Bugler out of the thicket and was paused at its edge, endeavoring to get his bearings when he remembered the scrap of paper — the piece which the drummer had torn from his order book for the black-haired girl of the stage to write her name on. It was an irrelevant thought which had nothing to do with getting Ben Reifel away from that posse; nevertheless it stopped him cold on the creek bank and drove a worried hand into searching his clothing. The hand didn’t find it so he stashed his empty pistol and put the other one to helping. He was in a fine sweat lest he’d forgotten to remove it from the clothes he had drowned in the creek behind Tim Foley’s. He finally found it in the sweatband of his hat.
He had no recollection of putting it there but his head felt so queer he might easily have forgotten as he’d forgotten its existence up until right now. Kind of funny though the way it had got folded….
He smoothed its creases and tried to make out the name but the light, even here in the open, wasn’t strong enough. The first word began with an M but it didn’t look like Mary. Monte, maybe — it had the right number of letters. Funny name for a girl, he thought, kind of scowling.
The scowl was still on his face when he put it away. He got to wondering now if one of those possemen had found it, or maybe that sheriff. Any girl who could write her name on butcher paper — By God, if the sheriff had found it…. That might account for a lot that he’d found queer about this deal. If she was all that important, or if her old man was, the sheriff probably knew them. Knew of them anyway. It might have made all the difference. It might account for him being left here unbound without a guard. It might — but he could figure that out later. First things first. The most important thing right now was to get the hell away from here — and he had better be careful not to leave no trail.
With that thought in mind he put Bugler into the creek. The New Mexican border couldn’t be very far away. If he could follow this water south or east and stay in it —
He’d got just that far when a voice barked gruffly: “Hoist your hands an’ come outa that!”
Sometimes when a man has reached the end of his string desperation lends him a strength beyond normal, a courage out of this world, the guts to achieve apparent miracles — but it was not that way with Ben Reifel. When those growled words came at him out of the dark he let out a long breath and let go of the reins, knowing deep inside him this was how he had expected it to end all along.
“Come on — get ’em up. I ain’t figurin’ to be takin’ no chances with you.”
Reifel, signing, raised his hands. But it was hard, bitter hard, to know he had failed so near to victory.
A man stepped out of the blackness of the willows. Moon-glow silvered the gun in his fist. He was one of those who had been with the sheriff and he said with a dangerous edge to his tone, “Climb down off that nag an’ wade over here.”
Reifel shook his head. “Not sure I can make it — ”
“You better get sure then. I’ve seen all your tricks I’ve a mind to. Climb down!”
Sudden hope poured through Reifel. This guy was too tense, his voice was too brittle. Ben Reifel had ridden too often with fear not to know a scared man when he saw one.
He came out of the saddle. The stream was waist deep and the shock of cold water wrung a gasp from his throat. He took a couple of floundering steps, made a frantic grab for the saddle and clung there.
The man on the bank above him swore. “I won’t tell you again — climb outa there!”
“W-w-wait a second,” Reifel gasped through chattering teeth and, transferring his hold to the gelding’s bridle, wheeled the big roan around and waded out at the ford.
The nervous deputy edged up to him warily but when he saw how used up Reifel looked, shivering and shaking in his soaked blue jeans, a sneer crossed his face. “You’re like all of these hard cases. Tougher than hell when you’re stick-in’ up stages an’ a damn sick chicken when you get caught up with. That horse’ll stand, you don’t have t’ hang onto him.”
Reifel let his hand drop away from the bridle. He staggered and the deputy’s gun jumped to focus. “None o’ that,” he snarled. “Get them paws back up over your head!”
Reifel put up his arms. He didn’t look to have strength enough to whip a grown June bug. “You want this shell belt and pistol?”
There was a sneer on the deputy’s face when he said, “What the hell good is a gun without bullets?” He looked at Reifel and sniggered. “Your luck run out when Chet elected to come along with Lafe’s posse. Chet had your number right from the start. Had it all doped out just what you would do an', brother, you done it — clear on down t’ hidin’ your tracks in that water! You’re a cooked goose, mister, an’ you might as well know it.”
“Yeah,” Reifel said, “I can see you an’ Chet sure are cute ones. Tripped me up slick as slobbers. Only thing I can’t seem to get through my hat is why, after Chet had it all doped out, he didn’t want to stick around — ”
“He wanted to all right but the sheriff wouldn’t let him. Lafe’s a reg’lar ol’ woman. Why, if — ”
He broke off, eyes widening, as Reifel swayed on his feet and looked about to collapse. It was a neat little act and well executed but Lafe’s rep was too jumpy to be taken in completely. As Reifel’s arms whipped toward him the man jumped backward, cursing. His gun came up before Reifel could reach him. Flame burst from its barrel.
But the man was too nervous. Even as he fired he got hung up in his spurs. His shot went wild. Fright jammed his faculties. He put everything he had into staying on his feet.
This was all the chance Reifel needed. Sick and weak as he was from loss of blood and exhaustion, vision fogged and senses reeling, he came in as though flung from a catapult and whacked the barrel of his pistol hard against the deputy’s skull. The man’s knees bowed out and he pitched forward into the mud and weeds.
Reifel dragged him back and fell across him, gasping. It took him a long while to muster enough strength to get up again. Three feet away Bugler, standing on dropped reins, looked into the west with his ears pricked forward.
Alarm stirred in Reifel and he got onto his knees. With hands that were all but unmanageable he fumbled with his empty pistol, reloading it with cartridges from the deputy’s belt — even thrusting a few extras into the loops of his own. Then he staggered erect and lurched over to the horse.
The stirrup seemed a terrible long way from the ground. He thought he’d never make it and, when he finally got a boot into it, the worn-out muscles of his arm wouldn’t pull him into the saddle. But he got there, someway. And someway he stayed in it.
• • •
It was the girl who saw him first.
She was standing straight and rigid in the open doorway arguing with the rared-back man in the wire-patched rocker that was fifty miles away across the dilapidated porch.
The fellow in the rocker wasn’t paying much attention. He looked a lot more interested in the bottle he was holding, hoisting it aloft from time to time and smacking his lips when he lowered it. He had a sunken-cheeked face swathed in a month’s growth of whiskers and his shape was so ganted you had to look twice to make sure he was there.
But he was there all right. When the girl saw Reifel — when she cried out and pointed — the weasel-eyed old reprobate came out of that rocker like he worked on a spring. He never spilled one drop from that goddam bottle, but he wasn’t no more than onto his feet before his other hand was thumbing back the hammer of a pistol.
“What the hell do you want?”
Reifel’s throat was too dry to get any words out. Even with both hands choking the apple it was all he could do just to stick in the saddle. A hundred miles of riding without food in four days, a
nd half the time fighting fever, had finally brought him to the end of his string.
The girl cried, “He’s hurt!” and made as though to start forward, but the old man waved her back with the bottle.
“You keep outa this, damn it — I know what I’m doin'. Another Devil Iron dodge! By God, I’ll show them bastards — ”
The last thing Reifel saw was the bore of that gun getting ready to take his picture.
9. WOLF’S GAME
GERT KAVANAUGH’S mouth pinched in at the corners as she put down the pen on the burn-scarred counter and jerked up her glance to meet the sober regard of the Orient’s proprietor.
So much of her eighteen years had been lived among men that she was sometimes surprised to find she hadn’t turned into one. She dressed like a man and was reacting like one when she said with a trace of defiant acerbity: “It’s still a free country — or have you closed this dump up?”
Joe Clinton’s shrewd eyes passed sadly over her face and he rolled the chewed match stick across his uneven teeth. He didn’t tell her bitterly he might as well close it up nor did he offer directly to discuss her assertion. He said instead, “What’s the use? You been to see him before. You reckon he’s likely to do any more now than last time?”
All of her most vivid memories, and many of those long since grown dim, were irrevocably entangled with the faces of cow hands, gun fighters, gamblers and saddle bums — observable milestones in the disintegration of all that was admirable in the man who had sired her.
The Boxed Y of the Kavanaughs had been carved from the virgin wilderness when this whole rock-girded basin had been traditional hunting ground for Geronimo’s Apaches. It had controlled the best water, the finest grass and winter browse protected by the tumbled bluffs of the Galiuros — a wild and rugged cowman’s dream held together by the exercise of one man’s will and the blazing guns of forty hard-riding punchers.
