The Last Hard Men

by Brian Garfield

  Staring at the black sky, he carefully opened small gates to let Susan’s haunting image flow into his mind. In a while her face hovered before him and he could hear her singing the way she did sometimes in the kitchen, in her small true voice.

  He wondered if Hal’s thoughts were like his own. Hal was a good boy. Boy, he thought. Hal was thirty-three or thirty-four, a successful mining engineer—no boy. He handled himself well and had not complained of the endless hours of rough riding. If Hal had a basic weakness, Burgade thought, it was not cowardice or squeamishness. But Hal tended to be too impetuous. He had been an athlete in his school years; he was handsome and self-confident and a lot of things had come easily to him. There was a chance his very abilities would be his downfall. His athletic coordination was great, like his stamina—but if he’d been a little less agile, a little more accident-prone, he’d have taken his knocks by now, learned his lesson, learned how to be more cautious.

  Burgade’s mind drifted. His exhaustion was physical, emotional, mental, all compounded by tense strain carried to the taut limits of tolerance. Sleep moved toward him, silent and black.

  He awoke fuzzily. He was lying on his side. He did not stir; he kept his eyes shut and his breathing deep and even. Someone was behind him.

  He heard a foot crunch gravel and the tentative clearing of a throat, and he made a face and rolled over. “Next time you come up behind a man,” he said, “announce yourself. I almost blew your head off.”

  Hal said, “I was deciding whether to wake you up. The clouds have cleared off.”

  “Time’s it?”

  “About two, by my watch.”

  Burgade looked around. Dust around the horned moon was a luminous ring. The light was enough to see by. “I slept six hours,” he said. “Too long. They’ve got another hour or two on us now.”

  “From what you say,” Hal observed, “I expect they’ll wait for us to catch up when they get to wherever it is they’re going.”

  Burgade grunted. He looked past Hal and saw the two horses standing thirty or forty feet away, saddled and ready. Hal had packed everything up. It annoyed Burgade slightly: people were always doing things for him, this trip. But what irritated him far more was the fact that the noise hadn’t awakened him. I can’t sleep again until we’ve finished this business, he decided.

  The sleep hadn’t revived him. He felt logy and weak. He stumbled once on his way to the horse. But Hal was considerate enough not to try to help him climb into the saddle.

  He found the tracks without much trouble and lifted the gray to a trot. Hal rode alongside in brooding silence for ten or fifteen minutes before he revealed what was eating him. “Sir, I had better know what you’ve got in mind to do.”

  “Do?”

  “You told the sheriff you were going to try to trade your life for Susan’s.”

  “So I did.”

  “Is that still your plan?”

  “It never has been. I lied to Noel—to get him off my back.”

  Hal’s face was turned toward him. Under the hatbrim his expression was invisible. But his voice was slightly choked. “You mean you never intended to offer a trade?”

  “You’re thinking if there was a chance in a thousand you could have Susan’s life by offering your own in exchange, you’d do it like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  “You’re damn right I would.”

  “That’s very fine and noble,” Burgade intoned.

  “You seem to disapprove,” Hal said, stiffly.

  “Let me tell you something. Zach Provo’s not going to strike any bargains. Why should he, when he’s got a corner on the market?”

  “It appears to me, sir, that we’re still obliged to try.”

  “Put it this way, Hal. Two enemies face each other with knives. They crouch and circle each other, looking for an opening. One of them is an expert knife-thrower, the other one isn’t. Suppose you’re the expert knife-thrower. What do you do? Throw your knife?”

  It puzzled Hal. “I don’t know.”

  “No. You don’t throw. Because your enemy’s in a crouch and you can’t be sure of finishing him with one toss. And once you’ve thrown your knife you’re defenseless. So you keep your knife and you fight your enemy on his terms.”

  “I’m not sure I follow that, sir.”

  “My freedom of action is the only weapon I’ve got. If I turned myself in to Provo as part of some sort of trade, I’d be giving up my only threat against him. You see, he’s not going to kill Susan as long as I’m out here with guns.”

  “Then what’s he going to do?”

  “He’s going to try to take me alive,” Burgade said in a tired voice. “He’ll want to force me to watch them do … things … to Susan. He wants me to watch her die. And then he’ll find a slow way to kill me. He’ll take his time because it’s going to dawn on him that killing me will leave a great big hole where his hate used to be. He’s going to miss me—he won’t like the idea of ending all the years of hating my guts.”

  The tracks curled behind the knee of a steep hill which threw a shadow across them. Burgade had to slow the gray to a walk and lean down to see the ground. The steel horseshoes had left shallow indentations in the hard ground. Twenty miles ahead loomed a mountain range, a dark heavier mass against the broken clouds and stars.

  Hal said, “But what can we do, then?”

  “Try to get to Provo. Pick him off. The rest of them will probably be willing to let Susan go in return for their own chance to get away.”

  “That’s a long shot, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the only shot we’ve got.”

  “But how can we get close enough to Provo to capture him?”

  “I said nothing about capture.”

  He heard the quick hiss of Hal’s indrawn breath. “You mean kill him. Shoot him from ambush. Is that it? I’m not sure I could do that, sir.”

  “Nobody’s asked you to.”

  Hal, not knowing what to say, curbed his tongue. They came out of the hill shadow and followed the prints along the flat toward the distant mountains. Inside Burgade, a hard knot grew, a pain of ugly lust that demanded violence—deeper, stronger than the will to live.

  The plain wrinkled up toward the mountains’ jagged upheaval. By mid-morning Burgade was in the foothills. The sun was a merciless, molten orange; the dazzling brilliance made his eyes swim. The hills made hard going for the horses: there were acres of looming boulders that weighed hundreds, even thousands, of tons.

  Hal said, “Where are we?”

  “Close to the west boundary. These mountains run about thirty miles thick. Beyond that you get into the deep gorge country—Grand Canyon. They wouldn’t be that far west—they’d be cut off with their backs to the gorges. Provo wouldn’t lock his back door that way. They’ll stay in these mountains.”

  They climbed steadily at a slow gait. Red cliffs leaned back high above them like exploded wreckage on a deserted battlefield. There were great swaths of pine timber standing in lancers’ order. The meadows and clearings were yellow with shortgrass. Hal said, “These tracks seem to be headed back downhill.”

  “No. A man bends the grass down in the direction he’s walking. A horse does the opposite.”

  “Do you suppose they’re where they can see us from up there?”

  “If they’re not, they will be. Stay inside the trees as much as you can and don’t skyline yourself.”

  Black-bellied clouds assembled over the westward peaks during the afternoon. By six o’clock the two horsemen were high in pine country, plodding their tired animals uphill along needle-blanketed slopes. The fugitives’ tracks went into a sun-splattered stream but did not come out on the opposite bank.

  Hal said, “They’ve gone in the water to hide their tracks.”

  Burgade grunted. He eased himself out of the saddle and had a long look around, turning slowly on the balls of his feet. Finally he took one of the canteens off his saddle—the empty one—and dipped it into the stream. It bubbled
and filled. He set it down on the ground long enough for the mud and debris to settle to the bottom before he drank from it. The horses were guzzling from the stream.

  “You may as well step down. We’ll wait here a bit.”

  “What for?”

  “Sundown. They kept going west up this stream, and I’m not about to follow along after them this time of day. Not with that sun in my eyes.”

  “But they’ll gain two hours on us.”

  “They’re not going far now,” Burgade said. “Beyond that pass to west of here, there’s a steep drop toward the gorge country. Provo’s somewhere right around here. I’d guess not more than three miles from us right now. At sunset we’ll scout around—on foot. Plenty of time. Why don’t you break us out something to eat? A man can’t fight on an empty belly.”

  Hal gave him a bleak look of dulled anger. Probably couldn’t understand how he could act so casual and callous. Burgade lay down in a thicket of brush and kept turning his head slowly from side to side so as not to miss any stray sound. A lot of things were flooding back into his conscious memory and he didn’t want to interrupt the flow. It had been thirty years since he’d ridden scout for General Crook but he needed to remember everything now, every nuance. His only chance was to be a better Indian than Zach Provo.

  He sat up to eat, and went to the stream to wash the camp pans and scrub his face. The sun was lodged in pinetops upstream and it was a good time for an ambush from that direction, and so he took Hal and the horses and faded back into the timber along the east face of a hill which blocked the sun from view. They waited there for almost an hour. Then he walked back to the stream, leading the horse. The twilight was cool and breezy; pine branches rustled overhead and the stream gurgled. Burgade walked along the bank, upstream, until he saw enough pale dots in the water to be sure. “They went up this way.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Horses kicked over a lot of pebbles. Look.” He reached down into the water, up to his elbow, and picked up a small stone. “Rough side up. It’s been turned over recently—otherwise it would have been smooth and slimy like the other side.”

  They walked very slowly up the bank. After ten minutes Burgade was trying to conceal the fact that he was breathing hard. He stopped and scowled at the heavy carpet of black clouds that was unrolling swiftly overhead. “We’ll have rain tonight.”

  “Does that mean we might lose them?”

  “Provo will make sure we don’t.” Burgade had been weighing things in his mind. Now he said with abrupt decision, “He’s not going to leave anything to chance. He’s got to be right around here someplace—three miles, maybe five, but no more than that. Otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered to ride in the water.”

  “And?”

  “He knows we’re close to him. He’s probably doubled back on his own tracks and set up an ambush. I don’t see any point in walking into it.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “Nothing. We camp and sit tight. When we. don’t show up, he’ll send somebody out to look for us.”

  “What if he does?”

  “We’ll just wait for whoever it is to show up.” The trees crowded down close along both banks of the stream. The dusk was thickening, made darker by swelling storm clouds. Burgade spent ten minutes walking around in the trees until he found a spot that satisfied him. “We’ll picket the horses in here and roll up a couple of fake blanket dummies to look like men asleep. Doubtful anybody’ll fall for it, but whoever comes will investigate. Well set a little snare for him.”

  “With what?”

  Burgade rummaged in his saddlebags. “This.” He took out the coil of fine high-test fishing line.

  The rain held off. Burgade showed Hal how to string the line, at shin level, taut from tree to tree. There wasn’t enough to go all the way around but it wasn’t likely an intruder would expose himself by stepping across the stream, so Burgade left that side open. The rest was circled by the tripwire.

  By the time they were finished it was full dark. Burgade picked his spot and pushed down on Hal’s shoulder. “Don’t even breathe. We don’t want him to spot us.”

  “What makes you think anyone will come?”

  “We didn’t cross over the top. Provo had to be watching for us. When we didn’t show up, he must have started to worry. He may even think we got lost. He’ll send a stalking horse.”

  “A what?”

  “A man to show himself. Somebody we’ll recognize and follow. Meant to lead us into a trap. Now shut up and lie still.”

  Burgade sat on the ground with his .30-06 rifle across his lap. Forty feet away, inside the tripwire circle, the picketed horses browsed. He couldn’t really see them; the darkness was complete. He spent a quarter of an hour gathering up dry pine needles and lashing them to the end of a two-foot twig in a torch-sized bundle. When that was done he unwrapped his waterproof match bag and put three wooden matches where he could get at them—one behind each ear and one between his teeth in the corner of his mouth like a toothpick. He set the rifle silently aside and palmed his .45 double-action, and then there was nothing to do but wait, and nothing to think about but Susan.

  The shadows were deep and sinister, the darkness all but total. It was possible to make out the darker outlines of the trees overhead against the clouds beyond, and he could distinguish the boles of nearby trees and the shape of the forest ground, but the horses were only vague suggestions and he had to rely mainly on his ears.

  It was hard to think about the anguish Susan must be going through; it was impossible not to think about it. Whether or not they had laid so much as a finger on her, she was living at every breath with the horror of it, the awful knowledge of what Provo aimed to do. Even if she could be rescued alive, would she ever be whole again?

  Zach Provo had that to answer for. Burgade knew the rage that burned in Provo. It was no more savage than his own.

  He heard the intruder long before he saw anything. The man was trying to be silent but he couldn’t help giving himself away. The wind had died, the creek was beyond earshot, there were no sounds at all to muffle the intruder’s movements. Whoever it was, it wasn’t Provo. Most likely it wasn’t Menendez or Taco Riva, either. Those three—and possibly Quesada—would know better than to move as fast as this one was moving. The sound was off to the right, perhaps a hundred feet away and coming forward on the far side of the horses.

  The intruder halted for a while and almost went around behind the wire ring. Probably scouting in a crisscross pattern—but Burgade didn’t want him to circle away. He began to sweat in the cool darkness. The revolver stirred in his fist.

  Hal stiffened. Burgade touched his shoulder to keep him quiet. Then he had a piece of luck. One of the horses stamped its hoof to get rid of an insect.

  The soft thud echoed through the forest. The intruder, wherever he was, froze for several minutes. There wasn’t a sound. Burgade could imagine him, turning his face slowly to try to pick up tiny sounds on the flats of his eardrums; keening the night, staring into the darkness as if to burn it away with his gaze.

  It was a long time before the intruder moved. Then the faint sounds of his travel crossed from right to left. The man was coming in toward the horses. Burgade lifted the revolver higher in his fist and settled his elbow against his knee.

  He still couldn’t see the man. He heard him move in from that northerly quadrant, moving a few yards at a time and stopping to listen again. A stray breeze roughed up the pine needles briefly; it must have carried man-smell to the horses, for one of them whickered tentatively, a very quiet throaty sound in the night. The intruder recognized the sound and kept moving forward. He couldn’t be more than a few yards from the tripwire but Burgade couldn’t see a thing over there. Several trees were in the way. The tripwire itself was in his line of sight, but he didn’t know whether he was going to be able to see the man that far away even if he did step into the view-line: it was fifty feet away and the darkness was intense.

&nbs
p; He could hear the taut dry constrictions of Hal’s breathing. The intruder seemed to have halted behind the trees just outside the tripwire. Within fifteen or twenty feet of the horses. The man must be able to see the blanket-wrapped dummies from there, the saddles and gear lying about. He would suspect the dummies for what they were. But his mission was to alert Burgade, not to evade him. The man had to move.

  But he didn’t. A drop of sweat formed on Burgade’s forehead, ran down his nose, and dripped onto the back of his left hand. Had the intruder spotted the tripwire? Burgade’s grip on the .45 tightened. He suppressed the sudden urgent need to reach around and scratch the small of his back.

  Then the intruder moved, crossing fast from pine to pine—Burgade saw his outline quite plainly, and then, between the trees, the tripwire caught the man just above the ankles and spilled him.

  The man fell toward the ground with quite a bit of noise, grabbing at branches to stop his fall. Burgade ran forward five paces, the noise of his own movement covered by the intruder’s tumble, and stopped with a clear view of the man.

  “I’ve got a gun aimed at you, friend. Don’t move a whisker.”

  The intruder hesitated, both elbows on the ground; but it was all right. He’d made his decision when he hadn’t started shooting at Burgade’s first word.

  Burgade moved slowly forward, holding the revolver balanced on the man. “Come on, Hal.”

  The intruder was an amorphous shape in the poor light. But any movement would draw Burgade’s fire, and the man seemed to realize that. He didn’t stir.