The Hunted

by Ralph Compton

  Rollie was the last one she came to. He had been fiddling with his pistol and sat with that resting loosely in one hand in his lap, the neck of a well-tended whiskey bottle in the other. He’d stretched his legs out fully toward the fire, forcing Hester to step over them. She was in the act of doing so quickly. Rollie reached up with one leg in between hers, raising her skirts to reveal the long-handles she wore underneath. He laughed, inciting giggles from the other men, who all had their eyes on the scant bit of covered leg revealed above her boots.

  Without pause, Hester tipped the scalding hot beans and biscuits onto Rollie’s lap, drizzled them onto his Colt, his hand, and his crotch. “Oh dear!” she said, jumping over his legs and retreating around the side of the fire. “I am so clumsy.”

  Rollie’s initial howl of surprise soon turned into cries of pain as the heat of the beans bubbled up blisters on his hand, and the juice oozed into his gun, and soaked into his grimy denims. He danced in a circle, wiping the sticky bean juice from his hand and howling blue oaths. He squared off at Hester and leveled his Colt at her, his gun hand red and already blistered. “You! You stupid cow! Look what you did!”

  “Hardly my fault, Rollie. You knocked me off balance. . . .”

  Charlie had known as soon as Rollie began his shenanigans what the outcome might be, and he wedged his bulk in between the shaky gun and Hester, who, not unexpectedly, had shown no sign of backing down.

  “Now, look here, Rollie. You had no call to go doing what you did, and if she says you’re the one who made her lose her balance, why, it’s your word against hers. But I’m siding with her. You fellas?” He looked to the other three freighters, who sat with their eyes wide and mouths agape, full of half-chewed food, their fingertips dripping bean juice.

  A couple of them nodded, having seen what this huge man had done to Rollie a few nights before, and wondering what he might do to them.

  The entire time he spoke, Charlie worked his way toward the shaky, seething Rollie, in hopes of catching hold of the revolver. He didn’t want to catch a bullet instead. He opened a hand, extended toward Rollie. “Give me the gun, Rollie. Give it up. You ain’t in no fit state to be wagging that thing around. You been drinking steady for days. That ain’t no way to live, Rollie. . . .” Charlie edged closer, keeping his gaze on Rollie’s wide eyes, on his wide-stretched mouth, spittle flecking his beard.

  A few more inches and Charlie felt sure he could bat that Colt out of the fool’s hand, away from the others. Then he’d close in, button up the crazy man’s eyes, tie him up if he had to, and call it a night.

  But Rollie had other ideas in mind. Charlie reached his big hand one inch closer and the next instant the campsite exploded in sound. Charlie felt a hot lance of pain stab low on his right side, smelled smoke as if from burned wool and leather. He clutched at his side, felt wetness, and raised a hand. Sound seemed to dull, become a wash of noise, low and blurry, as if he had been dunked in water. In the flickering firelight, he saw what looked like blood on his hand. Couldn’t be, though. Have to be hurt to bleed. . . .

  “You all saw him! He come at me! Come at me with that knife of his! He was fixing to kill me!”

  Slowly it came to him that he’d been hurt, shot, by Rollie. And then as if his head had been lifted out from being held underwater, sound, glass-sharp and sights of faces, fire, the wagons, these visions keen-edged and crisp, sliced at him from all around.

  None of it made sense to him. Charlie smelled wood smoke, then felt a new pain on the side of his head. He turned to see the butt of Rollie’s Colt swinging at him, the madman of a freighter leering, the thrill of excitement painted on his face, and Charlie tried to dodge it, but too late.

  He spun, then, saw the campsite go around and around him, grow bigger and bigger, blurrier and darker all the time. All that sound—screaming, might be it was a woman screaming, “What have you done? What have you done?” He heard more shouting and horses and mules—slowly pinched out too. And then Big Charlie Chilton knew no more.

  Chapter 20

  “What have you done, you murderer!” Hester O’Fallon dropped to her knees by the big man. She couldn’t believe what she’d seen, couldn’t believe that the worthless drunken bum freighter would shoot mild Big Charlie for standing up for her.

  She tried to see in the fading light, but between that and the snow that had begun falling harder, as if making up for lost time, tending Charlie was taking some doing.

  “Somebody check on that other one, the sickly, pretty girl.” Rollie gestured toward the spot under the wagon where Hester had set up Delia in a protected spot out of the wind.

  “No! No, you leave her alone!” Hester ran to her sister’s side, but found the girl sound asleep, seemingly at peace. She’d dosed her with laudanum earlier, hoping Delia would get a good night’s rest. The girl had awakened to the sounds of gunfire, but in her stupor hadn’t been able to rouse herself beyond a wobbly, questioning glance.

  “Someone shut her up and tie her up to that tree yonder!” Rollie waved his pistol at her and said, “Or I will, permanent-like.”

  Norbert hobbled over to the girl beneath the wagon and bent to her. Hester tried to kick at him, but Shiner grabbed her arms from behind and dragged her, screaming and kicking, backward toward Rollie. “Shut up, woman!”

  Norbert seemed rattled by the entire affair, but felt Delia’s neck for signs of life, bent to feel her breath on his face. He rose, shaking his head slowly. “She ain’t with us no more, boss.” He bent back to her and covered her face with her blanket.

  “What?” said Rollie, lurching toward the wagon. Before he got far from her, the now-crazed Hester lashed out wildly with her legs and landed a hard kick square on the side of his leg, half collapsing him sideways. He spun and seemed about to backhand her across the face when Norbert came up behind him and held Rollie’s arms.

  “Let her be, boss,” he said close by Rollie’s ear. “She lost her sister, for Pete’s sake. Leave her be for a few minutes.”

  Rollie stopped struggling against the tall man, then shrugged hard out of his grasp. “You ever touch me again, Norbert, and you’re done. You used up all your chances with me. Now tie her up.”

  Shiner held the now-sobbing Hester tight, too tight for her to break free, her struggles becoming less frenzied as Norbert cinched the ropes about her wrists behind her. “I got it,” he said to Shiner, who roughly thrust her to the ground.

  Norbert waited until Shiner was out of earshot, then lashed another rope tightly about her ankles. “Listen to me,” he said, looking up at her as he tied, without raising his head or moving his lips much. “Your little sister’s alive.”

  Hester stopped crying and stared, red-faced and trembling, at Norbert’s rough cob of a face.

  “I did that so they wouldn’t bother her . . . in the way they want to.” He double-knotted the rope to buy himself more talking time. “But you got to worry about yourself now. I don’t know as I can protect you much more.”

  Chapter 21

  Movement and sound, like rocks rattling in a can, woke Charlie. He was walking. No, that wasn’t quite right. He was moving, but he didn’t think he was doing the work of it. Someone was moving him. That must be it. He couldn’t call what he felt awake, since he couldn’t seem to open his eyes. But soon the sounds he heard became words, people’s voices, and he recognized the voices as Rollie’s and one of the other men’s, which one he couldn’t tell at first, but it soon enough sounded like Shiner.

  “Yeah, well, you and the others go along with me and I’ll make you all rich men.”

  “Just how rich we talkin’?”

  “Rich, I’m telling you, beyond your grandest imaginings.”

  Charlie could tell it was Shiner, or maybe Bo, that Rollie was talking to. Charlie didn’t much care. He tried to speak, but nothing came out.

  “How you going to pull off such a miracle?”
>
  “Heck,” said Rollie, “it’s simple as simple can be, boy. What we do is we’ll wait ’em out, let ’em starve, and then take all these here goods and their gold too.”

  “What if they won’t give up their gold?”

  “They will, when they’re starvin’ for flour and whiskey. And if they ain’t dead, they soon will be,” cackled Rollie.

  “What if they head on out, hunting and whatnot?”

  “We pick ’em off, boy. Use your head.”

  “But how we gonna live until then?”

  Rollie sighed, then said, “We have wagons full of food and supplies, don’t we?”

  “Yeah,” said Shiner. “Hey, that’s right. So when the town’s empty, we head on in, take the gold—”

  “And anything else worth taking,” interrupted Rollie. “And then we head west over the mountains, drop down to California. I figure we can make it by spring.”

  “What do we do there?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m fixing to live like a king. You, on the other hand, are probably too stupid. I doubt they will let you in.”

  Rollie’s laugh accompanied a sharp pain in Charlie’s side. Felt as if he was moving somehow. Maybe they were hefting him, helping him to his feet. No, no, Charlie, he told himself. That isn’t possible. The man shot you. . . .

  Despite his pain, Charlie couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Rollie was fixing to starve out and kill off the people of Gamble? He had to stop him, had to do something, but how? Then he heard the men’s voices straining, heard them grunting. They were lifting him, that much he was sure of, and then they let go of him, dropped him on something hard.

  His head hit, and it felt like thunder cracking in his skull. Hot rivers of pain flowered up his side, down from his head, then met in the middle, and lit his chest on fire. It felt as though he were about to explode.

  Charlie tried harder to speak, to make some sound, some movement at all. But he didn’t think he was too successful at it. The men had been talking the entire time they flopped him wherever it was they did, but he couldn’t make out any more than the blurred sounds of their voices.

  • • •

  “You can’t leave them here!”

  Rollie raised the snout of the Colt’s barrel to Hester’s forehead, dead between her eyes. His mouth smiled at her. His eyes did not.

  She trembled, but her gaze locked hard on his. “Do it, you . . . worm.”

  Hester saw a nerve jump and jounce at the corner of Rollie’s left eye, dirt smudged in the little wrinkles there. His thumb peeled back the hammer all the way, and he pressed the barrel harder into her head.

  “Do it, curse your worthless hide.” She said it low but clear.

  “That’s what you’d like, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Hester, without hesitation.

  Rollie smiled again, revealing stained teeth in his stubbled face. He eased off the hammer. “Then that is exactly what you will not get. Not yet anyway. We’ll see about later . . . later.”

  Rollie turned away and the tied-up woman’s face sagged in confusion and despair. “No, that’s not right! You can’t do this to me! You animal! You filthy animal!”

  Rollie turned to face her, his face becoming a mask of slow rage as she screamed on and on. Finally he could take it no longer and two long strides brought him beside her. Quick as a lightning strike, he lashed out with the butt of the Colt and hit her above her left ear. Her eyes rolled back and she sagged against the ropes lashing her to a tree.

  Rollie stalked back to his wagon, then stopped. “Put her in my wagon,” he said to Bo. “But you make sure she’s still tied, hands behind her and feet together. And gag her too, you got that? But not permanent.” He smiled. “I expect I’ll have need of her before too long.”

  The rotten-toothed man nodded and Shiner moved to help him cut down the unconscious woman. Shiner had hold of the older sister’s feet, her skirts hanging halfway up her legs, but all the men saw were faded pink long-handles. Still, they were almost revealing her naked leg, and that was enough to get them to thinking about the fun they were going to have once they got to California with their gold. Yes, sir, it was working out as Rollie said it would.

  First he got rid of that nasty old uncle of his; then he got hold of the freighting business for himself; then they were headed next to that gold town up ahead in the mountains. Just as Rollie said. Except for Big Boy and the women. Shiner looked up at Bo. “Where’d this one’s sister get to?”

  Bo flashed a frown. “Didn’t make it. Started scratching at me a while ago when I tried to get to know her, you know, and she scratched me right on the face.” He turned his head to show Shiner two deep welts down the side of his cheek.

  “Lucky you didn’t lose an eye.”

  “You darn right.”

  “So where’s she at?” Shiner asked again, lugging the unconscious woman and walking backward toward Rollie’s wagon. He was having a hard time walking and keeping an eye on the woman’s legs at the same time.

  “Had to pop her one with a stick of firewood. Could be I hit her too hard. She ain’t moving and I felt no heartbeat.”

  “No big loss,” said Shiner. “Rollie said she was sick anyway. Ain’t nothing we should have to deal with.”

  “You said that right. This one, though. She’s a spitfire. I reckon she’ll be some peeved when she wakes up, finds her sister and Big Boy are no longer with us, as the preacher says at funerals.”

  They reached the wagon and Shiner propped the unconscious woman’s boots on the flopped-open tailgate of the wagon. He climbed up into the wagon as Rollie walked up. “Yep, set her right there in that spot I got ready. Now tie her up.” The two men did as he said; then he said, “And the other one, she’s for-sure dead?”

  “The girl?”

  Rollie rolled his eyes. “Of course, the girl. I know Big Boy ain’t getting up again. I’m the one who drilled him and hit him, ain’t I?”

  “Yeah, well.” Bo didn’t look up.

  “Bo,” said Rollie. “Bo, what’d you do?”

  The greasy man spread his lips wide, exposing his blackened nubby teeth. “I’m sorry, Rollie, but she attacked me.” He showed Rollie his bleeding cheek. “Wasn’t nothing I could do. Had to do it. Clunked her with a piece of wood.”

  Rollie sighed. “Then Norbert really was right? She done for?”

  “Yeah, I reckon she’s not drawing breath no more.”

  Rollie rubbed his chin. “Okay, then, you probably did us a favor. She was sick anyway. Not looking too healthy. I reckon she wouldn’t have lasted all that long anyway. But tie that one up tight. She’s going to be all worked up when she finds out. Now let’s go. We only have a few hours of light left, and I want to make use of them.”

  “You sure we won’t need any of that gear we’re leaving behind?”

  “Norbert, what did I say about asking me about my decisions?”

  The thin man nodded, wished he hadn’t said a thing.

  “Besides, it’s junk. The only things them people from Gamble are going to want will be food and booze, tobacco, you name it. Anything but that equipment.”

  “Charlie said they was going to use that stuff for digging the gold. Equipment and such.”

  Rollie shut his eyes tight, then leaned back and drove a scar-knuckled fist right into Norbert’s rangy jaw. The buckskinned man flew backward, piled into the side of the second wagon, and lay still for a moment. He came around quickly, shook his head as if to shake off a fly. He focused his eyes on the man staring down at him, arms crossed and a ticked-off look on his face. Norbert rasped his hand along his tender jaw.

  “What all you do that for, Rollie?”

  “If I have to tell you, then I might as well shoot you now. Get up and get busy.” Rollie walked off, leaving Norbert struggling to stand, still dizzy and wonderin
g what it was he’d said that riled Rollie so.

  “I can drive a team now, boss.”

  “No, you can’t. You ain’t been right since you went swimming. Shut your piehole and ride shotgun.” Rollie turned and shouted to the others. “I’m moving out soon. You all can do as you please. Make sure those two wagons of mine come with me and don’t stay with you.”

  Shiner and Bo traded looks.

  “Boss ain’t making sense,” said Bo.

  “That’s his way of telling us that we’re in it with him all the way.” Shiner rubbed his hands together. “And if that means money, then you bet I’m in. I can almost smell that gold from here.”

  Bo walked back to his own wagon. “How far we got to go anyway?”

  “Boss said a few more days.”

  “Good,” said Bo. “With them Injuns about, I fear for my topknot.”

  “I don’t have that worry,” said Shiner, running a callused hand over his stubbled head.

  Not long after, Rollie and Norbert had finished lashing down a tarp on the lead wagon when Rollie said, “Norbert, I want you to make yourself useful and set fire to that wagon.” He nodded toward the wagon on which lay Big Charlie Chilton, and under which lay Delia, the sickly sister.

  “Burn them?”

  “But . . . she’s alive. I mean, I ain’t no doc, but she might well be alive. And the big fella, he’s still kickin’ too.”

  “Not by much.” Rollie pointed the Colt at Norbert. “Besides, if you don’t do it, I’ll be more than happy to plug you one right here, leave you to burn with them. Or did you forget what I told you about your chances with me being all used up?”

  Norbert raised his long, bony hands, let them drop.

  “Good, now do like I said and burn them, the wagon, the whole thing.” Rollie saw the horror on the buckskin-clad man’s face. “Heck, they’ll never know a thing. Be a good way to go—they was both on their way out anyway. This here is the right thing to do, mark my words. Think of it as us doing their dear, departed souls a favor. We don’t burn ’em up, they’ll be lion bait. You want that on your conscience?”