by Paul Lederer
Trinity swung down from his piebald now and examined some of the handiwork that had also puzzled him until recently. He was used to men reworking cattle brands, changing them to their own, but he thought that this was the first time he had ever seen a brand changed to match its genuine owner’s.
The brand on the hip of the red steer he stood beside now had been altered, but was not quite perfect. Squinting through the rain, Trinity saw enough to make it all come clear. The small loops of iron that he had found in the smith’s shed had indeed been broken off of a genuine Owl brand. The eyes removed, leaving only the shape of the head for an iron. Turning the broken pieces, Trinity had managed to make a known brand of them. The loops placed back to back formed a ‘CC’ brand, with the first ‘C’ reversed. It was a known brand out of New Mexico, owned by five men.
Cinco Compadres, or ‘five friends’ was the proper way to read the Double C brand. All of these cattle had been sold off by the CC, knowing that they would never be able to market them, that all were diseased. They had probably been grateful when Battles took them away for a tiny fraction of their healthy worth. He must have seemed like a madman, but Vincent Battles had a plan in mind. He had worked for the Owl before and it must have occurred to him that the butted Cs looked enough like the eyes of the Owl brand that it would take no artistic running iron work to burn an authenticlooking Owl on the steers. Especially if the original Owl head outline could be used.
Trinity checked another brand. This one was slightly misaligned so that the eyes obviously were not on the same iron as the one used for the outline. There was a gap between the eyes and the head where there should not have been. Two irons had been used then, the original CC back to back iron and the existing Owl outline.
Vincent Battles must have already been driving this herd into the hidden valley before Holly ever sent for him. With her old foreman – Dalton Remy – missing, she had needed help. Battles knew that she was more or less alone on the Owl, with Earl in Texas and Russell in the army. He arrived a few days after being summoned, bringing his own men, probably seeming to be some sort of savior knight to Holly – when all he had meant to do was profit from her.
What did he care if the Owl went broke? The army would certainly never do business with it again once these infected cattle were delivered. But Vincent Battles would have pocketed his profits and gone on his way. No wonder Battles had been upset by Russell’s unexpected arrival and nearly furious when Earl Bates returned. Battles probably cursed the old man, Lew Bates, for having the temerity to die on him just when Vincent seemingly had things well in hand and making it necessary to notify Earl Bates. Holly was out of her depth and knew it. All Battles had to do was convince her to stay at home, drive the infected herd through to Bridger and demand payment for the herd which had already been declared healthy and contracted for. That would take a lot of cool nerve, but Vincent Battles was not short on that commodity.
He could not now let Earl Bates, especially, go along on the drive. Earl was an experienced cattleman and would immediately know that these beeves were not an Owl herd. Hence the furious argument between Earl and Battles. It was not over leadership, but because Vincent Battles knew his herd could not stand up under scrutiny. Battles was probably already laying plans for the murder of Earl and Russell along the trail. He had to – his position was desperate now.
And Holly?
She had expressed her determination to travel with the herd to Fort Bridger, and could not be allowed to.
Trinity had seen enough. He had to get back to the Owl and warn Holly and Russell what was happening. Trinity knew now why his father had sent for Russell, what was important enough to summon him back from his army service. Somehow Lew Bates had found out the truth. Maybe Dalton Remy had gone to tell the old man what he had discovered before he was murdered.
Trinity turned the piebald eastward, toward the crooked trail over Dos Picos. The clouds had thinned just enough in the east that the sun now appeared as a misty red ball over the twin peaks. The brush beside the trail was soaked with rain water, glinting briefly in the moment of captured sunlight, the trail itself sodden, making for heavy going. Trinity let the piebald pick its own way.
The pain in his back was swift and searing, striking out of nowhere. Then the rolling echo of the distant rifle shot reached Trinity’s ears. He was already falling from the saddle of the startled horse when the sound reached his ears. Whoever it was taking the shot, he was a better marksman than the ambusher of the previous day.
Trinity had been struck just below his smallest rib by a man using a heavy-bore rifle. He felt the hot seep of his blood as he landed sprawled against the cold, sodden earth. The thorny mesquite where he landed ripped at his cheek and hand. His horse was gone, clever animal. Another shot clipped brush above him, encouraging Trinity to offer no target to the rifleman. He kept low, scrabbling and clawing his way toward a depression on the hillside.
He had gotten careless – spending too much time down among the herd of cattle, when his first glimpse of the steers had been enough to tell him all that he needed to know. Now he had to pay for that lapse in judgement – the men behind him could not afford to let him live. If he were to reach the Owl and reveal the plans of the riders and their masquerading steers, their hopes of a big payday would be lost.
The air was cool and water-heavy when he breathed in. This portion of the peaks must have burned off not long ago, for his body was covered from head to toe with damp ash. His side was fiery, flaring. He rolled into the depression when he reached it and took the time and trouble to peel back his shirt and survey the damage.
Clean through, the shot had gone, tearing away muscle and hide, but missing bone and any vital organ. That lifted his spirits somewhat, but the blood still flowed freely and the pain did not abate. He could congratulate himself for not being dead, but dead would not have hurt so much.
Tearing a strip from the bottom of his shirt he made a bandage, which he strapped tightly around his torso. Then he buttoned his still-smoldering jacket again, closed his slicker, and lay shivering in the sink as ragged clouds drifted overhead, seeming determined to reunite into thunderheads.
The day continued, gray and timeless, the wind curled its rattling way through the sheltering brush; his side continued to burn; his damaged kidneys, suffered in the bunkhouse fight with Willie Meese, decided to kick in with their share of torment. Probably they had been jarred loose again in his fall from the horse, just as they had begun to heal.
Now what?
He had to move, to rise and get out of there, or eventually he would be discovered. His attacker could not afford to let him slip away. Yet by rising he would offer a target to the rifleman who had undoubtedly followed and would be much nearer now. If he had his horse … but he did not, the animal, in an urge toward self-preservation, had run off. Trinity’s eyes lifted to the shattered bulk of the twin peaks beyond, knowing he could not scale them by clawing his way across the earth. Regaining the trail was an even worse choice. The rifleman, his pursuers, would be watching the trail for him to emerge.
He had to move! So long as he was moving, so long as the Colt revolver on his hip retained its snap and bite, there was a chance for survival. There was none if he lay cowering in the depression like a wounded animal.
Trinity got to all fours and peered up through the screen of brush surrounding him – a tangle of sumac, twisted manzanita, greasewood and sage. His first glimpse gave him a view of a horse’s legs – a red roan – as it was walked slowly up the canyon road. Its rider was undoubtedly searching from side to side, looking for what he knew had to be a wounded man. Trinity could see the cool glint of a rifle barrel’s metal where it dangled loosely from the rider’s hand. It was now or never, he thought.
Taking a desperate gamble, Trinity took aim through the scrub forest of brush at the shadowy figure of the rider. The close explosion of the .44 Colt racketed away as the rider flung his rifle aside and fell from his bucking horse. Trinity scra
mbled painfully to his feet and dashed toward the horse like a staggering avenger, revolver in his hand.
He found the horse standing trembling along the path, then let his eyes scour the brush beside the road until they found the man sprawled in the mud there, soot on his narrow face.
‘You…!’ Willie Meese screamed and he grabbed for the rifle on the muddy earth beside him.
Trinity shot him before his hand could grasp the Winchester. He walked toward the man across the uneven, rocky ground, holding his side with one hand. Willie looked up with haunted eyes. Rain fell into his face. His nose was covered with a sooty and mud-flecked bandage still. His lips barely moved as he gasped his last words, ‘I knew you were trouble, Trinity….’
Then his chest deflated and Willie lay staring, unseeing, at the iron sky which had mended itself once more and formed a sunless, rainy whole.
Trinity picked up Meese’s rifle, gathered the reins to the frightened red roan and leveraged himself into the saddle, his eyes on his backtrail, knowing that Willie Meese could not have been out here on the hunt alone. He had to get back to the Owl. He had to warn them all, had to get his side bandaged properly before he died on the cold and lonely trail. He started the roan up the slope, the going sloppy underfoot as the rain continued to cascade down. His entire body was shaking with cold except for his side which continued to flare with unremitting fire.
He rode on, upward, the roan slipping on the muddy surface which overlay smoth rock. Trinity wondered inconsequentially where the piebald had run off to. He would have to give that horse some further training.
If he ever saw it again.
The sun broke through the grayness, blindingly bright in his eyes. Along the trail, and beside it, all along the hillslope small pools of water reflected like brilliant mirrors. Then the sun was gone, as quickly as it had appeared as the dark clouds merged again, fighting back against the sunlight. Gloom and shadow reigned once more as Trinity crested the trail. He sat panting, aching; the horse under him heaved with exertion. He placed his hand on the roan’s neck, stroking it, thanking it for its effort.
The three men rounded a bend in the trail and were suddenly before him, rifles unsheathed, horses frothing. He could not identify their faces at this distance, but they seemed to know who he was although the rain swirled and he was seated on Willie Meese’s horse. The first bullet whipped past his ear, so near that – had he been a pirate – he would have lost his earring. Meese’s rifle had been left behind, and Trinity’s was lost, the piebald carrying it away when it ran.
He slicked his Colt revolver from its damp holster and fired back twice at the savage men. That did nothing to slow their uphill charge although one of them slapped at his shoulder as if bee-stung. Aiming was uncertain, the horse unsteady beneath him, the sky dark and constantly shifting.
Trinity knew he did not wish to go to ground again, not with three riflemen pursuing him and so he heeled the roan roughly and started away at a leaping, head jarring pace into the depths of another feeder canyon with no obvious trail. The brush was heavy, thorny and prickly. Mesquite and nopal cactus grew heavily in the bottom which was gray granite glossed with run-off water. Rifle shots followed him, bullets scything through brush and ricocheting violently off a rock face dangerously near to his head. He plunged ahead, driving the sturdy roan down the canyon which led – Trinity did not know where it led, only that he was going away from the hunters on some mad dash through thorny underbrush.
These were the thickets that Owl cattle were known to hide in, to escape to, to get lost in. The roan was a good little horse, but it was unused to brush-popping unlike those Texas-bred horses Trinity had once ridden down in the Big Thicket country on another, long ago mission for the army.
His head jolted back on his neck as the roan, urged to run too fast along the watercourse came to a hard stop, bracing its front legs. Trinity held up for a moment, as much for himself as for the roan. He could see no one behind him, hear no one rushing through the brush in pursuit. Maybe they had given up – or perhaps they knew that this canyon led nowhere at all.
There was no choice, Trinity started on. The swift water flowed past under the horse’s feet, washing the stone floor of the canyon free of debris and mud. The gray walls of the chute, through which he now rode, rose up high against the murky sky. Somehow the cold wind still blew strongly enough to buffet him, channeled down the canyon by the force of the fitful storm. He could see no way up and out of the stony canyon, nothing ahead of him that promised an escape.
He let the horse pick its way more slowly. If it were to break a leg, his situation would become desperate. Even without the bullet wound he would have been sorely pressed to walk out of this tangle, find his way down the slopes and hike to the Owl.
He found himself thinking not so much of guiding the horse now, but of those on the Owl who were about to be ruined, very probably killed before Vincent Battles’s game was played out. Russell was a good kid, but Trinity doubted he could stand up to Battles and whatever men he took along with him to finish sealing his scheme. Earl Bates, a man Trinity did not particularly like, but who was his most capable ally, would certainly be gunned down.
And Holly? Trinity thought of the red-headed girl with the hot temper and golden eyes, and knew he could not allow anything to happen to her.
Millicent, Trinity believed, would always find a way to survive – the meeting he had witnessed last night between her and Vincent Battles now had him nearly convinced that she was hardly an innocent.
The canyon had narrowed down to form a stony wedge. As it did, the cold running water grew deeper and the roan, not liking it, grew balky. The onrushing charge in the thicket beyond the rampaging creek caused Trinity to rein in hard and draw his pistol. Dark-eyed fury studied him, challenged him. The longhorn steer had somehow managed to entrap its horns in the thick, tangled manzanita wood. It was furious, twisting its head this way and that, rattling the brush with its six-foot horns as it tried futilely to free itself. On the best of days it would have been a hazardous undertaking to try to help the steer free itself. This was far from the best of days. There was nothing Trinity could do but ride on, hoping that the longhorn had enough retained strength to eventually break free of the woody manzanita.
The rain fell, much harder now – the way before Trinity was screened by it. He was sore, his wound throbbed, his kidneys ached. He was hungry and searched his pockets for the other ham sandwich he had been carrying, not caring what sort of shape it might be in – but he had lost it somewhere along the way.
The stony chute ended suddenly. He had to thank the roan for having the sense to stop. The water from the canyon formed itself into a waterfall which sheeted out and fanned downward across a sheer stone face. Trinity backed the shuddering red roan carefully away from the rim of the falls.
Now what? He could not go back, could not go forward, and the men with the rifles were somewhere on the trail behind, stalking him.
EIGHT
The hard rain stung Trinity’s face and the cold wind gusted as if it would thrust him over the ledge to plummet down the waterfall. He backed the red roan a few more steps. The cautious animal was eager to obey – it liked none of this and probably wondered what the creature on his back was thinking of, taking him down this terrible trail.
There was only one possibility, of course, to somehow clamber up the side of the canyon to the flats above. The slope was red mud over gray granite, exceedingly slippery and dangerously steep. Even if he could crawl up it somehow, what was to be done with the horse? Trinity thought of stripping its gear and sending it back in the direction they had come from, but that would leave him afoot again out in the dangerous wilds.
Studying the hillside through the driving rain, he thought he could make out a possible route up the slope. He would have to dismount and lead the horse, but then if the horse slid back and he were still holding the reins, they both would plunge to the bottom of the canyon. Still, it had to be tried.
> There was no choice.
‘Sorry, friend,’ he muttered to the worried roan horse, ‘but we’ve got to do this.’
Stepping down from the horse into the cold, rushing water, Trinity gathered the reins and started on his way. The horse balked, and Trinity could not blame it. At least Trinity had fingers capable of clawing his way up the treacherous slope. It would be something of a miracle if the hoofed animal could make the climb. He started on.
He made his way ten feet up the crumbling, drenched path – if it could be termed that – and parked himself on a narrow ledge of cold stone, the rain coursing past beneath him. He tugged at the roan’s tether, watched the fear in the animal’s eyes and its first faltering attempt at finding purchase in order to follow.
The horse’s hoofs alternately clattered off stone and were sucked down into the mud, but after two hesitant starts it managed to traverse the distance to stand, shuddering, beside Trinity on the narrow ledge. Feeling some confidence now, Trinity started up the hill slope again, the reins to the roan wrapped tightly around one wrist. He was clambering over a cold, muddy projection some three feet high when he felt his arm whipped back.
The horse was falling away from him. There was one brief moment when Trinity thought of whipping the reins free of his wrist, but he clung to the rocky projection, gritted his teeth and cursed, prayed, or both. The roan found its footing in some way and scrambled upward, going nearly to its chest in the attempt. It stood over Trinity, its heated breath washing down over him. Again they rested. Again Trinity rose – not looking down at the bottom of the stony chute, but upward toward the rainveiled rimrock.
He had only begun. The episode was repeated half a dozen to a dozen times as they ascended. Finally Trinity rolled over on to the flat ground that had seemed so far above and lay on his back in the muddy water, against cold stone, breathing in gasps, the rain falling on to his face. The horse scrambled up and over and Trinity watched the roan with unchecked admiration.
