“Get him?” Sorenson called.
“Yeah,” Brad answered and turned his horse in a half circle.
He rode back to where Sorenson was waiting for him.
“Two down,” he said. “Two to go.”
“Let me see who it was,” Sorenson said. “You hold the reins while I take a quick look.”
Brad waited until Sorenson returned, then headed north to look for Vivelda.
“That was Halbert Sweeney you shot,” he said. “That means that Schneck and Wagner are somewhere close by or else riding away hell-bent for leather.”
“Let’s find that girl and I’ll see if I can’t pick up the tracks of those two,” Brad said.
“Well, you’re lessening the odds some,” Sorenson said. “Now it’s only two against two.”
“Good odds,” Brad said, but he kept looking over his shoulder as the two scoured the underbrush, looking for Vivelda.
“Sweeney’s slumped over his saddle,” Sorenson said. “Maybe the horse will carry him back to the cow camp for all to see.”
“I reckon if that horse climbs these slopes, Sweeney will fall off somewhere, and the buzzards and the worms and the coyotes will have them a feast.”
Sorenson said nothing.
A moment later, Brad jerked up straight in the saddle and pointed ahead.
“What is it?” Sorenson said.
“I saw something, I think.”
“What? Where?”
“Up in those gray rocks, off to the left. Something.”
The two men rode closer to a jumble of rocks that seemed to grow out of the earth.
“Vivelda,” Brad called. “It’s me, Brad Storm. You’re safe now. Come out.”
He stopped his horse and listened. Sorenson did the same.
There was only silence as the wind blew against their clothes and moved the clouds faster out over the foothills and the long prairie.
The wind moaned in the hollows and crevices of the rocks.
Brad thought it was the loneliest sound in the world as he felt the chill bumps rise on his arms and crawl up his neck like a thousand icy spiders.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Wagner and Schneck both jerked upright in their saddles when they heard the single pistol shot. It was unexpected and came from the direction where Sweeney had ridden to check on Sorenson.
The two men looked at each other. Wagner shrugged. Schneck scowled.
“You don’t think Sorenson shot Halbert, do you, Otto? It did sound like Sorenson earlier.”
“Or do I think Sweeney shot Sorenson, you mean?”
“Could have gone either way, I reckon. Maybe Sweeney rode up on Sorenson and, with all them bodies lyin’ there, Sorenson might have thought he was next.”
“So, you think maybe Sorenson shot Sweeney?” Schneck said.
“I ain’t sayin’ that, Otto.”
“No, you’re not saying much. But we’d better check. Something’s sure as hell cockeyed here, and I mean to get to the bottom of it.”
“Sure, Boss. You want me to ride out there and take a look-see?”
Schneck considered that offer for a second or two and shook his head.
“No,” he said, “we’ll both ride out there and see what’s going on. I’m just as curious as you, Jim.”
The two rode in tandem toward the road. Schneck pulled his rifle from his boot and laid it across the pommel of his saddle at an angle. Wagner hesitated as he reached for his own rifle but left it in his scabbard.
“Seems to me you’re mighty confident, Jim. Leaving your rifle in its boot.”
“I ain’t confident at all, Otto. I just want both hands free in case we have to get the hell away.”
“Away from what?”
“Hell, we don’t know. What if it is Sorenson, and if it is, what’s he doin’ down here? Or who’s with him? Maybe he joined up with them sheepherders.”
“Jim, you ought to do something about that wild imagination of yours. Why would Sorenson join up with the sheepherders? They’re our enemy.”
“I don’t know. Might be they made him a better offer, Otto.”
“You’re full of shit, Jim. Sorenson wouldn’t just ride down to the sheepherders’ camp and ask for a job.”
“No, I reckon he wouldn’t. Maybe I am full of shit.”
They spoke no more until they saw Sweeney’s horse standing hipshot a few yards in front of them.
Only the rump of the horse was showing until they rode up alongside and saw Sweeney slumped over the saddle. His pistol lay on the ground next to the horse, a dim light from the cloudy sky streaming across the bluing of the barrel.
“Hey, Halbert,” Wagner said, “you sleepin’ on the job?”
He reached out to touch Sweeney on the shoulder, then saw the black and tattered hole with bits of bloody wool around it as if something had gouged his well-lined jacket with a pruning fork. The hole in his back was the size of a two-bit piece. Wagner withdrew his hand with lightning speed, as if he had touched a finger to an open flame.
“Jesus,” Wagner said. “He’s dead.”
Schneck picked up his rifle and waved the barrel in a small arc as if expecting to be attacked at any minute.
“Shot in the back,” Schneck said as he glanced over at Sweeney.
“Nope. He was shot in the front. That’s a damned exit hole, Otto.”
“So, Sweeney’s dead,” Schneck said, as if he were speaking to himself in order to make it final.
Wagner looked at Schneck as if he thought his boss had become addled all of a sudden. The look on Schneck’s face was blank. The German had no expression whatsoever. It was as if an unseen hand had wiped all semblance of humanity from his features and left a waxen image in its place.
Wagner got an uneasy feeling just then.
The Schneck he had known up until that day had been strong and resolute. Now he looked washed out and washed up, as if some force had cleaned him out and left a lifeless hulk in his place. It was just a feeling, but that one glimpse had begun to shatter Wagner’s confidence that he was working for a man who was always in control.
“Get his guns and let’s go after whoever shot Sweeney,” Schneck said, his voice devoid of any feeling.
“What?” Wagner said, as if the request had left him in shock.
“You heard me. Grab his pistol and rifle. We got to hunt down the man who shot Sweeney.”
“Christ, Boss, I don’t want his guns.”
“I do. We can sell them if nothing else.”
“You get ’em, then, Otto. I ain’t touchin’ nothin’ of Halbert’s, and that’s that.”
Schneck fixed him with dagger of a look, but only his eyes betrayed his anger at being countermanded. His face was like a cold pudding.
“I’ll send someone down for his horse.”
“And to bury him,” Wagner said.
“I don’t care about that,” Schneck said. “Leave him to the buzzards for all I care. The dumb sonofabitch.”
Wagner said nothing.
He followed Schneck as he rode toward the road. As they left the place where they had found Sweeney’s body, they both heard a warning rattle and saw a timber rattler coil up next to a downed tree. Its tongue streaked in and out of his mouth like black lightning with twin forks.
“Kind of early for rattlers,” Wagner said as he circled away from the snake.
Schneck gave him a dirty look.
“I don’t want to hear about rattlesnakes,” he said.
Wagner sighed and let it go. Something inside Schneck had changed. He wasn’t the same man Wagner had known for the past two years or so. Yet, he seemed determined to find the man who had killed Sweeney. It just seemed as if all the fire had gone out of him, and he was just going through the motions, like a soldier that has killed his first man, lost his mind, and just keeps marching forward, shooting at anything that moves.
Wagner stayed a few yards behind Schneck as they reached the road, and both looked at all the dead bodies of men, hors
es, women, and children. It was a sickening sight now that he could see the lifeless bodies and remember that they had once been alive and happy, laughing and talking until the gunfire broke out and they began to scream just before they died in a hail of bullets.
He didn’t like what he had done. He knew, deep down in his heart, that he would never get over any of it. And now, seeing all the dead, it was worse. The images of before and after were seared in his mind for as long as he lived.
“Let’s track them,” Schneck said in that same toneless voice.
“Yes, sir, I’ll try,” Wagner said and took the lead. He scanned the ground and sorted out the tracks. He saw where one horse had gone into the woods and returned from where Sweeney had been killed. Then that horse joined up with another and both had ridden into the timber where they would be harder to track.
That took him better than a half hour, while Schneck sat there with his rifle butt resting on his leg, staring up at the windblown clouds and the blue, green, and silver waters of the river crashing down through the long canyon on its rush to the South Platte. He gazed up at the high mountains and seemed impervious to the brisk and gusting wind that coursed down on them like some icebound reminder of winter and an unsettled spring.
“It’s going to be slow goin’ through them trees,” Wagner said.
“I don’t care how long it takes,” Schneck said. “I’m going to kill the man who shot Sweeney.”
“There are two men down here in the timber,” Wagner said.
“I’ll kill both of them. One of them is probably that goddamned detective.”
“Probably,” Wagner said. Then, to push the needle deeper into Schneck, he added, “The one they call Sidewinder.”
He saw Schneck stiffen as if he had been knifed in the back, and it gave him a perverse satisfaction for some reason.
“You ain’t so damned big, Schneck,” he said to himself. “You’re probably just as scared as me about that Sidewinder feller.”
And Wagner was scared. The man they called Sidewinder was an unknown factor in all this sheepherder business. He was a man that Schneck didn’t know and couldn’t kill so easy as women and kids. He’d bet his bottom dollar that Schneck was scared, too.
He just wouldn’t admit it to nobody.
Because, down deep, Schneck was a born killer, and he had no heart. Or, if he did have one, it was made of iron and pumped poison instead of blood.
He was sorry now that he even knew Otto Schneck.
But he did know him. He knew Schneck too damned well.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Vivelda ran as she had never run before, with a flaming ball of terror blazing in her mind, a terror so alien to her that she could not connect any part of it to the real world, the world of childhood and young womanhood that she had known when she was nurtured in the comforting arms of her mother, Imelda Udaberri, and the deep calm voice of her father, Alberto. She had never known a terror such as the one that burned her thoughts to a crisp like crumpled pieces of paper tossed into an open fire.
Reason deserted her as she ran, headlong, through a strange and terrifying wilderness where branches grabbed at her blouse and her skirt like the fingers of skeletons, and stones bruised her bare feet, brush scratched her ankles and legs like the raking claws of feral cats. Every crashing sound of her feet sent new alarms through her brain with the speed and heat of electric energy. She wanted to scream, but her throat was constricted and her brain burning up with the horror of what she had witnessed and could not process. Her mind was filled with the screams of children and the terrified shouts of her friends and the terrible sight of horses falling dead in their traces, men she knew toppling from their horses with blood spurting from their bodies like red wine from a shattered goatskin la bota, and the crack of the rifles like the sound of dry bones breaking under the hammer blows of hidden monsters.
She ran and stumbled and fell. She scraped her knees on sharp stones and desiccated branches. She picked herself up and rubbed the fresh red scars on her legs, then careened on, climbing steep terrain and falling into ditches and treacherous depressions in the earth that added to her terror.
She felt sure that men were chasing her. Men with rifles and knives. She could hear them in her mind, their heavy boots smashing downed branches and crushing rocks to powder. She did not look back because that would ignite more fires of that terror that burned all through her, frying her brain, paralyzing her heart, and searing her tired legs so that they ached with muscle cramps that felt like a fist was squeezing them so hard that she was sure they would give out on her and she would fall and never get up.
Sounds and voices faded away, and she ran and tripped in silence. Her chest burned with the agony of a long-distance runner. When she saw the large cairn of rocks ahead of her, jutting out of a short slope, she staggered toward it, breathing hard. There were crevices and crawl spaces among the gray boulders, and she knew she had to rest. And hide.
In the thin air, she was starved for oxygen. Her muscles began to tighten up on her, and she had cramps in both of her calves. Her feet were sore and tender from the hard rocks underfoot.
Vivelda clambered up to the stack of large stones. She bent over and extended her hand to one of the lower ones, bracing herself as she struggled to breathe. It took several minutes before she could breathe normally and without that searing pain in her lungs. She glanced back down the slope to see if anyone had followed her. She was relieved to see no one there. She looked up at the formidable array of rocks. They looked like a stone altar in the shape of a lumpy pyramid, somehow comforting, as if it might be some way station for weary huntsmen in the deep woods. She walked around to the other side and saw a crevice large enough for her to crawl into and rest for a spell.
She stooped down and peered into the dark hole amid the rocks. She looked for animal tracks in the soft earth but saw nothing but dried brown pine needles blown there by a long ago wind. She squatted down and felt the ground inside. It was dry against the palm of her hand. She breathed a sigh of relief and, on hands and knees, crawled inside. The hole was just big enough so that she could turn around and sit if she hunched over and pulled her legs up close to her chest.
She nestled against a rock at her back and sat scrunched up like some woodland creature peering out into the shadowy landscape flocked with pines and spruce, a couple of alder thickets. She could hear the river as it cascaded down the canyon. She rested her head on the tops of her skinned-up knees and closed her eyes for a few seconds. She heard her heart pounding in her chest, and it sounded loud to her, but regular as her breathing had become. The clouds across the river seemed low enough to touch, almost, and they were dark and bulging with stored-up rain.
A few moments later, she heard voices in the distance. She shuddered in fear and pressed against the rock behind her as if to conceal herself even more from anyone who might pass by and look for her in her hiding place.
The voices grew louder as she knew someone was getting closer to where she was hiding. She listened and her heart pumped faster. The fear in her mind flared up and made her tremble as if gripped by a sudden chill. She closed her eyes and prayed to the Holy Mother Mary.
“Don’t let them find me and kill me,” she added in the silence of her mind. “Please don’t let them find me.”
She stifled a sob as the voices grew still louder. Men’s voices. Very close.
Her heart seemed to skip a beat when she saw the legs of the horses, and a half second later, the figures of two men. They seemed to be following her tracks, because they both looked down at the ground as they rode very slowly straight to the place where she had climbed up to the rocky cairn.
Then, she heard one of them call her name.
“Vivelda. It’s me, Brad Storm. You’re safe now.”
She saw the man who had spoken and recognized him. It was Brad, but who was the man with him? Was he one of those who had shot her friends and killed them? She had never seen that man before. He was leading a hors
e behind him, a horse with an empty saddle. So she didn’t move.
She watched as Brad dismounted and walked toward her. She whimpered as she saw him looking at the ground and circling the pile of rocks. He stopped in front of the opening and bent over.
“Vivelda, are you in there?” he asked.
She whimpered but could not speak.
“It’s all right. The man with me is a friend and he is going to take you back to Mikel.”
Brad held out his hand.
“I can’t see you,” he said, “but I know you’re in there. Come on out. We have a horse for you to ride. You’ll be safe with this man. He will take you back up to the valley where Mikel and Joe will take care of you.”
She squealed and crawled out of the hole. She scrambled on her hands and knees to where Brad stood hunched over and reached out to him with her left hand. He grasped it and pulled her to her feet. Then he drew her to him and enfolded her in his arms.
He patted the back of her head as she sobbed uncontrollably against the warmth of his chest, the rough hide of the buckskin.
“There, there,” he said softly. “You’re going to be all right. You will be safe from those bad men.”
“Oh, Brad,” she sobbed, “I am so happy to see you.”
Then she laughed hysterically as he led her by the hand down to the horses.
“Vivelda, this is Thor. He works for me. You can trust him. Can you ride?”
She nodded dumbly and looked up at Sorenson.
“I—I can ride,” she said.
Brad helped her into the saddle of the horse next to Sorenson. He adjusted the stirrup straps as he poked her left foot into one of them. Then he walked around to the other side and worked the straps until she could rest her foot on the rung. She looked down at him in gratitude.
“You’ll be home in no time,” he said.
“Am I—am I the only one?”
“Yes,” Brad said. “I’m so sorry. I’ll get the men who did that.”
Then he looked up at Sorenson. “Thor, take her home.”
“I will,” Sorenson said. “Just follow me, little lady. I’ll hold on to the reins. You just hold on to that saddle horn.”
Snake Eyes (9781101552469) Page 15
