Brand of the Hunted

by John Glasby

  ‘You can’t,’ Neil told him, pushing his hands out towards the flames. ‘You’ve got to accept it, try to go with it. Just tell yourself it would be even worse if we’d taken Snake Pass. If it doesn’t get too deep, we ought to be all right. But if the Pass gets blocked before we make our way through it, then I reckon those of you who know how to pray had better start, because we’ll need all the luck we can get. There’s no turning back now. We’ve committed ourselves to getting through, and if it means fighting this every hour of the day and night, then that’s how it’s got to be. Better get that into your minds right away.’

  He turned his head slowly, looked at one man after the other, trying to read the expression on their faces. There was a little fear there, he saw, a little apprehension, but at the moment it was all hidden under the terrible surface numbness that came from the constant battering by that icy wind and the driving clouds of snow.

  Jackson got heavily to his feet, moved over to the cook-pot, pulled out a long strip of beef and thrust it between his teeth. With an equal slowness, he filled his cup with coffee and drank it down, then returned to his place beside Neil.

  Calder, thin-faced and short, pushed his legs towards the fire, said harshly: ‘I’ve got the feelin’ that we’re making a drive we’ll never finish. No one told us that it would be anything like this. We’ll never ride out this blizzard. We ought to have waited down in the plain until the winter passed.’

  ‘Don’t you realise it yet? We didn’t have enough supplies to do that.’ Neil spoke more sharply than he had intended. ‘We’d all have starved to death before the winter was through. And there’s another thing. There was the chance that Matt Hollard might be riding out on our trial, coming to finish what Sherman started out to do.’

  Calder shook his head in a bird-like fashion. ‘You’ve been scaring us with this talk about Hollard all the way here, Roberts. I don’t believe most of it for one. Seems you may have some idea in your mind that by coming with this train you’ll be safe from the law, which I understand is still on your trail. If you’d been forced to stay back there, they’d have come riding after you and then you’d have been taken back to Dodge or Abilene to stand trial. What was it they accused you of, Roberts? Murder, wasn’t it? They say you shot down a couple of men in the street.’

  By a supreme effort of will, Neil held in his surging anger. Keeping his voice lightly controlled and even, he said through clenche6d teeth: ‘That ain’t quite true, and I reckon you know it, Calder. Sure I killed some men a few years back, but they were crooked lawmen who would have shot me down without just cause. But the sheriff managed to get my name put out on the wanted circulars throughout the territory, and nobody seemed to inquire whether or not there was any truth or justification for it.’

  ‘Seems we only got your word for that. You seemed mighty anxious to lead this train all the way through to California. I ain’t denying that you seem to know this country, but I’m beginning to wonder why you came along. I ain’t forgetting either that we’ve lost some good folk because of the fight between you and the cattle bosses here.’

  ‘They would have killed us all if they had been able to,’ interrupted Jessup harshly, turning on the other. ‘We needed somebody with a fast gun who wouldn’t be afraid to stand up to them.’

  ‘Seems we really got somebody like that,’ muttered Calder hoarsely.

  ‘I’d hate to think of what might have happened to us if we hadn’t,’ said Jackson quickly. He turned and glared at the other, forcing him to a sullen silence. The logs crackled on the fire and there was an occasional hiss as the snowflakes whirled around the corner of the rocks and fell into the flames.

  At first light the next morning they began to move out again. Tired men and tired horses. The snow lay more thickly about them now, almost two feet in depth, and was still falling, although the wind was no longer as strong or as blustery as on the previous day, but the snow still fell as thickly as before, and there were no breaks in the clouds, no sign of the sun.

  For most of the day they travelled without mishap. Then, during the afternoon, they reached a spot where the ground became more open, the rocky walls which had hemmed them in all the way were no longer so close. In front of them the floor of the pass stretched in an unbroken sheet of white, the snow smooth and unsullied.

  At the head of the train Neil reined his mount and lifted his right hand to halt the train. Slowly, reluctantly, the wagons ground to a standstill.

  ‘What’s wrong, Neil?’ boomed Jackson, from his perch on the lead wagon.

  ‘I’m not sure. Just a feeling, I guess.’

  The other peered ahead through the thickly falling snow, staring out under thick brows, covered now with snow. ‘I don’t see anything wrong. Looks all right to me.’

  ‘Maybe so. But there may be danger up ahead. In country like this there may be chasms splitting across the floor of the pass, and it only needs a horse to put his foot into one of them and we lose not only the horse but the wagon as well.’

  ‘What do you suggest then?’

  ‘You’d better stay here. I’ll ride on ahead and take a good look-see. If there is any danger there, the sooner we know about it, the better.’

  He gigged his sorrel. The animal moved forward slowly and carefully, picking its own pace. The horse was both tired and doubtful, seemed to sense that there was something wrong, increasing the feeling of apprehension in Neil’s mind. The stud frequently stopped and had to be prodded forward before it would take another step. Turning in the saddle after a few minutes of this slow progress, Neil felt a momentary twinge of surprise, realising that he could no longer see the train, that it had been blotted out completely by the curtain of snow.

  He could not have travelled more than twenty yards, and yet there was neither sight nor sound of the train. The snow utterly muffled any sound and he had the impression of being utterly and completely isolated, cut off, in a nightmare world of white.

  On his left the edge of the trail suddenly pitched downwards into a deep canyon whose bottom he could not see. The sorrel gathered its feet closely together and began to mince a little, hesitant, winding itself around and around, trying to reverse its direction, until it was facing the way back to the wagons. Holding tightly to the reins, Neil forced it to turn and begin moving forward once more. They had gone less than fifty yards when the sorrel halted once more, stuck in its feet and refused to budge, no matter how he coaxed it. Slowly he slid from the saddle, moved forward gingerly on foot, placing one foot in front of the other, feeling his way forward, confident now that there was some kind of danger here, danger which he could not see as yet.

  Then his left foot went from under him, slid away as there was no trail to meet him. Losing his balance, he toppled forward into sheer emptiness. Only the fact that he was still holding on to the leather of the reins and that the sorrel had dug in its feet saved him at that moment. Swiftly, with a savage instinct, his hand tightened on the reins and he felt himself jerked upward as the sorrel pulled up its head in alarm. For a long moment he hung there, suspended in mid-air, feet swinging loosely under him, unable to obtain a grip or foothold. His other foot had slipped off the trail the moment he had lost his balance. Somehow he managed to prevent himself from panicking, maintained his hold on the reins and slowly swung his body back towards the trail, holding his breath in his lungs until it hurt, praying that the sorrel would not move forward or they would both go crashing to their deaths in the chasm that yawned below them.

  Slowly, speaking gently to the sorrel, he managed to swing his legs back on to the trail, sought for and found a precarious hold, dug in his toes and hung there, scarcely daring to breathe. Then, inch by inch, the sorrel moved back, away from the slippery edge, on to the firm ground of the trail.

  Neil found lodgement for his feet, heaved backward and managed to stand up straight, slowly placing his weight on the rock. It was covered with ice under the snow, but there were a couple of upthrusting rocks, and somehow he succeede
d in wedging his feet into them, fighting to maintain his uneasy balance. He walked back to the break in the trail, shuffling his feet now until he reached it, and knew himself to be on firm ground. Then he swung himself up into the saddle and urged the sorrel back to the waiting train.

  ‘There’s a slide back there,’ he said brusquely to Jackson. ‘Sheer drop into the chasm down on the left. Trail’s broken there and we’ll have to move around it before we can be sure we’re safe. It ain’t going to be easy, but unless we do, we’re stuck here for good. Better pass the word along to the others. Then we’ll move out. We’ve wasted too much time as it is.’

  He rode back along the whole length of the train, giving his orders to the others. They listened in silence, their faces almost completely hidden by the broad hoods pulled down over their eyes, the hands muffled in thick gloves. He knew how they must have been feeling at that moment, bodies numbed and frozen, with scarcely any sensation in their hands and feet. Yet they had to be made to move on, into the teeth of that howling blizzard, along the trail where danger lurked at every turn, and to fall out of the train meant certain death for the people in any stranded wagon. There were many tales in this part of the west concerning wagon trains that had moved out over the mountains and had never been heard of again, had certainly never reached their destination. Whether they had perished up here in the wild passes or had been set upon by the border gangs and totally destroyed, the wagons looted of all their possessions and then burned by the gunslammers, no one knew.

  At last they were ready to pull out and Neil led the way, moving close to the wagons, urging them to keep together, not to lose sight of the one in front. Ten yards in that swirling blizzard, tens of millions of white flakes streaming across one’s vision and everything was lost behind that curtain of white.

  Coming to the break in the trail, Neil paused, pushed himself upright in the saddle, then signalled to Jackson to move forward slowly, to swing away to the right, away from the edge where the rock fell away into nothingness, down into the stretching depths of the chasm that loomed on that edge of the trail. Had it not been for that strange sixth sense of his, something he had never been able to explain, but which had saved him so many times in the past that he had learned never to ignore it, they might have all gone plunging over the side into oblivion.

  It was a dangerous, tricky business getting those wagons past the break in the trail. Neil had expected no trouble with Jackson, nor with Jessup. Both men knew how to handle horses, even when the animals, sensing danger, threatened to rear and panic away from the spot. But there were others in the wagons who did not have that experience, and Neil was forced to station himself on the very lip of that steep drop and allow the wagons to move past him. It only needed one of the horses to bolt and he would be finished, thrust off the trail by the panicking animal, knocked to one side by the careering weight and bulk of the wagon.

  Then, after what seemed an interminable period, they were all past, moving on slowly into the swirling snowstorm, canvas tops swaying from side to side, but more slowly now with all that weight of snow lying on top of them.

  Another camp that night with the cold dampness seeping into their bones. There was the misery of not being dry, of wet clothing clinging to their bodies, irritating and chafing at the flesh until it had been torn and opened by the roughness of their garments.

  There was little wood here to light a fire, and once it went out during the latter part of the night, the cold became more intense than anything they had ever known before.

  Neil considered that up here in the pass itself there would be no danger from outlaw bands, or even from Hollard if he was following them, and he knew that it would be both dangerous and unnecessary to post guards to keep a look out for trouble. The men needed all the sleep they could get, and it seemed wrong to deny them it just because of the million-to-one chance that gunhawks might come upon them in the middle of the blizzard.

  Progress was measured in yards most of the way. If they succeeded in travelling half a mile a day, they considered themselves to be making good progress. Primitive and raw, nature fought them with everything at her disposal, as if to show them how puny they really were, that if she wished she could destroy them utterly.

  There were cold mornings and colder nights, men clustered around the fires when they had the chance, and now the stops along the trail were becoming more and more frequent as the men grew more tired and the horses needed the rests.

  There seemed to be no end to the pass, or the snow. It swirled around them as they rode with their bodies hunched forward over the reins or the necks of their mounts, eyes and nostrils clogged by the beating snow. It seemed incredible that these small, feathery flakes could do so much damage, could be so devastating.

  The folk with the train began to murmur among themselves, but although he knew of this Neil did not consider it dangerous. They had long since passed the point of no return, now they had to go on because to turn back would mean certain death.

  Then, two weeks after they had entered the pass, the snowstorm abated. Now they were fighting their way through deep drifts which, in places, threatened to engulf the wagons themselves, although fortunately the sheer walls of the pass had shielded most of the trail from the full fury of the storm. The sky cleared, the dark, lowering clouds blew away and, with the sudden change in the weather, they discovered that they were no longer moving level, but were descending down the further levels of the mountains.

  They had moved through them, had weathered one of the worst blizzards in the South Pass, and were now dipping down towards the stretching, fertile plains that lay beyond.

  Less than a hundred miles to the west lay the frontier with California. As if anxious to reach there, the men pushed their wagons to the limit now. The coming of the clear weather, even though the air was still cold, had brought a new life to the folk in the train. There was the feeling that they had surmounted every possible difficulty, that nothing could now prevent them from getting through, that they were safe from all trouble and danger.

  Perhaps it was this which almost proved to be their undoing. Reaching the level plains, they moved on in a cloud of their own dust, still heading west, not once deviating from the trail.

  They had come across almost a thousand miles of some of the worst country in the whole of the United States, had forged a trail across the continent which would prove to be the beginning of the tremendous movement to the west, would lead to the eventual population of the State of California.

  There was laughter now among the wagons, laughter that seemed to ease the strain of the past few months when everything had seemed to be conspiring against them to prevent them from reaching their destination. Now they were in sight of it, and they felt certain that nothing more could go wrong, that if there were any more dangers, they could not be as bad as those they had already faced on the way, and they could meet them and overcome them easily.

  Inside, Neil did not share their optimism. True, they had fought off the hired killers of the cattle barons to the east, they had met and forded rivers swollen in flood, and they had crossed the South Pass through a tremendous blizzard when it had seemed that nothing could possibly survive.

  Now, in front of them, stretching for mile upon endless mile, as far as the eye could see, reaching out to the flat, distant horizons to the west, lay the great plains.

  Riding ahead of the train, Neil turned in his saddle, feeling the sun warm on his head and shoulders, the dust on his face and cracked lips, getting under his eyes, blurring his vision. But anything seemed better than the snow up there in the pass. Behind him, stretched out over two miles of the prairie, the wagons were strung out in single file, rumbling forward.

  But, looking at them, it was hard to realise that these were the same wagons that had set out from the eastern boundary of Jesse Sherman’s territory all those long weary weeks before. Then they had been brightly painted, with white canvas stretched over the backs. Now that canvas was torn and shredd
ed by the tearing fingers of the winds up there in the mountains and the soaking it had received during their crossing the great rivers to the east. The paintwork was scratched and scoured, and the men who drove those wagons were all changed too. Now they were lean, gaunt men with deep-set eyes, brighter though than before, eyes that had looked out upon the far horizons and witnessed the great open spaces of prairie and mountain. Men with wide hats and long-barrelled Winchesters thrust into the scabbards by their sides.

  On the third night, with the wagons in a wide circle, the fires lit in the centre, the stock herded there for safety, with two look-outs moving slowly around the outer perimeter, Neil rolled himself into his blankets near one of the wagons, listening to the occasional crackle of the fire and the faint sound of the wind sighing over the prairie. In the distance he could just hear the low, mournful voices of the guards as they sang the songs of the Deep South, to keep up their spirits and to keep themselves awake until the others came to relieve them.

  Another five days on the trail, he thought inwardly, and they would have reached their destination, and then his work would be done.

  He would have finished what he had set out to do, would have fulfilled his promise to take this wagon train to California.

  And then what of him, what of Neil Roberts, wanted in Idaho and Arkansas for murder, even though it had been the murder of a crooked sheriff?

  He turned over Claire Vance’s words in his mind, considering them seriously for the first time. Before he had merely allowed them to pass through his brain without really concentrating on them.

  Now he held fast to them, turned them over and over in his thoughts. It was possible that, in California, he might be able to settle down and put the past behind him, never think of it again. Then, as he lay there, he found his thoughts slipping away to Claire Vance herself. The memory of her nearness that night, the feel of her slim hand on his arm, was still strong within him, and he doubted if he would ever forget that.