He turned in the saddle and called: ‘Turn off here and make camp.’
They swung toward the hills, the girl’s horse walking behind Maddox’s animal. Her hands were still tied to the saddlehorn. By now she was both desperate and frightened. The fact that she was now out of the territory of Arizona and on foreign soil somehow clinched the fact that she was well and truly in Maddox’s hands. She knew in her bones that the time for the killing of the man who had tried to save her was near. She awaited it with dread. Beyond that was the fear for her own safety. She knew that she too could end up dead. Killing meant nothing to this man Maddox.
She tried to slow her racing brain, to think of some way out of the terrifying situation. She reasoned that if Doolittle were about to die any road, she could take some risks on his behalf. At the very first opportunity, she would move.
The first thing, she told herself, that she had to accomplish was to get her hands freed. With her hands this way she could attain nothing.
This, strangely enough, proved to be the least of her problems. When they rode into the camping ground, she said: ‘Maddox, if you don’t release my hands, I shall lose them. I shan’t look very pretty without them.’
He thought that funny and laughed.
‘Can’t have that, sweetheart,’ he said, drew his knife and slashed through the rawhide thong that held her wrists. Still sitting her horse, she worked her fingers and felt the agony of the returning blood. Already she was on the alert for her move. She was still on a horse and her hands were free.
She turned her head and looked at Charlie Doolittle. His head was hanging loosely on the neck and for a moment she feared that he was dead already.
Maddox said: ‘Take him into the hills and get rid of him, Holy.’
Holy grinned briefly.
‘Sure,’ he said.
He moved his horse over to the one carrying Doolittle and stooped from the saddle to pick up the drooping line. She glanced at the other men. Maddox had turned away from her. Gaylor was unsaddling.
She thought: I do it now or I never get to do it.
For one awful moment she pondered the possibility of her. horse not responding to her command. Then she yelled to it and kicked it with her heels. The animal was so startled that it jumped forward. In that second she knew that she was committed to action that could and probably would cost her her life.
She suffered in the next few moments a series of wild impressions, no more. Her whole mind was concentrated on the line of the horse Charlie Doolittle’s inert body was draped over. The animal was resisting the pull that Holy Madder was applying. When the girl’s horse jumped forward, this animal shied sideways in alarm. Madder was jerked in the saddle.
Netta’s horse caught the tautened line on its face. It came up over its ears and Netta’s body wrenched it from Madder’s hand. She grabbed for it and missed.
She knew she would have to turn back. She pulled her horse around violently and headed back. The horse started to act up and Madder blocked her way. She drove her horse forward and it met Madder’s horse broadside as it reared. The beast was bowled over and whinnied piteously as it hit ground. Madder barely had time to jump clear, but even so he landed badly and sprawled his length on the ground. Netta’s horse jumped the fallen man and horse and she turned it again and came alongside Charlie Doolittle’s mount. It swung away from her and she went after it, urgency screaming in her, panic rising in her.
A man shouted and a gun went off. She heard the whistle of the bullet near her head and ducked down over her horse’s neck. She reached out for the hanging line and missed it as the animal swung away further. She thought she was lost now. That gun would fire again and she would be dead.
Gaylor was beyond Doolittle’s horse, grabbing for it. This movement aided her, for the animal turned back toward her again to avoid Gaylor. She grabbed for the line again and this time she made it. She turned her hand and wrist to gain a firm hold and yelled to her own mount. The animal was frightened and confused, but it jumped forward.
A man shouted again. She felt a powerful tug on her left arm and knew the led horse was resisting her. She kicked her own mount violently, screaming to it. It leaned forward on the line. The led horse leaned back, rolling its eyes and baring its teeth.
The gun went off again and Netta didn’t hear the lead sing this time. But the shot startled the led animal and it came forward. In the next moment, both animals were running forward into the hills.
There was no sound now but the pound and scrabble of the horses’ hoofs as they rushed through the dusk into the darkening hills. They burst out of a narrow gully and ran across a flat scattered with rocks. They reached an arroyo, swooped down into its bed and scrambled up the far side. She looked back and could see nothing that moved, but she knew that they could be following, for the sound of her own horses would drown those of the ones behind. Then she had hills close on either side of her. She turned right for no other reason than her instinct told her to, crashed through brush and started to climb.
After a short while, she told herself: They can hear me. They’ll hear us and follow by sound. She stopped the horses and listened.
There was a horse moving almost immediately below her. She held her breath, praying that the horses would not trumpet and give her position away.
The man below seemed to be moving past her, but she could not be sure.
What do I do? she asked herself desperately. Charlie Doo-little’s life was in her hands. If Charlie was still alive.
She heard another sound, slightly to the west of her. That would be the second man. Most likely it was Maddox and Gaylor searching. Madder would join them when he had recovered from his fall. If she could stay still and silent, they might possibly miss her. But the two horses could give her away. Dare she rid herself of the horses?
At first it seemed crazy to part with the animals so close to the enemy’s camp, to set herself and Doolittle on foot in these terrible hills.
No, she thought, she must compromise. She would send one animal off into the night to take the attention of the searchers. A man was shouting below. ‘She’s up above you. I heard her.’ An answering shout came.
‘Climb you fool. And shoot.’
That was Maddox. If he couldn’t get his hands on her, he wanted her dead. If she were dead, Spur need not know. Even dead, she could save Maddox from Spur.
Fear went coldly through her and she told herself that she could not afford fear at this moment. This man’s life and her own depended entirely on what she did in the next few minutes. She had no time to get Doolittle down from the horse and once down he would be helpless, so the saddler she had ridden must go. She slipped from the saddle, held on tight to the line of the led horse and struck the one she had ridden hard across the rump. It jumped and stood. She trembled with frustration and terror. She ran at it, hissing angrily at it and striking at it. It turned away from her and went scrambling down the. side of the hill.
A man yelled: ‘She’s comin’ down.’
She started climbing, leading the horse. She heard the other animal go trotting down the hillside. She prayed that it would run and lead the men off into the night. She stopped and listened. She thought she heard Charlie groan but she couldn’t be sure.
One of the men below ran his horse along the foot of the hill. It was the best thing that could happen for her. The horse she had driven away seemed suddenly to veer north and broke into a canter. A man shouted and she heard a second rider go galloping along to the west. She turned and started to climb again.
She climbed until she found herself among stunted timber and she stopped to listen once more. She thought she could hear horses at some distance to the north.
Now another sound reached her ears. A horse was trotting west from the easterly direction. That could be Madder coming from the camp. She stayed very still with one hand over the muzzle of the horse to stop it whinnying. The rider swept around to the north and she heard the hoofbeats of his horse die away.<
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She went on. She climbed a gentle slope for the next ten minutes and then she knew that she could not delay seeing to the man she might have saved. She found herself in a kind of shallow gully with brush all around her. From here she could hear nothing of what was going on down below. By the same token, she thought, the men down below stood less chance of hearing them up here.
She at once made an attempt to untie the knots in the rawhide rope that held Doolittle to the horse, but her fingers failed to carry out the task. She could have wept in her helplessness. She started to go through the man’s pockets and to her joy found a penknife in a pocket of his jacket. With fingers made clumsy by haste she opened out a blade and started on the thongs. The rawhide was tough and she had her work cut out. Muttering and sweating she sawed away with the little blade until she had cut through the last.
Now she was faced with the task of getting the lank heavy man down from the horse. She moved around to the side on which his legs hung and pulled on him. The horse shifted toward her and she backed up into some brush. She moved the horse with some difficulty and started again. At first she could not shift him and she feared to pull too hard in case he should fall and be injured further. However, his weight proved too much for her. When he came free of the saddle, he came with a rush and there was nothing that she could do to stop him. She fought against the weight that heaved down on her, but in vain. She found herself borne helplessly backward and to the ground. Charlie Doolittle’s inert body landed on top of her and knocked every bit of breath from her body.
She lay there for a moment, wondering if she would ever get up again. Then she pulled herself together and strained against the weight on her. Finally, her helplessness turned into a kind of hysteria and she said: ‘Charlie Doolittle, you’re no gentleman. This is no way to treat a lady.’
The horse whickered softly as if he were laughing.
At last, she managed to wiggle out from under him. Then, breathlessly, she kneeled beside him and lifted his head in her arms.
‘Charlie,’ she said, ‘can you hear me?’
Silence.
Maybe he is dead, she thought.
She fumbled inside his shirt and found that his heart was beating and she knew such a relief that once more she could have wept. Now the problem was how to bring him around. She needed water, but for all she knew there might not be any for miles around. She tried slapping his face and talking to him, but the woman who had made so profound an effect on Charlie back there on the outskirts of Sunset made no effect on him whatever now.
She gazed closely at his face, but the dark was so intense now that it was little more than a pale blur to her. Finally, she crouched in despair with his head cradled on her lap.
The horse whickered softly again.
This time the sound came home fully to her and she realized that the animal might be sounding the alarm. She slipped off her own jacket and folded it under the man’s head, doing it all with infinite gentleness, then climbing onto higher ground and listening. At first, she heard nothing, but gradually a faint sound was borne in on her. At first, she could not interpret it, but after a minute or more, she realized that she was listening to the almost imperceptible sound of water scrambling lightly over rock. She worked her way carefully through the gloom until there came a glisten of water which seemed to be at her very feet. But she knew that it was some way below her. Carefully, feeling her way in the dark, she climbed down to it and found a narrow rivulet that tumbled with a sort of tranquil gaiety down the hillside. There was something oddly reassuring and comforting about the sound. She stooped and, using her cupped hand, she drank from it and found it cold and clean. It at once refreshed her.
Now, she thought, she had to find some way of taking some to the man above. She could think of nothing. Neither of them had hats. She wondered if she could possibly fetch him to the water, but she reckoned she would only use that as a last resort. She remembered that his horse had saddlebags behind the saddle. Possibly there was a utensil in one of them. She climbed back up the steep slope and for a few minutes panicked when she failed to find the gully again. She heard the horse blowing, however, and that guided her. She found Doolittle as she had left him. She thought his breathing and his heartbeat steadier, but again he failed to respond to her words. She searched through the saddlebags and to her joy found not only a metal cup, but some jerky.
With the cup in her hand, she hastened back to the water.
When she returned to the gully, she was startled almost out of her wits by a man’s voice.
‘Quien es?’
It was the use of Spanish that threw her and for a moment she thought that Maddox or one of the others had found them.
‘Mr. Doolittle,’ she said in a trembling voice.
The man was plainly confused. He said: ‘Huh?’
‘It’s me. Netta Manson.’
There was some movement in the darkness. He mumbled: ‘What in hell?’ Then she was beside him and his hand fumbled for her. She found that he was on his knees. They whispered together confusedly, he not knowing who she was nor where he was. She thrust the water into his hands and he drank avidly.
‘We must be very quiet,’ she said. ‘They’re searching for us.’
Memory started to come back to him. He sat down and said: ‘Maddox.’
‘They carried you across a horse and they were going to kill you.’
‘Were they now?’ There was a pause and he asked in a hoarse hesitant voice: ‘And how do I happen to be here, wherever this is?’
‘We’re across the Border in Mexico.’
‘Are we, by God? You didn’t tell me how.’
‘They were off guard for a moment and I managed to lead your horse away from their camp.’
He sat there for a moment, digesting that.
‘In short,’ he said, ‘you risked your life to save my life.’
‘I’m sure,’ she told him, ‘that sounds very dramatic and very brave on my part. But it wasn’t quite like that. They would have killed me soon or late any road.’
‘I reckon you could be right there,’ he said blandly and she was a little piqued at his quick acceptance of the point. But he added: ‘Just the same—I owe you my life an’ it was brave, the thing you did.’
‘We can talk about all that later,’ she informed him. ‘Right now we’re in the Mexican hills with three murderers looking for us. We have one horse, a pocketknife, a metal cup and some jerky between us. No gun.’
He thought about that.
‘That’s real bad,’ he said. ‘No gettin’ away from it. But I always was a fool. I could never see the gloomy side of a situation. The way I see it, bein’ purely selfish, of course, is that I’m not so old, I’m fit an’ in my right mind, an’ I’m all alone on a fine night in the hills with the most beautiful woman I ever saw in my life.’
She said: ‘This is no time for that kind of talk.’
‘In my book, ma’am,’ he said stoutly, ‘any time is time for that kinda talk. This gives us a real chance to get acquainted and for you to come to the realization that Spur don’t measure up to me in no way whatsoever.’
‘You’re a vain and foolish man,’ she said, putting a lot of indignation into her tone because she had no way of showing him the indignation that was on her face in the dark, ‘and if it were not for the fact that you are sick and helpless I would leave you this minute.’
‘Don’t leave out the fact that you need me, ma’am,’ he added.
‘Need you?’ she cried. ‘I need you like I need a sore head.’
‘’Pears we started off on the wrong foot,’ he said. ‘Pity. ’Cause we’re sure going to come to a mighty intimate under-standin’ before we’re through. I’m a businessman and to me time is money. I hate to waste it with a whole heap of shenanigans.’
‘Will you drop the subject?’ she demanded. ‘All we have to think about it getting you as far away from those men as we can.’
‘A noble thought, Miz Netta,’ he said
, ‘an’ it does you real credit. Leave us see if’n I can stand on my feet.’
‘Go ahead,’ she said.
‘I—er—I shall need some slight assistance. Bein’ upside down for a good few miles has kinda addled my brains an’ the whole world is turning around the wrong way.’ He reached out for her and his hand found her shoulder.
‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘it’s cold an’ you don’t have no coat.’
‘I put it under your head,’ she said.
‘You did? Why, I take that real kindly,’ he said. She put her arms around him and fought to get him on his feet. It took quite a struggle, but finally they won the battle and he stood resting heavily on her.
‘Girl,’ he said in his slow steady voice, ‘we have to face it. I’m not in too good a shape. I shan’t be sittin’ a saddle for a day or two. I wouldn’t make a mile. We have to think of a plan.’
‘How do you mean, a plan?’
‘Where’s Maddox’s camp at?’
She told him as best she could and when she had finished he grunted and said: ‘Now, what I want you to do without any argument is to get on that horse and work your way deeper into the hills to the east. When you’ve covered about five miles, you head north till you’re back in the States. Hear?’
‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘What happens to you?’
‘Aw, me,’ he said. ‘I’ll make out pretty good, I reckon. I’ll hole up in these hills and not even an Indian could find me.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I know the kind of fool thing you’ll do. You’ll try and divert Maddox and his men from my trail.’
‘That’s crazy talk. I’m not in any shape to do any such thing.’
‘You were crazy enough to try and save me back in the Mexican’s house.’
‘I was savin’ myself.’
‘Mr. Doolittle, I may not look kindly on your courting activities, but I am not mistaken about your selfless motives.’
Gun (A Spur Western Book 8) Page 14
