by Peter Dawson
With a last deliberate glance downward at the fire—she could see tongues of flame licking the crowns of two of the trees now—she turned and started walking over to the mare. Suddenly she stopped, a horrible thought gripping her. Suppose Kincaid wasn’t dead? Suppose Pete had left him there, unconscious, to burn to death?
She ran to the edge of the drop-off again. Some two hundred yards down along it there was a break in its perpendicular line. A section of the rock had rotted and fallen, leaving a steep incline down which it might be possible to pick her way. The footing would be dangerous, for there were places that dropped sheerly still, but she was going to go down there.
Chapter Twenty-One
An insistent note of warning gradually penetrated the pleasing shroud of drowsiness that cloaked Streak’s consciousness. It kept nagging at him like a persistent little devil with a pronged fork, prodding him out of his utter serenity. He did his best to ignore it. Then he came fully awake, and retched and choked as the suffocating bite of smoke bit deeply into his lungs.
When he opened his eyes, he saw what was the matter. A short glowing length of a branch lay near his face. The smoke was coming from the scorching the glowing coal was giving the matting of dry needles underneath it. Only now did Streak associate that subdued roar with anything tangible. He pushed up onto one elbow, winced as a stab of pain cut across the middle of his back, and looked above. Flames were engulfing the crest of a nearby tree. Suddenly he remembered.
He had followed Dallam’s sign for miles after their first encounter, after he saw he didn’t have a chance of battling that first fire. He came on the second blaze to find that it had already gained more headway than the first. Only then did he realize that the original fire had been no accident. Dallam was firing the east slope.
Streak had caught up with Ed’s killer there below the rim, nearly had him. Then some sixth sense had warned Dallam and he had thrown that lucky shot toward the trees, sensing his danger. Streak’s pony had been skin-burned by the bullet and lunged out of cover. Dallam’s second bullet brought the horse down. Streak could still feel the sharp torture of the rock corner biting into his spine as the falling horse half rolled onto him.
Now he understood why he lay here. Dallam had expected he would never recover consciousness. If anything was left of his body after the fire, there would be no bullet wound to point to murder. Dallam had taken a chance and not a very long one at that, Streak decided, staring up at the bank of flames off to his left.
It was when he struggled to sit up that he found he couldn’t use his legs. A paralysis deadened all feeling in his lower body. After a moment he fought down the panic and stopped wasting his strength. Lying there, he tried to think coherently. The smoke ahead thinned momentarily and he saw the gray face of the rim through the trees, not far away. He should be able to crawl that far, he decided. He started pulling himself along with his arms, dragging his useless legs.
He wormed his way toward the tree margin for about thirty feet, then another twenty, feeling the hot breath of the mounting flames gather in intensity. When his strength began going, he rested more often. Time and again he had to roll onto his back or lie on his face to reach around and knock off burning branch ends that fell on him. His face was runneled with sweat and the air had become fouler and the coughing hurt more, but he was getting there.
Suddenly a dull explosion sounded over the roar of the flames. Ahead, a foot-thick tree lazily fell directly across his path, its trunk and branches solid sheets of flame. At first he couldn’t believe it. His mind couldn’t take in the fact that he was hopelessly blocked, that he was to die here. So overwhelming was this defeat that a half-mad laugh welled up out of his parched throat. The tree’s trunk, held by branches only two feet off the ground directly ahead, was a good sixty feet long. To the left, alongside its earth-torn bole, two other bigger trees were solid sheets of sky-leaping flame. Off to the right, the blazing crown of the fallen pine had already ignited the drought-dried tangle of an oak thicket. Between these two impassable barriers, the length of the tree was one long line of flame. To go around either end was as impossible as crawling under the tree.
Streak had always thought of death in a fatalistic way, seldom letting his mind dwell for long on where or how he might meet it. It would come when his number was up; nothing he could do would ward off his ultimate end. Once, facing a pepperbox Derringer in the trembling hand of a crooked monte dealer, he had imagined he felt the touch of death’s hand on his shoulder. He had brushed the weight aside in a gesture that was meaningless to everyone who saw it but himself, and thereby distracted the gambler’s attention for the split second necessary to knock the Derringer aside. But now he knew that death was near, standing more certainly beside him than that other time. He felt strangely calm. But he felt cheated, too. For, able to use his legs, he could have walked scornfully out of the inferno that was gradually closing in on him for the kill.
Once more Streak pushed his upper body from the ground. This time he tried to rock backward onto his knees. He shut out the roar and whine of the flames in his concentration on making his body bend to his will. Finally he was on hands and knees. His useless legs were half supporting him. Now if he could but crawl up to that blazing tree stem ahead, only that far, he knew he would live. He could stand the heat he knew would sear the flesh about his waist if he could only get close enough to the pine to throw himself belly down across it and fall to the other side. He took his weight from his right knee, trying to crawl. Suddenly he went too far off balance. He fell on his side and lay there doubled up, gasping to breathe.
He tried again. He rolled onto his stomach, then back to his knees. Now he could move his left leg a little. He lifted the weight from his left knee and moved it forward almost a foot. He shifted his weight off the other knee—and fell sideward again. It took him some time to pull in enough air to end the spasm of retching that racked him. But now he couldn’t push up onto his hands. He was too weak.
Finally he just lay there, waiting idly, watching the vertical sheets of flame devouring the timber about him. A fire was a beautiful and an awesome thing. Streak didn’t even mind the scorching heat now. With a force of will, he forgot the pain in his starving lungs.
As he felt consciousness slowly leaving him, he straightened and looked ahead once more to see the symbol of his death, the flaming tree that had blocked his escape. Through the bluish fog of smoke he could see the cool gray face of the rim, the last tree at the forest’s edge hardly ten good paces away. Something moved out there, a hurrying upright shape that was but a shadow through the smoke. Some stricken fear-crazed animal running from the fire, he thought. All at once that shape took on substance, became a man running in toward him. He cried out hoarsely, but then his cry died against the angry crescendo of the fire’s roar. It would be Dallam, of course, come back to make sure of his demoniac act of violence.
Streak’s first thought was of his gun—that he didn’t have one. The Colt Kelso had loaned him lay somewhere out there near his horse. If only he had the gun, he could take Dallam with . . . He saw the wealth of long dark hair topping the figure out there and instantly forgot Dallam, recognizing Cathy Bishop. He called again, his shout nothing but a hoarse croaking. By some miracle, the girl seemed to hear him. She stopped, looked his way, and then ran in past that outermost tree and toward the downed blazing pine.
She was close, barely the length of a rope away from him, when she lifted an arm to shield her face from the heat and stopped. He could catch the agony written on her face as she once more took a forward step, then quickly backed out of range of the searing heat. Then he heard her call faintly: “Kincaid! Kincaid, where are you?”
He shouted again and this time she did hear him and looked directly at him. He could see her decide to come closer to that burning tree between them and he called hoarsely: “Get back! No use!”
Desperation made her ignore his command. Again she came on toward the tree, this time three steps. Abrupt
ly she tripped and fell to her knees and until she had crawled back once more he had an agonizing moment of fear that his call had brought her to her death. That torturous moment strangely calmed the seething torment of his mind, and now his whole being, his every thought was concentrated on saving this girl. He forgot himself in face of a sudden understanding that it meant a great deal to him that Cathy should live. He had that moment of insight before his mind shuttled back to a thought he’d had a moment ago when he saw how close, yet how infinitely out of reach, Cathy stood from him. He knew then how he could get her to leave this spot, at least for a few moments, and perhaps, if he could get her to leave now, it would be impossible for her to return—for the blaze was spreading faster, whipped by the wind.
“Rope!” he shouted, hardly sure that she could catch his voice over the pulsating booming of the fire. “Get the rope off that downed horse!”
Cathy’s face lit with sudden gladness and she turned away, running out from the trees. That picture of her, beautiful, radiant in her thankfulness as she left him, was the last picture he would have of her, Streak supposed. He had that one deep pang of regret that made him forget the others, the knowledge that he would never again see this girl who was risking her life to save his. Then he closed his eyes, wanting to keep that image of her fresh in his mind. He didn’t mind what was coming now.
“Kincaid!”
He thought he was remembering her first cry of a minute ago. Then her voice came again: “Kincaid, you’ve got to try! Here! Look at me.”
She stood four or five paces beyond the tree, her arm again shielding her face. When he saw how much closer the flames had leaped to each side of her, he called frantically, incoherently a warning that was lost in the inferno of sound. She smiled as she shook loose the first two loops in the coil of the rope she had taken from the saddle of Buchwalter’s dead pony. He watched her make the first cast, expertly, and the next moment saw that what she was trying was impossible. She was trying to throw under the horizontal trunk of the tree, through the tangle of blazing branches there.
He managed to shout—“Over it!”—before a spasm of coughing doubled him up and made him gag for breath. He clutched at his throat to ease the constriction of the muscles there and could smell the singed hair on the back of his hand.
Cathy coiled the rope again, swung the small loop she had shaken through the hondo, and made her second throw almost blindly, for a billowing cloud of smoke abruptly fogged the tree from her sight. But the loop arced true over the blazing log and fell on Streak’s legs. The next moment he was gripping the hard-woven manila. He knew at once that Cathy didn’t have the strength to pull him. Also, that the rope, lying across the blazing tree trunk, would burn through almost at once. Those two facts, coupled with the knowledge of what he had let himself in for—he would somehow have to pull himself up and over the glowing flame-stippled stem of the pine—told him that Cathy was needlessly risking her life, that the faint hope of getting out of here alive was a forlorn one. Still, he owed it to Cathy to make the attempt. When he had shown her how hopeless his situation was, he could make her think of her own safety. She was pulling at the rope, trying to move him. He shook his head, hoping she would understand, and started pulling himself hand over hand toward the downed tree. She did understand, for she took a sideward step and wound the rope around the wrist-thick stem of an aspen sapling as he lay face down and gasping for breath after his first effort.
Streak found his arms stronger than he had thought them. Soon he was bowing his head before the furnace-like heat that radiated from the blazing pine. He would look up now and then in his efforts, seeing the smoking line of the rope lying across the blazing wood. Why didn’t it burn through?
He dragged a deep, gagging breath into his lungs and pulled himself up to the tree. Catching a hold with one hand on the rope where it lined up and over the flaming wood, he reached with the other for a higher handhold, steeling himself against the bone-deep burn he knew was coming. He turned his face from side to side, unable for long to stand the intense heat on one portion of it. His free hand was almost touching the glowing wood when suddenly the rope let go and he fell in and almost under the tree. The glowing coal of a branch end burned deeply into his shoulder and he gave a spasmodic lurch away from it. Lying there, lifting his head to catch a final glimpse of Cathy, he saw her turn and stagger back out of the trees and go to her knees at the edge of open ground.
At last she had been forced to think of herself. He lay wondering how much longer he could hold that final precious lungful of air. When he no longer could, the end would come quickly. He saw the sagging rope on the tree’s far side sag even farther. Abruptly its burned-through end fell to the ground. The red glowing tip scorched his fingers. He clutched it, hope suddenly alive in him. For the far end was still fastened to the sapling!
He dragged his half-paralyzed body a foot farther under the flaming pine, another, two more, clawing aside the burning and smoking branches that lay in his path. His lungs cried for air. Still, he wouldn’t take another breath, knowing that to do so was to die almost instantly and in agony. Along his back he felt the searing heat of the red-hot wood pressing down on him. Then the heat was strongest along his legs, at the back of his calves. In those final seconds, as the patch of ground before his eyes danced in misty, wavering indistinctness, he wriggled forward as far as one fresh handhold would take him. He had an instant of realization that he had been able to bend his left leg and push with it, that the paralysis there had gone. Then the air left his lungs in a final heaving gasp. He drew in another breath. The heat of it parched his throat, made him cough convulsively. He couldn’t breathe this air but had to. Mercifully consciousness left him and his long frame relaxed against the smoking earth.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Bill, I’m scared,” Fred Kelso told his companion, and his voice carried a strong note of apprehension.
“Who isn’t?” Paight said. “But we’re going on. He’s somewhere ahead. He’s got to be.”
Kelso had a moment ago insisted that they should ride straight for Bishop’s place to give warning of the two fires that were raging on the east slope. Bill had argued that they should stick on the sign they’d been following for better than the past hour. That sign was two sets of blended tracks, one of them a splay-foot’s.
“They’ve seen the smoke by now,” Bill argued. “And maybe Streak needs help.”
Kelso nodded. “Then let’s get goin’,” he said, and followed Bill’s lead.
The sheriff had no more doubt than Bill did that there was a good chance of Streak being in trouble. It was a certainty that whoever Streak was following had started the two fires, and a man who would do that wouldn’t hesitate to kill anyone watching him if he got the chance. Kelso couldn’t make so much as a guess as to who was riding the splay-foot.
They had been lucky back there at the hide-out. Letting Buchwalter lie where they found him, they had gone into the cave. They had found the chimney and run onto the sign near the mesa opening. They had gone back for their horses and come straight on, sticking to the sign. Just now they followed the sign down an abrupt slope and were soon out of the timber, with a high limestone rim close on their right.
Bill suddenly drew rein. “Which way?” he asked, studying the ground close ahead. “The splay-foot headed down there in the open. There goes Streak’s sign off toward the trees. Which one do we take?”
Kelso had been looking down the line of the rim. He answered flatly: “Neither. There’s someone down there. And there’s more smoke.”
Bill saw a figure coming out of the tree margin on down the line of the wash. He could see what looked like a down horse beyond the figure. Above, a billowing cloud of smoke fanned out and rode the wind. He touched spur to his pony and raced down the rocky draw at a hard run. For an instant he had a wild hope that the man down there was Streak, then he knew it wasn’t, for Streak was taller than this man. He heard Kelso coming along behind, falling back gradua
lly because his horse didn’t have much of a run.
About fifty yards away he recognized Cathy. A moment later he saw her stumble and go to her knees, looking behind her. The only recognizable thing about the girl was her raven-black hair that she wearily brushed back from her face as Bill rode up. Her face was smudged and reddened, her right sleeve torn at the shoulder. A curl of smoke lined out from a hole low on the leg of her denims.
She didn’t know Bill was there until he had vaulted from the saddle and beat out the still smoldering cloth at her leg. Even then she looked up at him with a dull, lifeless stare.
