He put it to her they might be wise to dump the gold. She agreed with him that the fourth man had most likely gone for reinforcements. But she did not vote for leaving the gold.
‘Let us keep the honeypot that will draw the bees.’ she said. ‘Then we will kill them one by one or all together, just as chance will allow us.’
‘You could get yourself killed,’ he said.
‘Is that so terrible for a woman in my position?’ she demanded and he couldn’t find any answer to that.
Without thinking and without looking at her, he patted her hand and found his hand in the grip of both hers. When he looked up, surprised, he saw that her eyes were wet.
In Spanish and with a smile in his words, he said: ‘Do not become too feminine on me, señorita.’ She laughed.
‘For a moment,’ she told him, ‘you looked quite frightened. Do women scare you so?’
‘If you scared me,’ he said, ‘I never knew a nicer scare in all my life.’
She leaned forward and kissed him softly and briefly on the mouth. In that moment, he knew a number of facts about himself and this woman. She was not something to be taken lightly. He knew also that they possessed an agreement of the flesh that he had seldom been aware of before with any woman. Sure, there had been women. Women were an element that made life worth living. But this was something more.
For a time that he could not measure, they were aware only of each other.
‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that I would never be able to look at a man as a man again. But you have showed me that I was wrong. All men are not animals and it has taken a professional man-hunter to make me aware of the fact.’
He knew that this was not the moment for any more contact. This woman was still ready to shrink within herself.
She said so suddenly that she startled him: ‘Look!’
His eyes followed her pointing finger and at once saw the slight stir of movement in the valley beyond the shelf.
‘Can you make it out?’ she asked.
Blade hurried into the cave and fetched McMasters’ glass, but when he put it on the spot where they had seen the movement, he could see nothing. He ranged the glass up and down the valley, but could see nothing. He considered the possibility that it had been a man who spotted them high above and taken cover. He thought it unlikely.
Pilar found something with the glass and thrust it into his hands.
‘There. There is a tall thin pillar of rock. Follow the line of trees along to that brush. Do you see?’
He caught a movement, a slow-moving dark object. If it was a horse, there was no man on its back. There was a blur of brush between him and the movement. Then it disappeared, leaving him convinced that he had seen an animal of some kind.
He moved the glass about twenty yards to the right and found himself looking into a face. He laughed in sudden relief.
‘A longhorn,’ he said.
She clung to him with delight—‘We shall eat beef.’
‘You bet we shall,’ he told her.
‘We shall go together,’ she said, ‘and I will show you how my people hunt the bull. These cimarrones are as fast as deer. We shall have sport.’
‘You stay here,’ he ordered. ‘You’re needed here.’
Her manner altered abruptly. She did not get mad, but she shoved herself to be a woman who had been raised giving orders.
‘You are mistaken,’ she informed him. ‘I shall hunt the bull.’
‘Pilar,’ he said, ‘the risk is to great. You will be needed here if anything happens to me.’
‘I shall hunt the bull. Save your breath to cool your steak.’
He took her by the shoulders and said: ‘Now you see here—’
She came into his arms so naturally that he put them around her and held her close to him. They seemed to meet delightfully from mouth to knee, their flesh hungry for the contact. Her small hard breasts thrust into his ribs. He mouth opened softly under his.
Crazy Annie came out of the cave and bawled: ‘There ain’t no goddam justice. Here’s me starved for love and you two sonuvabitches have all the goddam falladam-doodle in the world. Christ, it makes me sick to the stomach.’
Eleven
They rode down off the bench with the wonderful feeling that the whole world belonged to them. It was a dull cool morning with the feeling of storm in the air. But they would not have cared if it had been blowing a hurricane. The two horses were rested and full of grass, ready to run. At each saddlehorn the two rawhide reatas were neatly coiled ready for action.
As Pilar had said, the longhorns were as wild as deer. They found them a mile along the valley, deep in the thickets and not intending to show so much as a horn until they had to. Blade headed in to the brush and found that his horse was as keen as a Texas pony. Three mossyhorns lit out in front of him, heading for the open country where they could run. Here Pilar headed them off and let fly her rope like a veteran vaquero, forefooting the first animal and bursting it down with an efficiency that took Blade’s breath away. As the animal recovered itself and started on the prod for Pilar who had shaken her rope loose, Blade dabbed a line on the animal’s horns. The giant bull turned on him and he was grateful for the speed and agility of the horse he was on. The girl kept with him, building a fresh noose and dropped it with his over the horns and the longhorn found himself caught in a two-way pull. They headed back for the cave with a fight on their hands every inch of the way.
Getting that bull up the narrow track was nobody’s business and it took them a good hour of exhausting work. Finally, however, they made it, drawn close by the sharing of the sweaty chore. When Blade remembered the incident later, he remembered their laughter most. They laughed together as they ran that bull across the grassy bench. Going through the cave, they once more met Annie’s violent blasphemies as she objected to their passage.
‘Couldn’t you of killed the great stinkin’ sonuvabitch out there? Let it so much as go near my Charlie an’ I’ll blow his goddam head off.’
Getting the bull down the narrow passageway was like handling a killer in the dark. In the end, they took the ropes off him and drove him through with lighted brands from the fire. When he reached the grass in the canyon, he seemed happy enough.
Blade returned to the cave and said: ‘All we want now is a few hundred rounds of ammunition and we could hold off an army.’
‘You should ought to get me to a doctor,’ Charlie said. ‘I’m like to die, but nobody seems to pay no heed to an old man’s sufferin’.’
‘Pray for snow,’ McMasters said. ‘It’ll pin us down here, but it’ll get those bastards off our backs.’
That night it looked as if his wish would come true. It grew noticeably colder and the weather started closing in. Blade, Pilar and the Indian girl gathered in great masses of brushwood for the fire. McMasters had carried a light axe with him and Blade was able to cut some fair sized logs. When he had made sure that the flames could not be seen from outside by anybody not close to the cave, he allowed a large fire to be built up. They would sleep snug and warm that night.
They slept that night comforted by their sense of security, even though that security might be temporary. Before he closed his eyes, Blade looked around at his sleeping companions in the warm glow of the fire and thought about the situation. They had water and food for themselves and the stock, but, even with the ammunition they had taken from the enemy, they were still desperately short of shells. His one hope now was that a general alarm may have been raised by the discovery of the dead Mexicans. It was even possible that the killing of the Indians could have raised the alarm. If so, there might, even at this moment, be a column of soldiers or a sheriff’s posse out looking for them or at least trailing the killers. But he knew that where the massacres had taken place were lonely areas and it might be many days before somebody visited the spots. No, he had to face the fact that he, and only he, had to get these people to safety.
And when he rode to safety, he told himself, he wo
uld take the man he had come into this country to catch. A tall order, he thought wryly, but he would be damned if he settled for anything less.
He looked across at Pilar and saw how the firelight caught the high cheek-bones and accented the curve of her generous mouth. The girl had gotten to him. He was not the kind of man who tried to fool himself. She presented a problem. He did not lead the kind of life that allowed for a permanent woman. Well, maybe it was time to change the pattern of that life.
Such a thought had never entered his head before and its presence there was something of a shock. He imagined himself in the cattle business. Or maybe he’d take to raising horses. Plenty of problems would come with Pilar. There was her family and their money, their power. He did not want any part of it. But he wanted the girl and he knew it.
I reckon I’ll sleep on it, he thought. Tomorrow is also a day.
The day broke cold and clear. The snow was still holding off.
Blade took a long hard look at the valley, found no movement and left the two girls to keep watch. He went down the tunnel to the blind canyon and spent most of the day cutting down small trees and chopping them up for firewood. There was nothing like being warm to keep up the morale.
He was good and tired at the end of the day and, after a talk with McMasters and then with Pilar, he took a turn on watch and then turned in for a dreamless sleep.
The two wounded men seemed to be coming along pretty well. McMasters, fit and hard as he was, was healing nicely. If he suffered any pain, he never said. He was talking with greater animation and was even claiming that in a couple of days he would be as good as new. He experimented with walking, but grew so dizzy that Blade and the Indian girl had to half-carry him back to his bed. He made light of his weakness, but Blade feared that he had suffered some injury to his head that was beyond their knowledge.
However, the rest was obviously doing both, men some good. Old Charlie perked up considerably and started cursing his leg because it kept him away from Annie and he was sure feeling full of oats. The wound in his thigh seemed to be clean and healthy. He said to Joe Blade: ‘I sure appreciate what you folks’re doin’ for me, Joe, an’ I shan’t forget it. I’m a rich man now.’
Annie said: ‘When you aimin’ to butcher that goddam great ox, Joe? My belly’s sure a-rumblin’ for some good steaks.’
The night passed without incident. During the following day, they began to wonder if the threat from the outlaws had not passed.
As she sat keeping Blade company as he kept watch at the mouth of the cave, making the most of some pale sunlight, Pilar said: ‘I have been thinking, Joe. If the danger has passed, we will go about hunting these men in a different way. It is not right that your life and George’s should be needlessly risked. My father has many men. I shall lead a small army of fighting men into the Elbow and we will root out that vermin.’
Blade shook his head.
‘You’d never get ’em to go, girl. That bunch has a reputation. Three or four posses have already tried it. They say John Chisum himself had a try. Those boys’re strong up there. If you got in there in force, why, they’d just disappear. That kind have friends all over. Half the country look on scum like that as heroes. Rest easy. We’ll finish ’em.’
She looked disappointed—‘I thought I was agreeing with what you said the other day.’
‘That was the other day,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking. If they don’t come to us, I’ll go to them. No, I’m not playing at heroes. This is the kind of job that’s done easier by one or two men. George’ll be full of get-up-an-go in a few days. You go on to Taos with Annie and Charlie.’
She smiled and said: ‘You know you’re wasting your breath.’
‘You going to give me trouble?’
‘No, but I’m not going to do as you say.’
Blade went to speak again, but he suddenly sat up and gripped her arm.
‘Did you hear that?’ he asked.
‘What?’
Blade listened intently. The only sound that reached them was the distant bellow of a longhorn from far below.
‘I heard a horse nicker.’ he said.
‘You may have imagined it.’
‘No chance. Go back and tell the others we don’t want any noise.’ She started to protest, but he waved her away. She hurried back into the cave.
There was ten minutes of absolute silence. Then he heard the sound again and knew that he had not been mistaken. But he had little idea from whence the sound had come. He knew that it had come from below, but whereabouts exactly he could not tell.
His impulse was to cross the bench-land and investigate, but the distance was too great. He weighed the possibility of bringing out a horse from the cave and riding down into the valley, but he dismissed it. The bench was too open and the chances of being discovered and thus giving away the presence of the people in the cave too great. So he did the only thing he could do, stayed where he was and used his eyes and ears.
The minutes passed, but he neither heard nor saw anything.
He decided to work his way south, keeping the hill close to his left hand and staying under the cover of the rocks and brush that ran along the eastern edge of the bench. This would check if there were riders approaching from the south along the bench and also possibly give him a better view of the valley below.
Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Pilar watching him from the mouth of the cave. He signaled his intentions to her and started to work his way through the rocks and brush. It was in places slow and difficult going. The ground was irregular. There were drops of anything from a few to twenty feet, an occasional great boulder, and a tangle of brush or clumps of coarse grass. Within minutes, he was starting to breathe hard and to sweat even in the coolness of the day.
He had not covered more than a couple of hundred yards when he stopped abruptly. Almost immediately in front of him, but out of sight, men were talking. Blade dropped to the ground and wormed his way to the cover of some scrub oak. This did not offer him the best cover in the world so he crawled on to some lowish rocks. Here he caught sight of the men—two of them.
They were both at their ease and were smoking. It seemed they had not a care in the world. Had he not recognized one of them immediately, he would have wondered if he were stalking them needlessly.
The man he recognized was Duke Dukar.
The man had undergone some transformation since he saw him last —though that had not been in the flesh but a photograph. The urbane and smooth sophisticate, clean-shaven and clothed in a smart city suit and white linen had been replaced by a man weather-beaten and hard-eyed, unwashed and unshaven. The suit had been replaced by striped California pants and hickory shirt of faded blue. Just the same, the easy smile was still there and, as ever, Duke seemed coolly in charge of the situation.
The other man looked as though he had taken on a longhorn charge single-handed. His unshaven jaw was marked with caked and dried blood, one eye was closed and black. He held his ribs as if they pained him. Blade guessed correctly that this was the man he had met by the boat at the river’s edge.
Duke was saying: ‘Don’t fret, Bill, the ’breed’ll find ’em.’
The other man said, confirming Blade’s guess about his identity: ‘You can keep your gold. All I want is this bastard, Blade. By the time I’m through with him, he’ll wish the goddam Comanches had him.’
Duke chuckled good-naturedly—‘He’s all yours, boy.’
Blade was just making up his mind what to do next when he was startled nearly out of his wits by his hat being tipped an inch or so over his forehead and something hard and cold being pressed against the back of his skull.
Turning his head and raising his eyes, he looked into those of the man holding the gun.
He did not doubt that this was the half-breed Duke had mentioned. He was a small dark man who looked more Indian than white, his long black hair braided with grimed and colored strips of doeskin. The greasy and almost fringeless hunting shirt was of Ut
e origin. The pants had once belonged to somebody’s evening suit and were tucked into boots that had once been expensive and hand-tooled. The spurs were large-rowelled and Mexican. The hat was narrow-brimmed and high-crowned. The eyes had about as much emotion as a gila monster’s.
Blade did not have to be told that if he made a wrong movement he would be dead.
‘Up,’ this man said.
Slowly, Blade rose to his feet.
He faced two facts, then. One, he must break for freedom before they parted him from his carbine. Two, if he stayed a prisoner, the people in the cave were finished. No risk, therefore, was too great to be taken.
The half-breed’s rifle prodded him and he stumbled toward the two men as they climbed to their feet with looks of astonishment on their faces.
Duke recovered himself quickly and laughed with some pleasure.
‘Now, ain’t this nice,’ he said. ‘He came to us of his own free will.’
Blade’s eyes were busy measuring distances—from himself to the two men, to the nearest substantial cover.
He wondered how many more men were around. He could not see the half-breed, but he knew exactly where he was because the muzzle of the gun was now pressed hard in his back.
He was about twenty yards from Duke and the man called Bill.
A voice inside Blade’s head told him: You have to get away. You have to stay alive.
The closeness of death concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully. It also concentrates either his courage or his cowardice. At such a moment, it isn’t easy to tell which will take command. For such a brief moment, Blade’s mind became utterly blank, as though petrified at the thought of attempting the impossible. He was in the presence of three men, all with guns in their hands and one of those guns was pressed into his back.
There was that dreadful moment of empty hesitation, then the explosive release of tension that can only come with violent action. His life was saved only by the fact that men are never prepared for what they consider impossible. These were men with set patterns of behavior and they lived by guns. That being so, they respected guns. When a man held one and threatened you, you did as he told you. You had to or you died.
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