From time to time I checked the Big Dipper for the time, watching it swing around the Pole Star. After a while I slowed the dun to a walk, but I kept on going. I should camp soon, but the thought of that old man on my trail worried me. He would be coming along, and he was not going to be easy to lose.
The country presently became more broken. Several times I deliberately turned off the trail to one side or the other, leaving well-defined tracks where I turned off, and returning to the trail in places where the tracks were not likely to be seen. But I had a hunch the old man was an Injun on the trail.
For five hours I rode, and then my own weariness and the growing weariness of my horse made me realize that I must turn off and find a camp. Taking a turn at a place in the deepest shadow of a rock, I scrambled up a steep trail and rode along the top of a mesa, then off the other edge into a deep canyon. Here there was a trail of sorts, for the dun kept going when I could see nothing but occasional glimpses of the whiter, hard-packed ground.
Of a sudden, I heard water. Rounding a corner of rock, I found myself in a small basin where a trickle of water fell into a pool. A few cottonwoods were there, and some willow brush, and it was as good a camping spot as a man could want. It was at least three-quarters of a mile off the trail, and in a spot where I’d be hard to find.
Picketing my horse on a small patch of grass, I unrolled my blankets on the far side of a cottonwood tree where the ground lay bare and smooth. With my saddle for a pillow, I was soon asleep, not forgetting to place my Colt close to my hand.
My eyes opened to broad daylight, and opened on my strange pursuer. He sat his saddle not twenty feet away, and as I opened my eyes he shook out a loop. I started to come up fast, the loop shot out, and I had just warning enough to throw up an arm and get that as well as my neck, into the loop. Dropping my hand, I grasped the rope, but he slapped spurs to his horse and jumped him, and all that saved me was the sudden lunge I gave, throwing myself past the cottonwood tree and snubbing the rope there.
He brought up short, giving me a terrific jolt. I went to my knees, slammed into the tree, and he swung to ride around to get a loop around the tree, so as to bind me there. My hand grabbed at my blankets and came up with my Colt.
Too late he saw the gun, and grabbed at his chest. I fired, holding the gun in my left hand, and scored a clean miss on him, but burned his horse across the shoulder.
The crow-bait gave a startled leap, throwing his aim off target, and I got off a second shot and missed again. The rope had slacked briefly and I threw it off, flattening myself behind the cottonwood. I heard his gun roar and heard the bullet thud into the tree, but my pistol was in my right hand now and I jumped into the clear.
He had a big Colt in his hand. “Got you!” he yelled, and threw the gun up to chop down, as some men will do.
I shot, not looking at the gun, but only at him. My bullet caught him in the side above the hip, but he managed to fire. It was too close a miss for comfort, and I jumped back past the cottonwood. As my feet hit ground on the other side of the tree, I shot again. He reeled in the saddle, gave me a glaring look, and slapping spurs to the crow-bait, was away at a dead run.
For a moment I could only stand and stare after him. He was hit twice, one of them a good one, at least, but that was a tough old man. I wanted to see no more of him, ever.
The dun seemed undisturbed, by which I gathered he had been around gunfire before. Saddling up, I gathered my gear and rode out of there on the far side of the hollow, wary of every possible place of ambush.
Only then did I realize that my knees were badly torn from being jerked along the gravel and into the tree, my arm had a rope-burn that began to sting as sweat got into it. I also was developing a stiff neck, and a rope burn on it as well.
“That was a mean old man,” I said, speaking to the dun, who flicked an ear at me.
Talking to a horse was not a new thing for me, or for any man who rides miles over lonely country. But then, I always figured horses were as good as people, or better, and I took them into my confidence from time to time. That line-back dun was a good listener, and had to be, for I’d had the scare of my life and was talking it out of my system.
Of course, that old man figured he just had a wet-eared kid, but I’d gotten some lead into his system that was going to take some digesting. Nevertheless, I scouted the country carefully as I rode, and kept on riding the day through.
When I finally got to Walker’s Pass, two men were camped there with some sheep.
In answer to my question one of them said, “Three days ago—Bob Heseltine and two others and a woman. They went through the pass and I figure they’re headed north from there.”
“You know Heseltine?” I asked. They asked me to eat with them, and I joined them.
“Seen him kill a man in a saloon down Texas way. That was seven, eight years ago. He shot that man down with no reason at all but that he didn’t like him.”
He looked at me. “Are you Shell Tucker?”
“Yes.”
“Heard you was huntin’ him. Good luck.”
“There may be a man hunting me,” I told them, finishing my coffee. Then, as they were hungry for news, or for any sort of diversion, I told them about my encounter with the old man.
They listened, exchanging looks. “That old man, now—he about five-seven or -eight? Weigh about a hundred and forty? With a kind of white scar near his mouth?”
“You know him?”
“Boy, you tackled an ol’ he-coon. That there was Pony Zale. He’s a claim-jumper, a hoss thief, and more than once a murderer, but nobody ain’t never proved it on him.
“Down Ruidoso way he come up with some Mexicans drivin’ sheep, and offered to help. Of a sudden, a couple of days later, he cut loose with his Winchester and killed two of them. The third man came runnin’ back to camp, and he shot him…on’y that man didn’t die. He lived to tell of it.
“A posse set out, but he’d sold the sheep and left the country. He’s a bad one.”
“Well, I got lead into him,” I said, “but he was still in the saddle when he left out of there, and he didn’t look too happy about the way things turned out.”
One of the men chuckled. “If he shows up, you went south.”
The coffee had been good, the beans better, and I hated to ride on, but time was against me and Bob Heseltine was riding away.
Down the trail a piece, I looked back. The trail was empty, but I had an uneasy feeling that the hunter had become the hunted.
Chapter 17
T
HERE’S NOTHING LIKE time alone to give a man a chance to check up on himself, and I expect it was high time that I stopped to look at my hole card.
A lot of miles had been left in the dust behind me, and I’d been in a few shootups, and here I was no nearer to what I’d set out to do. And all the while, back there in Colorado was Vashti. And the more I thought of Vashti, the more I thought what a fool I was to go traipsing off across the country. By now she might even be married.
Married?
That pulled me up short, and the dun, too. Just the thought of it gave me a twinge, but why not? I’d staked no claim on that girl.
There was no reason at all why she should wait, but the thought of her marrying some no-account…
Of course, that was a cause for thinking, too, because a man has to be honest with himself. What did I mean…no-account? Mightn’t folks say that of me?
I had nothing. No claim, no shack, just a two-bit layout down Texas way that by now was probably occupied by somebody else. I had no means to make a living beyond punching cows or doing day labor, and that surely wasn’t enough for Vashti…even if she might think it was.
Somewhere along there I lost all track of Bob Heseltine and them.
From time to time there’d been tracks of a sort, and I’d been sure in my mind I was on the trail. That old dun was nobody’s fool, and he knew I was trailing somebody. I think that dun even put me back on the trail a couple of times.
Where could they go but straight ahead? If I knew Ruby Shaw, she wouldn’t cotton to any hide-out camp in the Sierras, which reared up on my left, nor would she take to Death Valley, which lay yonder beyond the Panamints. She would want to head for Virginia City, where they were taking silver out of the Comstock.
Come to think of it, these men must be catching billy-hell right now, Heseltine and the others. Almost ever since they got that money, months ago now, they’d been riding. She hadn’t had much chance to pleasure herself with having money, and she wasn’t the kind to let it lay. She would be nagging at those boys to do something about me.
Moreover, this was a pretty good place in which to do whatever they had a mind to. The mountains and the desert left few trails open for travel, and even after Death Valley was past there was still a lot of wide-open dry country to the east.
Suddenly, I found their tracks again. Four riders, and not very far ahead of me, by the look of them.
A man doesn’t travel as far as I had without learning something, and I’d been trailing tough, dangerous men. I’d had brief showdowns with both Sites and Reese, but so far I’d never actually locked horns with Heseltine. But now they were together again…or so it appeared.
Yet I wondered about Doc. His share of the money had probably been mentally divided among them, but now he had returned, and would be making claims.
Well, the element that makes a man a thief makes him untrustworthy, but those who associate with him often forget that. Doc Sites was neither needed or wanted, least of all by Ruby Shaw.
I’d not done much but just hang on, nagging at their heels, watching for my chance. Everywhere I went the story was there ahead of me, like at the sheep camp, where those men had known who I was.
And likely the outlaws, their ears to the ground, heard the stories, too.
The Owens River valley where I now rode was all of a hundred miles long and five to twelve miles wide. On the west were the Sierras, a rugged range that seemed to rise abruptly from the valley floor. On the other side the Inyo-White ranges rose in places to over 11,000 feet.
Both ranges were alive with game, and in some areas were alive with Indians. Neither was a place to spend money or enjoy the fleshpots of Egypt, so I had no idea the outlaws would stay in that area.
The valley looked to me like a great fault-block that had sunk. I’d picked up a smattering of geology from Con Judy during our rides, and had begun looking at deserts and mountains from fresh viewpoints, and it showed me that the more a man knew, the more interesting everything became. As Con had said, if you didn’t have books to read, you could always read the face of nature.
All around me were signs of change in the earth. Decomposing rock trickled down from notches in the hills, spreading wider and wider as they reached the valley floor, like great fans spread out. And in some areas heat and cold, thawing and freezing were helping the roots of trees to break up the soil, even to break up rocks.
Going ahead rapidly was out of the question here, for there were too many possibilities of ambush. Carefully not following any pattern, I varied my route from time to time, leaving the trail to the right or left, following the slope of one mountain or the other, suddenly changing direction, and using every bit of cover that I could. I knew they were somewhere ahead of me, and judging by an occasional track, they were only hours ahead.
And I watched my back trail. How badly Pony Zale had been wounded I did not know, but I had a feeling that tough old man would want some of his own back. He would be hunting me as I hunted them.
Con Judy’s talk of rocks and rock formations, as well as the possibility that some plants indicated minerals in the earth beneath them, kept my eyes on the country even as much as fear of ambush. I was well up the mountainside, riding through a scattering of trees and stopping from time to time to study the terrain ahead and in the valley, when my eyes were drawn to a smooth surface of rock, which must have been polished by a glacier. Here and there were places where weathering had broken the surface into pits, or wider areas that looked like great sores eating at the smooth face. Suddenly my eye caught a place where the surface had been broken…and recently.
Drawing rein in the shelter of some pines, I studied the spot. A horse’s hoof had broken that edge, and left in the place where it had broken off, a clear print of half a shoe.
Somebody had gone up that slope not long ago, just ahead of me.
That somebody was up there now. Had they seen me coming? Had they seen me draw up?
My mouth was dry, and all at once I was wary. I slid from the saddle, Winchester in hand. Moving quickly, I tied my horse to a clump of brush, then crouching low, I moved up among the rocks.
Beyond this area were scattered, stunted pines and a few cedars. Among the trees, and beyond them, the surface was broken.
The sun was behind the wall of the Sierras, but it still held a golden rim on top of the White Mountains opposite. Shadows were growing where I waited, and the silence of evening was over the land. Somewhere a dove called, another answered.
Easing my crouching position, I continued to wait. My spot was fairly good, hidden from the higher slope by rocks and trees, exposed to the valley below, but a valley that lay empty, so far as I could see. What I must be wary of was before or behind me.
Suddenly, somewhere on the slope ahead I heard two racketing shots, and then the slowly dying echo of them fading away among the canyons and along the mountainside. Those shots must have been fired a good four or five hundred yards off, and no bullet came close to me. I waited, listening.
For a long time there was no sound, and then a faint rattle of rocks came from somewhere up ahead, and a flicker of movement, followed by silence. The shadows grew longer as I waited. Returning to my horse, I untied it and stepped into the saddle.
I rode ahead warily, keeping to the shadows and trying for areas of grass or leaf mold where the hoofs of my horse would make no sound.