Who had fired? And at whom?
All at once, just as we started between two close-growing pines, the dun shied violently. Gun in hand, I held him still, listening.
No sound…only the wind in the pines.
Peering ahead in the gathering gloom, my eyes caught the shape of something lying on the ground. I stepped down from my horse, waited a moment, then moved forward on cat feet.
It was a man, lying on his face, and he was dead. I did not need an examination to know that. He had been shot twice in the back, at close range.
Even before I turned the body over, I knew who it was. Doc Sites should never have followed Reese and Heseltine to California. He had come up here with them, or had been followed, and then been executed…murdered.
He was never much of a man, I thought, although at one time he had seemed smart and almost glamorous to me. He had always been a tin-horn, living from stealing cattle or horses, and given to too much talk. But now I felt sorry for the man. Nobody should die like that, murdered by those he had believed to be his friends, left unburied on the lonely mountain for the buzzards and the coyotes.
There was nothing I could do but roll him into a hollow among the rocks, and pile rocks and brush over the body. His pockets had been emptied. His horse and guns were gone.
Angling down the slope, I found a vague trail along the mountainside and followed it.
When I had gone no more than two miles the trail turned suddenly up the slope, and I went along it. From time to time I dismounted to crouch low and study the trail. There were no tracks.
Those who had murdered Sites had gone on down to the main trail on the valley floor. The one I followed was an Indian trail, and it suddenly reached a small hollow under a rocky overhang where there was a pool of water fed by a trickle from out of the rocks. It was a sheltered, hidden spot, with grass for the dun, and a good quiet place for me.
Over a tiny fire I made coffee and soup from dried peas and jerked beef. I was tired, and it tasted good.
For a long time I lay awake, looking up through the leaves of a pin oak at the stars above. I listened to the stirrings of the night, and heard nothing that warned of danger. But I thought of Vashti, and found myself wanting again to be back in Colorado.
It came over me suddenly that I must end the chase. I must quit and find a place for myself, something beyond this endless pursuit, or I would someday end as Doc Sites had, shot in the back…murdered.
I went to sleep then, sure that I had arranged my future. And taking no thought for what destiny might have in store. A man may plan, but there are movements beyond his plannings, there are events born of powers that lie beyond him.
As always, unless very tired, I woke up just before daylight. For a few minutes I lay still, getting the feel of the morning. It was clear but still dark, only a few bright stars remaining in the sky.
A cool wind was just barely stirring the leaves. The dun was munching contentedly at some brush he had found near the camp.
After a moment I threw off my blankets, decided on what I would do.
I tugged on my boots, rolled my blankets, and saddled up, warming the bit for a few minutes inside my shirt, for the morning was chilly. Once saddled and ready, I tied the dun to a shrub and, taking my Winchester, went up through the trees to an outcropping I’d seen the night before. Beside it, where my body would not be outlined, I studied the terrain below.
There were the usual stirrings of birds and animals. A few doves talked in the brush. From a tree some distance off a mockingbird sang. Wherever I looked, there was no sign of a fire, and on the trail below, which I could make out as a dim gray streak, nothing moved.
My chase was over—that was the decision I’d come to the night before, and the one my morning thoughts agreed with. It was no way for a man to spend his life.
Now, not seeing me would worry Heseltine and his friends more than seeing me. They would not believe that I had dropped the pursuit, and would feel they must grow increasingly wary, not knowing when I might again appear.
Over a small fire I made coffee, fried bacon, and ate the last of the sourdough bread I’d been saving. Once more I checked the trail…nothing there.
Mounting up, I went down the trail on an angle, deliberately crossed it, and rode into the White Mountains with my mind made up.
I’d cross over into Nevada, strike the stage route that led through Eureka, and on to Salt Lake, and then I’d ride back to Colorado.
These were barren, lonely mountains…at least along the trail I was riding, and after a few miles the silence began to wear on my nerves. For there was no sound except what my horse made, my spurs jingling, or the creak of my saddle. Several times I drew up, listening, feeling suspicious of the morning.
The sun was bright, the day unbelievably clear. The sky was a calm blue, with only thin, very high clouds, so flimsy as scarcely to be seen.
The dim trail wound higher and higher, but allowed me no view of itself for more than a few hundred yards at any time. The dun was nervous, his ears twitching at every sound, but finally we topped out on a bald knob of the mountain, with a tremendous view to the east of a wide, barren land, sometimes showing the bared teeth of outcroppings, or scattered juniper, and here and there the white splotches of dried alkali lakes. Nowhere did I see any indication of water.
At noon, in the shade of a juniper larger than usual, I stopped to rest my horse. The area was wide open and empty, as free of cover as a bald head. Having picketed the dun, I stretched out in the shade of the tree.
Overhead the sky was wide and empty. Before I closed my eyes, I looked around carefully, and there was nothing, simply nothing at all. My eyes closed, and I slept.
The warmth of the sun, the clearness of the air, and my own weariness were enough, and my sleep was sound. After all, I was alone in this empty land.
Through the haze of sleep, something grated, there was a faint stirring, something tugged at my waist, and I opened my eyes looking into the muzzle of my own sixshooter.
Pony Zale was seated on his haunches not ten feet away. His grinning lips showed broken teeth, but there was no smile in his cold eyes. “Got you this time,” he said.
Slowly, I sat up. “Figured you were dead,” I lied. “I got lead into you, didn’t I?”
“You surely did.” He spat a brown stream close to my boot. “I’m still packin’ some of it, but it takes a lot to put me down. Bullet was never made to kill me. Old fortune-tellin’ woman, a gypsy woman, she told me that, so I never worry.”
His horse was nearby, right alongside my dun. My saddlebags were on his horse now, only his horse was no longer the crow-bait.
“You’ve got you a new horse,” I commented.
“Yes, sir. I got me a good one. Better’n your dun, I’m thinkin’. The man wouldn’t have been wishful to give it up, so I taken no chances. I surely do hate to be refused.”
He spat again. “You know what you got comin’, don’t you?”
I grinned at him. “Why, sure! You and me are going to ride down to Carson City and have us a drink at one of those fancy drinkin’ places where the politicians go. I’ll even stand treat…that is, I will if you’ve left me any money.”
“Well, now, that there’s a thought. I might even take you up on it if’n you hadn’t put lead into me. I don’t take to that at all.”
He was on his feet in one easy, fluid movement, unexpected in a man of his years. “No, sir. I don’t take to gettin’ shot at, nor hit. I’m a-goin’ to kill you. I ain’t a-goin’ to kill you outright—just put lead into you and ride off an let you die.
“This here trail you’ve chose ain’t been used in a couple hundred years or more. The Pah-Utes say it’s a medicine trail, and they won’t ride it. No white man knows of it…except me.
“There ain’t no water in fifty mile, and I don’t figure you’re going to make that much with a bullet in you. Not with you losin’ blood, and no water.”
“You’d better kill me, Pony,” I said casually, “because I’ll track you down and have your hide for this.”
He chuckled. “You’re game. Game as hell, but ’t won’t do you no good.”
There wasn’t one chance in a million, but I came off the ground in a long dive. I heard the bellow of his gun, felt a brutal slam alongside my skull, and went down into the gravel.
The gun bellowed again, and I felt my body twitch as it took the second bullet.
“Well, now,” I heard him say. “Reckon that’ll hold you. If’n you catch up to me now, you’ll surely earn what you get.”
There was a sound of a horse’s hoofs retreating, and then a vast emptiness. And then, for the first time, I felt the pain. The pain, and the hot, hot sun.
Chapter 18
I
T WAS DARK…dark and cold. My head throbbed horribly, and my mouth was dry. I lay very still against the earth, only I was no longer up on the mountain. Somehow, some way, I had gotten myself into a ravine.
The canyon walls sloped back steeply on either side, but I had no idea where I was, or how I had got there. Yet under me was the trail. I could feel it with my hands. Covered with dirt as I found myself to be, I thought, I must have rolled down the side of the canyon and landed in the trail.
I grasped rocks at the side and pulled myself along. There was no conscious thought of trying to survive, only that terrible drive to keep moving, not to stop. It was in my mind that I must get somewhere, and I must be there soon.
Somewhere along the line I must have ceased to be conscious, or at least, to have any sense of awareness. For when I realized anything at all, it was the warmth of the sun, and I was no longer in a ravine, but in a sandy wash in an open area—a
playa
, as the Spanish call a dry lake.
A shadow passed over me, momentary, fleeting. After a moment, it passed again…or perhaps it was another shadow.
I turned my head, looking up and around. It was a buzzard. It was several buzzards.
Somebody had told me they went for the kidneys first. It was a man I had met who had fought in China. He said the vultures always tried for the kidneys, not always waiting until a man was dead. If you went down, he said, always pull something over your kidneys, some protection.
My holster was empty, but he had not taken my knife—maybe because I was waking up. In all the crawling and rolling it had stayed in its scabbard, with the rawhide thong to hold it there. Slipping the thong, I got it out.
“Come on!” I yelled. “Come on down here!”
They did not come.
They were old at this game. Buzzards have patience built into them, a patience born of the knowledge that all things die, and they have only to wait.
Knife back in the scabbard again, thong in place, I crawled on because there was nothing else to do. My body was sore, my head was a huge hollow drum in which something pounded. My mouth was full of cotton and I could not feel my tongue. All through the endless heat, I crawled and crawled.
My hands grew bloody, the flesh was raw, and the blood left traces on the trail, but still I crawled.
How far I went each time I had no idea. Ahead of me I would see a stone and would drag myself as far as that stone. When I reached it after a long time, I chose another stone, and dragged myself to that one.
I was realizing now that the second bullet had hit me in the side, and the place was awfully sore. There was no doubt about where the first bullet had hit, because the throbbing in my head told me. There might be a hole in it, but I did not want to know.
Another rock ahead, and I crawled on. Then a juniper tree. I crawled…and then I passed out. I awakened in the dark, and this time I crawled toward a low star somewhere ahead of me. It was a reddish star…Mars, maybe. I’d heard that Mars was a red planet.
But crawling on, I somehow got too close to a bank and rolled over, hit bottom, or seemed to; a rock gave way and I fell straight down, landing with a thud. Pain shot through my skull and I passed out once again.
The sun was hot when I tried to open my eyes. My lids were thick and heavy. There was nothing in my mouth but a dry stick where my tongue should be.
I was lying in the bottom of a narrow gulch. Looking up, I could see where I had fallen…all of six feet. Above there was the sunlight and the sky, the lovely clear blue sky. I rolled over on my belly and looked down the gulch. Rocks, water-worn and smooth, small rocks, huge boulders, with two banks rising high above me.
Vashti…I was going back to Vashti. I had started out to go there, and she would be waiting. I crawled again, and something hammered inside my skull, waves of heat and cold swept over me. My hands were ugly to look at, the blood was stiff with sand and gravel and gray dust.
No longer did I sense clearly whether it was night or day. Dimly I chose rocks, junipers, anything to crawl to. I chewed on leaves. I tore at a prickly pear, ripping my bloody hands on its thorns, but crushing some of the pulp into my mouth. It was sticky, but wet.
And again in the heat there were those shadows that passed over me. I finally crawled into a hollow under a rock and lay there for some minutes with my eyes closed.
The sand was damp, and with my bloody hands, I dug into it until soaking blobs of sand came up, and I lay in the wet sand drinking in the coolness through my dry, parched skin. Water was around my hand. My hand was in water.
It was slowly seeping in, it was muddy, but it was water.
I lowered my sore face into it, drank a little, then drew back away from it. After a while I drank again. I bathed my face with it, bathed the blood from my raw hands. I put water on my neck, my face. Then I dipped my head into it to my eyebrows and held it there. After a moment I lay back again.
My pants were torn, but I found where the bullet had gone in right under the belt. Moving the belt, I bathed the wound. It looked inflamed and ugly.
I felt that the sun would kill me if I went out in it again. I must wait until night. I stayed in the hollow, poured water over me, waited for it to seep in once more, and then drank again. After that I slept, and it was dark when I woke up. I took a long drink, then got to my feet.