Sliphammer (19 page)

He tried to stretch the hour's lead. They found a spring, watered, and walked the horses downslope in the creek, then came to the confluence of a tributary and turned deliberately upstream in the secondary creek. It was out of the way but it might confuse pursuit. Tree led them out onto a shale slide that made dangerous footing but concealed all sign of their passage. When they had gone a mile beyond, he discovered Macklin wasn't with them: Macklin trotted up from behind and saw his look, and said casually, “Thought I better have one more look back the way we come.”

“See anything?”

“Not a thing,” Macklin said, and pushed on.

They breathed the horses at intervals but made no noon halt. At two they spent fifteen minutes in a creek, going upstream and thus losing a mile's progress to gain concealment; at a tortuous chasm Tree tossed big rocks across to the far side until he had overturned a fair number of loose stones to expose their damp undersides. It would take pursuers an hour or more to get over to that side. Tree led down the near side to the belly of the gorge, which took them by a series of rock-floored hairpin twists down through the upper elevations of timber forests. They entered groves so thickly massed at the treetops that no sun got through to the ground. Moss and decaying growth made easy footing for the horses but left clear sign. The riders had to ward off branches and duck under tree limbs. Once, in the center of the timber, Tree called a halt to blow the horses and listen for pursuit. He turned his head slowly to catch any sounds that might come rolling down the long-sounding forest corridors. He heard nothing—which in itself was not reassuring—and led on, noticing vaguely that Obie Macklin was occupying his nervous hands by sharpening his knife on stirrup leathers.

Distances in the high-country air deceived the eye. The high peaks that had loomed within obvious bullet range that morning were still ahead of them in midaf-ternoon, when they climbed past timberline into stunted marginal growth. The air had a clear, gemlike quality. Tree halted to give the canyons behind him a long inspection; doubtless the two pursuing bands were down there under the trees somewhere—the question was, how close?

Warren Earp said, “God damn it, I wish they'd show themselves.”

Wyatt said testily, “Take it easy, boy, take it easy.” It made Tree look at him. The deep voice, calm on the surface, had a strained, false timbre.

Warren said, “What the hell you mean, take it easy? My damn wrists are just about to start bleeding and we're unarmed and hogtied and right back there we've got a pack of stinking miners wanting to lynch both of us.”

Caroline said, with acid, “Don't you think your friend Cooley can take care of a few worthless miners?”

“Not if they get to us first,” Warren said, looking as miserable as he probably felt. He hadn't whined much, which was to his credit, but the strain was getting to him now. There was, Tree observed, a surprising amount of sand beneath Warren's bravado. A lesser man would have crumbled by now—he had expected it to happen, and found himself curiously pleased that it hadn't. Now, after the one minor outburst, Warren clamped his mouth shut and turned to stare stonily ahead.

They climbed another mile and Tree looked back again, saw nothing, and urged the weary horses on. Caroline drew alongside and crinkled her nose at him. At that moment Josie Earp, looking down the backtrail, said, “Oh, shit—Oh, Jesus Christ!”

Tree's attention whipped down the mountain. He saw them then—Floyd Sparrow's bunch, the white horse in the lead, coming up from the trees not three miles below.

Josie said, “Sweet Jesus, get us out of this.” She was talking to Wyatt.

Wyatt put his hooded eyes on Tree and said, “Don't you think this damned foolishness has gone far enough now?”

It was Caroline who said, “What's the matter—afraid you won't make it to Denver?”

Earp's eyes, flashing bright for a moment, receded under drooping lids; he said nothing more.

Dead weary, Tree pushed them on. He kept looking back, kept getting glimpses of Floyd Sparrow's determined gang, and knew without being told exactly what Sparrow wanted.

The hard pressures of pursuit, fatigue, vigilance constricted him like iron hoops drawn painfully around his chest. He glanced at Wyatt Earp and knew the man was getting rattled. He felt acutely embarrassed, as if he had blundered in on Earp's privacy. All during these endless hours of riding he had communicated very little with Earp but he still hadn't shaken the possibility he was doing Earp an injustice, Rafe or no Rafe. Nothing was simple, he thought; particularly in questions of guilt. There were no innocent men.

The horses clambered uphill, heaving and beaten. Tree looked at Earp again and found Earp chewing his lip. Earp caught Tree looking at him and straightened up in the saddle with an expression under his mustache that might have been a sullen snarl; Earp said, “Sparrow's the kind of man who won't mind shooting the lot of us whether we've got our hands tied or not—fish in a rain barrel to him.”

“What do you want me to do?” Tree snapped.

“I know,” Earp said, with imperfect sarcasm “you've got your stupid duty to do.”

Caroline, overhearing, let her horse drop back and said angrily to Earp, “Maybe just one time in your miserable life you ought to try pretending the rest of us are almost as good as you are.”

Earp tried to shrug with disdain. “I'm only pointing out the odds to your pigheaded friend. Why should all of you have to die over me?”

Caroline cried, “People are always deliberately choosing to die around you. All the people who absolutely
force
you to kill them!”

“I didn't kill your husband,” Earp snapped.

“You did everything but pull the trigger!”

“Nonsense!”

“You could have stopped Cooley,” she said, with scorn.

“You're babbling,” Earp grunted, and stirred in the saddle, looking back and making a face. “Can't we speed this up? Or are we going to dawdle and wait for Sparrow to ride right up?” He poked his face toward Tree: “Maybe you made a private arrangement with Sparrow to sell us out?”

Tree tried to keep the anger off his face. Earp's raucous bleatings were the signs of a man cracking up. Where was the man's courage? Earp hadn't once tried to escape—waiting for Cooley, maybe? Or just using his head, appraising the “odds” so coolly? Earp was a poker player—maybe he'd started out with a plan of some kind; but poker was a game in which you lost if you hesitated too long before bluffing. There didn't seem any getting around the obvious fact that Wyatt Earp was losing his nerve.

Not sure any more, Tree was enraged—enraged more by disillusion and his own uncertainty than by anything else, even Sparrow back there. Everything he had taken for granted seemed to be falling apart. He had, in a strange way, believed in Wyatt Earp; it had been important to him. Now either Earp was folding up, or it was some fantastic trick designed to get Tree off guard.

The thought grenaded into his mind, and he clung to the possibility almost with relief. He realized: he
wanted
Earp to try to escape.

Then Earp crushed him. Earp said, “Maybe you ought to think what it could mean to you to have the gratitude of men like Wayde Cardiff. I'm offering no bribes but you need to be reminded of reality. Damn it, all I want is a fair chance against those red-eyed sons of bitches down there.” He was brooding back toward Sparrow's bunch.

“Good God,” Tree said, his voice grating hoarse. “Shut up now, will you?”
Shut up before you destroy yourself!

He gigged the tired horse ahead.

The sun went down behind them, a vivid splash of colors across the mountains. The horses were played out; it was an agony of stumbling hoofs and slip-sliding boots, all the riders on foot now, leading the animals. Tree posted himself in the rear, guarding the backtrail. The pass was in sight, clearly silhouetted against the stars as night came down full; and they kept plugging stubbornly toward it until, dropping across a rocky bowl of ground, Tree called forward softly, went past the line, and spoke to Gant: “They can't see us in this hollow. We'll turn left and go north through the gully until it peters out.”

“Take us north of the pass,” Gant grumbled.

“Can't be helped. We'll go over the north side of the mountain. It may just lose them.”

So they turned, keeping to the concealment of the lateral gully along the flank of the mountain, hoping Sparrow behind them would keep going straight up for the pass. Tree dropped back to the rear. He felt stunned by weariness. His footing was bad, his eyesight played tricks on him. Once up ahead he thought he saw Obie Macklin stooping by a rock, doing something, his knife blade glinting dully. When Tree reached that area he gave the ground a close search and finally found it: a round quartzite stone the size of a hat, with bright, fresh slashes across its top, three parallel straight lines—a signal in private code. Sparrow, knowing what to look for, would spot it immediately. So, there it was. Tree closed his eyes and gathered himself, marshaling strength, and strode forward, dragging the horse, clambering past the rest of them until he caught up with Macklin.

Gant and Macklin were talking in subdued tones; they drew apart when he approached. Everybody halted, without needing instructions. Macklin caught some sign, even in the starlight; he stiffened arid said tentatively, “What's wrong with you?”

Tree said, “That's all for both of you. Shuck your gunbelts.”

Gant said, “Huh?” and Macklin at the same time said, “What the hell's all this?”

Tree shook his head. “Drop those belts and then sit down and take off your boots.” His palm curved over the sliphammer gun. Macklin and Gant looked at each other; then, as if on prearranged signal, they dived in opposite directions, both clawing at their revolvers.

The sliphammer gun fired—once—at Gant's big shadow, and whipped across toward Macklin. The little man was rolling under the belly of his horse, snapping off a shot. The report of the gun was startling. Muzzle flame lanced forward. The bullet went wide somewhere and Tree fired at the only target visible beyond the horse's shadow—Macklin's head. Bone fragments and blood sprayed from the skull. The horse reared, slipped on the loose rocks, and fell on Macklin, crushing his body underneath.

Tree spun, crouching, toward Gant, but Gant hadn't fired at all: clearly Tree's first one had hit him somewhere. His bodily functions had lost control; there was the sharp stink of human urine and manure coming upwind from Gant. Tree got to him in four strides and found him dying.

Macklin's horse scrambled for footing and ran in terror, back the way they had come. Gant's horse wanted to run too but it was joined by rope tether to the prisoners' horses; it reared and stayed put. Caroline stood back there with the birdhead .38 in her fist, aimed at Wyatt Earp, who hadn't moved a muscle after crouching down and whipping Josie flat to the ground.

Tree walked away from Gant, taking a deep breath and letting it out, went past Macklin's body, and reached for the reins of his horse. “That gunshot will bring them on the run. Get mounted.”

Josie said in a cracked voice, “Dear God. But those—” she was staring at the bodies.

Tree said harshly, “Let Sparrow bury them.” He led his horse over to Wyatt and Josie, glanced at Warren's shocked face, and said in a bitter, clipped way, ‘They were blazing a trail for Sparrow—Sparrow had to get you out here alone, away from Cooley and the rest of your friends.”

“How long have you known that?”

“I just got proof. Do you want to argue about it or get out of here?”

“Untie my hands first,” said Earp.

“No. I'm not done yet. Now damn it get mounted.” He swung toward Caroline: “You'll ride Gant's horse and lead the others.”

She didn't ask questions; she went to Gant's horse. The stirrups were far too long for her and she had to ride with her feet dangling. They left the dead men on the ground and went out as fast as the bone-tired horses would move them, curving broadly northeast, then east, then back toward the pass, because there was a chance Sparrow would not double back after finding the bodies. And the pass, now, was the fastest way across.

Fourteen

In the pass, the night wind sliced through Tree as if he were naked. His horse turned a fetlock and went lame; he swapped over to the spare animal but even without a rider the lame horse couldn't keep up with the slow pace, and he had to unsaddle it and turn it loose. With a game leg it wouldn't drift far and Sparrow would surely pick it up. Luck had turned all bad; this was just one more thing that couldn't be helped. Wyatt Earp's remarks, delivered at intervals, were snappish and bitter. Josie swore in a monotonous voice, going through her limited vocabulary of obscenities and then going through it again. Warren was the silent one; his eyes were shut half the time and he was probably half drugged with sleeplessness, so tired he just didn't care any more. Of the five of them, only Caroline didn't seem to have run out of stamina.

Beyond the pass the slope was a downgrade but not an easy one. Steep slides alternated with boulder-littered humps. At intervals they trotted, walked, and got off to lead. Tree kept looking back, expecting to see horsemen on the skyline. The moon rose, a pale, thin rind. They walked down into the forest of scrub pine and high mountain piiion and Caroline broke off unripe pinon nuts to chew. By the time dawn broke across the Rockies, there was a glaze on the surfaces of Tree's eyes that made him blink continuously to keep it away. He felt as if he had gritty sand under his eyelids. His legs were numb stumps, blistered and uncooperative. Wyatt Earp had developed a tic above his right cheekbone; his eyes were raw, sunk back behind dark pouches. He had gone hoarse and stopped talking an hour before sunrise.

They ate on the move. Around nine o'clock they entered the upper fringe of taller pine forest and at the edge Tree looked back once more. Still no sign of Sparrow: had he lost them? It didn't seem possible. They went down through the dry timber-land, zigzagging through canyons to stay dff the visible high ground. He checked the ropes which lashed the Earps' wrists. There was a raw-rubbed spot on Warren's left wrist that was ugly red with scabbed blood but Tree didn't loosen the ropes. Warren hardly seemed to recognize him. Tree scraped a hand across the abrasive stubble on his jaw, pinched his eyes with thumb and forefinger, and looked up to see they were near the edge of a promontory that looked down past a tortured series of gorges and ridges into a deep river valley. The sun, in the east beyond, reflected painfully off the rushing river several miles below and the steel ribbons of railroad tracks running along by the river. Tree looked at Caroline and said, “The Arkansas. If these horses get us that far we'll flag a southbound train and ram through to Denver if I have to hold a gun at the engineer's head.”