“In the house.”
“I don’t have time to explain. Lie down here and watch the road.” His chest was on fire. He could actually hear his heart pounding. “Yell the second you spot anyone.”
She started to say something, and he cut her off. “Don’t ask questions. Just do what you’re told.” He pressed her down, then ran toward the cabin, and Claire was standing stark-faced in the open doorway.
“Don’t tell me.”
“Three of them in town. They can’t be far behind. We need to pack and get out.”
“You’re sure? There isn’t any doubt.”
“None at all.” And he was slipping off his knapsack, taking out the gun belt and buckling it on. He checked the revolver to make sure it was loaded and holstered it. He hooked the knife in its case onto the gun belt.
“Here,” he said to Claire. “Fill my knapsack the same as yours and take them and the saddlebags out back. Grab the blankets off the bed.”
“Daddy, someone’s coming.”
They looked at each other.
“I’ll meet you where the trail starts,” he said to Claire. He turned, racing back toward Sarah, and she was standing out there, pointing toward the road.
“Someone’s coming! Someone’s coming!”
“Get down,” he told her, diving, knocking her down into the grass, crawling to the edge of the slope, and they were coming all right, the same three in their red-checked hunting shirts and jeans and field jackets, small down there, hiking up the road through the trees toward the open slope. Except that they all had rifles now, not just the one with the mustache, and now that he looked harder, none of them had a mustache, and neither of them were twins, and one of them was round-faced instead of thin or square and another was stocky and these weren’t the same three at all. They were coming in shifts. And they were so sure of themselves that they were just walking casually in the open.
Or maybe the other three were in the woods behind the cabin.
“Get moving,” he told Sarah. “Your mother’s waiting at the trail.”
But she didn’t move, and when he looked, she was holding her stomach, gasping from when he had knocked her down, and he had to grab her, dragging her back with him, saying, “Hurry, sweetheart. You’ve got to go.”
She ran, holding herself, toward the back of the house, and he was rushing into the front, up the stairs to the tower on top, the only spot in the house from where he could see them. He had to create a diversion, slow them, force them to think he was making a stand from the house, and the moment he came dodging to the side of the open window up there, he was drawing his gun, firing three times blindly, recoil kicking, watching them scatter as he fired once more and ducked out of the tower toward the stairs, hearing the ca-rack of a high-powered rifle, the window shattering loudly behind him.
He nearly fell rushing down the stairs. He swerved around into the kitchen and out the back door and Claire and Sarah were up there where the trees started, waiting on the trail.
“Those shots,” Claire said.
“Came from me. Don’t worry about it.” And then they were moving again, him hoisting the knapsacks up, one over each shoulder, Claire lifting the saddlebags, running awkwardly, Sarah racing short-legged ahead of them. It was cool in under the trees, the branches bare, leaves spread crisply yellow all around them. There were fall birds singing and then the birds stopped and he ran harder, thrashing through the leaves, working up through the trail between the trees toward the upper level.
They’ll hear where we’ve gone, he thought.
But there wasn’t anything he could do about it and he was too out of breath to worry about it anyhow, and then the trail turned to the right, grew steeper, turned to the left, even steeper, and they came bursting out of the trees into the sunlit level clearing up there.
They came so loudly, so abruptly, that the three horses skittered nervously in the corral, backing off, neighing, into one corner. He had found this place the second day after they’d come here. A log-fenced corral with water and feed troughs and one tumbled-down equipment shed from where the cabin’s owner must have kept his horses during hunting season. That was what had given him the idea of the horses in the first place, and he had brought Claire and Sarah up here to show them what to do if trouble came, going over with them what they’d learned when he had taken riding lessons, and each day he’d come up here to feed and exercise the animals. In the end he’d even persuaded the old man to let him have one of the bays instead of the lame sorrel, and he’d pretended to be unhappy about the pinto even though he was secretly glad because a horse that small was perfect for Sarah, and if the buckskin was blind in one eye, at least it could run and he thought he knew enough to be able to handle it.
“Help me with the saddles,” he told Claire, dropping the knapsacks, shouldering open the door to the shed. Claire was dropping the saddlebags, helping him heave the saddles up onto the fence, and Sarah was doing exactly what she’d been told, running around the corral to where the horses were, climbing onto the fence and shooing them over toward the shed. He paused just a second to make sure she wasn’t getting into trouble with them, and then he was grabbing the bridles from the shed, vaulting the fence, waiting till a horse came near, the pinto, slipping a bit into its mouth, hitching a halter up over its ears, buckling it. He slid a saddle blanket down over the pinto’s back then eased a saddle onto it, cinching it, going on to the next horse, the bay this time, while Claire tied a pair of saddlebags onto the pinto behind him.
It was taking too long, he told himself. They’ll be up here any minute.
He tried to hurry, but that only made him clumsy, and he needed to slow and do it right, finishing with the bay, turning to the buckskin, and the buckskin shied away and he had to waste time calming it.
“I hear them. They’re coming,” Claire said.
She was right. The trees down there were echoing with the sound of someone rushing up through the leaves.
“Open the gate,” he told Sarah, helping Claire buckle on her knapsack, easing her onto the horse.
“Get going,” he said, slapping the bay, and it bolted through the open gate, breaking into a sudden gallop, almost dropping her. He picked up Sarah and set her on the pinto, slapping it as well, telling her “Hang on” as the pinto bolted through the gate following Claire across the clearing, and then he was finished with the buckskin, buckling on his own knapsack, swinging up into the saddle.
The thrashing in the leaves was so close now that the sound wasn’t even echoing anymore. He kicked the buckskin sharply in the ribs, and digging its back hooves into the ground, the horse charged forward, lurching so close past one side of the open gate that he had to lift his leg to keep from crushing it.
Ca-rack and something whunked into the trees ahead to one side of him. He kicked the buckskin harder, forcing it faster across the clearing, his holster thumping against his leg. He saw Claire and Sarah galloping up through the trees and the trees were looming closer as he heard another ca-rack, a simultaneous whunk, and this time something was punching against his back nearly jerking him off his horse as he leaned close to the horse’s neck, frantically kicking, thinking, your knapsack, it’s all right, you’re not hit, they only hit your knapsack, and then he was into the trees, galloping up after Claire and Sarah, and there was another ca-rack, another whunk, this one just past him into a tree, bark flying, but it didn’t matter because the trees were too dense now for them to get a shot at him anymore and he was riding hard up toward the sound of hooves thudding and for now he was safe.
The light changed almost immediately. He glanced up through the dark bare branches of the trees, expecting clouds, and saw instead that the sun was already half down behind the western crest of the mountains far off to the right up there, swollen, flooding the forest with red. A half hour till dusk, and then an hour till dark. They had to get as far off by then as they could. He could hear where the two horses were thudding up ahead of him to his left now, and he reached to where the trail turned up that way, easing off on the half-blind horse, letting it pick its way carefully. The trail straightened, angling higher, and he needed to lean forward, clutching the saddle horn as the horse surged up over the top, jostling him, picking up speed across another open level toward Claire and Sarah galloping. He saw Claire kicking her horse, hooves pounding into the sparse brown grass, clods flying, Sarah’s pinto following, and he was kicking his own horse faster toward them, gaining, coming up behind, and then they were all three together, angling to the left across the level toward another trail up through the trees.
They took it one at a time, Claire leading, Sarah in the middle, and then they were up on yet another level, angling left again, always left. It was the way he had practiced with them, the way he had shown them on the terrain maps he had bought in town. If somebody came, they needed to get as far up into the mountains as fast as they could, and the route they were taking was the only way.
Two levels up they finally saw it, a sheer wall of rock that showed clearly on the terrain map and the narrow wash of boulders and shale and rotting timber that was the only way up through it. The map hadn’t shown whether they could climb it though, and this was the farthest he had come to scout, clearing some of the timber, charting a route, and he knew it was a chance but it was their only chance and they needed to take it. The next route up over this cliff was twenty miles to the right.
They came galloping up to the base of it, reining hard, dismounting. The horses couldn’t have kept up this pace anyhow. The sun was almost down behind the mountains, the air suddenly cold and gray, and his eyes were watering from the rush of the ride as he rubbed his sleeve across them, staring up past the cliff walls on both sides toward the gray-white tangle of rocks and timber that stretched up the quarter-mile wash in front of them.
“My jacket,” he told Claire. “In my knapsack. You and Sarah put yours on too.”
It was a brown woolen jacket with a hood. He had chosen it to blend with the autumn color of the mountains, Claire’s and Sarah’s the same, and the moment he finished buttoning it, feeling the sudden heavy warmth against him, he grabbed his horse’s reins and started up through the fallen timber, crisscrossing, working as hard and as fast as he could, first this way and then that, the horse struggling to hold back on him as he stopped to let it find a better footing before he urged it farther on. He slipped, scraping his face against a boulder, righting himself, tugging steadily on the horse’s reins, glancing back to make sure that Claire and Sarah were keeping up, that they weren’t in any trouble. Claire was doing fine but she wasn’t getting much speed, held back by Sarah in the middle who was having problems scrambling up herself, let alone leading a horse behind her.
“Daddy, I can’t make it!”
“You’ve got to. Take your time. Take it one step at a time.”
And then she was angling nearer, and he started up again, working this way and that, past boulders, in and around mazes of timber, shouldering logs painfully to one side. He glanced back toward where they’d come through the trees. Nobody. He looked up ahead, and the top of the wash seemed as far away as ever.
Keep moving.
“Daddy!”
He looked back, and Sarah was leaning exhausted against a rock.
“Don’t stop,” he told her. “You’ve got to keep moving. We’re almost there,” he lied.
And little by little she pushed herself off from the rock, struggling with the horse, and then the horse reared up, almost kicking her as she fell out of the way between two boulders, and the horse struggled to turn in the narrow space and lunge back down the slope.
“Don’t move,” he yelled to her, tying his horse to a log, scrambling down toward her. “Don’t move. Tuck your legs in.”
He was coming down fast, jarring his shoulder against a stout branch on a log, holding himself, wincing, as he made it down, one hand out now to quiet the horse, saying, “There now, there now,” settling it, for the first time noticing the echo of his words.
“It’s all right now. Come on out,” he told Sarah, and she was crying, frightened, exhausted, and he should never have tried to make her lead the horse up in the first place, a miracle that she had got it up even this far.
“We’ll leave one horse here for now. You’re coming up with me,” he told her, holding her, and then to Claire. “Tie yours. Bring the pinto. I’ll come back for yours as soon as we make it up there.”
He didn’t have time to quiet Sarah much, just to dry her tears and kiss her once, holding her, and then he was helping her up to where he’d tied his own horse, sending her on ahead, Claire working up with the pinto behind her, the bay standing tied farther back down there, looking blankly around, confused, alone.
Maybe it was because she was frightened or maybe in a kind of hysterical shock from when the horse had nearly kicked her, but Sarah made it to the top well ahead of him and at least she was safe, and wanting to have someone up there with her he worked even harder up through the rocks and timber, reaching a barren open stretch near the top, hooves clattering on the smooth weathered stone slope, up over the top into wind and scrub grass and a seemingly endless sweep of trees. Sarah was slumped down against a boulder, her face white, breathing hard, the wind blowing through her hair. He touched her going past, tying his horse to a nearby tree, slipping off his knapsack, rushing back to the edge, and Claire was just then coming up over the top. He pointed warningly toward Sarah behind him, rushing on past, down the slope toward the horse they’d left behind. A jumble of rocks spilled out from under him, bouncing down the slope toward the horse, nearly hitting it, flying past as the horse tried to rear up and avoid them, and he needed to take things slower, glancing now at the horse, now at the tree line down there, expecting any moment to see the red of their hunting shirts as they ran up onto the level.
No, he thought. Night coming, they’ll go for horses first. They won’t try to come for us on foot.