“Good idea,” Anders said.
“Safer than huntin' them higher up where the trees is thicker,” Dick said.
Pete was relieved. He was glad Dick and Mort were with him. The three of them ought to be able to handle that old galoot and the boy.
A flock of doves flew out of the piñons as they rode through them. Their wings whistled like tiny flutes as they passed, twisting in the air like gray corkscrews, and then they were dark, silent specks in the sky until they vanished in the scrub along the lower slopes. A quail piped from somewhere in the distance, a plaintive call that made the back of Pete's neck prickle as if spiders with hairy feet and fuzzy legs were crawling up to his hairline.
The call reminded him of when he and Luke were waiting for those two survivors of the mining camp. They had tried to imitate the quail's whistle, using it as a signal to each other that they were there, waiting and ready. Their whistles must not have fooled the old man and the boy.
They reached the little knoll and when they got there, Pete pulled the field glasses from his saddlebags and slung them around his neck. There were a few scrub pines for cover, their dwarfed trunks bent by wind and weather, stunted. Little water held to the ground in such a place. But they had a good view of a long stretch of trail. It was a good enough place for an ambush.
“If we get off our horses,” Mort said, “we'd have some cover. Not much, but some.”
“Good idea,” Dick said, swinging out of the saddle. He jerked his rifle from its sheath once he was on the ground. It was a Winchester '73, loaded with .44/40 cartridges. He levered one into the chamber and stood behind one of the scrub pines.
Mort and Pete dismounted, too, and took their rifles in hand, moving to cover, their boots scraping on rocks. A clump of prickly pear clung to the hillside, its spines running with sunlight as if they were liquid. Pete stepped around it and knelt down behind one of the small trees. He leaned his rifle toward it, nestled the barrel on a crotch where he could reach it easily and quickly.
He put the glasses to his eyes and focused on the highest point of the trail. The glasses filled with trees and rocks and he swept them wide and then up and down.
“See anything?” Mort asked.
“Yeah, I see something.”
“Them?”
“No, just trees. The trail. You think they're just going to ride up now that we're here waiting for them?”
“No need to get smart about it, Pete.”
“Well, if I'd a seen 'em, I'd have called it out, Mort.”
Mort didn't respond. He knelt down, too, and smoothed a place for his left knee. That didn't help. Small stones dug into his flesh.
Ants scurried from a small mound nearby. Mort looked at their red-and-black bodies, their quivering antennae, their spindly nervous legs. He began to sweat as the sun bore down on them.
“I hate waiting,” Dick said, after a while. “And we got ants up here. Long as we don't bother 'em, maybe they'll leave us alone.”
“Shut up, Dick,” Mort said. “Sound carries a long way up here.”
Dick nodded.
They waited, listening.
Pete glassed the trail, steadied on the trees that hid what was above them. His knee hurt from his weight pressing it down into the sharp pebbles. An ant crawled across the toe of his boot. He stood up.
“Whatcha doin', Pete?” Dick asked.
“Leg's goin' numb.”
“Yeah.” Dick stood up, too, flexed the leg he had been leaning on to bring back the circulation. Mort looked at them and licked dry lips. He lifted his knee slightly and rubbed it.
“Yeah,” Mort said. “Time for a stretch. Hell, them two might take hours to get down this far.”
Then, they all stiffened as they heard a clatter of rocks up in the trees where the trail emerged.
“What was that?” Pete said, clawing for the field glasses.
“Take a look,” Dick said, holding his rifle in front of his chest with both hands, ready to bring it to his shoulder.
Mort assumed a fighting stance as Mort brought the glasses up and pressed them against his eyes.
A horse emerged from the line of trees, trailing its reins.
“What the hell . . .” Pete said.
“Ain't nobody on that horse,” Mort said, in a gravelly whisper.
“Shh,” Dick said.
The horse braced itself as it slowly stepped down the trail's incline.
Pete took the glasses away from his eyes, reached down, and grabbed his rifle.
The horse stopped, whickered. Then it turned its head and looked back up into the trees.
Pete's mouth went dry.
Â
Ollie and his men negotiated a dry wash. The horses' hooves rang on stone as they stepped across the rocky flat.
They all reined up a second later when they heard, far off in the distance, the faint crack of a rifle. The sound echoed down to the them, sounding like the sharp snap of a bullwhip.
Then the sound died away into a deep silence. The horses stood like statues, leg muscles quivering, chests flexing with the rhythm of their breathing.
It was a long time, or seemed so, before they heard another rifle report. This one made a different sound, deeper, louder, not as sharp-edged, and the echoes seemed to go on forever as it sought that same desolate silence as before.
Ollie felt his throat go dry and begin to crack inside as if suddenly parched for no good reason.
An odd feeling came over him. He didn't like it because he couldn't define it. It felt as if some voice inside him was telling him to run, to ride fast and never look back.
It wasn't fear, exactly, but it was a crawling thing inside his mind, a creature that bore no name and made no sense.
The feeling he had just then was that he had heard rifles firing, but they were so far away that he could not put faces to the shooters. It seemed, he thought, as if those rifles had been fired by ghosts.
And who was dead? Who was going to die?
His hands turned clammy with sweat, and his skin crawled with centipedes as if someone had walked across his grave.
15
THE MORNING SUN STIRRED UP BREEZES ON THE GREAT PLAINS. Its heat warmed the land, generating vagrant currents of air that swirled and mixed with the cool zephyrs surging lazily down from the Rocky Mountains. Small whirlwinds, dust devils, churned across the grasslands, whipping up dirt and pollen in their vortices, dancing across gullies and washes like some capricious dervishes, before gusting into lifeless dust that floated back to earth and vanished. As the sun's rays burned ever westward, warming the cold earth, molding the wet clay and the mud, the breezes soared and sank, blended with other air currents high and low, whispering through brush and trees, carrying scraps of messages in its currents and sounds it gathered along the way, dashing some to pieces, lifting others on invisible pinions that carried them far before dropping them like dust from the brief flights of ephemeral whirlwinds.
The breeze blew against John's face and he heard small bits of garbled sound that made no sense at first. Then, his senses interpreted those sounds as fragments of human speech, far off voices that faded in and out, as if a passing wind had listened in to a conversation and carried pieces of voices and words that made no sense, but were clearly identifiable.
He stopped his horse and held up a hand. Ben halted his horse, too.
“Listen,” John said.
But the scrambled voices died away and the zephyrs carried only the whispers of a light breeze.
Then John heard it again. A man's voice. Then another, different voice on top of that one. It was almost maddening because he could not pinpoint the speakers nor the direction from which the sounds had come. Yet, they came from the east, below him. He wet a finger and held it up. Yes, the light breeze was coming from the east, from the lower elevations below them. Not on the trail, but from another place, off to the left.
“You hear it, Ben?”
Ben shook his head.
John pointed off to the left, cupped his ear to pick up the sounds.
A rattle of rocks so far away his ear might have been fooled. Then, a low voice, a human voice, bearing part of a word, pieces of a sentence full of gaps and holes.
He turned back to look at Ben.
Ben shrugged. John pointed to his own ear, then nodded in the direction from which the sounds had come.
Ben cupped his ear and leaned forward in the saddle.
“Da . . . Ol . . . Pue . . . Foun . . . qua . . . ick . . .”
“I hear 'em,” Ben said, in a loud whisper. “Far away. Down in there somewhere. Men on horseback, maybe. Comin' this way.”
“Let's see who it is,” John said, easing his rifle from its scabbard. Ben pulled the Henry up by the stock and rested it on the shoulder of his pommel.
The two rode down to the fringe of trees and dismounted. John slipped his rifle from its scabbard. On foot, they walked to the trees that halted at the rimrock of the shelf they were on and peered down at the open valley dotted with scrub and rocks, clumps of chaparral and cactus. There, on the knoll, they saw the three men crouched down, rifle barrels glinting in the sun.
“Yonder's the one that got away from you, Ben,” John whispered. “The one called Pete.”
“I recognize him. Them other two look familiar.”
“One is called Dick, and I think the other one is named Mort.”
“You got a good memory.”
John said nothing. He studied the men. They were within rifle range, but their bodies were concealed. A bullet could deflect and they could turn their rifles toward them and return fire.
He gestured to Ben as he stepped back from the tree cover. Ben followed him until they were back where they had ground-tied their horses.
“We got to get their attention,” John said. “I want 'em standing up.”
“How you figure to do that?”
“Give me a minute.”
Several seconds went by and John heaved a sigh.
“They're watching the trail,” he said. “Lookin' for us.”
“I reckon.”
“If you were to run Gent down there, they'd see my horse and maybe come out of hiding.”
“They might shoot your horse just for practice, Johnny.”
“I want to make that Pete pay for what he done, Ben. If you were to ride up behind Gent, but keep to cover, you might get one of the others.”
“I might. I might get one. What about you? You'll be afoot.”
“I'll walk down there and take out the other one if I can.”
“Might be best to shoot their horses first. Then they can't get away.”
John's forehead wrinkled as he gave that idea some thought.
“I'm still going to dust that Pete.”
“Sure.”
“You shoot the claybank and that bay. The sorrel belongs to Pete. I'll put that one down if I can.”
“Their rifles will be barking, too, you know.”
“I know. Those men came back to pick us off, Ben. I think Ollie and the others are riding toward Fountain Creek.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Those three don't look too happy. I think they were left behind to finish us off, while the others rode on to Pueblo.”
“Reading minds again?”
“Nobody down there except those three. Beyond where they sit, there's no cover in range. I think these three are by their lonesome.”
Ben snorted.
“Sounds logical.”
John snickered at the two-bit word. But it was the right word.
“Let's do it. Don't drive Gent down the trail out in the open until I have time to get set.”
“I won't be able to see you, Johnny.”
“Give me five minutes. I'll be set by then.”
“Done,” Ben said. He mounted Dynamite. John handed him Gent's reins.
“Good hunting, Ben,” John said.
“You, too, Johnny.”
John walked back to where they had observed the three men on the knoll. He lost sight of Ben, but could hear the faint chink of iron hooves on stone. He walked to the edge of the tree line and saw that the three outlaws were still there, squatting behind scrub pines, watching the trail.
He had been counting, trying to measure the minutes. Now he pushed the numbers out of his mind and concentrated on Pete, who was nearest him. A flicker of doubt ticked a corner of his mind. It was one thing to shoot at a man in self-defense, another to just kill a man who had no idea a bullet was coming in his way.
Was what he was about to do right? He was going to kill a man in cold blood. Just shoot him. End his life forever.
He thought about Alice and his mother, his father. He thought about all the others those men had helped slaughter. None of those murdered had stood a chance against these heartless killers. They deserved to die, maybe in the same manner. The flicker of doubt quivered, wavered, then vanished as he thought about those three men, what they had done, the looks on their faces when they had shot dead all of his friends and family.
Then he saw Gent out of the corner of his eye. The horse stepped out, down the trail, its reins dragging in the dirt. The man named Pete stood up and then reached down for his rifle.
John brought the Winchester to his shoulder. He eased the hammer back to full cock, squeezing the trigger slightly, so that the mechanism made only a dull scraping sound. He set the blade front sight on Pete's face, square on the nose. He brought the rifle into alignment so that the blade dissected the rear sight slot. He drew in a shallow breath. His finger took up the slack in the trigger and he squeezed.
The rifle bucked against his shoulder with the force of the recoil as the powder exploded. White smoke and sparks spewed from the muzzle and he thought he could hear the whiz of the bullet as it sped toward its target.