Trackdown (9781101619384) (23 page)

He didn’t hear anything, which was good. He had almost reached the rocks when a glowing spark fell out of the sky and landed in front of him, startling him into catching his breath.

It was the butt of a quirley one of the outlaws had tossed off the top of the spire, he realized. That was proof they were still up there.

The question now was how long they were going to stay up there.

Bill couldn’t answer that. All he could do was wait and see. He started crawling again, going around the still-glowing cigarette butt, and a few minutes later reached the base of the towering spires.

Bill rolled against the rock and lay there for several moments, resting and gathering his thoughts. He knew that where he was now, the outlaws couldn’t see him, so he climbed to his feet and leaned against the chalky stone wall.

While he was waiting there, he saw a small orange glow on the prairie. As it grew larger, he knew it had to be the campfire he had told Overstreet to have Josiah Hartnett and the other men build. If Bill could see it, he knew the men on top of the spire could, too. They had a better view of it than he did and could estimate that it was several miles away.

Now to see how they would react, he thought.

A moment later he heard voices. He couldn’t make out the words, but they were having quite a discussion up there. Bill figured they were talking about whether to go ahead and pull out now that the posse had retreated and the ambush had failed.

On the chance that they would, Bill knew he had to get around on the other side of Castle Rock where the horses had to be.

As silently as possible, he began working his way around the formation toward the other side. He stuck close to the rock. When he reached the last spire, he slid along its base and held the rifle ready in both hands as he followed the curve of the formation.

The last of the sunlight was gone now. The sky was black from horizon to horizon, but millions of stars dotted the blackness and cast a faint silvery illumination down on the earth. In that dim light, Bill made out two dark shapes that had to be the horses.

More important, he heard a rock clatter down the spire. Tilting his head back, he looked up and saw another shape, this one man-sized, moving against the lighter face of the rock.

“Careful,” the other man said from the top of the spire.

“I know what I’m doin’.”

He was moving down too quickly to be descending by way of handholds and footholds, Bill realized. Those outlaws were canny. Sometime in the past, a man had climbed to the top of the spire with a rope and attached it somehow, so they could get up and down easier. Even with a rope, the descent had to be nerve-wracking, and a man would still have to be pretty careful.

Clearly they didn’t trust the rope to take the weight of more than one man at a time, because the second man didn’t start down until the first one was on the ground. Bill knew there were only two outlaws because he could see two horses.

With his back pressed against the rock, just around the curve of the spire, he waited while the second man climbed down as well. The outlaw heaved an audible sigh of relief when his boots were on the ground again.

“I don’t know about you,” he said to his companion, “but I’d be happy if Caleb never sent me up on that damn rock again.”

Caleb, Bill thought. That had to be the leader of the gang. Bill wondered if this Caleb was the man who had grabbed Eden off the street.

The other man laughed and said, “It’s your own damned fault for bein’ such a good shot with a rifle.”

The second man let out a disgusted snort.

“You wouldn’t know it by what we accomplished today. I can’t believe we didn’t kill a damned one of those possemen.”

“Don’t worry about it. I don’t believe they’re really turnin’ tail, so you may get another chance at ’em.”

“I doubt it. They’ll never find the hideout.”

Bill stepped around the rock, brought the rifle smoothly to his shoulder, and said, “How about if I give you another chance right now?”

He didn’t wait for the men to react, although in his anger he hadn’t been able to keep from throwing out that challenge. His finger squeezed the trigger as soon as the last word was out of his mouth. He kept firing, aiming low and shooting fast as he worked the Henry’s lever. Muzzle flashes lit up the face of the rock formation.

The hail of lead tore through the legs of the outlaws as they tried to turn and claw the guns from their holsters. Bill didn’t give them a chance. He shot their legs right out from under them, his bullets ripping through flesh and smashing bones. Screaming, both men pitched to the ground.

Bill held his fire and rushed forward. One of the men tried to stand up and thrust a pistol toward Bill. Still moving fast, Bill used the Henry’s barrel to knock the gun out of the man’s hand and then backhanded him on the side of the head with it.

The other outlaw howled in pain, but he managed to get his gun out, too. Bill twisted away as the gun roared. He thought he felt the slug pluck at the side of his shirt, but that could have been his imagination.

He didn’t have time to be fancy, so before the man could squeeze off a second shot, Bill finished swinging the Henry
around and fired it one-handed. The muzzle was so close to the man’s chest that sparks from the shot landed on his shirt and started it smoldering as the bullet drove him back to the ground.

Firing a rifle one-handed like that was a good way to break a wrist, or at least sprain it, but Bill hadn’t had any choice. And at point-blank range like that, accuracy didn’t matter a whole hell of a lot, either. The outlaw was down and out of the fight, and that was all Bill cared about at the moment.

Another worry reasserted itself a second later. He whirled toward the first man and then backed off so he could cover both of them. He had no way of knowing how badly wounded the first man was. The outlaw might bleed to death, and Bill couldn’t have that. He moved around so that the first man lay between him and the body of the second one, then approached carefully. He set the rifle aside and drew his Colt as he knelt beside the outlaw.

Bill found a pulse in the man’s neck and felt relief at that. In the middle of a desperate fight like that, it was usually easier to kill a man than it was to wound him and take him alive. He picked up the pistol and rifle the man had dropped and slung both of them well out of reach, then rolled the man onto his back. He was still out cold.

Both pants legs were dark with blood. Bill holstered his gun and drew his knife from its sheath. He cut strips from the man’s shirt and tied them around his upper thighs, pulling them as tight as he could. That would slow down the bleeding, anyway, and maybe keep the man alive for a while.

A while might be all he needed, Bill thought.

He rolled the senseless outlaw onto his belly and cut another strip from the man’s shirt, then used it to tie the man’s hands behind his back. Once that was done, he cautiously checked on the second outlaw and found that the man was dead, just as Bill had thought he would be.

With those grim chores taken care of, Bill picked up his rifle again and fired three evenly spaced shots into the air. He was pretty sure Hartnett, Overstreet, and the other members of the posse had started in this direction as soon as they heard
all the shooting, but that signal would tell them that he was all right and it was safe for them to come on in.

By the time the posse rode up with a flurry of hoofbeats, Bill had dragged the unconscious outlaw over to the rock and propped him up against it.

“Bill, are you all right?” Hartnett asked anxiously.

“Fine, Josiah.” Bill didn’t waste any time on explanations or platitudes. He said, “I need some light. Somebody gather up some brush and make a torch out of it.”

One of the men came up a moment later and lit the makeshift torch with a lucifer. By the light of the flames, Bill knelt and cut away the outlaw’s trousers to examine his wounds. It looked like the man’s left thigh bone was broken, but his right thigh was just badly grazed. All the bullet holes were still oozing blood, but it wasn’t flowing freely anymore.

“That fella looks like he’s half dead,” Hartnett said.

“Half is fine as long as he doesn’t up and die the rest of the way,” Bill said.

“I don’t savvy,” Overstreet said. “Why do you care if this varmint lives or dies?”

Bill glanced up and said, “Because he’s got to live long enough to tell us how to find the hole where the rest of ’em are hiding.”

Night had fallen by the time the outlaws reached their hideout. Gloom had closed in almost as soon as they entered the sharp-ridged canyons with their prisoner, and as the sun set, darkness clamped down hard and fast on the rugged terrain. Eden couldn’t even see where she was going, but it didn’t matter because her captors seemed to know, and one of them led her horse.

They entered a narrow defile where the shadows were even thicker, so thick that moving forward was almost like pushing through black fog. Eden couldn’t see the rock walls on either side of her, but she could sense them. She thought that if her hands were free, she could have reached out and touched both of them. The outlaws were riding single file
now. The trail through these badlands was too narrow to do anything else.

Hannah rode right behind her. The redhead laughed and said, “You’d never find your way out of here even if you got loose now. And these rocks are sharp. They’d cut your shoes to ribbons and slice the flesh off your feet right down to the bone!”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Eden said quietly.

“Damned right you’re not.”

After what seemed like an hour or more of riding through that slash in the earth, the path opened up abruptly. Eden could see more than a slice of starlit sky again. They had come out into a bowl shaped like an irregular circle. It was about two hundred yards across at its widest point. The rough walls surrounding it were steep enough that while a man could probably climb them, a horse couldn’t.

The starlight was bright enough that Eden could also see several crude cabins with stone walls. Nearby was something that might be a brush corral; she couldn’t be sure about that.

“We’ll stand our usual guard shifts,” Caleb said as he reined to a halt in front of the largest cabin. It figured that one would be his, Eden thought. He went on, “Hannah, bring the prisoner in.”

“You’re gonna keep her in there with us?” Hannah demanded, not bothering to hide her irritation.

“That’s right. I want her where I can keep an eye on her.”

Hannah snorted and said, “You want to keep something else on her. You’re not foolin’ me, Caleb Tatum.”

So that was his full name. Caleb Tatum. Eden had never heard of him. Maybe she should have, she told herself. Maybe as a lawman’s wife, she ought to keep up with such things as wanted bandits.

Caleb dismounted and snapped, “Just take her inside.”

“And put her in your bunk?”

For a second Eden thought Tatum was going to answer in the affirmative. But then he said, “You know better than that. Make a pallet on the floor for her, and see to it that she’s tied so she can’t get away.”

That didn’t sound appealing, but right now Eden was going
to be grateful for any small favor she could get, like another night without being molested. That run of good luck was probably coming to an end soon, but any respite was better than none.

Tatum’s head came up sharply as the sound of distant gunshots drifted into the bowl. On their way deeper into these badlands, they had heard scattered shots several times, as well as one prolonged volley. Every shot Eden heard sent pain jabbing into her heart, because she knew the outlaws who’d been left behind at Castle Rock were engaged in battle with the posse. Bill might have been killed already…

She didn’t believe that, though. She was confident that if he died, she would know it, even at a distance of several miles. And every instinct in her body told her that he was still alive.

Now, after the shooting had been over for a while, suddenly there was another flurry of gunfire, and Eden had no idea what that might mean. It probably wasn’t anything good for her, though.