The Eye of the Hunter (16 page)

“Yes. But I can't swear to it.”

Henry dumped the big oiled canvas roll on the ground and left Frances to spread it. He led the horses and mules to the mouth of the side canyon, put them inside the stone fence, and closed the Texas gate—three strands of rusty barbed wire.

He went back and placed himself in the heart of the treasure hunter's camp. With one foot on the seat of the massive stump, he looked around. Overhead, the shadowy branches of a blackjack oak meshed in a dense web. He tried to see the big half-dome butte he had picked out as such a fine sniper's roost when he first laid eyes on it; but the trees overhanging the camp completely blocked it out. So if Rip Parrish had indeed died on this juniper throne, he had not been shot from the dome.

The throne had the rough elegance of Shaker furniture, made to accommodate people's bodies but not to coddle them. The stump was a full four feet thick. Someone had simply sawed a tree off about six feet from the ground, possibly for timbers for the church. Then a later woodsman had made a horizontal saw cut halfway through this tall stump, lopping it off at the comfortable height of about twenty inches. Finally the soft juniper wood had been split right down to seat height. Now there was a seat and a back. Either long usage or someone with an adz had hollowed and smoothed the back and chamfered the edge of the seat, creating a fine place to sip whiskey with friends, to look at treasure maps and swap yarns.

Frances was building a fire under the sheet-iron oven. She called, “Do you see it?”

Henry had just spotted it—a round hole about eighteen inches above the seat and dead in the center of the chair back. He pushed the tip of his ring finger into the hole. His pip knuckle was just an inch in diameter and made a fair thickness gauge for estimating calibers. The hole seemed to have been drilled by a .50 caliber slug, maybe even larger, a bullet from some freakish gun barrel like Budge Gorman's.

Right through the brisket.

Henry wouldn't mention it to the widow, but it had taken a little bone into the chair back with it. He could feel something sharp in there. Tomorrow he would dig it out.

“So he was sitting here when he was shot?”

“Henry, I'll tell you when we get our breath. Slice me some of that ham, will you?”

Humming, Henry got to work. As a bachelor, he understood that kitchen chores did not do themselves, and he worked with skill and a deep pleasure that he and this woman were performing a rite of important domestic significance. How might it be phrased?
With this skillet, I thee troth?

By the time they had washed the dishes, the firelight had crumbled to coals and the daylight was gone. Frances dosed him with his quinine and he put on a pantomime of distaste to make her smile. Afterward he sat on the stump, but she said quickly: “No! Don't
ever
sit there.”

He knew she was ready to tell him about Rip's death now. She was rubbing her hands together as though they were cold. She stood up from the flat rock where she was sitting.

“I'm sure he died there,” she said. “But I was in the cabin when I heard the shot. I'll show you. There's a candle there, if the packrats haven't eaten it.”

Henry lighted his small Army lamp. Frances led him to where the cabin huddled against the bluff. She took the tin lamp and illuminated the planks of the homemade door; though thick and iron-strapped, they were beginning to rot, and there were the cuneiform marks of an ax blade. Then she pointed out a splintered hole, high up.

“That's my shot.”

“I wouldn't brag about it. Couldn't even have taken his hat off.”

“No. But it scared the wits out of him. So he left me alone.”

“What was he doing? What was the problem? Little marital disagreement?”

Frances pushed open the door and led him into the musty-smelling cabin. Somehow the packrats had failed to fill it with rubble, and even the canvas Army cot looked clean. She found the votive candle and Henry lighted it. She sat on the bed.

“I was sitting right here praying, and he was out there chopping his way to his fair lady. He was drunk, and probably ashamed that I'd caught him out—no, I'm wrong—there was no shame in the man. So he was going to win my hand by ... raping me. Finally, when I couldn't stand it any longer, I fired at the door with that Peacemaker you like so well.”

“I didn't say I liked it, Frances. It's just purty. I like a Smith and Wesson double-action better. Were you actually afraid of him?”

“Well, what do you think?” she cried. “Sitting there like a helpless sacrificial maiden?”

“You helpless?” Henry sat down close beside her and took her hand. “You're a brave lady, and as ingenious as a crow. Tell me about that night, from shuffling the cards to who won the pot.”

She told him that after the shot had driven Rip away, back to his banjo and wine bottles, she had finally fallen asleep....

But she had been awakened by a shot. It was one loud crashing shot from a distance, and after it she had heard the echoes still pouring down the canyon. And, amazingly, she thought she heard a last nasal chord from Rip's banjo! Then a cough, and a heavy, sprawling thud.

She was afraid even to look outside. If Richard had been murdered, and anyone knew she was in the cabin, then she might be killed, too!

After what she reckoned was nearly an hour, she heard another shot nearby, then scuffling sounds, gruntings like a wild pig rooting in the camp, and finally splashing noises from the creek.

And that was the end of it.

In the dawn light she looked over the camp. Sparrows were pecking about the ground and her horse was grazing near the creek, saddle still aboard but skewed to one side. From the fire hole trailed a last bit of smoke.

But of Richard there was no sign. Holding the revolver in both hands, she went to where he had been playing his banjo and sipping wine. Gouts of blood on the chair and the ground made it plain that her husband had been shot and his body carried away.

“So I just kept quiet about it.” She sighed. It was almost dark now. “I didn't want to be accused of his murder, or even be involved—I just hoped it would all fade away like the dream. I cashed the checks, but I could hardly tell Mr. Manion what had happened, or he'd write Sheriff Bannock, and there I'd be again.”

“Well!” Henry said cheerfully, smashing his palms together. “Let's clean out this cabin, Frances, and fix you up a bed.”

“Where will you sleep? Don't be too far away....”

He was tempted to say, just to test the waters, “Why, I'll sleep right beside you,” but it was no time for joking.

Frances spread her bedroll on top of the old, stale-smelling blanket. Then, as Henry prepared to depart, she looked wistfully at him. Her braids traced her bodice almost to the waist, and the shadows in her face stirred him.

“Where will you be?” she asked anxiously.

“I plan to be on the roof,” he said. “The parapet is a soldier's dream. Good night, Frances.”

“Duerme con la pierna suelta!”

Notched into the cliff, Henry discovered, was a sort of stone stairway to the roof. The roof itself was of the familiar Mexican construction: layers of close-laid willow wands for a ceiling; then earth; tarpaper or tar; and in this case a layer of dry leaves. He unrolled his blankets on the leaves.

Then, in the old jungle style, he lay motionless a while with all his senses turned. Overhead, the stars blazed whiter than he had ever seen them, and the Milky Way spread a glowing phosphorescent path. He tried to understand something—how Parrish could have been shot from any of the cliffs with the trees hiding him—but his mind went out of focus and he slept.

Shortly before daylight, his rifle slung, Henry climbed the bluff behind the house. He found a vantage point among some boulders and got comfortable. Yawning, he sat cross-legged with his rifle on his lap, sipping cold coffee from a canteen and watching the dawn come with shades of lilac and pink. But beneath the lovely feminine tones of the sunrise, the landscape emerged like some old religious picture of hell. Crazy volcanic horns and ribs erupted from the land, and little peaks rose like fangs. Among them stood black buttes naked as stumps. A visiting hellfire preacher might accept this as a vision of Hades and go home to describe devils taking their ease beside rivers of ash in dead canyons, while starving sinners sifted the clinkers for morsels....

He started, realized he was dozing.
Wake up, Henry!
he thought.
You haven't gone to hell yet, but you will if you let the Hunter catch you napping
.

Putting his hunting scope to his eye, he searched for the dust or smoke of travelers, but saw nothing to think twice about and craned forward to scrutinize the camp below him. He saw a flake of fire, and smoke rising through the trees: Frances was up and doing the chores.

He could see the executioner's chair, and ran his eye from it to the top of the half dome, towering a hundred feet higher even than the bluff where he sat. A bullet, though allowing for a high, arching trajectory, would have to tear through the foliage of the oaks, and certainly be deflected. Nor could Rip have been seen on the stump! So Frances was clearly wrong about the season of the killing. The trees must have been bare, so that the bullet would have had some chance of threading the needle through the bare top branches.

But that spelled winter—not spring.

Down below, he saw Frances looking for him, Rip's carbine in her hands. With her black hair hanging, and in her leather skirt, she looked like an Indian woman. He whistled and she looked up and waved, and wondering how you accused a woman you loved of lying about a murder, he started down the bluff.

While Frances cooked a line rider's breakfast, Henry wandered about the camp, counting Rip's wine and whiskey bottles. The wine was local, but the whiskey was a national brand that made him thirsty. He might have been an interesting man to know, an amusing friend. A friend for a man, that was, not for a woman. He had heard that Arizona was hard on women and horses. Rip evidently loved to sit around drinkin', pickin', and singin', to make a show—drink whiskey in cemeteries and make friends with beautiful women. Well, the man had had impeccable taste there.

And the man loved to gamble, of course.

What was the gamble he was making out here? Was there actually free silver in that mine? Because there was no ore-pulverizing equipment, none of the other enormous paraphernalia of ore reduction.

Yet he was banking pure silver.

Frances called to him. Sitting on empty dynamite crates, they ate salty ham between slabs of sourdough bread and drank strong coffee. Without discussing it, both avoided the executioner's chair. Frances, looking drawn, had pinned her hair up and pulled on a Mexican blouse with red embroidery. But her hair kept straggling down, and she seemed nervous, biting her lip and brushing at wisps of hair. Her face was thinner and there were blue smudges under her eyes. She was losing weight, and she'd had none to spare. He wished he could put her to bed for a week and take care of her—return the favor.

She managed to smile at him as he refilled her cup. “You look like a beat-up old cowboy,” she said. “Do you feel feverish?”

“Ma'am, I am at my malarial best.”

“Have you taken your quinine?”

“Hey, I was just going to.”

He went through the quinine pantomime while she giggled, and he wished again for a little whiskey.

Afterward he put the rifle to his shoulder and used the scope to reconnoiter the brushy delta of the side canyon, the rock wall that enclosed it, and the bluff. But when he tried to aim at the dome atop the bluff, he saw nothing but a blur of green.

“Can't be done.” He sighed.

“What can't?”

“If Rip were sitting on that there stump, Frances, the Hunter couldn't have hit him from anywhere but right here. Where I'm sitting—or you. Because look up—can you see the dome?”

“Of course not. I'll take you up there after breakfast, Henry. You can see the whole county—there's an Indian ruin, a lookout or something. Without the leaves on the oaks, you'd have a perfect shot at the stump! If you can picture the trees bare, and Richard sitting there ...

“When the leaves are on the ground,” Henry agreed, “there'd be a good chance. But I think you said April.”

Frances looked at him blankly, then smiled. “Oh, my, I see your problem now! You're looking at the trees like a Missourian. But these are good old Arizona blackjack oaks, and for some strange reason the leaves hang on all winter. And then, first thing in March, they drop! In April the branches are still bare. Richard was killed in April, two weeks before the oaks greened up.”

Henry stretched and said, “I can't tell you how glad I am to hear that. If you told me a little green man came out of the mine and shot him, I would make every effort to believe you. I would sift the county for little green men. But who else would believe you? Whispering George Bannock? Ben Ambrose? No, ma'am—before this news hits the sidewalks of Nogales, we've got to cook up a believable story.”

She looked at him archly. “‘Cook up'? Isn't that something dishonest lawyers do?”

Henry laughed. “Well, dishonest lawyers and honest gunsmiths.”

“I really am not lying, Henry,” she said.

“And I'm not lying when I say I'm going to figure out how that shot was made. It's all in the numbers, Frances. The Hunter knew his tables. Damned genius,” he said. “One shot? Impossible! But he did it.”

“What numbers?”

He considered how to simplify a very complex equation. He began with descriptive motions of his hands.

“Numbers like how far the bullet has to carry. And how high, in order to clear the trees. Bullets don't travel flat, you know—they climb,
a lot
, lose speed, and drop. The tables will tell me how high a trajectory. Five or six feet, at least. And the slug's got to start fast, reach just the right elevation, and then dive like a red-tailed hawk—not fall like a stone.