The Eye of the Hunter (17 page)

“Sometimes the figures shock you! They say, Henry, you'd need a cartridge they don't make! Savage doesn't make it, Stevens doesn't make it, Marlin doesn't. A shell called an H and H Magnum might be close. The solution lies in using exactly so much powder and a precise amount of lead. For the Hunter, it meant that to carry the trees and come down fast would require a special shell. I don't think there's any doubt of it.”

Fascinated, Frances watched his hands drawing out a slim brass tube. “Well—where could he get it, then?”

“He could make it. Take something like an old Sharps buffalo load and modify it. Start at .50 caliber and neck it down to .45. Throat it to use a couple of paper patches, for maximum spin when the bullet left the gun. But I'm still bothered,” he said with a sigh.

“Why?”

“Because even with the leaves on the ground and the right load, no sniper could hit that stump the first time. He'd have to make a dozen practice shots first. He'd need a spotter, too—he couldn't take an hour's hike every time he fired. So he's got a cohort. A man down here flag-signals him where he's hitting. Bullets are dropping allover the camp, and the spotter hides behind a tree.

“Then the Hunter finally hits the chair. When he puts five or six shots in a six-inch circle, he's ready. But those ranging shots leave holes, Mrs. Parrish! And I don't see holes—only the one that, urn, killed him. The slug's still in there, by the way. It didn't go through the wood. I'll dig it out later.”

Frances shrugged. She was involved in all this speculation up to the eyebrows, but like most women, she hated guns. Their minds just turned off when they saw one of the nasty things.

But he persisted. “Don't you see the problem in all this shooting? It had to go on when Rip was at the ranch! But why didn't he notice the holes when he came back? If he was them, he'd say, ‘Hey, Rip! Don't you think maybe that chair isn't the healthiest place to sit?'”

Then he opened his pocketknife and carefully inspected the stained seat in the ancient stump. For the first time he noticed a long, dark stain that might be grease, but might also be blood. The chair back was a concave slab of soft silvery-gray wood. He went to work like a furniture refinisher. Scraping the juniper revealed a fine-grained pinkish heartwood with an aroma like that of a cedar chest. Tough breed of tree! he thought. Dead twenty years, maybe a hundred years old, and still aromatic.

The blade caught on something harder than juniper. He squinted, made a sound, and beckoned to Frances, who stood across the fire ring, pinning her hair up.

“What do you see?”

He stabbed at a blemish in the wood, perfectly round, about a half inch in diameter, and resembling a dowel in a piece of cabin furniture: End-grain wood instead of the long straight grain of the body of the piece.

“What is it?” she asked.

With the point of the knife he pried at the foreign wood until it loosened. After digging out some of the wood around it, he managed to extract a dowel of the same kind of wood as the chair. About three inches long, it was apparently a section cut out of a small branch.

“Practice shot,” he said. “He plugged it and then smoothed it over. Stained it with coffee or something so it wouldn't be noticeable. Let's go up and see if he left me some cartridges....”

Frances said they would have to walk. The only way to the bench was by a trail only she and the foxes knew about. The dome rested on the flat bench like a derby hat on a table. From the front it appeared inaccessible, but she said it could be scaled from the back. Along the lofty edge of the dome ran a capstone that looked like the parapet of a castle. In fact, Frances said, it was the wall left by prehistoric people.

She led the way up a sandy path in the middle of the canyon, through tall clumps of saw-edged bear grass and oak brush to the nearly vertical west wall of the wash. The base was hidden by brush, but Frances pushed straight into a thicket and disappeared. He followed her by the moving brush and the clouds of choking dust shaken from the leaves. When he caught up with her, she was standing at arm's length from the stone wall, pointing.

“There!” she said.

All he saw was a narrow crack in the rock. “That?” he said.

“Oh, come on, Henry! You Missourians! Don't you know anything about mountains? Walk sideways, like a crab....”

She slipped into the passage, disappeared, and called back, “Like that! Come on!”

Henry held his rifle over his head and squeezed into the slot. His belt buckle scraped in front and the hip pockets of Rip's Levi's dragged in back. Oh, my God, he thought. He had a native dread of tight spots. But stumbling over rubble, swearing under his breath, he scraped along. Hard freezes and ages of waterborne sand had chiseled out this narrow crack in the stone. He wouldn't call it a trail. In another thousand years it might be one.

“Henry?” she called, from far ahead.

“Hello,” Henry muttered.

He struggled on, sweating and swearing, as the heat thickened and tiny stinging gnats sang about his ears. What if he became delirious again? What a place to get sick! Frances could no more drag him out of here than she could a dead steer. Why, a dead man couldn't even fall down in this place!

Then, to his relief, he saw her only a few yards ahead in a sort of chamber an arm span wide, floored with the trash of dead branches and the litter of generations of pack rats. It was the end of the trail, or the beginning, for he could see that a miniature waterfall had cut away at the solid rock until it opened a crack. Propped against the wall, a dead piñon tree made a natural ladder to the ridge above.

Frances clambered through the dry, brittle branches and Henry scrambled after her, eager to get out of the torture chamber.

He emerged onto a narrow ridge running straight back toward the wash. Barely wide enough for a path, it was swept by a breeze that the Hunter must have worried about. Winds ordinarily died at sunset, but what if—? So he might have had to make a last-minute decision on windage.

Frances stopped and faced west, her arm pointing. “We rim out there—at the black mesa. And north where—well, someplace—and you can see most of our landmarks from here.” She looked at him, flushed. “I watched a sunset from here once. You can't imagine—!”

“Bet I can. Bet the Hunter watched a few sunsets, too.”

They had to walk north, then, as far as they had walked south up the blind canyon, and it was rocky going, the ridge stripped down to bed-rock. Tough mountain shrubs had their iron claws in the rock, and the wind hissed through little twisted piñon trees. He had been timing the trip, and as they reached the bench he looked at his watch. Thirty-five minutes and they weren't on the cap yet.

He moved to the edge of the bench in the strong breeze. Frances watched his pleasure as he discovered the scene below. From here, the camp looked like a railroad company's advertisement for a projected town in some grim wasteland where they were selling city lots.
There
was the mine opening,
there
the stone corral; and the wash ran east and west a few hundred feet north.

But because of the trees, the shot would not have been possible from here. So if there were any evidence of what had happened, it would be up on the dome.

Frances cried, impatiently, “Come, Henry!” and headed for the southwest face of the dome. Here it had crumbled to a talus slope of boulders piled against the solid stone like gravestones dumped from above. She shaded her eyes to peer up the slope, then started nimbly up the rocks.

Henry muttered and followed her. Damned ague had left him short of energy. His ears were ringing when they reached the summit, a roughly square space forty or fifty yards across. Weeds grew everywhere, and brush, and in places the Indian walls had crumbled. They were built close to the edge of the bluff on the north and east sides, and were constructed to last.

They crossed the dome to a seven-foot wall made of flat stones. In its center was a narrow vestibule through which, he supposed, people were supposed to enter—a full-height inlet into a tiny room, with egress to the outside. Unwelcome strangers would arrive single file, to be shot or clubbed as they came.

He stepped outside. There was a path a few yards wide clinging to the wall. He peeked over the edge of the cliff—a typical lovers' leap above the meadow a few hundred feet below. Frances was already out of sight around a bend in the wall; he heard her calling. When he caught up, he found her looking at a heap of stones like a surveyor's monument, at the very edge of the cliff: Flat rocks had been dragged there and stacked a couple of feet high. At one end the stones stepped down to a ledge, forming a seat.

“I suppose that's an altar or something,” Frances said.

Henry chortled. The dominoes were beginning to fit. “No, ma'am. That pile of rocks really makes an old sniper sentimental, Miss Frances.”

He got in position on the seat and rested the forearm of his rifle on the ledge. It gave him an absolutely steady rest for the gun barrel. Once set, he could adjust the sights quickly and be ready to fire. Then, after the kick, he could reload and lay the barrel back exactly where it had been. To demonstrate, he sat on the bench and looked for a target down in the meadow. He picked one of the horses, got into the marksman's position, and squinted across the iron sights. He said, “Ahh!” raised his head, looked around, and told Frances, “That's how it was done. He sat here like a schoolboy and took his tests. Went to school here and graduated that night.”

“Summa cum laude,” Frances murmured.

“How's that?”

“Pig Latin.”

“You went to college to learn Pig Latin?” Henry's spirits soared like a hawk. He had added all the numbers, and everything tallied. At least, almost everything.

“No, but I learned to write prescriptions and play the mandolin.”

“Did they teach you how to find bottlenose shells? I need one of those even more than I need Pig Latin.”

Frances looked at the ground. “Would he leave any?”

“Not the practice shells. He'd be able to find and pick them up. Except maybe the ones that went over the bank. Those would be down there on the bench.”

They looked around, brushing away leaves, turning flinty stones. Frances found the first shell. It had lodged in a bush a few feet below the rim—a bit risky to reach, so he had left it there. Another shell snuggled under the rock that formed his seat, out of sight. Frances retrieved the cartridge in the bush, but after looking the second one over, Henry said, “Let's leave it—let the sheriff find it.”

He took a breath. “And now, one last question. We know how he did it. And I think we know why. But what I don't know is why he went to all the trouble of shooting a man from up here, with a special rifle! Why not just lay for him near the camp and knock him out of that chair?”

Frances blinked. Then she smiled. “Oh, it's like the leaves—I haven't told you all the little details. He couldn't get near that camp without Richard's knowing! Richard might have shot him first.”

“Why?”

“The dog! Richard had the smartest dog in creation, according to him. It could smell a horse or a man a half mile away, or hear him a mile off. No one could ever have crept up on him. You see?”

“But what happened to the dog?”

“The Hunter shot him, too. That was the last shot I heard, later that night, when the man came down to drag the body away.”

Henry felt vastly better. As fine a job as the Hunter had done of getting the right gun, the perfect shell, and his sniper's roost, all that effort just hadn't made much sense, somehow.

But the dog explained it.

While Frances made sandwiches, Henry inspected the rusty mining equipment and peered into the mine. The machinery had been there for a coon's age, he was sure, and the meager size of the mine dump showed it had not been tunneled very far into the cliff. Using the little Army bull's-eye lamp, he explored the mine but found nothing more exciting than a mummified bat hanging against the rock wall.

If Rip Parrish had been finding silver, it must have been in the form of church artifacts and money the padres had held out on the king of Spain. He caught the horses and let them back to camp. Frances, anxious to leave, told Henry that if they left now, they would be home well before dark. She had started packing while he was exploring the mine. Henry said, “Sure,” saddled the horses, adjusted the packsaddle on the mule, and decided to get it over with.

“Do you know a woman named Catalina Cachora?” he asked.

Frances, brushing her hair, looked at him oddly. The sun made the dark plaits gleam like a racehorse's hide.

“Of course. She was the woman Richard was living with. She and I said adios, all very friendly, and she rode away on her burro. Oh, wait,” Frances said, frowning. Brush in hand, she gazed down the meadow. “That's funny. She went the wrong way! She couldn't have gotten out with the burro. It's a blind canyon. Yet she didn't come back—that I know of, at least.”

Henry scratched his neck. “Yes—that's what she told Father Vargas. That she had to come back.”

“Well, I didn't see her. I must have locked myself in the cabin by then.”

“Probably. And you never came out? Just fired that one shot to scare him off?

Frances pointed the brush at him and demanded, “What is it, Henry? What did she tell him?”

“She said she saw you cash in his chips.”

“What?”

“Shoot him.”

Her eyes closed, Frances clenched her fists. “That is a
lie
! It happened precisely—! What exactly did she tell him? What?”

“That she ran away from the camp but got boxed in and had to come back. And that—that she saw you shoot him and he fell out of the chair.”

“She was too scared to know what she saw! She only
heard
the shot—and I suppose saw him fall. But I was barricaded inside the cabin!”