The Last Hard Men (18 page)

He could hear the taut dry constrictions of Hal’s breathing. The intruder seemed to have halted behind the trees just outside the tripwire. Within fifteen or twenty feet of the horses. The man must be able to see the blanket-wrapped dummies from there, the saddles and gear lying about. He would suspect the dummies for what they were. But his mission was to alert Burgade, not to evade him. The man had to move.

But he didn’t. A drop of sweat formed on Burgade’s forehead, ran down his nose, and dripped onto the back of his left hand. Had the intruder spotted the tripwire? Burgade’s grip on the .45 tightened. He suppressed the sudden urgent need to reach around and scratch the small of his back.

Then the intruder moved, crossing fast from pine to pine—Burgade saw his outline quite plainly, and then, between the trees, the tripwire caught the man just above the ankles and spilled him.

The man fell toward the ground with quite a bit of noise, grabbing at branches to stop his fall. Burgade ran forward five paces, the noise of his own movement covered by the intruder’s tumble, and stopped with a clear view of the man.

“I’ve got a gun aimed at you, friend. Don’t move a whisker.”

The intruder hesitated, both elbows on the ground; but it was all right. He’d made his decision when he hadn’t started shooting at Burgade’s first word.

Burgade moved slowly forward, holding the revolver balanced on the man. “Come on, Hal.”

The intruder was an amorphous shape in the poor light. But any movement would draw Burgade’s fire, and the man seemed to realize that. He didn’t stir.

Burgade stopped six feet from him. He handed the torch to Hal and got the matchstick out of his mouth. “Stay behind me. Light that and let’s have a look at him.”

The match exploded into light. By that illumination Burgade took one step forward and kicked the rifle away from the intruder’s black fist. He reached down and plucked the revolver from the belt holster. Hal had the torch lighted now. The intruder showed his alarm: wild white rings showed around the pupils of his eyes.

“George Weed,” Burgade said. “Stand up and walk over by the blankets.”

Weed got to his feet, surly and sullen. He didn’t talk. He went into the clearing. The buttstock of Hal’s rifle protruded from its saddle boot and Burgade saw Weed eyeing it. “Go ahead. Pick it up and try for me.”

Weed shook his head. “You’ve unloaded it.”

“Sure.”

“So you wouldn’t of shot me. You was bluffing. You wouldn’t of done it.”

“But
you
would have.”

“You bastard, Burgade. You motherfuckin’ bastard.” Weed turned around and pulled the crotch of his Levi’s down and said, “All right, hell, you got me, now what you going to do with me?”

“Tie you up,” Burgade said. “Hold my gun on him, Hal. If he tries anything, shoot him.”

“Yes, sir.” Hal’s voice was without tone. Burgade sat Weed down on the ground and tied his hands together behind his back with a rawhide piggin’ string. He tied the ankles together and used Weed’s own belt to hook the ankles and wrists together so that Weed couldn’t straighten out. Burgade kept one eye closed during the entire business and when he had tested the knots and found them secure, he stood up, still with his eye shut, and held his hand out to the side, and spoke to Hal behind him: “Now hand me back my gun and go douse that torch in the stream.”

The torch moved away from his back, throwing his bobbing shadow longer along the ground and then fading back among the trees. When he heard it sizzle in the water, he opened the eye he had kept closed. It had not been blinded by the light and now, with the one eye, he could see Weed well enough. He slid the revolver into leather and walked back across the tripwire to the spot where he had waited in ambush; picked up his rifle and brought it back into camp. Hal had come back from the creek, still carrying the soaked torch for some reason—Burgade said dryly, “You can throw that away now.”

Weed said, “What you expect to get out of this, anyway?”

“You were supposed to be a stalking horse, George. You were supposed to let me spot you and then you were supposed to lead me back into Provo’s ambush. Fine. Now you’re going to tell me where that is.”

“Stick it up your ass, Burgade. You don’t get nothing out of me. Nothing, motherfucker, nothing.”

Burgade ran his hands quickly over the man’s pockets. Nothing in them but odds and ends. But in Weed’s boot he found a sheath knife. He slipped it out and tested its blade with his thumb. It was a squat heavy knife, made for animal-skinning, not for fighting. It had gone rusty and a little dull. He locked its handle in his fist to weigh the knuckles and suddenly clouted Weed across the side of the face.

Weed’s head rocked back against the ground. Burgade heard Hal gasp.

A few tiny raindrops came down through the trees. Burgade felt one strike the back of his hand. His knuckles began to hurt. “I can beat on you for a while, George, until my hands get tired. And then I can start cutting you up with this rusty knife of yours. I don’t mind if you bleed to death.”

He heard Hal’s taut breathing, full of disapproval, but he didn’t look around. He only said, in the same calm voice, “Now, you know Provo doesn’t give a damn about you, George. He picked you to come out here because he figured you were the most expendable of all of them. When you don’t come back he’ll know I’ve got you. But it won’t worry him. He won’t do anything about it. You don’t owe him anything, George. And you may as well forget about that buried gold of his, because you’ve got no chance to get at it now. Either I slice you up and leave you here to bleed to death, or you tell me what I want to know, and I’ll leave you tied up until I’ve done my business here and then we’ll take you back to the law. That’s your choice.”

“Choice between you killing me and the law hanging me? Hell, Burgade, you got to do better’n that.”

“Maybe if you tell me what I want to know, Provo’ll kill me. Then all you’ve got to worry about is getting yourself untied. You might get away clear.”

Weed showed a double row of white teeth. “Now, there’s a thought, ain’t it?”

“Where are they, George? Where’s my girl?”

Weed told him.

Nine

Shelby came awake irritably. Somebody was kicking him in the butt.

“Come on, get up. Your turn to stand guard.” It was Joaquim Quesada. Shelby rolled over and saw it hadn’t been a kick after all. Quesada had been hitting him with the stock of his rifle.

“Jesus,” Shelby complained. “The hell time is it?”

“
Quién sabe
?” Quesada lay down and wrapped a blanket around him.

Shelby picked up his .30-30 and walked off a little piece, and sat down in the grass. It was a surly night, the sky was black and wild. Dim suggestions of enormous cloud banks drifted overhead. Somewhere to the west he saw the reflections of sheet lightning, a flicker through dark mist: it meant the lightning was somewhere beyond a thick haze of falling rain.

Provo had picked the most exposed spot on the map to camp. Shelby huddled in the chill night and tried to see out across the meadows. Menendez was sitting up on the far side of camp, by the horses, watching that way. The grass was cropped down short—Navajo sheep had grazed it and moved on. There wasn’t a tree for half a mile in any direction. The flat dish of grass was surrounded by mountainsides. A creek came down out of the peaks and ran along the lower end of the meadow before it spilled over a waterfall into a canyon beyond; the creek-bank trees, maybe a thousand yards away, were the nearest cover of any land. Shelby felt isolated, exposed, and nervous, even though he knew there wasn’t a rifleman alive who could make a bullet count at that range.

They had come down into the meadow by a round-about switchbacking route. When Provo had chosen the campsite, out in the middle of the grass, Gant had exploded in anger. Provo had ignored him completely: the only remark he made was, “Rivers can be as changeable as women. That creek’s changed its course some since last time I was here.”

Portugee had yelled and bitched. It was a setup for an ambush. They could be surrounded. It was a trap. Menendez had laughed at him. Provo had said, “Only two men after us. How’s two men going to surround anybody?”

Shelby knew he was right. It made perfect sense. Burgade couldn’t come within range of them without showing himself on the meadow. There was no cover. But what the hell did Provo intend to prove by all this?

And there was another worry. He could already begin to make out the vague shadow-streaks of falling rain above the slopes immediately to the west, illuminated by frequent bursts of lightning. In a few minutes the storm would be on top of them. It could conceal Burgade if he came then.

Shelby unfolded his oilskin slicker and put his head through the poncho hole. He laced it up around his throat and sat with the poncho flowing around him, a tent that covered him from the neck down. He stared into the cool opaque night with wide eyes and kept shifting his grip on the rifle. Once, he thought he saw something move in the corner of his vision; he whipped his head around and stared. Nothing. He swallowed and glanced across at where Menendez was sitting, but he could no longer make out Menendez’s shape in the impenetrable black.

He knew his fear was irrational. They were eight against two—or anyhow seven against two; Weed hadn’t come back yet, but nobody expected him before dawn. But groundless or not, fear was a constriction against which Shelby pushed with increasing resentment.

The drumming crash of the thunderstorm awoke the others; there were rustlings and stirrings, men wrapping themselves in oilskins. Shelby walked over to where Susan Burgade lay. Provo had tied her hands behind her and hobbled her ankles. Someone had thrown an oilskin across her. Shelby couldn’t tell if she was awake. She didn’t stir when he bent down over her. He straightened up after awhile and walked back to his post.

There was rain. It came down hard and sudden, as if dumped out of buckets from treetop height. Fierce lightning licked across the sky in fragments and stabbed toward the earth, brought down by metal in the mountain rocks. Inside of a minute the water was funneling out of the trough of Shelby’s hatbrim, dripping down the back of his neck, getting inside the collar of the slicker. Within a few more minutes he was soaked through.

“Easy, Mike. It’s me.”

Provo’s voice made him jump a foot off the ground. Shelby turned and said, “Christ, Zach.”

“Can’t see anything in this rain anyway. Let’s you and me go sit with missy.”

“She’s all right. I just checked her.”

“I know. But Burgade might take a notion to come in tonight, use the rain for cover. If he does, he’ll try to find his girl and ease her out of here without us seeing him.”

Shelby went, with him to the girl. She hadn’t moved. Provo didn’t sit down. He stood above the girl, a tall lean shadow in flowing oilskins. Shelby sat down on the wet ground and brooded miserably into the rain. A shaft of lightning sizzled down not half a mile away and thunder crashed immediately. The rain was a steady splashing racket.

The waiting rubbed his nerves. He tried to occupy himself by making plans, thinking about the gold, deciding step by step where he would go and what he would do. Australia, he thought. Or East Africa. Ride from here up across the Four Corners into the Rockies. Get outfitted in respectable clothes in Ouray or Silverton, so he wouldn’t attract attention. They probably had his picture on post office walls, but he had an ordinary young face, likely nobody’d spot him if he just used his head, kept calm, didn’t act like a fugitive. Ride the coach on up through Grand Junction and up into the Jackson Hole country. Up past the Tetons through Cody, on up by Butte and Helena and right through into Canada. If the money looked short he’d knock over a country store or two, but do it at night and wear a mask so nobody’d see his face. Keep moving, that was the trick. As long as you kept moving and didn’t shackle yourself to anybody else, you’d be all right. Loners always had the best chance because there was nobody to betray them.