Wild Country (23 page)

"He's gone," called the man, not using the loud-hailer and not needing to. Someone called a reply. Another green flare hurtled up over the ravine, and Quantrill, looking down into the shadowy depths, saw a ledge of caliche which the flare had tinted a ghastly shade of bile green. The ledge was the width of his hand. Standing on that ledge, a man might drop to the slope and then into cover without breaking every bone in his employ. He found two more footholds, heard someone shout from below, and dropped onto the ledge.

Caliche is rotten stuff for compression loads. The ledge crumbled instantly, and Quantrill smashed both elbows against what was left of it on his way past. The impacts checked his fall but turned him slightly, and then he struck the steep slope at a hopeless angle, cartwheeling, hands outthrust to protect his head. He never saw the ragged hunk of caliche that powdered against his skull just above his left eye. and after that gigantic white flare burst inside his head he saw nothing at all.

Familiar pain… faint pressures of hands exploring his body… blankness… splash of lovely cool wet stuff. Vaguely, Quantrill knew he was swallowing water.

Bits of talk from several male voices.

"Nothin' broke that I can tell."

"Beats me why the sumbitch ain't in more pieces than a china doll."

A deep low voice: "He will be, if I know Jer."

"I seen this one someplace, Billy Ray. Rocksprings, maybe."

"Well, take his feet, goddammit; you expect me to tote him thru this brush and shit all by myself?"

Rough handling then, not vicious but clumsy, and a slow passage through foliage as tough as an acre of wire brush. Then curses, grunts, and cushions under his butt. The aft cockpit of a cycle, perhaps. A wave of nausea, then blank-ness again.

Later, Quantrill realized he was trussed and in a safety harness as a diesel thrummed in the chassis; headlights swept across him from time to time from a following cycle, and a cool wind fanned his face as they proceeded in darkness. When they stopped for a break, he managed with a struggle to sit up. They gave him more water, and a strip of salt jerked meat to chew. Against all odds, he still had teeth to chew it with.

"I think you're gonna make it,
pocho
," said one of his captors, half in wonder. The man was roughly Quantrill's age and, checking the swelling on his captive's forehead, clucked to himself. "You hearing any of this?"

Quantrill nodded, and thought his head would roll off onto the ground.

"What do they call you?"

Quantrill croaked the first thing that came into his head: "Sam Coulter. More water…"

From nearby, the strong deep voice: "Watch the fucker, L. J., he might sandbag you."

"And him hogtaped like this? Ease up, Longo, I'm just givin' him water." Quantrill took the canteen, his wrists taped together, and savored a full quart of it.

From what little he could see in the multiple glows of running lights, Quantrill estimated there were five of them; taciturn hired hands, men he had perhaps nodded to at Saturday dances or on the streets of Rocksprings. At least, none of them seemed to know his name.

"Gettin" on to eight o'clock," said the leader, the one others called Longo. "If that radio of yours is fixed, Billy Ray, call Concannon. Tell him we're an hour out." He mashed a cigarette underfoot, drew on his gloves, and swung into the forward cockpit of the lead cycle. Quantrill kept the canteen and managed during the next ten minutes to empty it without heaving any water up. He had been thoroughly bound with the modern cowpoke's standby, filament tape, his upper arms bound to his sides. He could not get his wrists anywhere near his teeth, and the effort was exhausting. He tried to stay awake but eventually slept again.

He woke in a modern, well-lit equipment barn as his captors were stowing their cycles. His driver, the wiry young man they called L. J., freed him from the harness, cut the tape at his ankles, and helped him stagger onto a cement floor. Then they prodded him forward, out the folding doors into a packed-earth yard bathed by an overhead sodium-yellow light. Standing alone, fists on his hips as he studied the latecomers. Cam Concannon shook his head as he looked into Quantrill's face.

Longo, the one with the resonant basso and a barrel chest to push it, jerked a thumb toward the captive. "Says his name's Sam Coulter. Poking around where that S & R crew picked up the limey."

Concannon's eyes flickered. "Coulter, huh? That's a good name, I reckon. Well, Mr. Coulter, you got some explaining to do." He turned to the other men, considering his words carefully. "You boys find fencecutters on him? Any brush-popper hardware?"

Quantrill stood there, weaving a bit, shaking the kinks from his legs as the men made their report. They'd found very little to suggest more than simple trespass. It seemed they had taken a careful look around his cycle. Billy Ray, it turned out, had brought the vet kit and the Nelson rifle along as evidence.

"This damn rifle of his sounded like a twelve-gauge, but it's just one of them vet guns. He coulda been tryin' to knock over a few beeves," Longo rumbled.

"Oh, sure," Concannon said, running a hand through his hair as he considered the idea. "Nothing to skin a beef, not even a balisong or fencecutters; how the hell was he gonna dress out anything more than a few steaks and get over a Garner fence with it?"

"I could've told them," Quantrill began, "but the first warning I had—"

Not loud, but fierce: "You shut the fuck up. Coulter," said Concannon. "You're a major pain in my ass. Think more and talk less 'til I get you in front of the old man." His gaze augered into Quantrill's. It said a little about fairness and a lot about caution when talking among these men. Quantrill sighed and brought up his hands to show the tape at his wrists.

"I see it," said Concannon, and laughed. "Hell, I ordered it. Damn good thing you didn't bag any Garner hands out there, or the tape coulda gone over your nose and mouth, too." Asphyxiation was a terrible way to die; as bad, perhaps, as the death of the skins. The foreman was telling him, as clearly as he could, that on Garner land a rough judgment might be followed up by summary execution.

And there were still more judgments to be made.

Quantrill had few illusions about that; he had already made a rough match between the deep-chested Longo and some records he'd studied in Junction. If he had carried his wallet with him, they'd have known his name immediately—and
Longo
might've whacked him on the spot. Maybe that was why Concannon was pretending to buy the "Sam Coulter" charade.

After a few more questions, and praising the men for a job well done, Concannon told them the cook was waiting with peach cobbler and waited until Longo had followed the others away into distant shadows. Then, with a shove on Quantrill's shoulder, the foreman aimed him toward the main house.

A big rectangular two-story pile of quarried limestone, Mul Garner's home loomed out of the dark, solid as some medieval fortress, its upper windows lit like hollow eye sockets. The place seemed all of a century old, with ornate woodwork tracing the eaves of its broad wooden porch. A tangle of rosebushes, all evidently dead of neglect, flanked the porch like barbed wire. The house might stand for centuries more, but the porch had seen better days.

"I'll just keep the tape on 'til the old man sees you this way. You need all the sympathy you can get, Quantrill." It was the first time Cam Concannon had indicated their earlier acquaintance. "I told you before, you and me never met."

"Right."

Concannon knocked, waited a moment, then opened first the screen door and then the big wooden door with a squall of hinges that had forgotten the taste of oil. Inside, the hallway floor was honest oak, innocent of covering, scarred from generations of men wearing spurs—some with Spanish rowels, to judge from the dotted scars. A broad staircase angled down to the big hallway, but Concannon steered his prisoner into a library the size of a bunkhouse. No, it was a parlor, but one built to entertain whole families. It spoke in a hollow voice musty with age of quilting bees and tired ranchers toasting their boot soles before a great fireplace that now yawned cold and blackened between bookshelves at one side of the room.

"We brung him in, Mr. Garner," the foreman called, mocked by echoes in two corners where antique floor lamps lit the recesses with rawhide lampshades. "In the sittin' room." He turned; saw Quantrill sniffing the air. "Them goddam Cuban cigars of his," he said with rough affection.

"They don't do his emphysema no good, but…" He finished with a shrug.

Quantrill, toeing the enormous hooked rug underfoot: "Nice old place."

Concannon, guiltily: "Needs fixtn'. When the missus was alive she kept me fart in' around here a day a week. But I can't be ever'place at once." He looked up, as if he could see through the high ceiling, following creaks of footsteps above. As the steps began to move down the staircase he added, "Wild Country Safari don't even know who-all's on its payroll, it's that big. They could have a dozen Sam Coulters for all I know, but you got your ownself into this, and your story's your problem."

Quantrill nodded silently, knowing that spoken thanks would be rejected. This way, Concannon could deny—even to himself—that he was helping this troublemaker.

The old rancher who stepped into the room had once been a giant of a man? Even with the big shoulders stooped he stood well over six feet in the western boots that poked out from worn denims, his turned-up sleeves revealing the corded forearms of a man who had wrestled many a fencepost into its socket. But from all appearances, Mul Garner no longer spent his days in the sun. He was pale, with a mane of white hair and sideburns he probably trimmed himself. His eyes were pale too, a piercing light blue of a color sometimes seen in Siamese cats.

Concannon stepped away from Quantrill; smiled half in apology like a disappointed hunter. "This is what the boys brung in, Mr. Garner."

But the old man—not so very old in years, though he had not been kind to his body—was already staring at Quantrill. "Goda'mighty. Cam, how dangerous can he
be?"'
He took Quantrill by one arm, looked at the livid bruise with blood now dried and cracking near Quantrill's left temple. Speaking now to Quantrill, pacing his words with the short breaths of a man with half the lungs he should have: "My foreman carries that hogleg forty-four, 'cause he can use it. I want your word he won't need to."

"I won't cause trouble," said Quantrill, with the faintest stress on the word "cause."

"Already did," said Mul Garner, and passed his hand across his leather vest. A flash of brass and polished bone, a flick, and the rancher had opened his balisong, the long-bladed Philippine equivalent of a switchblade.

Quantrill started to pivot, merely from reflex action; then stopped, realizing the rancher intended only to cut his bindings. Garner stood still and sucked a tooth for a moment. "I don't cause trouble either, young fella. And I only settle it when I have to."

"Sorry, sir. It's been a long day," Quantrill said wearily, and let the man slice the tape from his arms and wrists.

Garner was laughing to himself, a soft wheeze punctuated by deep breaths, as he stepped back and flicked the balisong shut with another sleight of hand. "You have a gift for understatement, judging from that goose egg on your forehead." He watched Quantrill rub his wrists, running his eyes over the trespasser. Judging. He chose a suede-covered chair, its back as high as a throne, settled into it as the others followed. Quantrill did not sit, because Concannon did not. "Let's have it, then; your name and story and whatever lame excuse you might have."

Long ago in army intelligence, Quantrill had taken crash courses in language; had never been sorry for it. Mul Garner kept the cadence and twang of Wild Country but had developed a wider range of pitch changes. His phrases were those of a man who might have acted in college plays, or perhaps he simply read as widely as Sandy. Perhaps a man with a romantic streak who would understand peculiar quests.

By now, Quantrill had a story ready. He was Sam Coulter, part-timer with WCS, he said; ex-army, now considering a career as a veterinarian with exotic game. "There's a Brit lieutenant who claims he ran up against the biggest boar in the solar system out here a day or so ago," he went on, "and I got curious. A boar like that would be worth more alive than dead, I thought." To himself, he added that it wouldn't hurt Ba'al's chances if Garner got the same idea.

Concannon: "That tallies. He was out near Faithful Creek on a WCS cycle with a vet's kit and a rifle that shoots hypos." A sudden grin, then, "Kept Billy Ray and L. J. pinned down for hours, told 'em it was a shotgun with boosted ammo."

"It's louder when you discharge it without a load," Quantrill chipped in. That told Garner he hadn't shot to kill.

Mul Garner had heard nothing of Wardrop's folly and spent five minutes questioning Concannon, irritated to find that an S & R crew had answered an emergency on his land without his knowledge. Turning again to Quantrill: "This is the dumbest goddamn story I
ever
heard. Coulter. Might as well go after a Brahma bull with a willow switch."

"That's what everybody told the Brit."

"It applies to you, too. I know that damn hog's been on my spread for years, and I know what he's done. Live and let live, I say. Even if you knocked him out with a hypo, how on God's brown prairie did you expect to haul him back to WCS on a two-man cycle?"

Quantrill told the truth: "I only figured on fixing him up, if he was hurt like the Brit said."

Garner sat back, shaking his white mane. "And make him your pet? Was that the idea?"

"Something like that."

"He'd eat your lunch and save you for supper. Coulter. They didn't name that hog 'Ba'al for nothing. He's a devil incarnate. I can't keep you from hunting him entirely, but I sure as hell don't want him munchin' your bones on my spread. And trespassers do tend to get shot in these parts. Do I have your word you won't cross my fencelines again?"