I realized that I was bleeding. The bullet must have gone into my side … somehow I’d had the idea it was my leg.
With infinite care I lifted my right hand and eased it, clear of the ground, back for my bowie knife. It was true I had no gun, but if I could get within reach of the knife …
The knife was bloody. Wiping the haft very carefully on my shirt front, I gripped it in my right hand. And I waited.
He was stalking me now.
He would be worried, because the longer he had to look for me the greater the risk of somebody coming out from town. John Blake must have heard the shots, and he would not stop at just being curious … by now he should be coming.
That cowhand who told me of Kate’s gelding, he had been an ally of Shalett’s, of course. Had he ridden on, or was he waiting in town for Shalett? If he was, he would be almighty puzzled by now.
With a stealth learned from the Apaches, I began to inch forward. I wanted to get into a place the eye would pass over quickly. Not an obvious place for hiding … that would be spotted too soon, but a place practically in the open. A man lying still, unmoving, can be almost invisible.
The earth beneath me was damp, muddy from the nearby stream. Lying flat, with infinite care to make no noise, I rolled over in the mud. It would discolor my shirt, would help to make me difficult to see.
Easing myself along, I chose my spot. There was a stump and a fallen tree, and straight before them was grass, low-growing plants, and brush, none of it more than a few inches high.
By now my clothing was matted with leaves and mud, my hair was muddy, and bits of grass and leaves were clinging to it. My face was streaked with mud.
I lay down close to the edge of the brush, but almost in the open in the small clearing opposite the stump and the fallen tree, and closest to where I believed he would come.
He might see me, and if he did, I was a dead man. The eyes naturally tend to look across a clearing. He had no experience of me in the woods, and the obvious place was across the clearing where the fallen tree offered a hiding place.
Lying absolutely still, afraid even to breathe, I waited. And, my ear being against the ground, I heard him before he reached me.
He was good at stalking, and he had had plenty of experience at stalking men; he was much more skillful than most men, and therefore he was confident. He was the hunter, I the hunted.
It was a game among Apache boys to scatter out and lie down, then for others to try to see how many they could locate just by looking, and I knew how difficult it was to see someone who lay perfectly still.
He could have no doubt that he was going to kill me. My evasive tactics only prolonged the game. But he had been too successful for too long.
He came out of the brush not a dozen feet from me, his rifle half-lifted for a shot, his eyes ranging the brush on the far side of the clearing. And as he stepped past me I raised up and threw the knife upward into his left kidney.
It was hard thrown, for I am a strong man, with much practice at throwing a knife, and it went clean to the haft.
His body stiffened sharply, and I followed the knife in, catching hold of the hilt just as he started to turn. The knife came free with a hard wrench, and he tried to lift his rifle. We were face to face in that instant, our eyes only inches apart.
He looked at me with astonishment, and he said, “You’ve killed me!”
I said, “Uh-huh … it looks like it.”
He fell then and lay there on the grass, staring up at me. “Take my rifle,” he said, “take good care … finest shootin’ -”
So I picked up his rifle and walked across the clearing. When I got to the far side I looked back at him. He was dead, all right, and it was hard to believe.
When I came out of the woods John Blake was bending over Shalett. Bed Mike was there, too, and Meharry.
“This here’s Frank Shalett,” Bed Mike said. “Is there somebody else back in there?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, “the Dutchman’s back there. If you figure to see him you’d better go look. He isn’t coining out.”
So they got me on a horse and took me back into town and put me in a bed.
There was one more thing I did before we started back to Texas – one more thing, I mean, after Kate and I were married. It was never in me to brag, but there were two people, I thought, who ought to know.
On a piece of note paper I wrote to Sir Richard, in England, at Sotherton Manor. The other letter I sent to Colonel Edwards, of the US Army. The same message was in each letter, and it was simple enough, but I had an idea they would both understand:
First there were three, now there are none.
When we started for Texas I was riding on my back in an ambulance with Kate, but I had an idea that before we crossed the Nation I’d be back in the saddle again, looking at the world from between a horse’s ears.