“Shut up!”
Nobody said anything. Ogletree took a bottle from under the counter and filled Dancer’s glass, waving away the cowboy’s protest. “On the house,” he said.
Vancouter Allen shoved his chair back, got to his feet, and walked out of the door. The gunmen followed him. Outside, Sonora Macon spoke quietly. “Boss? About that partner, now? Can he really stop our wages?”
“I’m paying you!” Allen said sharply. “I don’t need him. I’ve got the money right here!” He slapped his belt.
Macon exchanged a glance with Romero, who shrugged. “Sure,” Macon said. “All right, boss.”
Inside the store somebody suddenly began to sing “The Hunters of Kentucky.” Ogletree chimed in on the chorus.
Allen, his features ugly with anger, rode away to the north, up Rye Creek.
There was nothing to worry about, he told himself. Tell Sackett was no more than fourteen or fifteen miles away, treed up against the mesa where he could not escape.
They would be there by nightfall.
chapter sixteen
So here at last was I, William Tell Sackett, and a far piece I’d come from the Cumberlands, a far piece … to die with my back to the wall in the Mogollons.
It left me with no good thought to know I had come so far and done so little with my life. I’d fought for my country in the War Between the States, to save the Union, and I would do it again. I’d fought the redskins, too, and driven cattle north from Texas to Montana, and helped to open up some of the most lovely land under heaven.
At the end, it all came to nothing. Ange murdered, and my death nearing me at the hands of the same man, and no son to leave behind.
Most of all, I hated to leave Allen alive, he who had killed my lovely girl. There’s some, I’m told, who frown upon revenge, and perhaps it is better so, but I was a mountain boy, reared in a feudal land, living my life through by the feudal code, and our law was the Mosaic law of an eye for an eye.
They were waiting now, waiting for somebody to come before they moved in for the kill. That somebody had to be Van Allen. He wanted to be here, to be sure I was actually dead. He wanted to look into my dead eyes and know that he was safe. There would be talk, of course, but nobody would push such talk very far in the face of the guns Allen could command. Especially when the only man who could give Allen the lie was dead and buried.
They were waiting for him, then, and that meant that somehow I must stay alive until he got here. I must stay alive and save a bullet for him. Somehow, even in being destroyed, I must destroy him.
I looked about, seeking out a hole into which I might crawl, anywhere to hide. There was no place to run, nor had I the strength for it. It was root hog or die right here. But the place offered me little.
The cliff reared up red and steep behind me, and along the lower reaches it was scattered over with scrub cedar. It was broken, eroded rock, with much stuff fallen from above. The canyons opening to right and left were steep, places where a man might crawl if he could find the cover for it.
Where I was, lay a sort of trough that ran for several yards. Larger slabs of fallen rock had landed out a few feet from the base, and cedar or yucca had grown up among the slabs, so that I could not be seen, even if I moved.
There’s seldom a corner so tough a man might not find a way out, if he has the nerve and the strength to try. Nerve enough I had, but I was played out, worn to a frazzle by the exhaustion of weeks of running, piled onto the wounds I’d had.
When I looked down at myself, showing through my torn shirt the way I was, it was a shocking sight. I was a strong-muscled man, but lean. Only now every rib showed. I was ga’nted up like a share-cropper’s mule, just a rack of bones and hide.
For a time I lay there watching them. Though I thought they must know where I was, they were avoiding this place, searching out the rocks down below just to make sure I hadn’t fooled them, and it was that that gave me the idea.
My strength was slight enough, and going up, if I found a way, would give me nothing but the chance to die on higher ground. So what if, after they’d searched well over the lower ground, I slipped down there and let them move on up, to search up here?
If I could get below, then I’d have them, or some of them, against the hill where they figured to have me. And when Van Allen came, he would be down there, close to me.
Lying quiet, I studied the terrain below, and saw a way it might be done.
There was a sight of Injun in me, though it came of learning and thinking, and not of blood. I’d run the hills with the Cherokees as a boy, them as were called the Overhill Cherokees because they lived west of the mountains. So I laid Injun eyes on the land below me, and saw a slight chance in the way I might go. It was the only chance I had.
They’d not be expecting me to come toward them now. They would watch the likely places, and the one I’d chosen wasn’t that … it offered little enough place for a man to hide. But the thing I knew was that the best place to hide was in the mind of the searcher, for all men have blind spots in the mind. They rarely see what they do not expect to see, and their minds hold a blindness to what seems unreasonable. Nobody but an Apache would think to choose the way I’d chosen.
And if any Apaches were down there, they would not be expecting Apache thinking of a white man.
There was open ground to my left, and it was there I went, edging along, for I had to go slow, and needed to for the quietness my going called for.
There were no big boulders here, no gullies or cracks, and no brush at all. There was just rugged desert ground with a few places here and there, only inches deep, and scattered rocks no bigger than your head. Tufts of bunch grass grew among the yucca, but nothing larger.
First I rubbed my rifle barrel all over with dust to take the shine from it. My clothes, so stained with dust and sweat, were almost of the ground’s own color, mingled with blood-stains and the tears where my sun-browned skin showed through.
Flat on my belly I went. Inch by inch I wormed along, through a space where a few cedars grew. I came to a fairly shallow place and went into it, and there I lay still for a bit. Then on I went, working along, moving so slightly that it scarcely seemed like movement at all.
Apaches had done it … I’d known of a case where a man grazed his horse with it tied to a rope and the rope’s end in his hand … and an Apache slipped up in the bright afternoon sunlight and cut the rope and eased off with the horse. He swung astride him and was gone, leaving the man holding the rope and looking foolish.
My mouth was dry as dust, dry from fear of being seen, and dry from having no drink in many hours. My heart pounded heavily and my head ached from the hunger and tiredness that was in me. But my rifle was in my hand, and when the moment came, if I could only find a rest for it, I’d take a good lot with me down the road to death.
A long, slow hour passed. Once a boot crunched within a few feet above me as I lay still. Another time I heard men talking of a fight there’d been, of men killed with violence, and guns flaring and thundering in O’Leary’s place … and then I heard the name of Nolan Sackett.
Nolan! He had come, then. Nolan was an outlaw Sackett, a wild and desperate man, and one who had pulled me from a bad hole in California not too far back. Me they might kill, but now I could be sure they’d know the Sackett men before the summer was gone.
There was no doubt in me that I would die, for there was no way out that I could see. For minutes, long minutes, I lay perfectly still, right in the open with those hunting men about me, knowing my only safety lay in their searching minds, for it was up on the higher ground they looked now, and not right there below them.