By noontime I was breasting the rise at the head of the canyon. Only a few yards away the rock of the mesa broke off sharply and dipped into another canyon, while the great flat surface of Buckhead lay on my right. It was several miles in area and thickly forested.
Crawling back into the brush, I settled down to rest a bit and to try thinking things out. My head wasn’t working too well and my thoughts came slow, and everything looked different somehow. I kept passing my hand over my forehead and scowling, trying to rid my eyes of the blur.
Near as I could figure, Ange and the wagon were now about three miles off, and moving as I had to, it might take me to sundown to cover that distance. Long before that, every inch of the mesa top would be scoured by riders who would seek out every clump of brush, every tree, every hole in the rocks.
Nobody ever denied that I was a tough man. I stand six feet three in my socks, when I own a pair, and I weigh a hundred and eighty, most of it in my shoulders and arms. I ain’t what you’d call a pretty-built man, but when I take hold things generally move.
But now I was weak as a sick cat. I’d lost a sight of blood, and used myself almighty bad. The way things stood, I couldn’t run and I couldn’t fight. If they found me they had me, and no two ways about it … and they were hunting to kill.
There was no way across that mesa but to walk or crawl, and there was no place a rider couldn’t go. It looked to me as if I needed more of a weapon than that hand-axe I had in my pocket.
Turning around, I crawled deeper into the brush and burrowed down into the pine needles. My head ached, my eyes blinked slowly. I was tired, almighty tired. I felt wore out.
Ange, Ange girl, I said, I just ain’t a-gonna make it. I ain’t a-gonna make it right now.
I was trying to burrow deeper, and then I stopped all movement when I heard a horse walking on frozen ground, but the sound faded off in the distance.
My head felt all swelled up like a balloon, and I couldn’t seem to lift it off the ground.
Ange, I said, damn it, Ange, I …
chapter two
Leaning my shoulder against the rough bark of a tree, I stared at the empty clearing, unwilling to believe what my eyes saw.
The wagon was gone!
Under the wide white moon the clearing lay etched in stillness. The surrounding trees were a wall of blackness against which nothing moved. Within the clearing itself, scarcely two acres in extent, there was nothing.
To this place I had come after hours of unconsciousness or sleep, after hours of fitful struggle for some kind of comfort on the frozen ground, in the numbing cold.
Only when darkness had come had I dared move, for riders had been all about me, searching relentlessly. Once, off to the right I heard faint voices, glimpsed the flicker of a fire.
How many times they might have passed nearby I had no idea, for only occasionally was I even fully aware of things around me. Yet with the deepening shadows some inner alarm had shaken me awake, and after a moment of listening, I rolled from the pine needles in which I had buried myself, and taking up my stick, I pushed myself to my feet.
All through my pain-racked day I had longed for this place and dreamed of arriving here. In the wagon there would be things to help me, in the wagon there would be weapons. Above all, Ange would be there, and I could be sure she was all right.
But she was gone.
Now, more even than care for my wounds I wanted weapons. Above all, I was a fighting man … it was deeply grained in my being, a part of me. Hurt, I would fight; dying, I would still try to fight.
A quiet man I was, and not one to provoke a quarrel, but if set upon I would fight back. I do not say this in boasting, for it was as much a part of me as the beating of my heart. It was bred in the blood-line of those from whom I come, and I could not be other than I am.
This it was, and my love for Ange, that had carried me here. Ange, who had brought love and tenderness to the big, homely man that I am.
Ange knew me well, and she knew I was not a man to die easily. She knew the wild lands herself, and she would have believed that she had only to wait and I would return. She would not willingly have left this place without me, knowing that even if I suffered an accident I would somehow return.
And now a curious fact became evident to me. This place, to which I would be sure to come back, was not watched. None of the searching men were here in this most obvious of places. Why?
The simplest reason was that they did not know of it, though a wagon is not an easy thing to conceal, nor are the mules by which it was drawn, nor the cattle. But now they were not here.
Hesitating no longer, and using my staff, I limped into the clearing and stopped where the wagon had stood.
There were no tracks.
I looked to where the fire had been, and there were no coals, no ashes. The stump that I had dragged up for a backlog, which should have been smoldering yet, was gone.
Had I then come to the wrong place? No … the great, lightning-struck pine from the base of which I had gathered dead branches and bark to kindle our fire stood where it had been. The rock where I had sat while cleaning my rifle was there.
But the wagon was gone, the mules, the cattle … and Ange.
Ange, whom I loved. Ange, who was my life; Ange, whom I had found in the high mountains of Colorado and brought home to the ranch of my brother, in Mora.*
*Sackett, Bantam Books. 1961.
The numbness seemed to creep into my brain, the cold held me still. Leaning on my crude staff, hurting in every muscle and ligament, I looked all around me for a clue, and I found none.
I knew she would not have left without me, and if someone or something had forced her to leave, there should still have been tracks.
Horror crept over me. I could feel its ghostly hand crawling on my spine and neck muscles. Some awful thing had happened here, some terrible, frightful thing. The ruthless pursuit of me, the wiping out of tracks here, all of it spoke of a crime; only I refused to allow myself to think of what the crime might be.
Stiffly, I began to move. I would find the camp of those men and see if Ange was there; in any case, I would see who my enemies were. The wagon and the stock must surely be there.
Turning, I started with a lunge, only to have the end of my staff slip on the icy ground. I fell heavily, barely stifling a scream. My hands fought for a grip on the frozen ground and I struggled to get up, and then I must somehow have slipped over on my face and lost consciousness, for when I awoke the sun was shining.
For a time I lay there, letting the sun soak away the chill in my bones, but only half aware of my surroundings. Slowly realization came to me: I was a hunted man, and here I lay almost in the open, at the foot of a pine tree.
Carefully, I started to turn my head. A wave of sickness swept over me, but I persisted.
My eyes came to a focus. There was no sound but the wind in the pines. The clearing was there before me, and it was empty.
My mind was alert now, and in the broad daylight I carefully skirted the clearing. There were no tracks anywhere, none to show our arrival, none to show how the wagon had left. It had simply vanished.
I was without weapons, without food, without clothing or shelter, but all I could think of was Ange. Somebody had been so desperate to have her disappear that every evidence of our presence there had been wiped out.
An hour later, I was at the clearing where their camp had been the night before, but now all were gone. At least a dozen men had slept there, and there were tracks in profusion. Cigarette butts were scattered about, a coffeepot had been emptied, and a crust of bread lay upon the ground.