“Not only them,” I said. “When it comes to money or a pretty woman, there’s not many who can be trusted.”
“Not you, Mr. Sackett?”
“I’ve the name of being an outlaw,” I said.
A spatter of rain was falling when Flinch led out the horses in the morning. It was dark, with only a faint suggestion of light showing beyond the cottonwoods. Underneath them it was still like night. I tethered the dun near the buckboard and, rifle in hand, went across to Pio’s.
The room was lighted by candles. It was warm and pleasant, with the smell of breakfast cooking. Loomis was already at the table, his face stiff with sleep; only the eyes seemed awake. Drawing up a chair, I sat down opposite him, and was scarcely seated when Penelope came in, hurrying to her chair. I rose and seated her, and Loomis gave me a dark, angry look.
Whether he was irritated with me because he believed I was making up to her, I don’t know, and cared less. Flinch came in, walking quite as a ghost, and sat down at the end of the table.
The senora came from the kitchen with a platter of food, and then brought a steaming pot of coffee. We ate in silence, all of us heavy with sleep. As for me, I knew I should be thinking of the trail ahead, and the day before us. But I could not keep my thoughts from going back to yesterday, and the dog.
Whoever had been in the adobe house across the way had gone before the dog could find him. I remembered how the dog, hackles stiff, had walked toward the adobe, growling. Nobody else had seemed to be watching him.
He went inside the open doorway, and I got up and strolled across the street and followed him. He knew me, had been smelling around when I picketed my horse the night before, and had seen me that day around Pio’s house. He looked up at me, then smelled around the empty room.
The lean-to behind the adobe showed where a man had slept and smoked cigarettes, a lot of them. The big dog sniffed curiously, then wandered out to the low back wall where the man had evidently gone …
Steve Hooker? I wondered.
It was still dark when we went outside. The air was cool and the spatter of raindrops had begun again. The old buckboard creaked when they climbed into it. Flinch gathered the reins, and they moved off.
Pio came out as I stepped into the saddle. “I do not like it, amigo,” he said. “The senorita will have trouble, I think. We like her very much, my wife and I.”
“Her worst enemies are behind us. The ones of whom I spoke. Tell them nothing.”
“Adios,” he said, and I left him there, and moved out after the buckboard.
We crossed the Canadian, which was mostly a wide bed of sand, and then went west on the farther side, keeping well back from the bank to avoid the numerous creeks. But occasionally we traveled in the dry river bed itself, the narrow stream of the river shifting from one side to the other as we moved along. By daylight we were well on our way.
Riding ahead, I scouted the country for Indians or for anybody else who might be around. As it grew light, I swung right and left now and again to cut for sign. Most of the tracks I found were those of sheep from Borregos Plaza, or of buffalo.
The light rain increased, and I led the way out of the river bed. It never took long in this country for a flash flood to come, and I didn’t know how much it had been raining up the country.
When we were maybe a mile back from the river, I caught movement in the willows ahead and below us, and two riders came in sight from the direction of the river. At that distance I couldn’t make them out, but they never so much as glimpsed us, but rode on ahead.
It took only a few minutes for me to ride down the hill and pick up their sign. They had been bedded down under a rough shelter on the bank of the river overlooking the trail, and they had been waiting there for some time. Crouching, I looked back the way we had come. They must have seen us leave the river bed.
Who were these two who had been tricked out of their ambush by sheer luck? If there had not been those heavy clouds in the distance and that rain to worry me about the river bed, we would have walked into the ambush and they would have had us cold turkey.
Where they had waited they had a thick screen of boughs for concealment, and yet a perfect field of fire through neatly prepared openings in the brush where they had broken away leaves and twigs. They could have taken me and one of the others with the first two shots, and the ones who were left would never have gotten away.
Those two men were western men; I knew that by the way they rode, and they were experienced at their work. Right then I began casting around in my memory for some clue as to who they might be.
Men hired for the job, surely. I could bet on that. So who was there around Griffin or Fort Phantom Hill who might be hired?
The names I came up with weren’t happy ones to think about. I knew of several around this part of the country, and any one of them would be a package of trouble. The two who had laid for us were good at their job, too good for comfort.
I walked the dun up out of the brush and across the green slope through the rain, and was thinking about what would happen when all of these treasure-seekers reached the Rabbit Ears at the same time … Or could we get there first?
“Who were those men?” Loomis asked as I came back to the buckboard.
He had had his eyes open then. “Hunters … big-game hunters, Mr. Loomis, and we’re the game.”
“They were waiting for us?” He was incredulous. “Who could they be?”
“Somebody hired for cash to do a job. Good at the work, too. We were lucky this time, but we can’t count on luck next time. Mr. Loomis, I didn’t figure on this when I signed up with you, but it looks like I’ve got to go hunting for them. Either I take those men, or they’ll take us.”
He didn’t come up with any objection, and from his remarks he seemed more worried about who was doing the hiring than about the killers themselves. There was nothing I could tell him about that, but I knew we were in trouble a-plenty. The best way I knew to keep those two from doing their job was to find them first.
6
The rain continued to fall—a light, gentle rain. Although there was no flash flood in the river, the water widened and deepened, and we went on, keeping some distance back from the bank.
It was close to noontime before we turned off up Punta de Agua Creek. We had to pick our way along, avoiding obvious places of ambush and trying to keep in the open without becoming too good a target. It wasn’t easy.
My dun covered twice the distance of that buckboard, just checking back and forth. We held north on the right of the creek and when we made camp on Los Redos Creek we were about half a mile back of its junction with Punta de Agua.
Nobody had much to say. All of us were beat from the rough country we’d crossed, and Loomis was glum and mean looking. We watered the horses, then picketed them in close. I put together a bed for Penelope, and then went out a ways from camp and bedded down near a rock wall where nobody could come up on me sudden, and where I had a lookout over the camp.
The trend of Punta de Agua was a little westward, then north, but when we started out again we held due north. About four miles out the creek turned westward, but I kept the buckboard headed north. I had a hunch that would worry those men who were racking guns for us, for if we were headed for the Rabbit Ears and Romero it would seem more than likely that we would follow the creek. However, Punta de Agua Creek took another bend north, and I figured to cut west and pick up the creek at that bend.
I rode ahead and scouted the country and we made good time. The rain had stopped, but the slopes were wet and slippery. Meanwhile, I was doing some contemplating. Those ambushers would be somewhere ahead … but where? If I could figure that out, I might sort of roust around and get the best of them.