“I already bought chips,” Jordan said. “They dealt the hand.”
He turned from the bar and went through the door and then he saw the big old man coming up the street on the steeldust. Trace had gentled that steeldust himself. He had taken time with the horse. Next to the big red horse he rode, it had been the best of the lot.
The old man had a shock of white hair. His eyes were fierce and commanding. When he stepped down from the saddle there was something of the thing in his manner.
Trace Jordan stepped down from the walk and started across the street toward the old man, a tall man with an easy woodsman’s walk and the knowledge that he was heading right into trouble. Down the street a man stopped … another appeared in the entrance to the store.
The brand on the steeldust had been worked over and an excellent job. The JH had been turned into an SB.
The old man looked across the saddle at him, a strong old man with fierce unrelenting eyes. “What’s the matter? Lookin’ for something?”
Remembering Johnny lying in the dried mud beside the water-hole, Trace told him: “I’m looking for the man who stole that horse from me. He’s mine. I caught him. I broke him. I branded him JH —”
Quick temper flared in the hard old eyes. “You callin’ me a horse thief?” He stepped around the horse to face Jordan. He was wearing a tied-down gun.
“I’m only saying that’s my horse you’re riding. He’s a stolen horse.”
“You’re a dirty liar!”
When the old man’s hand dropped to his gun, Trace Jordan shot him through the stomach.
Jordan looked over the smoking gun at two bystanders. “Walk out there and lift that saddle skirt, both of you.” When they started walking he said, “If there isn’t a four-inch white scar under the saddle skirt, find a bar.” The scar was there …
“No matter,” one of the men told him, “maybe this is your horse but that old man was no thief. You’d better ride before they hang you.”
There was an instant then when Trace Jordan looked down into the dying man’s eyes. “That was my horse,” he repeated. “My partner was murdered when he was stolen.”
All time seemed to stop while the old man struggled to speak but blood frothed at his lips and he died. But of one thing Jordan was sure. The old man had believed him.
From up the street a yell, “He’s downed Bob Sutton! He’s shot Bob!” And the doors vomited men into the street. Trace Jordan hit the leather running and took the big red horse out of town at a dead run. Behind him guns talked but no bullet hit him.
And now he was here, high on a sunlit mesa, dying in the saddle. There was nothing to see but distance, nothing but an infinity of far blue hills and nameless mysterious canyons. The mustang stopped suddenly, head up. Jordan turned painfully, searching all around, and in all that vast emptiness there was no living thing to be seen but a solitary buzzard. Heat waves shimmered the outlines of the junipers but nowhere was there movement, nor any sign of life … and then he saw the tracks.
The tracks of a pack rat in the dust and the tracks of a deer.
They led to the cliff edge and disappeared there. Why did that seem important? His mind fumbled at the puzzle but the mustang tugged impatiently at the bit and Jordan gave the horse his head. The mountain-bred horse swung at once to the cliff-edge and, reaching it, stopped.
Below him was an eyebrow of trail that clung to the cliff face. To this trail led the tracks. Jordan tried to focus his thoughts on the trail. The tracks of a pack rat alone would mean nothing, yet the deer tracks on the same trail could mean water. And the smell of water would have stopped the horse, for the animal must be half-dead with thirst.
Despite his condition he realized at once the possibilities of such a place. His horse, bred to wild country and only a few weeks away from running wild, might take that trail. A wrong step could send them plunging a thousand feet or more to the bottom, yet those tracks might lead to water and a deer had negotiated the trail. And what had he to lose? Going on was impossible … he spoke to the horse.
Momentarily, ears pricked, the horse hung back; but the urging of the rider and his own promptings decided the matter. The inside stirrup scraped hard on the canyon wall and the outer hung in space but the mustang, walking on delicate feet, went on down the trail, no more than an edge of sloping rock stratum, to a place some forty yards along where the trail widened to ten feet. Here Jordan swung from the saddle and, trailing his reins, he went back up the trail on hands and knees, unable to risk walking in his weakness.
With a handful of bunch grass he brushed out the tracks leading to the cliff-edge and then, taking a handful of dust, he let it trickle from his hand and, caught by the wind, spray over the ground, leaving the earth apparently undisturbed. Then he edged back down the trail and climbed to the saddle.
Concealed from above by the overhang of the cliff, the trail became increasingly dangerous. At one point there was only slanting rock but the big red horse scrambled across while Jordan sat his saddle only dimly aware of what was happening.
Suddenly, after more than a half-mile of trail, it ended in a half-acre of shelf almost entirely overhung by the cliff and entirely invisible from above. The outer edge was skirted by manzanita and juniper that gave no indication from across the canyon of the space that lay behind it. Here, concealed from all directions, was an isolated ledge … and at one side of the ledge, a ruin.
Without waiting to be guided, the horse walked toward the ruin with quickening footsteps … and Jordan heard the sound of running water.
Almost falling from his horse, he staggered to the basin where clear cold water trickled from a crack in the rock to fall into a rock basin some dozen feet across. When he had drunk deep of the water he rolled on his back and tried desperately to think.
Wrinkling his brow against the dull throb of pain, he went back over his trail in his mind. Not even Jacob Lantz would find it a simple one. Much of the mesa had been bare rock, nor was there any indication from above of this place he had found. Nor would any man in his right mind attempt the trail to it.
He drank, and drank again, feeling the slow penetration of the cold water through all his thirst-starved tissues. After a time he stumbled to his feet and stripped saddle and bridle from the horse, picketing it on the thick grass.
He would need a fire … dry sticks that would make no smoke. The ruin would shield the reflection. He must have hot water to bathe his wound. He must …
A long time later he opened his eyes into darkness. Listening, he could hear no sound but the trickle of water. The night was cold.
Crawling to his saddle, he fumbled at the knots and finally loosened them enough to get at his blanket roll. Wrapping himself in his blankets, he lay still, his head feeling like a great half-empty cask in which his brains seemed to slosh around like water. His lips were cracked by fever … outside a lone star hung over the rim of a far cliff.
Through the fog of his delirium Jordan listened to the trickle of water. He must be careful … careful. His enemies might be far away but in the still of a clear desert night, sound carries. And by daylight they would be all around, thirty or forty belted blood-hungry men. And at dawn he must be watching that thread of trail, rifle in hand.
Pain gnawed at his side like a hungry rat… such a little wound but it needed care, it needed cleansing. His eyes found the lone star above the canyon’s rim and held to it and a long time later, he slept. A pack rat appeared at the edge of the trail, peering curiously at the sleeping man, then went on, wary but unfrightened, to the water’s edge. Out in the canyon a small stone, long poised by erosion, fell into the depths with a faint, lost sound.
On the mesa’s top a long wind stirred, moaning among the junipers and fluttering the campfires of the searching men. A man had been slain and it was the law of their time that the killer must die in turn. A coyote yapped at the moon, a weird cacophony of sound suspended a moment, then scattered by the wind and then the night under the lonely moon was voiceless and still. Only the water trickled and the hunted man moaned softly in his delirium and his sleep.