Rain fell softly through the day and the antelope disappeared. Once, far off, Tom thought he saw something moving, but he had only a glimpse, then nothing more.
Restless with lack of movement, Susanna walked down through the trees. They had stopped, found what was needed, and had gone no further, but now she walked into the deeper recesses of the woods, the area where the small ravine narrowed to a mere dimple in the hillside from the lower lip of which fell the water of the spring.
It fell upon sand and vanished to appear thirty or forty feet further along, and then to become a trickle three or four inches wide down to where the wagon was, and the horses.
Then she came upon a place where the rock had broken off and fallen, leaving a hollow overhang, a place such as cliff-dwellers used to wall up for houses. There was a shelter, five to seven feet high, twelve to fifteen feet deep at its deepest, and masked by brush. No rain penetrated here, not even with a strong wind from the west, because of the brush.
She walked back to camp. “Duncan? Could you and Tom and I carry that chiffonier? And the bed?”
“We loaded it, didn’t we? I mean with your father’s help. Yes, we could. Why?”
“Call him down and let’s do it. Our wagon’s too heavy, Duncan. Mr. Vallian was right.”
CHAPTER IX
When the Huron walked into camp they all turned to look. He crossed to the fire and squatted there, taking up the coffee-pot, blackened from many fires, to fill his cup.
He was a tall, taciturn man in a buckskin shirt, homespun pants, and a battered black wool hat.
“Well? What happened?” Booster demanded.
The Huron sipped his coffee. “Good man,” he said shortly, “very good man.”
“Did you get him?”
“Maybe.” The Huron sipped coffee then shrugged. “Maybe not. In the morning we will see.”
“You didn’t trace him down? You mean maybe he’s lyin’ out there?”
The Huron ignored the comment until he had eaten a strip of jerky, and then he said, “One does not go into the bush after a grizzly.”
“I’ll be damned,” Shabbitt took his cigar from his teeth and regarded it, then brushed the ash away. “I don’t understand you, Huron. Sometimes I think you’re less an Injun than a white man, and an eddicated one to boot.”
The Huron offered nothing, merely sipping his coffee. Finally he straightened up, rinsed his cup and walked to his bed.
As he lay down he stopped, just before stretching out. “He is a good man. If he is not dead, somebody will die.”
“Come daylight,” Ike Mantle said, “I’ll have a look around. If he ain’t dead, he better be.”
Con Vallian had been hit hard and he knew it. Near the base of a tree he pulled moss from the tree and packed his wound. The bullet had gone through his thigh, but no bones were broken. After a moment’s rest, he pulled himself up by clinging to brush and with a staff made from a broken branch, his rifle clutched in his left hand, he started on.
He made a hundred yards or so before he had to stop. He leaned against the bole of a tree, resting, panting heavily. By daylight there would be wolves on the scent, and he had to have left some blood sign back there. They would find that, then come after him.
Finding a small stream, rushing knee-deep after the rain, he stepped in and worked his way up stream. It would fool nobody, certainly not the Huron, but it might slow them down. He knew that a tracked man will usually come out of a stream on the same side he went in, but he went out on the opposite side, pulling himself up where the rocks were waist high.
For a few minutes he sat there in the rain, then with rifle and staff, pushed himself to his feet. He stood there, wavering from weakness, trying to make out his surroundings. A wink of firelight caught his eye… it was several hundred yards off, no doubt the camp of the Shabbitt outfit.
He made a dozen wobbling steps on the rock ledge before he had to step off, found another bare rock and managed to get to it. There was a long log going the way he wished to go, but he shied away. When it was wet like this the bark might slip off in places and that was the sort of sign the Huron could read at a dead-run.
He staggered on, hitching himself along. Twice he fell. Once he crawled for several hundred yards, then managed to get up again. When he got to where his horse had been, it was gone.
Even in the darkness he could see the white end of the broken branch. Frightened by something, a lion or wolf, probably, the horse had broken free and run off.
He wasted no time in cursing his luck, for that never helped. He did pause long enough to think the situation through, for much depended on what happened next.
They would not know his horse had run off. They would find its tracks and his and would conclude that he had mounted the horse and ridden away. Clinging to the bush he pulled off his boots, cut a rawhide string from the fringe of his jacket and tied them together by the loops and slung them over his shoulder.
He walked on. What to do? It would do no good to go to the McKaskels, and their wagon was far away now, at least a mile and in the wrong direction.
His first idea had been the best. He would go to the Indians. He had a rough idea of where their camp might be, and he started for it.
What followed was nightmare. He hadn’t gone fifty steps when he tripped and tumbled into a ravine, losing his staff, but clinging to his rifle. How long he lay there he didn’t know nor even when he started out again.
Somewhere along the way he became delirious. The loss of blood had weakened him, and he must have had a mounting fever. Perhaps it was only exhaustion, but all that followed was a hazy time of stumbling, staggering, moving-of falling, lying in the wet grass, rising and driving on. He went through trees and brush, tumbled into another gully and got himself out by crawling.
The moss came loose from the wound so he used grass.
He remembered lying on the grass and feeling hot sun on his back. Then he remembered trying to get up and hands taking hold of him. Somebody tried to take his rifle away and he clung to it. They tried to remove his gun belt and he struck the hands away and went to his knees, and then for a long time he remembered nothing at all.
It was a sensation of smothering and of wracking movement that awakened him. Suddenly he was awake, lucid, listening. He was moving, his body lay on an incline and he was wrapped in something coarse and smelly. His fingers touched his gunbelt. He still had it. A slight movement of his head and his cheek touched the cold of his rifle barrel.
He was lying on a travois wrapped in the folds of the buffalo-hide teepee. He was with the Indians then, and he was being moved. For some reason they were keeping him hidden.
Suddenly the horse that was pulling him stopped with a jerk, twisted a little, then was still. There was a confused sound of movement, the galloping of horses. Then a hoarse voice… Ike Mantle’s voice. “You Injuns seen a wounded white man? We’re huntin’ him!”
“No see.”
“You better not be lyin’ to me, you Injun son-of-a-!”
“Ike! Shut up, damn you! That big buck yonder’s got his rifle right across his saddle at you! Lay off!”
“Why? There’s only six of them and they-”
“Eight,” the Huron said calmly. “There are two others somewhere.”
There was a moment of silence. “We’re huntin’ a bad white man,” Doc Shabbitt said, “you Injuns find him, kill him or bring him to us, you savvy?”
Nobody said anything.
“I’d like to shake ’em down,” Ike said angrily. “What’s in all those bundles? What’s on the travois?”
“Their lodges, Ike,” Purdy said, “just the duffle they have to live with. Hell, if you want that gent so bad, let’s hunt him. No use to start a war with these Injuns. We might whop ’em but we’d lose two or three and one of them might be you or me.”
Red Hyle swung his horse away. “Let’s ride!” he said roughly. “We don’t care about him, anyway. Let’s find that woman.”
“All you think about’s that woman,” Booster said.
Vallian heard the sudden creak of a saddle, the movement of a turning horse. “What I think about’s my own damn business. You want to make something of it?”