Once I glanced back. A man was standing on the walk staring after me, a man in a short sheepskin coat … the man who had told me where I could fine Heseltine.
A spatter of rain fell and I slipped into my slicker. It began to rain harder, and the trail became slippery. I rode off it into the sparse grass beside it, and kept on, listening to the sound of rain on my hat and on my shoulders.
The rain would wipe out the tracks, but there were few anyway.
The tracks of a Ione rider going into Leadville seemed about all.
When I had been riding an hour or more the last shacks had been left behind. On the trail I could see only the lone set of hoof prints going opposite to the way I rode.
It would be dark early, I thought. The water was standing in small pools, and the cold rain slanted across the sky.
I went on. Once my horse slipped on the gravel but he scrambled and got his footing. We kept on for what seemed like a long time, and presently I could see the thin ghost of smoke from a chimney.
The trail took a bend, bringing it nearer the cabin where the smoke lifted. Suddenly I realized I was tired, and that I had been hours in coming this far.
Within another hour it would be dark, and aere was a chance for a meal, fodder for my horse, and rest.
The rider who had left the tracks I had seen had stopped here, too. In fact, he had mounted his horse by the gate. Despite the rain I could see his tracks clearly in the mud.
The man in the sheepskin coat! The man who had told me where I would find Heseltine. He had stopped here at this house.
He had come into town only minutes, perhaps, before he talked to me.
Why would a man ride in and make such a point of delivering news of whererd find Heseltine? How would a man from out of town know I was hunting them?
I stared at the house. It was shadowed and still.
Only the slow smoke rising, only the tracks of man and horse leading from the stoop.
Suddenly I knew this was no place for me.
I had dismounted to open the gate, but suddenly I turned, and catching a closer grip on the reins, I stabbed my toe at the stirrup.
Instantly the evening was ripped apart by the ugly bark of guns.
Something hit me and I staggered, half falling against the horse.
Something hit me again, but my toe slipped into the stirrup and the forward lunge of the horse sent me into the saddle.
Hanging low in the saddle, I rode on up the trail, away from the house.
Behind me another gun slugged the night, and still another. My horse staggered under me, gathered itself, and went on.
Up the hill we went, taking a quick turn into the trees and weaving through them. Behind me I heard a shout, and galloping hoofs.
Through the trees we dodged and turned. The horse was laboring hard now, but it was game. Suddenly I saw a notch in the rocks below me and pulled up, sliding to the ground. Zeaful did so I pulled the drawstring on my blanket roll so that it fell into my hands. Then I grabbed my Winchester and, slapping the horse with the flat of my hand, I turned and slid through the notch. As I went down with a rattle of stones I heard the trotting hoofs of MY horse, moving on.
Going through the notch in the rim had landed me on a steep slope of talus. I slid on this broken rock, clinging to rifle and blanket roll then rolled off it to the grass and went on down a slope through the aspens.
A momentary glimpse down through the trees allowed me to see a canyon wall falling steeply away ahead of me, cloaked with aspen all the way down to the waters edge, at least two hundred yards below.
Hooking an arm around a slender at , I held up and listened. Would they come down after me? I doubted it, but I could not be sure. I let myself slide down to a squatting position, concealed by the trunks of the trees and the growth of plants among the aspens.
For a time all I could hear was the slow drop of water from the leaves, and the whispering of the rain as it fell among the trees.
Then I heard, some distance up the slope, a faint movement, and I heard someone call out, “We got He’s been winged, anyway!” Suddenly, almost with the shock of a blow, I realized I had been wounded back there.
There had been no pain, only the shock of being hit . . . was it once or twice?
Then the wild scramble had followed, in which my only thought had been to escape death.
They had suckered me into an ambush. If I had not noticed the tracks at the gate I would have gone on into the cabin and been shot down at point-blank range.
“There’s blood here!” came Reese’s voice.
‘All right.” It was Bob Heseltine and his tone was grim. ‘So we got lead into him. That doesn’t mean he’s dead.” ‘allyou going down there after him?” Reese protested.
‘We don’t need to,” Haseltine said.
“That’s a box canyon, and it opens out right near the cabin. All we have to do is set and wait for him to come out, or die there.
There ain’t no two ways about it.” They talked some more, but they were closer together by then, and their voices were lower. I could hear nothing more that they said. But I waited.
Slowly my breath came back to me, but with it came a feeling of weakness. I knew I was hit, and was afraid to find out how bad. I didn’t want to die, and I was scared, more scared than I’d ever been.
It might happen here … right here.
I realized there was no reason why I should win and they should not. A bullet had hit me, and a bullet that could hit me could kill me.
Suddenly, crouched under the aspens, I began to shake as if Id had a chill. Maybe it was because I was scared. Maybe it was just reaction.
At the same time I knew that if I could hear them, they could hear me, and I had no idea whether I could move or not.
With infinite care, I eased one knee to the ground and got a tearing spasm of pain in the leg.
It was the leg, then … I’d been hit in the leg.
Holding my rifle by the barrel with t’he butt against the soft ground to steady me, I began to feel with my right hand. I found the wetness of blood, and followed it up my leg. It was right at the top, a raw, bloody place just back of my holster.
Now they were moving ofF. Their voices dwindled away; their movements faded out. I leaned the rifle against the tree and tugged my left coat sleeve up and the shirt sleeve down. The shirt was new, fresh that morning, a gray flannel one.
Hating to do it, because I’d not had many new shirts in my lifetime, I slipped my knife blade into the flannel and cut loose the cuff and most of the sleeve below the elbow. Then I eased it off and folded it into a thick pad, which I pressed to the wound to stop the bleeding. With part of the string that tied my blanket roll I tied the pad in place.
Then, using the rifle as a crutch, I pushed myself up.
My horse was my first concern … I would have to have my horse.
Hobbling painfully, then crawling, I made it to the top, but I hadn’t gone fifty yards when I saw my horse.
It was down, and it was dead.
No horse, and me in a box canyon with no way out.
Maybe when they said there was no way, they were thinking of a man on horseback. Most western men thought in terms of using a horse because a man in that country without a horse was usually as good as dead.
Crouching among the aspen, I peered all around.
I could see the rim of the canyon, and it surely looked bad for a man as crippled as I was.
Right then I , began to take stock.
Nobody knew where I was, so nobody was going to come to help me, even if there’d been anybody to help.
Down at the mouth of the canyon were two men who felt it would be better if I was dead-two men and a woman. Only I didn’t agree with them, no way at all. I wanted to get out of there, and I wanted a whole skin.