Novel 1971 - Tucker (v5.0) Page 6

  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 hoofprints 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 greasy trail, 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 here 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 where I’d 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. As I 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 water’s edge, at least two hundred yards below.

  Hooking an arm around a slender trunk, 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 him! 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 calm. “So we got lead into him. That doesn’t mean he’s dead.”

  “You goin’ down there after him?” Reese protested.

  “We don’t need to,” Heseltine 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 I’d 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 the 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. And now I was beginning to get mad…really mad.

  They had stolen our money, they had been responsible for the death of pa, even though those things might be laid at my own door. If I hadn’t acted like a fool kid and run off, that horse would never have strayed, and pa might be alive this minute.

  All the time I felt aggrieved over them taking our money I couldn’t escape the idea that I’d played the fool myself. But they’d tried three times to kill me. Once when they shot into the restaurant, and again when Doc Sites had laid for me in the dark at the foot of the stairs. Now they had tried it a third time, and they might have succeeded. Only now I was mad enough to want to live, mad enough to want to see them in hell, and me with my money back.

  I’d lost some blood—they’d seen that. But though they knew I’d been hit, they didn’t know how bad. I didn’t know how bad myself, but by the size of that wound it didn’t look good.

  Two things I had to do now. I had to hunt me a hole and see ho
w bad I was hurt, and then I had to crawl out of that canyon, one way or another. Once out of the canyon I somehow had to get me a horse and get back to Leadville to stay until I was able to ride again.

  Pa, he always said there was no stoppin’ a man who was set on an idea. He’d told me of men who kept going, even when they was out of their heads, so I told myself what I had to do, and then I set about it.

  Just beyond where my horse lay there was an opening in the brush. It might be where a deadfall lay, but it might be a path, and a path would lead to somewhere. Crawling, so’s I could drag my leg, I worked my way along the slope, sometimes in and sometimes out of the aspens.

  It was a trail, sort of, but it was mighty old. No fresh tracks showed; it hadn’t been used in a long time. I turned down the trail, for I needed water, and it was down in the bottom of the canyon.

  It began to rain. The grass and lupine around me were already wet, but rain couldn’t matter to me now. What I needed was some kind of shelter, some place where I could make a fire, and do something about my wound.

  Time to time I thought of that other blow. Had I been shot a second time? No telling…but no time to worry about that. The thing to do now was to crawl.

  Somewhere along the trail I passed out. Now, in stories I’d read sometimes in those dime-novel books that Reese, Sites, an’ me were always swappin’ around, when a man passed out he would always come to hisself in a nice bedroom with a pretty girl a-pattin’ his brow.

  When I come to it was dark, and wet and muddy. I was face down in the trail, and there was no light, not even a star, no fancy bed, and surely no girl a-pattin’ me. Only the rain.

  “You always thought big about what you’d do when you come to manhood,” I said to myself. “Now, boy, you better crawl, or you just ain’t a-goin’ to make it.”

  So I crawled.

  Chapter 7

  *

  LIGHTNING FLASHED AND thunder rumbled back in the mountains. I saw the reflection of lightning on the rain-slick rocks. I saw the reflection off the rain-wet grass close to my face. I started to crawl.

  I towed behind me my blanket roll with my rifle stuck through the string that tied it. There was sense enough in me to hang onto that.

  Once I found a pool on the downhill side of a rock and I dipped my hand into it and drank. I was dry…dry inside me anyway—from losin’ blood, most likely.

  Finally I found a fallen tree, a dead spruce with heavy boughs, and I crawled close to it. It was a fresh fall, the earth likely loosened by the rain. I cut away a few branches with my knife, unrolled my blankets, and crawled in further, muddy and wet though I was.

  Twice during the endless night I woke up, once from the pain of my wound, another time from the cold. I felt sick and very tired, and when morning came at last, a gray, dull morning with slanting rain and lowering clouds, my mouth was dry, my head ached, and when I tried to stand I was weak and dizzy. But I knew I must move. If I stayed where I was, in the state I was in, I would surely die.

  Staggering, I got to my feet, made a clumsy roll of the blankets, and slipped into my slicker…there hadn’t been time before. Slinging the blanket roll around my shoulders, I worked my way back up the slope to my horse.

  For several minutes I listened to the rain, studied the layout, and when I was sure there was no one about, went up to the saddle.

  I got the saddlebags loose, tugged the one from under the horse, and then with them over my shoulder I started up the canyon.

  They’d said it was boxed in. Maybe. One thing was sure, the way I felt I wasn’t going down canyon to give them a shot at me. As I recalled, there was no cover near the cabin…I’d have to break into the open within easy range of it, and they could set right there in the warmth of the cabin and pick me off when I tried to get by.

  There was some grub in those saddlebags. Down on the slope I leaned against a tree, because it hurt to bend my leg to sit down, and I ate some jerked beef and a chunk of bread. Then I started on.

  My head was throbbing. When I’d made no more than a hundred yards, I had to sit down. I almost fell onto a log and stayed there, panting. My forehead was hot, and my eyes didn’t seem to focus right. After a bit I went on, struggling along through trees, over slippery rocks, working my way higher up the canyon.

  Presently the canyon narrowed, and a branch came in from the south. Standing there, swaying a little from weakness, I stared up the branch.

  You never saw such a mess. There’d been a blow down, leaving hundreds of trees, fallen and dead, crisscrossing the canyon.

  Sometimes a howling wind will funnel down such canyons, all its strength channeled into one tremendous blast. Every once in a while in the Rockies you’ll come on a canyon like that…they seem to suck the winds down them.

  This one had blown down most of a small forest, but it had left some trees standing, and others had grown up among them. The place was like a nightmare, but it gave me hope.

  Already I could see the rock wall at the branch canyon’s end, and it looked sheer and seemed to promise nothing, but I had just an idea that the mess of dead wood might offer something. They had said there was no way out, but I was willing to bet no cowboy had ridden into that canyon, or tried to climb very far through those fallen trees.

  Weak as I was, and fuzzy as was my vision as well as my thinking, I had the wild animal’s urge to escape, to escape and to hide. At the canyon’s entrance I turned and brushed the grass upright where I had stepped. Just the bending over almost caused me to fall, and my hip hurt bad. Turning, I went into the canyon, ducked under one deadfall and half fell over another. I sat down there and swung my legs over a moss-grown boulder and went on. When at last I looked back toward the mouth of the canyon, it could no longer be seen.

  Here it was shadowed and still. The whisper of the rain was the only sound, except once in a while the rubbing of one branch against another in some slight stirring of the wind.

  Sometimes I fell. My hands were scraped by rough bark when I tried to catch myself. My pack and my rifle caught again and again on branches into which I blundered. But somehow I kept moving because it was in me that I had to move.

  I could not let them beat me. I had to get out of here. I had to make them pay for what they had done, but most important, I had to get that money back. I had to get it back for those neighbors of ours in Texas.

  Sometimes I passed out and lay still against the wet grass. I wanted to stay and just rest…but always I started crawling again. My wound opened and bled, and it hurt, too.

  Once when I opened my eyes I found I wasn’t among pines any more, but among aspens, so that meant I was getting higher up. Grasping the slender trunk of the nearest tree, I tugged myself up and leaned against it.

  The rain had stopped, but there was drifting mist around me. Looking back, I could see nothing of the canyon, for now it was thick with cloud. But on one of the bare, rain-wet peaks above me I could see the reflection of sunlight. Using the trees to help, I pulled myself on, from one to the other.

  Aspens are the forest’s effort to recover itself, the first trees to spring up after there has been fire, and often they grow on the steep mountainsides below a ridge. They give shelter to wildlife, and to the young evergreens until they are strong enough to stand alone. As the evergreens grow tall, the aspens die out, for they need sunlight and open ground.

  This idea worked its way through my fuzzy, wandering thoughts as I struggled along, but a spasm of pain went through me and I fell. I lay gasping, too weak to get up. After a long time I slowly pulled myself up again.

  I did not want to go on…I wanted to quit. Just to lie down, close my eyes, and not try any more.

  That was the way I felt, and that was what I thought I wanted, but something kept urging me on. And suddenly I was at the top. I came out of the trees into a mountain meadow. The far side of the meadow was in sunlight, and when I reached it I stood still, soaking up the warmth.

  My eyes had been on it for several minutes before
the realization of what I saw reached me.

  It was a chimney. A chimney of stone…of native stone.

  Where there was a chimney there must be a house or cabin. A house or cabin sometimes meant people.

  Walking very carefully so that I would not fall, I went through the trees and brush toward the building, which was a cabin. From behind an aspen I studied the layout.

  The cabin was small. There was no sign of life anywhere around, but there were some horse droppings in the yard that might not be old. With the recent rain it was hard to tell. There was a corral and an open-faced shed.

  Walking slowly, my rifle ready in my hands, I went around to the front. No tracks since the rain. A path led away from the cabin and down into the trees.

  The door opened easily under my hand. Inside, the cabin was spotless. There was a neatly made bed, a fireplace with the fire laid, and a floor that had been scrubbed…something unusual in the mountains.

  A blanket hung over a door to a room beyond. Pushing it aside, I saw another bedroom, this one with curtains. In a crudely made wardrobe were some women’s fixings.

  I put my gun down and laid my blanket roll on a bench, and then I lit the fire and put on a kettle. I knew that I was working against time. That I was in bad shape, nobody needed to tell me, and it was time I bathed the wound in my hip and discovered what else had happened to me.

  Weak as I was, I had no idea whether I’d get through the day or not. Taking off my slicker, I unslung my gunbelt, blinking my eyes in dull amazement at what I saw.

  The bullet had evidently hit my belt, exploding at least two cartridges and leaving that part of my belt mostly blown away. The explosion had torn that hole in my side. Suddenly scared, I peeled down my pants and lifted my shirttail free.

  The folded flannel had stopped the blood, but where it didn’t cover the wound I could see the shine of a fragment of metal from the exploded shell. If that stuff was all through the wound I was in mighty serious trouble.