Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (7 page)

"I know. And just in time. What was wrong?"

"Dead pack rat in the intake pipe. Plugged it up tight. Don'i ask me how he got in there, the foot valve was just fine, but there he was, inside."

"Well, I'm glad it wasn't the whole pump," Amy said.

"That's for sure." Harry nodded. "Pack rats I can live with. People like Ted Smith are something else." He stared down the creek toward the place where old Doc Chamberlain's cabin was located, a hundred yards downstream in the cottonwoods. "I keep thinking we should just dump the construction company and retire out here full time. Show those bastards that somebody else can walk off a job too. Doc was talking about the same thing last summer, just taking up full-time residence here on the creek and let things in town go hang. Maybe we ought to talk to him again one of these days and see what he thinks right now. Maybe go down and buy him a drink tonight."

12

The house Frank Barrington was looking for was down a long canyon road outside the town of Canon City, Colorado, at the very end of a string of cheap builders' houses as alike as ugly ducklings in a row. Frank eased the little rented Ford down the steep road, watching the house numbers closely. Near the very end of the road a little yellow house had a yard sign that said
comstock
on a plastic board pressed to make it look like wood.

Frank turned into the driveway and snapped off the motor. The place looked deserted—no car in the drive, garage open and empty, drapes across the front windows.
Well, that figures,
Frank thought glumly. He had gotten a 7:00
a.m
. flight from Sea-Tac to Denver, then boarded a local puddle jumper south to Colorado Springs, arriving around 2:00
p.m
. Mountain Time. Four times en route he had tried the Comstock number, twice in Seattle, twice in Denver, with no response. By the time he'd rented the car and started south to Canon City to find the place itself, he was pretty sure it was going to be a big waste of time, but he had to tiy. It was the one connection with Pam that he could pin down: a name and address on a Forest Service citation.

He got out of the car, walked up on the porch and pushed the doorbell, heard the dingdong noise inside. He pushed it twice more, waiting, then banged on the door with his fist. Nothing. Finally he walked around the house, looked into a kitchen window at the back. Nothing alive in there. An open box of cake mix sitting on the counter. A mixing bowl with a beater, tipped back, the blades covered with something thick and white. Some dirty dishes in the sink, and a microwave oven, still turned on
. . . somebody left in a hurry . . .

Starting back for the car, Frank saw a white-haired man standing on the neighboring porch, staring at him. "You looking for something, buddy?"

"I'm looking for Comstock," Frank said. "Robert Comstock."

"You ain't going to find him," the man said. "He ain't here."

"So I see. Do you know where he went?"

"Couldn't rightly tell you, buddy." The man looked at him closely. "You didn't hear about that? He's dead."

"Dead of what?"

"Pneumonia, so they say. Got sick up there in Seattle and just turned up his toes. Same with two or three of the others."

Frank walked over to the man, not sure he'd heard right. "You say Comstock
died
in Seattle?
This
Robert Comstock?"

"It was on the TV just this morning."

"Look, this is very important," Frank said. "He had about twenty people with him up there. They were camping, right? Do you know if any of the others have come back?"

"Well, sure, I think Art Toomey's kid, Pete, got back, and— say, who the hell are you, anyway?"

"Forest Service." Frank held out his government ID with his picture on it. "I'm checking out that camping party."

"You aren't planning to make trouble, are you?"

"Well, no, I'm trying to keep people
out
of trouble, and I need to know what happened up there."

"Well, you could check with Pete Toomey, they live up on Avondale Street, you can get the number out of the phone book. Then there were Ted and Vi Thompson and a couple of people from Colorado Springs . . ." The man went on to name half a dozen others, with their addresses or general locations.

Frank thanked him and got back into the car. Exhausted as he was, he felt an urgency to get going down the list that afternoon. It was no easy job. Canon City, thirty-five miles south of Colorado Springs, boasted only about 12,000 people, but it was a rural sprawl of a town, spread for miles across a flat basin surrounded by rough sandstone hogbacks and outcroppings to the north and south and the rising Rockies to the west. Frank checked a local map in a gas station, then drove a couple of miles west of town and turned right up Skyline Drive for a high view back at the town for general orientation. Then, back in town, he started searching out the streets and houses. The rental car was a lemon, a clutch that slipped on grades and brakes that grabbed so badly he nearly flew through the windshield whenever he touched them. Nor were the people he was looking for, when he began finding them, much'more cooperative. Mostly they looked vaguely frightened, closed up like clams or slammed their doors in his face the moment he mentioned Com-stock or the camping party.

Pete Toomey, the first one that he actually located, was sick in bed with a "bad cold," his mother said, and she wouldn't let Frank see him; the doctor told her, she said, to take him to the emergency room at the local hospital if he got any worse, and in any event, he wasn't in condition to talk to
anybody
right then. Ted and Vi Thompson, in a little cottage on the far side of town, cut him off in midsentence and slammed the door hard; when he persisted at the doorbell, Ted returned with a double-barreled twenty-gauge and told Frank, past a privacy chain, exactly how many seconds he had to pack into his car and get out of there. Two other tries were equally unproductive—one not home, with no response to repeated telephone calls, the other a house he couldn't find at all until he discovered that the town had two streets with the same name on opposite sides of the valley and he had wasted an hour searching up and down the wrong one.

By then it was eight o'clock in the evening, and Frank was beginning to see things at the side of the road that weren't there.
No point going on without rest,
he thought,
got to have a clear mind, at least, just in case one of these people decides to break down and talk for a change.
He found a room in town at the Sky Valley Motel, walked down the main street to a steak house for food and then returned to the motel and fell asleep on the bed with his clothes still on.

It was not until three the next afternoon that Frank finally struck pay dirt. Jerry Courtenay was just getting home from work as Frank drove up to the little house tucked away in the hills above the town. Jerry was a small, bright-eyed, wiry man driving a plumber's van. He looked at Frank's Forest Service ID, and then at Frank, and nodded briefly. Yes, he was one of the group that just got back from the Enchantments. Yes, it was the group Comstock had organized, and no, he wouldn't mind talking to Frank about what had happened up there if he thought it would do any good. "Goddamned awful about Bob and those others," he muttered. "I don't know what hit 'em, but something sure did." He led Frank into the house, introduced his wife and a small son. "Beer?" Frank nodded, and the man tossed him one. "Just let me change my clothes," he said.

A few minutes later Jerry sank down in a living-room chair with his own beer. "So what do you want to know, exactly?"

"Everything that happened up there," Frank said.

"If I knew what happened I'd sure tell you, but I don't," Courtenay said. "All I really know is that one minute everything was going great up there, beautiful country, the whole crowd of us were having a ball, and then the next minute it seemed like everything turned to shit."

"There were twenty of you?"

"Twenty-one in all. Bob Comstock had his group all lined up, and then he found out we were thinking of going up a week later, and we knew some of his crowd pretty well, so we decided to go up together. We all took the same flight to Seattle, and then got the bus over the mountains to Leavenworth and started up the trail next morning. We drifted in to Upper Snow Lake above five in the afternoon and decided to call it a day."

"You see anybody odd along the way?"

"Well, there was this lady cop from the Forest Service came into our camp about six-thirty and climbed all over us. Bunch of laws we'd never heard of before . . ."

"It's a Wilderness Area. You didn't see the rules posted down at the trailhead?"

"Well, no. I mean, we'd had a few beers in the morning before we started out, and the kids were all over the place, and we didn't hardly see anything. Anyway, this girl came over and made us put out our fire and break up our camp and all that stuff. Seems like they coulda put up some bigger signs or something. And hell, the fire was right out on the rocks, it wasn't gonna start anything burning."

Frank nodded patiently. Suddenly, with an agonizing pang, he could see Pam walking over there in her little green hat and taking on this crowd of twenty-one people without a second thought, looking up at them and saying, "Look, folks, these are what the rules are and this is how it's going to be done," and then jolly well seeing to it that it was. "Did you notice anything peculiar about the girl?" Frank said.

"Well, she was just a tiny little thing, kinda risky to be wandering around up there all by herself, I thought, but she wasn't takin' any crap, she read the riot act and that was that. We started putting the fire out and she headed back toward her camp. Had a bad cold, though, she did. Got to coughing there by the fire and couldn't hardly stop. Matter of fact, I remember hearing her coughing all night long, clear across the lake."

"You didn't see her in the morning?"

"No, she was gone before we even got up." Courtenay produced two more beers. "We broke our camp around noon and started around the lake and up that steep path toward Lake Vivian. Lousy trail, straight up, you'd of thought we was mountain goats, and it must have been a hundred in the shade by then. I thought I was gonna die with that backpack on, before we got to the top."

"You didn't see any other people that looked—odd?"

"Hell, yes, there was plenty of them." Jerry shook his head. "Let me tell you, you got some weird hikers in that part of the country. People came charging up that trail at a dead run, like their lives depended on getting up there in thirty minutes flat. I swear to God, white-haired old ladies were catching up to us and passing us by, going uphill. I don't know what they were trying to prove. But no, there wasn't anybody you'd call exactly odd." The man was silent a moment, ruminating. "Except for one real strange one that we saw. There was this kid coming up the trail while we were resting by the creek and soaking our feet. Just a young kid, was all, but mean-looking, and he was barefoot—I mean, no boots at all—and that trail was nothing but sharp rocks."

"This was a boy?" Frank asked.

"Right. Maybe eight or nine years old. Scruffy little bastard, too, looked like he hadn't had a bath in a month. He had a long stick with a bandana bag tied to the top. Soon as he saw the creek he flopped down and started drinking like a pig. When he finally got up he gave us all a filthy look and started on up the trail. Didn't say one word, and we never saw him again."

"Well, I guess it takes all kinds," Frank said. "So what did you do then?"

"When we finally got to the top? We found a couple of good campsites in a meadow up above the second lake, that place where the creek comes wandering through before it drops off down the rocks, you know? So we set up our camps, and some of the kids went down to the second lake for a swim—we were plenty heated up, by then."

"You didn't see her up there on top?"

"Not a sign of her. So the kids went swimming and a couple of us started rigging our fly rods—and then all of a sudden everything all fell apart. Bob Comstock and his niece Janie Austin got sick."

"Sick," Frank repeated. "Like how, exactly?"

"It was like they'd come down with a bad cold and a fever," Courtenay said, "only it started up all of a sudden like some-body'd thrown a switch. They both crawled into their tents for a nap, and then Bob started chilling, said he felt like he was burning up. Then next thing they were coughing up a storm, the two of them, and aching so bad they could hardly move. By dinnertime two others were coming down with the same damned thing, and a fifth one wasn't feeling very good." The man shrugged helplessly. "Hell, we didn't know what to do, never got sick on a camping trip before. We gave them some aspirin and they just threw it right up. Couldn't hold any dinner down, either. We figured we'd just let 'em sweat it out for the night and start back down next day if they didn't feel any better but then about midnight Bob started coughing up blood, said he couldn't hardly breathe, and we could
hear
Janie bubbling in her chest, and the rest of us began to get scared, decided we'd better get them down to some help then and there without waiting for daylight . . ."

Jerry Courtenay got himself another beer. "I guess you'd say we sort of panicked then," he went on. "It seemed like I was kind of in charge, with Bob knocked out of it, and all I could think was we needed a doctor. So I told everybody to forget their gear, just get on their boots and jackets and grab their flashlights—and we started down." He sighed. "Believe me, picking our way down through those rocks in the dark was something else, and the trail down the wall was damn near impossible. Terry Gilman hauled Bob along by draping an arm over his shoulder until Bob's legs gave out, and then another of the boys took his other arm and they fairly dragged him. Had to do the same thing with Janie before long, and then two other sick ones started to give out. I was the strongest hiker, so when we finally got down to Snow Lakes I took off ahead at a dead run in order to get to the bottom and get an ambulance up to meet the others at the trailhead. I swear I nearly broke my leg three times, falling over windfalls and roots; there wasn't much moonlight through the trees, and the one or two camps with somebody still up gave me lots of great advice but no help, so I just kept on going. When I finally did get down and found a phone, 1 tried the Ranger Station first, and finally got somebody, but they were no damned help—"