Medicine Road (27 page)

Considering this longhead action, the precious ness of time forced him to chuck it out. Carson's
Creek Gorge cut into the main canon here at the
flats, from the east, its own canon being nearly a
quarter mile wide at the junction. If a man circled
the flats, he would have to feel up that side canon
half a mile or so, too. By the time he'd got that done,
he'd have shot two hours he didn't have to spare.
And likely for nothing, at that.

Chances were nearly gut-cinched that the Arapahoes had gone on, had tied Tim out naked with the
idea of having him sun bake and thirst to death. It
surely wasn't any accident that the bubbling thread
of Carson's Creek ran past just inches beyond the
staked-out renegade's feet.

Crouching back in the trail-fringe brush, the
mountain man calculated his next move. When a
man had run a ten-to-one track into an odds-on
stymie like this, he might as well chuck in the rest of
his poke. No use standing there, picking his seat
about it. Leaving Heyoka in the brush, Jesse
chucked his in.

Swiftly he went, gliding out into mid-clearing,
bearing down on the waiting Tim like a mountain
cat coming up on a tied-out colt. Eastward, the sun
was just rimming the mesa, tumbling its red flood
down the cedar-black gullet of Carson's Creek
Gorge.

The hostiles had rigged Tim with what Jesse's
Sioux folks called an Arapaho halter. This was an
inch-wide strip of green rawhide, passed through
the mouth, cinched down on the tongue and tied
fast back of the skull base. What this crude bit,
shrinking slowly in the sun, did to discourage a
man's urge to converse was six shades stiffer than considerable. Even after Jesse had slashed it out of
his mouth, Tim couldn't make anything but deafmute mumbles for a full minute. Then he got his
tongue going.

"Listen, Callahan.. ."-delivered in hoarsely
earnest tones, the Mormon renegade's plea broke
out desperately-"and for Gawd's sake, believe
me!"

"Go on," snapped Jesse, blue eyes swinging an
apprehensive circle around the flats.

Now that he was out in the open, the mountain
man's Indian hunch was hammering at him again,
telling him he had likely been right, first off, thinking this thing was a hostile trap. Tim's rushing
speech stumbled in, harsh and heavy, on his redhaired companion's rising instincts.

"They left me haltered like this for trying to get
the kid away. I killed that lousy Skull, grabbed the
boy, and run for it. The squaw nailed me and would
have killed me but for Black Coyote busting in. He
thought it would be funny as hell to leave me tied
up for you to finish off....

"What the hell are you trying to give me,
O'Mara?" Jesse's interruption was ignited by the
quick flash of the narrowed eyes behind it.

"Listen, I'm telling you. You know how them red
scuts are for their damn' courtesy rules. Well, they
somehow figured I had tipped you off to that ambush in Wild Hoss Bend. They give you credit for
letting them know I'd crossed them up. So Watonga
he says . . . 'Wagh! We'll leave Big Face. that's me,
see . . . 'in the trail as a courtesy gift for Tokeya Sha."

"Well?" Jesse's challenge froze the perspiration
beading Tim's scowling gaze.

"Well, hell! They figured you'd kill me account of them grabbing me when I took out after the squaw
in Wild Hoss Bend and making it look like I was
mixed up in the ambush."

"You know something, O'Mara"-the mountain
man's break-in was deceptively quiet-"they figured right."

"My Gawd, Callahan, you don't mean that! We're
white men. Listen. Didn't I steer them offen you
when you knocked that pebble off the cliff? Didn't I
try to-?"

Jesse's answer came with the flashing knife blade
that whipped out to sever Tim's bonds. "I'm cutting
you loose. You get ten seconds to loosen up your
arms and legs. Then I'm going to kill you, mister.
With my hands."

Flexing his thick shoulders, the renegade shot a
side glance at the waiting mountain man, decided to
make one more try. "Callahan, I ain't lost no more
love for you than you have for me. But unless I can
have a hand in getting that kid of Lacey's back from
them scuts, I ain't got a chance in the settlements.
Leave me throw in with you. There's nobody in the
camp up yonder but the kid and the squaw. The
braves are all up on the mesa running buffalo. I
swear I ain't had nothing to do with this whole deal.
As for Lacey, hell, you can have her. You got her,
anyway. Me, I just don't want them red buzzards
sticking me full of cedar needles and burning my
hide off. What do you say, Callahan?"

If there was a time Jesse would have felt any kinship with the white man in front of him, it was
long gone. He wasn't seeing Tim O'Mara's sweaty
face, nor hearing his hoarsely growled words. He
was seeing the sodden-blanketed eggshell crush of
little Kathy's head, and hearing the dull, sick mon otone of her shocked mother's low-voiced cry:
Dead. Dead.

"I say you're a god-damned liar, O'Mara. And
that your ten seconds have come and gone."

"Callahan!"

"Save it," grated Jesse. "I was in that brush spur
over Watonga's lodge when the sub-chiefs voted you
down. It was a still night, mister, and none of you
was whispering."

Jesse was backing off with his words, placing his
Hawken and knife belt carefully out of reach on a
shelf-high rock ledge. He saw the dark light shoot
Tim's sudden scowl at his flat challenge. Didn't miss
the following blankness that spread like pond ice
over the big Irishman's slab face. Knew, without
anybody having to write him a letter about it, that
he had made his match-and met it.

"You came after me once, O'Mara," was all he
said. "Now I'm coming after you."

Tim's answer was to glide away from the mountain man's crouching advance, his light-stepping,
easy way of going, as though his feet had better eyes
in them than his head, letting Jesse know he had a
fighting man on his hands. And, in the breath-held
seconds of the first wary circling, a man had that
strange, timeless pause that goes ahead of any
hand-to-hand encounter where the announced
stakes are life itself, to study just how much of a
fighting man!

Tim O'Mara was big. Six foot two, anyway, and as
thick-set and well-balanced as a boar grizzly. His
massive, fleshy head was set on a neck that seemed
to be nothing more than a foot-wide continuation of
the sloping, ropy-muscled shoulders. His eyes, tiny
and close-set as any bear's, appeared lost in the re ceding shadow cast over them by the protruding
Neanderthal brow ridge. His wide, blunt jaw, slack
now under the looseness of the thick lips above it,
had the look and cut of base rock. A keg-chested,
heavy-waisted man, his wide hips and thick legs
were a grotesquely bulky foundation for the support
and movement of the gross muscularity of the great
trunk above them.

Crouching now, moving lightly, stripped to the
gee-string as the Arapahoes had left him, nearly the
whole of his hulking figure overlain with a coarse
mat of black body hair, Tim O'Mara looked brute
enough to give any fellow human ample pause.
Across from him moved a man of different cut.
Nearly as tall as Tim, lean, supple, graceful, Jesse
Callahan was the renegade's diametric physical opposite: the kind of a spare, unimposing-looking
man an opponent would be likely to dismiss, at first
glance, as ordinary. Then, if that opponent were a
seasoned frontier rough like Tim, he would take another look, as Tim was taking now, and figure
maybe this mountain jasper wasn't so ordinary, after all.

Where he looked on the slight side for a trade that
ran to big men, he had a spread of shoulders you
could lay an axe haft across and a set of hands sizable enough to span a horse pistol without stretching, and dangling on arms as long and thick as
split-oak posts. What 190 pounds there was to the
rest of him was pure, dry muscle and dense, big
bone. He handled himself in a way that made you
watch him, two feet moving as softly as though
there were nothing but summer wind under his moccasin soles. Huge hands and forearms flexing and
unflexing in that slow, rhythmic way that told you you'd better get in close to this one. Close and bear
hug-tight. Where he couldn't wind up that rocksized fist and throw it with that mule-muscled
shoulder back of it. Just about when you had settled
your mind to that, you found yourself looking into
the quietest face you'd ever seen on a man, and,
back of the face, into the chilliest pair of blue-dark
eyes this side of two chunks of lake ice. And then
you didn't know what to think. You just kept on
moving in your circle. Moving and watching.
Watching and moving.

Five eternity-long seconds dragged away as Jesse
deliberately closed the circle. He was within six feet
of his man now. Another step and it was five. Then
four. And still the big Mormon waited.

Jesse hesitated. Tim O'Mara matched his pause,
seeming not to look at him, not to know he was there,
tiny eyes appearing to watch everything within the
mountain arena except his opponent. It was a bad
trick, this thing of a man not looking at you when you
were trying to get in on him. You couldn't see his
eyes. And when you couldn't see a man's eyes, you
couldn't read his body. Jesse cursed, wavered, took a
half step backward, finding himself confused, uncertain, for the first time in his life afraid.

As the mountain man's retreating foot felt behind
him for a safe and solid setting, he was necessarily
and for the least fraction of split time off balance.
Tim struck instantly. Whirling to roll with the lunge,
Jesse's pivot foot struck a loose, fist-sized boulder.
He felt the searing pain of the ankle turn as the leg
spun on out from under him, knew he was falling
even before Tim's huge weight bombarded into him.

Where it should have cost him his life, the awkward fall saved it. Tim's leap, thrown off time by his adversary's collapse, carried the burly Mormon's
body on over its intended target, causing the thick
grasp of the circling arms to miss their intended
bear hug, close, instead, on the mountain man's desperately upflung arms. The next instant Jesse's
drawn-up thighs had straightened, driving his bony
knees up and into the twin pits of Tim's groin. With
the groin thrust, Jesse balled his body, rolled sideways to his hands and knees as Tim, ten feet away,
came scrambling to his feet. It was now the Mormon's turn to hesitate, slowed by the intense pain of
the double blow in his groin.

It was a hesitation that sent Jesse leaping toward
him, big fists clubbed. But the first surge of that leap
sent a hot knife of sickening weakness up the calf of
the mountain man's left leg, bringing him to a staggering halt five feet from the waiting renegade.
White-faced, Jesse tested the foot, found it would
just bear his weight. And no more. The fight was ten
seconds old, unjoined as yet, and he was going into
it with a sprained ankle!

As the injured Jesse halted his rush, Tim wheeled
and came at him, his headlong attack indicating a
sudden disregard of caution and maneuver. The indication was only apparent. The big Mormon was
one of those occasional humans whose instincts to
kill or be killed had survived 10,000 years of civilized veneering. He came down on Jesse now, as
one wolf would on another, sensing the fact of the
mountain man's distress without knowing its nature. Without knowing and without caring, his
animal-sharp extra-sensory perception telling him
as accurately as any certain knowledge that he had
wounded his foe and had him going down. Jesse
did what he could, and it was not enough.

As the charging renegade leaped in, he set himself
back on his good right leg and drove his right fist
fully into the snarling face. At the instant of the
blow's delivery, Tim tucked his chin for the classic
frontier brawler's diving head-butt. Jesse's whitened
knuckles smashed into the matted hair and ironhard bone of the Mormon's skull top, the wrenching
shock of the collision spearing up his straightened
forearm and bicep to explode with rocket-bursting
force in the spasmed muscles of his shoulder. He felt
the rupturing impact of the bull's head-butt bury itself in the pit of his belly and knew he was falling
again.

He had no sensation of striking the ground, his
next memory being the perfectly clear one of an interval during which he could not breathe or move.
The same clear, helpless consciousness told him that
Tim had him in an armlocked bear hug and was
crushing the literal life out of him. His breath, reflexing from the solar-plexus smash of Tim's head,
came bursting back with its swift, familiar burgeoning of fresh strength. Twisting to free his arms so
that he could get his hands into Tim's face, he found
his numbed right arm would not respond, while his
left was pinned by the double prison of his own and
his opponent's weights. At the same time he found
the Mormon's great hips and legs had his own long
limbs hopelessly wedged beneath them.

With the cool dimness of coming unconsciousness spreading its grateful shade before him, he
forced his mind to work and his eyes to see. What
they saw was an ear. A thick-lobed, protruding, dirtcrusted human ear. It was attached to a big round
head that was buried, grunting and straining, against the giving crack of his upper ribs. That was
undoubtedly Tim O'Mara's head and the ear was
undoubtedly Tim O'Mara's ear. With all of consciousness and strength that remained to him, Jesse
flashed his white teeth down and into that ear.

He felt the grating of the parting cartilage as his
jaws clamped crazily home, sensed the spasmodic,
wild recoil of Tim's whole body, heard the animal
pain in his hoarse cry. Then he was free. Standing
clear. His feet under him once more. His mind and
vision glass clear.

Tim was waiting across from him, dull face contorted, hairy left paw just coming away from the
side of his head. Tim brought the hand down. Stared
at it wonderingly. Jesse's eyes followed the Mormon's, seeing the hand and the bright blood.