Novel 1971 - Tucker (v5.0) (7 page)

I had had my first gun battle. I was still alive, and Doc Sites was down.

Nothing in me wanted to kill Kid Reese, or even Heseltine. All I wanted was my money, and then to ride free, to make a place somewhere for myself.

When I was a few steps shy of the Clarendon, a man stepped out from the wall. He was wearing a short sheepskin coat, and his black hat had a torn brim.

“Are you Shell Tucker?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He was a stranger, a narrow-faced man with shifty eyes, and I did not like the looks of him very much.

He smiled at me. “Heard about you an’ that shootin’. Heard about them fellers makin’ off with your money. That there don’t seem right.”

“It wasn’t.”

“That Reese now, him an’ Heseltine—they’ve skipped town. They’re scared of you.”

Maybe I was a kid, but I didn’t believe that. Not for a minute. When I remembered the hard, leather-like face of Bob Heseltine and his cold eyes, I felt a chill. He might be many things, but he was not afraid of me.

“I know they’ve skipped,” he said. He glanced up and down the street and stepped a little closer. “I know they’ve skipped and I know where they are.”

“You do?”

“They’re holed up in a shack the other side of Independence Pass. Sets back in the quakies.” I knew that mountain folks often called the aspens “quakies,” from their name of quaking aspen. “Good run of water close by,” he added. “Figured you’d want to know.”

“Thanks.”

Con Judy was not in the room when I entered, nor was he in the bar. There was a restlessness in me, and I did not want to wait. They were at the Pass…suppose they left there? How long might it be before I found them again?

In our room I quickly wrote a note, then taking up my rifle, my saddlebags and blanket roll, I went down the steps and across the lobby.

My horse was standing three-legged in his stall, and he rolled his eyes at me when I came in, and laid back his ears when I threw the saddle on his back and tightened the cinch. All I was thinking was that they had gone from here, and if I was to have my money back I must follow. Con Judy had his own affairs, and this was mine. Was I a child that I needed him to guide me?

Ducking my head as I rode through the wide door, I turned my horse down the trail. 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 find 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 lone 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 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 how 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

L
IGHTNING 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.