Talon & Chantry 07 - North To The Rails (v5.0) (9 page)

“And then?” Williams’ voice was low.

“I’ll take your gun away and break your neck.”

Williams laughed. “I’d kill you, Chantry. Nobody will ever put hands on me the way you did with Koch. Gun or no gun, I’d kill you.”

“Better have your gun out when you see me coming, then. You’ll never get a chance to draw it.” He got to his feet and walked over to the chuck wagon for the coffeepot. Coolly, he filled Williams’ cup and then his own, putting the pot down by the fire. “And while you’re at it, French, you’d better tell those Talrim boys to light a shuck. They might lead to some misunderstanding.”

He looked at French, and suddenly he smiled. “I wouldn’t want to break your back and then find it was all a mistake. You tell them to light out, will you?”

French Williams shook his head. “Chantry, if I wasn’t so set on beating you out of that herd, I could like you.”

T
HE NEXT DAY broke cold and raw, with a long wind in their faces, and the cattle had to be forced into it. And the wind did not let up as the sun rose behind the low gray clouds.

There would be water in the Picketwire where they would camp, and some shelter in the river bottom, if they were lucky. Tom Chantry rode the drag for a while, spelling a rider there, then he moved up into a swing position. After the noon break he took the
grulla
from the remuda and went scouting.

It was still cold, and he wore a buckskin jacket over his blue wool shirt. He went directly east, riding warily. Twice he came upon pony tracks; each time they were several days old. He held to low ground, climbing the ridges only to peer over the crest, showing himself as little as possible. He was uneasy, and after a bit he took his rifle from its scabbard and held it in his hand.

The wind was raw. He turned up the collar of his jacket, tucked his chin into it, and pulled his hat low. He was studying the ground, then suddenly looked up to see he had ridden right into the bend of an elbow of hills, He must either skyline himself by crossing the ridge or follow along the side until he could reach the cattle trail. It was the country ahead he wanted to see, but caution told him the longer way was best.

He had turned to ride along the side of the hill when he glimpsed a notch, almost at the bend of the elbow, a small gap by which he could get to the other side of the ridge without showing himself on top of it. He swung his horse toward the notch.

His horse scrambled up the last few feet. At the opening of the notch he could see only that it was a sort of cleft in the ridge that seemed to lead all the way through. Old tracks told him the buffalo used this route, so it must go all the way through.

He walked his horse into the gap, traveled about a hundred yards, then suddenly rounded a low shoulder of the hill and emerged on the other side.

He never heard the shot, but he felt the blow. It was as if somebody had struck him suddenly across the side of the head with a whipstock.

He knew he was hit, he felt himself falling, he remembered the necessity of clinging to his rifle. He hit the dirt, smelled the dust that rose, and then he neither felt nor heard anything but the vague sound of his horse.

Cold…icy, teeth-chattering cold. It was cold that brought him to consciousness, it was cold that opened his eyes.

It was night…cold and black, and there was a smell of rain in the air, and a distant rumble of thunder. He was lying sprawled on the earth, the smell of dust and parched grass in his nostrils. He started to move, a spasm of pain went through him. He lay still, wanting no more of that.

He had been shot. He had fallen from his horse. He had been shot sometime in the middle of the afternoon, but if anybody was looking for him they could scarcely find him here.

A spatter of rain struck his shoulders. Shelter…he must find shelter. He risked the pain, and tried to sit up. On the third attempt he made it.

He was still at the cleft of the hills where he had been shot. He felt around him for his rifle…it was gone.

His knife? Gone. He felt then for his money, but it was gone, too. It was only then that he realized how cold his feet were.

His boots were gone.

Gingerly, he touched his head, which throbbed with a dull, heavy beat. His hair was matted with blood. He got to his knees, then shakily to his feet. He looked around slowly, blinking against the pain.

His horse was gone, too. He remembered then that he had heard it running off. It might not have gone far, and he called out. There was no sound in answer, no sound and no movement but the falling rain.

He staggered to the lip of the cut and looked around, but it was too dark to see anything.

The herd would be ahead and to his left. Taking a careful step at a time, he moved slantingly down the hill, toward the northwest. He stumbled over a rock and fell. When he got heavily to his feet, he realized that the butts of his palms were bloody, skinned in the fall.

Whoever had shot him, had left him for dead—or if not dead, sure to be dead soon.

He fell three times before he reached the bottom of the slope, and by then his socks were worn through and his feet were hurting. He peered about, trying in the distant flashes of lightning to see something he might use for shelter, but there was nothing.

First of all, rain or no rain, he needed some protection for his feet. Fumbling in the debris at the foot of the rocky slope, he found a jagged piece of rock, and removing his buckskin jacket he sawed off the sleeves a little above the elbows. He slipped these over his feet and used thongs made from the long fringes, knotted together, to tie the sleeves around his ankles.

Putting on his coat again, he moved out, walking carefully, trying to avoid the rocks and the patches of prickly pear.

A dark line ahead warned him of trees, and he went even more slowly, wary of Indians who might be camped there. Under the cottonwoods he stood close to a tree trunk and listened to the falling rain and the rustle of water in the creek bed, but he could hear no other sounds.

His eyes searched for a fire, or some evidence of human life, but there was nothing. He worked his way among the trees until he found a place where several bigger ones were grouped together in such a way that their entwined branches made a sort of shelter.

Here he leaned against a tree trunk and closed his eyes with weariness. After a moment he opened them, and his eyes, now accustomed to the darkness, saw a fallen limb from one of the cottonwoods. He went to it and, huddling there in its partial shelter, he leaned back against the tree, and slept.

Around him the rain fell softly, steadily. Overhead the cottonwoods rustled. In the hollow of a tree not twenty yards away a squirrel peered out at the rain for a moment, listening, then tucked its bushy tail around it once more and went back to sleep.…In a saloon in Trinidad a cowhand on the drift lighted a cigar and glanced at his cards. “I’ll take two cards,” he said.

More than a thousand miles to the east a girl in a white dress with lace at the throat looked down the table at her father and said, “Pa, I haven’t heard from Tom. It isn’t like him.”

Earnshaw looked up, and said quietly, “I hope every-think is all right with him. I have written to him, telling him what has happened here. Everything depends on him now.”

She was a gentle-appearing and lovely girl, but in the coolness of her eyes now and the set of her chin there was something that reminded her father that she came of pioneer stock. “Pa, I want to go west,” she said. “I want to go to him.”

“That’s impossible. He’s out on the range. From what I hear it’s very wild country.”

“He may need help.”

“What help do you think you could give? You are a single girl, and we have no friends there, no one to whom you could go. It would be unseemly.”

“Nevertheless, I want to go.”

“Wait. We will hear from him.”

C
HANTRY AWOKE, SHAKING with a chill. He was wet through to the skin, without shelter, without food, without fire. He had lost blood, and he was very weak. He had no shoes, only the crude moccasins made from his sleeves.

He struggled to his feet and clung for a moment to the trunk of the cottonwood. He was shaky and uncertain, but he knew he must move, he must get on. A faint light under the trees indicated that daylight was not far off. He picked up a broken branch from the ground. It was almost straight, and was about seven feet long and almost two inches in diameter. Using it for a staff, he started to walk. For the first time he realized how sore his feet had become, but step by step he went through the cottonwoods to the far side.

By now the herd would be moving, or about to move. To overtake it in his present condition would be impossible. He had left the herd by riding east, and at a rough guess he must be about fifteen miles from Trinidad.

The clouds were low, the light still dim, and there were no landmarks visible. Fisher’s Peak or the Spanish Peaks would have given him direction, but they were out of sight behind the clouds. Yet there was something he could go by.

Leaning on his staff in the partial shelter of a tree, he furrowed his brow against the throbbing in his skull, and thought of the Purgatoire, called by cattlemen the Picket wire. It lay ahead of him, crossing his line of travel had he been with the herd. The creeks in this area flowed north into the Picketwire, so the nearby creek would be flowing north, or in that general direction. To reach Trinidad he must turn at right angles to the flow of the creek and keep it at his back, and so go west.

Nobody would be looking for him. Williams had everything to gain and nothing to lose if Chantry never turned up again, or if he failed to be riding with the herd when it reached the railhead.

His body was chilled through, but he started on weaving a slow way among the trees. He managed a dozen steps before he stopped, then another ten. Ahead of him he could see the bank that marked the edge of the river bottom; once he climbed that bank he would be in the open, without any shelter at all.

Yet he could be no wetter than he now was, and not much colder. His only hope lay in keeping moving. Ten steps…then five. The buckskin on his feet would not last long. There was one thing to be thankful for: no Indian was fool enough to be out in the rain.

He came to the small bluff that marked the river bottom, and blinking his eyes in the rain, he looked for a path, and found it. Slowly, slipping and tugging at his staff, he climbed the bank.

Now for the first time he felt the wind. It went through him with icy fingers, probing at his strength. Clinging to the staff, he plodded on, turning occasionally to be sure the line of trees was at his back.

He thought of what had happened. Who had shot him? An Indian? French Williams? One of the Talrims? Or perhaps some stranger who needed a horse? No matter. There would be time to think about that when he was warm again, and when he had eaten.

Warm?
Would he ever be warm again?

He hobbled westward, depending on his staff, and pausing every few steps to ease the pain in his feet. The ground was muddy from the rain, and he had to stop often to shake the mud from his foot coverings.

When he had gone scarcely a mile he found another creek bed and descended into it, pushing through the brush. He scooped up water and drank, then crossed on scattered stones and climbed the far bank.

Every step now was agony, but he plodded on simply because he knew he must not stop. He had thought at moments of giving up, he had thought of surrendering to whatever ill fate awaited him, but it had never really been in him to do so. Somewhere beyond the muddy plain across which he was slogging lay Destination, a place where there was food and warmth, a solution to his immediate problem.

When he fell down again it was at the edge of some trees. He had come to another creek, and the water still ran north, so he was on the right track. He got up and stumbled to the flat ground under the trees, and here he found the remains of an old campfire.

He searched the ground for something useful, perhaps a broken knife blade, something for a weapon. But what he finally found was a shelter, a lean-to, tightly made and with dry leaves and grass on the ground inside. He fell to his knees, rolled over, and slept.

Words awoke him. He did not open his eyes, for he heard the first words spoken.

“Leave him be, Sarah. He’s as good as dead, can’t you see?”

“And if he doesn’t die?”

“But he will!”

“I’m going to make sure that he does, Paul. I did not come this far to have anything else happen. I want him dead. I want French to have those cattle…then there’ll be just one man.”

“Is it worth it? There are only about two thousand head, Sarah.”

“And in Dodge they are worth ten thousand dollars with the outfit.”

“Ten thousand? You will have to pay the hands.”

“You talk like a fool, Paul. Let me have your gun.”

“
My
gun? Why?”

“Because I am going to kill him with it. Then I am going to put the gun in his hand and when he is found they will think he shot himself because of the hopeless situation he was in.”

The words of this creature called Sarah came to him clearly and plainly. He was to be murdered, for some reason he did not know. He was not sure whether he could move or not, but he was about to try when Paul spoke again.

“Let’s make a fire and have some coffee. I’m cold, Sarah. We can take care of him any time. He isn’t going anywhere.”

They moved off under a tree and the man built a fire. When they had coffee on and both were sitting down, Tom Chantry lifted his head. The sleep and the emergency had brought clearness to his mind. He looked around cautiously.

Their horses were over there, sixty or seventy yards off.

He eased slowly to his elbows and began to crawl. Moving with infinite care, he made no noise on the sodden ground. Out of the lean-to…behind a tree…then angling off to come at the horses from the other side.

There was talk between the two at the fire, the smell of coffee…He reached the horses, pulled himself up. He got to the brush where they were tied, pulled the loose end of the slipknot, and holding the reins, he grabbed for the pommel. The horse side-stepped away from the smell of him and he fell against the saddle.