the Burning Hills (1956) (9 page)

Yet he had almost dozed off when he heard the sound of a walking horse.

He came to his feet, Winchester in hand. Twice as he listened the horse stumbled. It was very tired. He shifted the rifle to his left hand and touched his pistol. He moved to the patch of meadow, passing soundlessly through the grass. The moon was just coming over the rocks and the meadow was bathed in pale light. Ghostlike the horse and rider materialized from the dakness.

Jordan started to her, seeing her hair against the light. Then faintly, far or close he could not guess, he heard another sound.

"You are here?" She spoke softly, yet her words carried. He did not reply. Somebody or something was out there in the darkness. Somebody who also listened.

She walked her horse deeper into the clearing. She made a silent lonely figure, like an Indian woman on her horse. "You are here?" There was a plaintive lost tone in her voice that twisted his heart.

He waited and in the stillness there was no sound. She sat still upon her horse, waiting for some response. He could almost feel the hope going out of her. Was he, as she must have believed, only another man who would ride away? Had he taken her help, let her get into a corner and then left her alone? Desperately he wanted to speak, to cry out, to --

"No," it was another voice, "he ain't here. But I am."

A tall man in a conical hat stepped from the shadows. She tried to start her horse as he grabbed at it but the horse was too tired to move quickly. Sutton grabbed the bridle and jerked the horse around and then he reached for Maria.

Trace Jordan picked up a small stick and tossed it into the brash a dozen feet away. It lit in the brush and instantly the man by the horse turned and Jordan saw moonlight on a gun barrel.

Sutton waited, his gun poised. Then he relaxed slowly. "Animal,'' he said aloud. He turned toward Maria Cristina. "Now I'm goin' to finish what I started,"

She was still too close to him. There was too much risk of her being hit if shooting started. Jordan picked up a small stone and tossed it into the brush across the clearing. Sutton froze in place, listening. Then he holstered his gun. "Get down," he said, "or I'll pull you down."

Maria Cristina had sat still, apparently too weary to move, too defeated to try. Now she moved suddenly. She threw her leg over the horse and dropped to the ground on the opposite side. She slapped the horse and he lunged. Sutton sprang back and Maria Cristina dropped into the blackness at the edge of the brush and was absolutely still

Jack Sutton stood alone in the clearing, staring at the shadows, listening for her breathing. "Do you no good," he said conversationally. "I'll have it my way now. Ben ain't here to stop me."

There was a faint whisper of grass around Trace Jordan's feet as he moved. Trace Jordan was going to kill a man. He had to kill and not be killed for she must not be left alone with Jack Sutton. He stopped and he knew Sutton could see him.

"Who is it?" Sutton demanded. "Buck? Ben?"

Tension was building but more for Sutton than for him. He knew whom he faced; Sutton saw only a shadow in the night. "Speak up!" Sutton said impatiently. "Who are you?"

"I reckon I'm the man you been hunting," Jordan said, "unless you hunt only women."

The night was cool. Jack Sutton stood very still, hearing the slow heavy beat of his heart. He wished he could see Trace Jordan. This shadowy figure worried him. There was no personality there, only something dark, indefinite, indistinct.

Never, since the beginning, had he seen this man. His partner he had killed and he had helped to pursue him and bring him to this moment but never once in all that time had he actually seen Trace Jordan.

You could not look into his eyes; you could not measure the man. It disturbed Sutton but did not make him less confident.

"I figure you're one of those who murdered my partner," Jordan said.

Sutton wondered if Jordan could see his gun hand. It was dangling at his side but he began to inch it higher. "Sure." His voice was taunting. "I'm one of them. Fact is, it was my idea."

His hand was at the bottom of the holster as he spoke. He had only to bend his elbow to grasp the butt. He bent his elbow suddenly. His hand grasped his gun butt and suddenly he was choking with the lust to kill. He drew --

The bullets smashed him in the belly like two fists, a hard one-two that set him back on his heels. He put his left foot back to steady himself and started to lift his gun but when he got his hand up he found it was empty.

Confused, he stared blindly at his hand and then his knees buckled and he fell. His body from the waist down was numb, yet his brain was alive and clear. He tried to speak, to see the face of the man who stood there, watching him. He tried to frame words but then the notion faded ... this then was how it felt to die.

The last thing he remembered was the wet grass on his face.

Trace Jordan walked forward, circling a little, knowing his bullets had gone true, yet wary as always, taking no chances, estimating the danger of the man who lay there.

"Maria Cristina?" Then she was coming toward him. "We must ride now. They'll be coming." He gestured. "Take his horse. He hasn't covered the ground yours has."

Into the desert they rode. Sand and more sand. Rock, Spanish dagger, yucca, ocotiflo and broken lava. It was a brutal heat-baked corner of hell.

The cacti cast weird shadows in the moonlit night and a low wind moaned in the scattered clumps of brush. They rode in silence, knowing there was no returning now. Another Sutton had died and made another mark against them.

The Sierra de San Luis pointed a rocky finger into the wastelands south of the border. It was Apache country and it was the desert and the desert can kill. This was the land that time and again had defeated armies of the United States. This was the land of the peccary and coyote, the land of the rattler and the scorpion, of the prickly pear and the cholla.

In the moonlight even more than by day the desert is a place of weird and strange beauty. One can live in the desert. There are plants that provide food; there are plants and places that provide water. But if one does not conform to the desert's pattern, one can die in the desert

They did not talk. When the first light of dawn came he saw how her face was bruised and swollen and for the first time Trace Jordan was glad that he had killed a man. Yet she did not complain, she sat her horse well and rode straight on into the awful wilderness to the south. He looked back but saw nothing. No riders, no dust, no movement.

Sweat trickled down his face and down his body under his shirt. Twice within three hours great canyons split the desert floor. They descended into them and they emerged from them. And when he looked back a second time there was a dust cloud. There were two dust clouds.

This was wilderness, raw, untamed. There were no villages and no ranches. It was the land of the Apache, the most dreaded guerilla fighter the world has yet known. When it was almost noon he drew up and they dismounted, sponging out the mouths and nostrils of their horses. And then they walked.

Dust settled on their faces and necks. Jordan felt his neck growing raw from the chafing of his collar, stiffened as it was by sweat and dust. His head ached, his mouth was dry, yet they pushed on and the heat waves moved in closer around them, blotting out the distance, leaving only a vast shimmering waste.

Twice, for short times, they rested. Each time the dust clouds seemed closer.

"You know this country?" he asked.

"Down here? No."

"There is a place, the Canyon de Los Embudos," he said. "Do you know it?"

"It is an Apache place."

"There is water," he said, "and a place to hide."

The country became increasingly broken and again they mounted. Yet before many miles had passed Sutton's horse began to stumble. The big red horse Jordan rode had rested well and fed well. The distance seemed as nothing to him. They dismounted again and walked on but Sutton's horse fell and lay there in the sun.

"Take the food and the rifle," Jordan said. "We'll leave him."

"He will die?"

"No ... after the sun goes down he'll get up. He will find water then or join them when they come up."

So they walked on but his strength had not returned and after a while the horizon began to weave and dance before him and the mountains became like liquid and he went to his knees. He got up at once and started on, tearing his collar wider. The gun belts and pistols chafed his thighs.

They looked back and there were no dust clouds. He looked ahead and three Apaches on ragged ponies stared stone-faced into their eyes. It was too late for the rifle and he did not know if his hand was strong enough to hold a gun.

From under his black hat brim he looked at them. Three tough men of the desert, their finely muscled bodies shaped like the land itself, of rock and sinew. Being Apaches, they would have seen the dust clouds and they would be wondering about them.

Jordan gestured at their back trail "Enemy," he said, then indicated Maria Cristina's battered face and touched his gun.

They were impassive, their black eyes studying him. He was sunburned and as dark as any of them, only his eyes were gray. Maria Cristina looked at them but said nothing. Her man was talking and this was man's business.

"Indio?"An Apache pointed at her.

Jordan gave the sign for half, then indicated himself with the same sign. This last was not true but he had the features and could have been and the idea might help.

The Apache with the red headband turned and pointed. "Embetdos," he said.

"Si," Jordan replied and when the Apaches drew aside, they went on, walking slowly. Neither of them spoke, neither made a sound until they were hidden in an arroyo. Then he swung quickly to the saddle and with Maria Cristina behind him rode rapidly until several miles were behind them.

Hours later, his feet aching and his body utterly exhausted, he was still moving. Yet now the terrain had changed. They had entered a weird jungle of Spanish dagger, cholla and Joshua, all broken by the remains of an ancient lava flow. The spaces between the cacti and the fallen black chunks of kva were crowded with brittle bush.

For what must have been six or seven miles they inched their way through this barrier, at times at a loss as to how to go forward; then, mounting a hill amid a thick forest of cholla, they suddenly looked into a ravine that was startlingly and incredibly lovely.

Below them was water. Not a little water but a large clear pool surrounded by jutting kva. Shading the pool were sycamore, ash, willow and buckthorn. And down near the edge of the pool were several small open places where they could see the remains of old fires.

Dismounting, Jordan led the way down the steep path to the water's edge. Following along the shore under an overhang of lava they came to a small clearing among the trees, completely shaded and masked from view by a curtain of willows. Here they stopped. With almost the last of his strength Jordan stripped the saddle from the red horse and put him on a picket rope.

Then without a word he stretched out and went immediately to sleep, a sleep through which horses raced and guns barked and where he was endlessly falling over blocks of lava into acres of cholla.

When he awakened it was dark and cold but a blanket had been thrown over him. Faintly he smelled a wood fire. He rolled over and sat up.

"There is food," Maria Cristina spoke from die shadows. "By the fire."

He stumbled to the edge of the pool and bathed himself, mopping his face and body dry with his shirt. Wrapping himself in a blanket, he went to the fire.

There was a pot of stew and he ate hungrily, then ate from a stick of tortillas. Then he sat down, looking at the moonlight's reflection on the dark water, listening to the night sounds and drinking coffee.

"Suppose Lantz knows this place?" he asked.

"Who knows?"

She was silent for a time. "He is a devil ... but not so bad as the rest."

They needed rest, the horse needed rest. To go on in the night was out of ihe question. They would just take a chance. They must stay.

"My father ... he knew of this place. It is a place of ihe Indies, of the Apaches. They come here to make talk -- but not often, I think."

He got up stiffly, every muscle complaining, and going to his saddle he got his bed roll. He spread out his blankets and took off his boots.

When he had stretched out he said, "I am sorry about your face."

"It is nothing."

"The man I killed?"

"Si ... Jack Sutton."

He drew the blanket about his shoulders and settled down to rest. Once, lifting his head, he glanced around. She sat unmoved and unmoving, her profile etched sharply against the sky beyond the lake. He started to speak, then changed his mind and lay down. In a moment he was breathing deeply and steadily.

Maria Cristina hunched the blanket around her shoulders and looked at the water. She said nothing; she thought nothing; she was at this moment an Indian, at one with her world.

Fifteen miles back, huddled under an escarpment of sandstone, Hindeman and his men made dry camp. It had been a day of defeat, of heat, dust and cacti.

At dawn they had found Jack Sutton. He had been shot dead and it had been good shooting. His gun, unfired, lay near his hand. Looking down at the body, Buck Bayless felt a moment of shock, of near terror. What kind of a man was Jordan?

Wounded unto death, he escaped. Days later he came from hiding and left not a ghost of a trail and now he had slain Jack Sutton. Buck Bayless felt his courage draining from him. He felt sick and whipped.

Wes Parker touched his tongue to his lips and stole a careful look at Hindeman. Yet he knew Hindeman would go on. It was a trait of Hindeman's that he had admired. Now he cursed it

Ben Hindeman could feel no remorse. Sooner or later he would have had to kill Jack Sutton himself or be killed. Now the man was dead, finished. "Woman crazy" he said aloud. "If he left her alone, he'd be alive."

"She's a curse," Buck Bayless said resentfully. "Shell be the death of us all. Let her go, I say, and good riddance."

Ben Hindeman was angrily impatient "We can let her go," he said, "but we can't let him go. If one man can wipe his feet on the Sutton-Bayless outfit, we won't last out the year. We kill him or we all go."

He swung a wide arm at the country. "There's fifty outfits in Arizona and New Mexico who want our graze. There's two or three mighty near strong enough to do it. Like John Slaughter... that's why I kept Jack and Mort from going that way."

They were still there when Mort Bayless came in with four men. These were the tough ones, the men with a reason to want Trace Jordan dead. Mort Bayless had used an argument they could understand. "We got him runnin'," he said. "You think he'll let up if we quit? Not by a damn sightl

"He'll bide his time an' he'll come back. Folks will talk; he'll know who got his horses. He'll hunt down every man-jack of us, you'll see!"

He knew men-fears because he knew his own. This was a danger they understood. Jordan was a tough man and they had been fools to listen to Jack Sutton. Beside the fire they hunkered down and made war talk.

"Where'll they go?" Hindeman asked Lantz.

The old man spat into the fire. "No tellin'. With the Mex gal we could figure some but Jordan's taken the lead now an' he knows where he's goin'. This here desert is out of my knowin'. Might be a sight of places around if a body knew 'em."

He took a pull at the coffee. "You been thinkin', Ben? This here's Apache country. We get caught down here an' we're in genuine trouble."

"No matter. We'll find him."

"Worse'n huntin' a needle in a haystack," Buck Bayless complained. "We'd have to hunt up every canyon. Take us ten year."

"Hadn't better," Ben Hindeman replied dryly. "Your wife will forget you in that time."

Wes Parker lifted himself to an elbow. "I'm goin' back. I'm catchin' me that Mex kid. If that gal knows a hideout down here, that kid should know."

Ben Hindeman considered that. He did not like to have anyone abused but the situation was getting out of hand. They were losing time and the ranch needed them. All had work that needed doing. Moreover, for the first time he was finding an element of doubt. The increased caution of Lantz was part of it.

"All right, Wes. Take Buck with you. Maybe he'll be better huntin'a Mex than a man."