Threepersons Hunt (29 page)

“He's cooperating.”

The second cowhand said, “You need a hand maybe? I got a rifle in my kit.”

“Thanks for the offer. But we'll handle him.” He didn't want trigger-happy cowboys killing Joe. “Go on now,” he said, making it gentle.

They went.

The air, even inside, was sticky and close. Rain battered the bunkhouse and suddenly a white flare winked in through the windows; three seconds and then the thunder exploded like racks of billiard balls. He placed it somewhere to the northeast and that meant the center of the rainstorm had passed. The room had the steamy odor of damp-swelled wood. Watchman had to guess how long it would take Joe to get down here from the higher slopes; probably Joe would hurry it because he couldn't know how much time Rand planned to spend inside the bunk-house.

It would be best to give Joe time to come close but not time enough to get settled in too well; but there was no way to guess where the dividing line was and so Watchman just waited until fear began to pump the sweat out of him. Then he made his move.

5.

The edge of the timber made an arc from the side of the bunkhouse to the back corner of the main house; it left a curved patch of open lawn clear as a field of fire.

Two-foot piñons and junipers squatted here and there along the crescent of grass, haphazardly spotted. They weren't much protection but they would conceal a prone man well enough in this poor light; he was counting on that for safety but if Joe was there it was still a matter of avoiding the impact of Joe's first shot.

It would take a certain fraction of time for Joe to see him come out of the building and another fraction for him to react and steady his aim. Then Joe would have to judge the speed at which Watchman was moving, and the range, which would tell the hunter how much of a lead to give his moving target. There would be hesitation because things were hard to see in the dark shimmer of slanted rain and that would be countered by urgency because Watchman was only going to be in the open for a short time.

So Joe would have to take his first shot before Watchman reached the midway point between the two buildings. If the shot missed he would still have time to work the bolt of the .375 and squeeze off another shot before Watchman could reach the house. There might even be time for three tries. That was the way Joe had to figure it.

So Watchman had a set of limits, beginning and end, and had to work within them: he knew Joe wouldn't shoot earlier than a given moment, nor would he delay past a certain moment. Between those two moments lay the uncertainty and that was where intuition had to sustain his judgment. And if his intuition was wrong it would be too bad because a mere graze from a .375 magnum would knock him twenty feet across the earth and a solid hit anywhere in the torso would kill.

It was no comfort knowing how likely it was that Joe wasn't there at all. He had to assume he was there; odds didn't enter into it.

…. Coming out the bunkhouse door he had the pistol in his fist across his chest, the muzzle under the jacket lapel so it wouldn't throw a telltale flicker. He paused fractionally on the top step, still under the porch roof, and lifted his head as if to look at the weather; actually he was scanning the ring of trees. He didn't expect to see anything and he didn't. He waited long enough to be spotted but not long enough to be shot; he turned past the supporting pillar and went down the steps, taking the top two deliberately and then abruptly jumping the rest when the rain hit him. He broke into a slow lumbering run along the outside curve of the driveway, took four measured running strides and then doubled the pace without warning. Three strides that way and he dropped back to a dogtrot and the sudden noise of the exploding cartridge ripped a gash through the fabric of the rain.

He heard the bullet rip up ten inches of the airplane fountain but he was already reacting then, diving straigh toward the trees and skidding across the grass on his belly.

He slid up against the tiny bole of a juniper and tried to see through the branches. Buck Stevens spoke loudly through the open window to his right: “You're surrounded, Joe. Unload and come out.”

Watchman had the pistol up but he didn't want to use it. Stevens said, “You all right Sam?”

“Come on out, Joe,” Watchman said. “Nobody wants to shoot you.”

Then he heard the snap of brush and he took the chance: gathered his legs and ran half the distance to the trees and flopped down before Joe could tag him. But Joe didn't shoot at all and Watchman wasted a little time before the crawled off to his right and got around the far side of the clump and ran straight into the woods.

In the lofty pine cathedrals the light was murky and rain splattered the puddles, confusing the ear; but Joe was on the run and Watchman heard him—ahead of him and up to the left. There was a dim reflection of lightning somewhere far behind Watchman. He moved toward the sound, going from tree to tree. Thunder crashed back there in the mountains to the north. Watchman had been waiting for it and when it began to roll he broke into a run, knowing that Joe's hearing wasn't going to be very acute right now after that magnum charge had gone off right next to his ear.

He stopped forty yards into the woods and listened.

There was the drip of rain and he heard a door slam behind him. His eyes burned through the grey light, seeking corner-of-the-eye movement but when something drew his attention and he stared it turned out to be a squirrel leaping from branch to branch.

Then a little grey bird made a brief racket and spun up into the rain and Watchman swung that way, moving with more care, smothering his sound.

Something had scared that bird. He reached the spot and froze and turned his head slowly to pick up what he could on his retinas and the flats of his eardrums. There was a faint murmur of distant thunder; he hadn't seen any lightning this time. The rainfall was distinctly thinner than it had been five minutes ago; the edge of the storm was nearby. But no sign of Joe.

He kept moving. His clothes clung and grew heavy inside the slicker and his feet squelched as he walked. The diminishing rain made a spongy hiss. He began to picture Joe squatting in the cool dripping shadows like a malignant mushroom waiting for Watchman with the big rifle lifted; he stopped in his tracks, afraid.

Which way now? He couldn't get this close and then lose Joe again; it was too much to ask.

Uphill. That would be the instinct: uphill, west, back toward the Reservation. Get off Rand's property, get back to the sanctuary of the White Mountains.

He went up, angling left because that was west. The curve of the ground took him over a little hump and he keened the dripping forest all the way, looking for sign that Joe had passed this way. But the matted floor of needles retained nearly nothing by way of impressions.

The music of water ahead. He crossed the slope and it became a little louder and he kept moving west, drawn by the sound.

The water came down from the higher reaches; it plunged along like a thick dark tongue, probing its way into cracks and gullies, dividing around tree-trunks and cascading through the creases in the land. As Watchman moved toward it the earth became treacherous with slime because all the run off was sliding down beneath his boots to join the rain-swollen stream.

There was a distinct line of twigs and debris that ran along parallel to the torrent two or three feet higher than the surface of the water and this meant the level had dropped significantly in the past several minutes. Half an hour ago this had been a flash flood. Now it was subsiding but there was still power in it, a tremendous volume of water cascading down onto the plains somewhere out in the middle of Rand's acres.

It meant something important: it meant Joe hadn't crossed, couldn't have crossed. Joe was still somewhere on this side of the river.

And he wouldn't have gone downstream. Not back into Rand property.

He was above here. Either running or standing to fight; but he was above here.

Watchman clawed his way up from the flooding, up to the spine of the razorback, up the slope of the spine through the lodgepole forest. He heard himself wheezing as if he needed oiling: but Joe was in bad shape too, worse shape probably. Watchman pumped the air in and out and ran on up into the rain, not blinking as drops splashed his face.

He wanted to get to Joe before Joe got beyond the trees because here in the confinement of the pines the range of the big rifle was meaningless; out in the open there'd be no way to get near him.

He ran past the edge of the storm and then it wasn't raining any more; an aftermist hung in the air and the smell was thick and strong, the pine resin carrying on the mist.

A scar of rocks ran across the slope from north to south, clear of trees in a belt a hundred feet wide. It was boulders and loose broken shale and Joe could be staked out behind any rock. Watchman looked both ways but it went on forever, he couldn't go around it.

He moved along the fringe of the trees. The water pelted down through the rocks to his left; he moved to the right.

And found Joe's spoor: the heel of Joe's boot had left its impression in the earth.

It was an indentation that had been made after the rain because its lips weren't washed in. Within the past fifteen minutes Joe had come this way and the heel-print pointed straight into the rocks, or across them.

He took it slow and listened to the beat of his pulse. Boulder to boulder; lie up, run, lie up again. Here the shale had been disturbed, the pale dry sides of chips had been overturned. Here the groundwater was still seeping into a depression which therefore couldn't have been made long ago. Here the side of a boulder had been scraped white, perhaps by the inadvertent scratch of a rifle's steel buttplate or the buckle of a belt.

The trail of little signs led him straight across the belt of rocks and into the stunted timber above it. Watchman discarded the rain-slicker and Rand's hat and jacket. He glanced at the sky: an hour's light left, and things were clearing up ahead of him, ribbons of blue beginning to show through as the clouds broke apart. Sundown soon.

The thin high air chilled him through his soaked shirt. He winced now when the trees dislodged moisture onto him; he moved along quickly, watching the ground, watching the forest shadows ahead of him. Joe had passed here, and here, and again here: his track was becoming easier to read because the trees were thinning out and the ground was softer and there was rain to wash away the spoor.

It kept turning from side to side. Once Joe's knees had made dents in the earth at the crest of a rise where he had paused to survey his own back trail. How long ago? Had he seen Watchman coming?

Angling farther to the right the trail went briefly into thicker scrub pine and then the trees became clumps with wide slopes of mud separating them; he could have followed Joe's track here on a moonless midnight. He had discarded caution; the trail led uphill at an angle across the slope on an almost steadily exact course, west-northwest; these weren't the splashed-out prints of a man in panic. Joe was making the best time he could and that meant he now had a specific destination in mind.

Pulse thundered in Watchman's eyes and breathing was painful. The shirt lay matted against his back and the wet Levi's rubbed his thighs. The climb got steadily more sheer. At the end he was using his hands as well as his feet and when he reached the top at last he squatted on elbows and knees, just puffing.

The plateau ran west away from him, spotted here and there with growth. Up here the wind blasted the flats constantly and allowed no forests to take root.

The figure was out ahead of him, small, maybe a mile ahead, bobbing along at a steady run. When Watchman's eyes cleared of pressure he could make out the rifle strapped diagonally across the running man's back, the easy rise and fall of arms and legs.

Watchman gathered himself and climbed onto the table and put himself into the agony of the run.

6.

A Hereford steer was half-decomposed and the passage of the running man disturbed the buzzards from it. Watchman's passage eight minutes later disturbed them again and they flapped around, talking, circling the eyeless corpse.

His muscles worked only in spasms. He was running into the setting sun and he missed it when Joe Threepersons stopped.

By the time the angle widened enough for him to see Joe he had gained a quarter of a mile, which put him something like nine hundred yards away.

Joe was down on one knee, sighting through the Bushnell 'scope.

Watchman kept going. Nine hundred yards was a possible shot with that rifle from a benchrest but the wind was gusty and Joe was out of breath and weak and that one-knee position wasn't the steadiest.

Half the sun burned, perched on top of the horizon. Joe's silhouette crouched to the right of it, shimmering against the red-banded sky. Watchman began to tack. Eight strides on a northerly quarter, six on a westerly quarter, seven to the right again. He counted them because he wanted a random pattern to the changes and if he didn't count he'd fall into a regular rhythm; the body always chose symmetry and you had to reject it consciously.

Eight hundred yards. He was angling across the line now to put Joe farther to the right of the sun. At this angle of incidence he could almost see the sun's movement; another fifty strides and it would be down.

Seven hundred and fifty. He began to zigzag more violently but he didn't drop the pace. His shoulders were lifted to give him more lung space and sharp pains laced across the collar muscles. He hadn't much feeling left below the hips. He didn't credit Joe with a decent shot at more than six hundred yards under Joe's present circumstances; at that point he'd start ducking from scrub to scrub but in the meantime Joe was giving him a good chance to close up some of the distance and Watchman was taking it.

Seven hundred. Joe fired.

Watchman heard the crack. It was startlingly loud for the distance but the wind was at Joe's back and carried the sound. It was all Watchman heard of the bullet—there was no nearby sonic bang; either the slug had rammed into the earth ahead of him or it had gone far wide of him. He suspected the latter: Joe had fired a warning shot.