‘We can go across by night,’ Mary-Lou suggested. ‘He can’t cover all the places we could try.’
‘No, but tomorrow morning they’ll soon find our tracks, and on these horses it won’t take them long to catch up on us. I’d be surprised if his horses aren’t fresher than ours.’
‘What can we do then?’
‘Eat,’ Bobcat growled.
His suggestion was as good as any. So long as they needed to wait for darkness to go any further, they might as well use the time getting a meal for themselves. As the people on the other bank couldn’t get quickly across to them without being seen, there was no need to hurry.
While their horses grazed, Bobcat slipped away to visit a prairie dog town they had passed not far back, and Johnnie went down to the river for water. There was no corresponding break in the rim on the other side of the river, meaning that the rustlers couldn’t get close enough to him for a shot. In their absence Mary-Lou gathered some brushwood, and set up a campfire in a dry wash.
Before long both men were back, Bobcat with a brace of black-tailed prairie dogs. Then, with Johnnie keeping a watch on the horsemen across the river, and them sitting their horses looking right back at him, Mary-Lou and Bobcat prepared a quick meal. Three hindlegs were spit-roasted over raked- out embers, and the rest of the meat was diced or shredded to be stewed with sage, sow thistle and a mush of prickly pear heart.
By the time they had consumed it all, evening was drawing on.
‘Once it’s dark,’ Johnnie said, ‘and those fellows can’t see what we’re up to, we’ll leave you to mind the horses, Mary-Lou, while Bobcat and I mosey across the river. We should be able to find something we can do to discourage those fellows.’
‘Won’t they come across to our side trying to do the same thing?’ Mary-Lou asked.
‘Probably,’ Johnnie nodded, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. ‘So long as they don’t find you is the main thing. It’d be best if you ride Dusky, and head way out across the plain. The rest of the horses will stay with you if you’re on Dusky. Just don’t come back till the morning, and then look for us on a high point about a mile down-river from the crossing.’
Mary-Lou wasn’t particularly happy with the plan, but having nothing better to suggest, agreed.
In the last of the daylight they repacked their gear, and checked all the tack. Before she mounted, Mary-Lou paused, to look worriedly at each of her companions. Then, catching Bobcat for once slow to react, she reached up and kissed the Indian’s leathery cheek. Johnnie, knowing what was coming, stood rooted to the spot, while she kissed him too in the same way.
‘Take care,’ she said, a curious break in her voice. Then she mounted, and was moving quickly away into the darkness.
‘You too,’ Johnnie called softly, touching the still-tingling place on his cheek.
Bobcat shrugged. These white-eyed women were emotional creatures. He looked at Johnnie, who had yet to take his eyes off the shadow fading into the night. So were some of the men.
‘Split up, eh?’ Bobcat said.
‘What?’Johnnie asked vacantly.
‘I cross here. You cross down there,’ Bobcat persisted. ‘Not shoot each other.’
‘Oh, yeah, sure,’Johnnie nodded.
His thoughts, though, were still not really on what he was doing, as he strode off through the thin scattering of knee-high blackjack oak which masked the rim of the mesa along that stretch. He was hard put to know how to deal with a widow woman, whose husband had only been a few short weeks in the ground. It was easy enough, given a few unavoidable allowances, to treat her more or less as he would a very tomboyish sister. He had grown up with a couple of those. The problem came if he allowed himself to see her, under all the grime and his young brothers’ clothing, as a very beautiful and eligible young woman. Up until that time he had mostly been able to avoid such thinking, but Mary-Lou’s kiss, even though only to his cheek, and given equally to Bobcat, had unexpectedly broken through his resolve.
Not until he came to an arroyo giving easy access to the river did his whirling thoughts begin to slow down.
The river was running high, filled still with water from the storm that had racked the mountains a few days before. With no moon to help, it was hard to make out the far bank, so he had to commit himself to the current with no guarantee as to how he’d fetch up. To help him, he found a piece of driftwood, a short but thick length of red cedar, and on it he fixed his guns, cartridge belt, and ammunition box, all wrapped in his slicker.
With the makeshift float tucked under his left arm, he lowered himself into the cold water, and set out. Immediately he was ripped away from the bank. There was nothing to be gained by trying to fight it. All he could do was keep working his way across the flow, and ignore the distance he was being carried downstream. At least the float allowed him to keep his head well clear, and see what little there was to be seen.
Eventually, gasping, and with a worrying numbness beginning to creep up his limbs, he was glad to be able to make out bushes overhanging the right bank. Because of the high water, they’d have branches within his reach, if he could only get to them. On his first attempt, the twig he grabbed came away in his hand, but before it did the drag it provided had the effect of swinging him in yet closer to the bank.
He caught at more substantial branches as the current rammed him into them. For a moment he almost lost his grip on the float. The belt he had fixed around it was loose, swollen from the water it had soaked up. The slippery driftwood was sliding through the loop. Only his gear mattered, so he let the wood go, and heaved his wrapped bundle up among the tangle of branches.
Then he started to force his own way through, no easy task in the dark, with rough edges jabbing into him, and scratching at his hands and face. Wherever he broke a branch in his efforts, a spiked end was left to catch in his wet clothing, or tear at the parcel he was trying to drag with him.
By the time he reached open ground, he was chilled, shivering, and exhausted. He was also worried about the noise he had made.
Quickly he headed for a darker patch in the darkness, a stand of cottonwood, which gave him some shelter from the breeze coming down the river. There he stripped off his wet clothing, and wrung out as much of the water as he could. When he was dressed again, he put on his slicker over the top, and then belted his cartridges over that. They were coming to no harm from the dampness, but he couldn’t allow himself to open his ammunition box. Until he could get himself properly dried out, he’d be unable to reload his Remington.
Gradually his shivering stopped. The damp wool of his clothing held in the heat of his body, while his slicker kept off the chilling wind.
He felt himself ready to go looking for the outlaws.
At least one of them would already be looking for him.
Before he left the shelter of the trees, Johnnie crouched low and listened to the sounds of the night. Far-off coyotes were of no interest to him. Of far greater importance was a frog that had started croaking while he was wringing out his clothes, but which had now stopped. Probably it had been croaking before he arrived, and it would have resumed when his activities no longer disturbed it. Now it had stopped again. Why?
For a while Johnnie held his place, straining to see anything moving from the direction of the frog, but not neglecting all the rest of his environment even so.
Something crunched under an unwary foot. Soon after came a soft scratching sound, the kind of noise made by leaves brushing against oiled canvas. Somebody was coming along the riverbank, and whoever it was, it wasn’t Bobcat.
Bobcat would never give away his presence so easily. Besides, he’d be staying in his own territory up-river to avoid just such a mistake.
Not that Johnnie was complaining about or criticizing the noise. He had made enough of a racket himself in his endeavours to get out of the river, and probably all that noise was what had drawn at least one of the outlaws to him.
Johnnie eased in behind the trunk of a tree. The other man was s
omewhere between him and the river. If he kept coming on that path, the other man would be outlined against the stars, while Johnnie was sheltered in the blackness under the trees.
Johnnie waited... boot leather scuffed against a loose stone. The man was almost level with Johnnie, and then suddenly there he was, a black silhouette against the night sky.
‘Up with ’em!’ Johnnie called. ‘You’re covered.’ He could still not bring himself to fire on an unwarned man. The outlaw must have thought him a gift.
Flame blossomed from the dark. The crash of the shot was shockingly loud. Lead thwacked into the tree trunk in line with Johnnie’s chest.
‘Drop it I said!’ Johnnie yelled, and fired over the fellow’s head.
All he got for a reply was another bullet; this one buzzing like a bee right where his head had been.
That did it!
From ground level Johnnie put two quick shots slightly high and to the right of the flash made by the other man’s gun.
There was a clatter, and a thump, several smaller thumps, heels drumming on the ground. The silhouette was no longer there.
Johnnie waited.
After a few minutes, he moved, slipping silently to his right, angling to get downwind of the fallen outlaw. There was something Danny had told him... the smell of freshly dead men.
There it was. Blood, and urine from when his victim’s bladder relaxed after death. If the man had been still alive he’d have been sweating, and that would have given the sharp, acrid smell of fear.
Johnnie moved in close, and felt around the body. Stone dead all right. Stubbled face. Hair tied back with a bootlace. Johnnie couldn’t remember that on the man in grey, so this had to be one of the others. He found the dropped gun, a revolver, and turned the cylinder back to leave a spent chamber under the hammer. Then he thrust it barrel first into a pocket of his slicker. The fellow’s cartridge box went into the pocket on the other side.
Satisfied that there was nothing more to be feared from that outlaw, Johnnie returned to the shelter of the trees, and waited for another.
Between them, Johnnie and the dead man had advertised the place to any interested people within a dozen miles of them. Sooner or later somebody would come to investigate the shooting. It wasn’t likely to be in an outlaw’s nature to do the sensible thing and wait for daylight. That was another of Danny’s little ideas.
It bore fruit too.
More than two hours passed, but finally there came a faint whistle from downstream. The frog hadn’t been heard from again in all that time, so Johnnie thought it was more than considerate of the approaching outlaw to advertise his presence.
Gradually the whistle grew closer and closer, sounding perhaps only once in any quarter of an hour, but always working nearer as the searcher moved from cover to cover.
Johnnie let him come right up almost to where he had killed the first man. Then this one’s outline also appeared suddenly against the stars.
‘Hold it!’ Johnnie started... and flying lead nearly took his head off.
Shockingly, the roar and flash of gunfire was coming not from the man in front of him, but from another about twenty feet behind him.
Johnnie fired back, once, twice, and then at where the man had been in front of him.
That one had dropped flat, and was firing at the flash of Johnnie’s gun, only to hit the tree trunk which sheltered him.
Johnnie rolled away, fired again at each of them, and rolled back to the tree trunk again. More fire blasted over his head. Somewhere behind him something, perhaps a broken-off tree branch, fell to the ground. One of the men fired at it. Johnnie fired at him, twice.
There was a sound of boots beating on the ground. One of them was rushing in. Two more shots brought him to a halt, but didn’t stop him from firing.
Again Johnnie shifted position. The Lefancheaux only had one shot left, the Remington two.
He laid down the Lefancheaux under his chin, and pulled out the gun he had taken from the dead man. He used that to fire at the next man who fired at him.
‘Together!’ one of his opponents yelled.
Both of them fired at him at once. He immediately fired back at both of them.
‘Now rush him!’ came the shouted command. Johnnie expected that. He had fired twelve shots in rapid succession.
Two black shapes reared up against the stars, and came rushing at him.
Johnnie carefully put the last shot from the dead man’s gun into the fellow who had been shouting, and emptied his Remington into the other. As both crashed to the ground, he grabbed his Lefancheaux and rolled out of the way.
Despite the two bullets in him, the second man wasn’t dead. He fired again at where Johnnie had been. For a moment his head showed in the flash from his gun. Johnnie used his last bullet to silence him.
Now Johnnie’s weapons really were all empty.
THIRTEEN