Milo Talon (23 page)

“Even for a little while? After all, there’s been no trouble about the others.”

“We’re kindly people, Bess, that’s the reason. But a sharp young lady around, and especially if she saw his horse or guns or even the gold. Now don’t you be thinking of it. I know how you’d like company but it’s taking too big a chance.”

“Only for a couple of weeks? One week, even?”

“Now, Bess, I’ve got to be going. If I’m to be there first it’s a hard ride.”

“You do as you think best, Dickie, but do wear the coat while you’re waiting. Those old rocks are chilly and you could catch your death.”

W
E TOPPED OUT on a shoulder of Elkhorn Mountain and I glanced back. It lay all green and still under the morning sun. Turning away, my eye caught something—I looked back.

Dust? It was too far off to see. Might be smoke. Or maybe just a change in the type of vegetation. I felt myself frowning. It did look like dust.

The old man had been right. There was every chance Rolon Taylor or Pride Hovey would have somebody watching at both Grape Creek and Copper Gulch as they were the only routes east over the mountains. Turning west was the right idea.

Texas Creek? I considered that. If we crossed the Arkansas near Texas Creek we could head into the hills and to Denver. There, with a good lawyer, we could probably get things settled. Yet the idea bothered me.

Jefferson Henry knew a lot more about the courts and law than I did and, for that matter, so did Pride Hovey. Nor did I want to get tied up in any long legal argument. I wanted to be over the hills to yonder.

There were shadows in the canyon when we reached it, but only here and there, for the hour was not yet late.

“I’ve been thinking, Molly. Maybe it would be better to go back to town, back to German Schafer and the railroad. They wouldn’t be expecting it, certainly, and the answers all seem to be there.”

“Are you sure? Weren’t we trying to get away from there?”

“Yes, but they’ve all followed us. Or most of them have. I don’t know, maybe it’s a foolish idea.”

Yet the more I thought of it the better I liked it. We had pulled them away from the town, and they would scarcely expect us to return. Back there I could be in touch with Portis, and through him with the United States Marshal’s office.

There were scattered trees and some clumps of rock where we emerged from the gorge. We were walking our horses when I glanced off to the south in time to catch a wink of light. I spurred my horse and startled, he leaped, bumping Molly’s horse. Something rapped me hard on the skull and I felt myself falling. My horse sprang from under me and I fell among some rocks, rolling over and dropping into a dark space between them. I clawed at the rocks, trying to catch myself,
then I hit bottom and all was blackness. Through the closing darkness in my skull I heard, I thought I heard, another shot.

M
OLLY’S HORSE SPRANG away, following Milo Talon’s horse. She tried to rein in but, remembering that other shot, she rode on into the shelter of a clump of rocks. Drawing up, she turned in the saddle.

Something stirred in the rocks and her heart leaped. Then—it was the old man! The man from whom they bought the horses!

Relieved, she said, “Oh? It’s you! Thank God!” She looked back toward where Milo had fallen. Nothing stirred. A pleasant stretch of green grass, some trees and brush, here and there clumps of rocks. The shadows were growing longer.

“We’d better ride back to the ranch,” the old man said gently. “He’s been shot, I think, and killed. I’ll come back in the morning for the body.”

“But maybe he’s only hurt! He may be lying there—!”

“He’s dead. Gone. It was a perfect shot. Besides, didn’t you hear that other shot? They are still around. We wouldn’t dare look. Not now. You come along with me. You’ll be with us.”

“Well,” she was reluctant, “maybe. Until they are gone.” Then she said passionately, “He just can’t be dead! He can’t!”

The old man smiled, taking her bridle rein. “You will feel better after you’ve had something to eat, and
Bess is waiting for you. She’ll be surprised, but she’ll be pleased. She’s a lovely woman and I like doing little things to please her.”

“But Milo?”

He smiled. “Tomorrow’s another day. He’ll keep until tomorrow.”

C
OLD … IT WAS cold, very cold. Starting to turn over, I banged my head hard, then put out a hand. A cold wall, something cold and hard above me.

I was dead. No, not dead. I could feel cold. I could feel pain.

I was buried alive. I was in my coffin. They believed I was dead and they had buried me.

There was a moment of sheer panic, then I fought myself to calmness. Tentatively, I put out a hand. Stone. It was a stone wall, a rock wall. My hand went down. I was lying upon sand.

I could lift my hand; it moved but a few inches until it came in contact with stone. Now my eyes were wide open. It seemed a little more gray on my left side so I put out my hand.

Emptiness. No rock wall there. Starting to ease myself over, I stopped suddenly. Something had moved, something above me. A slight trickle of sand, a small pebble that bounced off the rock wall, then again, and again.

Something was up there, something that moved with incredible softness. I was afraid. My hand went to my hip. My pistol was still there, held in place by its thong, so was my bowie. I slid the knife from its
scabbard and held it ready. Something was crawling about up there. It was a man. Rough cloth rubbed against rock.

He was above me. How high? Maybe fifteen feet. Slowly, my memory was fitting circumstances to recollection.

I had been shot. I started to lift my hand and pain shot through me like a knife. My arm was hurt. With my other hand I felt of my skull. There was blood, caked, matted blood in my hair and on my face. Gingerly, my fingers touched my scalp. A cut, raw and tender. A bullet must have hit me, cut my scalp, given me a concussion.

Lying still, I listened. A rock fell near me. Then a voice, a familiar voice. “Talon?” It was the old man from the ranch.

Starting to speak, I suddenly closed my mouth. Why was
he
here? How could he know where to look for me? I lay quiet, wanting to speak, yet every sense warning me not to.

“Talon? If you’re alive, speak to me. I want to help you. Molly is with us. She’s at the ranch with Bess. We’ve got her now. We’ll keep her, for a while.”

Lying very still, I tried not even to blink. Why had he come out in the dark to find me? And how had he come upon this place? Tracks? Did he follow tracks? But we had left few tracks, very hard to find. I would wait. I would think.

Why was he here? Why had he spoken so strangely of Molly? “We’ve got her now. We’ll keep her,—for a while.” What had he meant by that?

Slowly, it was coming back. The old man had told
us how to go, by Road Gulch to Texas Creek. Nobody else knew where we were, yet I had been shot? By whom? Could Rolon Taylor’s boys have found me so quickly? Or Pride Hovey’s men? It was scarcely possible.

I had been shot. I remembered that, just a sharp rap on the skull at the time, then falling, hitting rocks, rolling over, falling again.

Blackness. I’d been knocked out. Now it was night, hours later. Molly was at the ranch, he said, so he must have taken her to the ranch and come back here.

He was just trying to help. He seemed a kindly old man, and he had been helpful and courteous.

Yet why had he taken Molly all the way back to the ranch and then returned here? Had she been hurt? I felt a surge of fear.

Molly?
Hurt?

I held myself very still. If not hurt, why had he come back alone? Why had he not kept Molly with him, to help in the search? Either she had been injured or he wanted nobody around when I was found.

Why?

Suppose it was he who shot me? He had known where I would be. He had known I had money. He had sold me two horses. But that was silly. They were such nice people.
So clean and so neat
.

Something about that was familiar but I could not place it. There was a thought there, fleeting, tantalizing, something to be remembered, but there was no way I could put a rope on it.

Something Ma had said once, commenting on how some visitor had referred to somebody as “clean and
neat.” “See?” she had said. “People remember such things. Keep yourself looking nice, Milo. Dress well. Keep clean.”

Ma was great on that. “What’s the difference between a rat and a squirrel?” she’d say. “Mighty little, but everybody likes squirrels and nobody likes rats. Why? Because a squirrel is dressed a lot better. He looks pretty, and he’s always around trees. A rat is always in the walls or the gutter.”

It just seemed funny to me at the time, but the idea stuck, as she intended it to. But what had that to do with this?

This visitor, and I’d been only a youngster then. Must be twelve, fifteen years back. He’d been talking about some folks. “Doing well,” this man had said, “got a nice place there. Clean and neat. Don’t see how they do it as he’s got no hands, doesn’t seem to be running many cows.”

Lying still, I listened. He was still, too, listening, as I was.

What else had been said back then?
“Clean and neat,”
the man had repeated, then he’d gone on to say, “Had a chestnut there, handsome horse. I tried to trade him out of it but he wouldn’t trade.

“Handsome horse, one of the finest I’d seen. He’d traded for it, he said.”

Pa had looked around at him, I remembered that, because Pa was different suddenly. “Chestnut with a blaze face? Three white stockings?”

“That’s the one. I’d give plenty for that horse. Plenty. But he wouldn’t swap.”

Pa was tapping his fingers on the chair arm, a way
he had when he was thinking. “I know that horse,” he’d said. “I wonder how he ever got it? I offered Moon-Child a hundred dollars, and when she refused I doubled it, and she told me she would not sell. The horse had been captured from the wild by her man, just for her.”

If there was more talk I did not hear it because Ma had come along, insisting I go to bed; but it had stuck in my mind, all this time. “Moon-Child”—I loved the name, and I expect I was romantic enough to think she wouldn’t sell the horse her man had given her, and how fine that was. An Indian could buy a whole lot with the two hundred dollars Pa had offered her.

Maybe it was this same old man who’d had that horse. “Clean and neat,” well, they were all of that.

“Talon? If you need help, I’ll help. Take you back to your girl.”

He was impatient, I could tell it by his voice, but I lay quiet. It was so dark I’d no idea what kind of a fix I was in. This place where I’d fallen, it was down among the rocks somehow. Maybe it was a crack, maybe just a hole among some boulders. He either couldn’t get down here or didn’t want to try, especially as he did not know whether I was alive or not, or what kind of a mood I was in.

After a long while I heard him moving around, muttering to himself, then his footsteps going away. But how far away?

Putting out a hand, I felt of the grass, sand, rocks, then a drop-off. It might be inches, it might be fifty feet. I lay quiet, thinking.