Relentless (23 page)

“I've taken care of that. Are we ready to go?”

“As soon as you saddle your horse.”

Vickers' expression changed a little—a pinching of mouth corners. Evidently he had expected somebody to saddle up for him. Watchman didn't take the hint. He was nobody's hired wrangler.

Getting to be a pretty proud Innun, aren't we
. He chastised himself silently for his childishness and went over to the fire to gather his things. Mrs. Lansford was trying to comb wet tangles out of her walnut-brown hair with her fingers; she looked up at him and her smile showed him the same resilient strength he'd admired last night. “Thanks for what you've done, Officer.”

He said impulsively, “My name's Sam Watchman. Sam.”

“All right. Thanks, Sam.”

Keith Walker said, “Remember what I said about the Major and Baraclough.”

“I will. Listen, if we're not back here by daybreak tomorrow you'd better start down the mountain. And watch your footing in the drifts.”

Mrs. Lansford said, “You'll be back.”

“They may have headed down the back of the mountain by now. Don't wait past morning. All right?”

“All right, Sam.”

Walker only nodded bleakly and Watchman walked to his horse.

5

It wouldn't have taken half an hour to reach the ranger cabin if it hadn't been for the drifts. A good part of the way the horses were up to their bellies in snow. Twice Watchman had to double back and find another way around.

At the summit the wind was still brisk but nothing like the previous day's gale. Ramps of snow lay against two sides of the cabin all the way to the peaked roof line. The spindle tracery of the wooden watchtower loomed above the cabin in silhouette against the clouds. Watchman signaled a halt at the side of a twenty-foot boulder and took a good long time to look the place over. He didn't see any smoke at the chimney but that didn't need to mean anything. The blowing snow had almost erased a line of indentations in the crust that emerged from the cabin door and made an abrupt right turn and disappeared down over the far crest. It could mean they had moved on; it could mean they had laid tracks to invite their pursuers into an ambush. Watchman dismounted and dragged his rifle out of the saddle boot. Without the need of instructions Buck Stevens got down with his rifle and braced his aiming arm against the abrasive side of the boulder, training the rifle on the cabin door. Watchman nodded to him and struck off on foot to make a wide circle and come in at the cabin from its blind side. When he looked back he saw Vickers coming after him.

The scatter of boulders made it possible to keep cover until he had come up within twenty feet of the cabin. When he stopped Vickers bumped into his back and muttered, “Sorry.”

“Keep a little distance,” Watchman said, and swept the summit with a careful inspection. Nothing stirred except the wind and snow. He looked across the little flat and made a hand signal to Buck Stevens, and Stevens' hat lifted and fell in acknowledgment. Watchman stripped off his right glove and put it in his pocket; fitted his hand into the rifle's trigger guard and sprinted for the side wall of the cabin.

He was ready to drop and slide but his run drew no fire. Against the cabin he spent a good while listening. Heard nothing and glanced back. Vickers was still in the rocks, training his rifle on the cabin. Watchman nodded to him and Vickers made his run, skidding to a stop beside him.

Watchman went along to the front corner of the log shack and poked his head out. Stevens had the door covered but that didn't keep anyone in the farther rocks from having it covered too.

The snow right in front of the door had been churned up and was brown with mud, thinly covered with a fresh white fall that had coated it since the tracks had been made. Watchman tried to judge how long that might be but it was hard to estimate—ten minutes, maybe two hours; the cabin roof overhung it and a lot would depend on the changes in the wind during the past hour or two.

A few blunt icicles hung from the edges of the roof. Watchman eased around the butts of the corner logs and moved along to the door, and stood there studying it and studying the rocks beyond. Vickers' head appeared at the corner, an inquiring lift of eyebrows, and Watchman held up a palm to keep him where he was.

There was a padlock hasp, badly bent; no lock. What held the door shut was a wooden throw bar, a dowel handle of which protruded through a slot in the face of the heavy plank door. You had to slide the dowel about eight inches to the right. Watchman thought about that for a while, not touching the door, and after he had considered the temptations he went back to the corner and said, “Wait here. Don't touch the door.” And looked both ways and jogged over to Buck Stevens' post in the rocks.

“What's up?”

“Nothing, I hope. Hand me that coil of rope, will you? Thanks.”

“Want me to stay put?”

“Yes. Make noise if anything moves.”

Watchman carried the lariat back to the cabin door and dropped it on the ground. Vickers was scowling at him. Watchman said, “Be a good idea if you went over to those rocks for a minute.”

“Why?”

“Just prudent,” Watchman said. He picked up the noose end of the rope and pulled it down tight into a small loop. Then he made sure the coil of rope lay properly on the ground, and gently hung the little loop on the dowel handle of the door bar. He did this very gingerly. Finally he reached down for the free end of the rope and began to pull it slowly. The rope began to uncoil, not disturbing the latch.

Vickers had gone over to the rocks and Watchman backed toward him slowly, paying the rope out. It was a fifty-foot lasso and he went back into the rocks with the end of it. “Duck down behind that rock now,” he said, and Vickers finally got the idea and took cover.

Watchman pulled the rope around back of a boulder and kept pulling until he heard the door latch begin to scrape in its slotted guides. It looked as if they hadn't booby-trapped it after all, but he didn't regret taking the time to be sure.… And then the rope met resistance, he gave it a brief final tug, and a blast of explosives blew the cabin door out.

6

Just inside the doorway the explosion had dug a little crater in the dirt floor. Vickers picked up a small piece of metal and dropped it quickly because it was still hot. “Shrapnel. It was a fragmentation grenade.”

Watchman nodded. He fingered the charred end of the dangling piece of wire by the door frame. They had wired the grenade to the post and hooked the tripwire around the latch, to pull the pin when the door was opened.

“Now that raises an interesting question,” Watchman said.

“Such as?”

“Just how many more of these handy little goodies do you suppose they're carrying?”

7

He felt the potbelly stove—still warm. They hadn't been gone very long.

He made a quick search. The explosion had littered the front of the room with wooden debris and it had knocked a few shrapnel holes in the walls. But the fugitives didn't seem to have left anything behind except for a few discarded empty tin cans. Well, they'd had an extra horse—the one Walker had left behind; they had plenty of space to pack everything they wanted.

He went back to the jagged-edged doorway and stepped across the remains of the door. Vickers was coming out behind him and Buck Stevens brought up the horses. Watchman could see vaguely the shapes of lower summits down the north slope.

Vickers said, “They can't have got far. Look at those tracks. What would you say, half an hour ahead of us?”

“Something like that.”

“Let's go, then.”

“Take it easy a minute,” Watchman said.

“What for? Four men, seven horses—they can't travel in this snow without leaving tracks. We've got them now.”

“Or maybe they've got us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They may have heard the racket up here. They know we're close behind them. They can't count on wiping all of us out with one grenade so they've got to figure they've still got some of us on their trail. And like you said, they know they can't hide their tracks.”

“So?”

“So put yourself in their shoes. They're going to do two things. First they're going to set themselves up in a place where they get a good long view down their own backtrail so they can count us on their fingers when we come in sight. Then when they know how many we are they'll go on down the mountain a little way, lay some nice tracks for us to follow, and they'll double back around their own tracks and set up a fine little crossfire for us to walk into.”

A crimson flush suffused Vickers' cheeks. He got busy lighting a cigarette.

Buck Stevens said in his matter-of-fact voice, “How do you want to work it, Sam?”

“No point in playing the game by their rules. I think we'll cut over east a little way. Go down behind that ridge line and ride north.”

“You mean try to get around in front of them.”

“It's worth a try,” Watchman said, squinting across the mountains.

Vickers said, “You're talking as if you can anticipate which way they're going. It's all very well for us to go on ahead of them and try to ambush them, but what if they don't walk into it? What if they go another way entirely?”

“Then we'll just have to send them an invitation, won't we?” Watchman walked past him and mounted his horse. “Of course you can go right on after them if you want. I don't much recommend it but you can please yourself.” He nodded to Buck Stevens and led the way down off the summit, splitting wide away from the dimpled tracks the fugitives had left in the snow.

Behind them Vickers climbed onto his horse and gigged it nervously. When Watchman looked back Vickers was coming right along after him. Watchman smiled a little and turned to face front.

CHAPTER

8

1

The napalm burn on Baraclough's wrist was supposed to be dead scar flesh but it had a way of itching sometimes. He scratched it viciously, enjoying the pain.

Eddie Burt said, “I don't think they're coming.”

“They're not stupid,” Major Hargit conceded. They'd seen three men start down off the skyline by the cabin. Three men had left the bonfire by those two trucks down on the flats night before last, and if it could be assumed these were the same three men then none of them had been hurt by the booby-trap grenade in the cabin. If they were smart enough to avoid that one they were pretty good.

But it had been a good twenty minutes since the three horsemen had disappeared over the summit half a mile above, and they should have showed up long before now if they were following the tracks.

Hanratty took it badly. He dragged his gloved palm down across his face with an abrasive rasp of stubble and began to shake. He had shaken like that an hour ago, coming down into this timbered cut, when the Major had halted the group and said, “The pack only chases a prey that runs. We'll turn and face them.”

Now Baraclough said, “I guess they want to flank us.”

Eddie Burt grinned. “They ain't bad for country cops.”

Major Hargit nodded. “They're not bad, Sergeant, but they're no A-team. Their friends will be taking the three of them down off this mountain in canvas bags. All right, gentlemen, let's go find them.”

2

The wind had just about died but it was still quite cold and Baraclough had stripped down to his windbreaker because he took a kind of pleasure from the discomfort. They followed the Major along a steep hillside, keeping under the pines where the snow hadn't drifted very deep. The Major checked his compass at intervals and finally turned his horse straight up the northeast face of the mountain and they clung to their saddles, leaning far forward to balance the horses. Hoofs scrabbled in the loose footing and the horses lunged and heaved their way toward the top.

At the military crest they tied the horses to trees and crawled to the top. Baraclough waited for the Major to hand him the field glasses. The Major completed a sweep and handed them over. Baraclough lifted them to his eyes and said, “See anything?”

“No. Your try.”

But Baraclough saw nothing either.

Hanratty said, “Jesus, let's don't just lie here. I'm fixing to freeze my ass off.”

“We'll wait,” the Major said.

3

Half an hour drifted by. Baraclough was mildly offended by the rank smell of his own wet clothes. The temperature had risen considerably since dawn; the wind seemed cold but everything was melting around him. Snowflakes drifted lazily through the air but they were thin enough to cause no problem of visibility; he could see one peak, east along the range, that must have been eight or ten miles away. The sky beyond it was dark and wild where the storm had gone, but overhead now little salmon streaks of color showed through where the clouds were thinning and beginning to break up. Baraclough suspected they'd have sunshine before the end of the day.