Ride the Dark Trail (1972) (17 page)

Being a big, healthy sort of man I could shed hurts as well as most, better than a lot. I'd lost blood a-plenty, but what I needed now was to check out those wounds for infection. And there seemed to be none. When I'd bathed them pretty well and done the best I could dressing them, I laid back on my blankets and was soon asleep.

When I awakened I felt better. But I was worried about Em Talon. I was fearful that she'd not gotten home safe, and worried about those eight men back-trailing my horse. When that horse came up to the ranch they would think surely I was dead. Barnabas knew where he'd left me, but Em had been right there and she would have found nothing.

I checked over my guns and made ready for trouble, if trouble came. And of one thing I could be sure - where I was, trouble was not far away, dogging my heels all the way to perdition.

It was cold and damp, and for a few minutes I lay still just thinking and listening. My mouth was dry, and I felt almighty hot and tired. Although I was feeling better than I had the night before, there was just no strength in me, not even to build me a fire. I just lay there, staring into the half darkness of the cave and wondering whether I'd ever get out of there alive. Right then I wouldn't have bet any money on it.

I could hear no sound above the tumbling water, and soon I dozed off again. When I awoke I was hot and dry like before, only more so. My mite of fire had gone out long ago and I poked sticks together and got hold of some old, dry bark from one of them; crumbling it in my hands and striking a match I coaxed a little flame to burning again.

For a while I just poked sticks into the blaze and tried to get some coals, then I put some coffee into the cup again and when it was brewed, I drank it down. Just having something hot inside me felt good.

By now most of them must have figured me for dead. I guessed I had been holed up a couple of days and nights, although it could be longer. I had to get out of this place. I had to get out in the sunlight and the air, and I had to get myself some grub. Without a horse I was going to play hob gettin' anywhere, but I could surely try. If I was to die I wanted to be out in the fresh sunlight and under the trees.

It taken some time, but I rolled my blankets, taken up my guns, and crawled for the opening, dragging my gear along.

When I first got into the air everything looked wrong-side to. It was morning time and I had been sure it was afternoon. Somewhere I'd lost some time ... a day was it, or two days? By the way my stomach felt it might have been a week.

I studied the trail that I crawled along and I found no tracks. It had rained since I'd come in, but that wasn't surprising as in the high-up mountains it can rain every afternoon and often enough does just that. Whatever tracks there might have been were washed out, and I found the same thing on the regular trail when I got to it - that trail Em had followed showed nothing at all of her mule, those who chased her, or me.

Using the low limbs of a tree I pulled myself up, favoring myself not to open my wounds, and I hitched along the trail, making no effort to hurry. I just wanted to move along. Where I was headed I surely had no idea, only I was going to come down off the mountain to where I could get some better grub.

I taken rest a-plenty, but by the time an hour was passed I'd made more'n a half mile. The river was off to my left, and a mite of a stream was flowing in from the right to join it. I stopped, laying flat out on the grass, and drunk my fill. Then I hobbled on again.

Once, afar off, I seen a deer. And a couple of times grouse flew up, or some bird resembling them. Marmots, of course, were there wherever I came up to a rock pile of some sort. After a while I just couldn't make it any farther and I moved back into the trees and found a place at the edge of a small clearing where I could stretch out in the sun. When I'd rested there awhile, I started on, keeping off the trail and taking time a-plenty. Little by little I worked my way along the mountainside toward the higher meadows back of the ranch.

The easiest way had been to follow along the steep side of the canyon and gradually work my way down. I couldn't travel but a little way without stopping to rest, and nobody was going to see me unless they were looking over into the canyon. Pretty soon the sides grew steeper and I made my way down to the streambed.

It was lucky I did so because the walls became sheer, white rock cut with many places where water had run off or with deep cracks. At the bottom the stream ran almost bank to bank, but there was an edge of sand or gravel that I could work my way along so that I only had to enter the water occasionally for a few steps.

There was a lot of driftwood, logs and such, washed down by the flash floods that happen in mountain country. After a ways I commenced to get awful tired but there was no place to set down. Suddenly I came upon a kind of gap in the wall It was half filled with trees and such, but beyond it I could see a patch of green that had to be a meadow.

Crawling over the brush in the mouth of the canyon I found myself with a meadow stretching away before me, but I had to wade through marsh to get to dry land. Ahead of me were a bunch of grass-grown hummocks that were old beaver ponds, and higher I could see the still water of beaver ponds that likely had beavers in them yet.

Off to one side there was a grove of aspen, for the beaver never live very far from them. I sat down on a log just inside that aspen grove.

I was beat. My side ached and there was a weakness on me like I'd never felt before. I needed a camp and place where I could lie down and be safe, but the shape I was in I wasn't up to looking around. So I just sat there watching the light change. Huge billows of cloud lifted high above the mountains catching the last light. Slowly I began to peel flakes of thin, very dry bark from a long dead aspen; then I moved off the log with an effort and I began putting a little fire together.

Leaning my rifle against a tree I started cutting evergreen boughs for a bed. The heavy six-shooter on my leg weighted me down, and after a bit I taken it off and hung it on a low branch. Then I went on cutting boughs, rigging me a halfway shelter there in the aspens. Limping back, and nearly played out, I bent over to replenish the fire. I added a few sticks, dropping to one knee to do it. My breath was coming short and my head was dull and heavy. I had started to rise when I heard the footfall on the moss. Just as I started to turn something hit me.

I started to fall, grabbing for my six-shooter, but it was gone. Through a haze of pain I could see the legs of several horses. I tried to get up.

"Hit him." It was Jake Flanner's voice. "Make a job of it."

Something did hit me again, and this time I fell flat out on the leaves and grass. And they hit me again and again, only there was no more pain, just the sodden brutality of the blows. The first blow had stunned me, leaving me only a shell.

Somebody kicked me in the side and I felt the warm flow of blood where the wound was torn open. My hand reached out but there was nothing to lay hold of, and after a time I passed out.

It was the rain brought me out of it. A drenching downpour that came down in buckets. The rain brought me to consciousness and to realization of pain, but I did not move. I simply laid there, unable to move, while the rain poured down, soaking me through and through. After a while I passed out again.

They believed they'd killed me for sure this time. That was my first thought, and it stayed with me. Maybe they were right. Maybe I was already dead. Maybe I was dead and this was hell.

I was wet, soaked through, but it was no longer night. It was coming up to morning although there was no sun as yet. As I lay there I began to remember other things. They had shot into me as I lay on the ground. I recalled the roar of the guns and remembered a burning stab of pain. There had been at least three shots ... funny, how I remembered that.

If they had done that, how was I even alive? How could I realize anything at all? How could I feel? And I did feel. I felt pain, I felt weariness, I felt like just lying there to be finished with my dying. Trouble was, I was mean. Too many folks wanted me dead for me to go out of my way to please them. I opened my eyes and lay there looking at some sodden green-brown leaves and the wet trunk of a tree.

No matter what they'd done or tried to do I was still alive. I knew what was happening to me and a man who can feel is a man who can fight. It just wasn't in me to die there like a dog in the brush without getting some of my own back. Jake Flanner had come after me himself. He'd brought help, but he'd come. And now I was going after him. I'd no idea what happened down there in the valley at the Empty. Nor right at this moment did I care much. I was an animal fighting for life and I tried to roll over to get my hands under me.

I done it. It wasn't easy. I couldn't move at all on one side so I turned over, mighty careful, the other way. I got one hand under me and I pushed up until I could drag a knee up.

As I got to one knee I realized my shirt was stuck to my side where I'd been shot before. I'd been kicked there, right where my wound was, and it had bled some. All right, so I'd lost blood. I'd lost it before this, and a-plenty. They wasn't gettin' no maiden when they tried to bleed me.

I caught hold of an aspen and pulled myself up. By that time there was light enough for me to see what they'd done to me, and it was a-plenty. My shirt front was stiff with dried blood, and so was the side of it. On my left side I found a fresh bullet hole from front to back. The bullet had gone through a place where my shirt bagged out to one side, going clean through without so much as scratching me. I had a fresh scratch atop my shoulder, and I had bruises all over from the blows and kicks. On my skull I had a fresh cut and a couple of lumps.

Oh, they'd laid it to me proper, only being down like I was, lying on soft ground and grass, some of the shock had been taken from the blows. Most of it I had taken, and so I was sore outside as well as inside.

If they'd hunted for my guns in the dark they surely hadn't found them, for there they were - the rifle had fallen from the tree where I'd leaned it and was lying on the wet grass, but the pistol still hung from the stub of a branch where I'd hung it the night before when all weighted down.

My head was throbbing like a big drum, my stomach was hollow and I was weak, but there was a mad on me like nothing I'd ever felt before. Looking around I saw some broken branches, all seasoned and gray from exposure, and out of one of them and a crosspiece of green aspen I fashioned myself a crutch to spare my wounded leg. Then with my six-gun belted on and my Winchester in my good hand, I started off along that trail those riders had left.

It was plain to see where they were going. They were riding down on the back of the Empty, and they were going in for a kill. They had a lead on me, but it wasn't so much. Where they went, I could follow.

My clothes was torn and I looked a sight, but nobody offered me no beauty prizes at any time, so I kept on. My jaw had a healthy growth of whiskers, caked with mud and blood. My hair likewise. Somewhere back along the way I'd lost my hat, and my bloody shirt was ripped in a couple of places, but I was mean as a cornered razor-back hog and I was hunting blood.

Here and there at a place where they had to do a switch-back descent, being a-horseback, I just sat down and slid, saving myself some time a-travelin'.

By noontime I could read their sign enough to see I was closing in. They'd stopped a while to wait for sunup, not knowing the trail or what they faced, so I'd gained a mite. As I edged up to the back meadows I expected to hear gunshots, but I heard nothing at all, and that worried me. I didn't want them killing Em Talon, and I knowed that was what they had in mind. And if they killed her there must be no witnesses so they'd kill that girl I'd taken there for shelter. And that was my affair, all mine.

That crutch was sawing into my armpit, making it sore, but I'd no choice. When I slid and crawled down through the rocks near the ranch, I still heard no sound. I could see the horses down in the corral and mine was there. So he'd found his way home, all right. The horse Barnabas rode was there also. He'd gotten into the place alive ... or at least his horse had.

I'd come to that point of rocks up behind the place and to one side. It was a raw-backed ridge, covered with broken slabs of tilted rocks, a lot of brush, and some scattered pines. There were a thousand hiding places or shelters on that ridge and I could look right into the corrals and yard without being seen ... I hoped.

The sunlight lay easy upon the yard. The shadows lay where they ought to lie, and the horses lazed in the corrals. There was no sign of horses that shouldn't be there.

I couldn't make it out.

By rights Flanner and his men should have arrived and should have attacked the place. Right now there should be a fight ... or else Flanner had already taken over. But where were their horses?

It was almost midafternoon and there should be some sign of life around the place. But still nobody showed. With four people on the place somebody should be moving around.

I lay quiet in the brush and studied all the cover around. Maybe the Flanner outfit had moved in, opened fire, and now were waiting, just as I was, for somebody to make a move.

Then I saw something that didn't figure. On the back steps there was a dark patch where no shadow fell. Water would have evaporated in the time I'd been lying there, at least enough of it so's I couldn't see the stain. Water would, but blood wouldn't