When Lou Harris left this world, only one shot had been fired. While the source of that shot remained unknown, there wasn’t a soul inside or outside the ranch house who doubted that Cort Lacey was somewhere in Broken Rock Canyon.
Wassin, for one, was completely convinced. By reputation alone, he knew the aim was too sure, the timing too delicate, for it to be anyone but Cort Lacey. And that was fine with him. Despite five dead men, Wassin considered his mission to Broken Rock Canyon a success. He had to find Lacey in order to kill him. Well, now, he was found ... almost.
Snake-like, Wassin began to edge back farther into the brush and along the canyon wall. Ever so slowly, he made his way toward the eastern slope. The hunt began. But the hunted was not unaware.
Despite the roar of gunfire and the confusion of Double C men and horses frantic to avoid death, Cort’s attention never strayed from the figure of Wassin at the far side of the canyon. At six hundred yards, however, Cort could not see who he was. But when he saw him pull his horse off into the brush with a cool, purposeful lope, Cort knew what he was. A professional killer. And Cort knew he’d need to be very careful, or he’d be a professional killer’s victim.
If he could depend on twelve-year-old memories, Cort had one advantage—he knew Broken Rock Canyon. On the other hand, he had one disadvantage—a left leg not entirely healed. It was time to ponder.
Settling himself down to a few minutes of deep thinking, Cort, all of a sudden, felt the cold chill of fear as he sensed the presence of someone close behind him. Very close. He silently cursed himself as seven kinds of fool for letting a second hired killer escape his attention. Then he remembered Clare. “Lord,” he whispered to himself as he turned, “I hope it’s her.” And there she stood, pretty as a summer sunrise, with her thin cotton blouse, wet with perspiration, clinging to every curve of her firm, round breasts.
About to cuss her out as eight kinds of a fool for sneaking up on him like that, Cort was stopped by the palm of her hand placed over his lips. She raised the canteen toward him, and said, “I thought you might be thirsty.” He was bone-dry.
After he drank, he briefly told her what all the shooting had been about. Rather casually, in the hope of playing down the danger, Cort added that one of the Double C men was hiding in the brush on the west side of the canyon.
“Why didn’t he turn-tail and run with the rest of his breed?” Clare wondered aloud. Her memory, however, jumped to supply the answer. “That man in the brush, Cort,” she said, her voice and face betraying her agitation, “is he the one who was riding off to the side of the other Double C men before they rode into the canyon?”
Cort was impressed and said, “You walk a silent trail and got good eyes too.” And as there seemed to be no real point anymore in keeping her in the dark, he calmly added, “Yeah, the feller in the brush is who you think he is.”
The easiness with which he told her that her worst fear was true helped Clare shed the momentary panic that had gripped her.
Cort couldn’t help but ask, “Where’d you learn to see the difference between an ordinary hired gun and a professional killer?”
The question startled her, but then, with a calm to match Cort’s she said, “I only knew I saw a difference between the one man and the pack. Watching you, Cort, seeing the muscles in your neck tense, that’s what told me that that man was dangerous. I didn’t know he was a professional killer until you just told me ... and now I’m a lot more scared than I was before.”
Cort would have taken more time to reassure her, but he had let too much time slip through his fingers already. Whoever was stalking him was still on the west side of the canyon, but moving, always moving, and getting closer to the moment when a clear, unobstructed bullet could find its mark in Cort’s body.
He gently took hold of Clare’s arm, smiled, and said, “Neither of us has time to be scared.”
For an instant, Clare’s mind flashed to a twelve-year-old memory. She stood by the spring with a heartsick young boy who had also taken hold of her arm. It was hard to believe that, that young boy and this wiry man were one and the same. Things had certainly changed. What changed most, was that twelve years ago she hadn’t wanted that boy’s hand on her arm. Now, she didn’t want him to let go.
But he did let go.
“Listen,” he said, “Just the way you snuck down the trail behind me, I want you to Injun-it to the ranch house. I’m sure that snake-in-the-grass over yonder won’t take a shot at you, ’cause that would show me where he’s at.
“Now. When you get into the house, this is what I want you to tell the others to do later on tonight; First, have someone go into the barn and saddle two horses. Work fast. Saddle two in the time it would take to saddle one—that’s important. Outfit the first horse with heavy saddle bags filled with grub and ammunition. Make it look like the feller who’s gonna get on that horse is gonna be on him for a long time.”
“What about the other horse?” Clare interrupted.
“I’m gettin’ to that.” Cort smiled. “Tie cloth around the hooves of the other cayuse and leave him stay put in the barn. But take the first horse out and tether him in Pine Needle Clearing ... ” Cort’s eyes suddenly clouded over. With a sadness born of a lost youth, he asked, “Is Pine Needle Clearing ... ”
“It’s still there,” Clare said, saving Cort the pain of asking if that beautiful refuge from the rest of the world still existed behind the wall of battered stones and scraggily brush.
“All right,” Cort sighed, now suddenly feeling the weariness of a man who, only five days after getting a bullet in the leg, force-marched a rugged two-and-a-half miles. He took another sip of water from the canteen, shaking the urge to close heavy eyes, and went on with his instructions.
“The time to saddle the horses and lead the one horse out to Pine Needle Clearing should be in the early evenin’ about an hour or so before dark. After that, everybody stays in the house. At around eleven o’clock, start some sort of ruckus to cover any sound I might make when I leave the barn. I’m gonna ride the cayuse with the make-shift moccasins out the mouth of the canyon. I hope.”
Clare nodded her head to the negative. “Why don’t you sneak down to the ranch house with me? A couple of days more rest couldn’t hurt and nobody would be able to get at you inside the house.”
“That’s all true,” he answered, “but once I was in the house, chances are I’d never get out again. I’m safest out here where I can move around just as much as the feller who’s trackin’ me. As for restin’ up, if I can get outta here okay, I’ll head for Cliffordsville and the people hidin’ Ella Frank. Ridin’ a horse that leaves no tracks ought to get me to town with an empty backtrail, so I figure I can stay put in Cliffordsville without too much risk.
“And speakin’ of risk, the longer we stay here and chat, the greater the risk is that these will be our last words.”
Last words? She took his light-hearted admonition to heart and trembled. Something happened inside her. Something changed. When the trembling passed, Clare, with an odd mixture of boldness and gentle longing, said, “I don’t want these to be our last words. I don’t want that at all.”
Cort, never daring to hope he’d ever hear her say so much, didn’t think twice after his initial surprise. He wrapped his muscular arms tenderly around her waist and back, and pulled her to him. She did not resist. He kissed her on the mouth, tentatively at first, then hard. Clare’s lips parted as she kissed him back. Her arms came up to caress his neck and shoulders, and that’s when Cort could feel the press of her breasts rubbing against his body. In another second or two he might have been oblivious to all the world outside of Clare and himself, but, the both of them, at virtually the same moment, remembered the man on the western side of Broken Rock Canyon. Reluctantly—very reluctantly—they came out of each other’s arms.
“There will be another time, a better time,” Cort said huskily.
“I’ll wait,” was her breathless reply. And then, like a puff of wind, Clare was on her way down the trail.
Wassin had travelled almost three hundred yards toward the back of the canyon when he caught sight of movement on the eastern slope. His finger was on the trigger.
As soon as Wassin saw the shape of his target, a cruel grin crossed his face. He had killed women before, but never without first taking his pleasure. He lowered his Winchester and amused himself with thoughts of what he’d do to this good-looking woman in tight fitting blue jeans ... .
There were at least half a dozen rape victims in Wassin’s past. In all other things, from the care of his horse to the stalking and killing of a man, Wassin was a model of cold, calculating reason. With women, however, he was less than a human being, even less than a beast. There was no sanity in the man when he put his hands on a woman—or a girl.
He had concealed his crimes well, in phony alibis, frame-ups of innocent men, and in the raped and mutilated women’s bodies that had not yet been discovered. He had no fear of being caught. And he had no doubt that this woman going into the ranch house would be his next “lady friend.” But business—the death of Cort Lacey—would have to come first. So Wassin continued to circle to the east.
And as soon as Clare stepped into the safety of her home, Cort began to move—also to the east.
Noon. Eleven hours of cat and mouse lay in front of Cort. There could be no sleep, no eating, not a moment’s loss of concentration. His life lay in the balance. It would help him if he could find out who was tracking him. The ranks of professional man-hunters were slim, and their names and styles of work were well known to men like Cort Lacey. If he could identify the man across the canyon without getting a bullet between the eyes, keeping away from him after that would be much easier. Of course, there was another alternative; Hunt the hunter. It could be done, Cort conceded to himself, but what was there to gain? He would be putting himself in greater jeopardy to kill a man he didn’t know and held nothing against. The real enemy was Cliffords, the man who paid the killers. It would do no good to risk his life in any other endeavor except the removal of the Double C paymaster.
So, with his six-gun still in his holster, and his Winchester carried with its muzzle pointing down at the ground, Cort took one careful step after another, blazing a zig-zagging trail that kept cutting back on itself in an endless series of circles and arcs. For every hundred yards he walked, he moved perhaps only seven or eight yards toward the back of the canyon. When he reached the steep slope at the rear of the canyon, he turned and began back-tracking his own devious trail. He trudged all the way back to the thin deer path that he and Clare had used to come down from the rim.
The obvious thing to do now was find a look-out point high above the crisscrossing maze of trail he had left. That is why he decided to try the unorthodox idea of a look-out from below. It was something that the hunter would not expect, and it might give Cort a chance to identify the man trying to kill him. He wasn’t however, leaving his life strictly in the hands of his strategy. When he found a vantage point some ten yards down the deer path, Cort put a bullet into the chamber of his rifle and held it at the ready. If he was lucky, the killer would follow the deer path up the slope on the assumption that his prey had left the canyon. The only thing to do now, though, was wait and see.
Wassin came off the steep, northern slope at the back of the canyon only a scant few minutes after Cort had doubled back to the west. He quickly found the tracks of his would-be victim. Almost as quickly after that, he found himself amid a befuddling maze of trails that seemed to lead nowhere and everywhere at the same time.
The late July heat was oppressive, and sweat dripped from Wassin’s pinkish white skin. He took a silk, San Francisco handkerchief from his pants pocket and dabbed at his face.
Standing quite still, he tried to figure out what these confusing trails might mean: A means to slow him down? A decoy to set him off following an intriguing false trail? A trap? At the very least, it was obvious that Lacey knew someone was tracking him. Wassin had to remind himself that this was “the” Cort Lacey he was following. There would be no room for error. He had to out-guess Lacey at every turn.
“I’ll play it safe,” Wassin finally murmured to himself. “I’ve got to figure it’s a trap.” With that decision made, he tried to visualize what kind of trap it might be, and how he might turn it to his own advantage.
“Somewhere, in the middle of all these tracks,” Wassin reasoned, “Lacey is ready to bushwhack me. He’s layin’ in wait, expectin’ me to be comin’ from the back of the canyon; so what if I just kind of circle down underneath and come around at all these crossing trails from the other side?” He answered his own question: “I’d take him by surprise ... probably in the back.” Wassin was pleased with his figuring, and showed it in a tight, white-lipped smile.
He checked his plan from every angle and could see no major flaw in it. But a plan is only as good as the premise it is based upon. Wassin knew that, of course, but he was so sure Lacey’s reaction to being hunted would be to hunt back, that nothing could have broken the iron conviction that his premise was one hundred percent correct. And that he would, by dark, have a money belt around his waist with ten thousand dollars in it.
For perhaps the seventh time since entering Broken Rock Canyon, Wassin checked the condition of his weapons. Then he headed down—over ten yards below the lowest trail—and swiftly moved in almost a direct line to the deer path where Cort, his eyes riveted to the trail above him, waited.
Wassin, too, was looking in the wrong direction; black eyes scouring the brush above, but never once peering any further than a few paces straight ahead. And the distance between them kept shrinking and shrinking.
When they were separated by only seventy-five yards of thin brush, Cort, his neck stiff from looking up the slope, turned his head to the left. At just that instant, Wassin, by the dumbest of luck, stepped behind a small pile of boulders, and was hidden from Cort’s view. Cort turned his attention back to the deer path above him, and Wassin just kept on coming.
When they were fifty yards apart, Wassin lifted his gaze and briefly looked straight ahead. He looked right at Cort, but, because Lacey was completely motionless, Wassin failed to see him.
At forty yards they were still totally unaware of each other.
Thirty yards. Nothing—no brush, no boulders—separated them. Each was in perfect view of the other, yet both continued to look up at the slope.
In order to keep from dying by the gun, a man who lives by the gun has a highly developed sense for approaching danger. It was at twenty yards that the sixth sense finally worked. Without so much as the sound of a twig being snapped, both men knew, at virtually the same instant, that death hovered somewhere very near. Too near.
Wassin’s eyes darted from the slope to Cort Lacey in the clearing directly in front of him. Pivoting on his left foot, Cort turned his whole body to the danger he sensed coming at him from the north. He saw a pasty-faced man with dark black hair dive to the ground and point a rifle at him. For his part, Cort didn’t waste any time either. He swung his Winchester around as he dove behind a small knoll a yard up the deer path.
Wassin’s rifle bellowed first, shattering the tranquility of the canyon. It shattered nothing else. Wassin’s piece of lead went screaming aimlessly past the prone Cort Lacey, who just then pulled the trigger of his own Winchester.
The bullet from Cort’s rifle dug itself into the ground only a few inches in front of Wassin’s head. The little color in the killer’s pinkish white face disappeared. This was not the way it was supposed to be. Wassin’s style was to hunt a man down like a dog, not shoot it out with him practically face to face. There was no question in his mind—it was time to retreat.
Without particularly aiming, Wassin poured a hail of bullets in Cort’s direction, and, at the same time, ran hell-bent in the direction of the heavy brush above him on the eastern slope.
The maneuver was successful. Cort was forced to keep his head down and Wassin, by the time Cort could look up and aim, had vanished.
The bad news sunk in slowly as Cort wiped his sweaty forehead with a shirt-sleeve. That death-white, pasty-faced man that had looked down the bore of a Winchester at him—that was Wassin. Cort had never seen him before, but he had heard plenty ... a relentless killer who was capable of tracking you round the clock, day after day, ’til there was nothing left inside you except a delirious desire to sleep. And then Wassin would put a bullet in your head so you would rest in peace.
Cort came up to a low crouch, then quickly put some distance between himself and the heavy brush up the slope where Wassin had disappeared. Knowing Wassin’s reputation, Cort knew he had to stay as far away from him as possible, try to stay awake, despite the weakness caused by his wound, and hope that his plan for getting out of the canyon during the night wouldn’t come up a cropper.
Hours passed. The hot, dry, glaring sun started to give way to long shadows, but the shielding dark of night still seemed to be weeks away instead of mere hours to the exhausted Cort Lacey. He had climbed, clawed, and scratched his way up and down the eastern slope of the canyon. Always circling, back trailing, and looking over his shoulder, he had kept moving. His wounded leg, however, made every step an ordeal, and his heavy loss of blood five days before made him tire quickly. Yet to stop and rest would be an invitation to disaster.
Finally, dusk brought its dark hue into the sky. Sam Lacey left the ranch house and entered the barn. Cort was hopeful and Wassin was curious. But they both kept on the move, only now and again would they cast an eye down to the canyon floor. Some fifteen minutes later they had something to see ... Sam Lacey leading a fine-looking black gelding, all saddled up, out of the barn and toward the back of the eastern slope.
After tethering the black in the confined area of Pine Needle Clearing, Sam hastily returned to the safety of the ranch house. He met no interference from Wassin, whom Cort had purposefully led to the far end of the canyon.
Cort’s plan of escape seemed perfectly clear to Wassin. Lacey would try, with the aid of night, to beat him to the prearranged spot where the horse was hidden. Without a doubt, Wassin reasoned, Lacey was already circling around him, getting a head start. With that thought in mind, he joined the race—except he was the only one racing.
As darkness descended, Wassin rushed toward the back of the canyon, while Cort moved swiftly on a downward angle toward the floor of the canyon. The sound of his own movements kept Wassin from hearing the creak of the dynamite damaged door, as Cort slipped into the Five Fingers barn.
It was after ten-thirty when Wassin found Pine Needle Clearing. The horse, tethered and cropping grass in a wide circle, still awaited its rider. A dip in the earth at the edge of the clearing, protected on three sides by small pine trees, became Wassin’s place of ambush. He settled himself into this little fortress and waited contentedly for his victim to arrive.
The minutes dragged on.
“Must’ve recognized me and took it too cautious tryin’ to get here. Well, that’s fine, ’cause it only takes one mistake, Lacey,” Wassin whispered into the night air, “and you’re about to make it.”
At eleven o’clock the sounds of a loud argument, complete with screaming insults, crashing pots, and slamming doors, erupted in the Five Fingers ranch house. The fight was so loud, the echoes off the canyon walls so intense, that the sound Cort’s horse made with its muffled hooves could not even be heard by Cort himself.
And though he didn’t know Cort Lacey had just escaped his grasp, somehow, Wassin knew he had been had.