He would have to go into the draws and washes, the breaks and badlands; into the thickets and woods, and the high grass, and there would be danger everywhere, so he made his preparations carefully. In addition to the thick jackboots that reached above the knee, he donned heavy bull hide leggings that would cover the rest of the body to the waist, and despite the summer heat, a bull hide jacket and wrist cuffs and gauntlets over his buckskin shirt. All that swathing slowed his movements a little, made him just a trifle awkward, but there was no help for it. None of it would turn the full power of a bite from the massive jaws of a lobo wolf, but it would shield him from the smaller animals, up to and including, he hoped, coyotes.
Then there was the horse to think about. Again, he’d not risk Eagle, the Appaloosa stallion, though that cut his advantage even more. A trained war-horse, the stud’s keen senses, iron-shod hooves, and crushing jaws had saved his life more than once, but he could not bear the thought of its being bitten. So he had to settle for Bourke’s gelding, superb but no match for Eagle. And it, too, must have protection. He wrapped its legs to knees and hocks with shields of bull hide, and draped it with a kind of bull hide apron he devised, the sort of thing he had seen Mexican vaqueros in the brush country use to protect their mounts from the thorns of the Brasada. Crook and Bourke watched all this and lent a hand, and Bourke said wryly, “You look like a member of King Arthur’s Round Table going out on a quest.”
The General gave his aide a reproving glance. “It’s no joking matter. It’s only common sense.”
“I know. I wouldn’t do it for a million dollars—unless, of course, you gave me a direct order, sir.”
Crook shook his head. “It’s not anything I’d give anyone a direct order to do. But I agree with Sundance. There’s no other way. We decided that at the conference—Sundance, Taylor and I. After those two men took those arrows and the word spread, the troopers simply won’t go on with the poisoning program until that madman’s laid by the heels. So there’s no way around it—Jim has to go out and find him. Sundance, would it be any help to you if I rode with you? You’ve hunted with me; I’m a fair hand at this kind of thing myself, you know.”
They were in the stables at the North Platte post, to which Crook and Bourke had come immediately upon receiving Taylor’s wire. Sundance straightened up from his final inspection of the horse. “Three-Stars, there’s nobody I’d rather have. But this is a different kind of hunt and a one-man job—Cheyenne against Cheyenne. Good as you are, you’re ho Cheyenne, and you’d only slow me down.”
He paused. “I’ve got a place to start from now. I’d have lined out after him yesterday and might even have caught him if Ravenal hadn’t pulled his little caper of disarming me and checking my arrows. That gave him plenty of time to get away. But he left one track and he’ll leave more. Nobody can hide his trail all the time. I’ll find him—and then we’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, if you’d do what I said about Ravenal—”
“Yes. I’ll check into everything about him very carefully—and quietly. I don’t see what connection he could possibly have with this madman, but—”
“Neither do I. All I know is that he stopped me yesterday at the wrong time, and then there was that business with Jody Carson ... You keep an eye on him. It’ll be like watching my back.”
Crook nodded. “Well, good luck. I’ve got to get back to my office.” He and Bourke put out their hands and Sundance shook them, and then they left the stable.
Sundance looked around. Everything was complete, except for—he picked up a tow sack full of tallow balls, each containing a cyanide pellet. These he would sprinkle as he went, get that much poisoning done. Then a sudden thought hit him. Fishing out one of the balls, he broke it open, extracting the pellet carefully. He held it in his hand, looking at it with a kind of awe. A small thing to be so deadly; swallowed, it would produce instantaneous, painless death. He remembered the man beneath the restraining sheet, the howling, the gnashing, drooling jaws ... and if he himself were bitten, he had no intention of going like that. He found an empty cartridge box laid aside after cramming his belt and weapons full of loads, slipped the pellet in if, then dropped it in the side pocket of his jacket. Only a precaution, but he was almost literally about to enter the valley of the shadow, and a man had to be prepared for anything.
Then he was ready, swung into the saddle, bull hide gear creaking, turned the strangely armored horse, and rode out of the North Platte post, beneath a high sun.
~*~
Circling the town, keeping within the burnt area, he struck the North Fork of the river, followed it west a few miles going away from where the murders had taken place the previous day. Then he doubled back, swinging northeastward, and now he was on the hunt in earnest. In a wash beneath a sandy bluff, he reined in, opened the long parfleche, withdrew the short, recurved bow of juniper tipped with buffalo horn, and, without dismounting, strung it, slipping it and the panther-skin quiver full of arrows over his shoulder, where he could get it into action in a couple of seconds. The killer yesterday had proved the advantage of bow and arrows over rifle in certain circumstances: a good Cheyenne warrior could drive home an arrow as accurately as a bullet at three hundred yards, and there was no gun sound or muzzle flash or cloud of powder smoke to give away his position.
Thus armed, and with his Winchester across the saddle bow, he worked his way back toward the scene of the killing. Now he traveled slowly, taking advantage of every bit of cover as only an Indian could do, and always on the alert for any scrap of sign, either of man or animal. Of animals he found enough, including that of a kit fox apparently in the last stages of rabies. Usually a fox placed its feet so that all its tracks fell in a straight line; this one had been lurching and sprawling, with paw prints going everywhere. Here and there Sundance dropped a few of the poisoned tallow balls. The fox itself would not take them, was too far gone even to swallow, but any animals it might have bitten would. Sundance fingered the cartridge box in his pocket, then rode on.
Mid-afternoon found him at last in the draw where the dead antelope’s body had already been savaged by scavengers, and where the moccasin track still showed. This wash or one running into it would have been the logical place of retreat for the killer while Ravenal was delaying him. Maybe somewhere further down it, before it broke into the Platte bottomlands, he could find more sign. He unslung the bow, held an arrow at the ready. If he encountered any rabid animals, he did not want to betray his own presence with a gunshot. These, he figured, would probably be the chief menace; it was not likely that the killer was hanging around the scene of the crime.
Carefully, on foot, leading the horse, stopping often to search the brushy edges of the draw, he worked his way along it. Half a mile, a mile, and still no sign of man or horse beyond that one print. Maybe he was barking up the wrong tree, should move out on the flats, search the bunch grass where the killer had lain when he’d loosed those arrows. Instead, he redoubled his watchfulness, taking it even slower, and making sure not to miss even the slightest sign of human passage.
Another mile, traversed along the winding wash, with a patience that would have sent the average white man into fits. Then Sundance tensed, dropping to his knees. Moistening his finger, he dipped it into a tuft of grass. A long breath of satisfaction came from him as he examined the brown flecks clinging to it when he brought it up. Carefully he searched the grass and at last he found it—a tiny wad of paper, hardly larger than a pinhead, rolled up tightly, dropped there along with the tail end of the tobacco the cigarette had contained when someone had stripped it and hidden its remains.
Getting to his feet, he dusted off his hands. So he was on the right trail after all. A little more swiftly now, he moved along, bow up as he edged around a sharp bend in the draw.
Here the whole floor of the wash changed, turning from sand to rocky, sunbaked hardpan. Jutting from the wall was a scrubby juniper—and Sundance searched its limbs painstakingly until he found the stripped bark where the reins of a tied horse had chafed a branch. His eyes searched the wash’s floor, and finally picked out the faint scars made by the hoofs of an unshod horse. Again, these were things few white men would have noticed; but if the killer had been mounted, that would have been the logical place to leave his horse. It was easier for a man to hide his own tracks in the sand of the wash’s upper end than those of his mount.
Sundance swung up on the gelding, working slowly down the draw. Almost imperceptibly, the trail became easier to follow. The more distance put between himself and the crime, the less pains the killer had taken to hide it. Still, it was twenty-four hours old and the half-breed was under no illusions; its maker was far away by now. That did not matter; now that he had the trail, he would run him down unless the man sprouted wings.
The sign ran on down the draw, which gradually opened up. Where it turned sandy once more, mouthing into the Platte low grounds, there were no tracks; the killer had put his mount up one side or the other. A brief search showed Sundance the passage through the juniper brush, and he led his own horse up over the low bank, into a lush growth of bottomland wild hay.
Here the passage of the unshod horse through the tall grass was easier to follow. Sundance rode bent in the saddle, a smaller target in case the killer had doubled back today to watch his back trail. Then the gelding snorted, shied, jumped backwards. Sundance stared at the tan-colored, long-bodied little animal that furiously attacked its foreleg, needle-sharp fangs gnawing at the heavy bull hide armor. The horse kicked, and the black-footed ferret went spinning through the air, landed on its feet, and with mindless savagery came back at this creature a thousand times larger than itself. It was a tiny, twisting target, so swift-moving that it blurred, but he loosed the arrow from the bow and suddenly, pinned to earth, it writhed and died.
Sundance stroked the excited gelding. There was no way the ferret’s teeth could have pierced the heavy bull hide. But reminded of the danger now, he scattered more of the poisoned balls of tallow as he went, with another arrow nocked to the bowstring as he rode.
~*~
The sun was low-slanting when the trail led him out of the high grass into the cottonwoods along the river. Now, deliberately, it wandered, meandered aimlessly—a fine imitation of a stray horse drifting along the river, pausing here and there to browse. To the unpracticed eye, it would have seemed just that—but when he found the droppings, he grinned tautly, having further proof that this was no stray he followed. A stray would have halted to void its bowels, leaving the droppings in a pile; a horse being ridden left them strung out, as Sundance found them. Sundance dismounted, stirred the dung with a stick, found it hours old. He swung back into the saddle, keeping to the wandering trail as the light lessened.
Here the Platte ran wide and shallow, studded with sandy islands, some no more than brushless spits. It looked easy to ford, but Sundance knew that beneath its muddy surface were treacherous quicksands. Presently, though, he found where the horse had entered the current.
Boldly, he put his own animal in, guiding on a nearly brushless low sandy island in midstream. There was no doubt in his mind that the killer knew every inch of this country intimately; he had not ridden this close to the Union Pacific Railroad in broad daylight, but had made his trip through the lowlands and across the river under cover of darkness. Where he had gone, it would be safe to follow.
Sure enough, it was swimming water all the way, and the cavalry gelding breasted the current easily, shaking itself as it clambered out on the island in midstream. In the last of daylight, Sundance reined in, swung down. Horse tracks crossed the island, entered the current on the other side. All right: but for him, this would be a fine place to spend the night. There was no animal sign at all on the spit, except for mink tracks along its shore, and mink were not likely to be rabid, living mostly on fish as they did, and being too quick and too smart to be caught by predators. He gave the horse a measure of grain from his saddlebags, ate cold Army rations, spread his blankets, slept, rifle cradled in his arms, pistol close at hand, weapons belt draped around the horn of the saddle he used as a pillow.
Before first light, he was up, having marked at sunset the night before the place where the tracks left the island. It would have made him too vulnerable to cross after dawn; in midstream he would have been a fine, helpless target. So he trusted the horse to find its way in darkness, and again there was swimming water to the far bank. Day was just breaking when it climbed out in the brush along the stream.
The killer had ridden all night. Again, he’d simulated the wandering, meandering trail of a stray horse, but always edging back into a direction that gave Sundance a bearing on his course. No doubt about it. Once over the bluffs along the south bank of the Platte, he was bound across the low divide that separated the Platte from the broken drainage of the Republican. There in the rough country along Fox Creek or the forks of Medicine Lake Creek or one of many others, he could hole up, still be within easy striking distance of either post.
Sundance followed him more rapidly now, but without lessening wariness. In crossing the divide, his quarry had used every scrap of cover, just as he would have done, and as the country became more broken, there was plenty of it. Again he was taking pains to conceal his trail as well, and there were times when the half-breed lost it, but patiently he circled, sometimes going on foot, and eventually he found some mark or sign to give him bearing. Usually it was the faintest trace, and more and more he was convinced that the man ahead of him was Cheyenne-bred.
At least, he told himself, once down on the Republican side of the divide, he would more than likely be out of the rabies epidemic’s range. The day wore on, and he moved into the drainage of the southern river, convinced that the killer was heading for some specific spot there, a permanent hiding place. He found himself wondering why the Indians themselves hadn’t picked up a trail, run the man down—but he’d probably been a lot more careful while the Cheyennes were still in the territory. He knew he had little to fear from the cavalry and not much from any Pawnee scouts who might be brought in—their efforts to find a man who killed their enemies would be at best half-hearted.
It was late afternoon when the trail led him to a thin-running creek where the killer had taken to water to hide his trail. Sundance followed, watching either bank for any sign of where he might have climbed out. His alertness was doubled now, for he was fairly sure he was nearing the end of his quest. Judging from the sign, his quarry had gone more than twenty-four hours without sleep; he and his horse alike would give out soon. This was the last push to reach his hideout, and it could not be too far away.
Another hour, and he reined up his mount, hock-deep in water. The stream, wider now, was edged with alders and willow, and a few cottonwoods grew along its bank. Here there was a buffalo crossing, used by other game as well, the ground chopped by hoofmarks in the mud. He reined over to the right bank, examined the churned sign there, but saw no trace of anything but cloven hooves. Turning to the left bank, he leaned far out of the saddle, eyes probing the mud. Early this afternoon, a bull and two cows had crossed, and their splayed hoof prints nearly blotted out the marks left by the unshod horse. Sundance’s mouth twisted, and with bow and arrow at the ready, he put the gelding up the bank, through the brush, into the cottonwoods.
Beyond them lay a miniature badlands of sandy cutbanks, draws and gullies, clogged with brush. He was aware of his heart beating faster: it was up in there somewhere, had to be—the killer’s lair.
The horse’s feet made no sound on the sand beneath the cottonwoods. Sundance passed from under the trees, eye picking up an almost invisible fleck of trail sign here, another there: the killer had tried here to erase all marks of passage. Ahead lay a narrow, steep-banked cut grown up to the height of a horse’s head with a solid wall of scrubby juniper and thorn. Seemingly impenetrable, it had nevertheless afforded passage to the killer and his mount—at the level of a rider’s shoulder, Sundance saw the one telltale broken twig of cedar.
He turned the horse back into the shelter of the cottonwoods, dismounted, hitched it. Now he put away his bow, useless in thick brush, and his arrows, hanging both on the saddle horn. The killer had ridden in there, but he was not about to, not until he had reconnoitered it on foot. With a round in the chamber of the Winchester, he edged back to the draw’s mouth. Dropping behind a mound of sand, he watched and listened for a long five minutes before he was wholly satisfied. But nothing moved, and there was no sound but the constant trickling murmur of the stream not far away. Getting to his feet, bent low, he moved into the brush.
He had hunted grizzly, mountain lion, black bear and wolves in such thickets, but now he was after the most dangerous game of all—a man Cheyenne-raised and armed with guns and arrows. His own life depended on his stealth and caution, and he was like a shadow as he vanished into the juniper.
It was with excruciating slowness that he edged forward, never putting down a foot until sure of a silent place for it to rest, never forcing passage so that limbs would rasp on leather. Ten feet into the thicket, he saw it—the first hoof print of the horse he had followed for so long. Then there were more, as if, safe now in his covert, the killer saw no need for caution. And from here on his passage had worn a kind of corridor in the juniper, so that Sundance could move a bit more swiftly.
Two hundred yards, three hundred, he worked up the wash, and it took him half an hour. Presently a change in the quality of light ahead told him that the thicket ended. Dropping to his belly, he crawled the last hundred feet to the edge of the juniper and peered out cautiously at what lay ahead of him, and slowly his lips peeled back from his teeth in a snarling grin of triumph.
~*~
Ahead, the cut opened up into a kind of small bowl, with walls towering more than thirty feet, all eroded dirt, rock, a few clumps of brush. The dugout shelter had been built into one side, a cave dug back into the clay and sand, shored with timbers, screened by a door of buffalo hide that fell like a curtain. Nearby, a horse grazed on a picket line. Beyond the bowl, the wash continued, turning, and Sundance saw the edge of what looked like a pen made of juniper and cottonwood poles close set—probably a corral for a spare horse. For the moment, that did not worry him—a faint but perceptible wind blew straight into his face, so his scent would not carry to any animal that might give the alarm.
His hand tightened on the rifle. The man he had sought so long was inside that dugout, and, behind that bull hide curtain, more than likely sound asleep after his long, grueling ride. It should be easy to take him—but Sundance had been around too long, survived too much, to take that for granted. There would be no rush that might alarm the horse, wake the killer. Slowly, carefully, with the rifle at the ready, he edged from the brush. Crouched low, he stalked across the sandy, rock-strewn earth, all his attention focused on that dugout only fifty yards away. The horse, hearing sounds inaudible to the man ears, raised its head, turned, looked at him, but, catching no scent, did not even snort.
Now only ten yards lay between him and the door. He moved more quickly, raising the Winchester higher. Then, the voice rang out, familiar, harsh, from the draw’s rim: “All right, half-breed! Hold it right there and drop the gun! I’ve got you covered, and so has Maynard on the other side!”
Sundance seemed to turn to stone. “Fitz,” he heard himself say, and his brain froze like the rest of him. It was not Fitz he’d followed, nor yet Maynard—and then he understood, and a chill went down his spine and he lowered the hammer on the cocked Winchester and let the rifle drop and raised his hands.
Then Fitz’s voice rang out. “Okay, Maxton. We got him cold. You can come out now.”
And as Sundance stared, the bull hide curtain moved and a man—or what had once been one—emerged. Wearing buckskins, moccasins, and carrying a cocked Colt leveled at Sundance’s belly, he grinned. “Hello, Jim,” he said. “Damned if you didn’t ride right into the trap.”
“Silent Enemy,” Sundance said.
“That’s right, Sundance,” the other half-breed said. “What’s left of me, after the beating the Cheyennes gave me. Not much, is there? But that’s all right. You’ll pay for everything that’s missing.”