When they had covered about six miles, Vaughan fell off his horse. He did not cry out. One moment they were pushing at a steady canter through the open, burning land, concentrating upon simply covering ground, knowing their pursuers must already be moving up behind them. They hit a sharp slope down into a gully and crossing it, the horses jumped at the far side and Vaughan went backwards off his horse and lay in the sand, shaking his head.
In a moment Gates was out of the saddle and beside him, lifting Vaughan’s head.
‘No — good!’Vaughan managed.
‘Come on.’ Gates said. ‘I’ll carry you.’ He put an arm under Vaughan’s limp body and then cursed. When Angel swung down beside him he showed him the bloody hand.
‘Get out of here,’ Vaughan said weakly. ‘Get — goin’!’
Gates shook his head stubbornly. ‘I ain’t leavin’ him,’ he said to Angel. His voice was truculent, as though he would fight about it.
‘Yes. Yes — you are!’ Vaughan managed. He made a gesture with his hand towards his body. ‘All — busted open,’ he managed. ‘No. No — chance.’ Angel just looked at him. Gates cursed.
‘Get out of here,’ Vaughan said. He made a supreme effort of will and sat up, the colour draining from his face as he did so. The smile he put on his face wrenched the guts of the two men watching him.
‘That blasting powder,’ he said. ‘Give it to me. And — a — rifle.’
‘No!’ Gates shouted.
‘Goddamn you, Pearly, do like I say!’ Vaughan shouted. His outburst racked his body with pain, but he forced himself to get to his knees and then, agony on his face, every muscle screaming with the pain in his body, he stood up.
‘Help me over to that rock,’ he said. The muscles along his jaw line were bunched like stones and his hair was soaking wet with perspiration.
‘Help me, damn you!’
Gates helped him. Angel stripped the canisters of blasting powder from Blantine’s saddle and unsheathed his own carbine, a .44.40 Winchester. He ran across the arroyo towards Gates, who was easing Vaughan to the ground in the shelter of a sloping rock that leaned against the far side of the gully they had been trying to cross.
‘Give me that,’ Vaughan said. He was going on sheer nerves now and they could see a pulse throbbing in his temple. He took the carbine and jacked a shell into the breech.
Then he pointed up to the rim of the gully.
‘Get me up there! Behind the rock.’
‘Goddammit, Chris — ‘ Gates burst out.
‘Pearly, you argue anymore and so help me I’ll — ‘ Vaughan’s iron control faltered, and a fit of coughing racked his frame. They saw blood fleck his lips. Vaughan wiped the bright red spots away with the back of his hand, and as gently as they could, they lifted him up behind the rock. Off across the empty desert nothing moved, but they all knew the pursuers were out there. Vaughan looked back across the gully at Yancey Blantine, sitting on the ground where Angel had unceremoniously thrown him as he ran back.
‘That old bastard!’ Vaughan said. ‘I’d’ve — liked to see him — hang.’
They saw his eyes swim and he teetered for a moment then pulled himself around.
‘I can. I — can hold out, Frank,’ he managed. ‘Give you — some runnin’ time ... ‘ Again the wrenching cough seized him and Gates half lifted a hand, then let it drop. There was agony in his eyes too, but of a different sort, Angel thought.
‘The powder,’ Vaughan said. ‘Toss it out there where — I can see it.’ Gates lobbed the three tins out on to the open sand. One to the right, one in the middle, one to the left. Vaughan squinted along the barrel of the carbine. He nodded.
‘Bueno,’ he said. ‘I can see th — ’ He drew a breath and then let it out. The pain was burning him up, and his hands were trembling. He laid the carbine down on the hot rock.
‘Move out,’ he said.
When he saw them hesitate he began to curse them. Every obscenity he had ever learned poured out of him until they moved, and slid down the rock away from him. Vaughan nodded.
‘Chris,’ Angel said, tentatively.
Vaughan shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no one.’
‘The buttermilk and honey girl?’
‘That’s a pretty thought,’ Vaughan called. His voice was lighter now, and the harshness was gone from it. ‘Go on, get the hell out of here! You’re — wasting time!’
Angel raised a hand. Vaughan smiled and at that distance, his smile was the heartbreaking, boyish smile that they remembered. Angel fixed it in his mind and then turned away. He jerked Yancey Blantine to his feet and pushed him towards the horse. Blantine clambered up into the hurricane deck and then looked back across the gully towards Vaughan. He opened his mouth to speak, a sneer already fixed on his face, and as he did so he saw Angel’s eyes.
‘Say it,’ Angel said quietly, ‘just say it!’
Yancey Blantine was a renegade. He had killed men with his own bare hands, in terrible rages and in the bitterest of cold blood. He had stood by and watched the carnage his riders had wrought in Stockwood without a tremor but what he saw now in Angel’s eyes froze his very marrow. He did not think he had ever seen the cold lust to kill so naked in a man’s eyes and he recoiled, his lips trembling.
‘Go!’ Angel said to Gates.
The big man cast one last despairing glance at Chris Vaughan and then swung his horse around, riding blindly ahead of Angel and the tethered Blantine, his eyes misted with a pain he could not isolate.
They thundered off into the desert, the dust of their going sifting high and falling. Vaughan could hear it settle to the ground, a tiny hissing sound that touched the edges of his heightened consciousness. The pain was now a total entity below his ribcage. It burned like all the fires of hell inside him, as tangible as the rock slab he lay upon. The heat of the noon sunlight was terrible, now, yet he hardly felt it. Strange ghostly films drifted across his vision and once he lapsed into unconsciousness, rapping his forehead against the rock then jerking back to instant alertness, sweat dripping from his face and spotting the sandstone in front of his eyes.
‘Come on,’ he muttered to himself, to the desert, to the pursuing renegades he could not see. ‘Come on!’
A flicker of movement caught his eye. A kangaroo rat poked its nose out of its hole about ten feet in front of him, then wriggled out on to the sand. It moved away from the hole in its curious, hitch kicking gait. Vaughan grinned.
‘You better get out o’ here, friend,’ he whispered. ‘Gonna get some noisy shortly.’
The kangaroo rat heard his voice and scuttled squeaking for the safe shelter of a prickly pear. As it did, Vaughan heard the jingle of steel touching steel, the sound of harness, perhaps, or a spur touching a cinch ring. He tightened his grip on the carbine as the first rider came into view about forty yards away.
He let them get within twenty yards before he fired.
His first shot catapulted Dave Hurwitch out of the saddle and he levered the Winchester as fast as he could after that, ignoring the deep bite of the pain inside him, swinging the carbine around, dropping men from the backs of their horses with each shot, the sweat dripping off him and now the slow red pulse of blood brightening the makeshift bandages around his middle.
He saw now that they had come forward in a long arc and although he had dropped four of them in the first blasting volley, they were already moving in on him, bent low over the necks of their horses, firing as they came. Slugs whined past him and once he felt the slightest tug on his shirt and looked down surprised to see that blood was coursing down his arm. He felt nothing. A feverish exaltation gripped him and he levered the carbine again and fired, knowing he could not miss, there was no way he could miss. Again he fired and again and each time he heard the meaty sound of the slug smacking into the body of a horse, saw a man spin flailing to the ground. One man rose and ran for the shelter of a tall ocotillo, throwing himself behind it and Vaughan shot him in midair, knowing the man was dead as he hit the ground, grinning triumphantly to himself at the way he was shooting. The first wave of the riders came level with the canister of blasting powder in the centre dead ahead of him and he aimed very casually and fired and the air filled with the booming flash of the explosion. Sand and stones boiled up in a huge cloud and he thought he saw something tattered like a shirt flop to the ground, and then he waited no longer. They were all there in front of him now and he fired at the other canister of powder and then the third, the explosions almost simultaneous, a boom! and then another boom! There was a thin scream in the roaring hail of dirt and sand, but he could see nothing except the sifting pall of dirt. His eyes were unfocusing and he levered the action of the Winchester, swinging the barrel around seeking anything that moved, a faint smile on his lips. He never even saw Gregg Blantine rise out of the swirling dust and level his six-gun. When the remaining men came running forward they found Blantine standing over Vaughan’s body. Even in death he was still smiling.