DENVER CHUCKLED AS he walked forward out of the night, behind Chris’ left shoulder. “You must’ve been mighty rattled to let yourself fall for an old trick like that” Denver chided him. He walked around in front of Chris and carefully picked up Chris’ fallen revolver, then stepped back, all the while holding his gun steadily on Chris.
“All right,” Chris said. “Do what you’re paid for.”
“Why?” Denver said, “ain’t nobody paid me to kill you, Chris. Nobody wants you dead.” He chuckled again, and then had to bend over as a harsh fit of coughing racked him.
Chris was priming to jump forward, but Denver’s eyes never left him though he was coughing blood and bent almost double in pain. Finally, the gunman straightened, took a swipe at his bloody lips with the sleeve of his shirt, and gestured with his gun.
“Inside, Chris. You’re going to take the old man’s place.”
Chris said, “Like I told you a couple of weeks ago, my mammy taught me never to fight the drop. That was you, wasn’t it? You and Ramirez?”
“I guess you got us pegged,” Denver said. He seemed in rare good spirits. “Go on inside. You’ll find a lamp on the floor. Get it lit, but don’t make any sudden moves.”
Chris went inside and did as he had been ordered. When the lamp wick was turned up and the chimney replaced, Denver came in through the door, his gun balanced lightly in his fist. The lamplight from below threw his hollow cheeks into gaunt relief and made his eyes glitter strangely.
Chris said, “Mind straightening out the mystery for me?”
“I ain’t paid to talk,” Denver said. “Sit in that chair and put your hands behind it. Cross your wrists.”
“Just like old Anse, hey?”
“Yeah,” Denver said.
“Tell me something. Did you kill him?”
“Who, the old man? No, but I heard about it. Hell, you ought to know me better than that. I don’t go around back-shooting old men.”
“Who did?”
“That ain’t included in the price of your ticket. Now just sit still while I rope you. My gun’s handy here so don’t get jittery. All right?”
“You’ve got the gun,” Chris agreed. “What do you figure to do—leave me here for the posse?”
“That’s a pretty good idea,” was Denver’s enigmatic reply.
“How much are you getting paid?” Chris asked abruptly.
“Enough, I reckon.”
“Suppose I offer you five thousand dollars to let me loose and testify to the murder of Santee?”
“Where you going to get five thousand dollars, amigo?”
“Don’t forget I own half of the Concho.”
“Save it to pay your lawyer,” Denver advised. “I don’t backstab my hire, Chris. Sorry to let you down.”
“I’d do the same,” Chris said reluctantly. “Listen, Carson, there’s one thing I’ve got to know. Who am I fighting?”
By this time Chris’ arms and ankles were firmly bound to the chair. Denver stood up, coughed, and holstered his gun. He said, “I reckon right now you’re fighting me, amigo—me and a posse that’s bound to turn you up before sundown.”
“Who’s your boss?”
“Who do you think?”
“Boyd.”
Carson Denver clucked his tongue. “Ain’t nice for a lad to suspect his own blood kind, amigo.” He coughed violently again, spat a dark stream, and said, “I’ll be bedded down outside till sunup, so don’t try crashing around in here. I’m a light sleeper, y’know.” With a not-unfriendly grin and careless wave of the hand, Denver went outside.
Chris heard the man unsaddling his horse, staking it out, dropping his saddle, and grunting as he eased into a prone position with a sigh.
The thin rind of the moon heeled over westward, splaying the faintest of illumination over the interior of the cabin through its half-gone roof. An hour passed, then two, and finally Chris began to stir. Long ago, he had tried straining against the ropes that bound him and had quickly learned that that was no good. His muscles were not altogether recovered from the beating he had suffered, and furthermore, Denver was no amateur when it came to tying efficient knots.
Nor was he able to slip his wrists free, for the same reason. But there were a few possibilities left, and the most likely one came to him after a long mental struggle.
When he had stopped at Cavanagh’s earlier in the evening, trying to run down Pete Ramirez, he had removed his spurs for the sake of silence. They now remained where he had put them: in his hip pocket.
The spurs had sharp, small rowels. If he could get a grip on one of them, he might be able to saw through the ropes that bound his wrists.
Hunching around, he tried to reach his hip pocket with his bound hand, clawing in through the open-lattice back of the chair. He had to move with caution, for the slightest sound might awaken Denver, who seemed – from the noise he had made – to have bedded down just outside the cabin.
Straining until tears came to his eyes, he reached the dangling strap of one spur with his outstretched fingers. Pinching them around the strap, pulling it slowly upward, he held his breath and finally got his thumb around the strap. After that it was easier—until the second spur, pulled out of his pocket by the first, fell to the earthen floor.
It dropped on its leather strap, so that the sound was not loud, but still the rowel jingled briefly. Breath pent up in his chest until it felt likely to burst, Chris listened to the night, motionless.
Nothing stirred in the darkness. Chris let the breath out of his mouth slowly, breathing shallowly until his lungs settled down. He got a reverse grip on the spur and held it tight; if he dropped it now, his last chance was gone.
He sawed away steadily at the ropes. The cord was old, dry, stiff, made brittle with age; it should not be too exacting a chore to cut it through.
But his estimation was wrong. An hour later, exhausted, his hands and arms on fire from exertion and from the tourniquet effect of his twisting, he was still firmly bound.
He had no way of reckoning time but knew the sun would be up fairly soon—and with it, Carson Denver. It would be too late, then. And time was against him, too, with the posse.
With renewed vigor, Chris forced his aching hands to saw at the ropes. The spur rowel turned if he used it as a blade, thus serving no purpose; he had to saw sideways in tiny movements, like a file, wearing down the rope fiber by tough hemp fiber.
He had to stop to rest. His head hung limply down over his shirt buttons. Then, with a massive effort, he expanded his chest and heaved, trying to rip his wrists apart.
He felt the frayed rope cut into his raw-chafed wrists; in spite of the numbness, he distinctly felt the sudden warmth of drawn blood dripping down on his hands; still, the rope did not give way. He feared the blood would make his hand slippery enough to drop the spur. His cheeks puffed out and he laid into the cruel strain with one last mighty effort.
And the rope popped.
It almost spilled him over, chair and all. Somehow he kept his balance. Both his wrists were bleeding, lancing him with pain. He bent down to set the spur silently on the ground and ignored the pain as much as he could while he fumbled and pried at the knots around his ankles. All the while, his ears strained for sign that Denver had awakened.
The knots stubbornly resisted his hands, made clumsy by the torture they had just undergone. The exertions had reawakened all his old hurts, and now they thudded at him in pulsing waves of pain. Grimly, he picked at the knots, knowing that even if Denver didn’t awaken, with daylight the posse would find his trail and catch up in short order.
Any minute now, he was sure, the first streaks of gray in the eastern sky would herald the coming dawn. And with that first light, he knew equally well, Carson Denver would yawn, stretch, and come awake.
The knots came free, and he put the ropes aside. Bending down, he removed his boots with quiet care, then he stood up slowly and moved on stocking feet to the door, testing each step for loose gravel before he put his weight on it.
He reached the door and stood within the heavier mass of its shadow while he looked out.
Denver lay on one side, perhaps ten feet away, his back to Chris. The gunman did not use his saddle for a pillow. Instead, he had his right arm crooked under his head, the hand protruding behind—gripping his revolver tightly.
There was no chance of taking the gun away from Denver without arousing him. But there was another choice. Chris started forward on stealthy, silent feet.
It seemed to take an eternity. He moved an inch at a time. He could make no noise, nor could he allow his shadow, faint as it was in the night to fall across Denver or move in front of the sleeping man. Once Denver emitted a half moan, half-cough, and Chris froze in his tracks.
But Denver did not move, and Chris resumed his stalk. And in time, he was within a footstep of Denver, standing immediately behind the man, his feet not a yard from the tightly gripped six-gun.
Lifting his knee high, Chris jammed his foot down tight atop the revolver, pinning it to earth.
At the same time, he bent and savagely cuffed Denver across the back of the neck.
It served the purpose of making the gunman slap at his neck and roll away groggily. Swiftly, Chris knelt to pick up the gun from under his foot.
He had it cocked and aimed by the time Denver rolled to his knees, glaring balefully at Chris. Denver’s hand clutched the top of his empty holster.
“I’ve got the deck, now,” Chris told him. “Stay right there, Carson.”
“How’d you get loose?”
“Necessity.”
“I guess you’re smarter than I figured.”
“All right,” Chris said, laying down his words like an angry whiplash. “Now it’s my turn to talk, and yours to listen. You and Ramirez jumped me that night just outside the Concho. What you did to me I wouldn’t do to a poison scorpion. I figure I’ve got a pound of flesh coming to me, Carson, and I aim to take it out of your hide if you don’t answer my questions the right way the first time I ask them. Don’t think I’m bluffing—it could be the biggest mistake of your life.”
“No,” Denver agreed, “I can see you ain’t bluffing.” But he seemed curiously unperturbed. “What is it you want to know?”
“I want to know who killed Santee.”
“Pete Ramirez.”
“And Anse Fuller?”
“Pete again.”
“And now I want to know who paid to have it done.”
“I reckon you spelled that out yourself last night, amigo.”
“Then it was Boyd?”
“Yeah.”
Chris said, “You’ll testify to that in court—amigo.” There was grim satisfaction in his tone.
“Maybe—maybe. First you got to get me there.”
“I figure to do that right now. You’re going to saddle both our horses, and I’m going to watch. One false move, and I’ll tear out that pound of flesh. You hear me?”
“I hear you good,” Denver breathed. “You look out for that gun of mine, you hear? It’s got a single-set hair trigger, filed down to next to nothing. Don’t get jittery with that thing.”
“On the move, Carson.”
Chris watched with narrow-eyed attention while the disarmed gunman slowly caught up and saddled the two horses, and cinched them tight. Then, abruptly, Denver turned to face him and grinned. “Amigo,” Denver said, “I got an original Henry Derringer in my hip pocket, and I’m going to take it out and point it at you.”
Chris cocked the revolver. “Go ahead,” he said evenly.
Denver dropped into a crouch. His hand flashed with incredible speed to his pocket, and came up with a tiny handgun. Long before it was leveled, Chris had pulled trigger.
The revolver’s hammer dropped with a crisp little click of metal on metal; there was no explosion.
Denver chuckled, his derringer leveled. “I just wanted to see if you’d do it, amigo. I guess you’d have killed me, right enough. Had that thing a bead on my forehead when you pulled trigger.”
Still showing his dry amusement, Denver walked forward and put out his open hand. “I took the precaution to unload that thing last night, amigo. Hand it over.”
Chris had no choice. He was staring down the .41 caliber barrel of Denver’s cocked sleeve gun.
Denver said amiably, “That’ll be the posse raisin’ all that ruckus down southwest of here, if I’m right. You’d better hit the trail, amigo.”
“You’re letting me go?”
“You could’ve crushed my head with a rock this morning. You left me alive, though. I’m doing the same for you. Like I said last night, I wasn’t hired to do you in. Hasta luego, Chris.” With a flippant wave of the hand, Denver climbed asaddle and rode away into the gray predawn dusk.
There was no time to puzzle over the eccentric inexplicability of Denver’s behavior. Chris mounted the marshal’s bay, noted with relief that the marshal’s saddle carbine was still scabbarded, and moved away from the shack, pressing deeper into the badlands as day broke.
He reached the northern rim of the badlands around mid-morning, and turned sharply eastward to avoid the long, exposed flats of the reservation desert. Here he ran along the thin flange of a ridge that razor-backed from west to east, providing a definite boundary between badlands and flats.
He stayed on the down-valley side of the ridge so that he was not skylined but could see out across the badlands and detect any pursuit in time to avoid it. He had no precise plan in mind, but his encounter with Carson Denver, and his strange actions, had for some reason touched a nerve end of caution in Chris. He wanted time to sort things out before he decided on any headlong actions.
In the meantime, he needed to elude the trailing posse and find a place to hole up.
He saw that he wasn’t doing a very good job of the former task when, near noon, he sighted across a corner of the badlands the unmistakable sign of the posse: a large pall of risen dust.
They were trailing him doggedly. Offhand, he could only think of one man in the valley with the keen ability to stick so closely to a wily man’s trail: Clete Sims, Boyd’s foreman. Clete had been a cavalry scout during the Apache wars.
Chris had been dawdling, conserving his horse, because he figured the complicated topography of the badlands would hinder his pursuers. But they were not more than forty minutes behind him, and he knew now that he had to sharpen his wits and lose them quickly.
The southern sky was clouding up, and that offered one hopeful sign. If the clouds moved up and brought rain, it would give him immeasurable help.
But he couldn’t count on an accident of weather to save his skin. In any case, even if rain did come, it would be half a day or more before it reached this northern end of the valley. In half a day, he thought dryly, the posse could not only ride him down, but draw and quarter him.
Suddenly, the absurdity of his whole situation and the improbability of the events that had led him to his junction in his life overcame him and he laughed aloud.
It made him aware that he was dangerously near the point of breaking apart. So much had been heaped upon him in the last two weeks: he had suffered so much pain, so much misery, and not least, so much confusion, that his nerves were so tattered he could feel his own jittery raggedness.
He muttered, “Don’t get spooked, McLean. Not now.”
He kept riding eastward toward the foothills, knowing that his only hope of covering his trail was to lose himself in the mountain fastness. While he rode, he withdrew Carlos Riva’s saddle carbine and checked its load. It was a well-balanced Winchester .44-40, probably accurate enough at medium-short range. He practiced raising it to his shoulder and sighting, knowing that his life might depend on how well the unfamiliar weapon performed in his hands.
As he climbed into the foothills, he stopped in the shelter of a shadowing rock slab to survey his backtrail and found yet another surprise.
There was more than one banner of dust on the badlands. Altogether, he counted four of them, gradually converging toward the point where he had recently ridden into the foothills. Each dust cloud represented a pretty large party of men. One would be Boyd’s crew—that one was the largest and the closest to him. Another might be Cavanagh’s crew, a third Carlos Riva and a posse from town. The fourth might consist of other ranch crews, or perhaps Riva had split his posse; in any event, the desert seemed to be alive with pursuers, and Chris recognized that his predicament was narrow and dangerous.
They had him in a trap. He realized that just after full darkness when the horse stopped and he discovered that he was flush against the base of a high barrier cliff. There was no way through or over the cliff, except for a fly or a bird; and half an hour’s casting about to right and left only proved to him that he had come as far as he could in this direction.
The trouble was that the posse behind him had been spreading out all afternoon into a wider and wider semicircle, and he had been swept helplessly before it. He didn’t know whether they had consciously planned to force him against the cliff, but it was probable; at any rate, it had worked out that way.
He hadn’t much time. They were closing in on him; even if he couldn’t hear them yet, he knew they were not many miles distant. The marshal’s horse was pretty jaded, and there wasn’t a long sustained chase in it. If he were detected and chased, Chris knew he would be run down.
He had caught glimpses of them during the late afternoon, spreading wide in a firm cordon, pressing forward in their relentless arc. The four groups from the badlands must have joined forces and then spread out under central leadership—probably Boyd’s leadership, since Carlos Riva was none too adept at man hunting.
The night was deep and still. A frigid wind sluiced down off the higher pine slopes and chilled him through. He felt the damp touch of it and looked up to see that most of the sky was blanketed with storm clouds. The storm wouldn’t break for hours yet, but at least the clouds obscured the moon and stars, and that was one break in his favor.
He had no jacket to warm his chilled flesh, but that was the least of his troubles. He patted the horse on the neck while he tried to plan a way out.
He didn’t seem to have much choice. The only alternatives were to sit it out in hopes the storm would break and cover his movements or to head back the way he had come and hope to filter silently through the posse’s lines in the darkness.
He couldn’t count on the weather, so he made the obvious choice, pointing the horse westward and heading back toward the valley whence he had fled.
Tight with strain, he listened for sounds ahead of him as he put his horse through a stand of timber and ran along in comparative silence on the pine-needle forest floor, dodging trees that loomed up suddenly out of the deep night.
From the top of a ridge, he caught no sign of pursuit and descended again toward the gurgle of a bubbling creek. He took time out to water the horse and take a few swallows of the cold, fresh water, then crossed over and rode into a thin woods which masked a trail heading upslope.
With taut alertness, he watched the shadows ahead and keened the night for the rumor of advancing riders.
He reached the crest of a bald hill and saw below him a long ribbon of meadow, bare of cover, deep in grass. It would have been a pretty little place under other circumstances; as it was, the vale was all but invisible in the pitch blackness, yet he was half afraid to cross it because it was open and there was no cover in sight.
He put the horse down the hill at a canter and ran steadily across the width of the meadow, pulling up in the farther trees to blow the horse and listen. Nothing stirred. He turned to the right, on impulse, and pressed north into the hills. If he continued in that direction, ahead of him lay perhaps twenty miles of rugged mountains, at the end of which lay the desert flats; but in that direction also was one arm of the outflung posse.
Still, it was as good a tack as any. He had never made the crossing, did not know the country, but he decided to keep aiming in that direction in order to nourish the idea in Boyd’s head that he was clearing out. That was not his real intention; he had to return to the valley as soon as the posse was eluded, in order to regain his hold on Denver, or capture Pete Ramirez, and prove his innocence as well as Boyd’s guilt.
He rode forward, winding through the mountainous black alleys, while the night ran on noncommittally silent and the storm clouds held off exasperatingly.
He came across a scratch of a game trail, not much used. It took him to the edge of timber overlooking a meadowy corridor, up that, and then wound by a pine stand and crossed a shallow creek. Very dimly, he could see the ragged upthrust of the serrated peaks ahead and to the east.
The faintly perceptible trail dropped him into an overgrown pocket at the base of the highest peaks, yet to be crossed, and he had the strange feeling that he was all alone in the night. Yet he knew that armed riders rode within a mile of him, perhaps within yards. He drove the bay into the brush.
The horse carried him through to another stream, and here—just in case—he turned upstream, northeastward, and covered his tracks in it for a quarter-mile, after which he rode on well back in the trees. Hunger began to saw at his vitals; he had not eaten in more than twenty-four hours.
He ascended the reaches of a narrowing canyon. Ahead of him, it narrowed to a twenty-foot passage between cliffs. He passed a spring bubbling out of the base of one wall, rode through the opening, and suddenly saw a rider loom up close by and loose a loud bellow, muzzle-flame stabbing from his gun.