It was the best part of a mile before he caught up to her. The pines were too thin to hide behind: she tried it anyway. When he started toward her, she threw a rock at him. It missed. It was quiet in there in the pines; cold, too. The wind died down. A squirrel ran up a tree and began to complain.
Carmody had the rifle, but the girl swung at him. All he had to do to make her fall down was to step aside. Carmody sat down close by. “That’s the way, honey,” he said. “Rest up while you have the chance.”
The green eyes were more defeated than mad. “Water,” she said. “A drink of water.”
Carmody said, “Sorry, honey, the canteen’s gone. So is the whisky and the blankets. So is the food. All we got left is my trusty old rifle. But we’ll make out— you’ll see.”
It was kind of mean to tease the girl like that. Carmody liked it. Anyway, she didn’t take it that way. The green eyes brightened up again, this time with malice, not rage, “Maybe it’s time you turned me loose,” she said quietly. “Maybe Frank won’t even bother to go after you. Think you can make it with nothing but your trusty rifle, Mister Carmody?”
Carmody grinned. “It’s going to be kind of flat without the whisky,” he said. “Maybe we can think of something else to pass the cold nights. Now, Miss Yates, you just get your ass moving down that valley.”
For a moment she was still the tycoon’s daughter. “You can’t talk to me like that, you saddle tramp. My father’ll kill you when he hears ...”
Carmody fished out a cracked cigar and put a match to it. While the girl glared at him, he tried to mend the crack with spit. The crack was too wide and he had to break the cigar in two to make it draw. There was no water, no whisky, no food, but the broken cigar tasted good.
“Why the hell don’t you just let me go?” she asked, the anger fading into hopelessness.
“You want the other half of this cigar?” Carmody said.
“You know what you are, Carmody?” Katherine Yates said.
“Don’t you know any good names besides son of a bitch?” Carmody answered, pushing her ahead of him.
Katherine Yates mentioned several other possibilities.
They were pretty good, Carmody thought. He complimented the girl on her bad mouth. “Shows you got spirit, honey. Just keep moving.”
They moved back to the stream to drink, then away from it. At least some of Garrison’s men would be following the stream. Carmody figured they were more than twenty miles into the mountains. Everything considered, they hadn’t done so badly. Two of Garrison’s men were dead, one wounded; that sort of compensated for the loss of the supplies. He had enough shells for the rifle and the half-stick of dynamite would come in handy if a bullet didn’t take him any place near the left shirt pocket.
With the cliff stripped clean by the last slide, it would take Garrison and his men some time to climb down. But they would be along; there was no doubt of that.
Carmody had chewed on jerky the night before. Jerked beef kept you alive; it didn’t do much for the hunger feeling. He listened to his belly rumble. Too bad it wasn’t fall. There would be chokeberries to eat. Right now the best they could hope to eat was maybe wild honey or the eggs of a ground nesting bird.
The valley was about six miles long. Halfway into it, he told the girl to rest. “Oh God, my feet,” she complained, sitting down in the soft grass under the trees.
Carmody told the girl to shut her damned mouth.
“Leave the boots on,” he warned her. “If your feet are that bad you’ll have a time getting them on again.” He was listening for sounds. There weren’t any. But he could feel them coming. After digging around with the long blade of the Bowie knife, he found a cluster of wild onions. He wiped off the dirt with his sleeve. “Eat them,” he said, throwing some of the small, bitter tasting onions to the girl.
“You’ll be sorry you did that,” he advised Katherine Yates when she bit into an onion and spat it out. “Now you eat the rest of your breakfast, like a good girl.”
Ignoring the rank taste, Carmody chewed the onions up fine and swallowed. “Like a cow chewing the cud,” he told the girl. “Just like a picnic, ain’t it?”
“I’d like to kill you,” she said.
“Wait till you know me better,” Carmody answered.
The promise of wild honey later in the day didn’t cheer her up one bit. Carmody could understand that. It didn’t excite him either. The girl excited him, tired and hungry as he was, but that would have to wait. It would be a shame if they travelled all this way together without something happening.
It was still some distance to the end of the valley when three spaced shots sounded. That would mean they had found the place where he’d rested with the girl. “Come on,” Carmody prodded the girl.
All the way from the hideout the going had been pretty easy. The bad part of the trip, the last twenty or twenty-five miles, was up ahead. Out from the end of the valley the mountains rose up, jagged and tall. There wouldn’t be much wild honey up there, or much of anything.
They followed the stream out of the valley. After another two hundred yards the stream disappeared into a split between two huge rocks. Only a fish could get through the mountain that way.
Climbing the first ridge the girl slipped and fell. The rock was wet and she would have fallen all the way to the bottom if Carmody hadn’t caught her. Her face twisted with pain. She started hopping on one foot. “My ankle,” she said. “My goddamned ankle.”
Carmody jerked her to her feet when she tried to sit down. “Put your arm around my neck,” he ordered. “Keep the weight off the foot. We’ll take a look at it later.”
Slowed down, they were only part way up the first ridge when Garrison and three men cleared the mouth of the valley. Garrison and two men were coming fast; the man some distance behind would be the Hatten he’d wounded back at the meadow.
Carmody dragged the girl higher up the ridge. He pushed her down behind a rock and slid out the rifle. Garrison dropped behind a rock as Carmody fired at him. The little man with the big hat didn’t move fast enough and Carmody got him in the chest. The first bullet didn’t knock him down. Carmody sighted again and shot him again.
The others were all out of sight; Carmody held his fire. Carmody heard Garrison yelling something. It sounded like he was talking to him.
“Carmody,” Garrison yelled louder, not showing himself. “You hear me, Carmody?”
“Yeah, Frank,” Carmody yelled back.
“Let her go,” Garrison shouted. “You can’t make it. This is the last chance you’re going to get, Carmody. Let her go.”
Carmody kept down. “Not a chance,” he yelled.
Garrison was yelling again when Carmody told the girl to get set. The wind rasped in his throat as he started to drag the girl away from the rock. The rock protected them for another twenty feet, then they were exposed again. Another twenty feet and still no shooting. Carmody thought about the half-stick of dynamite in his pocket.
Suddenly they started blasting from down below. The dynamite had no more magic. Finally, Garrison had come to the kill-crazy stage. They got to the top of the ridge without being hit, the bullets singing past them like hornets. The girl was limping badly. A bullet broke itself to pieces on a rock near her head, stinging her face with fragments of hot lead. Blood began to trickle from a small wound in her forehead. Behind another rock Carmody yanked out the girl’s shirt, tore a strip off the end, and tied it around her head to keep the blood out of her eyes.
Katherine Yates looked at Carmody. “He doesn’t care if he kills me,” she said.
“What else can he do?” Carmody asked her.
He had figured to keep the half-stick of dynamite for later. It wouldn’t do much good here unless he was lucky. Maybe it could buy them some time. He stuck the dynamite in a cleft in the rock and dragged the girl away from there. They climbed up through the rocks. There was no more shooting. Garrison and the two Hatten boys would be climbing the first ridge.
Even before they cleared the top he exploded the dynamite with a single shot. He could have waited till they got close enough for the explosion to do some damage. But half a stick wasn’t much to count on. By then they’d be too close if the dynamite didn’t do more than make a loud noise. All he wanted was to make them think he had more dynamite.
They started climbing again, hidden by the cloud of grey dust that boiled up when the dynamite went off. It was three to one now, not such good odds even without the girl to slow him down. But better than before.
The rock walls closed in and he knew there was no way back. The girl was barely able to walk. The swollen ankle had tightened up inside the boot. He had to choose between letting her rest and carrying her. Here’s where you really start earning that ten thousand, he told himself. The path between the rock walls climbed sharply. It was strewn with broken rock and he had to take it slow, a few steps at a time. The worst part was getting over an old rock fall that would have blocked it altogether if it was much higher.
Fighting for breath, Carmody went over first, then pulled the girl across. Her body shook under his hands and he thought she was crying. She wasn’t far from it but now she was laughing. The bitch was laughing.
Carmody guessed it was pretty funny at that. Setting her down to rest behind the fall, he sighted the rifle back the way they’d come. He couldn’t see them but he could hear boots scraping over rock. They were coming, not as fast as they could have.
The rock fall was a perfect place to stand them off, provided he had water, food, extra shells. All the things he didn’t have. The girl was still shaking.
“Having a good time, are you?” Carmody enquired with a sour grin.
The tears started to come and she opened her mouth to scream. This was what Carmody had been waiting for. It should have happened long before. A slap rocked her head. It took another slap to make the tears come quietly. There was nothing to do but let her cry. Soft talk might make her feel better; it might also cause her to go to pieces. There was still some toughness behind the tears, and some of it was real. Carmody knew she was just a spoiled, rich man’s daughter playing a game that had suddenly become real. Anyway, he was no good at soft talk, even if he did feel sorry for her. He didn’t.
“Climb on,” he told her. “Climb on and shut up.”
Katherine Yates was a big, rangy girl. Silently, Carmody cursed her for not being a wispy little thing with an hourglass waist. Her hat brushed against the rock wall and fell off, spilling red hair down Carmody’s back. Set down too hard, she cried out with pain. Carmody scooped up the hat and rammed it down over her ears. He was glad to see anger jump into her green eyes.
“If the folks in Denver could see you now,” he said. The rock walls opened out into a sandy draw without cover of any kind. Smooth grey rock, slanting inward up near the top, hemmed it in on all sides, shutting out the sun.
There was no water, not even seepage. Rifle shots echoed up from the crack in the rocks. They were shooting at where they thought he might make a stand.
The wide fissure in the rock continued on the other side of the draw. To Carmody, it felt like ten years since that last drink of water. Putting the girl across his shoulder in a fireman’s lift, he carried her to the other end of the draw. In spite of the high country chill, the sweat was soaking through the lining of his sheepskin coat.
The entrance wasn’t wide enough to let them through together. He set the girl down and said harshly, “You had your rest. Now you walk for a while. Crawl if you like. Just get in there.”
Hopping on one foot, she did what she was told. She fell and Carmody had to wait for her to get up. It was almost the last time he ever waited for anything. A rifle cracked behind him and the bullet nicked the top of his ear. It would have killed the girl if she’d been standing up.
Carmody pushed himself into the crack and yelled at the girl to stay down, to keep moving. Three rifles began to crack and bullets whined and ricocheted. Flat on his belly in the crack, Carmody shot back, levering fast, spraying the other side of the draw with lead. The sound of the shots rolled together and echoed like thunder.
Garrison showed his face and Carmody shot at it. Garrison ducked back and Carmody turned and started after the girl, loading the rifle on the run. A bullet tugged at his sleeve. Another blew hot wind in his face. He turned and fired at the rifle flashes. The shooting slackened off. Carmody went after the girl.
He found her gasping at the end of the crack. The light was bright up ahead. The rocks had torn the girl’s Levis. Blood was soaking through at the knees and her hands were scraped raw. He grabbed her by the back of the coat and dragged her into the sunlight.
They were at the start of another draw that sloped down and lost itself in a tall stand of hemlock. The distance to the trees was too great without being killed before they got there. Carmody dumped the girl in the sand and told her to keep her head down. There was no use running; he’d have to face them.
He lay on his belly and squinted at the sun. A long day had dragged by since morning. Now the sun was beginning to slide. The girl lay quiet and still. Carmody hoped to hell there was water down by those trees—if they managed to get that far.
They came out of the rocks at a run. Bud Hatten was first and Carmody shot him twice through the chest. The other Hatten, Corey, was next. Just as Carmody put the rifle on him, Corey’s wounded leg gave way, and he went down. Garrison fired as fast as he could work the lever. Bullets kicked up sand all around Carmody. He rolled away, firing without aiming, trying to keep them pinned down.
He rolled again, steadied the rifle and killed Corey Hatten. Garrison ran back into the rocks. Swinging the rifle, Carmody pegged two shots. Garrison roared but he made the rocks.
Carmody raised his head and Garrison threw a shot at it from cover. Now it was just the two of them. Garrison still had the advantage, for the moment anyway. As soon as it got dark they’d be even.
It was quiet suddenly. Birds scared out of the hemlocks by the shooting flew back. They sounded like magpies.
“What do you think, Carmody?” Garrison called out. “Still think you’re going to make it?”
Carmody’s mouth was dry. The shout he gave was more like a croak. “I made it this far,” he said. “What do you think?”
Garrison gave out with a big laugh. Carmody held his rifle steady on the entrance to the rocks. Garrison didn’t show himself.
Carmody said next, “Just the two of us, Frank. No use putting this off any longer. You just step out and we’ll settle it in a jiffy.”
The wild laugh boomed again. “You’d like that, haw Carmody? A nice, clean shoot-out.”
“It’s an idea, Frank.”
“You go to hell, old pard.”
Carmody didn’t say anything else. After a while Garrison said, “No hurry, old pard. I’ll be right behind you wherever you go. When I kill you, it won’t be easy.”
Carmody looked up at the sun. About another thirty minutes to go. He spoke quietly to the girl. “Start crawling toward those trees.”
Katherine Yates nodded. The fire was gone out of her eyes. There was no way yet to know what that meant. It could mean that all she wanted right now was a quiet place to lie down.
It got dark while Carmody watched the place where Garrison was holed up. No more bullets came out of there, no more talk. Carmody let it get good and dark. Then he stood up and went quietly after the girl. He stopped and listened, then went on again. He did this three times before he heard the girl moving through the sand ahead of him.
She didn’t make a sound when he reached down and picked her up. It was going to be another long night.