They pushed through the Sierra Anchas and down into the Tonto. They knew what they were sacrificing, driving the cattle so hard. Every added mile meant that much more beef melted off the animals. But they couldn’t help it. This was the last leg of the race against time.
The cattle were jumpy and frantic with exhaustion, ripe for a stampede. The men were half delirious with strain and weariness and lack of sleep. To Brian it was an insane nightmare of battling the wild and broken country, the intractable animals, his own deep need to lie down and sleep. But finally, like a ghostly wall rising out of the pale dawn mists, they saw the Superstitions ahead of them.
It was where Iguala left them. He was riding point and he stopped with that first early morning glimpse of the mountains. He pulled aside and let the herd stream past him. None of the men spoke as they passed him. This was a thing they had known from the beginning and they were too exhausted even to offer good-bys. As Wirt Peters passed, glancing at his man with empty eyes, Iguala crossed himself.
They reached the Superstitions that day. They found a pass that rose into the gnarled peaks, winding and twisting until Brian could look back and see nothing but black-timbered slopes hemming him in on all sides. It filled him with the eerie sense of having cut himself off from all contact with the world he had known.
They pushed all that night to get as deep into the mountains as possible and stopped at dawn for their first real rest in days. Cameron took first watch on the herd while Pancho fixed their grub. Like sleepwalkers the men went through the motions of stripping their horses and setting out their bedrolls. Sandoval had dropped behind to cover their back trail and he rode in while they were eating.
“No sign of Tarrant,” he said.
“Why should there be?” Asa said. “He’s probably happy to see us get in here.”
They all glanced at him sharply. Brian saw a haunted look come to Pancho’s face. None of them spoke. Sandoval wheezed wearily, climbing off his horse, and stood leaning against it, his head bowed and his eyes closed. Asa looked around the circle of them, a wolfish defiance in his gaunt face, eyes fever-bright.
“We better get a man up on the ridge,” Brian said.
Asa’s head swung sharply to him. Then a completely wild look flamed into his eyes and he spat in the dirt at Brian’s feet, flung his half-filled coffee cup from him, and rose and staggered to his bedroll, throwing himself face down on the blankets.
They all stared emptily at him. Sandoval was still leaning against his horse. He spoke in a feeble, wheezing voice.
“I can’t do it, Brian. I just can’t do it.”
Brian couldn’t eat any more. He sat there a long time, trying to gather enough will to rise. Finally he gained his feet and stumbled toward his horse. He got the saddle on somehow and laced it up. He tried three times before he got aboard. Peters had fallen asleep sitting cross-legged by the fire. His thin plate was still in his lap and his head was bent forward so far his hat had fallen off. Sandoval and Pancho watched Brian with glazed eyes as he turned his horse up the shoulder of the mountain and into timber.
He didn’t know how long it took him to reach the ridge, pushing up through dense yellow pine and towering firs, his horse laboring in the thin air. But when he came out of the timber he could look down on a vast tumbled chain of mountains, their bases in the distance cloaked with a mauve vapor that made their timber-shrouded peaks seem completely severed from the earth, floating against the sky like disembodied spirits.
It brought back fragments of a hundred superstitions connected with these mountains. It nudged the primitive fears in him and apprehension eerie as a dog’s seemed to lift the hackles of his neck. A weird hush lay over the scene. The motes swam like glittering gold through the channels of yellow sunlight in the timber-aisles and the heat rendered pitch from a thousand pines till its smell lay sweet as blackstrap on the air. It lent a cloying falseness to the lazy peace of the scene.
He hitched his horse in the trees and climbed to the ridgetop. He settled down to watch. But the need of sleep was like a sickness in him and he knew it would overpower him if he remained still long. He began to move around, keeping to cover, searching the tumbled and shadowy slopes beyond. All through the forenoon he fought off sleep until Peters came up to spell him. The man had lost twenty pounds in the drive and his once beefy jowls had sunk into the hollows under his cheekbones till his face had a gaunt, driven look.
“Funny,” he said. “I heard about these mountains all my life. They’re just like any other mountains.”
“Yeah,” Brian said. “They are.”
Neither of them sounded convinced. Peters shifted in the saddle and the rigging groaned. It was the only sound in the world. “I wish it wasn’t so quiet,” he said. “I like to hear the birds singin’.” Brian didn’t answer. Peters squinted at him. “You want to watch that Asa,” Peters said. “He’s had a snake in him ever since you hit him.”
Brian nodded. “I’ll watch him.”
When he reached camp Asa was still lying face down in his blankets, sleeping heavily. Brian rolled in fully dressed and was asleep instantly. Sandoval woke him near dusk and they ate again and drove again. They drove through the night without incident but the pressure of waiting and watching was building up against all of them.
They halted again and Pancho fixed breakfast and they fought sleep to eat it. When Sandoval was through he dumped his dishes in the wreck-pan and looked at Asa.
“Brian he’s carried more than his load on watch,” the Yaqui said. “This morning watch it’s yours.”
Asa’s eyes swung to Brian, hot and smoldering. But they were all looking at Asa and the weight of their attention kept him quiet. With a bitter shape to his mouth, he rose and cinched up the saddle on his horse.
Brian turned in till midafternoon when Pancho waked him. He saddled a horse and rode up to the westward ridge where Sandoval was watching. The Yaqui said he had seen nothing.
“But the herd they are nervous. That I don’t like.” He put a sinewy hand on Brian’s shoulder. “Apache I know. You got the bad watch. If they come, out of the sun it will be. Remember that. Out of the sun.”
Brian nodded and watched Sandoval’s blue roan switch its narrow rump back and forth down the steep pitch into timber. He thought of Sandoval’s warning and looked at the sun. It lay westward just above the ridge and its fiery ball blinded him. The valley’s shape disappeared and the tops of the countless trees became the silvery shimmer of a sea and his eyes began to water and he had to look away.
He hitched his horse in the timber below and climbed to the ridge. It was a hard climb in the thin air and he was breathing heavily and sweating when he reached the top. It started him itching all over again and he couldn’t do anything but settle down in the rocks and scratch and rub himself like some mangy animal. He couldn’t remember when he’d washed or had his clothes off; he had developed running sores from the friction of sweat-stiff clothes and when they had camped in the bottoms the mosquitoes had done their work. Remaining still like this only made the misery more acute.
He had a poor measure of the time he sat there, fighting sleep, trying to watch the endless miles of jagged country about him. The sun seemed to touch the top of the ridge now, a blazing core of fire that spilled its molten reflection down the ridge and into the timber. It was then, in his search of the shadowed valley below, that he saw the motion. He crawled deeper into the rocks and lay on his belly to watch.
It came again, a tawny flutter of motion in the lower timber. A clammy sweat moved down his back and the wind wouldn’t dry it. He watched till he saw the motion again, higher now. It could be some animal.
He heard his horse snort below him and turned to look on impulse. It swung his eyes into the sun that lay in a shattering explosion of light right on the top of the ridge. For a moment he was completely blinded. He closed his eyes, blinking them, and looked away from the sun down to where his horse was hitched. The animal was barely visible to him, deep in the timber, but he could hear it snorting and pulling at its hitch.
It increased the tension in him and he gripped his gun tighter as he looked back down the opposite slope. He saw the movement again. Closer. Much closer. It was no animal.
He inched his saddle gun forward, butt against his cheek, drawing a bead on them. The sun flashed against a bronze body. Another. Half a dozen of them, riding upward through the timber.
The horse snorted and fretted again below him. Could it smell them that far away? The Indians below had disappeared in shadow again. His finger was against the trigger. He knew his first shot would warn Sandoval and the others. Then what? Draw in to protect the herd. It was about all they could do. But at least they hadn’t gone into it without warning.
The horse began to whinny and squeal and thrash around. It sounded frantic. He could ignore it no longer and turned for another look, squinting his eyes almost shut this time to blunt the sun’s effect.
And knew what a fool he had been.
Watching the decoys on the slope below while the others came in from behind, came out of the sun as Sandoval had said, right out of the sun.
In that single instant before he went blind he had a dim impression of their movement coming down the top of the ridge with the blazing sun at their backs. He started to switch around in the rocks and work the lever on his gun but it was useless because he couldn’t see anything.
He waited for them to fire but no shots came. And suddenly he understood. Their whole goal was to get him without noise so that the men in the valley would not be warned. And with that understanding he had his choice. If he stayed where he was he would have the protection and temporary safety of the rocks. But he would lose his chance to join Peters and the others with the herd.
With a soft curse he rose and lunged down the slope toward his horse. Still they did not fire. But a pair of bucks veered off the ridge. The sun was no longer at their back and he could see them. They were afoot. They were taking a chance too. They wanted that horse.
He knew what he would bring on him by shooting. But he had to get to the horse first. He threw his Winchester across his hip and fired. His second shot took the first running buck in the leg and the man pitched on his face and slid ten feet down the slope.
The others lost their need for silence then. The second running Indian began firing his long Remington and those on the ridge started shooting.
A bullet kicked dirt high into the air behind Brian. He saw another bite bark out of a tree ten feet to the right. Then he was in the timber, a treacherous running target dodging through the densely massed trees. They protected him the same way they had his horse. He reached it and got the reins loose, throwing all his weight against them to hold the frantic animal. The second buck appeared, breech-clouted, moccasined. He had dropped his empty rifle and there was a knife in his hand.
Brian couldn’t fire and mount at the same time. He swung aboard the horse. The Indian jumped at him. Brian swung his rifle at the man, caught him across the head. The Indian fell back but the jar took the rifle from Brian’s hand. He heard the others coming into the trees and turned his horse and put the spurs to it.
His horse was wild and he couldn’t hold it down. A dozen times he was almost swept off by the low branches. He came out into a park and had a glimpse of the valley below. Something was happening down there. A haze of dust hung thickly over the herd, hiding most of it from him. He had a vague glimpse of riders veering through the haze, the flash of gunfire.
Then he lost it as he plunged into timber again. It took him another ten minutes to reach bottom and when he came out of the trees the bulk of the herd was gone. He saw a few of them scattering into trees on the farther slopes and a small bunch running hell-for-leather back down the pass, but the rest of the herd was not even in sight.
There was a mass of twisted rocks farther up the pass. He could hear firing from there and saw movement in timber flanking the rocks. He plunged into the trees again, working his way cautiously toward the sound. His horse was lathered and blowing heavily, but as he neared the rocks the firing covered his sound.
Almost at the rocks, he caught sight of some Indians in timber on his flank. There were a dozen of them milling around on their ponies jabbering in guttural voices. Brian tried to dodge away but they caught sight of him and gave chase. All he could do now was put the spurs to his horse and run it headlong at the rocks. A wild volley of shots followed him, smashing through the pines overhead and spewing up handfuls of fallen needles from the carpet littering the ground.
Then he was in the open and the cattlemen began to fire from the rocks. It drove the Apaches back and kept them off his neck long enough for him to gain cover. The rocks broke from the slope in a natural fort, a strange twisted network of sandstone spires and towers and heaped boulders. He drove the laboring animal right into their midst and halted it among the men. They had their horses hitched in the hollow and were scattered out among the boulders, still firing. Sandoval ran from his nook to grab Brian’s horse while he swung off. The Yaqui showed more emotion than Brian had ever seen before.
“Damn you,” he said. He was grinning and he pounded Brian on the back. “I thought they got you, damn you—”
Though Sandoval had displayed a sort of casual comradeship during the cattle work this was the first indication of any true feeling he had shown Brian. It filled Brian with a warm affection for the dehydrated little Indian. Then both of them immediately sobered, as Peters came in from the rocks. He was bleeding from a cut on the face and limping heavily.
“They come in from behind us,” Peters said. “Stampeded the herd. Too many to fight in the open.”
The firing had stopped now. Brian looked at Asa and Cameron, sprawled down in the boulders heaped around the outer rims of the natural fort. Pancho was not in sight.
“He was keeping watch on the opposite ridge,” Peters said. “That’s where they hit us from. They must have got Pancho before he knew anything. He didn’t give us no kind of warning.”
Brian looked helplessly at the other wall of the valley, knowing how it must have happened with Pancho, giving him a decoy to watch while the others came out of the sun behind. Somehow Brian felt a deep guilt for the whole thing. If he had only heeded Sandoval’s warning, if he hadn’t been such a fool, watching these decoys below—
He saw that Asa was watching him. “Well, now what?” Asa asked sarcastically.
It was directed at Brian but Sandoval answered. “Maybe come night we get out.”
“What about the cattle?” Asa asked.
The insolence of his tone angered Brian. “Maybe we can get ‘em back yet,” he said.
“I’d like to see that,” Asa said.
“Don’t make it tougher than it is,” Peters said. He went back to the boulders and squirmed into them till he reached a position from which he could see the Indians. “There’s a jag of ‘em. I doubt if we can get out with our own hides.”
Brian and Sandoval joined him. Sprawled among the boulders, sweating in the heat of a dying sun, Brian looked out at the timber and the parks and the open ground of the lower pass. There was still movement in the trees, the brazen flash of naked flesh, the shadowy passage of a horse. The Apaches had them completely surrounded and were keeping all the holes plugged. But the main group seemed to be gathering in the pass. There were perhaps twenty of them. Some of them sat tattered McLellan saddles and wore a motley collection of castoff army shirts and rawhide leggings and half-boots. But most of them were mounted on bareback ponies and were dressed in little more than G-strings and Apache war moccasins, worn up to the hip or folded over to knee height. They were a wild, mangy-looking lot but Brian could not see any war paint on their bodies. The bulk of them sat their fiddling ponies around a white-headed man, gesturing and talking excitedly.
Asa slid his rifle out. It was an old Ward-Burton bolt action. The Winchesters might not carry that far but the Indians were within range of the Ward-Burton.
“Don’t be crazy,” Peters said. “Kill a head man and they’ll make sure we’re all dead.”
“On the other hand it might bust ‘em up,” Asa said. “You know how it is when their chief gets it.”
He put his cheek against the butt. And an eddy of the crowd moved away from the white-headed Apache, revealing him fully to Brian for the first time.
Robles.
Brian pushed the gun aside so hard it hit Asa in the chin. The young man turned to him with a vicious curse.
“Damn you—”
“Slack off,” Brian said. “Can’t you see who it is?”
Still seething, Asa looked back at the Indians. Brian was staring at Robles. It had been a shock, recognizing the old man. Yet the logic of it took the shock away now. It was natural that Robles should come here. He was no reservation Indian. Brian remembered how often he had seen the old man staring off at these mountains, like a hound sensing something beyond human sight.
“What’s the difference?” Asa asked.
“I can talk with him,” Brian answered.
“They kill you,” Sandoval said.
“They will anyway. Who’s got something white?”
Peters had a white shirt on. They all looked at him. Finally he began to peel it off. He was sweating heavily and the heat had made his torso pink as rare steak. Brian took Peters’ rifle from him and tied the shirt to its tip. Then he stood up and walked from the rocks. He saw the whole group of mounted Indians turn toward him and for just that moment he went sick with the anticipation of a gunshot.
But it did not come. He walked toward them. There was cotton in his mouth and tension made his hands ache on the rifle. He saw Robles staring at him and he took off his hat so the old man would see his red hair and know who it was. Robles seemed to lift in the saddle with the sight of that flaming mane. When Brian was halfway to them one of the Indians started to lift his gun. Robles caught his arm and stopped him.
The wind was against Brian and when he was close enough to smell the nitrogen reek of their hard-ridden ponies he stopped. A flurry of motion ran through the group—horses fiddling and fretting and men shifting in their saddles. There was a starved and bitter look to their hollow-cheeked faces. Their eyes had a mean agate-glitter.
“Can we talk?” Brian asked Robles.
The old man pressed his pinto with a knee and the horse walked to Brian. Robles still wore the faded purple shirt, the age-yellow buckskin leggings pouched at the knees. His face had aged; the countless pleats grooving his cheeks were edged with the silvery fur of senility. Yet his eyes were clear and bright.
“Why did you do this?” Brian asked. “We aren’t here to harm you.”
“You go through?”
It was strange to hear the old man’s whispery voice after so long. It brought a flood of memory, a million fragments of Tiger, and softened Brian’s voice as he spoke.
“We’re driving to Alta.”
“Others come.”
“No. Just us.”
“Others come.”
Brian understood then what he meant. If the Apaches let this herd through it might open a route for further herds, then people wanting to settle. It would explode the mythical fear of the Superstitions and would rob this mangy, starved little band of their last refuge.
“Then the stories are true,” Brian said.
Robles knew what he meant. The Indian glanced around at the other Apaches. “No,” he said.
“But the men who disappeared in here?”
“Men die in Sierra Anchas. No Apaches there.”
Brian looked at the Indians, sullen, hostile, like a pack of curs waiting to jump. Robles saw the disbelief in Brian’s face. The ancient Apache looked at the tumbled, haze-ridden peaks east of them.
“Man get lost back there easy. No food. No water.” Something close to a smile touched his face, holding a wise and aged bitterness. “Other ways to die. Two gold hunters, last year. They find the gold. Each want too much. Kill each other.”
“But that can’t account for all of it.”
“You ever see?”
Brian frowned dubiously, realizing how intangible the evidence had always been. The Superstitions had been such a place of mystery for so long that it had become traditional to assign any unexplained violence to them. A man was burned out of his homestead and it was supposed to be a raiding band of Apaches. A man was found dead in the desert and it came from the Superstitions.
But now Brian was shaken. He had never known Robles to lie. “The rustling,” he said. “So much of it was supposed to come from here.”
“Why we go outside? We have all we can eat. Water. Earth. Sky. Enough for us.”
“Then the bad sign you were always talking about.”
“Not from here.”
“Did you know that at the time?”
Robles shook his head. “I know nothing then. I just feel. Bad sign. Some kind of bad sign.”
Brian remembered how he had scoffed at Robles’ talk. Now he was more willing to believe. “If it didn’t come from here—”
“Tarrant,” Robles said.
It checked Brian for a moment. Yet it was no surprise. He knew now that the Tarrant faction had probably been working for a long time to undermine the Double Bit and get Tiger into a position where he would have to do their bidding. Tiger’s death had merely shifted their attention to Brian, and Brian’s weaknesses had played right into their hands. But all of Tarrant’s activity had been gradual, undercover, shadowy. It was logical that Robles, with his primitive sensitivity to the slightest change in the country, should have sensed something wrong without being able to pin it down.
“That time we found Nacho with the Double Bit cattle,” Brian said.
Robles nodded. “Part of it. Nacho say he work for Latigo. He say truth.”
Brian leaned forward. “You mean Latigo was in it even then?”
“All the time. Latigo work for Tarrant.”
It brought another piece to the picture. It made Brian realize how the Double Bit had actually been bled dry of beef. Apparently his profligacy had little to do with it. Robles told him that Latigo and Nacho had been working at it through the years. The cattle run off by Nacho had been attributed to the Apaches in the Superstitions or the small-time border-hoppers. Latigo had stood ready to cover Nacho should he be discovered, as he was when Tiger and Brian had come up with him. At the same time, by falsifying the tally books, Latigo had covered the depletion of the herds.
At the same time, Robles said, Latigo was responsible for the loss of cattle by the Salt Rivers. One of their greatest strengths had lain in the mutual trust between the Salt Rivers and Tiger Sheridan. But if the Salt Rivers thought the Double Bit was mixed up in the unusual drift of their cattle onto the Rim, that trust would be undermined and finally ruined by a corroding suspicion. It was only one of the many ways Tarrant had worked to ruin the Salt Rivers, weaken the Double Bit, and gain the upper hand. Brian wanted to spit.
“You found this out, here?” he asked.
Robles nodded. “These people know what happen. Better than anybody. Like in the old days. A snake crawl a hundred miles away. Apache know.”
But it had been too late to help. Brian knew that. By the time Robles had discovered the truth, they had already smashed Brian. He looked at the line of dark faces. They were growing restless, muttering among themselves, jerking at their fretting ponies.
“And you’re saying they’ve stayed back in here all these years?” Brian said. “They haven’t raided, they haven’t rustled, they haven’t been responsible for the men who disappeared in here?”
‘Sometimes they kill. Only to save themself.”
“I could almost believe you, except for today.”
“You shoot first.”
Brian had to admit that. His face grew grim. “What about Pancho?”
Robles lifted a veined hand in a signal. The ranks parted and the Mexican was led forward by a pair of riders. He walked between them, hands tied behind him. He was sweating and his eyes rolled in his head.
“Dios de mi vida,” he said. “Ruegue por mi alma, Señor Brian, lastima de Dios—”
“Settle down, Pancho,” Brian said. “I think it’s all right.” The man subsided and Brian spoke to Robles. “What do you want, then?”
“Take your cattle. Go back.”
“You know we can’t. This is our last chance.”
“If you get through, others come.”
“If we get through we’ll stand a chance against Tarrant. And if we beat him nobody else will drive cattle through here. I give you my word.”
Robles was silent a long time, studying Brian. Finally he asked, “Coming through here. Your idea?”
Brian knew the whole thing hung in precarious balance now. He couldn’t sense what Robles was driving at, and hesitated with his answer. It made Robles look at Pancho. The Mexican nodded vehemently.
“Si, si, Señor Brian’s idea—”
Robles looked at Brian. “You think we kill you?”
Brian grinned ruefully. “I guess I believed the stories.”
“And still you come.”
Brian nodded. Robles looked at Brian’s hands, callused and scarred and crisscrossed with rope burns. He looked at Brian’s clothes, tattered and filthy. Finally he looked at Brian’s face. Weather and work had taken all the youth from it. There was no softness of flesh to hide the raw and shining ridges of cheekbone and jaw. The eyes were narrowed habitually against the sun now and a fine netting of wrinkles was forming at their tips. Where dust didn’t cover the skin it showed a burn as dark as Robles’ face and a hard fighting shape had come to the lips. Finally Robles wheeled his horse and walked back to the Apaches. He began talking in their guttural tongue. It started a big argument. A half-naked buck moved his horse till he was knee-to-knee with Robles, talking viciously, making wicked slicing gestures with one hand at Brian. The others set up a monkey-like jabbering.
Robles held up his hand and finally silenced them. He began an oration. By the way they listened Brian could see the power the old man had gained over them. Pancho stood between the two riders who had led him to the front, breathing heavily, working his mouth. Finally Robles stopped. There was silence for a while. Then one man answered from the group. It was just a couple of words. The buck who had argued with Robles pulled away from the old man, and Brian couldn’t tell whether it was triumph or defeat on his face. Robles turned his pony and came back. He came up to Brian and put a hand on his shoulder.
“We decide,” he said. “We take your word. You go on through. We help you get cattle back in bunch.”