CHAPTER IV

 

INSTINCT SENT HIM slide-rolling off the horse’s rump, reaching forward and dragging his rifle out of the scabbard as he fell.

The soft snow cushioned his fall and he rolled with agile speed behind the scrubby protection of a ball-shaped pinon plant, thick with low coiled and knotted branches. He strung out hot oaths and watched the calico horse wander imperturbably away.

The rifle on yonder ridge set up a sharp, steady chatter now, raking the snow all around his shelter. A bullet cleanly broke a half-inch branch over his head and dropped it startlingly on the back of his neck. He almost jumped.

When he looked at the sheared-off end of the broken branch, he knew that it had taken at least a fifty-caliber bullet to cut it down. Either it was the same gun that had killed the deputy or there was a sizable crowd of buffalo hunters in these mountains. And that was a poor possibility, since no buffalo had been sighted within five hundred miles of this part of Arizona within Brand’s memory.

It was not a time for speculation. The rifle up on the ridge kept talking in crashing signals. The man was an erratic shot—bullets were flying as much as thirty feet distant—the law of averages limited Brand’s time.

He dug in and pushed his rifle through the bush and waited while yonder rifleman reloaded; then, when the ridge erupted with gunfire, Brand put a clamp on his nerves and forced himself to ignore the bullets that searched the air and snow around him. He put the whole of his attention on the ridge, seeking the telltale rise of powder smoke that would reveal the location of the hidden gunner. Snow glare made the task a tricky and difficult one, but at the rifleman’s fourth shot he had a glimpse of what he sought—a wisp of rising gray—and that was the spot on which he brought his own rifle to bear.

His was no long-range buffalo gun, but an ordinary .38-40 Winchester, and to make the 400-yard shot that he had to make, he would need not only an expert judgment of bullet drop and wind, but also a very large portion of luck.

The rifle on the ridge kept up its fire, seeding the snow with lead, spraying the land in a wide pattern and now and then snapping off pieces of pinon over Brand’s head. His face was low enough against the bush’s trunk so that it was reasonably safe; but his legs stuck out awkwardly and there was no way to pull them in. Bullets thrashed the ground and split the air; one slug ricocheted off a shallow-buried rock and screamed away.

It was unnerving, frightening, distracting; but there was nothing to do but concentrate on aim. If he did not silence the rifleman or drive him back, presently one of those massive slugs would find its intended target. Brand had no liking for pain. He lifted the front sight of the Winchester, uttered a brief curse that passed for a prayer, locked his breath up in his chest and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle bucked against his flat, thin shoulder. There was no way of telling where his bullet had hit, but he had the small satisfaction of having surprised the rifleman and given him something to think about. Up to now, the man probably had thought Brand was armed only with his sidearm. The distance was far enough to have made it impossible for the ambusher to have seen Brand drag the rifle with him.

He put another bullet in the rifleman’s vicinity and levered a fresh cartridge into the breech. When the smoke dissipated from his gun muzzle, he surveyed the ridge.

Nothing stirred. The buffalo gun had quit, perhaps to retreat, perhaps to reload. Brand made use of the time by thumbing two bullets out of his cartridge belt and into the Winchester’s loading gate, and replacing the glove on his hand.

The buffalo gun opened up again, now with a savage haste that sent bullets well wide of their target. It told Brand something about the man who had ambushed him; retaliation had shaken that man badly. He hunched over the rifle and pulled the trigger.

His shot did not make the rifleman hesitate again. The buffalo gun had the advantages of good cover, high ground and a target pinned down like a butterfly.

After a snarling exchange of shots followed by a mutual lull, Jim Brand, reloading, felt the taut edge of desperation begin to saw against his nerves. The gun uphill was like an artillery piece slowly coming to bear on its distant target; in time it would find its mark. Before that time came, he would have to find a way out.

His horse had drifted quite a distance back, and the nearest trees were forty yards away. Even at this extended range from the ridge top, the buffalo gun would have better than an even chance of nailing him down if he tried to run across that expanse of open ground.

All that protected him now was the questionable shelter of the pinon bush, whose branches deflected those few bullets that came near; but sheer weight of ammunition would chop down the bush in time and leave Brand exposed. Still, there was the brighter possibility that the long gun would soon begin to run short of cartridges, and that in fact was what seemed to happen, for the gun now commenced to fire at a slower and more careful rate.

Jim Brand answered with four quick-spaced shots. The volume of his fire served temporarily to shut the buffalo gun up, and during the ensuing silent interval he tried to take stock of his situation.

Frozen earth, cold air and snow were gradually numbing his extremities. The air was cold enough to burn his throat and lungs when he breathed. A warm, damp patch along his upper arm proved to be a bullet bum, not serious by itself but threatening to become so if he didn’t tend to it. The massive blackening storm, still holding off, was wheeling forward with long strides. He had no gauge but his skin to measure the air temperature, but he knew it was steadily dropping.

He laid a pattern of four quick shots on the buffalo gun’s position and then put his rifle aside to do what he could about the bullet burn along his left arm. The air remained dry and still and he could not change the fact that the buffalo gun up on the ridge had his own saddle carbine damned well outgunned.

He packed snow on his arm, grimacing against the frigid pain, and bit down on the fingers of his glove to pull it off, then reached into his hip pocket for a kerchief with which he bound his arm as best he could. Then he put the glove on again, pushed his finger through the rifle’s trigger guard, cocked the hammer and once more shoved the rifle forward through the thick intertwining branches of the pinon.

He peered again through the dense interlacing branches and felt a thin panic, realizing that he had lost the rifleman’s position by taking his eyes off it. After a futile moment of scanning the ridge, he knew he would have to wait for the gunner’s giveaway fire. Anger flamed in his eyes. To lose the fight through his own stupidity was something he would not accept.

Freshly aware of the cold seeping into his fibers, he wriggled his toes inside the frozen boots and was surprised that he could still feel that movement. He set his teeth and laid down another series of shots on the ridge.

The buffalo gun made no response. Brand frowned and reloaded quickly, and set his sights on the ridge again, intending to rake it laterally with a magazine of bullets. That was when a small object dropped lightly on the back of his coat. He ignored it; an idle corner of his mind thought it might have been a twig broken off by a bullet and dropped by a breath of wind. But then another small hard pellet dropped lightly on the calf of his pant leg, and a third struck his boot heel with a soft but audible thwack. The air was turning more noticeably gray and it was becoming more difficult by the minute to make out the outline of the ridge against the bleak sky.

“Think of that,” he breathed. Another pellet hit the back of his leg, “Hail. Hailstones—I’ll be damned.” The falling rain was freezing into hail. He looked up again and could hardly see the ridge.

When it came, it came fast. The hail came down with abruptly increased volume and force. It battered his legs and back and hat. It dappled the snow surface with sudden pockmarks. It shook the branches of the piñon and made a seething obscurity of half-distant things.

A powerful wash of relief and reprieve swept through him. Sudden exhaustion, the aftermath of tension, coursed through his fibers like an exhaling long breath, and his head dropped. He lay with closed eyes, flat against the earth, feeling the pound of blood in his eardrums.

But it was only the beginning of struggle. Knowing that much, he forced himself to his feet. He could not see the ridge. A hailstorm was no one’s friend; it might have saved him from the rifleman, but only for its own vengeance.

Jim Brand wheeled, searching out the calico horse in the fast-dimming daylight, and caught sight of its faint outline down the slope a hundred feet distant. Bouncing the rifle in the circle of his fist, feeling the numbness of ears and nose and hands and feet, noticing the faint irritation of the flesh wound on his arm, he set off at a quick dogtrot, stamping his feet harder than necessary to work up circulation in them, and slowing the pace as he approached the calico, to avoid frightening it.

The calico, already made spooky by the lashed-down corpse and the rising dismal wind and the quickening hail, proved hard to catch. Brand was cursing a livid stream before he finally caught up with the shying, unsettled animal and jerked its head down.

“Stand still,” he said tautly, wheezing for breath, and managed to get a foot in the stirrup and swing his leg over the saddle cantle.

The wind whipped up a sudden gust, almost tearing the hat from his head, and he quickly untied the bandanna about his throat, cursing his clumsy fingers and using the bandanna to tie the hat down, thus protecting his ears from the batter of the elements.

He could see his breath steaming away and suddenly he had the belly-dropping sensation of being totally alone in a hostile sea, a foaming ocean of wind-blasted snow and hurtling pellets of ice. The air was a visible swirling blue-grayness, pounding the exposed flesh of his face. He hunched his shoulders and tried to shrink deeper into the thick sheepskin mackinaw for warmth.

Batting his gloved hands together, he sat the motionless horse and tried to peer through the storm. It was certain he could not turn back. Behind him lay no cover of any kind, and no man alive could hope to ride out what was coming forward across the mountains—a blizzard for sure. Nor was there any shelter around here, or sufficient materials to build a substantial one. A branch-and_:leaf lean-to would be no more effective than a bed-sheet in this undersea world turned upside down.

There was only one choice. He had to press forward, ride into the teeth of the norther, try to make the ghost town of Rifle Gap and hope the years had left at least a single structure—and worry about the man with the buffalo gun later.

The wind rose, whipping and wheeling. It seemed to be a foaming froth of some vast rage. And then a slow dark panic took shape and grew in the pit of his belly, shaking him bodily, lifting a great unreasoning anger into him and overlaying the anger with a soft, suffocating blanket of fear.

Which way?