Wednesday, October 11th, started sunny, with the kind of blue sky that seems like it’s going to be there forever. All the way round the horizon there wasn’t a single cloud to be seen, not even hanging on the jagged peaks of the tall mountains to the north and west.
Tired out after the excitement of the previous day, Becky slept in late. When she woke she found a healthy fire warming the shelter and a narrow path of trodden snow marking the way Jed and Whitey had gone to get water and more wood from among the trees.
The two of them were sitting out on large stones, heads close together, and the albino was drawing something in the snow with the pointed end of a long stick. They both looked round as soon as she made a move out of her cocoon of blankets. She noticed that both of them made the instinctive drop of the right hand towards the holstered pistols, checked unconsciously as they saw what it was had disturbed them.
‘Good to see you, Becky,’ grinned Coburn, no longer the frightening figure she had once thought him. He had washed his face and combed back his hair so that it hung in silver waves over his shoulders.
‘Coffee’s good and hot, Becky,’ said Herne, pouring out a steaming mug for her.
‘You should have woken me,’ she complained, feeling for some obscure reason insulted.
‘Didn’t need to. We been talkin’ about supplies. Whitey here could go down the store safely in Lone Pine, get us some basics and be back not long after midday. Might be we can finish up here before nightfall, but we got to reckon the dice aren’t goin’ to sit up and beg for us. So we might be here for a few days. Another foot or so of snow on top of what fell yesterday, and we could be in a heap of trouble.’
‘I’ll take my horse down. Say that me and my friends are moving on. It’ll be a while yet before folks get concerned and come lookin’ up here. Not before the spring thaw, I guess. So I’ll be goin’ now, and pick up the horse.’
‘Doesn’t he have a name?’
‘No. Never got round to it. Once rode clear across the desert on a horse with no name. Foundered under me a half mile from water. If’n I’d given him a name, then I’d be sitting here remembering him and how sorry I feel about the way he went. Too many people to recall without concerning myself with animals. Now,’ he stood up, stamping his feet to get the circulation going. ‘I’ll be getting going. You do that patrol, Jed, and we’ll talk when I’m back.’
Without a wave or a backwards glance, Coburn walked off through the frozen snow, his heels kicking up a tiny spray of white at every step. Becky watched him go, looking out of the corner of her eye at Herne. Seeing a certain look in his face she had never seen before. Not since the death of Louise. Something that was close to being affection. Something that she’d never sensed when he looked at her. The thought made her feel jealous and possessive, aware that the years that lay between the two men represented a past that she could never share.
Leaving her with the horses and the shelter, Herne went off on a similar patrol to the previous day, but with a new lightness of heart. There was no longer the threat from Whitey Coburn. His old friend turned enemy was again turned, for a time, friend.
There had been moments during the last night, when Herne had considered drawing his Colt and putting a bullet, without any risk, through the back of Coburn’s narrow skull. He knew that if they both survived the coming battle against the Stanwyck private army, that he and Whitey would have to face each other in a fight that must end in a killing. That was as inevitable as the sun lurching up from the eastern sky over the plains.
But the odds against him, locked up beyond the blue lake in Mount Abora, were too great. Stacked higher than he liked to think about. So Whitey would equalize them a little. And afterwards... ?
That would be a shot to call when the time came for the calling.
He noticed that there was the faintest blush of ice round the fringes of the lake, like spittle hanging at the corner of a madman’s mouth. Fronds of white, blending into the snow that lay crisply on the shores of the deep water. Herne skirted the open where his footmarks would be clearly visible to anyone with a telescope, remaining under the cover of the trees, treading softly and carefully.
If their provisional plan was to work, then his care in surveying the land immediately nearest to the walls of the house would be crucial. It would mean the difference between success and lying bare-boned and bloody in the snow.
He avoided the camp-site where Coburn and his gang had been living, guessing that the scent of fresh blood would have attracted any predators in the area to snuffle and root among the corpses. There would be enough trouble with human animals.
Gradually the trees thinned out, and the top end of the path faded away into nothing so that he had to thread his way among the low branches. He guessed that the guards around the house had never found the narrow trail up from the lake, failing to backtrack it because of the odd way it vanished at that end. Whatever the reason, it worked in his favor, meaning that there was a way up and also a way down, other than the corkscrewing main trail to Mount Abora.
Within three hundred yards of the house, Herne dropped to his knees and squatted down, peering ahead. He could just catch glimpses of the gray walls. He stayed like that for a full quarter hour, watching for signs of the patrolling sentries, checking his pocket-watch to time the intervals between their patrols.
It fell in with what both he and Coburn had separately thought. Generally in pairs, the sentries walked around the outside of the huge house about once every three-quarters of an hour. There were never less than four men on patrol at any one time and the delays made Jed suspect that they did more than just cover the area immediately closest to the house. They must be patrolling some way into the grounds on the far side nearest the main trail.
It began to look as though there wasn’t even the suspicion of the back way up towards Mount Abora, over the hills and down past the lake. So, if they depended entirely on the twisting, overhung road across the valley and up over the ridge to Lone Pine and the outside world it meant that Whitey’s purchases in the store there would be as vital as they’d hoped.
Finally, before returning to their camp, Jed decided to test out just how close he could get to the house, and whether it was possible to move clear round it. Waiting until the next pair of sentries had walked by, their feet crunching through the snow that lay thicker on that side of the valley, Herne began to step cautiously between the trees.
He was so used to the location of the tree roots, sticking up in gnarled shapes among the whiteness, that he very nearly stepped on the small pile of twigs between two particularly large mounds. Stopping dead in his tracks, with one foot actually raised in the air, Herne looked around him.
The nearer set of roots was from that jagged pine on the right. And the next heap of snow covered the roots from that tree ahead. So what was concealed in the snow between them?
The splintered tree had been hit by lightning within the last year or so and a longish branch lay against the trunk. Jed reached out and took it, shaking off its thin covering of snow, holding it by one end. It was about eight feet long, near as thick as a man’s wrist. Gently, he laid it down among the twigs ahead of him. Carefully pressing the further end of the branch into the snow.
Clang!!
The noise was stunningly loud in the peace of the forest, sending a bird noisily squawking out into the blue, echoing around for seconds. The branch was jerked from Herne’s hands, and he took a step back, eyes raking the surrounding wood to see if the noise had attracted any unwanted attention.
But nothing moved, apart from the bird now circling lazily on a thermal way up high. Knowing what he was going to see, Herne moved forwards and tugged at the nearer end of the branch, freeing it from the explosion of snow and earth that had covered the further end.
The steel claws of the trap had buried themselves deeply in the wood, leaving great white gouges and splinters. Jed tugged experimentally at the branch, but the trap was staked down deep in the earth. Hammered home with a sledge so that no amount of pulling would ever shift it.
The spring on the trap was the strongest that Herne had ever seen. Thicker than wolf-traps. Thicker even than the great clawing traps that the hunters of the north used to kill the giant grizzlies. It wasn’t meant for any animal, Herne guessed.
Just for any man foolish enough to come scouting round the Stanwyck home.
‘They really reckon their home is a damned castle, don’t they?’ was Whitey’s comment, when he and Herne met again at the camp.
Both were on time, much to the girl’s relief.
‘Why didn’t anyone hear the spring go off, Jed?’ asked Becky, picking a stringy hunk of gristle from between her teeth.
‘The house is so big, and the trees grow right up against it, so I guess it must have been muffled. But I could just see the nearest wing of the place from where I was, and I could have sworn I saw a face at the window on the top floor. A very pale face. A woman, I think. Looked to be dressed all in white. Stared at me for an age, then went away again. Couldn’t have seen me in the blackness under the trees.’
Coburn stood up. ‘All that talkin’, I forgot what I got me back in the store. Just what we need.’
‘Eggs? Flour?’ asked the girl, watching the lean scarecrow figure stalk to his horse and bring back a burlap sack from the saddle-horn.
‘Not precisely, Becky Yates. Something better than that. We got us enough food and plenty of the produce of God’s own brewery, right up here. No. This is something to add a mite of spice to life.’
Handling it carefully, shielding it from the fire with his back, he reached inside the sack and pulled out a small metal-bound box, the cracks in the wood sealed with tar. Using the point of his knife for a lever, the albino gently inched up the lid. Pulling aside a thick sheet of shiny brown paper, revealing what lay inside.
Becky and Herne leaned forward to look. Jed sat back with a sigh of pleasure, but Becky was puzzled. The box was packed full with a coarse-grained gray powder. She reached out to touch it, rolling it in her fingers, finding it felt like thick dust.
‘What is it, Whitey?’
‘Take just a little pinch, like the amount of salt you’d sprinkle in oatmeal gruel and then throw it on the fire.’
Already guessing what it must be, the girl did as he told her, taking a nip of the powder between her finger and thumb and flicking it at the fire. Not surprised by the puff of gray smoke and the flat crack it made.
‘It’s blasting powder, isn’t it? I remember that Pa used to keep some in the outhouse for breaking up big boulders.’
Coburn nodded. ‘That’s what it is. The miners’ friend. And hopefully our friend too.’
Herne looked at it, calculating. ‘Fuses?’
‘Twenty foot of five minute. Reckon that should be about enough.’
‘I guess so. What did you tell the folks down in the store?’
‘Told them we were thinkin’ of doing us some prospecting. They warned me off about goin’ anywheres near the Stanwyck spread. Seems a couple of kids went huntin’ up that way a year ago and never came back. They’re mighty free with their hardware up there.’
‘So they aren’t likely to tip them off about any strangers around?’
Coburn shook his head. ‘Couldn’t say that. A few dollars can grease a lot of palms. Wouldn’t trust none of them. Though they warned me about the weather as well. Said that they reckoned there was a whole lot more snow to come. And if it does...’
Becky shook her head. ‘I don’t understand. Why are you both pleased at the idea of more snow? Won’t it harm us more than them, safe in their house?’
Herne grinned, looking younger than she’d seen him for an age. ‘We got our trail out, and either on foot or with the horses, we can get out. But over that side, you already seen how it catches most of the weather. So if their road out also got blocked...’
‘The blasting powder! That’s what it’s for. Once their road is gone, they can’t get in or out. We’ve got them!’
Herne noticed the use of the word ‘we’ in the girl’s enthusiasm, but made no comment. ‘It won’t be that easy, Becky. Up here in the Sierras, you can often reckon to be shut in by snow for three to four months. They’ll be provisioned up. But us doing that’ll put a bit of pressure on them.’
Coburn took him up. ‘And the trail getting blocked is going to bring some of them crawling out of their hole. What we’re really aiming at, Becky, is helping to swing the odds a mite more in our favor.’
Jed nodded. ‘The only way in that I could see is the front door, and we don’t fancy that. But there may be another way in.’
‘I don’t understand. How will you be able to find that out?’
Both men laughed and Coburn licking his bloodless lips with relish. ‘Best way to find a way into the house is to ask someone who lives there. And that’s what we aim to do.’