McAllister 7

by Matt Chisholm

  He thought he heard the sound of another shot. Alarmed, he looked at Mose and his son and saw to his relief that both were still in the saddle. Part of McAllister’s brain told him that he should approach the timber with caution, but the reckless habits of a lifetime were too much for him. Anger ruled where cool thought should have guided him. However, the luck which perhaps he did not deserve saved him and, as he burst into the trees, his eyes darting everywhere in search of movement, he saw the sunlight hit the thin line of a rifle barrel. He swung Oscar right towards it, circling a tree and pounding on west. Within seconds, he could see the open grassland beyond the trees and there, no more than a hundred yards ahead of him, was a racing horse with a man crouched over its extended neck. He drew rein and dropped from the saddle, telling Oscar to stand, in a voice which the animal obeyed instantly.

  He laid the barrel of the Henry across the saddle and heard the other two riders crashing through the trees behind him. Even as he fired, he knew he’d made a hit. The shot laid the man flat along the horse’s neck. McAllister waited, expecting the motion of the horse to shake the wounded man from the saddle, but this did not happen. He levered another round into the breech, but the horse and rider were gone before he could fire, dipping down into a fold in the land.

  He swore, and Mose Copley went past him yelling like an Indian.

  At the top of his voice, McAllister bellowed: ‘Mose, you come back here.’ Bella was uppermost in his mind.

  Lige went past on the run, all Comanche and yelling for blood.

  McAllister roared: ‘Lige, you hold up or you’re fired.’

  He might as well have been shouting at the wind.

  ‘Goddammit to hell,’ he said, and vaulted back into the saddle. Oscar was running before his feet were in the irons. ‘I’ll skin those two bastards alive when I catch up with them.’

  He caught sight of the marksman heaving up a farther ridge. His three pursuers were all well mounted. McAllister could only, assume that the quarry’s horse was superb. It stretched away north as if the slope of the ridge gave it no problem at all. The pace was a terrible one and no horse could be expected to keep it up for long except on the flat, and McAllister did not fancy having three of his best horses ruined in pursuit of a wounded man. Besides that, he had other ideas about the purpose the wounded man could serve. McAllister wanted the kidnappers, and this man, if luck did its job, would lead him to them.

  He used his quirt again and Oscar, who was not used to the whip and did not like it, hit a pace that was equal to any horse’s on earth. He showed his quality now, no doubt urged on by McAllister’s furious bellows for his two crew members to draw rein. At last, not even they could ignore the commands of their boss and came sulkily to a halt.

  Mose was fit to be tied. His ugly face was all screwed up with rage.

  ‘You know what you just did?’ he demanded, getting the words out with the greatest difficulty. ‘You robbed me of my just rights. You wasn’t beat to no pulp. I owed one of them bastards. I wanted to get my hands around that trash’s throat and squeeze the goddam life out of him.’

  Lige was a little milder, but he was not looking kindly on McAllister.

  ‘Boss, you shouldn’t ought to of did that. That son-of-a-bitch’s hide belongs to my old man, and you know it.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ McAllister snarled. ‘I get your drift, but all this ain’t been set up for your satisfaction. I want the feller to lead me to the rest. Besides, I can’t face up to Bella again if one of you two gets lead in his fool hide. She won’t kill you, you’re family.’

  Mose cracked his face in a wide grin. ‘Wa-al,’ he said, ‘may be the son-of-a-bitch’ll bleed to death. Just you keep him moving, boss, so he can’t tie hisself up.’

  ‘That’s a promise,’ McAllister said. ‘Now you high-tail it back to the house and prove beyond all possible doubt to Bella you ain’t even scratched.’

  They looked like they were going to argue, but McAllister rode away from them shouting: ‘See you,’ and sent Oscar up-valley at an easy canter.

  ‘Maybe I should trail him, pa,’ Lige said. ‘You could tell Ma I went into town or something.’

  Mose was tempted, but he shook his head. ‘Home, son.’

  ‘Aw, Pa.’

  ‘Home.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Offdike was a tall, lean man with a cold brain. Nominally he was subordinate to Stevenson, but in fact Offdike was subordinate to nobody and never had been, not in all his life since the age of thirteen when, man-size, he had stuck three inches of jack-knife blade into the man who had taken him from an orphanage and called himself his guardian. That had been in Illinois twenty years before. Offdike had headed West then, and he had stayed West. There was still room here for a man with initiative. And initiative to Offdike meant taking what you wanted, when you wanted it. Unless the man who held that something was stronger than you were. In which case you walked around him.

  It was Offdike who had organized the trip – horses, mules, supplies, everything. And it would quite likely be Offdike who got the truth out of old Joe Ramage. Stevenson appeared to trust him, and J. Howard Lindholm could not see why. Stevenson seemed a worldly enough fellow and should have known better. The banker did not like Offdike and he did not trust him. Cold though he might be, the way he looked at Carla was far from cold. More than once during that terrible ride, Lindholm told himself that if they ever found the gold, he would not put it past Offdike to attempt to get away with the treasure and the girl.

  Admittedly, Lindholm’s temper was tried to its limit by the incessant riding. He could ride well enough, but his backside was not made to be in a saddle for twelve hours at a stretch.

  ‘We have to get to the gold and clear it out before any kind of pursuit gets close,’ Stevenson had said. ‘Then we each take our share and we scatter. Several trails are harder to follow than one.’

  That first night in camp, several miles beyond the Black Horse Breaks, Lindholm said: ‘The gold you took from the coach, Hank. Now we’re nearing the end of the trail, I think we should all know where you cached it.’

  That seemed to take the big man back a bit. ‘All in good time, Howard,’ he said. ‘It’s safe enough, never fear.’

  The Others were all listening, and Lindholm decided not to press the matter in front of them. He would get the truth out of Stevenson when they were alone. It was his right to know. After all, he was the originator of this whole scheme. If it had not been for him...

  He looked round at the others. Carla, bearing up wonderfully well under the physical strain of all the hard riding. He tried to catch her eye and failed. He had failed to do that a good deal in the last twenty-four hours, and that worried him. He blamed it on Stevenson, who had been remorselessly charming to the girl ever since they had slipped out of town with their two prisoners.

  He heard Offdike’s softly rasping voice – ‘It ain’t the gold you should be fretting about, Mr Lindholm. It’s the Kid.’

  A small flutter of unease went through Lindholm. ‘The Kid?’

  Stevenson said: ‘Why isn’t he here?’

  ‘It’s a long ride,’ the banker said.

  Offdike said: ‘He should of caught us long since.’ He laughed, and the sound was like the short, sharp bark of a kid fox. ‘Maybe that McAllister don’t knock over so easy.’

  The full import of this came ramming home to Lindholm. He knew about McAllister better than anybody here. He was an Indian if ever there was one. A savage. He felt panic clutch at his throat like a strangling hand.

  ‘What can we do?’ he said. Stevenson and Offdike were looking at him sardonically. He knew they both despised him.

  ‘Two things,’ Stevenson said immediately. ‘One, we make the old man talk because we don’t have any time now to fool around. Two, we kill McAllister.’

  ‘Supposing he has a whole posse with him? There’s some mighty able men in Black Horse.’

  Stevenson smiled and showed the gold in his
teeth. ‘No, McAllister won’t hang around for a posse. If the Kid missed him, he’ll come fast and alone. I know about McAllister.’

  They all turned their heads to look at Joe Ramage, who lay bound hand and foot on the edge of the circle of light from the fire. The girl Allison crouched beside him. She had to crouch, because her hands were tied to her ankles. She looked sick and scared.

  Carla said: ‘The girl’s the answer. Slip a little steel into Ally and the old man’ll crack.’ She smiled tight-lipped at her former room-mate. Allison’s eyes were huge and terrified in her pinched face. None of the men could believe that she had been beautiful so short a time before.

  Stevenson rose to his feet and walked over to them. He kicked Joe lightly in the ribs and said: ‘Think about it through the night, old man. We’ll start carving the girl in the morning. Just lie there and think about it. You tell us where the gold is, and we won’t have any reason to hurt either of you. We are not killers, Joe. Tell us where the gold is, and we’ll leave you with a couple of horses. I can’t say fairer than that.’

  The old man did not utter a word. His eyes snapped with rage and hatred.

  The girl Allison said: ‘I can’t believe this is happening. Carla, how can you let them do this?’

  ‘I can’t stop them,’ Carla said. ‘Even if I wanted.’ Stevenson kicked Joe Ramage again. Quite gently.

  ‘Get thinking, old man,’ he said. ‘It’s the knife for the girl if you don’t.’

  Joe’s voice came now in a high-pitched, keening whine – ‘You bastards. You low-down yeller bastards.’

  Offdike said: ‘I suggest we kill the fire and move camp before we hit the sack. No telling who’s sighted us here.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Stevenson.

  The Kid was scared. He was sick with fear. He was scared because he was wounded and bleeding. He was scared in case he was being followed and his pursuers might catch him. He was scared because he might be leading his pursuers to the rest of the gang. He knew Offdike and Stevenson. They were like him. A human life meant no more to them than that of a coyote. If they thought he had betrayed them, they would kill him.

  He cursed himself for attempting a shot that was at too long a range for his carbine. He had overestimated himself and the weapon. His mistake was unforgivable. It was the kind of thing a greenhorn would do. The man who had shot him had made no such error. The bullet had hit him high in the right shoulder. He reckoned his shoulder blade was shattered, but, strange though it seemed, the wound had hurt very little in the first minutes. Now, as he reached the northern end of the valley, the full effect of the injury hit him. He felt the pain and the shock of it. The pain sickened him; the shock had him trembling in the saddle like a girl. At first he seemed to burn up, then suddenly he was cold and he thought he would die of cold.

  He knew that he was bleeding and he wanted to stop and staunch the blood, but he dared not while there was a chance that there was a pursuer close behind him. Once or twice, he turned painfully in the saddle to take a look at his back trail, but he failed to find even a single rider there. There should have been at least three – McAllister, who had charged him, and the two black riders who had been yelling like Indians. But now the valley showed no movement except for that of cattle and a small bunch of range horses.

  Turning into the Breaks, he began to cheer up a little. It looked safe enough for him to stop and try to do something about his wound. He waited until he came to water. This came in the form of a narrow trickle in the bottom of a gully. It was not too sweet, but it was water, and he dismounted to drink copiously. He thought he would never be able to satisfy his giant thirst. When his stomach was distended with water, he stopped himself and tried to get off his coat and shirt. This hurt him a lot and he had to drive himself on to do it. Finally, the upper part of his body was bare, and he used his bandanna to wash the wound as best he could. The cold of the water made him feel a little better, but the pain was very great now and the intensity of it was scary.

  The Kid might be any number of low things, but he was tough and he had grit. He made up his mind that he was not going to bleed to death. He was going to reach the others and he was going to have his share of that gold. He fixed his mind on the gold. If he kept thinking about the gold he would get through this all right.

  Through a great wall of pain, he tied the wet bandanna over his right shoulder. It would not have been easy to do unhurt; hurt as he was, he went through the tortures of the damned. To keep the crude bandage in place, he tied a strip of rawhide to the front of the bandage, passed the thong around his body and managed with great difficulty to secure it to the bandage behind him. With that done, he felt as though he had gained a major victory and his spirits rose. He was weak from loss of blood, but he drank some more water and thought maybe that would help. He threw the bloody shirt away and found a fresh one in a saddle pocket. He managed to get into it, but found that his coat pained his wound too much, so he tied it behind his saddle.

  Then he was in the saddle and heading down the Breaks. He was still thinking about the gold.

  McAllister watched the boy from the rim of the Breaks. When he saw him ride off due west, going slowly, he was pleased, because it looked as if he was heading where McAllister wanted him to go. This way, McAllister might find himself in the vicinity of Blue Rock when the posse turned up there.

  The Kid was still in the Breaks when night came down. The boy halted and made camp in the rocks below. McAllister off-saddled and catnapped where he was, knowing that the sound of the Kid moving in the morning would reach him at his height. When the Kid moved, he would move. Maybe would lead him to Joe and the girl.

  The following morning, while mist shrouded the lower reaches of the Breaks, McAllister watched the ghostly figure of the boy below through his glass. The Kid’s movements were slow and painful. McAllister watched his agonized efforts to saddle and mount his horse and could not help wondering if the boy would be able to reach his friends. When at last the boy was in the saddle, even at that distance McAllister could see that the effort to stay in the saddle was almost too much for him. McAllister decided that he would not last the day out.

  No sooner did he decide this, than he decided on the action he should take. This was no time to be delaying. He had to reach Joe and the girl as quickly as he could. One way, of course, would be to get ahead of the Kid and pick up Stevenson’s tracks. But he doubted that the prisoners had been brought this way. They would have been taken across country through the hills to some point northwest of here. So he lifted his lines and urged Oscar to a brisker pace, descended to lower country a couple of miles further on and worked his way through the broken land at the west of the Breaks where he might expect to intercept the Kid.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  None of the men liked it – except maybe Offdike, but his face did not admit or deny his liking for dealing out pain to a woman. Stevenson for one would not have hesitated to put any man to the torture if his compensation was high enough. But all his instincts went against dealing out pain to a woman. He liked women too much. So, when it came to it, he started sweating. And Offdike’s mocking gaze on him when he stood over Allison Disart with his knife blade bared did not help. He would have offered the weapon to Offdike, but he feared the atrocity the man might commit.

  They had all been awake an hour now. Breakfast had been hastily eaten without enjoyment. Everybody’s nerves were bare this morning.

  Stevenson bent over Ramage and said: ‘What kind of a mean-hearted bastard are you, Joe, that you could see a woman hurt?’

  Joe spat back: ‘You harm that girl, Stevenson, and there won’t be a man in this country won’t fight to get a strangle-rope around your neck.’

  Which was true enough. That did not faze Stevenson. A good many men wanted him dead, in any case.

  Stevenson took hold of Joe by his scant hair and heaved his head off the ground. ‘Joe, we can’t kill you, because we want you to show us where the gold is. But we can kill the
girl. You want to have her on your conscience for the rest of your life. You’ll think of her every time you think of the gold.’

  From where he sat somber and grey on his rock, Offdike said: ‘I can kill the girl,’ and the words hung on the air, like an unmentionable threat.

  Stevenson stood up abruptly. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘kill the girl. Get it over with. I’ve lost patience with this old fool.’ Offdike stood up and drew his sheath knife. ‘Where do I do it?’ he said calmly.

  Stevenson glanced at Carla and saw that she was sitting stiff with horror. He shifted his gaze quickly from her and said: ‘Here. Right here, so Joe can see the result of his obstinacy.’

  Offdike said in that softly grating voice of his: ‘I aim to mark her some with the point, just to see how Joe takes that. If he don’t talk then, I’ll cut her throat.’

  Carla said in a breathless explosion of words: ‘No. You can’t do it.’

  Lindholm was alarmed to hear himself say: ‘Carla’s right. Threatening the old man turns my stomach. Harming the girl is not to be contemplated. With my stake in this affair, I should say that my opinion is authoritative.’

  Stevenson and Offdike were staring at him. He did not care. A rogue he might be, but he was no barbarian. Besides which, if they harmed the girl, retribution against them could be terrible.

  Stevenson said: ‘If you two don’t want the gold, why, you get on your horses and ride. You’re welcome.’

  ‘Our deal did not take in murder or torture.’

  Stevenson said: ‘It does now.’

  Allison Disart said: ‘Uncle Joe, for God’s sake tell them. Do you value your gold above me?’

  ‘That ain’t fair,’ Joe yelped. ‘My God, how that ain’t fair. I worked all my life to find this kind of claim. Now I got it, it’s took away from me.’