Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  “This way, you stay with me, goddammit. We got some hard travel ahead. We got twenty miles to go in about ten hours. You up to it? ’Cause if you ain’t, I can’t carry you, Mr. Sam.”

  “I will run till I die, Earl. You are a great man. You are a great American.”

  “That I doubt. But I do mean to get you clear of here, goddammit, so let’s go.”

  And off they went into the woods, stopping every one hundred yards or so for Earl to find and cut a rope necklace from a pine trunk.

  THEY got the fire out by dawn, but already the dogs had found the scent.

  “He won’t git far,” Pepper told Sheriff Leon. “My pups got him lined up right fine. They’ll be nipping at him by noon, Sheriff, and by four you can put him back in the cuffs and I can kick his ass for the knot he done give me.” Pepper was the conked one. The left side of his head was swollen like a softball. He had a headache, and he’d swallowed a plug of Brown’s Mule when he’d been hit. That was the worst, for he’d puked brown slop for an hour and it had emptied him of hunger for the ’baccy; so he had two grudges going, one for the knot on the skull, the other for the wasted plug.

  “Yessir, the pups be on his Arkansas be-hind.”

  But the sheriff was not so convinced.

  He knew there had to be a second man and that the second man had to be mighty smart. Already the sheriff found himself behind the eight ball. The fire in town proved to be nothing but an old building burning and some kind of firecracker put together from some .45 shells. It was clever. This feller’d thought hard to come up with that one.

  Meanwhile, as all the sheriff’s deputies are hiding behind trees and looking for targets at what’s nothing but burning lumber, whoever he is is back in the compound, jury-rigging a bomb out of the generator and freeing up that goddamned Arkansas lawyer.

  He should have killed the dogs, though, the sheriff thought. He should have slipped in there and cut twenty dog throats. Why didn’t he kill the dogs?

  “Okay,” he said. “Y’all got your sleeping packs? This may be a long ’un.”

  His deputies by now had switched to hiking boots, for there were no horse trails in the deep woods, and they all carried packs. It was the drill. They’d hunted men before. They also all had rifles.

  “Sheriff, you want I should go on up to the Farm and tell Warden and Bigboy we gots a runner. They’s got them good hounds, too.”

  “Hell, they hounds ain’t no better ’n my hounds,” Pepper put in. “My pups outtrack them mangy Farm mutts any day of the week, including Sunday and Armistice Day. Yes sir, my hounds the best hounds.”

  Pepper’s hound pride meant little to the sheriff, and he considered telling Warden and Bigboy and getting the guards in on the hunt. Some of them were essentially professional manhunters, as they’d run many a nigger to ground their own self over the years. But again: that meant notification and coordination, it meant trying to rendezvous in deep, twisting piney roads and nobody had radios or anything, and it could just mess it up bad. Sometimes too many on a manhunt got in their own way and ended up chasing each the other.

  “Naw, it’s only one man, maybe two. Running through woods they don’t know, toward what they ain’t sure. We knows our land, and them dogs old Pepper has are good enough. You boys, let’s git her going. And, let me say this again, man fleeing justice who done lit up a municipal building is a desperate man. No limit likely on what he’s willing to do to taste some free cooze and a jar of lightning down the road. So if you git him in your sights, you jack. Okay? Understood? You shoot him dead. This boy’s had the smell of mischief on him from the git-go, and his wagon should be fixed. Let’s move it out.”

  With Pepper’s six best hounds straining against their chains, driven almost insane by the thickness of the Sam-smell clinging to the earth, they set out, the dogs snuffling furiously at what they believed to be Sam’s path out of the compound, around the back of the house and crosswise to the wire, where he’d obviously slid underneath.

  The sheriff commanded the wire cut, for now that he’d started he didn’t feel like backtracking to the gate, then circling around again to this spot. One by one his men slipped through, and then he followed.

  “Cut the dogs free, Sheriff?”

  “Cut ’em, Pepper. Let ’em hunt.”

  So Pepper clicked to his animals in some strange dog tongue he knew, and the old blue, the master of the pack, fought through his instincts and settled. Soon the others followed.

  Pepper passed among them, freeing each, and though each had instincts that commanded onward, they had had their obedience beaten into them by Pepper’s brutality, and so they knew they risked a thumping if they disobeyed, no matter how their loins ached to.

  Finally Pepper said, “Go!” and the six took off like nags from a gate, yelping their excitement as they gobbled up the Samness of the track, and plunged, muscles working, jowls slobbering, toward the woods.

  “Oh, they got it rich,” Pepper said. “Watch them pups hunt. They are hunters and they got locked in on that ol’ boy. Going to bring in the meat.”

  The dogs plunged ahead, almost in formation, so strong was the Sam-smell, and for just a second the sheriff allowed himself a whisper of pleasure.

  They had it so strong. They were so sure. It was going to be easy.

  But then the pack seemed to explode. Each dog picked a different direction. One raced into brambles, another circled back around, two more began barking at a tree, and the last two simply stood stock-still and began to whimper. They’d stopped before they’d even got going.

  “What’s happening? They lose it?”

  “Goddamn,” said old Pepper. “Goddamn him, that goddamned tricky bastard.”

  “What happened?”

  “He done laid a false scent. He brings the dogs here where he’s smeared up ever-thing with Arkansas scent. He must have had some clothes or something, and he riled up a big scent trap here, and my pups is all messed up in their heads. It ain’t that there’s no scent, it’s that there’s too goddamned many scents.”

  The sheriff felt the frustration rising in him like a column of steam, pressure increasing, heat rising, pain swelling.

  “Goddamn him! Goddamn him all to hell.”

  “That goddamn lawyer is smart,” said Opie Brown, one of the younger fellows.

  “Lawyer nothing. Some other bird’s in on this one, don’t you see. He been watching us and thinking this thing through a while. Who else set that fire last night, God himself?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Pepper, what we do?”

  “Well, sir, got to start over. Got to run a perimeter until my pups can find the true scent, then we be off.”

  The sheriff knew this would take hours: he and his party and the dogs inscribing a large, slow circle around the compound until one of the dogs came up with a Sam-smell unaffiliated with this riot of Sam-smell here.

  Then the hunt would begin in earnest.

  “We’ll get him, Sheriff,” Opie cried. “Goddamn, I know we will!”

  THEY ran out of loops of rope too early.

  “Goddammit,” said Earl.

  “What?”

  “We’re ahead of schedule.”

  It was still dark in the woods. Around them loomed the shapes of trees rearing up, which men with undisciplined imaginations might have seen as monsters assaulting them, or foreshadowings of impending doom. But Sam didn’t have enough imagination to let run wild, and Earl was too locked into the absolutely necessary. Though a flicker of dawn showed behind them, the sun was still more than half an hour away.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” said Sam, breathing hard.

  “Nah, it’s bad. Means we just sit here till it’s light enough to take a compass reading, goddammit.”

  “You can’t—”

  “No, sir. Can’t see far enough to set a compass reading, shoot an azimuth. Got to sit here till I can make out a landmark half a mile ahead.”

  “We’re hours ahead of them, and
they can’t bring any horses in here.”

  “You’d be surprised how hard men can move when they’re motivated. And that sheriff’s got plenty of motivation. He’s been humiliated in his own little world, and he don’t want that getting out, ’cause everything he has is based on the idea that he is the toughest, smartest, meanest sumbitch in the territory. Seen it in my father, same goddamn mule-pride craziness. He will come after us both barrels, and now we’re stuck just sitting here for a half an hour. How you holding up?”

  “Ah. Okay. I’ve got a blister on my foot.”

  “Got bandages and some aspirin at my goods cache, but that’s still a few miles ahead. That’ll be some help.”

  “Good. I didn’t wear the right shoes for a hike.”

  They both looked at Sam’s leather brogues from Brooks Brothers in St. Louis, a smooth, beautiful shoe in rich mahogany, a successful man’s shoe, and so out of place in the woods it was almost laughable.

  “You just keep on pumping,” Earl said. “You do that, I’ll have you home to your kids in two days.”

  “The hell with my kids. I just want to see Connie Longacre.”

  “She is some gal—”

  “Earl, an experience like this, gets a man to thinking, and I—”

  “Save it, Mr. Sam. Not for now. Save your breath. You’ll need every little bitty piece of it before this here thing is run out.”

  In twenty minutes Earl found just enough light to shoot his azimuth to a terrain feature, and they were off again, and an hour after that found Earl’s goods cached out of sight behind a log, in some high, dry grass.

  Earl unscrewed his canteen and Sam took a good long draft. Earl got clean, dry socks out of his pack, and a bandage, and Sam took off his shoes, threw away the socks, bandaged his foot and pulled on the dry socks, which, being thicker, fit not quite so well in the tight, sodden shoes.

  “That’s okay,” said Earl, “they’ll loosen, you’ll be fine.”

  Then he reached further into his pack and pulled out a .45 automatic, which had been worked on a few years back: it had a larger than usual rear sight welded to the receiver and some kind of shelf on the safety.

  “Here. This is for you.”

  “Earl, I can’t accept that. I cannot kill to get away. That invalidates anything I have ever stood for, which is the law.”

  “Mr. Sam,” said Earl, as he reached further into the dry grass to pull out his Winchester ’95 carbine, “do you see much in the way of law out here? We are on our own, and no law’s going to help us.”

  “Earl, I know you to be a moral man, a decent man, a good man. They say you are the best policeman in the state, and I know in the war you done fine work for our side. But I must say it amazes me how quickly and well you convert to the other side. It’s as if your great gifts for action, well-conceived thought, for capability beyond all men, could go either way. I hope your boy grows up to be the straight and narrow you, and if you have another son, I hope he doesn’t grow up to walk the crooked, violent road.”

  “Are you ready?” Earl said, returning the untaken pistol to his pack.

  “Earl, you cannot kill with that rifle. Kill a man and you have crossed over.”

  “I will not kill except to save you, Mr. Sam. Except a dog. I may have to kill a goddamned dog or two. That I will not enjoy, but if it has to happen, it will.”

  And that was when they heard, far off and scratchy, the sound of the hounds.

  “My, my,” said Earl. “I do believe they are still in the hunt.”

  THE dogs had something.

  “The pups got ’em. Yes sir, got one of ’em treed.”

  The pitch of their barking changed. It was not the unfocused yipping of the tracking animals who made noise to keep themselves amused and because it was their way. It was focused, ferocious, and intense.

  As they came into a clearing, they all saw them gathered.

  “Yes sir, by God, got a one of ’em treed, you can see, ha, goin’ to git that sumbitch, yes, sir, oh, them wunnerful doggies!” cried Pepper, his throat phlegmy with glee.

  The hounds circled a large pine, three on point, the other two trying to leap up the trunk, snarling fiercely. Only the big blue was apart, as if not sanctioning this development.

  “Okay, fellows,” yelled the sheriff, “now you git around ’em and be care—”

  One shot sent a Winchester bullet blowing through the clusters of pine needles, and then they all opened up, shot after shot after shot laying into the tree, puffing it with green haze as the bullets ripped through. Dust and pulverized bark rose from the tree, a limb hit precisely tumbled off under its own weight.

  “Cease fire, goddammit!” yelled Sheriff Leon, and one by one the men stopped firing.

  “Take cover, and keep the tree covered, goddammit. Just wait and see what you bagged.”

  The men scurried to cover, and the dogs, who had scattered at the first reports, reassembled under the tree and recommenced trying to leap and nip at it.

  The sheriff waited another three minutes, then slowly drew his Smith .38/44 Heavy-Duty.

  “Y’all cover me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Opie, you don’t be shootin’ me, you hear?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Opie.

  The sheriff slid on the angle toward the tree, and as a veteran of several gun battles—he’d worked on the New Orleans police force before being cashiered for corruption back in 1932, at which time he’d started his new career as a prison guard at Thebes, which led ultimately to this position—he knew what he was doing. Keeping the gun out before him aggressively, his finger caressing the trigger, he at last ducked under the skirt of boughs and pointed upward to see what he could see.

  “Well,” he finally said, when he emerged, “why’n’t you boys come see what you have killed.”

  The deputies raced to the tree.

  About ten feet up, hanging on a sheared-off limb and surrounded by the pock and puncture marks of too many rifle bullets, they could see two black socks hanging limply.

  “You killed that lawyer’s socks,” said the sheriff. “Pity he ain’t in them.”

  “THEY are truly a disciplined bunch,” said Sam, when a mile or so behind them the firing eventually stopped. “You were right. They attacked my socks. They were fancy socks, too. I don’t suppose I’ll ever get them back.”

  “You never know,” said Earl. “These backwoods fellows, they don’t like to waste a thing. Probably someone named Billy or Ray Ed or something is trying ’em on right now. You could come down in ten years or so when everybody’s forgot all about this, and probably find them on his feet on Sunday at the meeting.”

  The pines showed no particular tendency toward abatement, though now and then they’d come to a logged out area, which upset Earl; he would not let them pass through the open land, because a rifleman who got there before they cleared its bare spaces might get a good, clean shot off, and one was all it took.

  “On the other hand,” Sam had argued, “we can make better time, because the ground is less cluttered with these goddamned vines and weeds and things. We can advance our lead and—”

  “But they can make better time too. They’re following our smell. We go ’round, they go ’round. That’s it. Either that, or you figure out a way to stop smelling. When you get that one done, you let me know.”

  “Should have known I couldn’t outthink Earl Swagger on some tactics issue,” said Sam.

  “I got a bagful of tricks,” said Earl. “Only goddamned thing I know at all in this world.”

  But he hadn’t sprung his best trick yet. He’d been looking for just such an opportunity, which demanded the congruence of stout trees, not pines, but the occasional oaks that sprung up helter-skelter in the woods. He needed a dead one, with a nice spike of splintered trunk atop it.

  And at last, on the far side of a gentle hill, he found it.

  “Okay,” he said. “You take a rest.”

  “Earl,” said Sam, his face a
shine with sweat, “you know those boys can’t be that far behind.”

  “I got a little something here. This one’s real pretty.”

  Earl knelt and reached into his pack. He came out with a big coil of rope. He diddled with it, until at last he’d fashioned a cowboy’s lariat with its expandable loop just perfect for bringing down running steers from close-by horseback.

  “We used to see them Western-type movies in the Pacific when we wasn’t killin’ Japs. You know, with that feller John Wayne, you seen any of them?”

  “Yes, Earl, of course I’ve seen Westerns. But what on earth—”

  “Oh, you just watch me now.”

  Earl swung the looped rope overhead, building up a nice rhythm and swoop, then let the thing fly and it soared the thirty feet or so to the spike and missed.

  “Goddamn,” he barked.

  “I’ll go—”

  “No. You stay where you are.”

  Instead of retrieval, Earl snapped the rope back slowly so that it wouldn’t catch on anything. Then he began again, flinging the rope across and—

  This time he got it right, and the loop settled over the spiked trunk and slipped down.

  “There we go.”

  With that he went to another oak, this one alive, pulled himself up a bit, got to the second branch, pulled the rope tight but not too tight, so that it had some spring to it, and secured it by a peculiar knot to the trunk.

  He scurried down.

  “Now you come on.”

  “What are you up to, Earl, this is the craziest—”

  “You just come with me.”

  They forged ahead another hundred yards.

  “That’s fine. That’s right good. Now come on.”

  They backtracked to the tree.

  “Now sir, you git up that tree and you hand-over-hand across to the other tree.”

  “Earl, I don’t see—”