As it was, he stood watch himself most of the night.
Lorena proved a competent traveling companion. They had bacon and coffee, acquired in Fort Stockton, and she had coffee made and bacon fried not long after they made camp. In the morning, she cooked them a bite of breakfast before first light.
"That cowboy reminded me an awful lot of Dish," Call said, as they ate. "I'd like to see Dish sometime. I never expected him to go in the hardware business." "I wonder if he married?" Lorena said. Dish had been in love with her once; he had stayed in love for several years.
It was a love she couldn't return, though--she just couldn't. Some traveler told her that Dish had taken a sledgehammer and used it to smash a heavy barrel of horseshoe nails, in his surprise and disappointment, when the news reached him that she had married Pea Eye. The traveler said that people in Lincoln were worried that Dish would lose his mind from disappointment, even though by that time, she hadn't so much as seen him in over three years.
Lorena didn't know what had kept her so stiff with Dish. She had just got stiff. For a time in Nebraska, he had brought her flowers and given her little presents, but it hadn't changed anything.
Then she fell in love with Pea Eye, who would never have ventured to choose a present for her, or pick her a flower, either.
"I guess I should have left Pea Eye at home," Call said, after they ate. "Then you wouldn't have had to make this long trip." "It won't matter, once I get him back," Lorena said.
The way she said it made Call wish they could hurry along a little faster, or that Pea Eye would get wind that his wife was coming and ride to meet them. He felt he had run a miserable expedition so far; it was the most ineffective of his life. Three families had been inconvenienced, with as yet no progress at all in the matter of Joey Garza. Rumor in Fort Stockton had it that Joey had gone back to Coahuila, but no one really had the details, and Call didn't know how much credit to give the rumor. Now he regretted that he had taken Brookshire with him, or Deputy Plunkert, either. Colonel Terry would rightly be incensed at the long wait and the absence of results.
Brookshire had lost his wife while on the trip, and Pea Eye had lost time from his farming.
Lorena had to take leave from her schoolteaching.
When they got to Presidio, he meant to send everyone home. From that point on, he would hunt Joey Garza alone.
Call wished his neck would ease up. He had rarely felt a pain more intense than the fire that shot up his neck if he moved his head a little too quickly. He also wished the cold would abate.
In the morning, his hands were so swollen that he had increasing trouble doing the packing. Lorena saddled her mount and was ready to go before he could complete his chores.
When they got ready to start, Call noticed two horses standing a fair distance to the northwest of their camp.
"I wonder if those cowboys lost some horses," he said. "If they did, there'll be trouble when they get to John Chisum's. He's the kind of man who counts his horses, and he expects a full count." He finished his coffee. Lorena was about done with her packing. Their breaths made clouds of steam; it was hard to see the knots they had to tie to secure their duffle.
"I think I'll just ride out and check the brands on those horses," Call said. "I don't know why those men would let those horses stray. They seemed like competent men." He put his horse into a short lope. Before going a quarter of a mile, he surprised two mule deer, a doe with a fawn. They had been bedded down, but jumped up and scampered off. In the clear air he had misjudged the distance to the horses a bit; they were farther from camp than he thought. While Call was watching the mule deer, his horse shied at a badger that waddled out from behind a sage bush, practically at the horse's feet.
The horse crow-hopped a time or two, just enough to cause Call to lose a stirrup.
He had the horse almost calmed down and was searching for the stirrup with his foot when the first bullet struck him, low in the chest. Careless, he thought; too careless, and now I'm shot. He whirled his mount and yanked his rifle from the saddle scabbard, but his hands were so stiff with cold that he dropped the weapon. Just as he did, a second bullet smashed his knee and evidently went through and wounded his horse, for the horse squealed and began to buck. A third shot hit his arm. Call was trying to hang on; he couldn't afford to be thrown, not with the bullets coming so fast and so, accurately.
They seemed to him to be coming from under one of the stray horses. Careless, he thought again. He's shooting from under the horse, and I rode right out to him. Then he lost his seat and was thrown hard, in the direction of the rifle he had dropped. Fortunately, he was able to reach the rifle. He had to work the lever with one hand, but as soon as he could sit up he began to fire in the direction of the horses.
One of them raced away, but the other stood exactly where it had been, hobbled, probably, so the rifleman could shoot from underneath it, hidden by the sage.
There was a final shot--it brought down Call's horse.
All he could do then was wait, in the hope that the killer would be foolhardy enough to come and try and finish him off. After the shot that killed his horse, there was not a sound from the northwest. Call knew he would have to try and staunch his bleeding soon. He had been hit three times, and the bullets were heavy caliber. His left arm and right leg were smashed for good; the arm was practically shot off. When he looked at his knee, he saw bone fragments through the hole in his pants. The first wound, the one in the chest, was bleeding more than it should. If he didn't staunch it soon he might faint, and if he fainted, he was lost, and probably Lorena, too.
Call raked up a little sand and covered the chest wound with it, pulling aside his shirt. The sandy poultice quickly grew muddy with blood, but it was the only way he had of staunching the blood flow; he kept raking sand and patting it onto his chest.
He raised up only high enough to see that the hobbled horse was still there. Any higher he couldn't risk.
He felt a deep shame when he thought of Lorena, back at the camp alone. She would have heard the shots, and he hoped that she would run.
There were ranches to the south. Perhaps she could survive long enough to reach one of them, if the killer didn't strike her, too. He had brought her with him, and then failed to protect her--the very thing he had mentioned, and the very thing he had feared. Now he himself might be dying. The chest wound probably involved a lung. He could feel the bullet like a nut inside him when he coughed. Call knew he should not have let the killer know that he'd got his rifle--that was another mistake. Now there was little hope that the killer, Joey Garza probably, would expose himself at all, and even if he was reckless and let himself be seen, Call knew it would only be luck if he could hit him, shooting one-handed.
He had botched the matter completely; everything was his fault. He had known in his gut that someone was following them, someone so clever that unending vigilance was essential. But the fact that the cowboys had apparently lost two horses, a normal thing, had distracted him to such an extent that he had just ridden out casually, as he would have under normal circumstances, to have a look.
Now a clever boy, shooting from under a hobbled horse, had done what all the fighters he had engaged with over four decades--Kicking Bird, the Comanche; the Kiowa Pedro Flores; and outlaws of all description, both Mexican and American--had failed to do. He was hit, and hit soundly. Probably only the fact that his horse was restive caused the first bullet to miss his heart. It hadn't missed it by much, at that, if it had missed it. Perhaps it was his heart's blood he was pumping out.
Once before, he had been hit by a bullet.
That bullet was fired by an Apache, as Call was about to cross the Pecos River with Gus McCrae's body, on the long trek back from Miles City, Montana, where Gus had died.
But that bullet had merely lodged in his side and had touched no vital organs. It was a nuisance, mainly; it pained him at times, but Call didn't regard it as a serious wound and had never bothered to have it cut out. The Apache had
shot from a considerable distance, too; the bullet had been almost spent when it hit him. It didn't stop him from crossing the river, or from burying Gus McCrae where he had wanted to be buried.
Now Call knew he was so badly hit that he would be lucky to live. He didn't expect that he would live and didn't care, really, if he could only kill Joey Garza before he died.
He felt that he had to kill him; it was the only way to provide any measure of safety for Lorena. And not just Lorena, either. There was Pea Eye and Brookshire and Deputy Plunkert to think of. The ease with which Joey Garza, if it was the young bandit, had drawn him in range, and the consistency of the shooting, was a shock. Shooting from under a horse was an old, old trick. The Indians had done it routinely. Call reproached himself bitterly for carelessness, for assuming the horses were strays. But he knew that he could reproach himself for a year and not alter the truth, which was that someone, Joey Garza most likely, had outsmarted him easily and shot him, probably mortally. What made the failure worse was that the burden of his error would be visited upon people who had depended on him. It would be visited on Lorena, and probably on Pea Eye and Brookshire and Deputy Plunkert, too.
Call remembered Mox Mox, and the Cherokee killer, Jimmy Cumsa. He considered the possibility that they had lured him out of camp.
Perhaps it was Jimmy Cumsa who had shot from under the tethered horse. But Call didn't think so.
Mox Mox was like most outlaws, careless and lazy. He had made camp in a place that laid him open to easy ambush. He had posted no guard. Nothing he had done had been smart or well planned.
Crouched behind a sage bush, one arm and one leg useless, Call felt a desperate need to slay his murderer before he died. He felt the wound in his chest; it seemed to him the bleeding was slowing. He might have an hour--he might have more--but he doubted he had much more.
He didn't think his opponent was Mox Mox, or the Cherokee, either. They ran, and he imagined they would keep running. But someone had followed him, and waited while he was in Fort Stockton, and then had picked up the trail when he and Lorena left town. It was the sense that he was being followed that caused the terrible ache in his neck, Call was sure of that. Never before in his life had he been unable to backtrack and surprise a pursuer. Rarely had he encountered an outlaw with the patience to wait outside a town for three days, in bitter cold, until his prey took to the trail. Most outlaws acted on impulse. They rarely planned, and when they did plan, the slightest hitch was likely to cause them to abandon their plans. Many an innocent citizen had fallen because some bank robber saw a deputy sheriff approaching as the robbery was in progress. Usually, the robber started shooting; rarely was the deputy the one killed. Old ladies chatting with a teller got killed, or merchants who picked a bad time to make a deposit got killed.
Call knew that successful bandits had their reputations inflated by rumor. The press helped bandits get names for themselves. People in small towns, who were bored most of their lives, thought bandits were colorful. The newspapers printed the gossip, and pretty soon everyone on the frontier would get the notion that a certain bandit was invincible, when in fact, few of them were particularly able, or more than moderately smart.
But the person who had put three bullets in him in less than five seconds was exceptional. Call knew his first mistake had been a reluctance to believe that the Garza boy actually might .be exceptional. He had assumed that his was just another case of inflated reputation. He had only begun to suspect differently when he hadn't been able to catch Joey Garza following him. Call had known it, when the boy had ridden up almost before he was out of sight, and killed Roy Bean.
Yet he hadn't acted on his knowledge. He had eaten Lorena's bacon, drunk her coffee, and loped out to check the brands on two horses, as if Joey Garza was any other killer.
He had failed in vigilance, and now he was paying for his failure. That had always been the way of the frontier. If you failed in vigilance, you usually died. Rarely would the frontier permit a lapse as serious as the one he had just made.
Call considered that he had always been able to draw on more will than most men possessed. He could keep riding longer and keep fighting harder than any man he had worked with. He had never considered himself brilliant, and as a rider or a shot he was only average. But he could keep going in situations where others had to stop. He had never quit a fight, and the fight he was in now demanded just that persistence of him. He might be dying, but he couldn't quit until he had killed his killer. If he failed, all his effort would have been futile, and the lives of people who trusted him deeply would, in all likelihood, be forfeit.
Call risked sitting up for a second to see if he could catch a glimpse of the rifleman.
The hobbled horse was exactly where it had been.
But Call saw no one--not a movement, not a hat, not a glint of sun on a rifle barrel.
He flattened himself on his belly and began to push the rifle ahead of him. He wished he could simply cut off the useless arm and the useless leg.
The leg was the worst--he didn't look at his knee, but he knew it must be nothing but bone fragments. The pain was beginning, and when he moved, sharp points of bone tore at what flesh was left. The arm he didn't feel. He pulled himself along on his one good elbow. For a while he pushed the rifle ahead of him, but he soon abandoned the rifle and took out his pistol instead. If he got a shot at Joey Garza, it would likely be at close range. If it wasn't at close range, he would probably miss anyway, particularly if he tried to shoot a rifle with one hand.
Every few minutes, Call raised up. His vision annoyed him. He couldn't see sharply.
He could see the horse but not the shooter. It angered him. His eyesight was no longer adequate to the work he had tried to do. No doubt Gus McCrae or Charles Goodnight, men renowned for the sharpness of their vision, would have seen the boy under the horse while still safely out of rifle range. Either one of them could have seen that the horse was hobbled, and have avoided the bullets. He had tried spectacles but found them irritating, and he had not provided himself with any for the trip. That little neglect was another reason he was shot and dying.
Call kept on crawling. The hobbled horse had been some two hundred yards away when the shots came. Call wiggled for nearly half the distance, the pain in his leg growing more terrible with every movement. He left a trail of blood on the sand and on the sage bushes as he crawled. But he began to grow weak, and he began to feel light-headed. He saw that he wasn't going to make it to the hobbled horse. He wouldn't last that long.
Besides, the boy might not even be there. He might have been so confident of the wounds he had given that he had simply slipped away. Call felt his strength failing. He had crawled a long way, but he was still just half the distance to the horse, and had still not caught one glimpse of human movement.
He decided to tempt the boy, if the boy was there. He would show himself; maybe the boy would want to laugh at him, taunt him, shoot him again. If so, Call might be lucky enough to get off two or three pistol shots. If he was very lucky, he might put the boy down.
It was a gamble, of course. He had never shot especially well with the pistol, and the Garza boy would not likely be such a fool as to come close.
So far, the Garza boy had been no sort of fool at all.
But it was a chance--his only chance. In another few minutes, he might pass out. Already he had lost so much blood that his hand was unsteady.
Call wished he had kept pushing the rifle. It would make a fair crutch, something to support him when he stood up. But he had foolishly left it. He would just have to teeter as best he could and hope the Garza boy would be amused enough to expose himself.
Very carefully, Call got into a sitting position. He had his pistol on cock. He got his good leg under him and rested a minute. When he tried to take a deep breath to steady himself, he coughed. Again, he felt the first bullet, like a nut in his chest.
But he gathered himself, wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his good arm, wiped t
he blood off the gun with his shirttail, and slowly eased up. The hobbled horse was still hobbled. Call could see nothing beneath it.
Then he heard a movement to his left and shot three times at the sound. It had sounded like a human footstep--Joey Garza had probably been sneaking up to finish him. But to his immediate, bitter disappointment, Call saw that it was only the mule deer he had scared earlier. He had shot the big doe. She bucked a few times and ran off, the fawn bounding after her through the sage.
Call knew it was no good. It was a failure; a botch. Joey Garza had left.
He might have already found Lorena and killed her.
Perhaps Joey wouldn't bother with her. After all, he had killed the bounty hunter, and there would be no one to interfere with his robbing for a while. Perhaps the clever boy would just ride away.
But it was clear that all the options belonged to Joey Garza. Call couldn't see him, couldn't find him, couldn't affect his actions. He eased back down. He had begun to feel the dangling arm, as well as the shattered leg. He lay flat, concealing the pistol under his bloody shirttail. If the boy did happen to ride by to inspect the body, Call might yet get off a shot. But he didn't expect this to happen.
His head was swimming. He was so light in the head that he felt he was off the ground. He seemed to be somewhere between the sagebrush and the moving clouds.
He tried to keep his eyes open. He felt dreamy and tried to fight the feeling. He kept telling himself that any moment he might look up and see the Garza boy standing over him, or looking down at him from horseback. He had to try to stay alert. But his eyelids wouldn't obey. They kept closing, at first for only a fraction of a second. But then it seemed to Call that despite himself, he was floating away into the world behind his eyelids. They wouldn't stay open. They wouldn't.
In the world behind his eyelids, everything was white.
When Lorena heard the shooting, she quickly took her pistol out of her bag. In Presidio, Captain Call had given her one of his rifles; she took that, too.
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