The Bounty Hunters

by Elmore Leonard

  “This side of the first stall.”

  Madora’s hand went into his coat pocket and came out with a match. He scratched it against the board partition and just ahead of him Flynn saw a yellow flare and Madora’s face close to the boards.

  And the heavy, ringing, solid slam of the rifle report was there with the match flare. Flynn went down instinctively. The match went out and he heard Madora gasp as if he’d been hit hard in the stomach, and the sound of his weight falling against the partition.

  “Joe!”

  Flynn was rising. Three shots then in quick succession in the close stillness and he went down flat, hearing the horses scream, knowing they had been hit. In front of him, Madora’s mare fell heavily and did not move, but his own broke away and veered out into Stockman Street. His pistol was in his hand, but there was nothing, only the darkness and the stabled mounts moving nervously, bumping the boards and nickering.

  Suddenly the rear door, not more than fifty feet away, swung open with the sound of hoofs striking boards and packed earth and momentarily horse and rider were framed against the dusk, pushing through as the door swung open only part way. Flynn fired, the heavy revolver lifting in his hand, and then horse and rider were gone and he could hear the hoofbeats outside, on the street beyond the livery.

  Madora was breathing with his mouth open, his chest rising and falling with a wheezing sound. Flynn’s hand went over him gently until he felt the wet smear of blood just above his waist at his side.

  “Joe, you’ll be all right. It probably went clean through you.”

  Madora tried to answer, but he could not. He was breathing harder, gasping.

  There were footsteps behind them.

  “What happened?”

  Then more steps on the packed ground and a familiar voice. It belonged to the barber, John Willet.

  “Soon as I seen him I knew…tearing up Commercial like that. I didn’t even hear the shots and I knew.”

  Someone said, “Who?”

  “Who do you think!” Willet’s voice was edged with nervousness. “Frank Rellis. My God, he’s done it now….”

  3

  Late in the afternoon the sky changed to pale gray and there was rain in the air, the atmosphere close and stifling, and a silence clung heavily to the flat colorless plain. The distant peaks to the east, the Dragoons, rose gigantically into the grayness, seeming nearer than they were, and the towering irregular crests were lost in the hazy flat color of the sky.

  The sudden threat of rain was relief after the relentless sun glare of the morning. They had traveled through it saying little, their eyes heavy-lidded against the glare. Flynn’s searching, from habit swinging a slow wide arc that took in every brush clump and rise, then lifting to the rimrock and squinting for the thin wisp of smoke that would be almost transparent in the sunlight, or the mirror flashes that no white man could read, and half expecting one or the other to be there—because you never knew. There were reservations; still, you never knew.

  Flynn followed the sway of his horse loosely, a dun mare that he had bought last night, listening to the squeak of saddle leather. His hat was straight across his eyebrows and he seemed tired, listless; yet his eyes never ceased the slow swing over the valley. Often he would slip his boots from the stirrups and let his legs hang free. All things become routine. Relax, and be watchful at the same time. Relax only, and in Apache country it will kill you.

  He thought about Joe Madora and he could still hear the wheezing sound of his breathing. The crowd that had formed almost out of the air. First they were alone, then there were voices, dozens of voices, and one that he recognized. John Willet’s voice. He had heard John Willet very clearly say the name Frank Rellis. He had told Bowers about it before they started out that morning. Bowers said he was sorry, that was about all.

  Bowers wore civilian clothes now, a gray broad-cloth suit that he had worn on furlough perhaps a year or two before and now was too small for him.

  The doctor had worked on Madora a long time, half the night, and stayed there the rest of it, up in the hotel room where they’d carried the wounded man. He’d stop the bleeding, then it would start again and he’d work at the wound, applying compresses. Madora was unconscious by then, his eyes closed rightly as if ready to snap open at any moment. Flynn had watched the face more than he did the doctor’s hands working at the middle of Madora’s body, because he expected the face to become colorless and the eyes to open. He was sure they would open, because almost every dead man he could remember had been lying with his eyes open. He had placed small stones over the eyelids when he had the time. That was a strange thing. No, that’s why you remember them. There were others with eyes closed that you don’t remember.

  But Madora’s face remained calm, and though the bearded skin was pale, it did not become drained of all its color.

  Flynn slept for an hour before dawn and when he awoke and pulled on his boots and strapped on his gun, the doctor told him that the old man had a chance to live, but he wouldn’t advise making any hotel reservation in his name.

  They camped early because of the rain threat and rigged their ponchos into a lean-to. But the rain never came. And later on, when the moon appeared, its outline was hazy and there were few stars in the deep blackness.

  Flynn lay back with his head on his saddle and lighted a thin Mexican cigar. In three and a half days we’ll be there. Soyopa. And then we will watch and get to know this Apache and see if there is a pattern to the way he lives. What are his limitations? Where is his weak spot?

  He stopped suddenly and blew the smoke out slowly and smiled to himself. What’s the hurry? As old as he is, he’ll probably be there years after you’re gone. Luck doesn’t last forever, you know. It stretches so far and when you’re not looking there’s a pop and it’s all over and you don’t know what hit you. He smiled again. But that’s if you’re lucky. That’s how luck runs out if you’re lucky.

  He relighted the cigar and it was a soft glow in the corner of his mouth. Lying on his back, looking up into the darkness, his hand moved the cigar idly from one side of his mouth to the other, half biting and half just feeling the strong tobacco between his lips. He could see the girl’s face clearly. Nita Esteban. He had thought of her because he had thought of Soyopa. The lines of her face were sensitive, delicate, and her lips parted slightly as she smiled. She had worn a red scarf over her slim shoulders and held the ends of it in front of her. He remembered the red scarf well. What would she be, seventeen? Not much older.

  He watched the eternity of the sky. The dark was restful, but the vastness was cold and made you draw something close to you. His head rolled on the saddle and he saw Bowers’ form across the small fire. He’s trying to figure out what the hell he’s doing here, Flynn thought.

  Maybe we’ll catch the Estebans. That would be good. Then we could talk about all those things Deneen brought up and be familiar with them before reaching Soyopa.

  Bowers is honest, though. He doesn’t like something and he shows it. He doesn’t like this, but he doesn’t realize what is involved. He thinks it is dull routine that will keep him out of the promotion light for too long. Probably he has been talking to Deneen and Deneen had told him to keep an eye on me because, well, even though Flynn was an officer at one time, he’s not the most reliable man in the world, you see he resigned his commission because he was hotheaded and maybe a little afraid of what was to come. Those things happen.

  Bowers thinks all the time and he doesn’t smile.

  And his dad was Division Commander over Deneen during the war. What’s that got to do with Bowers being here now? Something. You can bet your best plugged peso, something.

  You smiled most of the time at first, he told himself. You smiled to show you were eager. A smile shows sincerity. Warmhearted, clean-souled, open-minded…and inexperienced.

  Flynn thought of the gray morning in April when he had crossed the Rappahannock with Averell’s Brigade. Seventeen years old and a second lieutenant bec
ause his father knew somebody. He remembered Deneen, who had been his captain then, his first captain, saying, nodding to the hills, “They’re up there. Those gray-coated, sorghumeating manure spreaders are up there. We get them before they get us.” He had been close to Deneen and he had smiled, because Deneen was a captain and had taken them through training and he talked like a cavalryman was supposed to talk.

  They met Fitz Lee, who was part of Stuart’s sabers, and almost cut him to pieces, but they couldn’t finish it because the rebel pickets were too close and by then the alarm had been spread. It was a good day and he had thought: This won’t be so bad.

  Then Chancellorsville. The third night it had been raining hard, but it stopped a matter of minutes after their patrol came in. The rebel artillery started up shortly after this. Whitworths pouring it down from the thicketed heights.

  His sergeant had appeared to him in the darkness, in the cold miserable darkness, showing the whites of his eyes with his body tensed stiffly.

  “My God, I saw him do it!”

  “What?”

  “With his own pistol.”

  “What—damn it!”

  The sergeant led him back into a pine stand. Deneen was sitting beneath thick, dripping branches, huddled close to the tree trunk. His pistol was in his hand. And the toe of his right boot was missing—where he had shot it away.

  They carried him to the rear and said shrapnel to the orderly who was filling out the tag which was attached to Deneen’s tunic. The remainder of the night Flynn did not smile because he was muscle-tight in the mud as A. P. Hill’s Whitworths continued to slam down from Hazel Grove.

  In the morning he found the sergeant dead; killed in the shelling. And he realized he was the only one who knew about Deneen.

  After that he smiled when he felt like smiling.

  In the army it wasn’t necessary. Most of the time it helped, but it wasn’t necessary. He had seen men do more than just smile to wangle a post assignment back East. He had accepted this, regarding it as something contemptible, but still, none of his business. He had accepted this and all of the unmilitary facets of army life because there was nothing he could do about them. The politics could go their smiling, boot-licking way.

  There had to be men on frontier station. There had to be men who took dirty assignments and made successes of them. And when he found himself in the role—when he found himself in a part of the army which still occasionally fought, he accepted it as quickly and as readily as the politics. Somebody had to do it. Do what you can do best. That’s how to make a success. Even if the success is only a self-satisfaction.

  But there was an end to it.

  The beginning of the end was the day a Major Deneen suddenly appeared at Fort Thomas as Post Commandant.

  He said nothing to Deneen about that night at Chancellorsville; and was shocked when one day he heard Deneen refer to his wound quite proudly. Others were present, but Deneen had looked directly at Flynn as he described it, the shelling, and the damn odd place to be caught by shrapnel. Flynn was certain, then, that Deneen had been in a state of shock and was not even slightly aware of what had happened that night.

  Then, suddenly, Flynn found himself with unreasonable hastily planned assignments. He had had them before—all patrols were not routine—but now they began in earnest. Bold orders that were cavalry, but not the way to fight Apaches. Following sign blindly because Deneen insisted on speed. Wandering, ill-provisioned decoy patrols that whittled down his men. In seven months he had lost more men than any officer at Fort Thomas.

  The end came during the Tonto campaign, almost a full year to the day since Deneen had arrived as post commander. They had chased Primero and his Tonto Apaches for five weeks and toward the end, when they knew they had the war chief and his small band, Deneen took the field. He arrived in the evening as three companies were closing in on Bosque Canyon in the Mogollon country. Primero was inside, somewhere among the shadowy rock formations.

  And Deneen ordered Flynn to take half of B and gallop through the narrow passage in order to draw fire. That would tell them where the damn hostiles were!

  “I suggest scouting first, sir.”

  “You suggest nothing.”

  “Madora’s Coyotero scouts could belly in after dark and tell us exactly where they are.”

  “Are you refusing an order?”

  He went in at dawn with fourteen men. Yes, they drew fire…and it was almost noon before they were pulled out. Six of them, Flynn with an arrow wound in his thigh.

  Deneen was in the tent they had rigged for him. He was not present as they brought in what was left of B, and Flynn found him there alone.

  “You’re killing good men to get me.”

  Deneen said nothing.

  “You knew what you were doing at Chancellorsville. I should have realized it before this. You’re afraid of me because of what I know. You’re afraid I’ll tell others what a yellow son of a bitch of an excuse for a man you are!”

  Calmly, quietly, “When we return to Thomas, Mr. Flynn, you will be confined to your quarters. At the moment, you are in need of the surgeon’s attention.”

  He resigned shortly after that and never again referred to Chancellorsville in Deneen’s or anyone else’s presence. It would do little good to tell others. Some would believe him, most would not, and either way it would accomplish nothing. He resigned hastily; too hastily perhaps, and regretted it almost immediately.

  He did the next best thing—in many respects, the better thing, as he came to know his job more thoroughly—he signed up as a contract guide. He could make his own calculations and patrol officers respected his opinion. He had learned from Joe Madora and that was good enough for most. Many of these officers were new to him, for he made sure he was not assigned to Fort Thomas. But after Deneen was appointed Department Adjutant, he did work out of Thomas for almost a year—seeing Deneen occasionally, seldom speaking to him—until he was assigned to the territorial prison at Yuma. Madora fought it because it was a sheer waste of Flynn’s capabilities, but he could do nothing. The order had come from the office of the Department Adjutant.

  He resigned again, this time breaking all ties, and went gold prospecting down into the Sierra Madre.

  Now you’re back, he thought, still watching the sky. Because this is what you like to do and you hoped Deneen might have forgotten. But nothing has changed. Deneen is still Deneen. It’s something in his mind. You are the only living man who saw what happened that night at Chancellorsville, which seems so long ago; something he’s trying to convince himself did not happen. As if by getting you out of his sight it will cease to have ever existed.

  But now you’re back and he’s going to a lot of trouble to make you quit again. It must be very important to him. What did Madora say: You might be mad enough to do this just so you can throw it back in Deneen’s face. Does that make sense? I don’t know. But this time there’s no quitting. The sooner he realizes it, the better. It will either straighten him out, or drive him crazier than he already is. But it is hard to feel sorry for him.

  4

  Early afternoon of the third day, in high timbered country, they looked out over a yellow stretch of plain to see smoke rising from the hills beyond. It lifted lazily in a wavering thin column above the ragged hillcrests.

  “From here,” Bowers said, “it could even be a barbecue.” He put his glasses on the spot and focused, clearing the haze, drawing the thin spire closer. He studied the land silently.

  “Coming from a draw beyond that first row of hills,” he said then. “I would say—two miles.”

  “Not much more,” Flynn said. “A trail cuts through the trough of the hills directly across from us.”

  “What’s there that will burn?”

  “Nothing.”

  “A house?”

  “Not unless it was built in the last six months. It would be a jacale—and brush houses don’t burn that long.”

  “Well, maybe it’s…” He would have said
, A wagon or wagon train, but he stopped, remembering the Esteban family that Flynn had described to him being only a day or so ahead of them; and he felt suddenly self-conscious, as if Flynn were reading his thoughts; and he said, “I don’t know.”

  “You were going to say wagons, weren’t you?”

  Bowers nodded.

  They had dismounted. Now they stepped into the saddles and nudged their mounts out of the timber diagonally down the slope that fell to the plain, and reaching the level they followed the base of the hill through head-high brush, keeping the plain on their left. They went on almost two miles until the plain began to crumble into depressions and the brush patches thickened, and when finally the flatness gave way to rockier ground they turned from the hill and moved across slowly so there would be no dust. They were beyond the smoke column, which had thinned, and now they doubled back more than a mile before climbing into timber again, following switchbacks single file as the hill rose steeper.

  Near the crest, they tied their mounts and both drew Springfield carbines from the saddle boots.

  Bowers lifted a holstered revolving pistol which hung from the saddle horn and secured it to the gun belt low on his hip. Watching him, Flynn’s elbow tightened against his body to feel the heavy bulk of his own pistol beneath the coat.

  “Ready?”

  Bowers nodded and they moved up the remaining dozen yards of the hill, brushing the pine branches silently. At its crest the hill flattened into a narrow grove, thick with piñons. They passed through in a half-crouch and went down on hands and knees when the trees ended abruptly in a sandy slope that dropped before them more than a hundred feet. Below, the pines took up again, but here were taller and more thinly scattered. Through them, they could see patches of the trail which passed through the trough of the hill.

  And directly below them, through a wide smooth-sand clearing, they saw the charred shapes of three wagons.

  They were no longer wagons but retained some identity in a grotesque, blackened flimsiness; two of the wagons, their trees pointing skyward and only half burned, were rammed into the bed of the third which was over on its side. The mules had been cut from the traces and were not in sight.