Nest of Vipers (9781101613283)

by Sherman, Jory

  Julio chased the two pulling horses back down into the valley.

  He rode back to where Joe waited. “We’ll have to hide our horses up in the timber where I have my lean-to,” he said.

  “Then we carry our canteens back down here,” Julio said.

  “We’ll bring back grub. That roll of twine. We may have a long wait.”

  “I know,” Julio said. He dismounted and handed his reins to Joe.

  “After we bring the grub and such, you and I will walk back up and carry that snake box down here and tie on the twine.”

  “Yes,” Julio said.

  The two left their canteens under the wagon, in the shade, and rode back up to Joe’s camp.

  In the valley, Wilbur walked past the bend in the creek and into the timber.

  Joe looked back and wondered if Wilbur was going to try to escape.

  If so, he had a clear shot, because he and Julio would be in the timber and busy hobbling the horses so that they could graze.

  He was betting that Wilbur wouldn’t ride out and put distance between him and them.

  Somehow, it seemed to him that Wilbur had come over to their side.

  Time would tell, he thought.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Horse tracks.

  The imprints of iron horseshoes in the dirt at the top of the bluff were clear and distinct. Brad sat his horse for a few moments as he looked down at the myriad of U-shape impressions and listened for any sign of Curly, any sound that meant he might still be near.

  Dead silence.

  Brad dismounted and studied each track with a trained set of eyes. He was looking for any blemishes, nicks, distortions in any of the separate impressions of horseshoes.

  There was a dimple in one hoof. As he walked by the retreating tracks, he determined that it was in the left high foot of the horse. In another, he saw a V-shaped cut on the right front shoe. It might have been made by a nail, a sliver of sharp flintstone. The other shoes were fairly uniform.

  But he had enough now to track Curly.

  He ejected the spent hulls from his .45 and inserted fresh cartridges from his gun belt. He spun the cylinder, then eased it to a space between two cylinders and slid the pistol back in his holster.

  He mounted Ginger and rode slowly along the line of horse tracks. He rode into the timber where he saw a rumpled bedroll. So, Curly had left his bedroll there. He probably thought he’d kill all of them and have the valley and the bluffs to himself.

  The tracks led to a narrow game trail. They continued on and Brad saw that the horse had not been over any of it until this day.

  Curly had made his escape along that game trail. The horse tracks were superimposed on the tracks of squirrel, quail, deer, and elk. The tracks were plain to see, and Brad knew they were Curly’s tracks.

  He rode slowly and noticed that Curly’s horse had stopped running after a few hundred yards. In fact, the tracks told him that the horse was on a walk. He looked ahead and saw that the game trail was straight for some distance.

  He followed warily, and he stopped every few yards to listen and look around him. There was only the silence of the looming mountains and the hills and ravines in between.

  The game trail led across a low hill and down into a swale where grass and bushes grew. It wound through these and continued up another small hill.

  Where was Curly headed? Brad wondered.

  He also wondered how well Curly knew these mountains since there was no sign that humans had been there. There was no sign of mining or prospecting activity for as far as he could see.

  Atop another hill, Brad saw where Curly had reined up his horse. He had probably waited there for a time to look at his back trail.

  After that, the tracks led down into a shallow ravine and up a hogback where, at the top of the ridge, the tracks veered off the game trail and the horse Curly was riding clambered over rocks and vegetation. The horse had mashed down the short tufts of grass and moved a few pebbles and stones. The tracks were not as sharply defined as before, but Curly’s passage was easy to determine to Brad’s trained eye.

  Brad looked off to the high peaks from the ridgetop. They were now well below timberline, but if Curly went higher, he would be crossing in shale and rocky detritus. He would still make tracks, but they would be more difficult to follow if he was on flat stones or harder ground.

  The wind rose and turned brisk. Wind could make tracks harder to follow if they smoothed the ridges from the horse’s shoes. Still, he kept on and rode down the ridge into a stand of timber. He saw where the horse had scuffed dead pine needles, and every so often there would be the branch of a bush broken or pushed out of place. He saw where Curly’s head had struck a low limb and dislodged bark and squaw grass.

  The man was going somewhere, he thought. But where?

  The tracks veered again. Curly was heading for the high country. After that, the horse tracks were in a wide zigzag pattern that told Brad that Curly was trying to elude anyone who might be pursuing him.

  There were trees above the last hill, and above them was timberline, a craggy, barren region above twelve or thirteen thousand feet where no grass grew. No trees, no bushes. Nothing but broken rock, shale, the talus that had tumbled down from the sides of snowcapped peaks.

  Brad saw a small cave, just above timberline. But the tracks did not lead there. Instead, they led a zigzag path through timber, over deadfalls and rock outcroppings green with moss and climbing bushes. It was dark inside the timber. The pines were tall and their branches and needles shut out the sun.

  It grew colder at that altitude, and Brad buttoned up his jacket as he shivered from the freshets of wind that blew through the pines. He crossed a small spring-fed stream and began to see deer and elk tracks. Once, he saw the faint impressions of a cougar’s paws before they left the loamy floor of the timber and as the cat jumped to a long, flat vein of rock. The tracks made Brad somewhat apprehensive. A cougar could be waiting ahead somewhere, atop a boulder or a rocky outcropping, sniffing, looking, its tail flicking like a tabby cat stalking a mouse.

  The tracks led out of the timber and headed for higher ground. Just above the timber there was a long, rocky ridge, and he began to see caves where bears might hibernate or mountain lions might sleep during the day.

  He found a fresh mule deer kill as he climbed. It had been disemboweled. One haunch had been ripped off and dragged up to one of the caves. There were cougar tracks all around. The deer’s neck had been broken. There was a wound at the top of his neck where the cat had pounced and dispatched the mule deer with a single bite of strong jaws, then mangled the hide and flesh as the animal went down and began to die.

  Curly’s horse tracks led right by the bloody deer, but Brad didn’t know if the deer had been killed before he passed that way or afterward.

  Brad could smell the fresh blood, the gamy scent of the cougar, and the hide of the deer. All of these aromas were strong in his nostrils as he continued to follow Curly’s tracks.

  He entered another stand of timber where the trees were dense, grown close together. It seemed a haunted place of deep silence and mystery. There were numerous deadfalls and on banks of soil, large, flat chunks of limestone. It was an eerie place and after riding several yards into this gloomy place, he saw a large outcropping of sandstone embedded in the hillside. In a narrow cleft, there was a large boulder, and beyond, an even larger flat stone that appeared to have markings on it.

  Brad rode up to the boulder and behind it to look at the flat rock. Etched in the stone were strange glyphs that he could not decipher. There were what appeared to be stick figures, some with bows and arrows. There was the outline of an animal that looked like a deer. Above these glyphs, there was the outline of a cross and lines scored around it that resembled rays or depicted a shining object.

  It was a baffling and puzzling collection of anci
ent graffiti that made ripples up and down Brad’s spine. The shiver he felt was not from the cold, but from seeing something so old that someone had scratched into the stone with flint or some sharp object. A record of people who had roamed the Earth long before the white man came to America.

  The sun was setting and still Curly was on the move. Brad left the rocky outcropping and followed the tracks into open grassy swales and over small creeks running with the water from melted snow high in the range that towered above him.

  Then he came to a ridge where the tracks followed a straight line. Above the ridge there were more rocks and bigger caves.

  Had the people who had carved the glyphs into stone once lived in those caves? Brad wondered.

  It grew darker and colder. Shadows began to flow from him and his horse and from rocks and bushes.

  The tracks grew dimmer and some were invisible on stone.

  Then they took a turn for the rimrock where there were caves peering down at him like hollow dark eyes.

  As he turned Ginger, some sixth sense sprouted in his mind.

  Brad knew that he was being watched. There was little cover in that place, which was just a hair below timberline.

  He looked up at the caves. He looked for one that had a ledge that might support a man on a horse. There was one, and he focused on that as he rode around a pile of boulders.

  That sixth sense, that strong hunch, made Brad rein up Ginger and wait behind the boulder for several seconds. He listened intently and looked up at that one cave that was fronted by a wide ledge.

  He thought he heard a scraping sound. Or maybe it was gravel slipping down from that high ledge.

  The silence around him deepened.

  Could a horse fit in that large cave? He looked at it again. The opening was high enough. He could not tell how deep the cave was, but it looked deep from where he sat his horse.

  Instinct told him to wait there for a few more minutes, even though he was losing the light.

  He heard the soft whicker of a horse and stiffened.

  Ginger pawed the ground and let out a soft nicker.

  Curly was up there, Brad knew. He was in that cave or one of the others. Or he was hiding behind a rock with his rifle at the ready.

  Brad knew it as sure as he knew the day was ending.

  He stayed where he was and listened.

  He stayed there until the sun fell behind the mountains and the sky was dappled with small tufts of rosy clouds with golden underbellies. Somewhere below, a jay squawked and a pair of crows answered the call with their raucous caws.

  Brad shivered in the sudden chill.

  He eased Ginger a foot or two from behind the rocks.

  He heard the sharp crack of a rifle from somewhere above him and the whoosh of a bullet before it struck one of the rocks and caromed off it with a nasty whine.

  “All right, you sonofabitch,” Brad said to himself, “I know where you are.”

  He pulled Ginger back until they were once more hidden by the rocks. Then he dismounted as quietly as he could and stood there as the clouds overhead turned to floating lumps of ash.

  The dark came on with a suddenness that seemed to wipe out all traces of the landscape and then there were only the winking stars blossoming in the velvet sky and the rim of the glowing white moon rising slowly behind the highest snow-mantled peak.

  The night hid many things. It was hiding Brad, and it was hiding Curly.

  But it could not hide the hatred Brad held in his heart for the man he chased.

  And hatred, he thought, could move mountains. Just like faith.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Pitch-dark and dead quiet.

  Brad waited for more than an hour before he quietly sat down and removed his boots and spurs. He stood up and loosened the strap on his knife. Then he lifted his pistol and let it fall back into his holster so that it was not firmly seated.

  He heard small shuffling sounds and scraping noises coming from the large cave. He could no longer see the cave, but he marked its location in his mind. He knew where the ledge was, as well.

  Still, he waited until the noises diminished, then stopped.

  He left Ginger ground-tied to a small bush and slowly stepped out from behind the rocks. He had on heavy socks, and these helped muffle his footfall as he began to climb the slope toward the ledge. The slope was not steep, but he was careful with each step. Before he let his weight fall on one foot, he tested the ground for rocks, pebbles, branches, anything that might make noise and reveal his presence and his path.

  It was a slow and painful process just to advance one foot at a time.

  The moon seemed to be creeping along the sky behind the mountain peaks. It did not rise but floated just below the jagged rim of the world, with only a small portion of it rising above the highest peak every so often.

  Brad saw the ledge off to his left. He climbed up even with it, careful not to shake loose any talus. He crawled part of the way and had to use his knees for balance and keep his feet off the ground. He reached the ledge and slowly stood up, masking his mouth with cupped hands as he panted for breath.

  Carefully, he picked his way across the ledge until he felt the edge of the cave with his outstretched fingers. He paused there for a long moment.

  Then Brad reached down inside his jacket and shirt and touched the thong that encircled his neck. Slowly, he pulled the set of rattles up, squeezed them in his hand and then let them dangle silently on the outside of his jacket.

  He listened at the cave and could hear the sound of breathing from both the horse and Curly. The sounds were very faint, but he sensed that Curly was dozing, and the horse was lying down, breathing through its rubbery nostrils.

  He held on to the leather thong with his left hand and drew his pistol. He squeezed the trigger slightly and thumbed the hammer back to full cock. The action made a soft snick as the sear engaged. Brad held his breath and waited.

  When he was calm and ready, he shook the rattles.

  There was a stirring from inside the cave. The horse snorted. Curly, roused from sleep, screeched.

  Brad moved the pistol just inside the cave and tilted its barrel upward. Then he squeezed the trigger.

  The explosion, amplified by the hollow cave, sounded like the roar of a cannon.

  A split second later, the horse came bounding out of the cave.

  Curly shouted a loud curse that took the name of the Lord in vain.

  The horse leaped off the ledge and fell through darkness. It landed with a clatter. Brad could hear the thump of its body as it fell. It kept tumbling downward, releasing a small avalanche of rocks, crashing through bushes and tearing limbs from trees. The horse screamed in agony.

  Curly stepped up to the entrance, his gun drawn.

  Brad saw only his bulky silhouette, his outstretched hand and arm with the pistol a black blob in his hand.

  Brad stepped close and brought his gun down on Curly’s arm.

  Curly screamed in pain and the pistol in his hand fell onto the hard surface of the ledge. He whirled to face Brad and drew his knife.

  “You bastard,” he grunted. He lashed out with his left hand and knocked Brad’s Colt from his hand. The pistol struck the ledge and lay still, silent, and useless.

  Brad saw the faint gleam of Curly’s knife blade. He drew his own knife and went into a fighting crouch.

  Curly lunged with his knife and swiped a half-circle arc with the blade, inches from Brad’s body.

  Brad sucked in his belly and lunged toward Curly.

  Curly backed up a foot and his blade swished at Brad. Brad rushed in, reaching for Curly’s arm. Curly pulled his arm back. His bald head gleamed in the dark like some ghostly overturned bowl.

  Brad whipped his knife downward as he closed the gap between him and Curly. He felt the blade slice through the fab
ric of Curly’s jacket and strike flesh.

  Curly yelled.

  “Damn you,” he shouted and backed off. Brad had struck his left arm, but Curly didn’t appear to be disabled. He roared and charged Brad, swinging his blade back and forth as if it were a sword.

  Brad stepped back in retreat and heard the shish-swoosh of Curly’s blade as it sliced through the air in two directions. At the end of one sweep, Brad charged forward and crashed into Curly’s unprotected gut. The air flew out of Curly’s lungs.

  Brad jabbed with his knife, straight into Curly’s exposed side. He felt the blade strike leather and metal as it penetrated Curly’s gun belt with its loop of pistol cartridges. Then the blade struck flabby flesh, and hot blood spurted from the wound.

  Curly whirled and grunted in pain. He raised his right arm and struck downward with his blade, straight at Brad’s shoulder.

  Brad dropped to his knees and grabbed Curly’s leg. He struck again with his knife, driving the blade into Curly’s calf. Then he pushed with his shoulder and felt Curly’s leg give way, then buckle.

  Curly screamed in pain. He fell backward and hit the ledge with a loud thud. Brad scrambled to his feet and stomped on Curly’s arm with his stockinged foot. Curly tried to bring up his knife, but his arm was pinned under Brad’s foot.

  Brad stepped over him and straddled his body. He pressed downward with his foot.

  Curly’s hand opened. His knife slipped from his fingers, clattering on the limestone ledge.

  Brad dropped to his knees, then crushed into Curly’s chest. He leaned down and grabbed Curly’s left arm at the elbow. He twisted the limb until Curly screamed as a bone cracked.

  Brad felt Curly’s breath on his face as he brought it down close to the man.

  “Was it like this for my wife when you were on top of her, Curly?” Brad husked.

  “You bastard,” Curly growled.

  “You know, Curly, when you shoot somebody, they still have a chance to live. They don’t die real quick sometimes.”

  “Who gives a damn,” Curly snarled, inches from Brad’s face.