Nest of Vipers (9781101613283)

by Sherman, Jory

  The tracks of Jordan Killdeer.

  “I hope he catches that sonofabitch,” Joe said.

  “I do, too,” Wil said. “I truly do.”

  “He will catch him,” Julio said.

  Joe herded his prisoners into the timber toward his lean-to and their camp.

  “Sit down,” he ordered, “five feet apart. Make a circle and turn your backs to each other.”

  The outlaws did as he ordered.

  “Wil,” Joe said, “if any of them try to get up or run, you shoot ’em down. Can you do that?”

  “I sure can,” Wil said.

  Then Joe turned to Julio.

  “Julio,” he said, “do you think you can go down on your horse and round up their horses, bring them back here?”

  “Yes, I can do that,” Julio said. “Then what will you do, Joe?”

  “We’ll wait for Brad. But I want to have their horses up here and hobbled. Ready to go.”

  “To Denver?” Wil said.

  “Yes, to Denver and to jail.”

  Some of the prisoners cursed under their breaths.

  Julio went to his horse and saddled up. In fifteen minutes, he rode away toward the road.

  “Now,” Joe said to Wil, “we wait.”

  He looked at the men sitting in a circle on the ground, their backs to one another.

  He wondered if Wil would back him if there was trouble.

  “Do you know any of these men, Wil?” he asked.

  “I know two of ’em,” Wil said. He pointed to Toby. “That’s Toby Dugan.” He pointed to another man. “And that’s Cletus Hemphill. I don’t know who these others are.”

  “Friends of yours?” Joe asked.

  Wil shook his head.

  “Nope. They work for Jordan is all. On his ranch. But they’re horse thieves all right.”

  “You may have to kill them, Wil. Could you do that?”

  “I could shoot ’em down like the dogs they are,” Wil said.

  “Good,” Joe said. “I just wanted to make sure.”

  Wil tapped the receiver of his rifle. Curly’s rifle.

  Joe smiled at him and patted his rifle.

  He had no idea how long they would have to wait for Brad to return, but he hoped he’d bring Killdeer back alive.

  He wanted to see Killdeer, along with the men he had in custody, hang from the gallows.

  Joe walked to where he had his lariats coiled and picked up one of them. When he returned, he cut lengths of three feet each. Then he squatted and began to tie the rope around the booted ankles of the prisoners. Each man glared at him as he tied their feet together.

  Then he picked up his rifle and sat down on the log, the rifle in his lap.

  The sun began to slide on its downward arc. Beams of yellow light streamed through the pine boughs. Wil sat down on the log and laid his rifle across his legs, his finger inside the trigger guard.

  Joe nodded in approval. He knew he could count on Wilbur.

  The man was reformed, for sure.

  FORTY-ONE

  The tracks Brad saw were small and easy to follow. The horse that had left the tracks moved at a gallop for some distance, so the ground was chewed up where its hooves had landed. The horse seemed to have been recently shod, as well, so the impressions were especially sharp and well defined. In between the tracks, there were small clumps and clods of dirt kicked up so that the trail seemed to have arrows pointing in the direction the rider was traveling.

  For some distance, Killdeer’s horse climbed almost straight up the small hills toward ever higher ones. Brad followed the tracks across small gullies and shallow ravines, and then, as the hills grew in size, he noticed the tracks were in parallel zigzags to the summits.

  The tracking became more difficult as the terrain became steeper and more broken. None of the country looked familiar to Brad and he realized he had never been there before. At one point, the tracks followed a game trail for a mile or so, then Kildeer doubled back into a gully where the tracks were harder to see.

  After that, he crisscrossed through ever deeper ravines, only to climb out at a low point and head for higher ground. Then Brad lost the tracks for a brief spell when the horse hit a rocky plateau where it left no visible tracks. He was able to pick up the trail again by studying the dislodged stones and the overturned pebbles that revealed their wet or damp undersides.

  He knows I’m tracking him, Brad thought as he picked up the trail again in an expected area beyond the plateau.

  After that, he strained to follow the thread of the tracks as Kildeer backtracked and sidestepped, or rode back over hard ground where the impressions were faint. And in one small stretch, the horse was backed for several yards, then turned around and headed in a different direction.

  “This guy knows what he’s doing,” Brad muttered to himself as he rode through a brush ravine and into a canyon that was open on both ends.

  As the afternoon wore on, the chore of tracking became more taxing on Brad. Killdeer seemed to enjoy leading his pursuer onto consistently more difficult paths through thick timber, grassy swales, brush-choked gullies, and difficult, rock-infested ravines. Yet, there was no avoiding it. If he was to catch Killdeer, he had to keep after him.

  He was somewhat encouraged by the age of the tracks. It seemed to Brad that he was closing the gap. Yet, at other times, he sensed that Killdeer had gained time on him. Perhaps he was becoming disoriented and confused by the winding trail he followed, the up and down path that Killdeer was forging in the rugged mountains.

  Then suddenly, Brad noticed a new pattern. From the high hills, the tracks led downward; although still in a zigzag, they were descending to another level. The tracks led him into heavy timber, older pines with many deadfalls and elk beds. He jumped a pair of muleys and began to smell bear scat.

  On a lower level, he began to see where Killdeer had ridden his horse over rotted deadfalls as if to thumb his nose at his tracker. The logs were mashed down in the center and leaked crumbling pulp from the innards. Not hard to track, but disconcerting, because a man usually made his horse jump deadfalls, not step and walk on top of them.

  He began to see rocky outcroppings on small hillsides that were heavily thicketed with brush and pines. By then, Killdeer was riding in a straight line toward some unknown destination, staying at the same level on the hillsides. And he was moving faster. That told Brad that Killdeer either knew the country, or he was betting on his horse not stumbling into a burrow or sinkhole. The tracks were straight, and the stride of the horse indicated its faster speed.

  Toward late afternoon when the light in the timber began to lessen, Brad saw another set of tracks that he recognized. Curly’s tracks from the day before. To his surprise, he passed the large boulder that guarded the depression in the hillside where he had seen the stone with the ancient glyphs etched in its surface.

  His heart quickened as he saw Killdeer’s tracks blot out or mar some of the tracks that Curly’s horse had made the previous day.

  He suddenly realized that Curly had not found that cave by accident. He had known where he was going all the time.

  And now it seemed clear to Brad that Killdeer was heading in the same direction, over the same path.

  His hunch was verified later when he saw the caves and, when he looked closely at the ground, there were the tracks of Killdeer’s horse heading up to the cave where he would have a commanding view of the terrain below the ledge. This gave Brad a sudden chill. In the distance, he saw the bare rim of the ledge and the large cave. As he rode to higher ground, he even saw Curly’s corpse, lying there on the ledge where he had left it.

  He reined up and rested the roan while he thought of his next moves.

  Was Killdeer in the cave, the same cave where Curly had hidden out yesterday? Was his horse inside with him as Curly’s had been?

/>   He looked at the pile of stones where he had hidden below the ledge. He did not want to go there again. If Killdeer was up there in that same cave, he would know that Brad had concealed himself there. His tracks would be plain to see.

  Brad now knew that he was following a very crafty man.

  Should he wait him out? Or try to sneak up to the cave on foot as he had done before?

  He breathed and rested. He patted the horse’s withers and thought about what he should do.

  Finally, he turned the horse until he could no longer see the ledge and the large cave. He slipped out of the saddle and ground-tied the reins to a sturdy juniper bush. Then he pulled Jinglebob’s rifle from its scabbard. He eased the lever down and saw that there was a fresh cartridge in the chamber. He seated the lever.

  He waited there for several minutes, listening for any sound coming from the cave, the scrape of a boot, the nicker of a horse. Anything.

  Then he walked upslope until he was about even with the ledge. He walked toward the ledge and found a shallow depression where he could sit and see the cave opening as a black blot on the face of the limestone bluff.

  He waited and listened as the sun began to descend toward the snow-flocked peaks. The air turned chill, and he felt the whisper of a breeze on his face.

  The silence was excruciating.

  The silence was deep and ominous.

  FORTY-TWO

  When Jordan first got a look at the rider who was following him, he thought it was that new man, Randy McCall, the one they called Jinglebob. When he had a chance to look again a half hour later, he saw that the rider was not Jinglebob. Instead, it was a man he had never seen before.

  Who was he?

  Jordan wondered. Was he a hired tracker? A detective? A U.S. marshal?

  It didn’t dawn on him until later that the man he caught a glimpse of whose pursuit was relentless, might be the man who had made him the offer to sell his horses back to him—Brad Storm.

  When he spotted the man again, he was sure that it was the one they called the Sidewinder. Brad Storm. The man was a superb tracker. No matter where Jordan led him, the Sidewinder picked up his trail. He waited for an opportunity to draw his rifle and pick off the tracker, but each time he stopped and tried to get a fix on Storm, the man seemed to know he was being watched and did not present a clear target.

  The man was uncanny, Jordan thought. Storm seemed to know when Jordan was waiting in ambush, and he would blend into cover and turn invisible. It was maddening to have a man like that on his trail. Even when he did see Storm in the open, he could never see all of him. Storm either hunched low over his saddle, or rode into a copse of thick trees, or just halted his horse and waited a few seconds. At such times, all Jordan could see was the switch of the roan’s tail, or a leg or two, perhaps the horse’s rump, or the boots of the rider.

  After two or three hours, Jordan knew that he would not lose his tracker with any of the tricks he had learned from the Cheyenne and Arapaho. He had tried everything he knew and remembered from when they were being pursued by Kiowa or Utes from whom they had stolen horses.

  Storm seemed to possess a sixth sense that warned him of danger. Jordan had no doubt that the Sidewinder could read tracks like some people could read books. He seemed to unravel every deception, every doubling back, every trail through thick brush or over trackless stone.

  Jordan and Sugarfoot climbed ever higher. He stopped just below timberline and realized that he dared not go farther. Up on the barren slope he saw a large mule deer standing like a sentinel looking down on him. If he ventured to that open space below the snowcapped peak, he would be an easy target for a rifleman.

  He turned his horse and headed back down. He knew now where he had to go if he was to make a stand and shoot the man who tracked him like a dog on the scent or a cougar stalking a wandering deer. He rode straight down into the thick timber that he knew. He still tried to throw Storm off his track, but after a time, he knew that he would never shake him. The man was as good a tracker as any Arapaho or Cheyenne brave. He was relentless, and he was not misled by any of Jordan’s backtrackings or tricks.

  He rode now with a purpose. He knew where he could go and have a chance to shoot Storm and kill him. He passed a place he knew well, where a large stone guarded the cavity in the hill where there was an ancient stone that the Arapaho had told him contained messages from their ancestors. He knew the stone well, for he had looked at it many times as a boy. And, more than once, his Arapaho companions had gone there to speak of the days before the white men, the days when their people talked with gods and believed that they had been created as special people to inhabit the Earth.

  He passed by there, and pangs of memory trickled through his mind like waves in a pool startled by a thrown stone.

  The ancient ones left records of themselves on many stones throughout the Rockies, and some of the elders in the Arapaho tribe remembered the stories they had been told, about a frozen world of ice and snow and a terrible deluge that had covered the Earth, except that one man and his kindred had escaped on the back of a giant turtle and repopulated the Earth.

  Jordan rode to the place of the caves and spotted the wide ledge where he could ride Sugarfoot and both of them disappear into a very large cave. A cave where he had heard the ancestors of the Arapaho once lived after the rains that nearly drowned the entire world.

  He rode up to the edge of the ledge and urged Sugarfoot onto it. He rode toward the cave and saw something he never expected to see.

  There, lying flat on his back with his throat cut deep from ear to ear, was one of his men. He recognized Dan Jimson, the baldheaded gunslinger the boys had all called Curly. He had been stripped of his gun belt and had already begun to decompose.

  Sugarfoot shied away from the dead man, and Jordan reined him in so hard the horse’s head bowed. He looked down over the edge of the ledge and saw a dark lump lying in a pile of brush and boulders. Curly’s horse. It must have leaped off the ledge and fallen to its death, Jordan thought.

  The shadows below the ledge began to deepen when he rode inside the cave and dismounted.

  He led Sugarfoot deeper into the cave and patted his neck. He pulled his rifle from its scabbard and walked back toward the entrance. He leaned the rifle against the cave wall next to the entrance and then dropped to his knees.

  He drew his pistol and checked that all the cylinders were full. Then he laid the pistol in front of him on the cave floor as he knelt and waited, listening for any sign that Storm was closing in on him.

  Jordan knew that this was his last stand. He had to either kill Storm or Storm would kill him.

  He knelt there and listened until he heard the soft sound of a horse moving toward the pile of rocks that were below the bluff and the ledge.

  The horse moved close to the rock pile and then Jordan heard the footfalls retreat. It was quiet for a time. Then he thought he heard the sounds of a man on foot. And the man was climbing up the slope beyond the edge of the ledge off to his left.

  Storm would reach the ledge in a few minutes, Jordan knew. If he had been the one to kill Curly, then he would know that he and his horse were in the cave.

  He heard the scrape of a boot on stone.

  Jordan began to chant the Arapaho death song in a low voice that gradually grew louder. He knew the words, and he knew what they meant.

  “It is a good day to die,” he sang in the Arapaho language. “I do not fear death. Death is my friend who comes for me. It is a good day to die.”

  He sang and waited, his rifle close at hand, his pistol lying ready just in front of him.

  The footsteps grew louder and louder.

  Storm was approaching.

  Soon, Jordan knew, he would be in a fight to the death.

  It was a good day to die for either one of them.

  FORTY-THREE

  Shadows
crawled up the cliff face and burrowed into the hollows beneath the ledge. They shrouded the face of the bluff and slid into the cave where Jordan Killdeer knelt and chanted his death song.

  He stopped and listened for the scrape of a boot or the crunch of stone underfoot. Instead, he heard what sounded like a faint whisper, a swishing sound as if someone had stroked an eagle feather with a pair of fingers.

  Brad Storm hugged the cliff face and heard the same sound, as if someone had breathed out a lungful of air, or brushed the seat of a chair with a feather duster.

  Swish, swish.

  Then, a silence for a few seconds.

  A soft scraping sound.

  It sounded like coiling scales.

  The brittle rattle from the edge of the cave broke the silence.

  Brad heard another series of sounds and a soft grunt.

  “I know your tricks, Storm,” Jordan yelled from inside the cave. “You don’t fool me.”

  “That’s not my rattle,” Brad said.

  The rattling grew louder.

  Brad heard the sound of boots striking the cave floor.

  “It’s a snake,” shrieked Jordan.

  Brad moved then, through the shadows and into the dark of the cave. He slid around the lip of the entrance and saw a dim figure stomping the ground. He heard the rattles become more frantic and looked down. There was a three-foot rattler coiled up and moving its head. Its forked tongue twitched as its eyes followed Jordan’s movements.

  Jordan had a pistol in his hand and was backing toward the wall.

  Brad ducked his head and charged straight at the man. He jumped over the coiled rattler and slammed into Jordan’s midsection with the force of a pile driver.

  Jordan grunted in pain and tried to club Brad with the butt of his pistol.

  Brad swung his gun hand in a wide arc and cracked into Jordan’s arm. The pistol flew from Jordan’s hand and clattered on the cave floor.

  The rattler uncoiled and slithered from the cave, its rattles clattering together like hollow dice.

  “Bastard,” Jordan growled and stooped to pick up his pistol.