Sliphammer

by Brian Garfield

Warren Earp said, “God damn it, I wish they’d show themselves.”

  Wyatt said testily, “Take it easy, boy, take it easy.” It made Tree look at him. The deep voice, calm on the surface, had a strained, false timbre.

  Warren said, “What the hell you mean, take it easy? My damn wrists are just about to start bleeding and we’re unarmed and hogtied and right back there we’ve got a pack of stinking miners wanting to lynch both of us.”

  Caroline said, with acid, “Don’t you think your friend Cooley can take care of a few worthless miners?”

  “Not if they get to us first,” Warren said, looking as miserable as he probably felt. He hadn’t whined much, which was to his credit, but the strain was getting to him now. There was, Tree observed, a surprising amount of sand beneath Warren’s bravado. A lesser man would have crumbled by now—he had expected it to happen, and found himself curiously pleased that it hadn’t. Now, after the one minor outburst, Warren clamped his mouth shut and turned to stare stonily ahead.

  They climbed another mile and Tree looked back again, saw nothing, and urged the weary horses on. Caroline drew alongside and crinkled her nose at him. At that moment Josie Earp, looking down the backtrail, said, “Oh, shit—Oh, Jesus Christ!”

  Tree’s attention whipped down the mountain. He saw them then—Floyd Sparrow’s bunch, the white horse in the lead, coming up from the trees not three miles below.

  Josie said, “Sweet Jesus, get us out of this.” She was talking to Wyatt.

  Wyatt put his hooded eyes on Tree and said, “Don’t you think this damned foolishness has gone far enough now?”

  It was Caroline who said, “What’s the matter—afraid you won’t make it to Denver?”

  Earp’s eyes, flashing bright for a moment, receded under drooping lids; he said nothing more.

  Dead weary, Tree pushed them on. He kept looking back, kept getting glimpses of Floyd Sparrow’s determined gang, and knew without being told exactly what Sparrow wanted.

  The hard pressures of pursuit, fatigue, vigilance constricted him like iron hoops drawn painfully around his chest. He glanced at Wyatt Earp and knew the man was getting rattled. He felt acutely embarrassed, as if he had blundered in on Earp’s privacy. All during these endless hours of riding he had communicated very little with Earp but he still hadn’t shaken the possibility he was doing Earp an injustice, Rafe or no Rafe. Nothing was simple, he thought; particularly in questions of guilt. There were no innocent men.

  The horses clambered uphill, heaving and beaten. Tree looked at Earp again and found Earp chewing his lip. Earp caught Tree looking at him and straightened up in the saddle with an expression under his mustache that might have been a sullen snarl; Earp said, “Sparrow’s the kind of man who won’t mind shooting the lot of us whether we’ve got our hands tied or not—fish in a rain barrel to him.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Tree snapped.

  “I know,” Earp said, with imperfect sarcasm “you’ve got your stupid duty to do.”

  Caroline, overhearing, let her horse drop back and said angrily to Earp, “Maybe just one time in your miserable life you ought to try pretending the rest of us are almost as good as you are.”

  Earp tried to shrug with disdain. “I’m only pointing out the odds to your pigheaded friend. Why should all of you have to die over me?”

  Caroline cried, “People are always deliberately choosing to die around you. All the people who absolutely force you to kill them!”

  “I didn’t kill your husband,” Earp snapped.

  “You did everything but pull the trigger!”

  “Nonsense!”

  “You could have stopped Cooley,” she said, with scorn.

  “You’re babbling,” Earp grunted, and stirred in the saddle, looking back and making a face. “Can’t we speed this up? Or are we going to dawdle and wait for Sparrow to ride right up?” He poked his face toward Tree: “Maybe you made a private arrangement with Sparrow to sell us out?”

  Tree tried to keep the anger off his face. Earp’s raucous bleatings were the signs of a man cracking up. Where was the man’s courage? Earp hadn’t once tried to escape—waiting for Cooley, maybe? Or just using his head, appraising the “odds” so coolly? Earp was a poker player—maybe he’d started out with a plan of some kind; but poker was a game in which you lost if you hesitated too long before bluffing. There didn’t seem any getting around the obvious fact that Wyatt Earp was losing his nerve.

  Not sure any more, Tree was enraged—enraged more by disillusion and his own uncertainty than by anything else, even Sparrow back there. Everything he had taken for granted seemed to be falling apart. He had, in a strange way, believed in Wyatt Earp; it had been important to him. Now either Earp was folding up, or it was some fantastic trick designed to get Tree off guard.

  The thought grenaded into his mind, and he clung to the possibility almost with relief. He realized: he wanted Earp to try to escape.

  Then Earp crushed him. Earp said, “Maybe you ought to think what it could mean to you to have the gratitude of men like Wayde Cardiff. I’m offering no bribes but you need to be reminded of reality. Damn it, all I want is a fair chance against those red-eyed sons of bitches down there.” He was brooding back toward Sparrow’s bunch.

  “Good God,” Tree said, his voice grating hoarse. “Shut up now, will you?” Shut up before you destroy yourself!

  He gigged the tired horse ahead.

  The sun went down behind them, a vivid splash of colors across the mountains. The horses were played out; it was an agony of stumbling hoofs and slip-sliding boots, all the riders on foot now, leading the animals. Tree posted himself in the rear, guarding the backtrail. The pass was in sight, clearly silhouetted against the stars as night came down full; and they kept plugging stubbornly toward it until, dropping across a rocky bowl of ground, Tree called forward softly, went past the line, and spoke to Gant: “They can’t see us in this hollow. We’ll turn left and go north through the gully until it peters out.”

  “Take us north of the pass,” Gant grumbled.

  “Can’t be helped. We’ll go over the north side of the mountain. It may just lose them.”

  So they turned, keeping to the concealment of the lateral gully along the flank of the mountain, hoping Sparrow behind them would keep going straight up for the pass. Tree dropped back to the rear. He felt stunned by weariness. His footing was bad, his eyesight played tricks on him. Once up ahead he thought he saw Obie Macklin stooping by a rock, doing something, his knife blade glinting dully. When Tree reached that area he gave the ground a close search and finally found it: a round quartzite stone the size of a hat, with bright, fresh slashes across its top, three parallel straight lines—a signal in private code. Sparrow, knowing what to look for, would spot it immediately. So, there it was. Tree closed his eyes and gathered himself, marshaling strength, and strode forward, dragging the horse, clambering past the rest of them until he caught up with Macklin.

  Gant and Macklin were talking in subdued tones; they drew apart when he approached. Everybody halted, without needing instructions. Macklin caught some sign, even in the starlight; he stiffened arid said tentatively, “What’s wrong with you?”

  Tree said, “That’s all for both of you. Shuck your gunbelts.”

  Gant said, “Huh?” and Macklin at the same time said, “What the hell’s all this?”

  Tree shook his head. “Drop those belts and then sit down and take off your boots.” His palm curved over the sliphammer gun. Macklin and Gant looked at each other; then, as if on prearranged signal, they dived in opposite directions, both clawing at their revolvers.

  The sliphammer gun fired—once—at Gant’s big shadow, and whipped across toward Macklin. The little man was rolling under the belly of his horse, snapping off a shot. The report of the gun was startling. Muzzle flame lanced forward. The bullet went wide somewhere and Tree fired at the only target visible beyond the horse’s shadow—Macklin’s head. Bone fragments and blood sprayed from the skull.
The horse reared, slipped on the loose rocks, and fell on Macklin, crushing his body underneath.

  Tree spun, crouching, toward Gant, but Gant hadn’t fired at all: clearly Tree’s first one had hit him somewhere. His bodily functions had lost control; there was the sharp stink of human urine and manure coming upwind from Gant. Tree got to him in four strides and found him dying.

  Macklin’s horse scrambled for footing and ran in terror, back the way they had come. Gant’s horse wanted to run too but it was joined by rope tether to the prisoners’ horses; it reared and stayed put. Caroline stood back there with the birdhead .38 in her fist, aimed at Wyatt Earp, who hadn’t moved a muscle after crouching down and whipping Josie flat to the ground.

  Tree walked away from Gant, taking a deep breath and letting it out, went past Macklin’s body, and reached for the reins of his horse. “That gunshot will bring them on the run. Get mounted.”

  Josie said in a cracked voice, “Dear God. But those—” she was staring at the bodies.

  Tree said harshly, “Let Sparrow bury them.” He led his horse over to Wyatt and Josie, glanced at Warren’s shocked face, and said in a bitter, clipped way, ‘They were blazing a trail for Sparrow—Sparrow had to get you out here alone, away from Cooley and the rest of your friends.”

  “How long have you known that?”

  “I just got proof. Do you want to argue about it or get out of here?”

  “Untie my hands first,” said Earp.

  “No. I’m not done yet. Now damn it get mounted.” He swung toward Caroline: “You’ll ride Gant’s horse and lead the others.”

  She didn’t ask questions; she went to Gant’s horse. The stirrups were far too long for her and she had to ride with her feet dangling. They left the dead men on the ground and went out as fast as the bone-tired horses would move them, curving broadly northeast, then east, then back toward the pass, because there was a chance Sparrow would not double back after finding the bodies. And the pass, now, was the fastest way across.

  Fourteen

  In the pass, the night wind sliced through Tree as if he were naked. His horse turned a fetlock and went lame; he swapped over to the spare animal but even without a rider the lame horse couldn’t keep up with the slow pace, and he had to unsaddle it and turn it loose. With a game leg it wouldn’t drift far and Sparrow would surely pick it up. Luck had turned all bad; this was just one more thing that couldn’t be helped. Wyatt Earp’s remarks, delivered at intervals, were snappish and bitter. Josie swore in a monotonous voice, going through her limited vocabulary of obscenities and then going through it again. Warren was the silent one; his eyes were shut half the time and he was probably half drugged with sleeplessness, so tired he just didn’t care any more. Of the five of them, only Caroline didn’t seem to have run out of stamina.

  Beyond the pass the slope was a downgrade but not an easy one. Steep slides alternated with boulder-littered humps. At intervals they trotted, walked, and got off to lead. Tree kept looking back, expecting to see horsemen on the skyline. The moon rose, a pale, thin rind. They walked down into the forest of scrub pine and high mountain piiion and Caroline broke off unripe pinon nuts to chew. By the time dawn broke across the Rockies, there was a glaze on the surfaces of Tree’s eyes that made him blink continuously to keep it away. He felt as if he had gritty sand under his eyelids. His legs were numb stumps, blistered and uncooperative. Wyatt Earp had developed a tic above his right cheekbone; his eyes were raw, sunk back behind dark pouches. He had gone hoarse and stopped talking an hour before sunrise.

  They ate on the move. Around nine o’clock they entered the upper fringe of taller pine forest and at the edge Tree looked back once more. Still no sign of Sparrow: had he lost them? It didn’t seem possible. They went down through the dry timber-land, zigzagging through canyons to stay dff the visible high ground. He checked the ropes which lashed the Earps’ wrists. There was a raw-rubbed spot on Warren’s left wrist that was ugly red with scabbed blood but Tree didn’t loosen the ropes. Warren hardly seemed to recognize him. Tree scraped a hand across the abrasive stubble on his jaw, pinched his eyes with thumb and forefinger, and looked up to see they were near the edge of a promontory that looked down past a tortured series of gorges and ridges into a deep river valley. The sun, in the east beyond, reflected painfully off the rushing river several miles below and the steel ribbons of railroad tracks running along by the river. Tree looked at Caroline and said, “The Arkansas. If these horses get us that far we’ll flag a southbound train and ram through to Denver if I have to hold a gun at the engineer’s head.”

  A wind rushed through the trees and at midafternoon they were within a mile of the Arkansas when a rifle went off somewhere not too far away, the solitary crack echoing and rebounding through the canyons. It stirred Tree’s adrenalin, bringing him more fully awake. All of them had stiffened in their saddles; they were all looking around. The timber was broken up into patches separated by meadows; the hilly horizons were near. Abruptly Tree spotted movement: a bunch, on horseback, wheeling out of the forest half a mile back. The rifle shot had been a rallying signal; horsemen galloped in from several directions. He recognized the white horse.

  Wyatt Earp bellowed, “We can’t outrun them on these horses.”

  “We can try,” Tree said. “On the run, now!” They urged the faltering animals downslope—just one more ridge to cross, then downhill to the river. But when they started up the ridge, a pack of riders materialized at the crest. Tree reined in; Caroline yanked her horse to a stop so abruptly that the other three got tangled up. Tree slapped Caroline’s horse across the rump and went wheeling past her, turning aside into a boulder-strewn gully that angled upslope to the right. They clattered up the defile in a row. It took them five hundred yards toward the crest of the ridge, and turned a bend, and ended: it just petered out in a sloping field of buffalo grass. They emerged, fully exposed on the flats. The upper band of riders was ramming forward at a gallop—and Caroline sucked in her breath: “That’s Cooley’s gang. God damn them!” Cooley must have taken a calculated chance, cutting ahead to wait by the Arkansas and trap the fugitives coming down. So now it was Cooley up there and Sparrow’s miners galloping up from below—a hopeless pincer.

  Wyatt Earp roared, “For the love of God cut us loose—at least let a man die with a gun in his hand!”

  Warren said bitterly, “You really fucked it up, Deputy—I hope you roast in Hell.”

  Tree got them dismounted. Cooley was three quarters of a mile away, plunging his army forward at a full gallop, riders fanning out in a tense arc—and half a mile below them, Sparrow’s miners, ungainly on horseback but armed to the teeth, came swirling upslope, disdaining the gully.

  Warren said, “All fucked up,” spitting it out like acid, and Wyatt Earp’s eyes, gone hard again, penetrated Tree. Dispassionately Tree took down his rifle, cocked it, and said with unhurried clarity, “We’re all going to walk back into that gully and belly down in the rocks. Move.”

  He jabbed Wyatt Earp in the gut, hard enough to make the big man stumble. Earp, his hands tied together, turned lobster red and went at an awkward, shambling run. Tree gathered up all the guns, handed some of them to Caroline to carry, and brought up the rear. They tumbled into the rocks and flattened themselves in boulder crevices.

  Wyatt Earp said, “Give us to Cooley and I’ll safeguard your hide. It’s the only chance you’ve got.”

  “My string’s not played out,” Tree said, watching the miners come—Sparrow had the lead, two or three hundred yards, but his path was uphill and Cooley’s was down. It looked like a dead heat: already both groups were lifting their guns, reining in, trying to feel out the shape of things.

  Tree said, “Keep your heads down.”

  Josie said, “Horse shit. If I’ve got to get shot I want to watch.”

  Warren Earp banged his shoulder into her and knocked her down. Two or three rifles went off—Sparrow’s men—the bullets singing off the rocks. Both posses came within two
hundred yards of the gully, on the opposite sides of it—and stopped.

  Tree said softly, “We’ll just count on Cooley to protect us from Sparrow.”

  Caroline said dully, “And who protects us from our protector?”

  “Cooley won’t ram in here as long as I’ve got a gun at Wyatt Earp’s head.”

  “So,” said Warren, “that’s it.”

  Rifles opened up: Cooley’s men shot high overhead in arced trajectories, trying to scatter Sparrow’s bunch. The miners returned the fire. It wasn’t long before both groups retired beyond rifle range of each other, leaving a few gunshot horses on the field. Wyatt Earp, squatting in the rocks, said, “Fine. Mexican standoff till sundown and then Sparrow’s ghouls sneak in here and finish us off.”

  Caroline said, “Will you shut up? Will you please just shut up?”

  Tree scanned the grass. Cooley’s strikebreakers had moved back into a grove of trees, left their horses, and now could be seen fanning out on foot. Sparrow’s men were somewhere in the thickets below. Tree thought, We won’t have to wait until dark. He said, “They’ll be coming up the gully. Watch the bend.”

  “With what?” Wyatt Earp demanded. “God damn it, a gun, man!”

  The grass was waving in various places; there was no wind to stir it. Men crawling on their bellies. Tree said, “Oh, Christ.” He looked at his rifle and closed his eyes down hard, hating it all, hating Wyatt Earp most of all. He opened his eyes and turned a bleak, hollow stare on Earp and said, “Call your friends down here.” He put his gun to Earp’s head.

  A man came in sight down the gully, a miner with a rifle. The rifle went off, badly aimed, and Tree fired a snap shot which drove the miner behind cover. Tree wheeled flat against a boulder, jacked a cartridge into the magazine and heard Wyatt Earp bellow, “Cooley! Get down here!”

  Lower down in the gully bend, several miners flitted from cover to cover. Tree raked the bend with rifle fire, and sprinted across to the far side. A bullet kicked up rock dust at his heels. He slammed behind a boulder and fired. From this angle he had a wider field of fire along the bend; he could keep them back, two hundred yards below. He levered the rifle, fast, slamming bullets into the rocks, hearing the ricochets buzz and crang. The miners went to cover—and Caroline shrieked, “Jerr!”