He grabbed a rock and hurled it down the canyon where most of the thrashing was concentrated. When he heard it splash dully in the shallow stream, he took off running farther up canyon. He had nowhere else to go, but he hoped the rock would confuse the Vultures if only slightly.
They were shouting at each other behind him. Water splashed and brush crunched. Someone took a shot—a pinprick flash of stabbing light that Spurr spied out the corner of his eye. The shooter had fired toward the far bank and the trail down which Spurr had ridden.
A germ of optimism sprouted in him. They weren’t sure where he was. He could hear Stanhope shouting straight down the ravine behind him, and a couple of others farther down the ravine. Others, however, were making their way toward Spurr, but he could tell from the sounds that they weren’t moving very fast.
Wary of an ambush.
Spurr got an idea. He turned into the stream, swung around, and triggered four shots quickly from his hip. The shots echoed, one screeching off a rock, another making a chugging sound in the stream. One evoked a clipped yell, and the old lawman gave a wry grin as he turned and started up the north side of the ravine, opposite the side he’d come down.
He had to find Erin. It was his fault she was here in the first place. He should have told her that her son was dead and sent her back to Sweetwater. She’d have been crazy with grief, but she’d have been alive.
Downstream, the shouting grew louder. Guns barked and flashed. The slugs splashed in the dark water that Spurr had left. Halfway up the bank, feeling as though his heart was in his throat and strangling him, he stopped and hurled two rocks and branches into the creek, a few feet beyond where he’d fired. They’d think he’d run on up the canyon. He hoped they’d left their camp unattended, and that he’d find Erin there.
Alive.
He sucked a long, deep breath, wincing against the stabbing pains in his chest and, pushing off his knee with one hand, holding his rifle in the other, he continued ascending the bank through the brush, moving as quietly as he could in his winded condition. Sweat engulfed him, trickled like ice chunks down his back. While the shooting and shouting continued behind him, he paused at the top of the bank and dropped to a knee.
He sleeved sweat from his brow, drawing painful draughts of air into his lungs that felt little larger than prunes, and saw lights to his right. Lamplit windows shone about sixty yards back the way he’d come.
“Oh, lordy,” Spurr wheezed, heaving himself to his feet. “If you’re up there, whoever you are—Jehova, Great Father, the Four Winds—I could sure use a hand ’bout now. Know I don’t deserve it…” He tugged his hat brim down and began jogging toward the cabin, the words bouncing out of him with each clawing breath. “But the woman sure does.”
He wouldn’t scout the place as thoroughly as he normally would. No time. He only hoped the woman was there, alive and alone. And that the Vultures didn’t savvy his ploy. If not, at least he’d take a few of these bastards with him to hell’s smoking gates. He hoped Clell was one of them. He owed Dusty and the other murdered lawmen that much.
The cabin looked dilapidated—probably only used by Stanhope. An old ranch house, long abandoned. As Spurr ran to the wall facing him, he looked in a window, saw a mess of saddle gear, strewn trash, an old deal table, several chairs, one leather one that had likely been left by whomever had built the place. There was a small hearth but it wasn’t lit; a coffeepot smoked on a monkey stove in the middle of the shabby living area.
Spurr ran around the back of the place, hoping for a back door. He found one hanging off one leather hinge. As he reached for the handle, he glanced toward the corral and stable flanking the place. His heart lightened. A saddled horse stood outside the corral, tied to a slat, whipping its tail up and down and sideways and craning its neck to look toward Spurr. It had probably been used by one of the Vultures for keeping watch from a ways beyond the hideout.
Spurr pulled the door open, found himself in a dimly lit hall, with the main area ahead, lit by guttering lamps. He could hear nothing, no one, except the Vultures continuing to shout and shoot along the ravine.
Keeping his voice pitched low, Spurr said, “Erin?”
He moved inside, walking down the short hall paneled with vertical boards, some of which were missing. The stove must not have been well vented; smoke hung thick, watering Spurr’s eyes. There was a curtained doorway on each side of the hall. He swept the right curtain aside, saw nothing but the shadows of a few sticks of haphazardly arranged furniture. He swept the left curtain away from the frame, peered into the dark room quickly, then let the curtain drop back into place. Turning back to the room, he looked in once more, saw a silhouette on the floor. Aiming his rifle guardedly, he stepped into the room and crouched over the woman lying on her side, facing the far wall.
She was fully clothed but with her wrists and ankles tied. Spurr recognized the brown serape and the baggy denims with the leg bottoms rolled. Thick hair hung in loose waves around Erin’s shoulders. Spurr could see by the starlight pushing through the room’s single window that her eyes were open. They shone like the water had shone at the bottom of the ravine—dully glistening. She didn’t move.
Spurr’s heart chugged. Dead…?
“Erin?”
He knelt beside her, closed a hand over her shoulder. She recoiled slightly.
“Erin, it’s Spurr.” He licked his lips, squeezed her shoulder harder, vaguely surprised by her lack of reaction. “I come to get you out of here.”
“Leave me here, Spurr,” she said in a hauntingly dull voice.
Spurr remembered the scream that had drawn him here. She knew about the boy.
“Can’t do that.” Quickly, glancing at the window and then at the curtained doorway behind him, he leaned his rifle against the wall and drew his bowie knife from the well of his right moccasin. He sawed through the ropes binding the woman’s ankles and wrists, then returned the knife to its sheath.
“Can you walk?”
“Please leave me, Spurr.” Again, her voice was dull, startlingly lifeless. “I don’t want to go with you.”
“Look here, damnit, Erin—I rode out here to get you back, and by god I’m gonna do it.”
He straightened, grabbed one of her arms, and crouching, pulled her up over his left shoulder. With a grunt, he staggered to the wall, grabbed his rifle, then swung toward the door. He stopped just in front of it. Running footsteps sounded outside the cabin, spurs ringing raucously. Breaths rasped. Then the man was pounding across the porch and into the cabin’s front door.
“Senorita?” a man called, breathless but buoyant. His voice, Spanish accented, was pitched high with mockery. “Are you alone, senorita? The old lawman hasn’t come for you, has he?” He tittered girlishly.
His boots thumped as he moved forward.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Spurr whispered a curse. Stanhope had sent a man back to check the cabin.
The man’s boots thudded slowly, crackling grit on the trash-littered floor, the spurs now ringing faintly, floorboards squeaking under the Mexican’s weight. Spurr had already racked a shell into his Winchester’s breech. Now, without setting Erin down—she hung limp as laundry over his shoulder—he stepped through the curtain and thumbed back the rifle’s hammer.
The Mexican stopped at the end of the hall, silhouetted against the lamp and candlelight. He held a rifle negligently in his left hand, obviously still expecting Spurr to be in the ravine yonder.
His jaw dropped. Spurr gave a cold smile and squeezed the rifle’s trigger. The report was like a thunderclap in the close confines. The Mexican yelped as the bullet slammed him up and back. He hit the floor with a bang. He groaned, softly, and moving his legs slightly, painfully, he lifted his hands toward the blood-spewing hole in the middle of his brown-and-red-striped serape.
Erin had jerked with a start at the rifle’s report, but now she flopped helplessly down Spurr’s back, too wretched even to struggle against his assistance. He wheeled, strod
e as quickly as he could down the hall and out into the night, angling toward the corral. Eerily, the shooting in the ravine had fallen silent, and only one man was shouting though Spurr couldn’t hear what he was saying.
Most likely, the Vultures had heard the shot and were switching course for the cabin. Spurr moved quickly, sort of hobbling as he closed on the saddled horse, which danced away from him and pulled against its tied reins. The other horses trotted around, manes glistening in the starlight.
Spurr leaned his rifle against a corral post, then lifted Erin into the saddle. “Oh, Spurr, leave me.”
“The hell I will!” Anger burned in him now—at both her and the Vultures. His anger for Erin was tempered with tenderness, but he had not come all this way to allow her to throw herself to the wolves.
As she leaned sideways in the saddle, threatening to tumble to the ground, he said, “Grab the horn!”
She shook her head weakly and opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off with an enraged, “Grab it!”
She did, sobbing. He grabbed his rifle, then untied the reins and stepped into the saddle behind her. As she lolled back against him, he ground his heels into the horse’s flanks and lit off in the direction he’d come. He’d no sooner passed the cabin and saw the furry black gap of the ravine stretching beyond it than guns began thundering and flashing.
“There he is!”
Spurr raised his arms on either side of Erin, shielding her somewhat, and shouted, “Ha-yahh, horse! H-hahhhhh!”
Bullets screeched around him, zinging off the ground on the other side of him, ahead and behind. The horse faltered, and a cold stone dropped deep in Spurr’s belly as he thought the beast had been hit. But the horse regained its stride and barreled off into the darkness angling gradually toward the ravine that was a broad, black line on Spurr’s left.
The flashing of the guns drifted off to his left flank, and then, mercifully, the bullets were falling short, thudding into the ground twenty, thirty, forty yards back in the direction of the cabin. Spurr swung the horse directly toward the ravine and trotted along its bank before finding a game path down into its murky, inky depths.
When, fifteen minutes later, he climbed up over the opposite bank, the horse blowing and snorting, the woman still lolling back against him, he stopped the mount. He looked back at the dark ravine. A menacing silence issued from its other side, from back in the direction of the Vultures’ cabin.
Would they pursue him tonight in the darkness or wait for morning?
Spurr had to assume they’d come tonight. He rode on out across the flat a ways, then stuck two fingers between his lips and whistled. He did not wait but turned the horse and booted it into a canter to the west, in the direction of South Pass City. When he and the woman had ridden a quarter mile, Spurr heard thuds behind him and turned to see the big roan galloping toward him, snorting and blowing and rattling the bit in his teeth.
Spurr stopped the outlaws’ mount and swung down from the saddle, turning to Cochise, who stood obediently before him. “Figured you’d blown the coop after you heard that lead swap.” He really hadn’t. The horse was well trained. The old lawman was just chattering to ease his nerves. He lifted Erin off the outlaws’ mount and set her in his own saddle on Cochise’s back, the horse craning its head to look her over, as if he’d never seen her before.
“It’s her,” Spurr told the horse, glancing up at her. “She just ain’t feelin’ too well, hoss.”
She sat straight-backed in the saddle, her hair sliding down to nearly cover her face. She stared straight ahead, her face a waxy heart shape in the darkness, her eyes so dark that the sockets seemed empty. She didn’t seem to be breathing, and Spurr knew with a chill that she didn’t want to be.
Her son was dead. She wanted to join the boy. He couldn’t blame her, but he wasn’t going to let it happen. Life was a cold-eyed bitch at times, but it had to be lived.
He swung up onto Cochise’s back and, leading the spare horse, continued heading west.
Clell Stanhope kept his right hand wrapped around the neck of his sawed-off barn blaster as he mounted the porch’s stone steps. He stopped in the doorway, Lester and Magpie Quint flanking him. Inside, Quiet Boon Coffey and Ed Crow were crouched over the still form of Santos Estrada, whom Clell had sent back to the cabin in case the old lawman had headed here.
Which he had.
Estrada lay flat on his back, blood like red pudding staining his serape. Clell strode inside the cabin and Lester and Magpie walked up to either side, all looking around the smoky, messy front room, their gear piled and scattered everywhere amongst empty bottles and airtight tins.
Quiet Boon Coffey, who never said much but let his two silver-chased Bisleys and his Sharps carbine do his speaking for him, looked incredulously up at Clell. “Spurr?”
Clell walked around Coffey and Crow and the dead Estrada and strode down the short hall to the second of the two curtained doorways on the right. The curtain hung tangled. Behind it, the small room was dark and empty, only an airtight tin—the peach tin that Clell himself had left there—shone in the starlight pushing through the unshuttered window.
Clell squeezed the neck of his sawed-off gut-shredder harder in his sweaty, gloved hands. His pulse throbbed in his fingers, anger rocketing through him. Not just anger—embarrassment. He’d underestimated old Spurr Morgan. He hadn’t figured on the man tracking him and the others in the dark, following the woman, then making them all look like bung-headed hillbillies by leading them up the draw yonder and circling around to snatch the woman out of their lair.
Clell had wanted to use the woman to lure Spurr into his trap, all right…so Clell could kill the old man slowly just for fun and to show Spurr how old and dried up and useless he was.
Just for fun. So that he and the others could laugh while the old man howled as he died slow.
But the old man—nothing but brittle bones and sinew garbed in ragged buckskins and a grubby hickory shirt—had made Clell look like a damn fool. Him, Clell Stanhope. Leader of the Vultures—the most savage and feared gang to ever prowl this neck of the postwar frontier.
Spurr was likely having himself a good laugh over this right now, wherever he was.
Clell was tensing his jaws so tightly that they ached as he strode back down the short hall and into the main room, where all his remaining men stood in a semicircle, facing him, on the other side of the sprawled carcass of Santos Estrada. The monkey stove ticked; the coffeepot burped.
The men looked grim beneath their hat brims.
Lester sneered. “No way that old badge toter done this, Clell. He must have someone ridin’ with him.”
“Shut up, Lester,” Clell said, walking over to the eating table and splashing whiskey into a tin cup.
Lester scowled indignantly.
Magpie Quint loudly rolled the cylinder of his Buntline Special across his forearm, making a solid, spinning sound in the tense silence. “What’re we doin’ here, Boss?” he said tightly. “Let’s git after him.”
Clell’s hand shook as he slowly lifted his cup to his lips once more and drank. “Let’s not be bigger fools than we already are—okay, Magpie? Is that all right with you?”
The others sort of flinched at Clell’s hard glare.
He sagged into a chair and said with toneless menace. “He’s headin’ for South Pass City. Only place he could be headed with the woman.” He sipped from his cup, swallowed, and said even more quietly, flatly as he set the cup back down on the table. “We’ll run into him there. Settle this thing.”
He set his sawed-off shotgun on the table and stared at it.
Spurr sipped from his steaming coffee cup as he stared across the fire at Erin. She lay curled on her side, facing him and the fire, a blanket pulled up across her shoulders. Her hair lay in a brown tangle across her face. Her eyes were closed.
Spurr raised his quirley to his lips and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. Blowing it out, he turned to look toward the east. The sun was ri
sing, blossoming rose over the shadowy gray hills, a few flat-topped buttes silhouetted against it. A cool breeze blew, foretelling the end of summer at this high altitude.
Spurr figured they were about seven thousand feet above sea level. If he remembered right, South Pass City was around eight thousand. He hadn’t visited the town, once a small city, in a while. The last time, there hadn’t been much left of it since the Oregon Trail, running ten miles south from east to west, had been rendered obsolete by the transcontinental railroad and the stage lines, and by the gold along the banks of Willow Creek having been mined out.
He hoped for Erin’s sake it had a hotel with a soft bed and a good sawbones.
He turned back to her now, humped on the other side of the fire. Her eyes were open, staring at the flames that were growing thin now with the gradually intensifying morning light. She didn’t blink for a long time, and when she finally did, she spoke, as well.
“It was when I looked into those cold, leering eyes of Clell Stanhope that I remembered he’d shot him down like some chicken-thieving dog in the street.”
Her voice had been toneless, dry, utterly lacking in emotion. As though all her sorrow lay lodged so deep in her soul that there was none near enough the surface to be expressed except for a flat hopelessness in her eyes. Spurr knew there was nothing he could say to ease her misery, so he merely took another sip of his coffee and looked out over the rolling sage-spotted hills, toward the Vultures’ cabin that lay about ten miles northeast.
“Best have you a cup of coffee,” he said after a time, nodding at the black pot he’d set on one of the stones ringing the fire. It leaned toward the flames, steam curling from its spout. “Then we’d better fog some sage.”
She did not move beneath the blanket, but her eyes lifted slightly to regard him dully over the opaque, dancing flames. “Spurr, do you have anyone?”
He pursed his lips, shook his head.
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