by Jack Sheriff
Dust was a drifting cloud as the riders came together and bunched. Bobbie Lee looked at Cassie, saw the understanding and deep anger in her eyes.
‘You know this feller?’
‘Never saw him before now.’
‘This is Ed Morgan.’
Cassie shook her head. ‘Ed Morgan was a dear friend, and he’s dead.’
Harlan Gibb moved restlessly in the saddle.
‘This is going round in circles. Where’s the hard proof you mentioned?’
‘Your man’s real name is Murphy,’ Bobbie Lee said, and silenced the man’s quick denial with a raised hand while his eyes held the rancher’s gaze. ‘He recognized me but, hell, who wouldn’t? And we saw him in Beattie’s Halt anyway, so that was easy. But if he’s Ed Morgan, not Murphy, then his memory should go back more than a couple of days.’
‘That’s fair enough,’ Gibb said. ‘Go on.’
Bobbie Lee looked at the man in buckskins.
‘You recognize this woman?’
The guide sneered. ‘My work’s taken me to southern Texas, you think I know everyone—’
‘Two years,’ Bobbie Lee said. ‘That’s the length of time you’ve been gone. A couple of minutes ago you told me you were ten years old when I left Beattie’s Halt, but you recognized me straight off. You knew this woman for all but the last couple of years – so, tell me, tell us all – what’s her name?’
‘You expect me to remember the name of every woman I’ve ever met?’
‘Cassie,’ Bobbie Lee said, ‘show that Henry rifle to Gibb.’
The rifle flashed in the sunlight as Cassie drew it like a sword from its boot and handed it to the rancher.
He took it, looked at with approval, turned it in his hands. When he looked up, his gaze had hardened.
‘Recognize this, Morgan?’ he said. Suddenly he was placing a distasteful emphasis on the name, and Bobbie Lee felt an instant surge of relief.
The guide shrugged. ‘A Henry. Forerunner of the Winchester. A good rifle—’
‘It’s got some writing on it,’ Gibb said. ‘Beautifully engraved. It says “For Cassie Blunt, love always – Ed Morgan”.’ He held the rifle up, turned it in the sunlight so that the guide could see the engraving.
‘I guess it slipped my mind—’
‘Bobbie Lee!’
It was Cassie’s urgent warning that turned every man’s eyes towards her, then sent them looking in the direction of her outstretched arm. On the far side of the strung-out column of cattle, Cleet was riding close to the herd between Gibb’s men riding point and swing. He had something in his hands that he was whirling overhead like a rope. From it, sparks were flying. As they watched, he took a last wide swing and sent the object hurtling over the cattle. It seemed to hang in the air, then dropped and settled over a pair of long horns. At once, a series of crackling explosions split the hot day’s searing torpor.
‘Chinese firecrackers,’ Bobbie Lee yelled. And suddenly there was pandemonium as the lead steers broke and ran.
Chapter Eighteen
The timing was wrong, the placing of the firecrackers done in haste and without thought.
That realization, added to the knowledge that he and Cassie by their actions had pushed Cleet into making those mistakes, rode with Bobbie Lee like a bright beacon of triumph as the group of riders spurred their mounts towards the shelter of the chuck wagon.
Gibb went ahead of them, leaving the stampeding herd to his men. He kept a firm hold on Cassie’s Henry, levered a shell into the breech and never let his aim waver as he forced Murphy to ride with them to the wagon. There he dismounted, and with a few curt words handed the unmasked outlaw over to the glowering, Derby-hatted cook.
‘I guess I owe you,’ Gibb said, as Bobbie Lee drew rein, his voice raised over the thunder of the running herd, the shrill yips of his men and the crackle of exploding firecrackers.
‘Us, and Cleet’s panic. He watched what was going on with Murphy, placed those firecrackers in the wrong place and saved your herd. Cleet set it running in the wrong direction. It’ll end up back where it started, on the banks of the Pecos.’
Gibb grinned. ‘Yeah, with that in mind we’re letting them run themselves out. They’ll rest for a day, I get a second chance of making Colorado.’
‘You had any thoughts about Van Gelderen?’
‘The ghost?’ Gibb smiled ruefully. ‘Why?’
‘If I’ve been right once, I could be right twice. That man who’s staying out of your way is behind this stampede. I’d like to know why.’
Murphy had been forced off his feet by the cantankerous, short-fused cook and was sitting with his back to one of the wagon wheels. The cook’s shotgun was lying across a box, cocked, pointing at the outlaw.
Gibb tossed the Henry to Cassie, then turned to Murphy.
‘You were hiding under another man’s name,’ he said. ‘What about Van Gelderen?’
Murphy’s face was sullen. ‘He made it up. His name’s Vern Hedger.’
‘Christ, why didn’t I think of him?’ Gibb said. He shook his head when he looked at Bobbie Lee. ‘Hedger had a wife and kid, a section on my land where he ran a small herd of dairy cows using my water; that was on fine grassland along a fork of the Colorado. Then something went wrong. His wife left him, moved into San Angelo with the kid. Hedger took to drink. When he began losing money, he rode out one night and stole some of my best cows.’
‘So you turned him off your land?’
‘Gave him the choice,’ Gibb said. ‘Pack his bags, or get his neck stretched for rustling.’
Bobbie Lee was still in the saddle, Cassie astride her pony a few yards away as the dust kicked up by the hooves of two thousand running animals rolled like the smoke of battle and rose like a pall to mask the hot sun.
But the vast cloud was drifting south with the running cattle and, but for sheer serendipity, for Bobbie Lee that could have been the wrong way. The chuck wagon and the small group of onlookers were left in bright clean air, outlined like painted figures against the rolling dun backcloth. The man watching in anger and disbelief from the edge of the Staked Plains’ escarpment had a clear view that offered an opportunity he dare not refuse, and sent his hand reaching to his saddle boot for his Winchester rifle.
The gunshot went unheard. Out of the chaos all around them the bullet came like an unseen messenger of death. The aim was sure, the bullet flew straight and true, but once again a head moved and one man’s life was saved. This time it was a horse that changed position and foiled an attempted murder. For some reason – animal instinct, or hearing sharper than any human’s – Bobbie Lee’s big sorrel jerked up its head. The slug took it in its graceful throat. It was dying as it fell.
Chapter Nineteen
It was midday when they picked up Vern Hedger’s trail.
They had stayed with the chuck wagon until Harlan Gibb decided it was time to take it trundling south. Then, with Bobbie Lee astride Will Blunt’s skinny blue roan, they bade their farewells and rode towards the escarpment.
With the herd running towards the edge of the hard pan and the grassland beyond, the dust had settled and a mind-numbing silence had fallen over the Staked Plains. It was as if all life had been sucked away, and the very air itself had thickened and was bearing down on their heads under the weight of the intense heat.
They had drunk their fill, replenished water bottles, soaked their bandannas and done everything they could to ease their way as they set out across that scorching wilderness – yet still they struggled. And when, a mere fifteen minutes later, they caught the glint of a brass .44 cartridge lying where it had fallen, saw the sharp-cut hoof marks in the baked earth and followed that trail with their eyes into the shimmering heat-haze – the task they had set themselves seemed beyond their capabilities.
They took a drink while they could. Bobbie Lee splashed water into his hat for the horses. He knew Cassie was watching him; knew she was thinking of the way ahead, the water they could carry compared wi
th what they would need.
‘If he can do it,’ Cassie said, ‘so can we.’
‘Sure. What’s a spell of warm weather to folks from Beattie’s Halt?’
‘Is there water out there, Bobbie Lee?’
‘Oh yes. I think Hedger knows that.’
‘So he didn’t need Murphy if he knew that. He could have snuggled up to Harlan Gibb and led the herd himself if he’d changed his face as well as his name.’
Bobbie Lee chuckled at the thought of Hedger growing a beard and wearing an eye-patch. He wiped his face with the damp bandanna, then sobered and pointed north.
‘Far as I recall, Hedger won’t get a drink that don’t come out of a warm tin bottle for at least another hundred miles. About then, the Rio Hondo forks off the Pecos. If it was me, that’s the way to go. If he heads for that water hole I think is out there in the middle of the Plains, he’ll be more than fifty miles to the east of the lush green grass and fighting to stay alive.’
‘Then why do it? Why not head for the river?’
‘Who can tell what drives a man? Harlan Gibb said something went wrong. Maybe that slip inside Hedger’s brain warped his entire way of thinking. A normal man formulating plans would pay some thought to what happens afterwards. Maybe Hedger couldn’t see that far. Maybe he could and did, but when things went wrong his loose thinking took another jar.’
‘A long answer,’ Cassie said, ‘but even if some of it’s right it leaves us chasing a man who’s riding blind.’
‘So we chase him until he runs out of space or time.’
‘And then?’
Bobbie Lee planted his damp hat on his head and climbed onto the roan.
‘That’s about the worst question you could ask. Cold-blooded killing is what Hedger deserves, but that’s something I’ve not done in the past and I know I can’t do it now.’
‘If he fights,’ Cassie said, ‘that makes it easy.’
‘Killing him is already justifiable. That would make it easier to stomach.’
There was no more talk.
They pressed on, acutely aware of the hundred hard miles that separated them from that water hole, always harbouring the forlorn hope that they would overtake Hedger but knowing full well that pursuit across the Llano Estacado would always resemble a race between snails.
Their water was rationed, several small sips each hour, more for the horses who were bearing the brunt of the hard going. Bobbie Lee reckoned they were covering no more than eight miles in each hour; by mid-afternoon that put them some forty miles from the start, sixty miles from the water-hole.
Towards dusk, with the sun a fierce orange ball over the purple hills to the west and another thirty miles under their belts, something plucked Bobbie Lee’s hat from his head. Cassie caught the wink of the distant muzzle flash. She opened her mouth to cry out and turned the paint towards Bobbie Lee. Then she felt her mind freeze as she realized what she had done. Even as she gasped, there was a solid, fleshy smack. That second bullet took the paint pony behind the left shoulder. Shot through the heart, it died on its feet and dropped without a sound.
Chapter Twenty
‘The sorrel was luck, the paint deliberate. He went for mine first and aimed high. But now we know he’s going for the horses, and you gave him a target he couldn’t miss.’
After the second fatal shot, silence had settled over the plains. The sun was almost down, the Llano Estacado an endless moonscape of rock and scrub bathed in eerie red light. Bobbie Lee and Cassie were huddled behind the warm body of the dead paint pony. Will Blunt’s blue roan was some yards away, reins trailing. It was exposed and vulnerable. One carefully placed shot by the distant gunman would leave them on foot in the middle of a wilderness and there was nothing they could do to stop him.
‘I know,’ Cassie said. ‘I knew as soon as I turned.’ Her laugh was bitter. ‘I was so sure the shot was coming I almost lifted my left leg up out of the way.’
‘Well,’ Bobbie Lee said, ‘he’s out there now, maybe looking through the sights with his finger on the trigger, but it’s getting dark. If he holds off for the next half hour, we’ve got away with it; we’ve got one horse between us, and we’ll use it as best we can.’
‘How?’
‘Let me think about it,’ Bobbie Lee said, and suddenly his mind was busy turning disaster into good fortune. ‘Hedger’s been riding all day,’ he said. ‘He’s hot; he’s tired; he thinks he’s got the upper hand; thinks he’s stopped us in our tracks. What he’ll do is bed down for the night – and that gives us a chance. When he’s asleep, we’ll ride straight past him.’
‘Pa’s blue roan can’t carry two of us,’ Cassie said.
‘We’ll do it this way,’ Bobbie Lee said. ‘Thirty miles to go, so we’ll take turns jogging and riding through the cool of the night.’
‘But you said yourself Hedger’s out there. If we travel in a straight line, we’re liable to fall over him.’
‘The moon’s rising in clear skies. Hedger will be dead to the world. We’ll see his horse from a distance and stay well away, circle around him. He’ll never know we’ve gone past. When he finds out, it’ll be too late.’
Cassie was watching him, her eyes puzzled.
‘I’ve been listening, and as plans go it’s not bad at all. But this is the man we’re hunting. So the question is, if we find him, why go past?’
‘Yeah, I thought you’d get around to that,’ Bobbie Lee said. He sighed. ‘I told you before, I’ve never killed in cold blood. I guess there’s a side to me that demands fair play. I never threw down on an unarmed man, never drew my pistol first, so any man I came up against always knew he had the edge.’
‘So taking a sleeping man, at night, is against some personal code?’
‘That’s about it.’
Cassie grinned. ‘Don’t be apologetic, Bobbie Lee. I like it. More than that, my opinion of you has soared, and God knows it was already sky high. And, like I said, as plans go it’s pretty good. I can see the beauty of it now: we go riding past, and in the morning when Hedger arrives at the water-hole and prepares to pick us off as we ride in out of the sun—’
‘We’ll be there, waiting. He’ll be caught out in the open, and that’s where it’ll end.’
The moon was high and bright. Alongside the lather-strung, doggedly trotting blue roan, Bobbie Lee was jogging economically with one hand resting light on the cantle. Despite the cooler air, his face was wet. Every so often he used the now stiff bandanna to clear the salt sweat from his eyes. When he looked up he could see Cassie’s chin dropping to her chest as she swayed in the saddle, and he knew she was dozing.
Well, that was OK. Bobbie Lee was tall enough to see some way into the distance. The air was mostly crystal clear, but close to the cooling ground a thin night mist lay like a white blanket stretching the length and breadth of the plains. He knew that the eerie mist rising from the cooling earth to turn a watcher cross-eyed with looking could work for them, or against them: they could blunder across the sleeping Hedger, or ride straight on by without seeing, or being seen.
In the end it worked out somewhat differently.
Cassie’s soft warning alerted Bobbie Lee, and when he started at the sound he was amazed to realize she was now awake and he’d been dozing as he ran.
‘Over there, Bobbie Lee.’
She reined in the roan. Off to the east, no more than fifty yards away, he saw the dark shape of a horse standing hip-shot with mist up to its hocks, sleeping in the moonlight. Close by, a pencil-thin column of smoke arose from a dying fire. And, despite the mist, Bobbie Lee could see the outline of a man lying on the hard ground, wrapped in blankets, his covered head resting on his saddle.
‘Glory be,’ he said softly. ‘I’ll be double damned if we ain’t going to make it.’
‘Steady now, don’t count chickens just yet,’ Cassie said. ‘So, do we circle wide, or chance it?’
‘Keep going. At a walk. But hand me that Henry.’
In the leade
n silence that was the dead of night they managed to move silently: a woman on a lathered horse, whispering to calm the animal; a man walking in its shadow, a rifle gleaming in his one good arm. Far off a coyote howled mournfully, and Bobbie Lee knew that sounds like that would lull the sleeping outlaw. The one sound he didn’t want to hear was a whicker from the man’s dozing horse, and so he walked on by with his heart hammering somewhere up between his chest and his mouth and within him the urge to break into a run and get the hell out of there.
Fifty yards beyond Vern Hedger the sweat was streaming down his face and, hoarsely, he told Cassie that it looked like they’d made it.
‘All we’ve got to hope now,’ she said, ‘is that he’s heading for that water-hole. You just had what might be your best chance, and passed it up. I hope you don’t live to regret it.’
The water-hole was a fringe of wilting grey-green cottonwoods and cactus marking a flat area of shiny gunmetal that glittered like ice in the light of the approaching dawn. It was a mile away. If they stumbled across those remaining barren yards, they had made it. But strength had gone with the last of the water, will-power alone was stopping them from lying down, curling up and dying – and Bobbie Lee wasn’t too sure if he had much of that commodity left to draw on.
After they’d sneaked past Hedger, he had worked it so that he did most of the running, Cassie most of the riding. She was slumped in the saddle now, peering ahead with bleary eyes, her flaxen hair straggly and matted with sweat. The blue roan was moving at a walk. Bobbie Lee hung onto the cantle with his good arm and forced weary legs to take one step, then another, and still another – and always there seemed to be too many steps to be taken to reach the water-hole; always it seemed that the beckoning glitter of cold water was not drawing nearer, but receding.
‘We get there,’ he said hoarsely, ‘we’ll have time to drink our fill, freshen up, get into position.’
‘If the water’s fit to drink.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you go ahead and cheer me up.’