McAllister 5

by Matt Chisholm

  Sometimes he would stop the mare and would stand listening for the approaching footsteps of the man. Then through squinting eyes he would search the terrain, carefully, in every agonizing detail, every now and then thinking that he saw the man, then realizing that he was looking at a strange shape of rock, an elongated shadow, wisp of dust.

  When night came his instinct was to stop, but that inner mind reasoned him out of it. This was the time to keep going, in the cool. Every step they took brought them nearer to water; every step they failed to take brought them nearer to death. The mare was limping badly now, but she steadily went on as if she had courage enough for both of them. They walked on all night under a full moon and a canopy of bright stars that mocked them with their cheerfulness.

  The cool of the night brought with it clarity of the inner mind, it seemed to push out and bring his thoughts into order. It demanded that he lighten the burden the mare was compelled to carry. He peeled off his treasured saddle and left it lying, for in this moment it was without value. More, it was a hindrance. He tied the lines in a loop over the mare’s neck and entwined his fingers in the coarse strands of her mane and she went on again, limping but game and together they walked till dawn. Even then they did not stop, but went on until the sun was high and the knives were at work again under McAllister’s eyelids.

  Still he thought for the mare and he searched for shade for her, but he found none. This frustrated him so much that he felt like weeping, but he knew there was no moisture in him for that. He examined her mouth and found that it was cracked and sore. His own tongue was by now so swollen that he could hear the air wheezing in his throat as he breathed. An hour or a day back, he had drunk his own urine. Now when he tried to make water, no more than a trickle came.

  He could not speak to the mare, so he fondled her ear. When he entwined his fingers in her mane once more, she knew that was the signal to go and she went. Her limp was more pronounced, but her pace was almost too much for him even so.

  He must have passed out on his feet. He was dragged back to consciousness by the mare’s sudden quickening of pace. He tried to ask her what was up, but nearly choked in his effort to speak.

  What may have been minutes or hours later, he lost his grip on her mane and fell. He heard an uncanny sound, so like the splash of water that he almost believed it. When he raised his head he could not believe his blurred sight. The mare had her head down and was drinking.

  He started to crawl forward on his belly, but even as he did so he knew that his disappointment was already formed. This had to be alkaline water. If it was not too bad the horse could drink, but not a man.

  There was a shallow pool of it among the flat rocks, no more than a few inches in depth. He scooped some up in his hands and moistened his mouth, and spat it out as best he could, because the attempt to spit was difficult and painful. In an agony of frustration he put his face in the water and held it there. At least he might absorb some through his pores. He even thought about lying in it, but reasoned that the alkali would crack up his skin and the cracks would turn into unbearable sores.

  Even the mare could only take so much of it. She raised her head and limped a few paces from it. Turning her head she looked at him, waiting to go on.

  When he stood up his legs felt like paper and his joints seemed to be all disconnected. However, there was a good side to it. His brain had now settled down to working on a simple and primitive level. It was satisfied to do no more than give directions to those feeble legs. McAllister staggered and wove towards the mare, got his fingers into the mane and she started off again.

  They stopped some time during the morning, or so he thought it was, and surveyed two lines of bones. He knew that it represented an ox team which had stopped and died there—perhaps a week ago, perhaps a year. There was no knowing.

  A shadow flitted lighter than a feather across them. He looked up and saw the vulture, fragmented to the human eye by the blinding sun. Then another and another. They went around the bones and the mare assumed her previous course. McAllister reckoned with a quiet pride that she knew just where she was going. She knew there was water ahead and she intended to take him to it. When he got her home, or when she got him home, she would have the best pasture he could find. Any stud she chose. He would build a monument to her. There had never been a horse like her.

  When they next stopped he examined her hide around the wound. To his dismay he found that it was hugely swollen. He stood there for some time not knowing what to do, cursing himself for forcing her to go on. But was the choice his? If they stopped she was sure to die. If they went on, she would have a faint chance. He looked at her and she reminded him of the shadow of a horse she had been when he found her down in Sonora. Now she was crow bait.

  He looked down at himself and realized that he looked like a ghost, covered from head to foot with the white dust. Something had rubbed his shoulder sore and he found to his surprise that he had saved his rawhide reata and was carrying it bandolier-fashion over one shoulder. Why the hell had he saved the rope? But he did not cast it aside; some instinct bade him retain it. When he gripped the mare’s mane again she limped on.

  Three

  It was night.

  He should have died yesterday. If the mare had stopped, he would have stopped. And he would have lain down and died. He knew it. It was the cinnamon mare who had kept him going.

  Sometime during the night he saw the hills off to his left and at once he thought that hills must mean water; but if there was water up there the mare did not think so, she plodded on steadily north. She must be made of iron.

  They almost fell together into the bed of a dried-up creek. He fell to his knees and dug with his hands, but all he succeeded in doing was to break his skin and his fingernails; there was no water there. So they stumbled on, following the creek bed.

  He fell twice during the night and she stopped and waited for him. He wanted to beg her to go on without him, but he could make no more than a dry choking noise. Her patient presence there in the pale moonlight got him to his feet again.

  It was getting near dawn and he was asking himself if he had walked for three or four days when the mare whinnied. It was the first sound she had made since their walk began and the sound startled him nearly out of his wits. She sprang forward as if she were in full strength again and took him off his feet. When he stretched his length on the ground this time she did not stop and wait for him, but was gone trotting away into the grey light, denying the pain of her wound.

  He had no way of knowing how long he lay there. He did so until that now shrinking inner core of his mind whispered its last message to him—

  Water.

  He could not believe it; yet it made some sort of sense. Water was the one thing which would make the mare leave him. Water, water, water … His dying mind whispered the word to him over and over again and each time he heard it, his resolve to move grew. As it was the only thing which could persuade Sally to leave him, so it was the only thing which could have forced him to his feet.

  It took him a long time but he was at last upright and painfully forcing one foot in front of the other, as uncertain as a man who walks for the first time after being months on a sick bed, fearing with each step that he would fall and then unaccountably tripping and going down.

  Finally, however, after a year of a crawling pace, he saw the mare to her knees in water, peacefully drinking. Such is the power of necessity, now he found the last of his strength and he ran. He reached the edge of the few-foot wide stream that was the mighty Humboldt River, tripped and went in headlong.

  It was not sweet water, it was not even good water, but it was the most wonderful water he had ever tasted. Getting it past his swollen tongue was almost impossible. He lay for what seemed hours with his nostrils just above the water, soaking his tongue, his mouth and his whole parched body. Then came the fear that he would fall asleep and drown in the foot of water, so he turned himself around and lay with his face in the shallows.
A little later he dragged himself forward a short way and left just his body in to soak up the precious liquid. Then he slept.

  When he woke the sun was high.

  He found that, while his tongue was still swollen, it was considerably reduced. This was such a relief to him that he had to laugh. The mare looked at him as if amazed. Now he found that he could drink properly and he allowed himself a bellyful. His belly, however, did not care for this sudden richness of liquid and threw it back. He did not care. There was water and he demanded nothing else.

  Four

  It was on the following day near to dusk when McAllister looked north and saw the wagon train moving along what he knew must be the Oregon Trail. As he watched, so the people in the train corralled their wagons for the night and put their cattle to graze on what poor feed they could find. Men and women came to fetch water from the river and McAllister walked to meet them, a more or less sane man now', and they at once took him to their train and fed him. There was a medical doctor with the wagons and he volunteered to do what he could for the mare.

  They were an assorted crowd, the wagon train folk, but mostly hailed from Ohio. A few families had come together from their homes to Independence, but most had not known each other until their captain had gathered them together, believing that there was safety in numbers. This had proved right enough on the long trail, but they had heard of Indian attacks on trains both ahead and behind them. So they were wary and expected each day that their luck could turn bad.

  The wagon master was a capable man whom McAllister had met some years before in Independence. He went by the name of Captain Mallett and he was a man who knew his job and had been over the trail a dozen times. He was a big, impressive man of not too many words, a quality which recommended him to McAllister.

  The acquaintance of the two men helped in the people’s acceptance of this alkali-coated stranger. They proved not only friendly but hospitable. As their cattle were worn down by hard travel and the master wanted to give them the opportunity to gain some strength before they took the steep mountain trails ahead, they decided to remain where they were for a couple of days. The doctor had lanced the mare’s wound and drained it of its poison. The master lent McAllister a good horse which enabled him to ride along his back-trail and retrieve his saddle and rifle. Except that the rifle had gone.

  McAllister circled, hunting for his quarry’s sign, found it and convinced himself that the man was headed slightly north-east for the Humboldt River. He wasted no more time, but rode back to the train. He estimated that the man may have reached the river ten or fifteen miles east of where the Ohio folk were camped.

  He found the mare far from well on his return, but the doctor reckoned that she would recover herself in a few days if she were well fed and not worked. McAllister knew that the people on the train were now starting to find themselves short of supplies, but between them they sold McAllister enough corn for the mare and odd supplies for himself to keep him going for a week or more, if he husbanded his resources.

  Over the fire that night, he questioned the captain and discovered some possibly useful facts. The train ahead of this one had the advantage of at least three days over them. The one behind was no more than a couple of days back. McAllister described his quarry to the master, but the man shook his head and said that he had seen nothing of the man.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘we had a horse stolen. Yesterday. Fellow who did it knew what he was at. Took a good saddle-horse at night without disturbing the rest of the remuda. We put it down to Indians. Who else could take a horse right from under your nose?’

  McAllister smiled. ‘I know one or two whites who are pretty good horse thieves.’

  So his quarry was now on a horse. Maybe riding bareback, but still he was astride and that gave him pace now. He made the captain tell him exactly where the train had been camped. The snag was, Sally would not be fit to be ridden for a few days yet and he was not a man to ride a horse before it was ready. He swore a little, but on the whole took the situation philosophically.

  The wagon train moved on and he was sorry to see them go. They were nice folks and he enjoyed being with them. After they had gone, he stayed where he was for a couple of days and the mare seemed to be coming along pretty well. He walked her two or three times a day to prevent her muscles from stiffening. When the limp started to disappear he decided to try her walking a fair distance. He put the saddle on her, but did not mount. She carried his gear happily and walked at his shoulder as he paced back along the trail. He gave her a good rest at mid-day and she seemed none the worse for the distance covered. Just the same, he decided to make camp until the following day when, in the cool of dawn, he pushed on. He did not miss the fact that pretty often there were enough hills and broken ground within rifle shot for the man he was following to take a shot at him.

  The mare walked well and the limp was scarcely perceptible. Her eyes were bright and she was alert. McAllister knocked over a couple of cottontails with the Remington and wished, not for the first time, that he had the Henry with him.

  Never mind, he thought, I’ll have it back before I’m through. But he still did not like the idea of being knocked over by his own rifle.

  By noon, he reached the place where the wagon train had camped. He found where the wagons had been laagered and where the travelers had their fires. To the north, he found where the horse-herd had grazed. He returned to the mare and staked her with a longish hair-rope to a picket-pin and circled the grazing ground on foot, ever widening the circle. It took a long and patient hunt before he picked up a faded sign of what he thought might be a man with a horse.

  It took him a good distance from the mare, and this made him uneasy. The last thing he would risk was to have the mare lifted and him to be set afoot in this country. By the time he got back to the mare, he sighted dust to the east. Guessing this was a wagon train, he waited.

  It proved to be a company composed mostly of New Englanders. They were a little suspicious of him at first, but eventually he was invited to eat with one of the families, after which he went around, trying to buy himself a rifle. But he had no luck. The train folk did not have too many weapons and those they had they reckoned they needed. He described his quarry and asked if anybody had seen him on the trail, but no luck there either. When they had gone on he once more picked up the tracks which may have been made by his fugitive and followed them.

  It was not long before he halted, turned, and looked towards the river. Though he could not be one hundred per cent sure, it looked as if his quarry turned back for the river. It was always possible, of course, that the man was executing a double bluff. Maybe he wanted McAllister to think that he had returned to the river, so that he would lose valuable time searching along the Humboldt for further tracks. McAllister suspected that if he searched the river’s banks, the tracks would suddenly play out.

  With a cold shiver he realized that he may have been in the fellow’s sights when he had been alone back there by the river. Even at this moment the man could be near, could be preparing for a shot.

  He had to do some careful thinking.

  Loading his pipe, he sat down in the mare’s shade. Then, thinking that Sal was too conspicuous as she was, he made her lie down. He had smoked his pipe out and still had not made up his mind. He was inclined to think the man had made no more than a feint towards the river.

  McAllister considered ... he had covered the ground west of here all along the trail. The man may have gone that way, but it was unlikely. So, if he had gone back to the Humboldt, he must have headed out east—if he stayed with the river. Surely he could not have gone south back into the desert. North was a possibility, but again it was desert and he thought the fellow would have been scared by the lack of water. For a while he would want to stay within reach of water, and probably the only water in this area was in the river bed. And there was precious little left there.

  He made up his mind what he would do next. Looking at the sky, he assessed the t
ime. Timing his movements right he would head east in daylight so that he could be seen, but soon as night fell he would turn for the river and head back along its southern shore for higher ground. If McAllister was in error the man would gain a few more hours and he had already gained more than a day. But, thought McAllister, that would not get him freedom, not in the long run. Somebody had to stay on the trail of a bastard like that and stop him. Fate had decided that it was McAllister. So he would keep after him till he got him. Or the other fellow got him.

  McAllister asked himself, not for the first time in his life, if he enjoyed this kind of thing. No, he thought, he did not enjoy it. He enjoyed being put on his mettle, but the idea of hunting a man did not appeal to him. Maybe five years younger, he did, but not now. His mind was at home on his horses and he was wondering how they were making out. That was where he should be, minding his own horses.

  While he had the mare down, he took a look at her shoulder. The healing was almost complete. There would always be a scar there, but now she was almost as good as new. He got her on her feet and started to walk east. He walked steadily until after dark, when he swung right and headed for the river. It was very much in his mind that his quarry could have travelled parallel to him and might even now be waiting at the river for him. That was a chance he had to take. He did not like to take chances, but there were times when there was no alternative.

  He gave the mare a handful of corn and chewed on some hardtack himself. Then he mounted the mare and let her carry him at a steady trot for the river. She went well and that pleased him.

  Why, he asked himself, did he even consider that the man had not acted sensibly and got out of the country fast? Why did he assume that the fellow wanted him dead? The answer was pure instinct. When you followed a man for as long as he had trailed this one, you started to put yourself inside his skull. You started to know the way he thought.