by Lou Cameron
“Slim’s got ‘em, I reckon. Do you want me to see if he’ll let us have ‘em?”
“Don’t you dare,” he said. “Slim’s so reasonable he could be mistaken for friendly. But he’s still one of the original Wild Bunch, and there’s just no way you could convince him we aimed to shoot at cans in the dark. He’d know right off that we were planning to make a break for it. I’d a lot rather let Slim and the others sort of figure it out in the cold gray dawn, and that’s still cutting it dangerously fine.”
“Well, nobody’s seen fit to take my guns away,” she said, “and I’ll be proud to share with you.”
“We’d be in a lot better shape with one rifle between us. I might be able to make more than one rider keep his distance, given a rifle to work with. Fights at pistol range make me nervous even when the odds are only, say, ten to one.”
She said, “Maybe we could sort of sneak about and see if anyone’s left a saddle gun unguarded, honey.”
He grimaced. “It might work. It might not. Once we make any move at all, the fat’s in the fire. Adding up all the dangerous moves we could make, I reckon just climbing up and out with the two guns we know we have for sure beats pussyfooting about and maybe not finding any rifle anyway.”
“Bueno,” she said. “When do we start?”
“Let’s give everyone a chance to settle down for the night. After midnight would be safer, but we need more time for our moonlight stroll. Ten sounds about right. It’s pushing nine right now, so…Why are you at my fly again, Opal?”
“Hell, I gave you the rubbers, and you just said we have a whole hour, right?”
So even though he was sure it was the wrong way to get in shape for mountain climbing, they were soon undressed and at it again. She’d been right about the damned rubbers. Whoever made the Pasha brand no doubt made bicycle tires on the side. It took him so long that way, and she seemed pleased with the results by the time he managed to climax.
That is, he’d thought so. She wanted to do it again. “Later,” he said. “If we get out of this mess alive, I mean to screw you silly. But let’s save our strength for now. We’ve got a long hard night ahead of us.”
She subsided in his arms, and as they cuddled, naked, under the top blanket, she asked, “What happens then, Stuart?”
“After what?”
“After we get away and you screw me silly. How long are we talking about afore you move on to broader horizons and prettier gals?”
He kissed her. “Nobody’s prettier than you…but, well, I do have a job, and I work out of Frisco.”
“I’ve always wanted to see Frisco,” she said. “I hear tell it’s nice.” He liked her even better when she added, “Someday I might get out that way. Would you mind if we run into one another out yonder someday?”
He assured her that sounded grand, and meant it. He knew he owed her at least the nearest town where she wasn’t wanted and he could grub-stake her with some of the money he’d taken from those bodies back at the mine. It seemed only fair, since she’d shot them both.
Somewhere up the canyon a guitar was strumming and three or four voices were singing “Get Along, Old Paint” about as tunefully as alley cats or coyotes might have managed. Stringer propped himself on one elbow to observe that the scattered night fires all about were down to embers by now. It seemed likely that any nearby insomniacs would either wander up to join that song festival or start throwing boots at it ere long.
The sky above the canyon was now as starry as it ever got in these parts. At this altitude the bigger stars looked close enough to shoot down and the Milky Way ran from wall to wall of the canyon like a streak of silver paint airbrushed on black velvet. But all that starlight combined would not have been enough to outline some of the rimrocks above like that. So he knew the moon had made it above the Divide to the east by now.
“We’d best get dressed,” he told Opal. “I don’t reckon it will get much quieter around here than it is right now.”
“It’s still early,” she protested. “Can’t you do it to me one more time afore we leave, honey?”
He kissed her. “I’d be proud to, if we weren’t leaving straight up a mighty steep cliff. Save some of that enthusiasm for a two-hundred-foot climb and at least fifty miles of hiking, and you’ll have a whole lifetime of screwing ahead of you. If we get caught, you won’t. I hope you understand this is a serious undertaking, Opal. You’d best stay here if there’s any doubt in your mind.”
She grimaced. “I was planning on talking Cousin Etta into going into a safer line of work even before Kid Curry shoved his bad breath and dirty moustache in my face. But you sure are a spoilsport. I wasn’t planning on climbing any rocks with the part of me that still feels amorous.”
He kissed her again, resisted the impulse to give her amorous parts a friendly feel, and reached for his jeans.
It didn’t take them long to dress, once they’d put more amusing chores out of their minds. Stringer hung the one canteen that still held water across his chest with the strap over his left shoulder and the heavy canteen riding his right hip. But when he suggested wearing her gun rig as well, Opal protested that it was hers and wouldn’t fit him as well in any case. He started to tell her to give him one gun to tuck in his waistband, at least, but then considered the risk of losing it as he scraped his belly over rocks, and decided the canteen would be awkward enough. Aside from the chagrin of dropping a .44-40 down a cliff, the noise it made would wake the dead, and he doubted anyone in camp had drunk that much yet.
He tried to check the time with his pocket watch, couldn’t make out the dial despite the Milky Way, and said, “Well, if you’re coming, we’d better get going.”
As he helped her to her feet Opal asked which one of them should go first. “Neither,” he said. “Without a rope, it makes no sense to climb in tandem. You don’t want me falling on you and, no offense, I don’t want you falling on me.”
She gulped. “Jesus, do you reckon either of us is likely to, Stuart?”
He shrugged. “The wall looks solid. Most of the loose rock seems to have fallen ages ago. All the boulders I’ve seen on the floor of this canyon look well weathered, and I observed by daylight, riding in, that there didn’t seem to be any scars of fresh rock on the cliffs all about.”
She chuckled. “I admire a man who plans ahead. Are you sure you didn’t make friends with me just to escape?”
He had, sort of. But she seemed reassured when he pointed out, “Hell, I’ve laid you twice and I still haven’t escaped. I don’t need you tagging along, damn it.”
That inspired her to step off the tarp and up to the sheer cliff. She was four feet off the ground before he could get started.
Stringer found a nearby vertical crack, shoved a fist in as far as it would go, and twisted his wrist to wedge in solid as he found a toehold and started moving up. He called softly over to her, “Take it easy. The notion is to go up, not down. Test every new hold good before you put all your weight on it, and don’t look down.”
“Pooh,” she said. “I guess I’ve scampered over rocks afore, and any handhold that can bear your weight ought to find it easier to bear mine, you big moose.”
It wasn’t easy, but he drew even with her. “We’re not grabbing the same rock,” he pointed out. “Slow down. I mean it. We’ve got one hell of a climb to go, and it’s best to take it slow and steady.” She asked if that was the secret of his swell screwing, and they moved on up, abreast, at Stringer’s more cautious pace. They were both too winded, and a mite too far apart, for easy conversation. As he stared up the rock wall ahead of them, Stringer found it impossible to judge just where the canyon rim might be. There were too many bulges between. So despite his own advice, he looked down, and felt his balls trying to pucker up into his dry mouth. The ruby dots of scattered night fires told him they were already signaling an eight-or ten-story drop, putting him and the girl about halfway to the top, and he was already getting a cramp in the arch of his left foot.
&nbs
p; He shifted his weight to free that foot and kicked the cliff a couple of times with his boot tip. It helped some, if not enough. Then, as he made ready to climb on, they both heard hoofbeats and war whoops down below, and some son of a bitch tossed more wood on a fire to shed more light on the subject.
“Freeze,” he hissed across at Opal. “We have to play lizard on a rock right now. What in thunder could be going on down there?”
“More of the Wild Bunch coming in,” she called back softly. “I told you Kid Curry sent word out. Lord, if that’s my kin, Cousin Etta, coming in with Sundance and Butch—”
“I doubt that for more reasons than I’ve time to go into, and even if it’s them, you can’t climb down as easy as you can climb up, even in better light. You can study on it once we get topside. If they spot us now, they’ll start shooting before they worry about what we might be doing up here. Start climbing again, and for God’s sake, don’t dislodge any pebbles.”
He moved up another arm’s length. But Opal gasped, “I seem to be stuck.” He swore softly and tried to keep his voice reassuring as he called over to her, “Just take it easy. Thanks to that firelight, you ought to find it easier to spot the next handhold, honey.”
She was trying to stay calm, but not quite making it. “There’s nothing above me but a damned old bulge of bareass rock,” she replied. “I’m having enough trouble hanging on where I am.”
“You have to,” he said. “Don’t panic. I’ll see if I can work my way over and give you a hand. The way up from over here looks possible.”
He had to climb a few more feet in order to get his toes into the crosswise crack he’d been clinging to by his fingertips. He found higher handholds, albeit ominously wider apart, and said, “Hold on. I’m coming.”
“I can’t,” Opal gasped through gritted teeth. “My fingers feel like I’m wearing empty gloves for hands and, Jesus, I’m getting leg cramps now!”
“Just move up and down a mite without trying to go anywhere. That ought to circulate your blood better. You have to hold on until I get there. So do it. It won’t be long.”
Then his questing right hand got to the bulge blocking the girl’s route. She’d been right. There wasn’t enough roughness to encourage a six-legged ant if it was afraid of high places. He worked his way as close as he could and looked down. Opal’s form was a black outline against the faint orange glow from the canyon floor. He couldn’t see her face, but he had no need to meet her frightened eyes when she gasped, “Honey, I’m about to go!”
He swung his right leg as far out under the bulge as he could and got as tight a grip as he could with his own numb fingertips. “Grab my ankle and hand on,” he said. “I’ll swing you under me, and you can grab the crack I’m standing in, see?”
“I can’t,” she answered in an agonized voice. “I only got one hand that still works, and it’s all that’s holding me right now.”
“Bang the numb one on the rocks and wake it up, then. It’s your only way out of that fix, honey.”
He heard her slapping the hard rock with her soft palm. Then she gasped, “Oh, no!” and fell, screaming and falling, falling and screaming, for what seemed forever, until he heard her hit bottom. Neither her screams nor the ghastly sound of her landing had gone unnoticed down there.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Stringer was climbing, cussing, and trying not to puke as the owlhoots started tossing more wood on their fires. One son of a bitch bounced bullets off the rocks all around before he could even see what he was shooting at.
Stringer was never to recall half the handholds he’d grabbed on the rest of the way up. He’d just climbed without looking for them, because he had to. He was three quarters of the way before he heard Kid Curry bellowing, “There he is, boys! It’s that son of a bitching Stringer. I’ll be vexed as hell with you all if he gets away!”
Bullets commenced to hit closer, and there was nothing like the notion of a bullet up the ass to inspire a man to all-out effort. He got peppered with spanged-off rock more than once. But before anyone down there had the sense to run for a saddle gun and do some sensible aiming at rifle range, Stringer was over the edge and running. He hadn’t run far when he tripped over a slab of rock, skinned his hands, and sat up to get his bearings in such light as the moonlight offered.
He saw he was on an elevated flat dotted with moon-silvered short grass and clumps of what they called soap weed in Colorado and yucca back home. He didn’t think he could be above the timberline, so the vegetation was likely sparse because bedrock lay just under the surface. Either way, there was no cover as far the eye could see.
On the other hand, one couldn’t see all that far by moonlight, and there had to be cover somewhere. So Springer sprung back to his feet to go look for some. He forced himself to walk instead of run, and knowing they’d expect him to beeline south toward the rail line, he headed north. He knew they couldn’t chase him up that cliff on horseback no matter how mad they were at him. He figured it would take a while before they worked their way to the top via some other canyon that wasn’t a pure box. That told him he had some time to work with, though not how much.
He’d made it a mile or more to the north, across scenery he’d have found mighty tedious if he’d just been sightseeing, and then he was glad he was walking instead of running, for he came close to walking off another cliff in the tricky light. Another canyon cut across his line of march. Kid Curry had known what he was doing, after all. This whole vast massif seemed to be Swiss-cheesed with canyons, for what Mother Nature did in one place she tended to do in another.
He swung inland to work around the canyon barring his chosen escape route. It ran much farther into the rimrocks than the one the gang was hiding out in. When he found the ass end of it at last, he saw it wasn’t boxed like the other one. If a man was dead set on getting down into it from the far end, he could sort of slide down safely enough. Then Stringer considered men on horseback coming up the steep slope he’d found. He decided it was too steep, and he had to go somewhere. So he lowered himself over the four-foot slab of rimrock, found his boot heels on dry scree that felt like railroad ballast and was just as treacherous under foot, and proceeded to lower himself into wherever. He’d no sooner done so when he heard a distant shout, stuck his head back out of the crack at ground level, and spotted a dotted line of torches to his south. Not far enough to his south for comfort, even if they had sense enough to spread out instead of riding in a bunch after him before they’d guessed where he might be. He hunkered down on the scree and started to half climb and half slide down into the darkness.
It took forever to get to the bottom. When he did, the exact bottom was hard to judge. The new canyon he’d found was a lot skinnier than Kid Curry’s, and choked with fallen rocks as big or bigger than houses. He spent as much time climbing as walking before things flattened out more reasonable, closer to the narrow mouth. He took a swig from his canteen. The night was cool, but it had still been dry and dusty work. He could see why the Wild Bunch had passed on such a disgusting canyon, even though they, had to know about it. That thought inspired him to recap the canteen and start north again. There was no trail following the base of the cliffs. But it did seem the natural way to work north along them. So Stringer moved away through the thicker scrub at an angle. He didn’t want anyone guessing the natural way he might walk, before he had a horse and gun.
That was hot and dusty work as well. He kept tripping over deadwood and bumping into bushes that smelled like gin. When he found himself wandering through a tanglewood of second grown aspen in some ancient burn out, he sat down on an old charred log to inhale some more water and study on what came next. It was harder to see where he was going, under the fluttering aspen leaves above him, and there were limits to how far north he might want to go in the first place. He knew that, save for mighty scattered spreads, there was hardly anyone living halfway honest between where he was and the original Hole in the Wall country. He knew he didn’t want to walk that far on foot
, even if both old Charlie Siringo and Deputy Lefors fell for Kid Curry’s ruse and wound up there to greet him.
He resisted the impulse to roll a smoke as he mulled over that angle a spell. Curry couldn’t have planned on meeting up with a dupe to feed the law red herrings. So from the very beginning the train robbers had been banking on the law expecting them to ride far, if not to their old hideout, instead of holing up so close. The important question was whether the law had bought the notion. That one posse he and poor little Opal had spotted sure had. Even if others had not, this was poor tracking country, and Kid Curry had been smart enough to work in the area as an honest or at least unsuspected cowhand for the last few months. So if he knew anything about tracking, and he had to, Kid Curry was in fair shape to put himself in a posse rider’s saddle and figure where such a gent might look.
Stringer didn’t know this neck of the woods as well as either. But he was good at putting himself in another gent’s shoes or saddle. He sipped some more water and decided that if the box canyon was at all well known, to even local riders, Kid Curry never would have chosen it. Curry must have stumbled over it, chasing strays one day, and noticed that others who lived around there had never seen fit to explore the details of the ragged-ass range. Honest men hunting stock would be more likely to dismiss areas of bareass rock where no cow would want to hide out in the first place.
He brightened and told himself that his best bet now would be range a sensible cow might favor, areas honest local riders would know best. Kid Curry and the others would want to avoid them.
He rose and started working his way downslope, knowing what Colorado riders called parks and anyone else would call a mountain meadow tended to run north and south between the higher and more barren ridges. It wouldn’t matter if he met up with a posse dumb enough to be searching for train robbers in green pastures. He just had to meet up with someone on his side of the law, fast. He couldn’t tell if he was leaving sign with his boot heels, in this light. He suspected Kid Curry could track pretty good, by morning light, if he was.