by John Benteen
Like a great hunting cat, Fargo took what rest he could while he could get it, knowing the demands soon to be made on his reserves. Stokes, less experienced, was also less calm. Fargo tried to take his mind off what lay ahead by quizzing him about every aspect of Sheep Mountain. “Forget the trail. We’ll have to go up the hard way, in the dark. You say you’ve worked all around it on these expeditions. You ever climbed it by any route except the trail? Any suggestions about the best way?”
Stokes considered. “Yeah, we’ve worked our way up its flanks on these different expeditions, looking for fossils. But never all at one time.” He rubbed his face, trying to remember. “And Lord knows we never tried it in the dark. Still, there might be a way if—how experienced a climber are you?”
Fargo hesitated. If he had any real weakness, it was an inbred fear of high places. The very thought of climbing sheer cliffs, working along narrow ledges, made his gut shrivel with a kind of panic. It was something, that fear, of which he had never been able to rid himself—but it was also something he had learned to overcome. Had been forced to, doing battle in as many different kinds of places as he had in his time. A professional fighting man had to take what came, not flinch because all his battles could not be fought on level ground. “I’ve climbed some rough ones in my time. It ain’t something I enjoy, but I can do it.”
“All right,” Stokes said. “One time, just once, I worked my way almost to the top from around on the eastern flank. First, we have to get into position through a lot of the damnedest canyons and draws you ever saw. Then the climb itself—it’s not so bad in the beginning, but the higher you go, the worse it gets. I started out at daylight one day two years ago, and I made it all the way except for the last three, four hundred feet. Then there was no way up but a chimney.”
“A chimney. You mean what I think you mean?”
“I mean the wall is sheer, except a split in it about five feet wide. A man could go up that way, but he can’t make much more than a foot at a time. He’s got to brace his back against one side, his feet against the other, and just hunch on up. And if he runs out of strength or nerve, he’s stranded. I made it about a hundred feet up the chimney before I decided what the hell, it wasn’t worth it, and then I eased on down.”
Fargo’s palms were sweaty. “Well, this time we got no choice. If there’s no other way, we do it, or we don’t. But we got to be up on that mountain by daylight day after tomorrow. Tonight we ride and git into position. Tomorrow night, we climb.”
“And then—?”
“Then we fight,” said Fargo.
Eight
By ten o’clock, a moonless darkness had settled upon the land. As they tightened saddle cinches, Stokes’ voice quivered slightly.
“Neal, maybe we’re crazy. Maybe—”
“Easy. We’ve come too far now to turn back.” Fargo pulled on a latigo. “Anyhow, maybe it won’t be as bad as it looks. After all, a lot of people up there with Schmidt are draft dodgers and deserters. They’re there because they didn’t want to fight in the first place. It’s however many real pros he’s got with him that we got to worry about. You keep your nerve and do what I say, we’ll make out all right.”
Stokes fell silent. They mounted, rode across the rolling grassland toward the nightmare country in the distance, bearing toward Sheep Mountain. Presently fingers of the Badlands reached out to embrace them. They kept their horses at a walk to minimize the sound of hoofbeats. Then the land fell away into a deep draw, where the grass began to taper off, and now there was little around them or underfoot but naked soil, bereft of all but the most scanty dry land foliage. Knife-edged ridges and shaly slopes loomed above them. And now, in the darkness, there were expected drop-offs and sudden barrier walls. Presently Fargo reined in. “This,” he whispered to Stokes, “is as far as horses take us. Off-saddle, cache the horse gear. We’ll take the ropes, canteens, the saddle bags with grub, and all our weapons; nothin’ else.”
Quickly, they swung down and stripped the mounts. Freed, the animals naturally turned back toward grass and water. Saddles and bridles were quickly cached. Then, in the remaining darkness, they worked their way forward on foot, heavily burdened. Fargo’s shotgun was slung, his rifle carried.
Stokes had slung the bow, now strung, his quiver full of arrows, also carried his long-gun in his hand. The coil of joined rope was draped around Fargo’s shoulder, the saddlebags and canteens were slung over Stokes’ torso.
It was slow, tortuous, nerve-wracking going. Like two ants, all right, Fargo thought, making their way across a vast expanse of cinders. The night was hot; he sweated, but not entirely from the heat or the burden of equipment, weapons, ammunition, that he lugged. For now they were working ever more deeply into the incredibly rough country around Sheep Mountain, and for every foot of forward progress they made, it was necessary to move twenty or thirty roundabout. There were sudden cliffs, forty, fifty, a hundred feet, which could neither be descended nor climbed in the darkness, and they had to edge this way or that until they found ways down or up. By four, they had used up their strength, and anyhow, false dawn streaked the sky. It was time to go to ground.
They sheltered beneath an overhang in a narrow cleft whose walls reared a hundred feet above them on either side. Above them in the darkness loomed the massiveness of the mountain, named for the bighorn sheep that had once grazed there. Fargo let the exhausted Stokes sleep while he stood first watch, rifle and shotgun at the ready.
Dawn came, briefly transforming the hellish terrain all around them to something splendid, as light glinted again off the naked layers of various ancient earths. Flat on his belly, palms shielding the lenses of the binoculars to prevent reflection, Fargo scanned all that lay before him, and his courage almost failed at what he saw. For all their striving, they still had at least another three hours of the same brutal travel they had put in tonight even to reach the real base of the mountain. Then, in what darkness was left, they would have to make their climb.
He scanned the mountain closely. Its flanks were raw-naked, cut and seamed, apparently impassable. At its top, it leveled off into a rugged, grassy mesa, hundreds of feet above where they now lay. Almost arrogantly, as if certain of their safety, the men up there had built breakfast fires, and fingers of smoke curled upward against the cloudless sky. Then Fargo stiffened.
Most of the bighorn sheep, Stokes had said, were long gone from the Badlands. But, Fargo saw, not all. Up there on the mountainside, four dun blots were climbing: a big ram with curling horns, a couple of ewes, a yearling. The big man in khakis lay immobile, watching them closely. They seemed certain of their route, as if they had traveled it often, and while a man could not necessarily go where a mountain sheep could, these animals would not, on the other hand, pick a trail so difficult that the short-legged yearling could not negotiate it.
With maddening slowness, they moved upward, pausing now and then to browse at some scrubby foliage. Yet he did not begrudge the time they took; it gave him opportunity to mark and memorize their route. The sun was high; it was nearly ten before they reached a narrow bench three hundred feet below the crest. Above them reared a rock wall so sheer that not even they would attempt it; moving on, with one breath-taking leap after another, they followed the bench and then jumped from ledge to ledge as it petered out. Presently they vanished from view around the mountain-side. But the pattern of the trail they’d followed was now clear in Fargo’s mind, and he let his eyes rove up and down it ceaselessly. If they could reach that same bench, that left only the chimney.
A dark cleft in the wall, it ran from the crest down to the bench. Looking at it, thinking about the way they must go up it, made his hands sweat again and his belly knot, but there was no help for it. Presently he awakened Stokes. “You lay low, keep under cover. Don’t do anything to attract attention, but keep your eyes open all the time. And—” He told Stokes about the sheep. “If they come back, watch how they travel. Meanwhile, try to remember how you did it before.”
“I’ll do my best,” Stokes said.
“Wake me in four hours.” Fargo, shotgun cradled in his arm, stretched out blanketless, the cavalry hat wadded and served as a pillow; almost immediately he was asleep. It seemed that he had barely closed his eyes before Stokes shook him.
“Everything quiet,” the young scientist said. “So quiet, in fact, I could hear horses whinnying up there on the mesa top.”
“My horses.” Fargo’s mouth twisted. “Okay.” He drank sparingly from a canteen. “The sheep. You see ’em again?”
“Yeah. They came back around the mountain and on down. It helped. They followed just about the route I did that time before. A lot of it came back to me.” He handed Fargo some hardtack and a can of beans. “But, damn it, Neal, even if we reach the top, it’ll be just before daylight. We can’t tackle that whole bunch in daylight.”
“We won’t,” Fargo said. “There’s bound to be some cover up there. You said it was covered with grass and juniper, and pretty well cut up. We’ll find it, and lay low one more day. Then we hit.”
~*~
He stared out from beneath the overhang at the mountain, towering like doom, or like a challenge. “Sundown,” he said. “Hurry up. We got a long way to go and a lot to do before the darkness goes.”
They waited. Meanwhile, Fargo gave Stokes a short lecture. “Garfield says they got grenades up there. If we can git our hands on those, that’ll go a long way to evening out the odds. You know anything about grenades?”
“I’ve never even seen one.”
So Fargo told him how to use them, demonstrating with a rock, plus a diagram of their mechanism sketched in the dust. “Just remember, after you pull that pin, you hold the lever down. The minute that flies off, she’s ready to go. Throw overhand, like this, and then hit the dirt, flat as you can. Grenade fragments fly up and out in a kind of spray. Unless you’re right at the point of impact, there’s a kind of zone of safety if you’re scrunched flat, and that means your butt, too. You stick it up in the air, take a chunk of shrapnel, that’ll put you out of action quick as a piece in the leg or head. So keep your head and your ass down.”
Stokes looked at him with a kind of awe. “Is this the way you’ve always made your living?”
“Mostly. Some jobs are easier, some harder. Not many harder than this one so far, though. There’s just one thing more. Remember what I told you, half dollars don’t shoot back. You’re gonna have to kill men up there, for the first time. You git buck fever and freeze up on me, we’re both dead. So when the time comes—”
“Yeah?”
“Mary Running Deer. You love her?”
“You think I’d be here if I didn’t?”
“All right,” Fargo said. “Well, there’s a lot of ways a man can rape a woman.” Tersely, brutally, obscenely, he recited them, as Stokes’ face went pale.
“Goddammit,” the young man whispered, “stop it. You hear? Damn you, stop it!”
“Just remember,” Fargo said coldly, “when you have to draw down on a man, he may be the one to have done those things to the girl you love. Remember that; it’ll make it easier to take him out.” He squinted at the sky; the sun had finally vanished in a flame of red, a purple dusk had settled over the enormous cinder bed that was the Badlands. “Let’s get the gear together.
“It’s time to move.”
Once more, in darkness, they began their agonizing progress forward through the jagged, brutal land toward the mountain’s base. Now there was no time to lose; at a sheer fifty-foot drop, Fargo looped the rope around a boulder, tested it with all his weight, and then, with gut knotted, swung out into space, worked his way down. Reaching bottom, he waited for Stokes to follow. The young man, with less fear of heights, made it more quickly, pulled the rope after. They coiled it and went on.
Twice more, in the early hours of the night they used it, again to negotiate another drop, another time to climb, when Fargo, using all his skill, managed to dab a loop, after several tries, around an upthrust of rock he could barely see, sixty feet above them. Down a more gentle slope, and then Stokes took the lead, guiding them through a twisting labyrinth of cuts and draws and washes.
But for all the urgency they felt, it was still nearly midnight when they reached the base of the mountain itself.
And that was no better—fluted buttresses of shale and stone and earth, narrow ledges ... Fargo sought, found a landmark spotted earlier when he had been watching the mountain sheep. It took an hour’s arduous, risky, blind climbing to reach it, and there were times when his nerve almost failed. Without Stokes’ help, his prior knowledge of the terrain, he would never have made it at all. But from here, this precarious ledge that was the jumping-off point, they could trace out the route the sheep had taken. It would be a slow process in the darkness, but in some respects easier for him than for Stokes. Darkness was the friend of the fighting man, the soldier of fortune, and over the years he had developed night sight better than that of most men. Deliberately he kept his eyes wide, staring, to collect whatever light was available, which was almost none, and he could make out objects where Stokes could see nothing at all.
So he groped forward, upward. From time to time, it was impossible not to dislodge a rock or a shower of earth. Yet that was not as serious as it might have been. With the constant wind that blew here, rocks were always falling somewhere and earth being dislodged. As long as their traveling made no pattern of such sounds, they were not likely to cause alarm. Anyhow, any guards awake would be watching the trail, which was far away, on the northwestern side of the mesa.
Still, that climb stretched every nerve, every muscle Neal Fargo owned. More than once he and Stokes paused, panting, plastered tightly against the wall, summoning not only strength but courage to go on. And somehow they always managed to find it. Hours passed; sweating, feeling trapped in a nightmare, Fargo lost all sense of time. Then, at last, along a ledge and finally a two-foot jump, small and simple, and then they would be on the bench. And yet, in his exhausted, shaken state, that two feet seemed a yawning chasm to Neal Fargo.
“Neal?” Stokes’ whisper came from behind. “What’s wrong?”
Fargo took a deep breath. “Nothin’,” he muttered and forced himself to jump. He landed sprawling on the bench, then moved aside shakily to give Stokes room. Stokes stepped easily across. They were at the base of the chimney. And the worst part of the climb, the part Fargo dreaded.
But he could not back off now. Guts was doing what you were most afraid of, conquering your fear. Still, realities had to be faced. One was that Stokes was a better climber than he and had less fear of heights; had already, once, worked his way a hundred feet up that cleft. “You’d better go up first,” Fargo whispered. “And we’d better rope ourselves together. We got to muffle our gear, too, so it don’t rattle and click.”
That took some doing. Fargo had to remove the bandoliers of cartridges, shotgun shells, wrap them tightly around his waist, securing them with lengths cut from the rope in such a way that they did not click together. The shotgun he slung across his chest. Stokes tied the canteens so they no longer swung free from his waist: each would still be burdened with a rifle in one hand, but the rifles were indispensable. A full half hour passed as, as silently as possible, they made themselves ready, and then they lashed each end of a thirty-foot length of rope around their respective torsos. But, Fargo knew, that was a wan precaution. If one fell, he would almost inevitably drag the other with him.
“I’m ready when you are,” Stokes whispered at last.
Fargo took a deep breath. “Let’s go.”
They eased into the rock cleft, Stokes first, bracing his back against one side, his boot soles against the other. Almost nimbly he went up into the darkness, and soon, as the rope slack paid out, Neal Fargo followed. Making sure his Colt was tightly seated in its holster, he rammed his back hard against one side of the cleft, planted his boots against the other, and with body hunched, used a measured amount of strength
to hold himself in place. Then, sliding his torso, moving one foot after the other, he began to hunch-walk his way up the chimney.
For him that climb was a nightmare that later mercifully blurred in his consciousness. By the time he was fifty feet up the chimney, his body was bathed in cold sweat. He conquered his fear by ignoring it, kept on doggedly, disregarding the shower of dirt, the occasional small rock that fell on him from Stokes’ more agile progress above. In fact, Stokes traveled so swiftly that more than once the rope came taut and the younger man had to wait on Fargo.
His back soon was raw from rubbing against the rough wall of the chimney. Once a foothold in loose dirt crumbled; he saved himself only by desperately clamping the other foot in place with lightning speed, and to his relief, it held. The immense weight of the gear he carried made it no easier, nor did the fact that he was using muscles that ordinarily rarely came into play. He had occasionally met mountain climbers in his wanderings, people who did this sort of thing for fun. They were, he thought bitterly, idiots; and he tried to disregard the fact that if he fell it would now be a drop of nearly two hundred feet and that likely he would drag Stokes down with him. It was a job, one he had to do, and that was all that mattered.
He lost track of time; looking up, which he did rarely, lest the dirt Stokes dislodged hit him in the face, all he could see was the writhing silhouette of the young man’s body, a darker blackness against the moonless sky. Then Stokes halted. A faint whisper came through the silence in the shaft. “Neal. I’m at the top. Hold fast. I’ve got to get out, and it’s gonna be tricky. The chimney widens up here. Brace yourself, in case I fall ...”
Fargo used all his strength to clamp himself in the narrow shaft. Looking up, he could discern the problem Stokes had to solve. At the very top, where the chimney opened, the young man’s body was stretched to its limit. And now, somehow, he had to perform the acrobatic feat of twisting around, getting a handhold on the shaft’s rim, pulling himself out. “I’m braced,” Fargo answered softly. “Go ahead.”