Beyond Fort North

by Peter Dawson

  A band of leaping flame was now crawling away from him toward the base of the wall, a cloud of smoke hanging over it so thick that he could no longer make out the slab of rimrock. But he well knew exactly where it lay, and now he threw three fast-timed shots into the wall angle. He was rolling back behind the roan before the crack! of Ash’s rifle came again, the bullet striking the carcass with a muffled thud.

  He moved fast now, lying flat while he thrust the .44 in under the belt at his leg again, then getting to his knees. He began crawling away from the roan, keeping the carcass in line with Ash’s rifle and favoring his bad leg as best he could.

  Once more during those first few seconds as he was moving away the rifle spoke loudly, menacingly. It was that sharp explosion that made Gentry abruptly angle out from the line of the carcass. A backward look showed him the foot of the rim still obscured by smoke.

  When he had gone a hundred feet on back toward the pond, he was finally hidden by the taller and thicker grass. Breathing heavily, he paused there and quickly set fire to the grass, having to move on hastily as the flames caught and fanned quickly out to either side of him. Then when he was deeper into the tall grass, he stopped and lay down, giving in to a light-headedness that suddenly hit him.

  Going on presently, he ran in a broken, painful stride that put a catch in his breathing. In another half minute he had the sound of one more rifle shot to bolster his hope and quicken his lurching stride. When he heard it, he quartered around, now running to the edge of the bench that dropped down into the malpais better than half a mile distant. And he was wondering how long it would take Caleb Ash to become suspicious, risk the threat of the .44, and circle on out beyond the grass fire to see that he no longer lay behind the carcass.

  If he could reach the draw that led on down off the bench, he knew he would have a better than even chance of hiding himself so that Ash would never stalk him. That was as far ahead as he would let his thoughts go. How he was to get down out of the hills was something he would think about when the time came to do it.

  He was weakening fast now. The distance he could cover before having to stop to rest grew shorter each time he moved. Always, as he paused to catch his breath, he was looking back toward the two pluming lines of smoke beyond the wall. And when he finally saw Ash’s tall shape suddenly appear out of the blue smoke-fog well above the spot where the roan lay, well beyond the pond, he felt a relief rather than surprise. For then the certainty that he had a chance replaced the mere hope of one.

  When he first saw Ash, the man was a good six hundred yards away. And he wasted almost a quarter minute watching the scout crouch and, half hidden by the grass, start circling in on the spot where the roan lay. That proof that Ash hadn’t yet guessed his maneuver brought a gusty, delighted laugh welling up out of his chest. He turned away then and, hunched over so that the thinning grass almost hid him, plodded on.

  The next time he stopped and looked back, almost a hundred yards beyond, Ash was out of sight. When he had caught his wind, he came tiredly to his crouch once more and set his mind to the torment of easing his weight onto his bad leg for the briefest possible time necessary to take a step in that stooped attitude. He had discovered the knack of throwing the weight of his shoulders into his lurching stride so as to drag the leg pendulum-like and not bend his knees. The knotting of the thick muscle along his thigh against the pressure of the crude tourniquet was the most painful thing of all, and, during his more frequent halts now, he stretched the leg out straight and took the .44 from under belt. The relief each time he did this was so keen that it seemed to outweigh the danger of the loss of blood it cost him.

  Finally he was within sight of the head of the draw, only a hundred yards short of it. He was plodding along, wondering how many more steps he could take before having to rest again when suddenly a feathery air-whip touched his face. He dropped in his tracks. Looking quickly back toward the pond as the hollow crack! of the shot reached him, he saw Caleb Ash coming at a jog little more than two hundred yards away.

  His first instinctive move was to reach for the Colt. He didn’t complete that gesture, at once realizing that Ash was too far away for even a lucky shot to have any effect. As he lunged to his feet, he had a moment’s grim satisfaction at seeing the loose, crippled way the scout’s left arm was hanging. He took several stumbling steps obliquely to his right and afterward cut quickly to the left. He forgot everything but the threat of the rifle, of his life being balanced against Caleb Ash’s skill with the weapon.

  The knotting of the muscle in his groin now made him pull the .44 from his belt. Afterward, with the bad leg suddenly able to bear his weight, he made his side-to-side run almost without a break in stride. The rifle slapped sharply once more, but he had no knowledge of where the bullet went.

  He reached the head of the draw and the shallow wash flowing into it quite unexpectedly. And as he vaulted from the bank, the angry whine of a bullet punctuated the painful shock of his leg catching his weight, then buckling. He fell in an instinctive roll that carried him to his feet again. As he turned on down the wash, he looked out over its edge and saw that Ash had halved the distance separating them. So, with his breathing crowding him unbearably, he suddenly halted, lifted the .44, and began firing.

  The thunder of his four deliberate shots was rolling away across the bench when he caught the break in Ash’s hurrying stride. The big man stumbled sharply to one side, then went to his knees. He didn’t go all the way down. Instead he lined the rifle. And now as his crippled left arm hung at his side and he leveled the weapon with only one hand, Gentry understood why those other bullets had been wide of the mark. Ash couldn’t use his left arm. Even so, Gentry hunched over and waited until the bullet had snapped overhead before straightening to go on, the rifle’s report coming as he moved.

  The wash tilted steeply downward now, and Gentry had his first good look at the twisting ravine directly below. His eye was shuttling quickly from one spot of cover to another, trying to decide on one, when suddenly he saw the hindquarters of Ash’s bay horse showing beyond a cedar only twenty yards obliquely downward and to his left.

  For a moment he could scarcely believe what his eyes were showing him. Then, awkwardly scrambling up the wash’s far bank, apprehension thinned his lifting hopes. A backward look showed him that Ash hadn’t yet reached the bench’s edge. But as he lunged on, he knew that he had at best a respite of only a few more seconds.

  He weakly stumbled and half fell into the cedar as he finally ran in on it. With a fierce tug at the reins, he pulled the knot loose and tried to step in on the bay. The animal kept shying away, tossing his head. Gentry shortened his grip on the reins and looked back once more. He saw Ash’s big shape suddenly sky-lined, looking down at him across a distance of perhaps eighty yards.

  With his gun hand putting a steadying pressure on the reins that took all his remaining strength, Gentry eased around and managed to get a hold on the horn. It was more than he could do to lift boot to stirrup. So, with a vast effort, he heaved himself up and went belly-down across the saddle as the bay shied violently away. The animal was making a panicked wheel outward from the cedar when the sharp report of Ash’s rifle rode down the draw.

  The bay stumbled, the abrupt change of weight helping Gentry lift a leg over the high cantle. For a moment it seemed that the horse would go down. Gentry knew certainly that the animal was wounded. And as his boots found the stirrups he hauled the bay’s head up savagely and reined him on away. Somehow then the animal found its stride and lunged into a hard run.

  Gentry turned in the saddle now and laid the .44 in line with Ash. The scout’s rifle was lifting again. There was no way Gentry could steady his weapon, and with a stark dread he realized that he hadn’t reloaded in his headlong flight down from the head of the ravine. Yet he took what care he could with that one remaining bullet, firing as he saw Ash’s rifle settle into line. Then immediately he pulled th
e gelding around in a change of direction.

  He saw his bullet kick up dirt several feet to one side of Ash. He saw flame stab from the rifle’s muzzle squarely at him. He felt a tug on the reins. Glancing quickly down, he saw the left rein dangling loosely from his hand, a foot of its other end flapping from the bit.

  Bracing himself in the stirrups, he leaned down alongside the bay’s neck and snatched at that broken rein, caught it. But he couldn’t straighten again, and from this awkward position he tried to look back.

  All he could see was this lower reach of the ravine with its steep near slope crowding closely in from the left. Ash was beyond his line of vision. That knowledge turned his long frame rigid, expecting to feel the slam of a bullet at any moment. Then another thought made him drop the severed rein and straighten in the saddle. Wonderment was in his eyes as he glanced back there once more.

  A turning of the depression had hid the bench’s edge. He was away.

  Chapter Fourteen

  They buried Robert Fitzhugh at 11:00 that morning. Mike Clears attended the services. He stood apart from the others, close to the gate in the cemetery’s rock wall beyond which he had tied his borrowed buggy. And the cynicism in him was utterly gone before the impressiveness of the ceremony.

  The troops were drawn up in double lines facing each other across the mounded earth of the open grave. Lieutenant Peebles had led Fitzhugh’s sorrel, stirrups tied across the saddle, to one end of the grave close to the flag-draped casket. Mary Fitzhugh, Sam Grell, George Spires, and the other officers stood opposite. And in watching the young widow, Clears noticed the way she finally lifted her veil and stood with head bowed, a handkerchief held to her eyes. He revised his opinion of her somewhat then, putting aside his impression that her nature was too calculating, cold.

  After George Spires had spoken his solemn, reverent words, half a dozen men of each troop dismounted and came to either side of the grave with their carbines. At Peebles’s command they presented arms, loaded their pieces. Then they brought them to shoulder and fired two crisp volleys that rolled sharply up the timbered slope beyond the log wall.

  The muted rattle of those shots reached Dan Gentry two miles away and far above. And on hearing them he straightened from his slouch with a vague alarm stirring him out of his pain-dulled apathy.

  After that first panicked, headlong run down to the head of the twisting trail through the malpais an hour ago, Gentry had pulled in on the bay and managed to tie the broken rein. At that slow pace the animal’s stride had developed a decided limp. So, on the way down through the malpais, Gentry had leaned out from the saddle and looked down until he found a bleeding, ragged tear in the skin along the thick-muscled gaskin of the bay’s left rear leg.

  The wound was painful but not dangerous, he had decided. His light-headedness and a fresh moistness along his thigh warned him that time was the all-important factor now, that he couldn’t help the horse. So he had gone on, working the .44 in under the belt at his leg once more.

  As the miles dropped slowly behind, he stopped thinking back on what had happened, stopped thinking of much of anything. The insistent pound in his groin would from time to time grow unbearable. He would lift the Colt out then, until the pain slacked away. Though the stain above his knee would turn a brighter red each time he did this, he knew he had no choice; not only was it impossible to stand the pain, but he remembered having once heard that to keep the flow of an artery shut off completely was to risk gangrene.

  The bay was traveling steadily downward, seeming to be heading for its home corral. Once he was sure of that, Gentry had relaxed his vigilance to the point of dozing when the pain would let him. But now as those two widely spaced volleys alerted him, he looked around and saw that he was crossing a familiar, narrow meadow where Elk Creek flattened out after its precipitous fall off the side of Sentinel. And suddenly he was feeling a powerful thirst.

  He saw a low outcropping ahead and reined over to it, stopping the horse alongside and stepping out of the saddle. He managed with some difficulty to slide on down to the ground. Then he led the bay across to the stream, only ten yards distant. There he lay and put his face into the water, gulping down many full swallows and only at the last moment remembering to stop the horse from drinking its fill. Momentarily refreshed, he plodded on back to the outcrop, climbed it, and went astride the saddle once more.

  This effort left him dizzy and weak, gripping the horn to keep from falling. When the bay started on before he intended it, he had several bad seconds when he was sure his stomach was refusing the water. Then, gradually, his awareness settled back into that twilight somewhere between consciousness and delirium, the throbbing along his leg the one thing that gave him even a slender hold on his reason.

  His next fully conscious moment brought excruciating pain and a surprise. The bay was taking him along the lower reach of the road down off the bench, and he had a bad moment before he realized he was well below the post. He quickly drew the .44 from his groin, and as the pain receded, he found he could no longer push himself straight but had to sit hunched over, holding to the horn.

  He met no one along the road. At the foot of the bench the bay turned, without the rein, up past the nearest placers and into the foot of the alley. It was about a hundred yards now to the Lucky Find’s rear platform, and as the crude shacks and cabins fell behind, one by one, Gentry began wondering quite lucidly if he could stay in the saddle as far as the saloon. The thought of the surprise he was bringing to Mike Clears made him smile crookedly in pain.

  He wondered, too, if Faith would be there, and it irritated him to think he was forgetting something Mike had told him about her last night. That was a long way back, was his thought as he remembered his talk with the saloon man there at his camp by the fire.

  Thinking of Faith he was drowsily startled now to hear her voice sounding dully across his consciousness. He liked the tenor of her words, which he hadn’t caught. And as she spoke again, saying quite plainly— “Dan! Stop!” — he wondered what fragment of circumstance he could be imagining.

  Then abruptly the motion of the saddle beneath him ceased altogether. His glance shuttled outward from its sightless concentration on the bay’s mane, on the swell of the saddle. He found himself staring down into Faith’s uplifted, frightened face.

  He realized then that this was no dream. Her eyes were wide, afraid. She was holding the reins tightly with one hand, reaching up to him with the other as she breathed: “My dear, you’re hurt!”

  He tried to smile, to shake his head so as to ease her worry. He looked on out past her to see that the bay stood close to the picket fence at the rear of Ralph Blake’s slab cabin. Now he remembered what Mike Clears had told him last night. Faith had moved in with the Blakes and was living in the new room.

  Just then she startled him by calling — “Sarah! Come help! Hurry!” — and he glanced over to the cabin again in time to see Blake’s wife come running from the kitchen door. He sat straighter now at the risk of losing his balance. And as he swayed uncertainly, Faith took his hand and said gently: “Get down, Dan. I’ll help.”

  He was so delighted not to be imagining all this that he stared down at her with a broad grin. “Got some things to tell you, Faith,” he said huskily. “Some things you’ll be glad to hear. Just....”

  “Just don’t try to talk now,” she told him as his words trailed away. Her frantic glance was pleading with him as she added: “Can you help us get you down?”

  Very deliberately he let go the reins and tightened his grip on the horn. Bending at the waist, he lifted his good foot clear of the stirrup and, trying to hold his weight, slid down off the bay. He would have fallen but for Faith and Sarah Blake holding him erect.

  Faith drew one of his arms about her shoulders and Sarah Blake took the other and they led him awkwardly on in through the gate and up to the kitchen door. It took a definite strength of will for him
to manage the two steps, to keep from tripping. He was breathing hard and loudly as they helped him across the kitchen and into another room.

  He saw a bed there. They led him to it, and he sank upon it with a groan of relief. Then, as Faith lifted his boots onto the blankets and he stretched out full length, he gave up trying to keep his eyes open and fell at once into a deep sleep.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Gentry came starkly and completely awake at a scalding pain along his leg. He was instantly aware of a weight at his chest. It held him down tightly, and as his eyes came open he was thrashing and crying out hoarsely.

  First of all he saw Sam Grell’s head and shoulders braced solidly above him. Grell was sitting on his chest, had his arms pinned down with knees and hands. And in sheer agony Gentry caught his breath, lifted his head, and stared wildly about him.

  He was in a small room, lying on a bed. Something was gripping his feet tightly, and with the easing off of the staggering pain, he let go his breath in a groan that brought George Spires’s head into sight above Grell’s outline.

  “Sorry, Dan. But we had to get this corruption out,” the medico said. “Can you take more of it?”

  Understanding now what was happening to him, remembering his bad leg and how he came to be here, Gentry’s reeling thoughts steadied enough to let him answer: “Go ahead. But get it over with in a hurry.”

  Before that second blazing stab of pain hit his right side, Gentry briefly glimpsed Mike Clears peering worriedly at him from the foot of the bed, which meant that it was probably the saloon man who was holding his feet. Then he caught his breath again, closed his eyes, and his long frame tightened rigidly against more of the torture.