by Bill Crider
O’Grady whistled low through his teeth. “Hey, boy,” he called. “Hey, boy.” He started walking slowly back up the hill.
It was only when he started walking that he noticed how much his right ankle was hurting him.
“Mother of Christ,” he said, stopping to sit down again.
He pulled off his boot and peeled back a dirty, ragged sock to look at the ankle. It was swelling a bit, but as he felt it gingerly he told himself that it was not broken.
He pulled the boot back on and stood up again, then limped on up the hill whistling between his teeth. “Hey, boy,” he said. “Hey, boy.”
When he got to the top of the hill, he didn’t see the damn horse anywhere.
Ben had just about given up on finding O’Grady when he heard the pistol shot.
After leaving Jink, Ben had followed O’Grady’s trail as best he could, but he’d lost it again before too long. He thought about turning back and checking on Jink, but he couldn’t see the profit in doing that. He thought he’d just ride until dark, maybe make camp, and then try following O’Grady again the next day.
Ben wasn’t sure that O’Grady would stop for the night, but he was damn sure not going to try any tracking after dark. Hell, he couldn’t even do it during the daylight.
He was looking around for a likely spot when he heard the gunshot. It was faint and a long way off, but there was no mistaking what it was, and although Ben’s mind didn’t work very fast, he was able to reason out that there really wasn’t much likelihood of anyone except for O’Grady to be firing a gun in that deserted area.
The trouble was that sounds did funny things in the late-afternoon air of the hill country. Ben couldn’t be exactly sure just where the shot had come from.
He stood in his stirrups and looked around for a couple of minutes, but there were no clues to help him out, just the blue sky turning orangey red on the horizon and a few hazy purple clouds covering most of what was left of the sun.
He looked down for tracks, but there was no help on the ground, either. If there were tracks there, Ben sure as hell couldn’t see them.
He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate, to remember precisely how the gunshot had sounded to him, hoping to get a clue from that as to its direction.
There was no help in doing that, either.
Then it occurred to Ben that if he was close enough to O’Grady to hear a gunshot, he must have been more or less on the right track all along. He’d been blundering along in the right direction, whether he knew it or not. So why not keep going in that same direction?
He nudged the horse ahead. He was sure looking forward to seeing O’Grady again.
As the two of them rode along, Jonathan told Ellie a little about his troubles with his son and how they had led up to the bank robbery.
“Gerald was never the kind of son I thought he should be,” Jonathan said. “He was too soft, too lazy, and I let him know it. I guess that might have been a part of the trouble.”
Ellie didn’t know how to respond, not having any children of her own. She’d always thought that you’d just naturally love a child, no matter what it was like, so she said that.
“Maybe that’s the way it ought to be,” Jonathan said. “But it ain’t. Least it wasn’t with Gerald. I tried to love that boy, I surely did. But it just seemed like me and him was too different. If his ma, God rest her, had lived, things might have worked out better. Maybe she could’ve loved him enough for the both of us.”
Ellie didn’t see how that could be.
“You’re probably right,” Jonathan said. “I guess maybe I ought not to worry about it now. The boy’s dead, and there’s nothin’ I can do to help him now. But I’ll always look back and wonder what I couldn’t have done different. And I’ll always wish I could’ve changed things for the better.”
Ellie thought about her own life. There wasn’t much she would want to change, except for all the events of the previous day. The rape would never have happened, and she and Burt would be together again.
“You can’t do that, though,” Jonathan said, interrupting her thoughts. “You can’t change what’s past by wishin’.”
“No,” Ellie said. “You can’t do that.”
“Might make life a mite easier if you could,” Jonathan said, shifting in the saddle.
Ellie gave him a look.
“Don’t you go wishin’ you’d tried harder to talk me out of comin’ along,” Jonathan said. “You can’t change that, either, and I ain’t goin’ back.”
He was riding easier than he’d thought he would. The pain that had hit him in the barn had passed, and the only trouble he was having now was that he was weak from having spent too much time in bed. It had been too long since he’d ridden in a saddle. He knew that if he lived through the night, he’d be sore as hell in the morning.
“I don’t wish you hadn’t come along,” Ellie said. “I don’t think I’d have gotten this far without you.”
She was being truthful. She could never have done any tracking, but thanks to Jonathan, they hadn’t had nearly as much trouble following the men they were looking for as Ben and Jink had trying to follow O’Grady.
For one thing, Jonathan was nearly as good a tracker as he said he was, and his eyesight was remarkable for a man of his years. He could see signs on the ground that Ellie would have missed completely.
And for another thing, they were following three men, not just one. Three horses left a lot more sign than one did if you knew how to look for it, and Jonathan did.
He knew how to interpret what he saw, too. He would kick apart a horse apple and say, “Looks to be fresh. Not more than an hour old. We’re gaining on ’em.”
Ellie didn’t doubt him for a second.
He figured out O’Grady’s trick at the river quickly, but that was because Ben and Jink hadn’t been trying to hide where they were going.
“Don’t take no injun to figger those two out,” Jonathan said. “They’re in a hurry, and they don’t think there’s anybody on their backtrail. Makes things easy.”
“Maybe for you,” Ellie told him.
“Yeah,” Jonathan said. “Maybe.”
He was standing by the edge of the water, holding his horse’s reins, and looking across at the other side. “Here’s where they went over. You can see the way the bank’s chewed up on the other side there. They weren’t tryin’ to hide their tracks.”
“Let’s go, then,” Ellie said. She was eager to get on with it.
“Tell you the truth, I could use me a little bit of a rest,” Jonathan said. “Have a drink of this river water, maybe eat a can of those sardines I brought.”
Ellie looked as if she might object, but she didn’t.
“All right,” she said. “But let’s cross over first.”
“I was thinkin’ that there was a pretty good spot for a rest right here,” Jonathan said, looking back and gesturing toward a clump of trees.
Ellie wondered if he really wanted a brief rest of if he were just unable to climb back into the saddle. Still, she didn’t say it.
Instead she looked at the sky. “It’s getting late. Do we have time to stop?”
“Got to stop sooner or later. Give the horses time to water. Get their breath back. Can’t just keep goin’ without a stop.”
“What about when it gets dark?”
“We’ll worry about that later. Oughta be another full moon tonight. You can see a lot with a moon like that if it don’t come up a bunch of clouds.”
Ellie vaguely remembered how the moon had looked the night before when she rode to town, following the Stones in her wagon. She decided that Jonathan was right.
“Do you think those men will keep on riding?”
“Never can tell what a man like that’ll do. If it was me, and if I thought there was maybe the chance of someone comin’ after me, I’d ride as long as I could.”
“But you said they didn’t know we were back here,” Ellie said.
“They don’t,
maybe. But the one leadin’ the chase knows those other two are in back of him, or he ought to. Those fellas ain’t the kind to let money get away from ’em. Now are we gonna rest a spell here or not?”
“Here’s fine. What do you have besides sardines?” Ellie didn’t like sardines. Too oily and salty for her.
“Tomatoes,” Jonathan said.
Ellie thought about Jink and Ben.
“I think I’ll just have a drink of water,” she said.
FOURTEEN
It was late afternoon when Shag Tillman rode up to the Crossland ranch house. Tillman was a big, rawboned man, and he’d been the deputy marshal in Blanco for nearly five years. It was a job that suited Tillman, who didn’t much favor the idea of hard work and responsibility. As Dawson’s deputy, all he had to do was show up at the little jail and do what Dawson told him. He could handle that all right.
When Rawls Dawson had told Tillman that he’d be riding out to the Crossland place to talk to Gerald about the bank robbery, Shag had laughed about it.
“That jug-head don’t have nerve enough to do somethin’ like rob a bank,” he said, shaking his head.
“He might set that fire, though,” Dawson said.
Shag thought about it. “He might at that. I expect he’s a sneaky one, all right. You want me to ride out there with you?”
Dawson didn’t think so. “I ought to be able to handle somebody like Gerald Crossland,” he said. “You stay here in case the Rangers come in. You can fill ’em in on what happened.”
“Fine by me,” Shag said.
But when Dawson rode away, Shag got to worrying about it. What if the robbers had gone to ground at Crossland’s? It wasn’t very likely, he had to admit, but it was possible. He hoped that Dawson knew what he was riding into.
Shag wasn’t the type to worry too long about anything, however. He spent most of the day loafing around town, and he didn’t think about Dawson again until the middle of the afternoon.
I wonder why he ain’t come back, Shag thought. Maybe I ought ride on out there.
He didn’t, however. It was a hot day, and he couldn’t believe that Dawson could really be in trouble. Things like that just didn’t happen around Blanco.
But the bank robbery had happened, and a little later on Shag saddled his horse and rode out to Crossland’s.
He saw the marshal’s body on the porch right away.
“Goddamn,” he said, dismounting and stepping up on the porch beside it.
He unpinned the note and read it, running his finger along underneath the words and moving his lips as he did so.
“I’ll be go to hell,” he said when he’d finished. He looked down at Dawson’s body. “I’ll just be go to hell.”
He knew he had to get Dawson back to town, but he didn’t know what to do after that. Old Jonathan Crossland was already on the trail. Maybe that was good enough. Or maybe it wasn’t. He wished that Dawson were alive to tell him what to do.
Then he thought about the Rangers. They would be in town soon, and they’d know what to do. He was pretty sure that it was too late to start after anybody now, and he had to get the marshal’s body back to town and let folks know what happened. That was his job.
Or at least he thought that was his job. He looked down at Dawson again.
“Damn,” he said. “Why’d you have to go and get yourself killed and leave me all this worryin’?”
Dawson didn’t say anything, not that Shag had expected him to.
“I guess I better see if I can find a horse to take you back to town on,” Shag said. “I’ll be right back.”
He started toward the barn. He hoped the Rangers would be in town by the time he got back.
Ben was as quiet as he could be, which wasn’t very quiet, and he knew it.
“Son of a bitch O’Grady could hear me comin’ a mile off,” Ben said to himself.
As he got closer to where he thought the shot must have come from, he decided to leave his horse and go along on foot. He wouldn’t make quite as much noise that way.
He tied the reins to the limb of a scrawny oak and started off. The sun was just about down now, but there was still plenty of light in the sky to see by. Nevertheless Ben drew his pistol to have it ready in case he blundered onto O’Grady before he was ready for him.
That wasn’t the way it happened, however. As it turned out, Ben saw O’Grady in plenty of time.
Ben was standing in the shadow of a tall cedar when O’Grady topped the hill he’d recently rolled down the other side of.
Ben wondered what the hell the Irishman was walking for, but he decided it didn’t make any difference. It just made things easier for Ben, who lifted his pistol and sighted down the barrel at O’Grady.
His finger was tightening on the trigger when he heard a low whistle. Then he heard O’Grady call, “Here, boy. Where are you, boy?”
What the hell? Ben thought. Had the son of a bitch lost his horse? And then Ben thought about the bag of cash. O’Grady would have tied it to the saddle. He lowered his pistol.
O’Grady started down the hill, whistling and calling softly.
Ben smiled. The bastard had lost his horse, all right. This was going to be easier than Ben had thought. And a hell of a lot more fun, too.
When he had finished eating, Jonathan walked down to the river and washed out the sardine can before he put it back in the saddlebags. He’d seen too many cans rusting by the trail in his time, and besides that, he didn’t believe in leaving any more signs of his passing than he could help. You never knew who might be coming along after you, looking to find you for one reason or another.
“You ready to get goin’?” he said.
Ellie hated to admit it, but she was pretty sure that she had needed the rest as much or more than Jonathan had. The day had been very hot, hotter than she’d expected, and she was not any more used to riding a horse than Jonathan was. She’d begun to suspect that he’d asked for the stop more for her benefit than for his own.
Her joints cracked when she stood up, and she could feel the pain in her thigh muscles.
“I’m ready when you are,” she said, trying to not reveal how she felt.
Jonathan smiled as if she weren’t hiding a thing.
“It ain’t goin’ to get much better,” he said. “In fact, when you climb in that saddle, it’s probably goin’ to burn you like fire.”
Ellie didn’t ask how he knew. “I’ll be fine,” she told him, but she couldn’t keep from sucking in her breath sharply as she rose in the stirrup.
Jonathan mounted up beside her. “You’ll get used to it after a day or two or three.”
“You don’t think it will take that long?”
“Most likely.”
Jonathan knew one thing for sure, though. He knew that he wasn’t going to last that long. He was able to get into the saddle and stay there, and he felt sure he could ride all night. But somehow, he didn’t think there was much more than that in him. If they had to go another day, even half a day, he wasn’t going to be around to see the finish.
The thought saddened him, but not because he dreaded the idea of his own death. That was something he’d come to accept quite a while back, and there had even been a couple of particularly low times when he’d more or less wished for it.
But things were different now, he realized. He’d come to have a strong liking for Ellie Taine. She was the kind of woman he’d once hoped that Gerald would marry someday—strong, determined, and proud.
Of course a woman like that would never have looked twice at Gerald. As far as Jonathan knew, no other woman ever had either, not unless Gerald paid for her. Jonathan knew about his son’s occasional trips to Mexico, and he had a pretty good idea why Gerald went there. There were whores aplenty a lot closer to Blanco than that, but Gerald was the kind who wouldn’t want to risk his reputation so near to home.
It suddenly occurred to Jonathan that Mexico must have been where Gerald had met the bank robbers. They were the kind of men t
hat Gerald would never have run across in Blanco, would never have associated with if he had. Gerald was too much of a snob for that. But in another country, probably likkered up, Gerald would have had the courage to approach them.
“Did you know my son?” Jonathan said.
“I saw him in town sometimes,” Ellie said. “He wasn’t very friendly.”
“No,” Jonathan said. “I don’t guess he was.”
Jink didn’t know what it was that woke him up, but he knew it was something out of the ordinary. All the other times, he’d jerked out of sleep as if someone had hold of his shirt and was pulling him, but this time was different.
He had a crick in his neck, and his back was hurting him because he’d been leaning against the tree for so long. The damn thing was hard as hell, but that wasn’t what had wakened him.
It wasn’t his finger, either, though the pain had spread up nearly to his shoulder now, and his arm was throbbing so hard with every heart beat that Jink thought he could see the skin bulging out and sinking back in.
He’d almost gotten used to that, however. There was a sort of regular rhythm to it that was almost soothing if you thought about it in the right way.
Bump. Bulge. Sink. Bump. Bulge. Sink.
It was regular enough to put a man to sleep, but Jink forced himself not to think about it, not to fall into the easy, lulling rhythm of the beats.
He opened his eyes to look around for whatever it was that had disturbed him, but he didn’t see anything unusual. It was a lot darker now than it had been the last time he’d waked up, but that was all.
He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. He knew there was something wrong, but he just couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
He thought for a minute that he might just be imagining things. He knew that he was in a bad way, and knew that a fever like the one he had could do funny things to a man’s mind. Maybe that was all it was.
Then he heard voices, or thought he did. He strained his ears to hear what they were saying, but he couldn’t. He could tell it was somebody talking, though. He was sure he wasn’t imagining it.