There was no going back—there were at least two men behind him. For a moment, he thought it was all up with him and determined to sell his life dearly. The men down there were travelling at twice his pace, for the mare was having a hard time getting down the slope. Even if he angled left, they could still catch him.
He drew his Colt’s gun and started the angling movement, but this made it even more difficult for the mare and she slowed her pace.
The Kid almost panicked. But there wasn’t time for fear. He fired at the leading rider. The man ducked his head. Two men to the rear started popping away at the Kid.
Don’t let them hit the mare, he prayed.
They were now half-way down the slope, loose stones flew out from the mare’s neat feet, there was dust rising. He heard the yells of men above him. He was caught.
Without thought and purely by instinct, the Kid reined the mare right. The animal responded wonderfully, as if she knew what was in his mind.
The leading man ran on past the Kid. The second man started to rein his horse in desperately. The third man thundered past this fellow and started to turn his horse. The Kid headed the mare for the second man, firing as he went.
The fellow fired back once, then he panicked. He didn’t know which way to go and he was still trying to make up his mind when the mare hit bottom and his horse started to rear. The Kid angled Jenny slightly and her shoulder caught the horse a glancing blow. It was no more than that, but it was enough to send horse and rider tumbling.
The Kid didn’t wait to see the result. He felt the mare break step under him, thought for a moment she was going down, but she recovered herself and ran on.
The open valley was in front of them. He yelled to the mare and she answered with a burst of speed. It was a straightforward race and he knew that, if Jenny kept on her feet, she would take him away from them.
He glanced back.
The fallen horse was on its feet. It’s rider was scrambling into the saddle. The other riders were spurring forward. At the start of that race, some shots came after him, but they were wasted and the men gave shooting up. But they didn’t stop riding. However, it was soon evident to the Kid that none of their horseflesh was in the mare’s class. A couple of miles and he knew that he could leave them whenever he wanted.
Now he had time to think, he knew that he wanted them right where they were, following him. He’d take them right down the valley and run them till their horses were bushed. Then he’d pull away, rest the mare and wait for them. They’d either call off the hunt altogether or they’d follow him. Either suited him fine. At least they’d be off Spur’s neck.
He slowed Jenny so that she kept a rifle shot away from them, allowing himself to stay in their sight till noon. Around that time, they knew they were beaten and would never catch him. One by one they dropped out and the Kid trotted the mare on into the afternoon, slowly cooling her down. He felt good; never felt better in his life. Now he came to think of it, it was about the first time in his life that he had done something for somebody else without an ulterior motive. Maybe that had something to do with it.
He slowed Jenny to a walk, got into the hills and came to water. He off-saddled, rubbed the mare down with grass, let her cool a mite more than allowed her to drink. Later he found a nice spot for her to graze, bedded himself down in the rocks and fell into an untroubled and dreamless sleep. Before he went off, however, he thought about Sheriff Carmody. He hadn’t seen the sheriff among the men back there and he didn’t like that much. Where was the sheriff? He’d work that one out in the morning.
Chapter Seventeen
Carmody was alone. He liked it that way. He reckoned now that he had more luck alone than he did with a witless posse. Yet he was not entirely off on his own. Working with him further along the shoulder of the mountain were his two deputies, men he could rely on.
Carmody had many vanities and one of them was that he was a fair tracker. It was pretty well founded. He was no slouch. It was this that decided him to go after Spur himself while he sent the bulk of the posse after the man who had attacked the camp. Carmody was more capable of putting two and two together than most men. He knew that Spur was not fit to travel far and fast. He knew that Spur had two partners—The Cimarron Kid and Cuzie Ben. The man who attacked the camp was one of these. The other stayed with Spur. So, if the posse went after the attacker and caught him, they would have netted a big fish. Meanwhile, he would net two big fish. Spur would be travelling slowly, if at all.
Having decided this, he used his instinct for what hunted men would do. He reckoned they would go up the creek and into the hills beyond. They had a wounded man with them and they would have to hide him if they didn’t want to kill him with riding.
He worked his way along the creek with his two deputies until he reached a spot which he decided was above that by which the escapees would have left the water. They were taking time to lose their trail, but they couldn’t waste too much time. He therefore chose a spot at random and then gave himself and the deputies each a piece of the mountain to comb. They weren’t to fire shots if they found sign, but were to gather at a given spot at nightfall with their information. He and the deputies split up and started circling in their allotted areas.
So Carmody slowly made his way up the mountain alone and prayed that it would be him that came on sign.
The hours of the day passed and he found nothing, he became tired and depressed in the heat of the sun. He was ready to give up and return to the rendezvous when he found sign.
One horse.
And that was headed down the mountain.
He cast around. He got down on his hands and knees when he found clear hoof-marks and studied them closely. One horse couldn’t mean Spur and whoever he was with, and the prints were going in the wrong direction. He had it. They were the tracks of the man who had attacked the camp.
Suddenly, he was excited.
These tracks could lead him to the outlaws, he’d wager. But first he circled slowly to the left. And found nothing. Then he circled right and headed towards what was now a tumbling water-course.
Here again he struck bonanza. The marks of four animals going uphill. He had them. The sign was fresh. The droppings he found were no more than a day old, he was sure.
He could hardly contain himself in his excitement. He went back and studied the tracks of the single horse again and, yes, he was certain that they were the tracks of Spur’s mare. The animal was famous for her speed and whoever had attacked the posse had used the mare for just that. He thought that must be the work of the Kid. Therefore, he had Spur and Cuzie Ben up ahead of him. Spur was out of the fight. That left only the Negro. A tough proposition just the same. He toyed with the idea of going it alone, but he decided not. His two deputies were men of worth and it would be a good thing to have them along.
He went back to his horse, mounted and rode slowly downhill. Dusk was dropping rapidly on the hill country.
When he reached camp both men were there waiting for him. Their faces told him that they had found nothing and he didn’t expect anything else. He unsaddled and put his horse out to grass and walked back to the others.
“I found them,” he said. “We start two hours before dawn. Look to your guns before you turn in. You’re goin’ to need ’em.”
They looked at him by the light of the fire. They looked grim. They were professionals and they could guess what was ahead of them.
Dawn found them plodding up the mountain. They were scattered out so they couldn’t be caught in a bunch. All the three men were tense and they didn’t talk at all during the ride. Carmody gave his orders with signs of his hands. Voices carried strangely in these uplands. All three men rode or walked with their rifles in their hands. They knew that when the shooting started, there wouldn’t be any time to waste.
They reached the spot where Carmody had found the sign. The two deputies inspected it and nodded. They agreed with the sheriff, the men they wanted were up ahead somewhere.
They went on.
An hour later, Carmody held up a hand. The two deputies halted. The sheriff signaled them into him. They closed in on him. They had just skirted a round shoulder of the mountain and had come to a grassy upland bench. On the far side were rocks and some stunted timber.
Carmody said: “This’d be a good spot for them to pick. Good field of fire and cover. Burt, stay with the horses and come on the run if you hear shootin’. Art an’ me’ll go in.”
They dismounted and checked their arms.
“Look,” Burt said. “Don’t you think all three of us should go. Whoever’s up there with Spur is going to be hard to cut down.”
Carmody thought about it.
“Tell you what,” he said and pointed to their left where timber ran in a wavering line along the side of the bench almost to the rocks. “Leave us go a couple of hundred paces ahead of you, then follow on foot slowly with the horses.’
“All right,” Burt said.
The other two set off west through the trees, stooping under their low boughs. Carmody reckoned by what he had seen that they would get within a short distance of the rocks under cover. Of course, all these precautions could be wasted. The men might not be there at all.
All they did was walk along the tracks of the animals as they went through the timber. The trail still looked fresh to Carmody. The soil was moist and soft underfoot and no amount of erasure would have rubbed the tracks out. They had picked bad country to lose tracks in. That wasn’t like any of them. But maybe they’d had no choice with Spur hurt.
Inside fifteen minutes Carmody and his man had reached the edge of the timber. Here they were in for a disappointment. Distance had played tricks on them. The distance between the timber and the rocks was far greater than they had suspected. Carmody looked around. He scouted through the timber, but he couldn’t find a safer way of getting to the rocks than by crossing the open space in front of them. So one of them would have to go. The trail they were following went straight ahead toward the rocks.
Carmody decided he would go first himself while Art covered him.
“I’m goin’ ahead, Art,” he said. “Cover me.
“Sure,” said the deputy. He levered a round into the breech of his rifle and the sound was loud and clear on the still air. The sheriff looked at him and then at the open space. The outlaws might not be there. On the other hand, they might be. This was going to take some nerve and he wondered if he had it. He decided he did and stepped out into the open.
That was the longest walk he’d ever made in his life. It was a thousand years longer than eternity. But he didn’t hurry. He walked at a steady pace, his rifle ready in his hands, his eyes everywhere. Every muscle in his body was tensed for the shot that might come. He started to sweat and had to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. The palms of his hands were slippery with it and he kept wiping them on the legs of his pants.
Finally, however, he reached cover and it was like a great anti-climax. For a few minutes, he leaned against a great boulder and couldn’t quite credit that he was still alive. That was what it did to a man like him, hunting men like these.
He waved Art on.
The Deputy crossed the open space on the run and arrived breathless at Carmody’s side.
They spoke in whispers.
The sheriff told Art that they would stick together until they thought they were near the hideout, then they would scatter and approach it from two directions.
They followed on along the tracks. They lost them on rock. Carmody hunted around, but he couldn’t find anything for a while. Then he found some soil between rocks and there were the two hoofmarks of a horse. They went on again and couldn’t find any more sign that they could be certain of. They heard a horse blow. They froze.
With enormous care, Carmody went forward alone.
In a moment, the rocks petered out and he came to a brief expanse of grass. On the grass were two horses and a mule. One of the horses was a red stallion.
He knew that he had reached his goal. He found that he was shaking a little. It didn’t worry him. It would stop when trouble started.
He went back and told Art to make his way carefully along the north side of the grass, while he took the south. It was his guess that the hideout lay west of them. He could be wrong, but it was an old trick to leave horses out as watchdogs. Cuzie Ben would think of a thing like that. He was half horse himself.
They parted and went their own ways.
Carmody thought: I could be dead inside five minutes.
It was the wrong thought to have at a time like that. It unnerved him a little.
He had taken badmen in the past, he told himself. He was a veteran at the game. If he was a veteran, his other self demanded of him, why was he crazy enough to think that he could take men like this with a couple of men?
He told his other self to shut up. He had taken the Mayflower boys alone. No help whatsoever. But then the Mayflower boys had not been Sam Spur, Cuzie Ben and the Cimarron Kid.
He knew that he was a little scared. Who wouldn’t be a little scared going into a thing like this?
One of the horses trumpeted. He guessed it was the red stud. His nerves screamed. The men in the camp must have been warned of their coming by now. Or they must be deaf. For one dreadful moment, he felt like turning and going back. But he got a grip on himself and forced himself to go on. It was just prefight nerves. Fight? There would be no fight. He’d get the drop on them.
Suddenly, he froze again.
Somewhere ahead of him, a man was coughing.
A trap?
He turned left away from the sound, so that he could work his way in from the south. He was a biggish man but he could move with surprisingly little noise. He was careful where he placed his feet, looking for twigs or loose stones. He was tolerably sure that the man ahead didn’t hear him.
He wondered how Art was progressing. He looked around him nervously, suspecting that there might be a man ready to cut down on him at any moment. He could see nothing, but he went on with that unnerving feeling that somebody was watching him.
At last he came in sight of the coughing man.
It was Spur.
He was sitting, pale-faced with his back against a boulder. He looked like a very sick man. There was camp gear all around him, saddles, tarps, blankets. By his side lay his six-gun. He sat in half-profile to Carmody.
The sheriff sucked in a deep breath and stepped forward.
“I’ve got you, Spur,” he said quietly.
Spur raised his eyes like a man who had not the strength to do anything more than that.
He also looked like a man utterly defeated.
“It sure looks like it,” he said.
Carmody was taken aback by the man’s calmness. He smelled a rat at once. He glanced uneasily around, then stepped forward and picked up Spur’s gun. He thrust it away under his belt. Art appeared out of the rocks. His eyes showed that he was more than a little scared. He stood looking down at Spur like a man who didn’t know what to do next. Carmody was at no such loss.
“On your feet,” he ordered.
Spur got shakily and slowly to his feet. He looked like he was going to fall down at any moment.
Carmody said: “Bring his gear, Art. We’ll go catch up a horse an’ ride.”
Art hefted the saddle and bridle lying there.
Carmody turned and saw the Negro. His blood ran cold. There was a gun in the man’s hand and it pointed straight at Carmody’s belly. He knew in that instant that he had never been nearer to death in his life.
Cuzie Ben said: “Drop the firearms, boys.”
Art’s gun fell with a clatter.
Carmody sighed and followed suit.
“Now the belt-guns. You first, Carmody. Do it gentle. I’d like you dead.”
Carmody took the butt of his Colt between finger and thumb, lifted it from leather and dropped it to the ground. He almost jumped out of his skin when the hair-trigger weapon went off at th
e impact. Carmody shot a frightened glance at the Negro, thinking, in that startling moment, that his reaction to the noise would be to shoot. But Ben merely blinked and stayed still.
Then Art lifted his gun and bent to lay it gently on the ground.
“Sam,” Ben said, “tie these two up. We’ll put ’em on their hosses an’ send ’em into town backward.”
Carmody shuddered. He thought he would rather die. Then a thought hit him —that shot. It would be a warning to Burt. Would the damn fool come riding in here helter-skelter. He listened for the sound of hoof beats and couldn’t hear anything. He prayed fervently that Burt would play this smart. Spur came forward, smiling faintly, a peggin string in his hands.
He said to Carmody, “Turn around, sheriff, and put your hands behind your back. This is goin’ to be a real pleasure. Remember, you did this to me?”
“I remember,” Carmody said. “An’ I’ll do it to you again.”
He put his hands behind his back and Spur tied the wrists tightly. The feeling of being caught and helpless made Carmody want to cry out in rage and frustration. But Burt would come and he’d be free and he would pay these two. By God, he’d pay them like they’d never been paid before.
It was Art’s turn next. He looked pretty sick as the outlaw tied his hands behind him. He told Spur with some venom that he would get him for this. Spur said that chance would be a fine thing.
“Where yo’ hosses?” Ben asked.
“Down in the timber,” Carmody said quickly before Art could answer.
“Go catch up the horses, Ben,” Spur said. “I’ll watch these two.”
The Negro walked away through the rocks when Spur had picked up his gun. Spur sat down on a rock. Their backs were to him and they couldn’t see him.
Carmody thought: They’re not going to kill us. That’s something. This Spur had a soft streak in him. Would Burt come? Would the Negro spot him moving in?
A few minutes later, Ben appeared with the bay, the stud and the mule. He saddled the stud and the bay. Carefully and unhurriedly he loaded the mule.
The Cimarron Kid (A Sam Spur Western Book 5) Page 15