I know the midpoint well. It is where I killed Jed Barnes. I take the stick from the lieutenant and jab it down on the line, halfway between the Xs. “Hatchet Rock,” I say. “You could hide an army regiment behind it, no one see a thing.”
The captain grunts again and Bix pulls him aside. I overhear their conversation. “We’re still an hour from Heavendale, Captain. But we can be at Hatchet Rock in ten minutes. If we find something, we might could get the jump on them.”
“And if we’re wrong we lose a day.”
“They had to change horses, Captain. No way around it.”
The captain gnashes down on what’s left of his cigar and hurls the stub into the dust. He grinds it beneath his boot heel. And then, glowering over at me, he says, “You better be right about this, Injun.”
In the gray half-light of the waning day, Hatchet Rock juts from the desert floor like a slab of tombstone granite. The thread of railroad track winnows off to the horizon, a far cry from the pounding lifeblood that still echoes in my recent memory. Storm remembers too. The stallion opens up his stride as we cross the rails.
“Champing at the bit,” Delmer says.
“He knows this place. We hunt out here.”
Circling around the back side of the rock, we fall in behind the captain, forming a single line to minimize our tracks. Reaching the jagged end of the far western corner, we dismount entirely and proceed on foot.
“Bix, you and the Injun follow me,” the captain says. “Rest of you stay put, keep the horses out of it.” My eyes stay with the ground as we tread lightly toward the rock. I know what to look for. Animals leave their marks, same as men do. But a tracker needs soft eyes. The signs have to come to you, not the other way around. Presumption is nothing but ego, and it will steer you right off a cliff, or leave you standing in the wind with your pecker in your hand.
“Nothing but windswept caliche,” the captain says.
“Horseshit.”
The captain’s chest expands as he sucks in the air to unload on me. “What the hell did you just say?”
“Horseshit. I smell it.” I follow the scent to the base of the rock, where drifts of sand have settled. Clumps, like buried stones, rise above the surface, a quarter-inch at most. But a quarter-inch is enough. I poke at the mound with my boot and it gives way, betraying a soft, spongy presence beneath the sand. I drag my toe back toward me, smearing a greenish-brown stain across the white surface—dried manure, caked with hay. “They tried to bury it.”
“Captain, look at this,” Bix says, running his finger along a crack in the rock. “Somebody wedged a knot of rope down into the crevice.” Mulgrew walks over to inspect it. “Looks like they cut it in a hurry.”
“I think we found ourselves a corral,” the captain says. “Now let’s figure out where they went.” The three of us step backwards from where we stand, clearing the area like we had stumbled upon a sleeping bear.
“Wind’s been too heavy,” Bix says.
I take a knee and still cannot see it so I drop to my belly and gaze out across the desert floor. The ground is trying to tell me what it knows, but my brain will not let it in. And then, for all my faults and trespasses, the Spirits grant me a fond, unexpected memory—the bighorn. That day out in the foothills, so many years ago, Sheriff and I had stood twenty yards from the herd and been ignorant of their proximity. It was only upon gaining some distance that I was able to detect a subtle flash of movement from the blessed creature whose stuffed head hung on Sheriff’s wall until yesterday.
“Hold on.” I get up and stride toward the massive boulder. “Gimme a hand here,” I say, finding a narrow toehold. Bix appears behind me and throws his weight into mine as I propel myself upward along the rock face. The cold stone, a stark, sobering reminder of the approaching winter, passes beneath my fingers. I grapple my way to the top and will myself over the upper ledge into a cool, rippling autumn breeze that crackles with life from the farthest reaches of the valley. Her song sings to me, honing my senses to razor sharpness. I peer over the edge and am slapped in the face with the glaring signature of the hunted. The gentle, undulating imperfections scream out to me from beneath a dusty blanket of sand, like the faint ruts from a wagon after an hour of snow.
The churned hoofprints swirl at the captain’s feet and proceed north, finding focus as the horses built speed, before branching off into two streams. One fires straight toward Heavendale. But the other, lighter of step—evidence of free-running horses—shoots off toward the mountains.
Rising from my knees, I follow the river of ruffled sand with my finger as it winds north, across the valley, up past the foothills and into the Sangres, until it kisses the sky at a point where the mighty range shows the faintest glitch in her armor. Two peaks rip from each other, leaving a steep scar of a ravine between them.
“There,” I say. “That’s where they will try to cross.”
Bix breaks away from his private meeting with the captain and comes over to address the rest of us where we stand, huddled by the horses. “Here’s what’s we’re going to do—divide up into two squads. Casey, Two-Trees, and the Frey brothers, y’all are with me. Rest of you ride with the captain into Heavendale and pick up the tracks from there.”
“We split up, we weaken our numbers,” I say. “Why even mess with Heavendale?”
“Triangulation,” the captain says sternly as he walks over. “One team follows one trail, the other picks up the second. We should meet in the same place.”
“Which team are we?” Casey asks as the men begin to splinter off into their respective details.
“We go straight into the hills,” Bix says. “In the dark.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
My dearest Caroline,
I write this by the first light of dawn near a little stream somewhere in the Sangre Mountains. We slept but an hour and will push off again as soon as the men finish their coffee. Once again, Captain Mulgrew has proved a worthy tracker. He picked up the Snowman’s trail outside of Heavendale on nothing more than a cigarillo butt stubbed out on a rock. Then, every two hundred yards or so, sure enough, we’d find a horse patty or a stain of tobacco juice and that was enough to bring us to where we are now. I don’t know when I will be able to write again. We are hot on the heels of the Snowman’s gang and moving like the wind. But don’t you worry about me. We have reinforcements waiting for us farther up in the mountains. And with the firepower we’re carrying, these outlaws won’t know what hit them. Give little Toby a kiss for me.
Yours always,
Delmer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Bix pulls the spyglass down from his eye and offers it to me. “You want to take a look?”
“No, I see them.” The captain’s team skirts the canyon along a thread of cut trail about a mile down the ridge from where we sit. They ride single file, painfully slow.
“I did not expect them till after noon,” Bix says. “They must’ve gone hell-bent through the night. Don’t know why they’re creeping along now.”
“Sangres will do that to you. One misstep and that’s all she wrote.” Between our position and that of the captain, the canyon forms a bottleneck where two sheer granite walls leave little more than a horse-width of wiggle room through which to pass. They should hit it in about five minutes, and then they will wind upward through the ravine to the clearing just below us.
“That’s a narrow bitch of a squeeze they’re heading for,” Bix says. “Glad we came up the back side. Your jittery stallion would’ve bucked you into that wall.”
“Only if your face spooked him.”
Bix snorts and hands me his flask. I take a nip. The whiskey, warm and sweet, spreads through my belly. “Much obliged,” I say.
We have been here for an hour, hiding out among the boulders on a steep, narrow slope, well protected by overgrowth. Casey dozes on a flat patch behind me and I cannot say I mind having a break from his prickly temperament. The Frey brothers, a Germanic, towheaded trio of ro
oftop snipers, seem to be in a contest of who can spit the most and say the least, but their quiet is conducive to the greater good of our purpose. We have still not caught sight of the bandits or their horses, but the droppings are fresher, a few hours at most. And unless the Snowmen have abandoned their mounts for billy goats, their only course is surely deeper up the pass.
“Where’s the scout?” he asks.
“Just below that ridge on the left.” I spotted the Navajo scout just after dawn, guiding his pony along the tree line. And he made sure we knew that he saw us too. Since then, he has kept mostly out of sight, but he is still up there, watching with a cautious eye, ready to dash off and report our numbers to the chief and his bloodthirsty son.
“How old you make him?”
“Sixteen, seventeen at most.”
“Stalking us all by his lonesome? He best not get any closer.”
“Oh, he can’t kill us. But he could run off and fetch the ones who could.”
“You let me know if he moves. I best signal the captain.” Bix produces a small mirror like was used on the rooftop and angles it into the sun. He flicks his wrist three times, sending the beam in the captain’s direction, but Mulgrew turns at that exact moment, distracted by a disturbance to his rear. Delmer’s horse balks at the tapering gap in the rocks and pushes back. The wiry Pinkerton wrestles the reins and tries to force the nag through.
“Fucking Delmer. That old stepper belongs in the glue factory instead of under his scrawny ass. I’ll fire off a shot, let ’em know we’re here.”
The lieutenant draws his pistol, pointing it skyward, when I dive up and snatch it. “No!”
“What the hell, Harlan?”
“Something’s wrong.”
“What? What is it?”
Through the shifting breeze, a thin trace of an odor arouses my senses. It is familiar, a strong and pungent burst that I cannot put a name to. “You smell that?”
“I don’t smell anything.”
And then, all at once, I connect it in my mind. “Oh my God.”
“What?”
“Quick match.” The words barely cross my lips before the explosion obliterates the air. A pile of rocks belches from the front end of the crevice, laying waste to everything in its path. The captain simply vanishes before my eyes, vaporized in a puff of pink mist. He is the lucky one.
The captain’s retinue bears the brunt of the shock wave, a violent torrent laden with stones the size of cannonballs that leaves a trail of carnage in its wake.
Through the choking, black storm of airborne earth I see a headless horse stagger sideways, drunkenly trying to right itself. An ash-covered human torso slides off its saddle, leaving a pair of twitching legs in the stirrups. Dirt and debris rain from the sky, crashing like hail against the hard ground of the canyon.
The overwhelming stench of cordite poisons every breath—mining-grade TNT. A pitiful, wailing chorus begins to issue from the fog—the sound of old men commiserating in slow, agonized death. But these are not old men. They are strong, vital soldiers cut down in their prime by a mad, ruthless genius who lured them straight into his web.
And then the second blast comes. The far end of the crevice erupts in a hellfire of fragmented boulders, thrusting the decimated ranks forward into the smoldering crater of the first explosion. The shock wave ripples up the side of the canyon, this time in our direction, knocking me backward into the reeling brothers. Chunks of charred horseflesh fall from the sky along with dismembered human limbs wrapped in singed, black wool.
Bix lies across my chest, Casey entwined somewhere at my feet. The six of us—a snarled knot of boot leather and sweated flannel—begin to kick free, pawing over each other to untangle ourselves. I get to my knees and scramble to the nearest boulder. Bix joins me and we peer over the edge, down into the aftermath of the massacre.
“A trap. A goddamn trap!” he hisses.
And what a trap it was—a perfect killing machine. With no open space to siphon off its power, the force of the detonation multiplied against the sheer, immobile sides of the rock face in the cleaved, shoulder-width gorge. The forward ranks of the pursuing posse walked headlong into the first blast, while the second charge at the backside annihilated the retreating survivors.
Bix stares down at the wreckage, shaking his head in stunned disbelief. “And there, but for the grace of God, go I.”
The youngest of the Frey boys, praying softly in German behind me, punctuates the lieutenant’s sentiment. “Bust out that spyglass,” I say. “Maybe somebody made it.”
“Be a bloody, sorry stump if he did,” Casey says.
Bix yanks the spyglass to full extension and scans the smoke for the living. A flicker of movement draws my eye along the slope to our left. It is the scout, meeting my gaze with a face of uncomprehending horror. He was probably a baby when the mines were last in use and has never heard a boom louder than thunder. But now, in the course of half a minute, he has learned the full extent of the White Man’s technical powers and the callous depravity with which he is wont to unleash it.
The boy seems to find some small comfort in my face—and understanding of common blood—but is left clueless as to how I could align myself with the trouser-wearers. Then his face grows awash with a new, sudden terror. He points toward the canyon.
“Holy shit, we got some live ones,” Bix announces. “I see Baker, he’s moving. And there’s Joe! He’s hurt bad, but he ain’t dead.”
I cannot bring my eyes away from the Dineh boy. His pointing continues as he backpedals and finally ducks behind the rocks and over the nearest ridge. I follow the line of his finger and realize that the cause of his fresh horror was not the bloodshed at the bottom of the gorge, but the approaching danger at the canyon’s upper edge. Across the ridge, a line of men nearly twenty strong and toting rifles comes over the top and takes aim at the survivors. Fish in a barrel.
“That’s them,” I say. “That’s the gang.”
“Good God,” Bix says. “They’re lookin’ to finish ’em.”
“Like hell,” Casey growls, slinging his rifle off his shoulder. A volley of gunfire kabooms from across the canyon as the Snowman’s henchmen unleash their weapons down into the gorge.
The Frey brothers need no prodding to do what they were put on this earth to do—shoot guns. Three rifles crack from behind me, Bix and Casey joining in with their thirty-aughts.
I drop behind the boulder and come back up, pistol blazing. The bandits produce such a racket with their own guns that they do not, at first, pick up on ours, until one of them drops, then another. And then the faces look out across the canyon—faces and outfits I recognize from the bank, from the campsite, from that taunting, circular exhibition around the jail. Their confusion is short-lived. Their weapons soon turn in our direction.
“Fan out, goddammit!” Bix shouts. The brothers scurry off to the right and take up positions along a fallen tree. I dive left, bullets zinging past me close enough to hear before ricocheting off the rocks. The entire canyon descends into an unholy cacophony of thunder, every shot echoing a hundredfold down the length of the giant, stone coffin. Pinned where I lay, I can see down to the canyon floor.
A figure springs forth from a shadowy crack in the rock face. He holds a double twelve and cranes his neck upward to bark a command at his associates. “Don’t shoot me by accident, you idjits!” A bandage around his head protects an injured right ear. Percy, the one I winged up at the campsite. Of course. The fuse man. Someone close to the charge had to light the quick match. He has probably been down there for two days, waiting. And now, methodically, one by one, he walks up to each dying Pinkerton, ready to put a slug through his chest. Boom. Boom. He works his way down the trail of wounded men. The ones already dead get a slug for good measure.
The bandits use the emergence of their compadre below to concentrate their efforts on us. Bullets careen off the boulders, eager for soft flesh. My only view is down at the swath of blood and body parts. Combing my
eyes to the tail end of the line, I see a crowbait nag slumped against the rock, her front legs blown clean off, tongue lolling almost comically to the side. A pair of human hands appear underneath her—just a flash of ghostly white, bony fingers—and then vanish again into the dark recess beneath the animal’s carcass. The crank gun and its assorted pieces lay scattered nearby.
“Delmer’s alive.” I say. “He’s hiding under that dead nag.”
“We gotta get him out,” Bix says.
“I will go,” I say. “But you need to make a right mighty stink with them rifles or I won’t get ten feet.”
“We got you covered, Two-Trees.” Bix rolls on his back and shouts toward the others. “On my go, we are up and blastin’. Be precise. Pick your man and put him down!”
“Got that right,” Casey says.
“Yah,” agrees the eldest Frey, echoing the sentiment of his nodding brothers.
A volley of gunfire cracks from across the canyon, skidding off the boulders behind us in all directions. We press flat against the dirt where we lay and wait for a lull in the onslaught. A break comes, and with it the sounds of men shouting commands and chambering fresh ammunition.
“Get ready to run like the wind, Two-Trees,” Bix says, jamming every bullet he can into his rifle until it will take no more. I let out a breath. I am the Spirits’ to guide. “Now!” he shouts.
The four of them spring up, surrendering their positions in an all-or-nothing gamble for the lives of a skinny crank-gunner and the half-blood Navajo who is fool enough to go after him.
I leap from the rocks and throw myself down the slope. The ground sails beneath me. I focus on nothing but the next footstep and where it will land, willing myself not to stumble.
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