To act hastily was usually to act foolishly. He must trust Mowry.
There are more ways of fighting a battle than with a gun, and it was of that he was thinking now. This had been the Allards’ camp…where were their horses? Their gear?
In the light of the still glowing coals, he could see the sand around the campfire had been disturbed by much moving about, and most of the tracks seemed to go away from the fire toward a space between two boulders.
Moving with the utmost care, in case someone had been left behind, he worked his way around the camp. Occasionally he felt of the sand before him with gentle fingers, and he managed to get on the trail they had taken into the trees. He had not gone far when he heard a horse stamp and blow.
A few minutes later he found the horses had been left alone. And their food, their clothing, their cooking pots, as well as their horses, all were here. Working swiftly, he put pack saddles on three of the horses and loaded everything. In all this time there was no sound from above.
Then he saddled one of the remaining horses, and was just about to mount when he heard a faint movement of someone coming through the trees.
Rifle in hand, he turned to face the sound.
Suddenly, the man stopped. “Hoffman? Is that you?”
“You can drop your gunbelt, my friend—or you can die.”
The movement was swift. Brionne heard a hand slap leather, heard the whisper of the gun on leather as it drew, and even as he heard the sound he had his rifle in his hands out in front of him and belt-high. He squeezed off a shot.
He heard the ugly chunk of the bullet as it hit the man’s belly, a sound almost lost in the blast of his enemy’s pistol as it went off, shooting into the sand.
Sand stung Brionne’s face, and he moved quickly, crouching lower…waiting.
At first he heard no other sound, then came a low moan. The man spoke, and his voice sounded surprisingly normal. “They’ll get you. You ain’t got a chance.”
“Are you an Allard?”
“No, but I’m kin of their’n. You hit me low down, mister, low down an’ hard. You goin’ to strike a light?”
“And have your friends kill me? Not a chance!”
Brionne could hear the man’s heavy breathing. Once it caught, and for a moment he believed the man had died, then the breathing resumed, but with a ragged, tearing sound.
“By now they’ve got your kid,” the man said. His voice was hoarse now, and weaker.
“I don’t think so. There’s a good man up there with him, a mighty good man. He’s from down Texas way.”
“The hell you say! Not Dut Mowry?”
“You know him?”
“He’s huntin’ me. Leastways I’m one of them he’s after. You can tell him he can tear up that reward poster. ’Cause you’ve just killed Tardy Benton.”
James Brionne was listening. Would somebody come down to investigate? He listened for a time, but there was no sound. They might think it a trap. Still, all their outfit was here.
The thought struck him suddenly. He was not alone with Benton—there was another man here! Benton was trying to keep him talking until the man, wherever he was, could get into position.
Tardy Benton spoke again. “You still there?”
“Who’s out there, Tardy?” Brionne whispered the words. “I don’t want to kill anybody but Allards.”
“You ain’t got a chance.”
“How did you come to tie up with them?” Brionne asked.
His every sense was alert. He thought the man would come close before shooting. He lifted one foot and moved it out to one side, ever so quietly.
“Rode with ’em a time or two.…Friend o’ their’n down to Corinne got me to fetch grub to ’em.…Promised I could get in on the fun.”
“Well, you did.”
“Hell, I was broke, anyway—blew ever’ dollar down to Corinne.…An’ who lives forever?” Benton was having some difficulty getting the words out. “How much time you got? Long enough to hear your woman screamin’, or your kid?” After a pause he added, “That there Cotton Allard, he’s a mean one.”
The voice was very weak; every word came with an effort, but Tardy Benton was game, and he wanted his killer dead. He wanted to keep him talking.
Behind them one of the horses blew faintly, as though alarmed. James Brionne rolled his weight over to the other leg, then stretched it out after bringing the second leg under him. In this way he moved closer to the dying man, and eight or nine feet from where he had been.
He was about to move again when he heard faint breathing close by, then actually felt the warmth of a breath. He swung with the butt of his rifle, but he was off balance and went sprawling as the gun roared right in his ear. He went down on top of rocks, rolled over, and swung his rifle for a shot.
The gun blasted again and the bullet spat sand within inches of Brionne’s head. He fired, missed, and worked the lever on his rifle as another bullet hit close to him. This one burned his cheek.
The man loomed up, right over him, and Brionne jabbed the rifle barrel into his belly. The man grabbed the end of the barrel, trying to force it up, and Brionne pulled the trigger.
The dart of red flame illumined for one flashing instant the staring eyes, the livid face, and then the man fell face down on top of Brionne.
Brionne felt blood on his own face and thrust the man aside. He sprang up, and another gun blasted, but the shot went wide by several feet.
“You got a fool’s own luck,” Tardy Benton said clearly. “The third time’s the charm.…You’ll get it.”
Brionne wiped the blood from his face. He felt for his cartridge belt and returned a couple to his rifle. Then he tied the lead ropes of the pack horses to his saddle horn, and started off through the night, driving the spare horses ahead of him.
He found the trail up which they had come. He had a good memory for trails, and for the country over which they traveled. He remembered a place where there was a hollow, a small meadow among the trees. He found this, took the horses around a clump of screening trees and into the meadow. He stowed the food and ammunition under some brush, and picketed the horses.
Tardy Benton had come up the mountain with supplies for the Allards. He might have come alone, although that seemed unlikely with conditions what they were. So the Allards might have been reinforced.
But where had they gone? They must be somewhere up on the mountain, but as yet there had been no shot from the lake camp. Had Dut Mowry been surprised and killed or captured? And what about Mat and Miranda?
Returning to the trail, Brionne started back up the mountain. The warmth of the day had vanished before the cool wind, and now it was cold. But he dared not move fast, for his enemies might be anywhere along the trail.
He was avoiding the area of the Allard camp. He had only one idea now—to get back to the lake and discover what had happened.
How long had he been gone, he wondered, An hour? Two? He would have liked to look at his watch, but there was no light, and he dared not strike a match.
His moccasins made no sound on the trail. He moved swiftly and easily, with occasional stops to listen and catch his breath, for the altitude made climbing difficult.
When he came to the edge of the boulders again, and could look across the gravel and sand toward the lake, he saw no fire; there was no sound, there was no movement. The lake lay like a strip of steel in the dimness; all else was dark.
His mouth dry, his heart pounding, he lay watching the lake, but after several minutes he knew he was alone. There was nobody over there, nothing.
Nearing the rock wall, he worked his way back to where the horses had been sheltered. The horses were gone; the packs were gone. There was no sign of his son, of Miranda or Dutton Mowry.
Had Mowry sold them out? Was he, after all, one of the Allard gang?
There had been no shots, of that he was sure. He had not at any time been so far away that he would have missed hearing a shot. There was no evidence here of a str
uggle. The sand was white, and he could see the tracks of horses and people—their own tracks.
He stood alone in the night, and despite the cold he felt the sweat break-out on his brow.
It must mean that they had Mat. The Allards had Mat, and they had Miranda.
He had been a fool to leave…a fool.
Chapter 12
*
THERE WAS NO blood anywhere on the sand. He felt sure he could have seen it on the white sand if there had been. No blood…no shots…so there probably had been no fight.
What did it mean? They had been surrendered to the Allards by Mowry, who had turned traitor. They had been captured somehow, without a chance to fight. Or—and this seemed the most unlikely of all—they had had some warning of the approach of the Allards, and had gotten away.
Gotten away…how? Or if captured, where had they been taken?
Brionne had been holding himself back in the darkness all this time, thinking. There was no panic in him. His military conditioning had taken all that out of him. Now he thought clearly, trying to isolate each fact.
He could find no signs even of a scuffle. It was possible that he might not find them in the dark, but such a scuffle would have resulted in deep indentations in the sand, the marks made by struggling men.
Mowry had not been in this country before. He might have been lying, but his actions on the trail showed no indication of previous knowledge. Had Miranda remembered something? Or had she been holding back some secret information? Perhaps she had recognized something unclear to her before.
There seemed to be nothing to do but wait. Yet even as he considered it, he knew that this was perhaps the worst place to wait. The Allards, if they did not have Mat and the others, might come back here to look for them, or for him. On the white sand any movement of his could be too easily seen.
After taking a long drink at one of the springs, Brionne slipped out of the cul-de-sac at the lake, went around the rocks, and climbed toward the pass.
This was a broken ridge, its sides made smooth in some places by slides, and heaped with scattered boulders or talus in others. Here the forces of erosion were always at work—wind, cold, heat, snow, ice, and rain.
Finally, near the top of the ridge, under a tilted slab of rock, he found a hiding place and shelter from the wind. He squirmed his way into the moss and broken rock, and curling up for warmth, he went to sleep.
It was dawn when he awakened.
The cold gray of morning under gray clouds found him haunted with fear for Mat and Miranda. He crouched under the slab of rock, feeling the dampness of the clouds that swirled about the higher peaks. A damp chill pervaded him, and there was something in the air that frightened him. He emerged slowly, like an animal from its den, studying all around him. Only when he was sure that nothing lay in wait for him did he begin his search for tracks.
He was not a man to whom anger came quickly; rather, it grew within him until suddenly he was swept by those black rages, rages of which he was aware and which he struggled to keep within bounds. Deliberately, he forced himself now to stand still, to breathe deeply, to fight down the thing that was rising within him.
He must keep his mind clear, or all was lost. It was only by thinking clearly that he could win. He told himself this again and again.
The Allards must also be hunting for him. Two of their men had been killed, and by now they must know their horses and outfits were gone.
That feeling in the air that he did not like he now realized was a developing storm. Now he knew that he had two antagonists—there were the Allards, whom he had to find, and there was the storm. But it was possible that the storm might prove an ally.
Mat and Miranda…it was what had happened to them that was important. For the moment he was not considering Dutton Mowry. They had gone somewhere, and it was up to him to find them, and quickly.
He went out on the mountain and began casting for sign. It was a slow, painstaking search. There were several areas of flat rock over which they might have been taken, and at first he found nothing.
He stood, a bleak and lonely man with the cloud-fog swirling about him, looking over the face of the slide rock, the smooth face with jagged edges like frozen gray flames. This was another world. Paris and New York, Washington and Virginia did not exist for him now. This was a primeval world, and he felt as if he had become a primeval man. His son had been taken from him, his only son; and the girl…what was she to him? He did not face that. She had been in his care, and that was enough.
This was no land for the niceties of civilization. He was alone, and he was facing, as all primitive men had sometime faced, the horror of unreason, of men who kill without passion, or kill with hatred for those who use their mind in a better way.
Patiently, steadily, he worked back and forth across the mountain. Had they gone directly down he would have heard them. They must have gone along the side of the mountain, or up it.
He found their tracks suddenly.
There was no single track that he could make out—only a tight bunch of tracks, mingled with one another, and tramped over by those following.
He went on, his rifle in his hand, every sense alert, his movements shrouded by the thickening, darkening cloud. The air prickled with electricity. He felt it in his hair when he took off his hat to run his fingers through his hair, a way he had sometimes when thinking intently.
A black, shattered cliff towered on his left, the mountain fell away in a steep slide to the timberline below, and there he could see a gray wall of long dead trees, some still standing, some tumbled about, limbs spread out as if in groping, or flung up starkly to the sky, tree trunks like the mummified bodies of some ancient battlefield. A slide had killed them, or a stroke of lightning, leaping along the mountain, ricocheting from peak to peak, cliff-face to boulder to tree.
As he looked, a bullet smashed rock, stinging his cheeks with fragments, and he half-turned, crouched like an animal at bay, and fired at the flash, a flash scarcely seen.
Then he ran forward three quick steps and threw the rifle to his shoulder and fired again at the running figure. The man fell, not hit, but losing his footing upon the loose rocks. He scrambled up, glancing over his shoulder in horror, as if looking for the bullet that might take him between the shoulders. But Brionne missed again, and for a second time the frantic runner slipped among the rocks. Then, scrambling desperately, he plunged through an opening and was out of sight.
Brionne was gasping for breath in the thin air. Drifting cloud cut him off from his surroundings, and he was lost in the chill depths of the fog.
It was a danger, that. He could come upon them without even realizing it.
He had noticed a crevice in the rock face on his left before the fog closed down, and he went to it now and clambered up, as quietly as possible. Every foot brought a wrenching gasp from him. His lungs fought for air, and when only a few feet up he had to stop, cling to the rocks, and rest.
They were somewhere ahead of him. Had the man at whom he fired been a straggler? And how many of them were there?
Crawling out on the flat top of the rock, he lay still, breathing hoarsely, but trying to listen. The man at whom he had fired had been trying to get to some spot in the rocks up ahead. Were the Allards there? If so, they knew he was close by. There was no surprising them.…
Yet why not? They would not expect a lone man to attack their camp. They would expect him to lie out and try to pick them off, one by one…or else to run for help.
But there was no help.
When his breath was back to normal, Brionne reloaded his rifle. Then, getting to his feet, he moved swiftly and silently along the top of the rock.
Somewhere ahead of him he heard a faint sound, a whisper, and then it was gone. Was there somebody ahead of him, moving along the rock? After a moment, he went on, holding his rifle ready in his hands.
The rock ledge along which he moved was damp and slippery, but the moccasins enabled Brionne to move easily on t
he wet surface, and with almost no sound. The heavy clouds, growing thicker by the minute, cut visibility to only a few feet; rarely could he see a few yards in any direction.
It was an eerie feeling, a feeling of being lost in some strange, misty world. At any step one might encounter a precipice or an enemy. After every few steps Brionne paused to listen…and again he heard the whispering sound.
Something was moving along the same ledge where he himself moved.
A person? A mountain lion? A grizzly? To encounter any one of them in this place would mean a fight to the death.
However, this was above the haunts of the lions; among these lonely peaks the eagles flew, and the bighorns moved among the crags. Here, except for the occasional storms, was a place of silence, broken only by the rattle of a pebble, the slide of rock, the groaning of a glacier.
Now the day was still. The clouds covered the mountain far below the place where Brionne walked, and here there was only the penetrating dampness and chill.
Had they managed to keep their packs, he wondered. Was Mat warm enough? The boy’s health was good, but this damp cold, at this altitude…
Again he heard the faint sound, like the sliding of rough cloth on rock. He stood still for a moment, his rifle easy in his hands, ready to turn quickly in any direction.
Moving on, he found the shelf ended in a cataract of rocks that disappeared into the cloud below…how far? He waited there, listening again. In the thickness of the mist, all sounds would be distorted, and he could not be sure of their direction.
Brionne stood on the rim like a man standing on the far black edge of the world, and he looked down.
He knew that the stones would rattle if he started down the slide, and they would carry a warning to anyone below or beyond. He must find a way around.
To the right was the cliff face…there was nothing there but a vast emptiness. He turned left and walked on cat feet, his ears pricked for the sound of movement.
Novel 1968 - Brionne (v5.0) Page 10