He was a hunter, alert for those other hunters, and something in him had changed, some ancient feeling had welled up within him. He squatted down close to the rock. It was smooth except where cut by the slow passing of a glacier that had left grooves into which he could lay a finger.
He thought he heard the whispering, rough sound again—or was it the wind? He waited, thinking of his enemies somewhere around him, and only the girl and his son who were friendly to him. He heard the sound again, and now he thought it was like something creeping toward him, and was tempted to shoot…but only a fool shoots at what he cannot see.
*
A MILE AWAY, huddled near a spring, Cotton Allard looked at his empty coffee cup. He knew they were waiting for him to decide, and he did not know what to say. Never in his life had he wished so much to kill a man as he wished to kill James Brionne now.
He hated Brionne because he had hunted down his brother, and he hated him because he had possessed such a home as he had seen in Virginia, and such a woman as the one who had so calmly waited for him. She would not leave his mind, tormenting him with her calmness. It nagged at him that she had bested him. She had killed one of his men, narrowly missed another shot, and then had calmly killed herself before he could put his hands on her.
He had seen the contempt in her eyes, and the memory would not leave him.
If he could kill the boy and the husband, she might be beaten then. He looked again at the empty cup, swore savagely, and filled it once more. The coffee was bitter.
Tuley spoke at last. “What are we a-goin’ to do, Cotton? Just set here? That man’s yonder in the mountains. So are the rest of them. As for that white-headed cow-puncher, I figure I nailed him.”
“You figure!” Cotton glared at him. “That there puncher you talk about is Dut Mowry! His kind don’t die easy. What I want to know is what happened to Tardy? He wasn’t exactly no pilgrim. He was a fair hand with a gun.”
“He’s probably waiting till the fog lifts,” Hoffman said hesitantly. “He couldn’t find us in all this.”
Cotton looked up. “Are you sure that was Brionne who shot at you? Not Mowry?”
Hoffman looked worried. He wanted to give the right answer, and was afraid he might give the wrong one. “I thought it was Brionne. I didn’t get a good look at him.”
Cotton Allard threw the coffee into the fire and got up. “So we don’t know. Maybe he’s alive, maybe he’s dead.”
“If we get the woman,” Peabody said suddenly, “the woman an’ the kid, then he’s got to come to us. Besides, it’d be mighty comfortin’ to have a woman around.”
Cotton did not reply. He was cold. He had been cold and wet ever since he came up on the mountain, it seemed, but this was a deeper cold…was it fear?
The question angered him. He would have struck anyone who asked such a question…had anyone dared.
No, it was not fear. It was just this damned country, the whole situation…and it was the memory of that woman. There was no way to get at her. She was dead, gone. Only she was not gone, for she lived in his mind and he could still see her sitting there, looking at him so calmly, looking at those intruders into her quiet, well-kept home.
At no time had she raised her voice, at no time had she recognized them as anything but a disagreeable intrusion…or so it had seemed to him.
“Look at it this way,” Cotton said, and there was a roughness in his voice, a forced assertiveness not usually present. “They’ve split up. Maybe both of ’em are shot up some, maybe just one.
“We got their horses an’ they ain’t goin’ nowheres without them. We just wait until this fog lifts, then we go get ’em.”
“Cotton,” Hoffman suggested tentatively, “this isn’t just fog. We’re away up in the mountains and these are clouds. I think they’re storm clouds.”
“So?” Peabody asked.
“Have you ever been this high up in a bad thunderstorm? Or suppose it snows? My advice would be—”
“Nobody asked your advice.” Cotton spoke in a mean tone.
Peabody glanced at his brother, and walking over to his blankets, he lay down with his face to the rock wall. Cotton was in a mood, and Peabody knew from of old how treacherous he could become.…
And it was worse now. Ever since they burned that house. A body would think killing a woman was something new for him.
Tuley fed fuel into the fire and walked over to the edge of the hollow to listen.
He did not like these mountains. He would have preferred to be down among the trees, which in some places were only a few hundred feet below them. And he had a sneaking feeling Hoffman was right about the clouds.
Tuley was no more than sixty feet from the fire, standing alone, looking down the mountain when James Brionne appeared.
He did not come walking up, making sounds as he came; it just seemed that some of the fog or cloud drifted away and there he stood, like a ghost, with a rifle in his hands.
“Where is she? Where’s the boy?”
His voice was low, and unconsciously Tuley Allard replied in the same tone. “I don’t know. We got their outfit, but they got away from us.”
“Were you there when my wife was killed?”
“Yeah, I was there. On’y she killed herself. Had herself a derringer we never seen. She killed one of us with the shotgun, then missed with the derringer, and before we could lay hold of her she shot herself.”
The rifle muzzle was down. Tuley smiled, showing his broken teeth. “Cotton is goin’ to be fit to be tied when he finds I’ve killed you.”
“Tuley?” It was Cotton’s voice. “Who you talkin’ to?”
“Brionne,” Tuley said, “an’ I’m goin’ to kill him.”
Tuley was a fast hand with a gun. Not so fast as Cotton, but he was an excellent shot along with his speed. He was very confident now. No ghosts disturbed his stolid, somewhat stupid temperament. His hand moved down and back. It was an easy draw. Tuley was smiling when his palm slapped the gun butt, and when the gun started to lift. He was still smiling when the rifle bullet struck his belt buckle’s corner, mushroomed, and tore into his stomach.
And he still smiled as his gun was coming up, only he was on his knees and a queer numbness gripped him. His fingers no longer felt the gun’s weight.
The bullet had ripped a wide gash in the wall of his stomach, glanced off a rib, and struck his spinal cord, coming to rest there.
At the first bellow of the shot, Cotton Allard hit the ground rolling and came up, gun in hand. Only there was no target. And the fire, a moment before the center of the small group, was suddenly deserted.
Cloud had drifted across the scene, swallowing it up and blotting it out. They could see nothing. Even Tuley, on his knees, eyes glazing, stared wonderingly at the place where Brionne had stood. There was only cloud. Nothing more.
Brionne, expecting fire from the camp, had dropped to his knee, and had then taken off to the right in a crouching run.
Suddenly, from farther to the right, in the vicinity of the peak, there was a brilliant flash. Brionne’s skin prickled with the electricity and his hair stood on end. A moment later there was a deafening crash of thunder. Dropping his rifle, he rolled away from it, and lay in the depression between two boulders.
The cloud swirled with a sudden gust of wind; and looking up, Brionne found himself staring at a crudely drawn picture of a running dog. The picture had been scratched on the rock wall, pointing toward the right and toward the ridge.
Driven by a sudden urge, he caught up his rifle and went in the direction the dog’s nose pointed. Indians sometimes used such picture devices; but this was, he felt sure, no Indian drawing. He had heard of prospectors using such markings; and somewhere near, he was convinced, was the place toward which Rody Brennan had been directed by Ed Shaw.
Farther along on the ridge, he found another crude drawing of a dog, pointing south. The ridge led him on, and the one place Brionne wanted to be now was off that ridge. He wanted to be on lower
ground, where lightning was less apt to strike.
When he had traveled perhaps half a mile he found another drawing, but this time it was of a horse; and a little farther along there was one of an Indian with a bow, about to release an arrow.
Suddenly he saw before him a gap in the mountain, a gap he estimated was not more than half a mile wide.
Part of the lower ground was obscured in cloud, but from his vantage point on the ridge he could see a green, forested valley where in some places there were meadows, and he could make out several lakes. Through the center of the basin, starting not far from where he stood, flowed a small stream.
He climbed down into the basin, going carefully and studying the ground as he went. He had not gone far when he saw a boot print—a small one, and not complete. Only part of the heel showed clearly, but the print appeared to have been made recently.
He went ahead on what seemed to be a game trail, and presently he found a small fir that had been cut partway through with an axe, then broken over to point along the trail. The cut was not new; it appeared to be at least several months old. A short distance farther along a dead branch pointing in the same direction lay across two living branches of a tree.
He came suddenly on the remains of an old campfire, and here again he saw what he thought was the suggestion of a track, scarcely to be made out—not much more than a flattened place at the edge of the campfire.
Brionne studied the site. On a limb nearby hung a pothook made from a forked branch, such as he had often used himself. It showed use; evidently it had been used more than once. This, he felt quite sure, must have been the camp, or one of the camps, that Ed Shaw had used while prospecting in the area.
A small lake was close by, and a spring ran a trickle of water into it. The shore was rocky, but trees came almost to the edge of the water.
Brionne paused inside the belt of trees to consider. The basin was surrounded on three sides by steep mountains, except at the point where he had come through, and undoubtedly at the point where the stream flowed out. The stream rapidly cut more deeply to make a small canyon before it joined the main stream, which was probably Lake Fork Creek.
He returned to the campfire and looked all about. The trail ended here, except for the walk to the edge of the lake for water. Had Shaw, then, entered the lake when he left the camp, and followed along the shore?
Thunder was rumbling now, and there were almost continual flashes of lightning. Here in the forest, with the walls of the ridges closed about him, he felt more secure.
His thoughts returned to the sound he had heard more than once up on the rock ledge. It was unlikely to have been any of the Allards, for there seemed to be none missing except those he himself could account for.
What then? An animal? Some other man? Or perhaps just a dead branch stirred by the wind?
He considered the situation. He could not attack an alerted camp head-on, and such an attack would be to no purpose now. What he wanted was to locate Mat and Miranda. The girl must have known more than she had said, or else she had seen some sign, such as the signs he himself had seen, that had led her closer to finding the mine.
He took a slow circle around the dead campfire, but he found nothing. He tried again, moving farther out, but the result was the same—nothing.
His son was somewhere on this mountain, alone with a young woman who was unfamiliar with the country, and unskilled in its ways. Miranda and Mat had no shelter, no food, no outfit of any kind. Tuley had said that the Allards had that outfit.
A storm was building, a slow, sullen storm that could burst with unbelievable fury at any moment. Moreover, somewhere on this mountain was the Allard gang. And if the Allards found his son they would kill him.
And somewhere on the mountain was Dutton Mowry—a good man, Brionne had believed, but how could he be sure of that now?
Who was Mowry? Why had he come to Promontory? What had led him to take this ride into the mountains with Miranda? Was he, too, after the silver? Did he know something they did not know?
James Brionne sat down on a fallen tree, his shoulders heavy with weariness.
They must be near…but where? Could he find them before the storm struck?
Chapter 13
*
THE THUNDER ROARED upon its great drums, rolling cataracts of sound down the narrow canyons and exploding them against the cliffs. Lightning shot in vivid streaks across the sky, great flashes of light that seemed not like the lightning seen in the lowlands, but like a heaven of flame gaping open above them, giving them a view of the blazing heart of some other world.
The rain did not come. The atmosphere was charged with electricity, and the streaks of flame seemed to bound and rebound from the peaks above them.
James Brionne got up and walked to the lake again. A sullen sheet, it lay open to the sky, shining like a great bowl of mercury. He went along the edge, alone in the thickness of cloud that only from time to time tore itself apart and allowed him to peer through, to see the dark firs, the great, craggy rocks, the bleak grayness of the shoreline.
His boy was somewhere not far away, his son who had always been a little frightened of storms—not wishing to admit it, but afraid nonetheless. Was Miranda with him? Something within Brionne assured him that unless torn from Mat’s side, she would be there, close beside him. She was that kind of person.
He paused again, during a lull in the cannonade of thunder, to listen for any cry, any call, any human sound at all, but there was none.
He looked about him, shaken with fear for his son, and seemed to see on all sides the evidences of a world in the making—the wind-worn rocks, the long rock-falls of shattered cliffs, the fallen trees, wedged among the rocks and breaking to pieces there, the trails made by rushing water, carrying away the gravel and sand and wearing the rocks as it ran, chafing them, hammering at them with an occasional large rock—everything busy in changing the form of the earth.
These peaks, too, would disappear some day. They would be worn down one day, polished and ancient, their hard-shouldered youth as nothing before the timeless patience of wind and water, of heat and cold, of growth and decay.
A young fir grew from a crack in a boulder where some earth had blown and been held. The roots would split the boulder further apart, and finally the boulder itself would break in half and fall away.
He saw these things, he thought these things, for such thoughts were a part of him. He had been born to see, to observe everything around him. So it was that now he saw something special: a spear of sandstone thrust upright in a crack of the granite—an unnatural thing, surely.
Why was it there? To arrest attention. To catch the eye of the beholder and to let him know that for some reason he must look again. The spear of rock, scarcely two feet long, was canted slightly toward the south. By accident, or design?
He saw that there was a trail, a suggestion of something man-made, a place where there had been movement. Brionne went forward, coming up through the trees to a bald knoll among them, and suddenly from out of the cloud an eagle flew, a lost bird, seeking its nest, confused by the storm, or stunned by the thunder.
The flight of the eagle carried his eye along to the westward, and through the torn clouds he glimpsed the wall of the basin, not far off.
An eagle, one would think, would be safely nested or roosted at such a time. An eagle’s instinct would have given him some forewarning of the storm…suppose something had disturbed him? Something coming too close to home?
Where had he seen him first? Brionne headed toward where he believed he had first seen the eagle, and when he had walked only a few minutes he came upon the trail again, that suggestion of something man-made.
Then he broke through the last of the firs and saw the log cabin, built against a shoulder of rock, utilizing the rock for its own rear wall.
Thunder rolled, lightning flared again. How far off was the cabin? Fifty yards? A hundred? He started to run.
And then the rain came.
When it did not open, he threw his shoulder against it, and the door gave way. He caught himself just a step inside, and stood there looking into the muzzle of Cotton Allard’s gun.
There were four other men with him, one of them the man Brionne had seen in the Southern Hotel in St. Louis, and again in Cheyenne.
At least one other Allard was there. That must be Peabody, of whom he had heard.
Mat was there, too, sitting back in a corner, huddled close to Miranda.
Major James Brionne, his hair plastered against his skull by the rain, water streaming down his face, was soaked to the skin, but he held a rifle in his hand as he stood facing Cotton Allard.
“Drop the rifle,” Cotton said. “I got somethin’ for you to watch.”
The reaction was immediate and swift. James Brionne had learned the zouave drill at St. Cyr, as well as a dozen intricate rifle drills, and now he flipped his rifle forward, spun the butt, and knocked the pistol from Cotton’s hand. Then with a butt stroke he smashed one of the other men in the belly, knocking him into a corner.
Peabody lunged at him and Brionne staggered into a corner, falling against the wall. Peabody leaped upon him, but Brionne whipped himself over swiftly and sprang to his feet, even as Cotton scrambled up, gun in hand.
Brionne’s gun was in his hand, too, and he looked across the room at Cotton. “You are the gunfighter,” he said. “You want to try it with me?”
“Holstered guns?” Cotton suggested, grinning, but it was an evil grin.
“Of course. That is the way, isn’t it? One thing, however, let my son and Miss Loften leave the cabin. There is no need for them to get shot by accident.”
“Let ’em go,” Cotton said. “They ain’t goin’ no place, and I don’t want nothing to happen to that girl yet neither.”
Brionne held his gun steady until Mat and Miranda were out of the door. The others trooped out after them.
Novel 1968 - Brionne (v5.0) Page 11