by E. L. Ripley
“To catch your breath, at least.”
In fact, Hale probably didn’t have the resources to pursue Silva very far or very effectively, but that wasn’t really the problem. The problem was that the world was full of Hales, and if Silva wasn’t welcome here, where could he go?
Silva drew his pistol and cocked it. He sat up, expression flat. “Come out,” he said, his exhaustion thick in his voice.
It was disappointing how quickly Carpenter’s flash of panic came and went. It was there and gone before he had time to think, leaving only something like resignation. He sat up a little, frowning as he followed the barrel of Silva’s gun.
“I apologize” came a man’s voice from the dark, and this man sounded every bit as worn-out as they were.
Silva kept the pistol up. It was empty of course, but this fellow didn’t know that. He emerged from behind a tree, unnervingly close by. Carpenter hadn’t even suspected there was anyone coming, but his blood was still pumping, and his breath still wasn’t coming easy. To spend a day truly on the run was nothing to make light of even for a young man. For his part, he was just glad he’d made it this far.
“I shouldn’t have approached,” the man said.
“I would agree with that,” Silva replied, rising to his feet and holding the gun at arm’s length. What he was doing was wise: appearing strong and confident, and that took Carpenter aback. It wasn’t that he was doing the sensible thing that was a surprise; it was that he had the energy to do it convincingly.
“It was just curiosity, I guess.” The man came a little closer, and the moonlight found him. He was as grubby and worn as they were—no, he was worse off. Carpenter and Silva looked a fright after just two days, but this man must have been making his way for a good deal longer than that. Dark circles ringed his eyes, and he had the makings of a beard. It was difficult to know his age, or even guess it, but he had a bad limp.
“You understand,” he said, peering at them in the dark. “Two voices, no fire.”
“Are you alone, sir?” Carpenter asked.
“I believe he is,” Silva replied.
“May I sit?” the stranger asked.
“Depends who’s chasing you,” Silva told him frankly. Carpenter couldn’t disagree; it was the only reason this fellow might have been creeping through the woods in the dark rather than sitting beside his own fire.
The moonlight caught the tip of the rifle over the man’s back, though he’d made no move toward it.
“Bounty hunters,” he replied, “I expect.”
That was a blunt and honest answer.
“For good reason?” Carpenter asked.
The stranger hesitated. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “I guess so.”
“Thinking of robbing us?”
Silva snorted before the other man could answer. He put his pistol back in its holster. “We’ve nothing for him to take.” He gestured in his gentlemanly way.
The stranger took off his things and settled beside them, taking a deep breath and looking over his shoulder. He began to rummage through his pack.
“Have you heard the wolves?” he asked.
“Now and then.” Silva paused to listen for a moment. Hearing nothing, he went back to his place, sheltered behind boulders. “There must be quite a few.”
“On all sides, feels like.”
“Do you take precautions?”
The stranger shrugged, coming up with a package wrapped in paper. “Their dens are in these woods. We can’t know where. That’s what’ll make the difference if they make a move or not.” He smiled in the dark. “We may walk too near to one, never knowing what we were doing. Or we may not.” He shrugged again, but there was no levity in it. His voice was melancholy. “Who can say? It’s a gamble.”
They watched him unwrap some hardtack. He took a bite, struggling a little with no water to soak it in; then he offered the package. Carpenter took a piece readily, and so did Silva.
“We’re grateful,” Carpenter said.
“Wolves have nothing to fear from us,” Silva added.
“They don’t know that. Even if they did, it wouldn’t make any difference.” The stranger cleared his throat absently. “It’s what you do when someone comes for you. You bite.”
Silva chewed and swallowed. “You seem to have a grasp of the animal.”
The stranger chewed, regarding them in the gloom. “Is that what brings you here?” he asked finally. “Did you wander too near a den?”
“Could be,” Carpenter murmured, looking up as something rustled in the dark. The stranger looked as well, but it was just the wind and the branches. “And you?”
The stranger finished his piece of hardtack.
“Maybe,” he said after a moment, and as he folded the paper packet back over it, Carpenter saw that he was missing fingers from his right hand. He put the hardtack back in his bag and pulled the strings to close it tightly. “But I gave them cause. It’s like you said. I’ve done wrong.”
“What did you do?”
“What I thought was right,” the stranger replied with a sigh, rising to his feet. He picked up his pack and put his rifle over his shoulder. “At the time. I’ll go on now. It’s for the best if you don’t meet my friends.”
“Nor you ours,” Silva told him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A shared bite with a benign stranger was a reassurance, but it wasn’t a hot meal or a soft bed. The sun rose on Carpenter in such a state that he did not so much rise from his bed of pine needles, some five miles from the place where they had met the stranger, as drag himself from it.
The first creek they found was too meager to offer any fish, even if they had had the means to catch them, but the cool water was welcome. Bathing was all well and good, but what they really needed was a laundry. A discovery of a small supply of wild berries at midmorning was a windfall, but it wasn’t enough. Carpenter hadn’t been the most gregarious man to begin with, and he was well aware of the effect that hunger had on his disposition. It was going to be a curmudgeonly sort of day.
A few spiteful stones gave way, and he might have taken the sort of tumble that could leave a man with broken bones or worse, but Silva caught his arm.
“Did you use that language with your wife?” the younger man asked dryly, trying and failing to hide what an exertion it was to help lift a man of Carpenter’s size.
Carpenter stopped swearing, which was good, because he was thoroughly winded. He groaned and sagged against a tree, then slid down to sit, wiping his brow. He took several breaths, peering up at the sun, which despite all these enormous trees still found ways to slip through and blind him painfully, joining the sweat stinging his gritty eyes. He wished he had his hat, which had been taken by the wind when they tried to flee the camp.
“You might make better time without me,” he said, leaning back.
“That is a miraculous talent you have, Mr. Carpenter.”
“Oh?”
“You saved my life.” Silva turned his back on him and looked back down the hill they’d climbed. He’d been planning to go on, but instead he just looked over his shoulder and gestured vaguely at Carpenter. “This is what it’s earned you. Half starved, and more than half done in, by the look of us. No prospect of anything good, certainly.”
Even if he’d wanted to, Carpenter had a feeling that if he opened his mouth, the best he could do at the moment was wheeze.
“I haven’t even thanked you. And I won’t,” Silva added. “Of course. You’re a busybody.”
“Is that my talent?” Carpenter managed at last.
“No, your talent is all that and no temper.” Silva snorted. “It’s really something, Mr. Carpenter.”
“Oh, I’d have one,” Carpenter replied grumpily, examining the calluses on his palms, “if I thought there was any use in it.”
“Ther
e is a use. You feel better.”
“How do you feel?”
“I’m angry.”
“Does it help?”
Silva just walked over and put his hand out. Carpenter took it and let the younger man pull him up. Silva started to climb again, but Carpenter didn’t.
“Can you walk?” Silva asked, looking back.
“We won’t last without provisions,” Carpenter told him. It was nothing Silva didn’t already know, but one of them had to say it. They could stay alive out here a good while, but neither was really any good at fielding this country. That was obvious. They wouldn’t starve or die of thirst, but they would be hungry, irritable, and ultimately careless. One of them would trip, or something else would happen. Things were already bad.
A sprained ankle or a cracked rib would bring certain finality to the matter. Going on like this could only end one way. If Silva knew it, he was leaning all his weight on the knowledge, pushing down with both hands, trying to keep it out of sight. The detail that they had no ultimate destination was secondary, because even if they had one . . .
Carpenter shook his head. “It ain’t smart,” he said honestly.
Silva, determined to be Silva, just put his hands on his hips. “When, Mr. Carpenter, have you known me to be smart? Or anything even resembling such a thing?”
It was a good point; they’d met when Silva had quite deliberately been returning to a town full of influential men who meant to kill him. He’d been traveling alone and evidently ready to put his faith in . . . what, exactly? In the letter that had been in his pocket? In the decency of men? In the hollow hope that ignoring a problem would make it go away? In that airy, theoretical notion that in a civilized world, men must behave in a civilized manner?
None of that was real, but apparently he’d believed in it just the same.
There was a word for that, but “smart” wasn’t it.
“You are, though. And you know better,” Carpenter told him frankly. There wasn’t time for Silva’s ego. “Is there anyone you can trust?”
“No more than I trust that fellow we met last night.”
“He didn’t stay but a minute. For a moment I thought I’d dreamed that.”
“For that, you’d have to sleep.”
“And you snore so loudly that no one could.”
“The hunger’s given you leave of your senses. You are hearing things, Mr. Carpenter.”
“My senses are sharp, Mr. Silva. Particularly my sense for a man who doesn’t want to answer a question.”
Silva folded his arms and leaned against a tree, brushing a fly off his shoulder. “I had one friend in Antelope Valley, or one man that I would have liked to call such.”
“Your business partner?”
Silva nodded, scowling. “Mr. Karr.”
“You think Hale bought him?”
“I hope so. The alternative would be that he threatened him.” Silva took a deep breath. “That would be a low thing to do. Mr. Karr has a wife and children, and I hold nothing against him for doing what was best for them. To cross Hale would be to sabotage his own interests, I know that. I know it,” he repeated, though Carpenter hadn’t said anything. It sounded as though the younger man had given this a fair amount of thought. Well, however betrayed he felt by this Mr. Karr, he seemed determined to be decent about it. That was admirable, at least.
“Does he have horses?” Carpenter asked.
“He does.”
“Will he give them to us?”
“He owes me that much.”
“But will he give them to us?”
“I pity him if he doesn’t,” Silva said, face bleak.
“Then we’d best call on him.” That was enough self-indulgence; Carpenter got raggedly to his aching feet and took Silva’s hand to clamber over the rocks. “Where is his property?”
“Northeast of the town proper.”
That was convenient; they could pay him a visit without going either too far out of their way or too near to Antelope Valley.
“Turn us a touch south, then.” Carpenter pointed.
“Oh, at once, Captain Carpenter.”
“I was never an officer.”
“I am surprised to hear that.”
“Good Lord, why? I’m good at a lot of things, Silva. War ain’t one of them.”
Their new course mercifully gave them a few miles on ground that was nearly flat, but then it was back to seeking a pass on the slopes. They could have stopped and taken the time to gather some plants suitable to crafting snares or fishing lines with, but a little hunger felt like an appropriate price to pay for reaching their destination more quickly. Mr. Karr would have something to eat that they would not have to catch or snare, and he would part with it if he knew what was good for him. It was the least he could do for abandoning his partner, however difficult it might have been to blame him for doing so.
“Perhaps,” Silva said, slightly short of breath as they picked their way through a particularly dense copse of trees, “Mr. Karr will see fit also to lend me a handful of cartridges. For my safe travels.”
“You want to dig it up, then.” Carpenter meant what Silva had buried along the trail.
“I must.”
“He’ll have people looking for it,” Carpenter pointed out.
“Of that, I have no doubt.” Silva slapped a buzzing insect and looked back. “And with enough time, they will find it.”
He was right, but it was still a risk. If they could get some horses and ride away now, it was a safe bet that Hale would never catch up. His resources were limited; he didn’t have so many men at his disposal, and did he even have money to pay them with? His desperation in the play he was making for Silva’s factory suggested that he didn’t.
Still, if Silva allowed his patent to fall into Hale’s hands, that was trouble. Even if Silva could find the means to get the matter to a courtroom, was there even the slightest chance that a white judge would side with a Mexican over Hale? Small details like facts would be unlikely to get between Hale and his goal.
Silva just wanted the same thing he had from the very beginning: to keep what was his.
“All right,” Carpenter said without much enthusiasm, climbing gamely after him.
“I don’t need your blessing,” Silva said, glancing over his shoulder. Then he stopped and looked back properly. “But I do appreciate it.”
Carpenter would have liked to tell him that he was very welcome. That would have been the polite thing to do, and Silva was nothing if not polite.
But he wasn’t very observant.
Not that Carpenter intended to be critical of that; he wasn’t much better himself.
“I see that squint on you, Bill,” Yates said. “I didn’t take you for a blind man.”
Carpenter sighed. Yates wasn’t even hiding; he was right there in front of them, off to the right, leaning against a tree. And now that Carpenter was awake, there was someone else with him, a younger man he didn’t recognize.
Yates wasn’t aiming the rifle in his hands because he could see that he didn’t need to. Time hadn’t changed the look of him much, though there was a touch of gray in his short beard. It appeared he still liked to do and say everything as though there were all the time in the world.
The boy wasn’t quite as relaxed. His pistol was in his hand, and there was a sheen of sweat on him that had nothing to do with the heavy pack he was carrying.
Carpenter had nothing to blame but his own inattention, though it was unlikely there was much that could’ve prevented this. Even at his best, he didn’t have a prayer of evading Yates in the wilderness. Yates knew what he was doing, which made it all the stranger.
“Did you take that shot when we were in the river?” Carpenter asked, unable to help himself.
The other man twitched, but smiled wryly. “I only wanted
to put it in your wing,” he said, looking openly disgruntled. “Couldn’t help but try. I thought I could make this a shorter trip, and you wouldn’t mind. You’ve had worse, Bill.”
“You used to have a bit more compassion,” Carpenter said dryly. “That, and I never knew you to miss.”
“Are your eyes as good as they used to be, Bill?”
“Yates, I’m lucky when someone writes big enough for me to read.”
“Then you know just how it is.”
“But you shot at me anyway,” Carpenter accused. “You might have killed me.”
“Sometimes greed gets the best of us, Bill. In my defense, it has been a long time since I’ve had to make a shot that counted for anything,” he added.
“Duly noted.”
“I do apologize,” Silva cut in, giving Carpenter a look. “Is there something we can help you gentlemen with?” He brought an impressive amount of dignity to the words, given how dirty and disheveled the two of them were.
Yates didn’t look happy to be there, and that wasn’t quite right. He was Carpenter’s age: too old to be tromping around the wilderness, and certainly chasing an old friend couldn’t have been his preferred occupation. Yet he ought to have been able to find something in it, some bleak humor. He and Carpenter had always had that in common.
There was none. Yates wanted to look like his usual self, but there was nothing real about it. Even if he still always had a joke ready and a smile on, this wasn’t the same man.
“You don’t look so good, Silva.” There wasn’t any ill will in the words. They were true; there was no arguing with that. “Are you through running?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Please, Bill.” Yates gave him a patient look, and Carpenter sighed.
He turned his wrists so that his palms faced inward, and Yates wrapped the rope around them to bind his hands tightly. It had been worth a try; if they’d tied his hands with them held horizontally, Carpenter would have had enough slack left to get free.
But Yates knew that trick, and he was still sharp enough to look for it.