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Havel dropped his rabbit stick and scooped up the fallen machete, starting towards the last of the bandits. Eric followed, picking up a few more baseball-weight rocks; behind him the two women were getting the packhorses under control, despite the handcuffs, which argued for considerable skill.
Bob looked at the approaching men with hatred that radiated from him like heat from a banked fire, then turned and followed his companions. Havel let out a long breath and shook his head, fighting down a wave of nausea and light-headedness. It had been a long time since he'd fought in a kill-or-be-killed situation, but it was just as unpleasant as he remembered.
Eric dropped his rocks. "Damn," he said. "I'm better than that with a baseball-I should have hit that fat fuck in the teeth or at least broken his collarbone."
"Not bad for your first real fight," Havel said, punching him in the shoulder. "Which it was, right?"
Eric gri
Havel nodded. "Only I don't think they had education in mind."
He turned to the women. "Ma'am," he said as the older of the two began to speak. "We need your help if we're going to rescue… your husband?"
She nodded; a woman of about forty, full-figured and with boldly handsome mestizo-Hispanic features, wearing riding jeans with a belt of silver medallions and a blousy white shirt. The teenager nodded too; she was darker, with a mass of frizzy hair, and would be quite pretty when she wasn't bloodied and terrified.
"Will, my husband. I'm Angelica Hutton, and this is our daughter, Lua
"Mike Havel. Eric Larsson," Havel said shortly; there wasn't much time for social niceties.
"What do you need?" Angelica Hutton said steadily.
"Tools, if you've got them; can't do anything until we bust you loose of those cuffs. And knives-one of them should be the biggest you've got."
There were tools; a jumble in one of the pa
As he worked, the woman spoke. He caught most of it: "… just attacked us, they came down the road on bikes to where our trucks stopped; we'd been pasturing the horses and we were about to head out ourselves, we hadn't seen anyone else and they just attacked us. Will's gun didn't work, and the pistol… They took our horses and-"
"Any more of them?" Havel asked.
"Not from what they said. I think they'd been in a fight, and they were afraid some Indians were chasing them. They just took what they could grab and made us saddle up the horses and… they were going to… "
The packsaddles bore her account out, heaped high and packed badly, with a melange of goods and food and gear thrown on higgledy-piggledy. It was probably a very good thing for Angelica Hutton and her daughter that the Aryan Trio had been pressed for time.
Better keep them ru
"You can ride?" he said.
"Since I was six. We always had horses."
"Good. Are these saddle-broke?"
"Yes," Angelica said. "We were taking them to an outfitter in Lewiston, and the stallion, they didn't get that one. My husband and I raise and train horses. These two are the slowest of the bunch, though."
Havel nodded crisply: "Look, Mrs. Hutton, get these packsaddles off, and hide your goods up there in that thicket, behind the big rock-you can get up along the side with a little work. I'd advise you to keep extremely quiet and wait. I don't have time to argue. We'll be back when we've done what has to be done, but it could be a couple of days or longer. Are those lashings rawhide?"
They were thin and soft-surfaced.
"Wet them down for me as well, would you please? Put them in water, do that first. And get me those knives."
"Thank you, and los santos go with you," the woman said; she and her daughter got to work with the quick competence of people who'd handled horses and their tack all their lives.
Havel worked as well. He'd spotted suitable red cedar saplings downslope to the north and not far from the edge of the road; the wood wasn't what he'd have chosen with more time, but it worked easily, and he'd been thinking hard about their brush with the three bandits. A few strokes of the machete at their bases felled both the young trees. After trimming the first he had a straight pole five feet long and another a little taller than he was.
A single swift hard chop split the smaller end of the first down the middle, leaving a cleft twelve inches long, and he repeated the process for the second, longer one. Then he used the hammer and prybar to knock the wooden handle off the machete, and punch out the two rivets; the tang was solid except for those holes, a simple continuation of the blade. He forced it into the cleft of the shorter pole, trimming with his knife and waggling it carefully to seat it and then hammering in two horseshoe nails from a bag in the packsaddles.
Angelica brought him the rawhide thongs, which had at least been thoroughly wetted down.
"Wish there was more time to soak these," he said absently.
Eric came up and helped hold the shaft while he bound the cleft with a double layer of leather cord, using the ends of the nails as tie-points and pulling the wet leather as tightly as he could with both hands and bracing foot. Then he turned the ends of the nails down with a few swift hammer-blows; there was no wobble when he shook the improvised weapon, and in a while the drying leather would hold it on like iron. The result was a shaft about the thickness of a shovel handle, with two feet of chopping steel fixed on the end coming to just over eye level on the younger Larsson.
"Looks like a naginata," Eric said.
"That's the idea," Havel said. "I was stationed in Okinawa for a while back in 'eighty-nine. You ever trained with one?"
"Just a few times, and watching. Hate to have to use one and try to ride a horse, though."
"Better than nothing, and we'll get down to fight. These'll give us enough reach to get at a man on horseback; I ride a lot better than those clowns, and I wouldn't care to try and fight from the saddle without a lot of practice."
While he spoke he sorted through the knives; he knocked the handle off a good-sized pointed kitchen blade, and bound it into the second shaft as he had the machete. Now he had a spear as well, about seven feet long in all.
By the time the weapons were ready the horses were as well; they both had bags of food thrown across their withers.
Eric gave him a boost to mount, then sprang on with rather more agility himself; Havel was a good practical horseman, and he'd enjoyed wilderness trips in the saddle, but he hadn't grown up in a family who had a stable at a country property.
"Wait, and keep out of sight," Havel said to the two women. They ought to be OK. Plenty of food for a week or two. "If we're not back in seven days… well, do what you think best."
"God go with you," Angelica said, crossing herself.
They both pressed their thighs to their mounts and the well-trained animals moved, taking the steep section of the trail that joined Highway 12.
Havel looked up. It was about an hour to the early spring sunset; the sky was already darkening in the east, and the temperature was dropping-it might go below freezing in the dark, and they probably wouldn't dare light a fire, but the horses should help keep them warm.
"We've got problems," he said to Eric, drawing level with him. The trail was broad enough for that, and soft enough that he could read the tracks fairly easily: one horse galloping first, and then three more strung out after it. Call it twenty miles an hour over this terrain, but they can't keep that up for long, even though these horses are pretty fresh and well-fed.