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“Just so,” Burgade said stonily. “But you understand it hasn’t been an easy memory to live with, regardless of who was to blame.”
The sun threw a last burst of light along the cloudy horizon. He saw one pale star. They kept ru
“Yes, sir. We could both use some sleep.”
“We’ll see. We don’t want to give them too much of a lead. But it’s just as dark where they are as it is here, and the country’s rougher up that way. They’ve probably been forced to stop too. Anyhow we can get a little rest until the clouds move on.”
“You don’t think it’s going to rain, do you? That would wash out their tracks.”
“It won’t rain tonight,” Burgade said, with only a glance at the clouds.
They loosened the cinches and hobbled the horses. Hal broke out provisions and they ate a cold meal; there was no risking a fire. Pemmican and hardrock biscuits, ti
Staring at the black sky, he carefully opened small gates to let Susan’s haunting image flow into his mind. In a while her face hovered before him and he could hear her singing the way she did sometimes in the kitchen, in her small true voice.
He wondered if Hal’s thoughts were like his own. Hal was a good boy. Boy, he thought. Hal was thirty-three or thirty-four, a successful mining engineer—no boy. He handled himself well and had not complained of the endless hours of rough riding. If Hal had a basic weakness, Burgade thought, it was not cowardice or squeamishness. But Hal tended to be too impetuous. He had been an athlete in his school years; he was handsome and self-confident and a lot of things had come easily to him. There was a chance his very abilities would be his downfall. His athletic coordination was great, like his stamina—but if he’d been a little less agile, a little more accident-prone, he’d have taken his knocks by now, learned his lesson, learned how to be more cautious.
Burgade’s mind drifted. His exhaustion was physical, emotional, mental, all compounded by tense strain carried to the taut limits of tolerance. Sleep moved toward him, silent and black.
He awoke fuzzily. He was lying on his side. He did not stir; he kept his eyes shut and his breathing deep and even. Someone was behind him.
He heard a foot crunch gravel and the tentative clearing of a throat, and he made a face and rolled over. “Next time you come up behind a man,” he said, “a
Hal said, “I was deciding whether to wake you up. The clouds have cleared off.”
“Time’s it?”
“About two, by my watch.”
Burgade looked around. Dust around the horned moon was a luminous ring. The light was enough to see by. “I slept six hours,” he said. “Too long. They’ve got another hour or two on us now.”
“From what you say,” Hal observed, “I expect they’ll wait for us to catch up when they get to wherever it is they’re going.”
Burgade grunted. He looked past Hal and saw the two horses standing thirty or forty feet away, saddled and ready. Hal had packed everything up. It a
The sleep hadn’t revived him. He felt logy and weak. He stumbled once on his way to the horse. But Hal was considerate enough not to try to help him climb into the saddle.
He found the tracks without much trouble and lifted the gray to a trot. Hal rode alongside in brooding silence for ten or fifteen minutes before he revealed what was eating him. “Sir, I had better know what you’ve got in mind to do.”
“Do?”
“You told the sheriff you were going to try to trade your life for Susan’s.”
“So I did.”
“Is that still your plan?”
“It never has been. I lied to Noel—to get him off my back.”
Hal’s face was turned toward him. Under the hatbrim his expression was invisible. But his voice was slightly choked. “You mean you never intended to offer a trade?”
“You’re thinking if there was a chance in a thousand you could have Susan’s life by offering your own in exchange, you’d do it like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“You’re damn right I would.”
“That’s very fine and noble,” Burgade intoned.
“You seem to disapprove,” Hal said, stiffly.
“Let me tell you something. Zach Provo’s not going to strike any bargains. Why should he, when he’s got a corner on the market?”
“It appears to me, sir, that we’re still obliged to try.”
“Put it this way, Hal. Two enemies face each other with knives. They crouch and circle each other, looking for an opening. One of them is an expert knife-thrower, the other one isn’t. Suppose you’re the expert knife-thrower. What do you do? Throw your knife?”
It puzzled Hal. “I don’t know.”
“No. You don’t throw. Because your enemy’s in a crouch and you can’t be sure of finishing him with one toss. And once you’ve thrown your knife you’re defenseless. So you keep your knife and you fight your enemy on his terms.”
“I’m not sure I follow that, sir.”
“My freedom of action is the only weapon I’ve got. If I turned myself in to Provo as part of some sort of trade, I’d be giving up my only threat against him. You see, he’s not going to kill Susan as long as I’m out here with guns.”
“Then what’s he going to do?”
“He’s going to try to take me alive,” Burgade said in a tired voice. “He’ll want to force me to watch them do … things … to Susan. He wants me to watch her die. And then he’ll find a slow way to kill me. He’ll take his time because it’s going to dawn on him that killing me will leave a great big hole where his hate used to be. He’s going to miss me—he won’t like the idea of ending all the years of hating my guts.”
The tracks curled behind the knee of a steep hill which threw a shadow across them. Burgade had to slow the gray to a walk and lean down to see the ground. The steel horseshoes had left shallow indentations in the hard ground. Twenty miles ahead loomed a mountain range, a dark heavier mass against the broken clouds and stars.
Hal said, “But what can we do, then?”
“Try to get to Provo. Pick him off. The rest of them will probably be willing to let Susan go in return for their own chance to get away.”
“That’s a long shot, isn’t it?”
“It’s the only shot we’ve got.”
“But how can we get close enough to Provo to capture him?”
“I said nothing about capture.”
He heard the quick hiss of Hal’s indrawn breath. “You mean kill him. Shoot him from ambush. Is that it? I’m not sure I could do that, sir.”
“Nobody’s asked you to.”
Hal, not knowing what to say, curbed his tongue. They came out of the hill shadow and followed the prints along the flat toward the distant mountains. Inside Burgade, a hard knot grew, a pain of ugly lust that demanded violence—deeper, stronger than the will to live.