The Last Hard Men

The intruder halted for a while and almost went around behind the wire ring. Probably scouting in a crisscross pattern—but Burgade didn’t want him to circle away. He began to sweat in the cool darkness. The revolver stirred in his fist.

Hal stiffened. Burgade touched his shoulder to keep him quiet. Then he had a piece of luck. One of the horses stamped its hoof to get rid of an insect.

The soft thud echoed through the forest. The intruder, wherever he was, froze for several minutes. There wasn’t a sound. Burgade could imagine him, turning his face slowly to try to pick up tiny sounds on the flats of his eardrums; keening the night, staring into the darkness as if to burn it away with his gaze.

It was a long time before the intruder moved. Then the faint sounds of his travel crossed from right to left. The man was coming in toward the horses. Burgade lifted the revolver higher in his fist and settled his elbow against his knee.

He still couldn’t see the man. He heard him move in from that northerly quadrant, moving a few yards at a time and stopping to listen again. A stray breeze roughed up the pine needles briefly; it must have carried man-smell to the horses, for one of them whickered tentatively, a very quiet throaty sound in the night. The intruder recognized the sound and kept moving forward. He couldn’t be more than a few yards from the tripwire but Burgade couldn’t see a thing over there. Several trees were in the way. The tripwire itself was in his line of sight, but he didn’t know whether he was going to be able to see the man that far away even if he did step into the view-line: it was fifty feet away and the darkness was intense.

He could hear the taut dry constrictions of Hal’s breathing. The intruder seemed to have halted behind the trees just outside the tripwire. Within fifteen or twenty feet of the horses. The man must be able to see the blanket-wrapped dummies from there, the saddles and gear lying about. He would suspect the dummies for what they were. But his mission was to alert Burgade, not to evade him. The man had to move.

But he didn’t. A drop of sweat formed on Burgade’s forehead, ran down his nose, and dripped onto the back of his left hand. Had the intruder spotted the tripwire? Burgade’s grip on the .45 tightened. He suppressed the sudden urgent need to reach around and scratch the small of his back.

Then the intruder moved, crossing fast from pine to pine—Burgade saw his outline quite plainly, and then, between the trees, the tripwire caught the man just above the ankles and spilled him.

The man fell toward the ground with quite a bit of noise, grabbing at branches to stop his fall. Burgade ran forward five paces, the noise of his own movement covered by the intruder’s tumble, and stopped with a clear view of the man.

“I’ve got a gun aimed at you, friend. Don’t move a whisker.”

The intruder hesitated, both elbows on the ground; but it was all right. He’d made his decision when he hadn’t started shooting at Burgade’s first word.

Burgade moved slowly forward, holding the revolver balanced on the man. “Come on, Hal.”

The intruder was an amorphous shape in the poor light. But any movement would draw Burgade’s fire, and the man seemed to realize that. He didn’t stir.

Burgade stopped six feet from him. He handed the torch to Hal and got the matchstick out of his mouth. “Stay behind me. Light that and let’s have a look at him.”

The match exploded into light. By that illumination Burgade took one step forward and kicked the rifle away from the intruder’s black fist. He reached down and plucked the revolver from the belt holster. Hal had the torch lighted now. The intruder showed his alarm: wild white rings showed around the pupils of his eyes.

“George Weed,” Burgade said. “Stand up and walk over by the blankets.”

Weed got to his feet, surly and sullen. He didn’t talk. He went into the clearing. The buttstock of Hal’s rifle protruded from its saddle boot and Burgade saw Weed eyeing it. “Go ahead. Pick it up and try for me.”

Weed shook his head. “You’ve unloaded it.”

“Sure.”

“So you wouldn’t of shot me. You was bluffing. You wouldn’t of done it.”

“But you would have.”

“You bastard, Burgade. You motherfuckin’ bastard.” Weed turned around and pulled the crotch of his Levi’s down and said, “All right, hell, you got me, now what you going to do with me?”

“Tie you up,” Burgade said. “Hold my gun on him, Hal. If he tries anything, shoot him.”

“Yes, sir.” Hal’s voice was without tone. Burgade sat Weed down on the ground and tied his hands together behind his back with a rawhide piggin’ string. He tied the ankles together and used Weed’s own belt to hook the ankles and wrists together so that Weed couldn’t straighten out. Burgade kept one eye closed during the entire business and when he had tested the knots and found them secure, he stood up, still with his eye shut, and held his hand out to the side, and spoke to Hal behind him: “Now hand me back my gun and go douse that torch in the stream.”

The torch moved away from his back, throwing his bobbing shadow longer along the ground and then fading back among the trees. When he heard it sizzle in the water, he opened the eye he had kept closed. It had not been blinded by the light and now, with the one eye, he could see Weed well enough. He slid the revolver into leather and walked back across the tripwire to the spot where he had waited in ambush; picked up his rifle and brought it back into camp. Hal had come back from the creek, still carrying the soaked torch for some reason—Burgade said dryly, “You can throw that away now.”

Weed said, “What you expect to get out of this, anyway?”

“You were supposed to be a stalking horse, George. You were supposed to let me spot you and then you were supposed to lead me back into Provo’s ambush. Fine. Now you’re going to tell me where that is.”

“Stick it up your ass, Burgade. You don’t get nothing out of me. Nothing, motherfucker, nothing.”

Burgade ran his hands quickly over the man’s pockets. Nothing in them but odds and ends. But in Weed’s boot he found a sheath knife. He slipped it out and tested its blade with his thumb. It was a squat heavy knife, made for animal-ski

Weed’s head rocked back against the ground. Burgade heard Hal gasp.

A few tiny raindrops came down through the trees. Burgade felt one strike the back of his hand. His knuckles began to hurt. “I can beat on you for a while, George, until my hands get tired. And then I can start cutting you up with this rusty knife of yours. I don’t mind if you bleed to death.”

He heard Hal’s taut breathing, full of disapproval, but he didn’t look around. He only said, in the same calm voice, “Now, you know Provo doesn’t give a damn about you, George. He picked you to come out here because he figured you were the most expendable of all of them. When you don’t come back he’ll know I’ve got you. But it won’t worry him. He won’t do anything about it. You don’t owe him anything, George. And you may as well forget about that buried gold of his, because you’ve got no chance to get at it now. Either I slice you up and leave you here to bleed to death, or you tell me what I want to know, and I’ll leave you tied up until I’ve done my business here and then we’ll take you back to the law. That’s your choice.”

“Choice between you killing me and the law hanging me? Hell, Burgade, you got to do better’n that.”

“Maybe if you tell me what I want to know, Provo’ll kill me. Then all you’ve got to worry about is getting yourself untied. You might get away clear.”

Weed showed a double row of white teeth. “Now, there’s a thought, ain’t it?”