The Last Hard Men

Menendez charged, shooting with one hand, holding the other revolver in reserve. He was ru

Burgade fired.

The bullet rocked Menendez, as a .45 would, no matter where it hit. Menendez skidded to his knees. A red spot showed up, high on the front of his shirt.

Burgade thumbed another cartridge into the revolver and took deliberate aim. Menendez’s legs were scrabbling for toeholds, he was trying to swim toward cover but his elbows and boots kept slipping. Burgade finished him with a slow-aimed bullet.

He went back down to get his rifle. Untied the horse and led it up through the trees to where Menendez lay dead. He loaded both Menendez’s revolvers and rammed them into his waistband, and stood a moment getting his breath.

Menendez’s body had cleared itself in the moment of death. There was the stink of human excrement. The straw hat had rolled away a few yards. Burgade picked it up, removed his own hat, and put the straw hat on. He hung his black hat over the saddle horn, and tied the horse up. Then he bent down and tried to pick up the corpse.

Menendez wasn’t very big. But the wiry little body was too much for him. The old muscles refused to lift it. Burgade got it propped up, seated, against a tree, but that wasn’t enough. He went over to the horse and checked out the saddle, but he’d known full well what was on it, and there was no rope. With a rope he might have hauled the body up by slinging the end of the rope over a tree limb and using his own weight.

He sat down to study it out. His mind was slow and vague; there was a red wash of fatigue over his eyes. His body needed nourishment and sleep.

He sat with his mouth slack, breathing with slow lifts and falls of his shoulders. He was like that when he heard the slow cautious clop of hoofs coming up from below.

He got the rifle and walked down through the trees and waited. It might be Hal, it might be a Navajo, it might be just about anybody; it wasn’t Provo or any of Provo’s people, so he was not determined to shoot at first glimpse, but he kept the rifle aimed anyway, on the spot where the approaching horse would appear in the trees below.

It was Hal.

“I heard the shooting. Are you all right?”

“I haven’t been shot, if that’s what you mean.”

“You weren’t up at the creek so I came back. I saw the tracks coming up this way.”

“Lucky you didn’t ride into an ambush.”

“What was that shooting, then?”

“Menendez,” Burgade said. He motioned to Hal to dismount. “Come on—back this way, they’ve got the clearing under a gun.”

He walked slowly up through the pines. It was an effort just talking to Hal: he spoke in short bursts, his breath coming thin and fast. “There’s only two of them left now. Provo and the kid. Up there with Susan.”

Hal stared at him. “What happened to the rest of them?”

“Dead.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Hal said in awe. He caught sight of Menendez; stopped and swallowed.

Burgade said, “Help me get him on his horse.”

“Put my hat on him,” Burgade said.

Hal had to get up on his own horse to reach Menendez’s head. Menendez sat slumped on the saddle, hands tied onto the horn by the ends of the reins.

Burgade pointed along the slope. “Lead his horse over there with you. Wait on the edge of the trees, don’t show yourself. Take a post behind a good big tree and don’t stick anything out except one eye and your rifle. Give me fifteen minutes to get up there and then whip this horse up the trail. And then start shooting.”

“Shooting? At what?”

“The rocks below the summit. Don’t aim higher, you might hit Provo but then again you might hit Susan with a ricochet. Unless you see a perfect target don’t try. Just make noise. It’ll rattle them and the noise will help cover my approach. Have you got plenty of ammunition?”

“In my saddlebags.”

“Get it. When you get over there, take off your hat and fill it with loose ammunition and keep it on the ground beside you where you can get at it fast. Keep a steady volley of fire going—use up everything you’ve got until you get down to the last ten or twelve cartridges. You’ll want to save those, you may need them if they cut me down. You understand it all?”

“I ought to be the one to go up there. You’re in bad shape.”

“I know the drill—you don’t. It comes down to that.”

Hal brooded. “Christ.”

Burgade turned and got his rifle. “Better make it twenty minutes,” he said bleakly. “That’s a stiff climb for old bones.”

He had to go through shoulder-high scrub trees; he went on his belly, and halfway to the top he stopped to study the rim. It was a long razorback parapet. Probably not more than a few yards wide at the top, with the cliff dropping away on the far side. There were big boulders scattered around, smoothed by the wind. Only one way to get up there from here without exposing himself to a withering fire from the rim—go along to the left and circle up through the field of boulders. It would be taking a chance they weren’t waiting there, rather than on top, but he had a feeling they were all the way up on the summit because it was the only place from which they could see down their own backtrail and shoot at pursuers.

By now they would be getting rattled because Menendez hadn’t showed up. They were somewhere along that hundred feet of rimrock, probably looking down the trail, but from here the rocks were in the way, he couldn’t see anyone. He took a deep breath and moved forward again; there wasn’t much time.

In the boulders a hundred feet below the top, he set the rifle down soundlessly and left it there. From here on he’d be within handgun range and a rifle would be unwieldly. He palmed the double-action in his right hand and made his way forward slowly through the boulders, feeling the dig of Menendez’s two six-guns in his waistband. The sun blasted down through the thin afternoon air, striking painful reflections off the rocks. He slipped forward along the high wall of a rock and paused while still behind it, in its thin stripe of shadow. The rim was only sixty or seventy feet above him, up a forty-degree pitch littered with house-size rocks. The passages between them were big enough for locomotives to get through, but there was no way to know what was on the far side without showing himself. He waited, sucking breath silently into his chest with his mouth wide open and gulping.

He heard the sudden rataplan of hoofbeats and a startled voice, not Provo’s, shouting:

“Jesus, that looks like Burgade!”

And there was a quick succession of reports, crisp in the thin air. Burgade was already moving. He heard Hal’s rifle open up from down below. Bullets cranged and whined off the rocks. He climbed as fast as his halting legs would move him, scrambling through the boulders—up through a notch, onto the redrock rim—and he saw Susan immediately, with Shelby right beside her, shooting downhill at Hal’s rifle smoke.

The hard snout of a gunbarrel rammed into Burgade’s back.

He froze.

Provo’s voice, breathing down his neck, said with savage satisfaction. “You’re holding a bust hand, Sam. You’re all through now. Drop the iron.”

Fighting reflexes were not instincts. They were the product of training.

Instinct—self-preservation—dictated obeisance. Provo had a gun in his back. Provo didn’t intend killing him on the spot; if he’d meant to do that he’d have fired already, without giving warning. No. Provo wanted him to suffer. To die slowly and know what was happening to him.

Shelby had turned his gun toward Susan, not to kill her but to add weight to Provo’s threat.

Burgade’s gun was already aimed at Shelby. In the split instant of time when Provo quit talking—when Provo was convinced he had his man cold—Burgade fired.

It cost no time to shoot the man he was already aiming at. His bullet hit Shelby dead-center.