Relentless

At the head of the column the Major looked back. “Come on—come on. Keep it closed up.”

“Just looking to see if they’re still following us.”

“Of course they are. What difference does it make? Three yokel cops with their noses to the ground. Come on, Captain.”

They moved on. The woman on the sorrel gave Walker a brief glance and then turned her face away; her heavy rope of hair swung forward and masked her.

The storm was starting to move. He could feel it, it made him hunch his neck into the collar of his coat; he could see it, higher mountain peaks being absorbed into its scudding blackness as he watched. The wind began to whip little flurries of powder snow off the surface of the ground. Walker’s blue could feel it too: he had to hold in the nervous prancing horse.

All the vibrations were bad, he thought. When you found yourself absurdly and unexpectedly on horseback in a stormy wilderness you began to think in simplistic truisms and it occurred to him for the first time that he was one of the Bad Guys. He hadn’t thought badly of himself until that moment back at the farm when Baraclough had stayed behind, inside the house with the doomed deputy, and Walker knowing what was going on had not lifted a finger to stop it. That was the point at which it had all crumpled. Up till then, even though they were things he was doing himself, they seemed more like things that had been happening to him—the preparations, the caper, the escape—as if he had been in an audience watching himself, an actor in a movie, acting out events that had no reality. But now it was real enough and the reality was pain. They were the real Bad Guys and in the end the Bad Guys always got killed by the Good Guys. In these chilly mountains he convinced himself that he was about to die.

Once you started thinking about your own death it was hard to stop thinking about it. He kept seeing himself on a mountain rock somewhere with the blood draining out of him, going cold and without life.

The wind dropped. They crossed a bare slope and penetrated the pine forest. The big trees shut out a great deal of light. The wind died altogether; the horse laid its ears back along its head and hoofs crunched softly in the silent pine needles. Goosebumps ran along Walker’s arms; the flesh of his chest quivered. Jingle of bit chains, squeak of saddle leather—the gray air hung cold and motionless.

Back in these mountains it felt as if civilization was a thousand miles and a thousand years away. The heaped-up summits loomed vast above them, timber and boulders and loose shale slides. They climbed the side of a long S-curving ridge and stopped briefly while the Major got out the topographical map and held it up with both arms wide, glancing up from it at intervals to check his bearings. The temperature was dropping sharply all the time now: the horses’ breath had begun to steam. The air was getting thicker, more gray, and it was getting noticeably more difficult to make out the outlines of the peaks against the sky. But the still silence persisted.

The Major checked his pocket compass and snapped it shut and turned around to look them over. Eight horses, six riders. The Major’s heavy beard stubble had grown perceptibly overnight.

Baraclough finished field-stripping the stub of his menthol cigarette and put the butt filter in his pocket, not for neatness but for security.

Eddie Burt’s thick waxy face was upturned as if to pray: Burt was watching the sky.

Jack Hanratty’s pitted face was averted, pointed meaninglessly toward the trees to the left: Hanratty wanted to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes for fear of what he would find there.

The Major said, “Captain, let’s have the clothesline.”

Walker dismounted, holding the blue by the reins, walked back to the pack animals and hunted for the coil of nylon line. He had forgotten where he’d put it and it took a while to find it.

The Major said, “Run the line through the bridle bits.”

“All of them?”

“All eight horses.”

“What for?”

“In a little while you won’t be able to see the horse in front of you, Captain.”

Walker’s eyes jerked toward the sky. Most of it was a seething obscurity.

The Major said, “Now we’ll have a little lecture in survival. Pay attention. You’ve all been up for twenty-four hours and you’re tired. That’s too bad. Fall asleep in this weather and you’re dead. Think about that and remember it. When you feel yourself starting to fall asleep, or when you begin to feel a fu

Walker said, “If we’re traveling that blind how will you know where you’re going?” He was threading the line through Mrs. Lansford’s bridle and he caught the edge of the woman’s bleak glance before it whipped away.

“Dead reckoning,” the Major said. “I’ve got a compass.”

Eddie Burt said, “Don’t fret it none. The Major’s never got lost in his life.”

Walker ran the nylon through Baraclough’s bridle and handed the free end up to the Major, who threaded it through his bridle bit and ran a double hitch around his saddle horn; he had about a dozen feet of slack left over and he let most of it go, coiling it and hanging the coil over his saddle horn, tying the butt end through the belt-loops of his trousers and knotting it around his hips. It was a three-eighths-inch nylon clothesline from the Lansford barn and it probably would test out at five hundred pounds or more.

Walker didn’t go back to his horse just yet. He stood beside the Major’s horse and tried to sound calm. “I wouldn’t mind knowing what our plans are, Major.”

Eddie Burt snapped at him from the rear of the line: “The Major’s kept you alive this far.”

“Nobody said he hasn’t.” But Walker kept his eyes on the Major, as stubbornly as he could.

“You have a right to know.” Major Hargit’s hatbrim lifted: he had everyone’s attention. “We’ll keep moving as long as we can, and then we’ll keep moving a while longer. The map shows a ranger station on that peak up there—a fire-lookout tower. I’d like to get at least that far but if it becomes impossible we’ll just have to rig shelter and wait it out. At least the pursuit won’t be gaining on us—they’ll be stalled in their tracks. If those are ordinary hick cops back there they won’t have enough woodcraft among the three of them to build a Boy Scout fire—maybe they’ll die out there. Maybe they won’t. Whatever they do they’ll be too busy staying alive to worry about catching us for a while.”

Walker’s mouth twisted.

“As soon as this lifts,” the Major went on, “we’ll cross the range. The storm will have covered our tracks and if the weather clears enough to permit aerial search sweeps they won’t see us as long as we’ve got the sense to stay under the trees. By the way forget those trucks we saw back there. That’s a trap.

“Once we’ve crossed into Utah we’ve got four or five roads to choose from. There’ll be roadblocks. We’ll raid one of them, confiscate their patrol cars, make our way into one of the villages over there. We’ll have plenty of opportunities to mail the bank money to ourselves in a series of small first-class packages, after which we’ll separate and find our way individually to Reno. The police are looking for five men and several hundred pounds of loot—if we travel separately without large quantities of cash we ought to be able to survive a few stop-and-search checkpoints. Bear in mind that the secret of a successful escape operation is not to hide but to blend into your surroundings. We’ll become ranch workers, itinerant mechanics, café dishwashers for a few days if we have to—by the time we get down there we’ll look disheveled enough.