Relentless

Probably they had reached the cabin. If they had they weren’t going anywhere for a while. Here under the cliff he had called a halt and built the shelter.

The woman had stumbled right into their camp for several reasons, but mainly because this was the only way down from the south face of the summit—the rest of it was too jagged, too crowded with boulders—and because it was a reasonably narrow trail, the same trail the fugitives had gone up. Mrs. Lansford had meant to come this way, it had been no accident of fate; it was the way she had arrived, it was the way home. She had known that if she managed to get down the trail a little way she would find at least a bit of protection from the wind because there were trees and boulders and mountain shoulders to hold back the storm.

Once out of the full brutality of the wind she had stopped and waited for quite some time on the trail, waiting for the pilot Walker, but he had not appeared and she had known she couldn’t wait forever.

In the end she had had to assume Walker wasn’t coming: either he wasn’t coming this way—he had gone down the other side of the mountain or taken shelter somewhere near the cabin—or he wasn’t able to come at all because the others had retrieved him or killed him.

She had been very bitter when she had wandered into the steep cut leading her horse and had almost trampled Buck Stevens. There had been a few moments of confusion there, Vickers ready to start shooting at the intruder, but it had got sorted out and they had brought the woman inside their shelter and fed her hot liquids and she had told them pieces of her story.

She was a remarkable woman, full of endurance and spirit, but women who chose to live isolated lives on the fringes of the wild country tended to be strong characters. At one point Vickers had told her how anxious her husband was about her and Mrs. Lansford had given him a twisted look and said, “How intrepid of him,” and looked around as if to emphasize the fact that Ben Lansford wasn’t here, hadn’t come after her. It was evident, and therefore sad, that Mrs. Lansford despised her husband; Watchman found himself regretting that because it violated his sense of orderly romantic neatness: a woman is in peril, you rescue her from it, you prepare to return her to her man, and you want her to look forward to that reunion with ecstatic joy. For a moment he resented Mrs. Lansford, he made her out to be an ingrate for obscure reasons, he even felt that her attitude somehow threatened everything good between himself and Lisa.

It was a brief passing irrationality and he had no time to dwell on it. Mrs. Lansford was just getting herself thawed out and begi

Now they had Walker bundled into the stinking carcass and Vickers was talking to the woman in his methodically polite FBI voice: “Now Mrs. Lansford if you don’t mind I’d like you to tell us everything you can about those four men up there.”

The woman began to talk and Watchman listened with close attention. A corner of his mind marveled at her resilience; mostly he just absorbed her words, forming a picture of the four men. The images of two of them were only vague outlines—the older man, Hanratty, and the one called Burt; but she had reacted sharply to the one they called only “Steve” and the other one, “Major.” From the information Washington had sent, Vickers supplied their names: Baraclough, Hargit. When Mrs. Lansford talked about those two men there was a change in her voice; the ma

After a while Vickers’ voice ran down with fatigue. They fed themselves and Watchman checked the pilot’s condition—the man was dead asleep, almost comatose in his rancid cocoon—and they wrapped up in a huddled knot and slept.

3

Watchman came awake fully and instantly. It was still night-dark and the wind still howled; for a moment he had trouble deciding what had disturbed him but then he listened to the wind again and discovered that its tone had changed.

Its direction had shifted around and the pitch of it had dropped; the air in the lean-to had a keen cold edge but it didn’t whip at him as it had before. As near as he could judge, it was coming up from the southwest now and that meant they were on the trailing edge of the storm’s circular flow: the blizzard was moving on east.

He had to adjust his blankets and peel back several layers of sleeve cuffs to see the luminous face of his watch. Just past five o’clock in the morning.

He turned, disturbing Vickers; heard Vickers grunt in his sleep and saw a shadowy figure sitting up in the mouth of the lean-to, wreathed in blankets and looking like one of those old photographs of Plains Indians sitting outside their tepees. That was Buck Stevens, keeping watch on the pilot.

Watchman touched him on the shoulder and went past to have a look at Walker. Then he began to dig around in the snow for firewood.

It took a long time to gather enough wood. It was quite wet but he built the fire on top of a burning Sterno can and that dried it out sufficiently for it to catch. He built it close against the rock face of the cliff, under the corner of the lean-to, and the wind whipped up the flames and carried the smoke away up the cliff.

Vickers and Mrs. Lansford moved close to the fire and Watchman lifted back the flap of horsehide over Keith Walker. The hide had frozen and it cracked when he bent it back. The embryonic figure moved: blinked and muttered. Stevens brought an aluminum cup of coffee and they got it inside the pilot. Walker’s face, when they brought him to the fire, was bloodless and slack, and his jerky rictus smile flashed on and off—the nervous reaction of spasmed relief, the smile of a survivor who had met death.

Mrs. Lansford gave him a grave look. “How do you feel?”

“All,” Walker said, and had to clear his throat. “All right. Like a cheap watch somebody forgot to wind up.” He shrank back against the heated rock as if to remove his offensiveness from the rest of them: the smell of dead flesh clung to his hair and clothes. “I guess I was pretty far gone.”

Vickers said, “You’re in bad trouble, Walker.”

Mrs. Lansford’s face came around fast. “For God’s sake.” She went back to Walker and her voice changed: “Do you think you can eat?”

“I’d like to try. I don’t know if I can hold it down.” His eyes were full of fear, darting from face to face, ready to flinch.

Vickers said, “Are you ready to talk?” in a no-nonsense voice.

Mrs. Lansford was building a plate for him and Watchman said, “Let the man eat something.”

“We haven’t got a whole lot of time, Trooper.” Vickers swallowed coffee and addressed himself to the pilot. “It may make a difference to the prosecution if I can tell them you came forward voluntarily and told the whole story to the FBI. But you’re not required to make any statement in the absence of your attorney and you—”