Relentless

Vickers had gone over to the rocks and Watchman backed toward him slowly, paying the rope out. It was a fifty-foot lasso and he went back into the rocks with the end of it. “Duck down behind that rock now,” he said, and Vickers finally got the idea and took cover.

Watchman pulled the rope around back of a boulder and kept pulling until he heard the door latch begin to scrape in its slotted guides. It looked as if they hadn’t booby-trapped it after all, but he didn’t regret taking the time to be sure.… And then the rope met resistance, he gave it a brief final tug, and a blast of explosives blew the cabin door out.

6

Just inside the doorway the explosion had dug a little crater in the dirt floor. Vickers picked up a small piece of metal and dropped it quickly because it was still hot. “Shrapnel. It was a fragmentation grenade.”

Watchman nodded. He fingered the charred end of the dangling piece of wire by the door frame. They had wired the grenade to the post and hooked the tripwire around the latch, to pull the pin when the door was opened.

“Now that raises an interesting question,” Watchman said.

“Such as?”

“Just how many more of these handy little goodies do you suppose they’re carrying?”

7

He felt the potbelly stove—still warm. They hadn’t been gone very long.

He made a quick search. The explosion had littered the front of the room with wooden debris and it had knocked a few shrapnel holes in the walls. But the fugitives didn’t seem to have left anything behind except for a few discarded empty tin cans. Well, they’d had an extra horse—the one Walker had left behind; they had plenty of space to pack everything they wanted.

He went back to the jagged-edged doorway and stepped across the remains of the door. Vickers was coming out behind him and Buck Stevens brought up the horses. Watchman could see vaguely the shapes of lower summits down the north slope.

Vickers said, “They can’t have got far. Look at those tracks. What would you say, half an hour ahead of us?”

“Something like that.”

“Let’s go, then.”

“Take it easy a minute,” Watchman said.

“What for? Four men, seven horses—they can’t travel in this snow without leaving tracks. We’ve got them now.”

“Or maybe they’ve got us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They may have heard the racket up here. They know we’re close behind them. They can’t count on wiping all of us out with one grenade so they’ve got to figure they’ve still got some of us on their trail. And like you said, they know they can’t hide their tracks.”

“So?”

“So put yourself in their shoes. They’re going to do two things. First they’re going to set themselves up in a place where they get a good long view down their own backtrail so they can count us on their fingers when we come in sight. Then when they know how many we are they’ll go on down the mountain a little way, lay some nice tracks for us to follow, and they’ll double back around their own tracks and set up a fine little crossfire for us to walk into.”

A crimson flush suffused Vickers’ cheeks. He got busy lighting a cigarette.

Buck Stevens said in his matter-of-fact voice, “How do you want to work it, Sam?”

“No point in playing the game by their rules. I think we’ll cut over east a little way. Go down behind that ridge line and ride north.”

“You mean try to get around in front of them.”

“It’s worth a try,” Watchman said, squinting across the mountains.

Vickers said, “You’re talking as if you can anticipate which way they’re going. It’s all very well for us to go on ahead of them and try to ambush them, but what if they don’t walk into it? What if they go another way entirely?”

“Then we’ll just have to send them an invitation, won’t we?” Watchman walked past him and mounted his horse. “Of course you can go right on after them if you want. I don’t much recommend it but you can please yourself.” He nodded to Buck Stevens and led the way down off the summit, splitting wide away from the dimpled tracks the fugitives had left in the snow.

Behind them Vickers climbed onto his horse and gigged it nervously. When Watchman looked back Vickers was coming right along after him. Watchman smiled a little and turned to face front.

CHAPTER

8

1

The napalm burn on Baraclough’s wrist was supposed to be dead scar flesh but it had a way of itching sometimes. He scratched it viciously, enjoying the pain.

Eddie Burt said, “I don’t think they’re coming.”

“They’re not stupid,” Major Hargit conceded. They’d seen three men start down off the skyline by the cabin. Three men had left the bonfire by those two trucks down on the flats night before last, and if it could be assumed these were the same three men then none of them had been hurt by the booby-trap grenade in the cabin. If they were smart enough to avoid that one they were pretty good.

But it had been a good twenty minutes since the three horsemen had disappeared over the summit half a mile above, and they should have showed up long before now if they were following the tracks.

Hanratty took it badly. He dragged his gloved palm down across his face with an abrasive rasp of stubble and began to shake. He had shaken like that an hour ago, coming down into this timbered cut, when the Major had halted the group and said, “The pack only chases a prey that runs. We’ll turn and face them.”

Now Baraclough said, “I guess they want to flank us.”

Eddie Burt gri

Major Hargit nodded. “They’re not bad, Sergeant, but they’re no A-team. Their friends will be taking the three of them down off this mountain in canvas bags. All right, gentlemen, let’s go find them.”

2

The wind had just about died but it was still quite cold and Baraclough had stripped down to his windbreaker because he took a kind of pleasure from the discomfort. They followed the Major along a steep hillside, keeping under the pines where the snow hadn’t drifted very deep. The Major checked his compass at intervals and finally turned his horse straight up the northeast face of the mountain and they clung to their saddles, leaning far forward to balance the horses. Hoofs scrabbled in the loose footing and the horses lunged and heaved their way toward the top.

At the military crest they tied the horses to trees and crawled to the top. Baraclough waited for the Major to hand him the field glasses. The Major completed a sweep and handed them over. Baraclough lifted them to his eyes and said, “See anything?”

“No. Your try.”

But Baraclough saw nothing either.

Hanratty said, “Jesus, let’s don’t just lie here. I’m fixing to freeze my ass off.”

“We’ll wait,” the Major said.

3

Half an hour drifted by. Baraclough was mildly offended by the rank smell of his own wet clothes. The temperature had risen considerably since dawn; the wind seemed cold but everything was melting around him. Snowflakes drifted lazily through the air but they were thin enough to cause no problem of visibility; he could see one peak, east along the range, that must have been eight or ten miles away. The sky beyond it was dark and wild where the storm had gone, but overhead now little salmon streaks of color showed through where the clouds were thi

A brittle thin sheet of ice clung to the shadowed side of a rock near Baraclough’s shoulder. It cracked like a rifle shot and Hanratty almost jumped out of his skin.