Relentless

Stalking, Watchman moved slowly, constantly turning his head to catch sounds on the flats of his eardrums. A search for shadows: he keened every tree trunk before he passed. At frequent intervals he stopped the horse and listened to the night.

The thin coat of frozen snow treacherously concealed an underlayer of loose granulations and it was hard to spot pits and gullies in the forest floor; once or twice the horse went in stirrup-high and floundered for footing.

It was the old Mexican shell game: under which shell was the pea? And of what did the pea consist?

He was on a downslope now, so steep it was almost sheer. Hargit’s horses had bucked the drifts hard, leaving great wallows. The track ran down to the sloping-off bottom and penetrated a district of ten-foot boulders and broken slabs of rock that stood upended and sometimes weirdly balanced on top of one another. From this elevation Watchman saw that the tracks went straight on through the boulder field and into the timber beyond.

The air was still now, but earlier winds had blown most of the rocks clear of snow. You could walk around in there, jumping from rock to rock, and not leave a trace.

If Hargit was waiting for him it was probably in there.

He stopped in the trees and considered the alternatives. The slopes on either side of the canyon, going past the sides of the boulder field, were too steep to travel. If you wanted to get across to the far side you had to go through, or over the tops of, the boulders. Either that or go all the way back over the mountain and go around. That might take three hours. No, this was the place. Maybe Hargit could see him right now. Three hundred yards, uphill, the moon going down behind the mountains; it would be a tricky rifle shot and Hargit would want to wait for a better one.

All right, assume he’s in there. Now how do I get at him?

3

Come on, Hargit thought impatiently.

He could see by the length of time the horseman spent up there in the trees without moving that the horseman smelled the trap. That was expected. The man had already proved himself, whoever he was. He wasn’t anybody’s fool. Well that was all right too. There was no challenge in doing battle with fools.

He’ll find a way in and I won’t see him when he comes. That was all right too. Right now he guessed the man was waiting for moonglow to fade out of the sky. There were a few clouds but the starlight was sufficient on the snow and on the pale boulders. The cop would leave his horse up in the trees, or maybe send it scooting down here to distract Hargit’s attention; the cop meanwhile would be slithering down inside the trees, keeping to cover, coming into the boulders on his belly.

No, you won’t see him until he’s on top of you.

He had wedged the grenade into a crevice at the foot of a boulder and tied the string to the pinloop. He had the end of the string tied around his arm. When he pulled it the grenade would go off. The grenade was about forty feet away and there was a rock for Hargit to hide behind when he pulled the string so he wouldn’t get hit by flying shrapnel. He didn’t expect to kill the cop with the grenade but the noise would distract the cop and that was when Hargit would put a bullet in him.

If only it wasn’t so God damned cold. He was shivering in his clothes. His toes hurt with a bony kind of pain that was altogether different from the numbness he’d fought against when he was leading them through that hell of a blizzard. Then he’d been moving, making an active fight of it, and that was what he was best at.

None of them knew how much it had taken out of him, breaking trail in that storm. At the end of it he’d been drunk in his legs, shaking with fatigue, an incredibly deep drained ache in all his fibers.

This coldness wasn’t the blasting fury of the blizzard. It was still, soundless, clear; there was no way to fight it. Fifteen or twenty below, he judged. His lips were cracked, his eyes felt painful. It was hard to breathe. He kept clenching and unclenching his hands inside his gloves.

The horse came plunging down the hillside and he watched it come. Nobody on board.

He looked around in the trees for sign of movement and once he thought he saw something sliding between trees but he wasn’t sure and he just waited. He had good cover here. He squatted in a groined joining of two ice-split boulders. They formed a kind of cave, a right-angle corner with a flat shelf of rock lying across the top. Nobody could creep up behind him. The cop had to come at him from the front. Either the cop would come in sight between the boulders in front of him or the cop would come over the top. Probably the former; the cop wouldn’t expose himself on the skyline by climbing over the top. When the cop appeared, Hargit would yank the rope and the cop would hear the click of the grenade handle flying off; the cop would dive for cover and the grenade would explode and Hargit would know where the cop was but the cop wouldn’t know where Hargit was. That would give him his shot at the cop.

Hargit squatted with one leg bent to run, and laid the rifle across his thigh. Carefully he bit into the fingertips of his right-hand glove and pulled his hand out of it, and put the glove in his pocket.

The steel haft and trigger of the rifle were very cold to the touch. He wrapped his hand around them, deliberately disregarding the icy pain. Positioned his index finger on the trigger and lifted the rifle, braced his left elbow on his bent knee and snugged the stock into the hollow of his shoulder. He was ready to swivel toward any point within the range of his vision.

He lifted his right arm until the rope tautened. That was good: one yank of his right arm and he’d pull the pin. He wouldn’t even have to take his hand off the trigger.

He settled in to wait. His breath made a frosty film on the metal breechbolt of the rifle. The cold air sliced into the bare knuckles of his right hand and the steel conducted frigid chills into his bones but as soon as he’d shot the cop he’d rub his hand to warm it up and then he’d put his glove on again.

He heard the horse clattering around in the rocks and he steadied his aim and waited for the cop to come to him.

4

Watchman wormed into the boulders on his elbows with his rifle in an infantryman’s carry across his forearms but when he got into the rocks he laid the rifle down and left it. If there was shooting in here it would be at close quarters and for that a pistol was more maneuverable. He stood up, flat against a boulder that towered above his head, and removed the service revolver from his holster and put the revolver in the pocket of his mackinaw. Then he removed his glove and put his hand on the grip of the revolver deep inside the sheepskin pocket.

He moved very slowly through the rocks. He did not crawl; he walked, bent over in a crouch, because he wanted his legs under him in case he had to jump for cover fast. Every turning in the maze of tumbled passages was a potential ambush and he stopped at every pace to study the new contours that his progress revealed. Several times he turned into blind clotures and had to retrace his steps. Once he climbed onto a handy shelf and put his head up cautiously to look around. He saw only the piled-up rocks in a jumbled panorama. His horse was moving around a few yards away; he saw its ears and the saddle horn go past a rockpile. He backed down and circled the boulder and moved on.

The shadows were deep and threatening. He moved very slowly and without sound. The pressure of time grated on the raw exposed ends of his nerves because there was always the chance Hargit wasn’t in here at all, the chance that Hargit had kept riding and was halfway to the flats by now, but Hargit was never going to find a better spot for an ambush than this one and Watchman had to rely on his own judgment of Hargit’s conceit.