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There was no chance to get a canteen filled here, for the watchers were too wide awake. Yet he might manage a drink.
He slid his knife from his pocket and opened it carefully. He cut several reeds, allowing no sound. When he had them cut, he joined them and reached them toward the water. Lying on his stomach within only a few feet of the pool, and no farther from the nearest watcher, he sucked on the reeds until the water started flowing. He drank for a long time, then drank again. The trickle doing little, at first to assuage his thirst. After a while he felt better.
He started to withdraw the reeds, then gri
Dawn was breaking when he awakened, and his nostrils caught a whiff of wood smoke. His pursuers were at their breakfasts. By now they would have found his reeds, and he gri
Worming his way through the brush, he found a trail that followed just below the crest, and moved steadily along in the partial shade, angling toward a towering hogback.
Later, from well up on the hogback, he saw three horsemen walking their animals down the ridge where he had rested the previous day. Two more were working up a canyon, and wherever he looked they seemed to be closing in. He abandoned the canteen, for it banged against brush and could be heard too easily. He moved back, going from one cluster of boulders to another, then pausing short of the ridge itself.
The only route that lay open was behind him, into the desert, and that way they were sure he would not go. The hogback on which he lay was the highest ground in miles, and before him the jagged scars of three canyons ru
The far-flung skirmishing line was well disposed, and Nat could find it in himself to admire their skill. These were his brand of men, and they understood their task. Knowing them as he did, he knew how relentless they could be. The country behind him was open. It would not be open long. Knowing themselves, they were sure he would fight it out rather than risk dying of thirst in the desert. They were wrong.
Nat Bodine learned that suddenly. Had he been asked, he would have accepted their solution, yet now he saw that he could not give up.
The desert was the true Powder Basin. The Indians had called it The Place of No Water, and he had explored deep into it in the past years, and found nothing. While the distance across was less than twenty miles, a man must travel twice that or more, up and down and around, if he would cross it, and his sense of direction must be perfect. Yet, with water and time a man might cross it. And Nat Bodine had neither. Moreover, if he went into the desert they would soon send word and have men waiting on the other side. He was fairly trapped, and yet he knew that he would die in that waste alone, before he’d surrendered to be lynched. Nor could he hope to fight off this posse for long. Carefully he got to his feet and worked his way to the maw of the desert. He nestled among the boulders and watched the men below. They were coming carefully, still several yards away. Cradling his Winchester against his cheek, he drew a bead on a rock ahead of the nearest man, and fired.
Instantly the searchers vanished. Where a dozen men had been in sight, there was nobody now. He chuckled. “That made ’em eat dirt!” he said. “Now they won’t be so anxious.”
The crossing of the crest was dangerous, but he made it, and hesitated there, surveying the scene before him. Far away to the horizon stretched the desert. Before him the mountain broke sharply away in a series of sheer precipices and ragged chasms, and he scowled as he stared down at them, for there seemed no descent could be possible from here.
Chuck Benson and Jim Morton crouched in the lee of a stone wall and stared up at the ridge from which the shot had come. “He didn’t shoot to kill,” Morton said, “or he’d have had one of us. He’s that good.”
“What’s on his mind?” Benson demanded. “He’s stuck now. I know that ridge an’ the only way down is the way he went up.” “Let’s move in,” Blackie protested. “There’s cover enough.” “You don’t know Nat. He’s never caught until you see him down. I know the man. He’ll climb cliffs that would stop a hoss fly.”
Pete Daley and Burt Stoval moved up to join them, peering at the ridge before them through the concealing leaves. The ridge was a gigantic hogback almost a thousand feet higher than the plateau on which they waited. On the far side it fell away to the desert, dropping almost two thousand feet in no more than two hundred yards, and most of the drop in broken cliffs.
Daley’s eyes were hard with satisfaction. “We got him now!” he said triumphantly. “He’ll never get off that ridge! We’ve only to wait a little, then move in on him. He’s out of water, too!” Mortion looked with distaste at Daley. “You seem powerful anxious to get him, Pete. Maybe the sheriff ain’t dead yet. Maybe he won’t die. Maybe his story of the shootin’ will be different.”
Daley turned on Morton, his dislike evident. “Your opinion’s of no account, Morton. I was there, and I saw it. As for Larabee, if he ain’t dead he soon will be. If you don’t like this job, why don’t you leave?”
Jim Morton stoked his pipe calmly. “Because I aim to be here if you get Bodine,” he said, “an’ I personally figure to see he gets a fair shake. Furthermore, Daley, I’m not beholdin’ to you, no way, an’ I ain’t scared of you. Howsoever, I figure you’ve got a long way to go before you get Bodine.”
High on the ridge, flat on his stomach among the rocks, Bodine was not so sure. He mopped sweat from his brow and studied again the broken cliff beneath him. There seemed to be a vaguely possible route but at the thought of it his mouth turned dry and his stomach empty.
A certain bulge in the rock looked as though it might afford handholds, although some of the rock was loose, and he couldn’t see below the bulge where it might become smooth. Once over that projection, getting back would be difficult if not impossible. Nevertheless, he determined to try.
Using his belt for a rifle strap, he slung the Winchester over his back, then turned his face to the rock and slid feet first over the bulge, feeling with his toes for a hold. If he fell from here, he could not drop less than two hundred feet, although close in there was a narrow ledge only sixty feet down.
Using simple pull holds, and working down with his feet, Bodine got well out over the bulge. Taking a good grip, he turned his head and searched the rock below him. On his left the rock was cracked deeply, with the portion of the face to which he clung projecting several inches farther into space than the other side of the crack. Shifting his left foot carefully, he stepped into the crack, which afforded a good jam hold. Shifting his left hand, he took a pull grip, pulling away from himself with the left fingers until he could swing his body to the left, and get a grip on the edge of the crack with his right fingers. Then lying back, his feet braced against the projecting far edge of the crack, and pulling toward himself with his hands, he worked his way down, step by step and grip by grip, for all of twenty feet. There the crack widened into a chimney, far too wide to be climbed with a lie back, its i