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Which way? The trail came out of the foothills and threaded the brush out along the flats.
Jay had said he’d followed it several hours but found nothing. Mackenzie wished he’d asked Jay whether he’d gone up into the hills or out on the plain.
Logic decided him. Jay probably had followed the trail first up into the hills because to the greenhorn there’d be nothing attractive on the flats: automatically he’d have concluded that if there were a water hole or a salt lick it ought to be up in the broken hill country rather than out along the featureless plains.
In his first night’s foraging Jay had intercepted the path somewhere around here and must have followed it up into the hills, where Mackenzie had no doubt it branched out into various tributaries and finally dwindled to nothing.
Because the animals that used this trail weren’t plains dwellers. They had to reside in the foothills in the narrow band of heavier vegetation along the slope where the occasional rain broke.
As he looked out on the flats he saw the vegetation grow steadily more sparse. Nothing bigger than jackrabbits out there.
The big animals lived in the hills but they came regularly down this trail and out into the plain—because there was something out there that drew them.
Jay had struck out that way on his second expedition. He hadn’t come back. It meant one of several things: he’d crippled himself or got sick or he’d followed the trail until daylight and holed up and continued the trail tonight. Or he’d gone out into the open to a point where Duggai had spotted him and Duggai had come after him and left him maimed or dead out there. Or—it was far-fetched—he’d run into a pack of pigs or coyotes and been jumped. Or maybe he’d been too tired to dig a pit at sunrise and had broiled in the deceptive shade of a bush.
It could be anything. But the odds were strong that Jay was out on those flats. Maybe fifty yards from here and maybe five miles.
Mackenzie set out along the game path. He hadn’t gone far before he got confirmation: a decapitated barrel cactus—Jay had cut its top off and drunk the pulp; and there was a little heap of fishhook spines that he’d carefully removed one by one before attacking the plant.
Mackenzie looked back toward the hills. You still couldn’t see the summit from here. Another quarter-mile out and he was certain it would rise into view.
He sca
Nothing. He moved on along the trail.
Thirst was getting to him; he had a short drink from the bag, rolled the water around in little mouthfuls for quite a while before swallowing, put a pebble on his tongue and sucked it to keep the membranes moist.
One thing was certain. Out at the end of this trail was a water hole or a salt lick. Sometimes you found them together.
The population of these hills couldn’t be very great—it took a good many acres of this sort of scrub to support much life—but there’d been enough traffic along this path to groove it deep and hard. That meant almost constant travel. If it extended any distance at all then it had to exert a very strong lure. Water alone wouldn’t do it: there were always pockets in hills like these where a man might never find water but a coyote could easily smell it out and dig for it. On the other hand salt alone wouldn’t do it either; a pack might wander to a salt lick every week or two for a treat but it wouldn’t venture such a journey every night.
If animals were beating this track every night or two it meant a potently seductive attraction at the far end. He concluded there must be ground salt and fresh water quite close together.
If that was the case and Duggai knew about it then a lot of possibilities fell into place. Duggai might have picked the spot deliberately if he knew he’d have ample water for himself—all he had to do was make sure his victims never found the water hole. If Jay had headed out that way last night then naturally Duggai would have been keeping an intermittent eye on his water supply; he’d have spotted Jay; he’d have had to prevent Jay from returning to the others with the news.
How much darkness left? Half an hour? An hour?
He was several hundred yards away from the protection of the foothills. The desert plain receded away from him in all directions, its undulation so gentle there hardly seemed anywhere Jay could be hiding.
Mackenzie stopped and measured the hills behind him—trying to determine how much farther he could proceed before he walked into Duggai’s line of sight.
It was sheer guesswork because he wouldn’t see the peak until he was out where Duggai simultaneously would see him. But the contours of the slopes at either end gave him a hint to the altitude of the summit and he felt strongly that he was quite close to the limit of safety here. It might be fifty yards and it might be a hundred and fifty but certainly it was no more than that.
And if Duggai spotted him on this trail that would end it right here. Bullets in both kneecaps would do the job handily.
His feet were bruised and raw. The moccasins were begi
He was having trouble walking: his breath came in short gasps and the muscles at calf and ankle felt spongy and his knees had developed a wobble. When he thought of the highway and the miles that lay between he didn’t think he’d have the strength for it.
He ate a string of jerky because it might perk him up; and moved on, sca
A voice rocked him back in terror:
“Mackenzie.…”
21
Jay had dug himself a pit on the north side of a manzanita twice Mackenzie’s height. The hole was invisible under its deep shadow. Mackenzie homed on his voice and didn’t see him until he was within arm’s length.
Only head and shoulders; Jay was down in the pit.
“Are you all right?”
“More or less. I stepped on a fucking cactus. Better keep your voice down. He’s right up there.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Several times. He doesn’t know I’m here.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m still alive, right?”
Mackenzie opened the water bag. “Here.”
“God. Thank you.”
“Don’t guzzle it.”
He watched Jay critically. The Adam’s apple lunged up and down but Jay reluctantly lowered the bag after three swallows. “I pulped a cactus but it’s not the same thing. Right over there—that’s a juicy barrel cactus but it’s right out in the open—I didn’t dare demolish it. He’d spot it right away.”
“I saw the one you cut open back up the trail.”
“He can’t see that one from up there.”
“How bad’s the foot?”
“Not too bad. I got all the splinters out. Spines. It swelled up some and I couldn’t walk on it last night. I’ve experimented—it still hurts but think another twelve hours should do it.” His voice was rusty, tired. “I let you down.”
“Forget it.”
“No. I wasn’t looking where I stepped. It’s entirely my fault. I’m responsible—you can’t pass it off as an accident.”
Mackenzie wondered if Jay had spent the past twenty-four hours flagellating himself with self-humiliation.
Jay said, “This is as far as I got but you look at these tracks, you know there’s got to be something out there.”
“Water hole and salt lick, I imagine. You did a good job finding this trail.”