The High Rocks Page 10
“Trying to slow us down, most likely.”
“Why, when they could just as well shoot us from ambush?”
He shook his leonine head. “I don’t know. I was him, I’d try to hedge my bet, set some sort of trap that can’t go wrong. Can’t think why he’d pass up a set-up like this.” His brow furrowed, and stayed that way for a long moment. Then something dawned over his features. “Unless he thought of a better one.” He swung around and took a step toward the edge over which he had just climbed. “Let’s ride.”
“What’s your hurry?”
He didn’t reply. He began backing down the way he had come.
“What about him?” I jabbed the barrel of the Remington toward Strakey’s body.
He looked at it hard, as if seeing it for the first time. “Pitch him over. Maybe he’ll keep Old Lop Ear off our backs for a night.”
We put in a lot of saddle time during the next two days. That day we rode until long after dark, camped for six hours, and were moving again before sunup. This time he didn’t bother handcuffing me, which I supposed meant something, but I was too exhausted to puzzle it out. Maybe it had something to do with me telling him about the broken firing pin when I might have tried to use the Remington to bluff him out of his own firearm. Whatever his reasons, I had somewhere along the line gained a measure of his trust, which wasn’t an easy thing to do.
I had not, however, gained all of it. He wouldn’t explain why we were in such a hurry, for instance; when I pressed him, he would give his horse a kick and surge ahead of me until my words were drowned out in the drumming of the dun’s hoofs. He spoke rarely, and then only in monosyllables when silence became inconvenient. Snow came in spurts, now light, now so heavy it was impossible to see past the flurry of dollar-sized flakes. By noon of the second day it had let up enough for us to see the cabin huddled against the south face of a lopsided mountain on the western fringe of the Bitterroot.
Even then, it would have been invisible but for a pale gray ribbon of smoke drifting up from the rough stone chimney; wedged into a triangular chink in the mountain itself, the log structure appeared at first glance to be nothing more than a pile of wind-toppled trees. Only upon closer inspection did the semi-symmetrical nature of its construction become apparent. In the spring and summer, it was probably masked by foliage. Now, it was little more than a black strip showing above the banks of snow which were piled up to its single tiny window.
We were perched midway down a slope that graded gently downward before us for another two hundred yards before leveling out in front of the cabin. Bear swung his great head in a slow arc from left to right, noting each detail in the landscape like a minister studying his scripture. Then he hooked the thumb and little finger of his right hand inside his mouth and whistled shrilly. The sound pierced the brittle air and echoed from the mountaintops; from a distance, it might have been a bird calling to its mate.
When perhaps a minute had crawled past without an answer, he whistled again. Again it was met with silence. The horses fidgeted and snorted steam out their nostrils.
“What I was afeared of,” said Bear.
No sooner had he said it than the door of the cabin swung open with a bang that reverberated like a pistol shot around the circle of mountains and Church stepped out into the open.
His right arm was locked around the throat of an Indian woman with a shape like a sack of feed. At that distance, her features were a blur, but her complexion, braided hair, and drab costume of skins left no question about her race. In his left hand, the bounty hunter gripped his Navy Colt with the barrel buried in the folds of her stout neck.
“You got yourself a brave squaw, Anderson!” He shouted twice as loud as he had to, to make himself heard. The mountains rang with his nasal tenor. “She’d of let me bust her arm before she whistled back. I’m kind of glad she didn’t, though. I like this way better.”
“Your squaw?” I queried, out of the corner of my mouth.
Bear nodded. “Bought her off a Blackfoot sub-chief from the plains, along with a hunnert pounds of cracked corn for Pike, here. He wouldn’t make the deal unless she went with it.”
“What’s it going to be, Anderson?” shouted Church. “Do you come in guns down, or do I make a mess right here in front of your cabin?”
“You’re too late, Church!” I called out. “This man’s in my custody.”
Bear glanced at me suspiciously. I ignored it.
“That you, Murdock?” called the bounty hunter.
I told him it was.
“I can’t see your badge from here. You might be an accomplice pulling my leg. Not knowing any better, I might accidentally blow your head off.”
“How bad do you want her back?” I asked Bear.
“She’s an awful good cook.”
“I was afraid you’d say something like that. Stall him.”
The scalp-hunter raised his voice. “How much time I got to think about it?”
“Don’t care for her much, do you?” It was a threat.
“I’m tired, damn it! Give me time!”
Church squinted toward the pale glimmering of light beyond the clouds. “One hour,” he said. “You better come up with the right answer, though. One more dead injun won’t mean much in this part of the country.” His arm still around the woman, he backed into the cabin and slammed the door.
We retreated up the slope into the cover of a stand of skeletal maple trees and dismounted.
“Is that your cabin?” I asked my companion.
“Built it two years ago. Ain’t four people in the whole range know about it besides me and Little Tree, there, and all of them’s Blackfoot.”
“How’d Church find out about it?”
He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Nothing’s secret if more than one knows about it. Old White Mane hunts these parts all year long; he’d sell out his tribe for a bottle of good whiskey. Anyhow, it don’t matter how they found out. I expected something like this when I seen that dead man they left behind to slow us down. I said before that Church was the kind that likes to make sure nothing goes wrong.” He rubbed a thumb thoughtfully along the scarred portion of his jaw. “How soon can you get around behind that cabin?”
“What behind? There isn′t any behind. You built the damn thing right into the mountain!”
“You climb good. You proved that back at the pass.”
I searched his face for some sign of deceit. I found none. “You’re getting awfully trusting suddenly,” I said. “Back at the pass you didn’t want me out of your sight.”
He grunted. “You can move without being seen. They’d spot me a mile away.”
“Church is no fool. It’ll be guarded.”
“I didn’t say it’d be easy.”
“What do I do once I get there?”
He untied one of the gunny sacks from the horn of his saddle—the one without the scalps—and set it on the ground. Reaching inside, he drew out a kerosene lantern of rusted metal and glass. “As soon as you get up on top of the roof, I want you to chuck this down the chimney.” He held it out for me to take. Liquid sloshed around inside the base.
“Are you serious? That’ll go off like dynamite! What about your squaw?”
“She’ll be outside when you do it. Just wait for my signal.” He jiggled the lantern impatiently. I took it.
“How about giving me the rest of what’s in that sack?” I asked him.
He started as if struck in the face. “What you talking about?”
I nodded toward the sack, which he had been in the act of tying back onto his saddle. “There’s a .45 caliber Deane-Adams five-shot revolver in that bundle. Leslie Brainard took it off me and you took it off the Indians who got it from him. There was a rifle too, a Winchester, but you don’t have that. Likely he threw it away after emptying it at the Indians. What I’m interested in right now is the revolver. How about it? You’re going to be in need of another gun hand when the shooting starts.”
“Why should
I trust you with a gun when I didn’t trust you with my knife? You never gave that back, come to think on it.”
“I didn’t stick it into your ribs either. That should prove something.”
He dipped into the sack without another word and handed me the holster and gun. I strapped it on, drew the revolver, and spun the cylinder to make sure it was loaded. It wasn’t. Grinning at him, I loaded it from the supply of shells on the belt. “You don’t miss a trick, do you?”
“Just don’t get no ideas about using it on me,” he warned. “That’s been tried before.”
I gave him a mock salute and moved off in a crouch through the trees.
“One thing.” Bear’s low murmur crackled in the crisp air.
I stopped and looked back at him. In his shaggy bearskin he resembled a hoary old oak standing among the anemic maples.
“Underneath all that snow there’s an inch of dried acorns on the roof. I put them there last summer to let me know if some injun was trying what you’re about to.”
“Is that all?” I snapped. “What about a moat and crocodiles?”
“Nope. Just acorns.”
It took me the better part of our allotted hour to circle around to where the cabin was socked away in the mountain’s broad base; brush being scarce, I had to take advantage of intermittent fierce squalls of snow in order to dash from one scrub patch to another, a clear enough target for anyone watching closely through the window. I hoped that whoever was manning that station was too busy rubbing the frost off the glass to spot me during those brief periods. Fortunately, that seemed to be the case, because by the end of the hour I was scaling the craggy surface of the rock toward the snow-covered cabin roof, and there were no holes in me.
My relief was short-lived. I was six feet off the ground when a gun was cocked loudly behind me and Ira Longbow offered me the choice of either coming back down or taking a bullet in the back of the head. I chose the former.
9
I glanced back over my shoulder. He was standing a couple of yards back from the rock wall, Dance in hand. His tracks in the snow indicated that he’d just come around from the other side of the cabin, where he had undoubtedly been watching my approach.
“Who says lawmen are dumb?” he said approvingly as I began my descent. “You know, I’d of killed you right where you was if Church wasn’t so soft on that badge. I think he’d like to wear one his-self. Drop the gun.”
I was still hanging on with both hands. Balancing myself precariously, I reached back with two fingers and flipped the revolver out of its holster. It landed in the snow with a muffled thump.
“That’s real good. Down, boy.”
The snow was slippery where I’d trampled it while searching for my first foothold on the way up. I tested it carefully with one foot before I let all my weight down on the ground. Then I slipped.
Longbow reacted as I’d hoped he would. Faced with a similar situation, a professional would have stepped back out of the danger zone; not the half-breed. He lunged forward, thrusting the barrel of the six-shooter at me. I tucked his outstretched arm beneath my right armpit and twisted left, grasping his wrist in my free hand as I did so. This accomplished two things: First, it jarred the bone of his wrist against my left hipbone, making him release the gun; second it allowed me to throw all my weight onto my right leg and fling him, head first, into the stone wall down which I’d just climbed. He folded into a heap at the base of the wall.
Time was running out. In another minute Church would emerge from the cabin to learn Bear’s answer to his ultimatum; I was fairly sure he hadn’t heard the commotion over the whistling of the wind about the structure’s thick walls, but I couldn’t afford to have him find me there, not when he had the Indian woman for a shield and another man with a gun inside. If Old Man Strakey hadn’t been armed before, he certainly was now that his son had no further use for the percussion cap pistol he’d been carrying. I located my gun and, after knocking snow out of the barrel, put it in its holster. Then I dragged Longbow’s unconscious form around the curve of the mountain, threw snow over it, and did what I could to smooth over the tracks on my way back. I was counting on the bounty hunter being too busy watching the top of the slope to notice the footprints that remained. Deciding not to try and find the Dance in the snowbank where it had fallen, I began climbing the wall once again.
I had just cleared the corner of the roof and was still moving when Church came out dragging Little Tree. I held my breath. Hanging by both hands, I was unable to get to my gun. If he looked up I was dead.
But he didn’t look up. His attention was centered on the stand of maples at the top of the slope. I continued my upward progress.
“Time’s up, Anderson!” he shouted. “What’s your answer?”
Seconds ticked by, during which I placed my feet carefully in each foothold lest he hear the noise in the overpowering silence that followed his call. Even the wind had died. He cocked the Colt with a dry click. The woman gasped. Anderson had appeared atop the slope.
I stepped down onto the roof, first one foot, then the other. Beneath twelve inches of snow there was a muffled crunch as I released my hold on the mountain. I froze. Church didn’t turn. Slowly I removed the lantern from my right shoulder, over which I had slung it by its metal bail.
“Don’t shoot!” Bear’s strident voice, so high-pitched for a man his size, echoed throughout the clearing. “I’m coming in.”
Church made a sound of satisfaction deep in his throat. “Now you’re getting smart! Remember, I got two men inside the cabin with guns.”
That was a bluff. He was keeping Ira Longbow as his ace in the hole.
Bear hurled the Spencer out ahead of him. It executed three complete spins and landed butt-first in the snow, its barrel pointing skyward. He gave his horse a gentle kick and the two of them moved forward down the slope.
The chimney was a column of soot-blackened stones sticking two feet up out of the snow on the opposite corner of the roof. I made my way over to it, stepping carefully on the layer of acorns beneath the snow. My pants legs were soaked above the tops of my boots.
“Hold it!” roared the bounty hunter. I stopped, reaching toward my gun. “Where’s Murdock?”
There was a tense moment while the question repeated itself again and again among the high rocks. Slowly, Church’s head began to turn.
“Ira?” For the first time since I had met him, the arrogance was missing from his tone. Half-formed fear played about the edges.
A hundred yards beyond the cabin, Bear raised his right arm above his head and brought it down with a savage slicing motion. It was the signal.
I lifted the lantern high over the smoking chimney and heaved it down through the opening. It struck bottom with a crash. I leaped back in the same instant, but not in time to avoid singeing my eyebrows in the jet of flames that erupted up out of the chimney.
Someone screamed inside the cabin. By that time Church had already swung about, his arm still around the woman, gun barrel rotating in search of a target. I launched myself from the roof and came down on top of both of them. The squaw squirmed free.
The bounty hunter and I grappled in the snow, rolling over and over as he tried to maneuver his Colt into firing position. Both my hands were locked around his wrist, but it didn’t budge. He had the wiry strength of a mountain lion. His other hand closed around my throat in a death-grip. The blood pounded in my broken head. Finally I let go of his wrist with my right hand and clouted him on the chin, once, twice. The gun dropped from his hand.
The cabin door banged open and a human pillar of flame ran bellowing out into the open. It was Homer Strakey, Sr., ablaze from head to foot. He fell headlong into the snow and began rolling, shrieking incoherently and slapping at the flames that engulfed him.
I was getting up off the stunned Church when something hard and cold was pressed against the base of my skull and I heard a deep, fury-wracked voice at my ear. “This is where you finish up, Murdock!”
The Deane-Adams lay in the snow between us where it had fallen when I’d left the roof. There was a pause while the half-breed came to realize the superiority of his position. Behind him, the window and open door of the cabin blazed brightly; against that background, the leer that came over his lean features was diabolic. His finger tightened on the trigger.
The air throbbed with a sudden explosion. The whole right side of Longbow’s face burst open and his head spun halfway around on his neck. His gun flipped from his hand, he pirouetted on his left foot, and crumpled into the cinder-blackened snow. After a few kicks he lay there without moving, eyes and mouth wide open, the good side of his face turned as though looking back at me over his shoulder. The sound of the fire greedily devouring the log cabin dominated the scene.
I turned. Fifty yards up the slope, Bear Anderson lay on his stomach in the snow where he had dived when the action started, his Spencer braced against his right shoulder and supported on his elbows. The echo of his shot could still be heard receding into the distance.
He couldn’t have thrown the rifle into a more convenient spot if he’d been practicing for a week. It had been no accident; he hadn’t survived a decade and a half of Flathead enmity by leaving things to chance. It was no wonder that the Indian women regarded him as the embodiment of the evil spirit.
Church was beginning to stir. I picked up my gun and got hold of his Navy Colt before he could retrieve it. He cursed, spat out what looked like a piece of a tooth, and climbed unsteadily to his feet. “Goddamn you, Murdock.”