The prisoner said, “If you’d take these cuffs off, I could help.”
“You want to help, take the horse upslope as far as you can and tie him to something, then come back.”
“Won’t he be exposed up there?”
“Sure. Out of range, too. They’ll spot him, but so what? They’ll know we’re here. Might save me a round if they grow cautious before I have to waste good lead just funning.”
“Won’t they know, once you miss a couple of times, that you don’t mean to kill nobody?”
“Don’t aim to miss by all that much, and if it comes down to real hard fighting I’ve been known to draw blood, in my time.”
The prisoner led the bay away, and by the time he returned, Longarm had erected a breast-high wall of slabs.
He said, “look around for some sticks, dry grass and such. You can work as well with your hands together.”
“There ain’t enough dry weeds and cheat-grass here for a real fire, Longarm. The thing you had in mind was a fire, wasn’t it?”
“Get moving. I got some shifting to do, here on this breastwork.”
“I’m moving, I’m moving, but you are pure loco! What in thunder do we want with a fire, not saying we could build one?”
Longarm didn’t answer. He was a fair hand at drywall construction and figured his improvisation would stand up to anything but a four-pound cannon ball, and he knew they wouldn’t be bringing along heavy artillery.
He saw the prisoner was doing a shiftless job at gathering dry tinder, so he went to work himself, gathering an armful of bone-dry weeds and cheat-grass stems. He threw it in a pile a few yards back from his stone wall.
The prisoner added his own smaller offering and Longarm started putting chips of shale on the tinder, with smaller fragments first and some fair-sized slabs topping off the cairn.
The prisoner watched bemusedly, as Longarm struck a match and set the dry weeds alight. As the acrid blue smoke of burning cheat curled up through the rocks he said, “I can see you’re trying to cook them rocks. What I can’t figure out is why.”
Then a thicker smoke, coiling like an oily serpent, slithered up and through the shale slabs to catch a vagrant tendril of breeze and float skyward like a blob of ink against the blue of the sky.
Longarm said, “Oil shale burns, sort of. learned it from a friendly Ute, last time I passed this way.”
“That’s for damn sure! Look at it catch! Burns with a damn black smoke, though. You says there’s Utes in this neck of the woods?”
“Utes, if we’re lucky, Shoshone if we ain’t.”
“You figure they’ll see this smoke signal and come running?”
“They’ll more’n likely come creeping, wondering who’s here in their hunting grounds. Not many white men have ever been this way and Indians are curious cusses.”
“Won’t the white boys trailing us see the smoke, too?”
“If they’ve got eyes, they’ve seen it by now. They won’t know if it’s us or some Shoshones fixing to lift their hair.”
“Hot damn! It may just turn ‘em back, don’t you reckon?”
“Not hardly. Men willing to chase a man with my rep and a Winchester don’t scare so easy. If they read this smoke as Indian signals, it might slow ‘em to a cautious move-in, though. I’m hoping they won’t be here too long before sundown. if they climb up behind us in good light, we’re in one hell of a fix.”
“What’s to stop ‘em doing it tomorrow just after sunup?”
“Tomorrow is another day, and like I keep saying, you eat the apple a bite at a time.”
“Yeah, I figure you got maybe twelve to fifteen hours before your apple’s all et, too! Man up there on the rim above us could save ammo and likely kill us just by chucking down some rocks! You reckon you could pick a man off against that skyline up there?”
“Doubt it. It’s about a quarter-mile straight up. Things look closer than they really are in this clear air of the high country.”
“But he’d have no trouble shooting down, would he?”
“Not hardly. Probably miss his first few shots, but we’ll have no cover, and like you said, a fistful of rock could do us in, thrown down from that height.”
“Gawd, you’re pretty cheerful about it all, considering!”
“Well, losing that horse threw me off my feed for a few minutes back there, but we’re in pretty fair shape again.”
“The hell you say! Can’t you see the fix they got us in, Longarm?”
“Yep. They’ll likely figure it the same way and move in slow and careful, like I want ‘em to. Hate to have to hurt anybody who don’t deserve a hurt, this close to the end of our game.”
“Longarm, I am purely missing something or you are out of your fool head! We are boxed in here with our backs to a quarter-mile-high cliff! You got a rifle and a pistol to hold off Gawd knows what-all in the way of white folks, and likely a tribe or two of Injuns!”
“Yep. Nearest Utes are about a ten-hour ride away. Boys from Crooked Lance should get here sooner.”
“Then what in tarnation are you grinning about? You look like a mean old weasel some dumb farmer just put to work guarding his hen house for the night!”
“I’ll allow some chicken-thieving tricks have crossed my mind since we lost that horse back there. I was worried we might have thrown ‘em off our trail, too, till I spied that Canadian’s fool red coat on the far horizon. You reckon they wear them red tunics to make a good target or to impress the Cree, up Canada way?”
“Back up. What was that about not trying to throw ‘em off our trail? Are you saying you could have lost ‘em in the mountains?”
“Hell, can a jaybird suck robin’s eggs? I’ll allow that Sergeant Foster’s a fair tracker, but I’ve been tracked by Apache in my time, and lost ‘em good.”
“In other words, you’ve been playing ring-around-the-rosie with them Crooked Lance vigilantes all the time?”
“Sure. Hadn’t you figured as much? Hell, a pissant like you could have lost ‘em by now! We’ve been over some rough ground in the last few days, boy. You mind when we crossed that ten-mile stretch of bare granite yesterday? Had to drop some spent cartridges along the way, pretending we’d been shooting birds for provisions. They know I pack.44-40 ammo, so…”
“But why, Gawd damn it? I thought your mission was to bring me in to Denver safe and sound!”
“I aim to. But I’m a peace officer, too. Can’t see my way to leave folks disturbing the peace and carrying on like wild men on federal range can I?”
“You mean you aim to arrest somebody riding with that posse of vigilantes?”
“Nope. If things go as I’ve Planned I aim to arrest the whole damn kit and caboodle!”
CHAPTER 18
It was getting late when Longarm spied the red tunic of Sergeant Foster on the skyline, far up the other wall of the valley. The Mountie had others with him. One rider was too tall in the saddle to be anyone but Timberline. Another distant figure had to be the midget, Cedric Hanks. Longarm looked for anyone riding sidesaddle, but the little detective had apparently left Mabel behind. He counted a good dozen-and-a-half heads up there and the sunlight flashing on glass told him Foster was sweeping the valley floor with field glasses. He’d probably seen the dead horse down on the far side of the creek. He had to have seen the big black mushroom of oil smoke still rising behind them.
Longarm turned to the prisoner at his side and said, “Lie down behind this barricade and stay put. I’ll be too busy to keep more’n a corner of my eye on you and I get testy if folks interfere when I’m working.”