Finally he led the horse over to a steeper part of the hillside and maneuvered it around until its left side was toward the high side of the hill. It was like standing on a box beside the horse—the extra foot of ground elevation was enough for him to get his foot into the stirrup and heave himself onto the seat. He settled himself down firmly in the saddle and gigged the horse gently, and rode down the hill with the first pale streaks of dawn behind him.
They were on foot; it was just about the only advantage he had over them—that and the fact that they must have heard the shooting and might feel half confident that Gant and Quesada and Shiraz had taken care of him. He ticked them off in his mind, those who were left against him: Provo, and Menendez, and the kid Shelby. They still had Susan. Hal was somewhere around, batting around in the hills, but he didn’t know whether Hal had waited around after setting the fire to see what happened. Hal might have gone back up the mountain to the stream where Burgade had decided to rendezvous if he’d gotten Susan away from them. If Hal had gone up there he couldn’t be expected to get back down here before mid-morning at the earliest. He dismissed Hal from his calculations.
Daylight grew stronger as he rode slowly down through the forest. He followed the same trail the horses had used in going up. Just on sunrise he came across Gant’s undisturbed body in the trail. The odor was already heavy, a rancid stench; Gant’s color had changed in death.
Fifty yards farther he glanced into the brush and saw Quesada where he had dragged him back off the trail. The formation of gases had bloated the corpse. Flies buzzed around his head. Here too was the sweet rotten smell of beginning decay. Insects and carrion would clean up everything but the bones, and as the bones rotted their calcium would help feed the ancient and unchangeable forest. Nature was efficient, nothing went to waste. Efficient and indifferent: the forest would not care whether, in the end, it be Zach Provo’s bones or Sam Burgade’s that stayed behind to nourish it.
Young Shelby posed a nuisance, merely because he was a third gun to account for, but it was the other two who made it look pretty close to impossible. Provo and Menendez were faster ‘and shrewder and five times as tough as any of the others. Burgade had only vanquished Gant’s three because they had been stupid enough to split up. Provo wouldn’t make that kind of mistake. Provo would keep close to his comrades and he would keep Susan tight by him as a shield.
But there was nothing else to do but keep taking chances until there were no chances left. Burgade rode straight on down to within twenty yards of the burnt-out meadow. The smell of smoke still hung vaguely in the air, enough to make the horse skittish, but the fire had burned itself out against the damp edge of the woods, and only the trees right along the edge had been scorched. Out there on the flat he could barely make out the scorched remains of Taco Riva’s body, where Riva had fallen off his horse with a bullet in his head and the fire had swept right over him. Heat had sucked the yellow fats out of Riva’s body and he was a pale unrecognizable mass out there with birds picking at him. Burgade turned left inside the fringe of the trees and began to work his way around toward the far side of the big meadow, where Provo had taken Susan last night. Most likely they weren’t still there, but it was the place to start tracking.
Eleven
Up here on the heights wind had stunted the trees and made them hunchbacked, and the steep earth was a spindly web of sunlight and shadow. The four of them stopped beside a rock parapet that commanded the western plain from the summit. From this high rim the redrock cliffs, smoothed and sanded by millennia of hard west winds, pitched down a thousand feet, almost vertically, into the dropaway mountains below and the desert plain beyond. The razorback summit was so narrow that from this vantage point Zach Provo could see across the divide in both directions, east and west, without moving his feet: the precipice to the west, the steplike tiers of wooded mountains to the east—the way they had just come.
Provo removed his tattered duster. The coat had flowed and flapped, ripped on nettles, hampered him terribly, but he had kept it because its pockets were filled with beef jerky and water flask, spyglass and rifle ammunition. He hadn’t salvaged much, there hadn’t been time with flames rushing maddeningly into camp, and he’d had his hands full with the girl. Now he took off the coat and threw it on the ground to free his arms and body from its hampering folds.
Menendez, seeing him throw the coat down, gave him a hooded look that indicated Menendez knew what the act meant. It meant this was as far as they were going.
Provo’s filthy shirt clung to him like the skin of a prune. In his way he had always been fastidious and the stink of himself offended him.
Chalk that up to Sam Burgade too, he thought, and glanced at Susan. She sat with loosely sprawled legs, rumpled, filthy, and too beaten to care. The wind blew her long hair across her face and she didn’t comb it away. There were raw red patches on her face and throat that must have come from Gant’s beard, and Shiraz’s and Quesada’s.
He took note of Menendez’s restless eyes combing the timber slopes behind. A few yards away, Mike Shelby sat down slowly, rocking with groggy fatigue. They were all living on their nerves.
Menendez said, “Let me have that glass, eh?” And put it to his eye and squinted. Following the direction of its aim, Provo saw he was looking down toward the big meadow four thousand feet below and more than four miles east—where they had camped before. It was a flat black waste now, all coals and ashes.
Menendez handed him the glass. “That little yellow patch,” he said, “that most be Taco. I thought I es-seen him go down las’ night. Focking bast—”
“He’s dead,” Provo said. “Cussing won’t help.” He folded the telescope and put it down: he didn’t need it to see the buzzards congregating around the three places on the slopes beyond the meadow. And there was a man on horseback coming up behind them: they had spotted him half an hour ago, a couple of miles below them, patiently tracking. If it was any of their own men he’d be coming along faster. It was Burgade, or Burgade’s partner, whoever that was.
Menendez said softly, “The viejo is quite a esstemwinder, ain’t he?” There was admiration in his voice.
Provo stared at him with eyes hard as glass.
Mike Shelby said in a cranky worn-out voice, “The bastard’s like some kind of mirage.” Shelby’s trousers were charred. He was whacked-out tired, but Provo could sense the tension in him: Shelby crouched like an exhausted beast still ready to spring.
Menendez moved to a new vantage point, clutching the rifle. It was the only one among them. They all had their handguns, but there was only the one rifle left, and that made it bad.
Shelby lifted his head with an effort. “Listen, we’ll never lose him, hell chase us clear to Canada.”
“Nobody can chase you if you don’t run,” Provo said.
“The hell. You want to stay put and end up like Gant and those others?”
“Nobody’s quitting. Not until I get his hide nailed to the barn.”
“Zach, we tried, it was no good. To hell with the old man.”
“I’m paying you to help me kill him.”
“You ain’t paid us nothing yet.”
“There’s thirty-eight thousand in gold left down there. Right down there within half a mile of where we camped. Three caches, two hundred yards apart. You want it, Mike?”