I knew she would not have left without me, and if someone or something had forced her to leave, there should still have been tracks.
Horror crept over me. I could feel its ghostly hand crawling on my spine and neck muscles. Some awful thing had happened here, some terrible, frightful thing. The ruthless pursuit of me, the wiping out of tracks here, all of it spoke of a crime; only I refused to allow myself to think of what the crime might be.
Stiffly, I began to move. I would find the camp of those men and see if Ange was there; in any case, I would see who my enemies were.
The wagon and the stock must surely be there.
Turning, I started with a lunge, only to have the end of my staff slip on the icy ground. I fell heavily, barely stifling a scream. My hands fought for a grip on the frozen ground and I struggled to get up, and then I must somehow have slipped over on my face and lost consciousness, for when I awoke the sun was shining.
For a time I lay there, letting the sun soak away the chill in my bones, but only half aware of my surroundings. Slowly realization came to me: I was a hunted man, and here I lay almost in the open, at the foot of a pine tree.
Carefully, I started to turn my head. A wave of sickness swept over me, but I persisted.
My eyes came to a focus. There was no sound but the wind in the pines. The clearing was there before me, and it was empty.
My mind was alert now, and in the broad daylight I carefully skirted the clearing. There were no tracks anywhere, none to show our arrival, none to show how the wagon had left. It had simply vanished.
I was without weapons, without food, without clothing or shelter, but all I could think of was Ange.
Somebody had been so desperate to have her disappear that every evidence of our presence there had been wiped out.
An hour later, I was at the clearing where their camp had been the night before, but now all were gone.
At least a dozen men had slept there, and there were tracks in profusion. Cigarette butts were scattered about, a coffeepot had been emptied, and a crust of bread lay upon the ground.
But there were no wagon tracks, no tracks of small boots for which I searched. And knowing Ange, I knew that she would somehow have contrived to leave a track. She knew me, knew my methods, knew my thoroughness when on trail ... and yet, there was nothing. Wherever she was, Ange had never been in this camp.
How could a wagon loaded with more than a ton of supplies, drawn by six big Missouri mules, disappear from a mesa that offered only two or three possible ways by which a wagon might leave it?
Somehow my impression was growing that these men knew nothing of Ange or the wagon. So what then? What had happened? Where was Ange? And who had shot me, and why?
Andwith these questions there were the others: Why were these men hunting me to kill me? Had they gone for good?
Or would they be back?
My hunch was that the search had only begun.
Such a desperate search would not be ended that quickly.
I moved off through the trees, hobbling painfully, crawling over fallen logs, occasionally pausing to rest.
When I had left the wagon to scout for a route off Buckhead Mesa, a route into the Tonto Basin, I had skirted the mesa itself and had seen a deep canyon leading off to the southwest. It was all of five hundred feet deep, and it appeared to be wild and impassable, but there was a creek along the bottom. There would be water there, there would be game, there would be fish.
I could no longer look to the wagon for relief. From now on I was completely on my own, alone and without any possible help. And I was surrounded by enemies unknown to me.
By nightfall of a bitterly long day I had found a cave under a natural bridge. The bridge was a tremendous arch of travertine at least a hundred and eighty feet above the waters of the creek, and the cave was a place where a man might hide and where no trouble would come to him unless from some wandering bear or mountain lion. It was a place hidden by brush and the rock slabs all about, a place littered with dead trees brought down by flash floods.
Using the bow and drill method, I started a small fire, and felt warmth working into my muscles. The warmth of the sun had brought some relief from the chill, but not very much.
Making a basin by bending together the corners of a sheet of bark, I heated some water and carefully bathed my hands, then lowered my pants and looked at my leg. It was almost black from bruising, and it was swollen to half again its natural size.
For perhaps an hour I sat there, soaking my wounds with a washcloth made from the remnants of my shirt. Whether it would help I did not know, but it felt good.
Then after carefully extinguishing my tiny fire, I put together a bed of evergreen boughs and crawled onto it. I fell into a fitful, troubled sleep.
Hunger woke me from a night of tormented dreams, but first of all I heated water and bathed my leg again, and drank warm water to heat my chilled body. It began to seem as if I would never be warm again, and though I was hungry, what I longed for most was clothing--warm, soft, wonderful clothing.
Sitting there, applying hot cloths to my wounds, I got to thinking on the reason for that attack on me.
As a general run, motives weren't hard to understand there on the frontier. Things were pretty cut and dried, and a body knew where he stood with folks. He knew what his problems were, and the problems of those about him were about the same. A man was too busy trying to stay alive and make some gain, to have time to think much about himself or get his feelings hurt. It seems to me that as soon as a man gets settled down, with meat hung out to smoke and flour in the bin, he starts looking for something to fuss about.
Well, it wasn't that way on the frontier.
A man could be just as mean as he was big enough to be; but if he started out to be bad he'd better be big enough or tough enough, if he figured to last.
Such folks were usually given time to reach for a gun or they were tucked into a handy noose. I've noticed that the less a man has to worry about getting a living, the more time he has to worry about himself.
Folks on the frontier hadn't any secret sins. The ones who were the kind for such things stayed close to well populated places where they could hide what they were. On the frontier the country was too wide, there was too much open space for a body to be able to cover anything up.
But now somebody wanted me dead, and it was apparently that same somebody who had taken my wagon away, and Ange with it.
I could understand a man wanting a wagon, or a man wanting Ange, and it wasn't ungallant of me to think it was more likely to be the wagon and outfit than Ange. And there was reason for that.
One thing a man didn't do on the frontier was molest a woman, even an all-out bad woman.
Women were scarce, and were valued accordingly. Even some pretty mean outlaws had been known to kill a man for jostling a woman on the street.
Pretty soon my leg was feeling better.
It was easier to handle, and some of the swelling was gone.
Toward noontime I found me a rabbit. I twisted him out of a hole with a forked stick, broiled him, and ate him. But a man can't live on rabbits. He needs fat meat.
Several times I saw deer, and once a fat, healthy elk, a big one that would dress two hundred and fifty pounds at least. But what I hunted was something smaller. I couldn't use that much meat, and anyway, I had nothing with which to make a kill.
The afternoon was almost gone and weariness was coming over me when I fetched up at a rocky ledge below a point of Buckhead Mesa. Pine Creek and its wild canyon lay north and west of me, the mesa at my back.
Night was a-coming on, and I wished myself back at my cave. Just as I was fixing to turn back, I smelled smoke. Rather, it was the smell of charred timber, a smell that lingers for days, sometimes for weeks after a burning. That smell can be brought alive again by dampness or rainfall. I knew that somebody had had a fire, and close by.