Flint (1960) (14 page)

Still, if he himself could find Kettleman, maybe Kettleman would pay to stay lost. It was a thought.

All the way home he cherished the thought and developed it, at the same time a cool rational wind blew through the dark places of his brain. Kettleman had been quick to use that pistol at Saratoga, and by all accounts he was a man of decisive mind. He just might decide to use the pistol instead of paying blackmail. The more Epperman considered that possibility the more uncomfortable he became.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed rubbing his feet when he remembered the man on the train.

Chapter
10

Dusk came slowly to Kaybar. From the far bills, a coyote called. A nighthawk swooped and dived in the air just overhead, and the bats were coming out. Otero loitered on his way to the stable as if to feed stock, and saddled their horses.

Thomas assured them he would be no trouble, and Flint went to Flynn's room. The foreman was barely conscious and it was foolish to move him, yet he could not be left behind.

"You don't know me," Flint said, standing over Flynn, "but I found you on the trail after you'd been shot."

"Thanks." The word was barely whispered.

"What I want to say is, we've got to move you. Shortly after dark the ranch will be attacked and they will fire the house. We have to be far from here. We're going to the Hole-in-the-Wall."

"Leave me -- with a rifle. Or move me." Flynn paused to breathe deeply, and then whispered, "Stand by her ... like my own daughter."

He closed his eyes for several minutes. "Gladys. Nobody else knew I was going. She told them."

Big Julius Bent, strangely gentle for such a big man, assisted by Juana, dressed Flynn for the ride.

Nancy planned quickly and surely. Flint passed in and out of the kitchen but made no suggestion because none was needed. Food, medicines, material for bandages, blankets, canteens, matches. Only when the horses were packed and dusk was down around them did she pause to look about. "It is the only home I have ever known."

"You can build again."

"Of course." She looked at him quickly. "One does not surrender, Jim. One has to go on."

He considered that. Had he surrendered? But his death was inevitable. Or so they said. There was no cure. But people had recovered despite all the medical prophecies. Was it mental? Was it faith? Or was it some chemical within the body that could be summoned by faith or by the will?

The West held many stories of men critically wounded who had survived when thought beyond all hope.

The will to live ... it was there, and with it perhaps any disease, any illness might be defeated.

Nancy and the men moved out into greater darkness, going slowly because of the wounded. Flint remained behind with Pete Gaddis to fire a few shots and give an appearance of defense. They did not plan to remain more than a few minutes.

Lying on the veranda at a corner of the house, Flint thought how quickly a man takes on the qualities of darkness! Men who live by night, the soldier, the thief, the traveler by night, the vagabond ... theirs is a different way of thinking, and they do not fear the dark nor what may come upon them by night because they themselves are of the night, a part of it.

He had been like this long ago, and then had lost it while living in lighted places, and in comfortable surroundings. Now it was creeping into him again, becoming a part of him. He was no longer a stranger to the night, he was himself a shadow, a creeper by night, a thing to which the darkness was a comfort and a surrounding defense.

There came, off to the left, an inquiring shot. Lifting his heavy rifle, he drew a careful bead on the source of the shot, knowing if the man was an Indian fighter he would have moved by now, and he squeezed off the shot, then instantly fired to right and left. He heard a startled cry, more of alarm than pain.

Gaddis stirred. "What do you think?" he asked.

"Give them one. Then we'll go."

They moved out, walking their horses where dust lay, Gaddis using his memory of the ranch to choose the route.

Gaddis was quiet, the coyote out on the ridge was still, the bats and nighthawks were invisible now in the cloaking darkness. They were accompanied only by the hoof falls of their horses and the creak of saddle leather.

"You hunting somebody?" Gaddis asked suddenly.

Now what did that mean? Flint waited a moment before replying and then said, "No ... there's nothing I want that anyone can give me."

They climbed a little, and when they were on a level again, working among the trees with only the stars listening, Flint said, "I'd like to help that girl. Believe me, I would."

They came up on the others suddenly. Far behind they heard another questioning shot. Then they saw the shadows of the bunched horses, and Flint was beside Nancy. They moved off at once.

"It is good of you to help. It isn't your fight."

"I no longer know whose fight it is. Maybe injustice is everyone's fight, now and forever."

"Who are you, Jim?"

He considered the question with wry humor. Who was he? A fair question, but a difficult one. He was nobody. He was a man without a name of his own, born of parents somewhere, somehow, but with no heritage of reputation, or love.

"I am nobody," he said, "I am nobody at all."

And soon he would be less than that. He would be dust -- a skeleton lying in a stone house in a secret place behind the dead lava.

"You have a family?"

"I never had a family." Only a wife that wanted him dead. "There is nobody," he added, "there never has been."

"You must have friends?"

Well, the original Flint was a friend. Or was he? He did not know how Flint himself would have answered that.

"Maybe. I think I did. I believe I had one friend."

"Had?"

"He was killed. But that was long ago, and almost in another world than this."

Nancy was mystified. There was an isolation about him, an aloofness, something she could not touch. Nor was there any reaching out in him, any grasping for love. Only this strange withdrawing. She had the feeling that he shrank from getting too close to people.

Flint. Even the name had a lonely sound.

Where had he come from? What did he want? Where was he going? Why was he here? And where was "here"?

He glanced back and saw the glow on the sky. Her eyes followed his. She drew up and watched it. "My father and uncle built that ranch with their own hands. I wonder if hope and ambition and memories and dreams catch fire, too?"

He watched the glow. "They are the intangibles. Nothing, not even fire, can destroy a dream."

A single shot sounded, then the quick reply of several rifles. She caught his arm. "Jim, one of my boys is back there."

"He's all right, believe me. And if he's not, there is nothing we could do but go back and get ourselves shot at. No." He paused, listening to the night. "Whoever it is came upon them firing the ranch. He knows you are not there or there would be shooting at the ranch, so he is just taking a few shots for himself."

"Will he get away?"

"I think so. He knows they are there, and he knows you aren't. I think he planned what he would do before he fired those shots and by now he is probably a half-mile from where he was."

Gaddis was waiting when they caught up. "You've got to know where to ride when you cross the lava," he said, "some of this solid-looking stuff is eggshell thin. Here and there you can see places where the roof of some blister has fallen in, leaving a pit nothing could climb out of."

Gaddis led the way up on to the lava. Their hoof-beats sounded like iron upon iron as they followed in single file. They went only a short distance, then descended into a hollow where there was dampness in the air and their horses rode through grass.

"The trail was smoothed long ago," Gaddis said. "Some Indian before Columbus came, probably. You have to know how to find it."

Firelight flickered on Otero's face when they dismounted. They were deep into the great twelve-thousand-acre pasture, surrounded by walls of lava nowhere less than twenty feet high.

"Do your other riders know this place?"

"Most of them. They have been with us for years, and when a man works range as long as they have, they get to know it. Also" -- she gestured -- "this was used to hide cattle from Utes and Apaches. The Hopi and Zuni Indians knew of the place, I think, but the raiders were always strangers."

Bent was breaking branches to make a bed for Flynn. Thomas had propped himself against a pine trunk and was building a smoke. His face looked ghastly under the leather-brown skin, but when he caught Flint's eye he winked.

"My advice is to sit tight. I'm pulling out."

Nancy turned on him. "You're leaving?"

"I want to send a telegram."

Gaddis was watching Flint make coffee. "I'd say more coffee. We like it strong."

Flint added more coffee, glancing up at Gaddis. "Something bothering you?"

Gaddis' eyes seemed to shade over. "Should there be?"

Flint got up. "Not that I know of, Gaddis."

He walked away from them toward the mare. She looked beat. She had been ridden steadily of late and she was no longer young. He made his decision then. He was going to ride the red stallion.

Sending the telegram would destroy his carefully arranged disappearance. Everyone would know where he was. But they would never know about the hideout in the lava bed. Once the land fight was over he could go there to die, as planned.

The trouble was Flint did not feel like dying. He had been warned that when his time grew near he would feel better, and there would be less pain.

He wanted to live. There lay the trouble. Before he had not cared. The prospect of death had been almost a relief after the failure of his one grasp for happiness.

The reason was obvious. Nancy Kerrigan made the difference, and even if he were to live he could not marry her.

She came to the fire just then, stretching her fingers to the warmth of the flames. "What can we do, Jim?"

He put a few drops of cold water into the coffee to settle the grounds. "Leave it to me," he said.

"What can you do against them all?"

"They aren't so many. In any such fight it is not only what you do, it is where and how you do it. An enemy has many fronts, and if one seems impregnable, attack on another."

Hoofbeats sounded and Gaddis reached a hand for his rifle. Flint faded into the shadows, waiting.

Two riders showed suddenly at the edge of the firelight. "Our boys," Gaddis said, and Flint recognized one of them as Scott. The other was introduced as Rockley. Scott was a powerfully built man who rarely smiled; Rockley, narrow-faced, with a wry twist of humor to his lips and a dry way of speaking. Both were seasoned men.

"Mornin', ma'am," Rockley said. "Nice weather for a picnic."

"How's Ed?" Scott asked.

"He stood the ride better than we expected." Nancy indicated the pot. "The coffee's fresh, hot, strong enough to float a mule shoe."

Scott walked to his horse and stripped off the saddle. As he did so he glanced at Flint, who was tightening the cinch on the mare. "Better ride Flynn's horse. Your mare's done up."

"I've another horse."

Rockley glanced at Gaddis but said nothing. He was wondering what they all were. Where did Flint keep his other horse? And who was Flint?

Flint returned to the fire for a cup of coffee, and picked up his rifle. Rockley glanced at it enviously. "That's quite a weepon. You never bought that on cowhand's wages."

Flint looked over at the cowhand and smiled, realizing with surprise it was the first time he had smiled at any of them.

"I could if I robbed stages and got away with it," he said. "But that wasn't how I got it."

"No." Rockley shot him an appraising glance. "I'd not say it was."

Flint put down his cup and, with the rifle in the hollow of his arm, walked to the horse and took up the bridle. He did not look at Nancy, just started away.

"Come back soon, Jim," she said.

He walked away, making no response. How could he promise to come back? No matter how much he might wish to return, how could he promise?

Rockley filled his cup again. "Six-Shooter brand -- that's one I never heard of."

Gaddis said nothing at all, watching the rider walk away across the shimmering grass. Day had come, but he was not thinking of that. He was thinking that he liked this man, and he might have to kill him.

"I'd say that was pretty much of a man," Rockley said. "I don't know where he came from, but wherever it is they cut them wide and deep."

Scott said nothing, watching Gaddis with curious eyes.

"I'm a right curious man," Rockley said, "and I'm wondering where a man could leave a horse and be sure he was still there?"

"He said something about sending a telegram," Thomas said. "He didn't say where."

They were silent then, and they could hear Flynn's heavy breathing. If he survived this ride, it would be a miracle.