from the Listening Hills (Ss) (2004) (12 page)

SUDDENLY DOPEY HISSED: "Okay, Tony, there's the guy."

"You think! When you see Doreen comin', let me know. I'm not interested 'til then."

He suddenly found himself wishing it was over. He always felt like this at the last minute. Jumpy. Prizefighters felt that way before the bell. Nerves. But when the gun started to jump he was all right. He caressed the finned blue steel of the barrel lovingly.

"Get set, Tony, here she comes!" The powerful motor came to life, purring quietly.

Kinsella sat up and rolled down the window. The cool evening air breathed softly across his face. He looked up at the stars, and then glanced both ways, up and down the street. It was all clear.

A tall, broad-shouldered fellow stood on the corner. Tony could see Doreen coming. She was walking fast. Probably she was nervous too. That big guy. That would be him. Tony licked his lips and lifted the ugly black muzzle of the submachine gun. Its cold nose peered over the edge of the window. He saw a man walk out of the drugstore, light a cigar, and stroll off up the street. Tony almost laughed as he thought how funny it would be if he were to start shooting then, how startled that man would be!

There! Doreen was talking to the man on the corner. Had one hand on his sleeve...smiling at him.

God, dames were coldblooded! In a couple of minutes that guy would be kicking in his own gore, and she was putting him on the spot and smiling at him!

Suddenly she turned away and started for the drugstore on some excuse or other. As she passed through the door she was almost running. The car was moving swiftly now, gliding toward the curb, the man looked up, and the gun spouted fire. The man threw up his arms oddly, jerked sharply, and fell headlong. McFadden wheeled the car and they drove back, the machine gun spouting fire again. The body, like a sack of old clothes, jerked as the bullets struck.

THE NEXT MORNING Tony lay on his back staring at the ceiling. He wondered where Doreen was. Probably the papers were full of the Robbins killing. Slowly he crawled out of bed, drew on his robe, and retrieved the morning paper from his apartment door. His eyes sought the headliners, blaring across the top in bold type:

GANG GUNS SLAY FEDERAL OPERATIVE.

MACHINE GUNS GET WATSON WITNESS.

Tony's eyes narrowed. A federal man, eh? That wasn't so good. Who would have thought Robbins was a federal man? Still, they were never where you expected them to be. Probably he'd been working a case on Baronski when Corney bumped him off. That would be it.

His eyes skimmed the brief account of the killing. It was as usual. They had no adequate description of either Doreen or the car. Then his eyes glimpsed a word in the last paragraph that gripped his attention. His face tense, he read on.

Slowly, he looked up. His eyes were blank. His face looked old and strained. Walking across to the table he picked up his heavy automatic, flipped down the safety, and still staring blankly before him, put the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

His body toppled across the table, the blood slowly staining the crumpled paper and almost obliterating the account of the Robbins killing. The final words of the account were barely visible as the spreading stain wiped it out:

"A fact unknown until the killing was that Jack Robbins, witness for the prosecution in the Baronski killing, was in reality George Bretherton, a Federal operative recently arrived from the Pacific Coast and working on his first case. He is survived by a brother whose present whereabouts are unknown."

-

From the Listening Hills

THE HUNTED MAN lay behind a crude parapet in a low-roofed, wind-eroded cave on the north slope of Tokewanna Peak. One hundred yards down the slope, at an approximate altitude of eleven thousand feet, just inside a fringe of alpine fir, were scattered the hunting men.

The bare, intervening stretch of rock was flecked here and there with patches of snow. Within the fringe of trees but concealed from his view except for the faint wisps of smoke, were the fires of his pursuers.

Boone Tremayne had no fire, nor at this time dared he make one, for as yet his position was not exactly known to the armed men.

It was very cold and he lay on his stomach, favoring his left side where the first bullet had torn an ugly wound. The second bullet had gone through his thigh, but his crude bandages as well as the cold had caused the bleeding to stop.

A low wind moaned across the rock, stirring the icy bits of snow on the cold flanks of the peak which arose two thousand feet above and behind him. Within the low cave it was still light, and Boone Tremayne clutched the stub of pencil and looked down at the cheap tablet at his elbow.

He must write with care, for what he wrote now would be all his son, as yet unborn, would ever know of his father and uncles. He would hear the stories others would tell, and so it would be important for him to have some word in his father's hand.

The pencil clutched awkwardly in his chilled fingers, he began to write:

"It's getting mighty cold up here, Son, and my grub's about gone. My canteen's still half full, but it ain't no use, they've done got me.

"Time to time I can hear them down in the brush. There must be a hunert of them. Seems an awful lot of folks to git one lone man. If I only had Johnny here I wouldn't feel so bad. Johnny, he always sort of perked a feller up no matter how bad things got.

"Except for you, I'm the last of the Tremaynes. Somehow it ain't so lonely up here knowing there's to be a son of mine somewheres.

"Now, Son, your ma is a mighty good woman as well as a pretty one. I never figured, no way you look at it, to get such a girl as Marge. If she'd married up with Burt, or Elisha, I'd no-ways have blamed her. They were the pick of the lot, they were.

"Just had me a look down there an' I reckon they are gitting set to rush me. Wished they wouldn't. I never aimed to kill nobody. They figured to hang me if I'm got alive, and I promised Ma I'd never stretch no rope. Least a man can do is die with his face toward them who aims to kill him."

Boone Tremayne put down the stub of pencil and chafed his cold fingers, peering through the stacked flakes of rock he had heaped into a wall before the opening. The cold was all through him now, and he knew he would never be warm again. That was okay, he had this one last job to do...and then he no longer cared. The wind whispered to the snow and then he saw a man, bulky with a heavy coat, lunge from the trees and come forward in a stumbling run.

A second man started as the first dropped behind a shelf of rock, and Boone put his cheek against the cold stock of the Winchester and squeezed off his shot. He put the bullet through the man's leg, saw the leg buckle and saw the man fall. Another started and Boone dropped him with a bullet through the shoulder.

He gnawed at his lip and stared, hollow-eyed and gaunt, at the shelf of rock where the first man had fallen. "Reckon I'd best let you git cold, too, mister," he said, and flicked a glancing shot off the rock over the man's head. That would let him know he had been seen, that it would be dangerous to try moving.

He shifted his position, favoring his wounded side and leg. Nobody moved, and the afternoon was waning. At night they would probably come for him. He glanced at the sullen gray sky. There was still time.

"It started over a horse. We Tremaynes always found ourselves good horse flesh. Johnny, he ketched this black colt in the hills near Durango. Little beauty, he was, and Johnny learned him well and entered him in a race we always had down around there.

"Dick Watson, him and his brothers, they fancied horses too and one of Dick's horses had won that race four years running. We all bet a sight of money. Not so much, when you figure it, but a mighty lot for us, who never had much cash in hand. Johnny's black just ran off and left Watson's horse, and Watson was mighty put out.

"He said no horse like that ever run wild, and that Johnny must of stole him somewheres. Johnny said no he never and that Watson's horse just wasn't all that fast. Watson said that if Johnny wasn't such a boy, him being just sixteen, he'd whup him good. Then our brother Burt, he stepped up. Burt was a mighty big, fine figure of a man. He stepped up and said he wasn't no boy, if it was a fight Watson wanted.

"Well, Burt, he beat the tar out of Dick Watson. There was hard words said, and Ma, she reckoned we all better git for home. We did, an' everything went along for a time. Until that black was found dead. Somebody shot her down in the pasture. Shot her from clost up.

"Johnny, he was all for going to town and gitting him a man, but Ma, she said no and Burt and Lisha, they sided with her. But Johnny...well, it was some days afore he tuned up that mouth organ of his. And when he done it, it was all sad music.

"We wasn't cattlemen, Son, not like other folks around. We was farmers and trappers, or bee hunters, anything there was to git the coon. Mostly, them days, we farmed and between crops we went back in the high meadows and rounded us up wild horses.

"They was thousands of them, Son. Land sakes, I wished you could of seen them run! It were a sight too beautiful for man to look upon. We rounded up a sight of them, but we never kept but a few. We'd pick the youngest and prettiest. We'd gentle them down with kindness and good grass and carrots, then we'd break them. My Pap, he broke horses for a gent in Kentucky, a long time ago and he knew a goer and a stayer. I guess none of us ever did forgit that little black mare.

"Now that horse was shot clost up. It was no accident. And no man would kill a good horse like that. Except for if he done it in pure meanness. And who had him a reason? Dick Watson. That black mare beat Watson's horse once and he would do it again. Johnny, he never said much, but from that day on he packed him a gun, and he never had afore.

"Them boys down in the bresh is fixing to move. Gitting cold I reckon."

Boone Tremayne's head throbbed with fever and he stared through the chinks in the flaked rock. The man under the ledge stirred cautiously and Boone put a shot down there to keep him from stretching out too much. He rubbed his hands and blew upon the fingers. A man moved in the brush and Boone laid a bullet in close to the ground., Bullets hailed around his shelter, most of them glancing off the rocks, but one got inside and ricocheted past his head. A hair closer and he would have been dead.

Flat on his belly he stuffed the tablet and pencil in his pocket and crawled along the bottom of the shallow cave. Painfully, he wormed his way along the cave for thirty yards and found a place where it was a few inches deeper and where some animal or bird had long since gathered sticks for a nest or home. Gathering some of the dead sticks together, Boone built a fire.

The long-dead wood made little smoke and the tiny flame was comforting. Later, when it was dark the reflection would give him away so he tried to shield it with rocks as much as he could. He held his blue and shaking fingers almost in the flame, but it was a long time before any warmth reached him.

They were waiting now, waiting for darkness. He must finish his letter. There would be no time later.

"Mighty cold, Son, I've moved a mite and got me a fire. Well, the black was dead but we had us about forty head of good horses ready to move. Sam and Lisha, they set out for Durango. We figured to buy Ma a new dress for her birthday and to get us some tools we needed and other fixings. Going in the boys had to drive past the DW where the Watsons ranched. They seen Dick a-watching them, but thought nothing of that at the time.

"Well, when they got into Durango the sheriff come high-tailing it up with five, six men, all armed heavy. They tell the boys they are under arrest for stealing horses. The boys tell them they trained them horses, that they was wild stock afore. The sheriff and that bunch with him, one of them was a Watson, they just laughed.

"Well, the boys was throwed in jail, but the sheriff, he wouldn't let them get word to the rest of us. Only Johnny, he got to thinking and when the boys was slow gitting back, he mounts up and heads for town. But they was ready for him, the Watsons was.

"Johnny, he seen the horses in the corral, and he high-tails it for the sheriff. The sheriff is out of town, maybe a-purpose, and Johnny, he goes into the T-Diamond Saloon. And there's three Watsons and two brothers-in-law of theirs, all setting around.

"These brothers-in-law, one named Ebberly, the other Boyd. This Boyd was some gun-slinger or had that reputation. Johnny, he never knowed them at all, but he knowed the Watsons. He asked the barkeep where was his brothers, and Dick Watson speaks up and says they are in jail for stealing horses, where he'll soon be. Johnny, he knows what Ma would say, and remarkable for him, keeps his head. He says nothing and turns to go and Dick Watson says, "Like you stole that black mare.'

"The three Watsons are spread out and ready. He seen then it was a trap, but still he never knowed those other two which sat quiet near the door, never saying I, yes, or no. Johnny, he says, "I trained that black mare, Watson, an' you kilt her. You snuck up an' shot that pore little horse dead.'

""I never!' Watson says, and folks say he looked mighty red in the face. "You're a liar!'

"Watson grabbed iron and so did Johnny. The Watsons, they got three bullets into Johnny, but he still stood, so this Boyd, he shoots him in the back. Johnny went down, but there was two Watsons on the floor, one dead, and Dick badly hurt.