Sidewinder (19 page)

“You can see what you must do for both your pistol and your rifle, Carlos.”

“Yes. Much work.”

“Well, you are going to have to make do by yourself. Julio and I are going to track those rustlers. I’ll buy you another horse in Oro City. In the meantime, you’ll have to find a way to feed yourself while we’re gone.”

“There is no food here.”

“Fire doesn’t consume everything, my friend. You’ll have to go through all the buildings to find what you need. I can give you cartridges for your rifle. You may have to hunt. There is plenty of game in these mountains.”

“I will be a rat.”

Brad smiled.

“Yes, for a time. You have water. Build yourself a shelter up in the timber. You’ll probably find tools. Make do.”

“I will,” Carlos said.

Brad set the bucket down and looked around at the bunkhouses, his own house, and the barn. Make do, he thought, that’s all any of us can do right now. He felt sorry for Carlos, but Carlos could make do for a time, just as Brad would have to do. Carlos could find food and tools to keep him going until Brad and Julio returned with Pilar and Felicity.

Brad walked over to the razed barn and the watering trough.

“Did you find some grain, Julio?” he asked.

“Enough, I think.”

“We have to track those cattle as soon as we can.”

“I am ready.”

“It will be slow. We might have to walk the horses some of the way.”

“Yes. They are tired.”

“Carlos will have to stay here.”

“He can ride with me.”

“No. Riding double would wear Chato down too much. He will stay. You and I will go on.”

Julio looked toward Carlos and shook his head.

“Maybe you are right.”

Brad looked at the horses. He patted Ginger’s withers. Ginger whinnied.

“You’ll be all right, boy,” he said.

“Julio, let’s get the horses under saddle. I’m going to give Carlos some .44 cartridges. We’ll get him a new horse when we can.”

“It is good that you have the gold.”

“Yes,” Brad said.

They saddled the horses. Brad gave Carlos twenty .44 rifle cartridges, most of what little food they had left, and waved good-bye. He and Julio walked the horses down through the valley, crossed the creek, and then they mounted Ginger and Chato. Julio looked back at the smoking remains of the ranch. Brad did not. What was done, was done, he thought. Looking at the devastated buildings would not bring them back.

Julio muttered something to himself, an epithet or a prayer, Brad wasn’t sure which, and a faraway look came into his eyes before he turned his horse. Brad nodded that he understood and looked down at the ground.

“The tracking will be easy,” he said.

“Maybe,” Julio said.

“They can’t move fast.”

“Neither can we move fast,
jefe
.”

“We can move faster than two hundred head of cattle.”

“Where do the rustlers take them?”

“Good question. We’ll just have to find out for ourselves.”

The two men rode well into the afternoon. Both were hungry. They had filled their canteens, and both had some jerky and hardtack to sustain them until the next day at least.

Brad realized that Coombs and his bunch were already trying to hide their tracks, wading the cattle down the creek at times. But it was difficult to conceal so many cow tracks, not to mention those of the horses.

“Can you make out the hoofprints of Carlos’s horse, Julio?” Brad asked as he finished deciphering the different horse tracks.

“No.”

“There is a small nick in the shoe on Tico’s left hind leg.”

“And Rose?”

“That one,” Brad said, pointing to a hoofprint that was slightly blurred on the edges. “I was meaning to shoe Felicity’s horse when I got around to it. The shoes are worn down. The rustlers’ shoes are all pretty new.”

“I see it,” Julio said.

They walked the horses for a time, rode them slow when they were mounted.

Late in the afternoon, Brad ran into a maze of tracks, each going in different directions.

“Uh oh,” he said.

“What is wrong?” Julio asked.

“They split up the herd. Three different directions.”

“That is bad.”

“Damned bad,” Brad said. “Give me a few minutes to figure out which way Pilar and Felicity went.”

Brad walked over each set of tracks. It wasn’t easy. The three paths were a maze of cattle and horse spoor. It took a lot of time for him to figure out which horses went with each portion of the split-up herd. Julio waited, holding the reins of Brad’s horse while he studied the tracks.

Finally, Brad walked back and took his reins from Julio.

“Bad news, Julio.”

“Bad news?”

“We’re going to have to split up. I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is.”

“Why?”

“Felicity’s horse went south with about seventy-some-odd head. Pilar went in a different direction. I’ll show you the way.”

“This is not good,” Julio said.

“No. It means we split our forces. It will be dangerous for you.”

“And for you.”

“For both of us. But, we can’t just give up. Not now.”

“No, we do not give up, Brad.”

“No telling where they’re taking the cattle or our women.”

“We do not know, that is true.”

“Is this the way you want to do it? You follow Pilar, and I’ll follow Felicity?”

“I do not know what to do.”

“If we find one, we may lose the other.”

“That is true.”

“We must plan on meeting after we find our wives.”

“Yes. Where?”

“In Oro City. Two sets of tracks, the one where Pilar is, go toward town. I have to get a horse for Carlos.”

“Oro City, yes.”

“Do you know the cantina, High Grade?”

“Yes. I know it. It is where the miners take their cups.”

“Let’s give it two days. No matter what. You meet me at the High Grade.”

“I will have Pilar with me.”

“
Buena suerte
, Julio.”

“
Suerte
,” Julio said. “Have the luck.”

The two men said good-bye and started out on their separate paths.

Soon, Brad was alone, following a track that would dim with the dusk, fade in the dark. Julio would face the same dilemma. They would have to feel their way, ride blind much of the night.

Brad knew only one thing. Felicity rode with two men. If he could catch them off guard, he might have a chance to rescue his wife. That was the thought that kept him going long after the sun set and every bone in his body ached. He hoped the men he tracked would stop for the night and make camp, light a fire, bed the cattle down.

When the moon rose, he knew that he had hoped for too much.

The tracks went on into the darkest night of his life.

Brad heard the groans and grunts of the cattle long before he saw them. The sounds carried on the night air and they told him some of the story. The cattle were no longer moving. They were bunched up or corralled somewhere to the south of him. From the bellows and moos, he figured they were in a draw or some other tight space, crowded together.

He had no idea what time it was. The moon was high and thin, curved as a snipped-off fingernail, and the stars so close he could almost feel their cold glow on his face. It had turned chill, and he shivered in the light denim jacket he wore over his flannel shirt.

When he looked down at the ground, he saw that it had been dragged clean of tracks. He could barely make out the drag marks, but they were there, as if someone had pulled a wide board across the road. And it was a road; he knew now. How long he had been on a cut road, he didn’t know, but it might have been after he crossed a dry streambed that had seemed unusually wide

The darkness played tricks on a man’s eyes. Brad knew that, but he was surprised at himself for not noticing how the land had changed under his feet. He should have noticed the change of sound from his horse’s hoofbeats, the subtle change of vegetation. Had his mind wandered? Of course it had, he reasoned. He had thought of Felicity and Pilar and even of Carlos and Julio. They were men who had depended on him, not only for sustenance and jobs, but also for their safety. He had gone off, chasing after gold, and left the ranch at the mercy of rustlers and killers.

Yes, his mind had wandered, and he hadn’t realized that he was riding down a road. A man-made road, blasted out of a hill or mountain, graded, widened, flattened.

But now he knew. And he knew it was an old road, built for a purpose. In the starlight and the thin light of the moon, he could make out limestone bluffs off to his right, the talus-strewn ditch, the shards of shale that signified someone had used dynamite to take out a natural obstacle to the road.

He felt imprisoned by that road and the low cliffs. He felt as if he had ridden into a trap and mentally kicked himself for being a fool who had lost sight of his objective. Sure, he was tired, but he was also burning inside. Burning to rescue his wife, burning for vengeance, and sick at the loss of his home and his cattle. And Felicity.

He stopped for a moment and blinked his eyes several times to see if his night vision could be sharpened. He looked at trees and tried to find definition. He looked at the sky and then at the ground. Was that a bush or a man? Was that a cactus growing beside the road or a man lying on the ground with a rifle in his hands?

He could smell the cattle now. He could smell their offal and their hides. Now that he looked at the ground more carefully, he could see their cow pies swept to the ditch by some kind of wooden or metal drag. And, when he leaned down so his eyes were closer to the ground, he could make out a faint track or two of a horse or a cow.

How far away were the cattle? He did not know. Half a mile? A mile? Two? Hard to tell. But he could smell them, and if he could smell them, they were not far. And two men and a woman, his woman, would be with them.

He must be careful now. He knew that. The road ahead curved, and it might be a perfect place for an ambush. A man could sit there, behind a rock or a tree, and shoot Brad as he rounded the bend.

It seemed to get darker, and Brad knew he would be making a huge mistake to keep blindly riding down that man-made road. Despite his eagerness to rescue Felicity, he knew he had to stop, wait for daylight.

Or almost daylight.

If he was going to be of any help to Felicity, he had to be able to see.

Brad turned Ginger around and began looking for a place to bed down for the night. He rode back until he ran out of bluff and saw trees, a place to get off the road and hide out for the night. Get some rest. Rest Ginger.

He found such a place, and he marked his bearings when he left the road, making sure it was the road and not the wide streambed. He rocked in the saddle as Ginger climbed into the timber. On a level place, he took his bearings from the North Star. He would need to sleep facing east, so the first flicker of sun would wake him. He took his time looking for a suitable spot to lay out his bedroll and sleep until dawn.

And there was such a place on a small shelf of rimrock. A place where he could hobble Ginger on grass and be high enough so that he could look down on anyone who might approach during the night.

He left Ginger saddled, hobbled him, and climbed up onto the ledge, carrying his bedroll and rifle, his canteen and saddlebags. He walked up and down the rocky outcropping to make sure it was clear of snakes and scorpions. He laid out his bedroll, placed his saddlebags at one end. He used one of them, the softest, for a pillow and lay down. He pulled his wool blanket over him, set his pistol within reach under the unused saddlebag.

Ginger was quiet, grazing. If anyone tried to come up to where Brad was, the horse would whicker or whinny to warn him. He closed his eyes and felt the tiredness begin to seep from his legs and bones. A fresh breeze tugged at his hat, and he took it off, put small rocks on the brim. He lay back down and closed his eyes again.

He fell asleep, dreaming of golden rivers and green pastures, of a woman like Felicity running across a glacier field with wolves chasing her, and of a rifle in his hands that would not work, its mechanism falling apart, spilling to the ground as he ran through hard-rock canyons and over windswept hillocks crawling with spiders and snakes.

Brad awoke just before dawn as if he had an alarm clock in his brain. One moment he was sound asleep, and the next his eyes opened and the tips of the pines came into sharp focus. It was still dark, but he could see the sky becoming just a tinge lighter as if the blackness was slowly bleeding away with the first light of the unseen sun.

He grabbed his hat, plunked it on his head, pulled his pistol from under the saddlebag, holstered it, and walked off into the woods to relieve himself. He stretched his arms, yawned away the last dregs of sleepiness, rolled up his bed, hefted his saddlebags, rifle, and canteen, and slid on his butt the short way to the flat where Ginger lifted his head and nickered to him softly.