The Eye of the Hunter (24 page)

“Turn around, Gorman. Face the brush.” He got up and made sure Budge was not armed. “Now take your boots off. I'll leave them a half mile up the road.”

“You can't—”

“What's this map?” Henry shook it at him.

“Oh—I wasn't supposed to give you that. It's where his new command post is going to be.”

Henry held it to the light, noticing at the bottom of the page the word
DESTROY. Tactical error, General! Did you forget Budge can't read? Wait a minute, though. The man is a fox. Did he really want me to get the map, to set me up for an ambush?

“What do you know about the new CP?” he asked Gorman. “What's out there?”

“Parrish's gun. Where it's marked on the map ... little drawing of a rifle?”

Henry saw it, an inch-long lever-action rifle. The details painstakingly drawn and shaded. By a man trying to think something out? “And the rifle is his CP? Doesn't make sense.”

“Does to him. Hey Logan, about my boots—I'll board your horse free for six months if—”

“No. Is she all right?”

“Yeah. She just set there reading a book and playing a mandolin.”

“What was he going to do with her?”

“Never said a damned word about it.”

Henry shouted, “Then why is he holding her?”

“Don't know, Logan! He never said.”

Henry took himself in hand. “All right. I'm going on now. Does this trail you're coming in on go direct to the CP? Better tell me straight—the general is waiting there for me.”

“Yes, only I lost it about where my horse keeled over. You'll see him. Pick it up there.”

“Some men'll be coming along soon. This is very important: Tell them to go to the ranch and stay there. But not to go to the command post! Understand that?”

“I understand, Henry.”

“What are you to tell them?”

“Not to go to the CPo Stay at the ranch.”

“Good. Take this message from the general, and when you see the men, tell them to read it carefully. They'll understand why they must, under no conditions, go out there. What are you to tell them?”

“Stay at the ranch! I ain't dumb, Logan.”

No, you're way past dumb
, thought Henry.
You're crazy
.

After a first, agonized vision of Frances as a hostage—bound, gagged, and blindfolded, terrified as she waited to hear the rattle of a gun bolt—Henry refused point-blank the possibility of her being hurt in any way. He put all his energies into reaching the church before dawn.

It was a quarter to nine when he left the road, and Gorman said it had taken him four hours to ride to where he had hit the wagon road. But Gorman had killed his horse, so he'd better count on five or six hours at a reasonable gait. Even a steady jog should see him in the wash below the church by two or three
A.M.

Now and then one of the horses's shoes would strike a stone and sparks would fly, and the big red dun would stumble and recover its balance. The mountain night was still and clear and utterly silent, the sky blazing with hard, blue-white stars and a phosphorescent Milky Way. A sweetish smell rose from the brush and nighthawks flicked past.

When he thought of Frances again, he took an angry swipe at a scrub oak with his carbine.

A moment later the dun sidled and began making nervous snorts. Henry talked to it, dug his thumb into the big nerve on its withers, working it past the dead animal lying half in and half out of the brush. The horse settled down but he thought,
What if he gives out? What if he falls and breaks a leg? Breaks mine, too?

To settle himself down, he tried to concentrate on the general and the insane duel they would fight at dawn.

For some reason he had no doubt that as far as ground rules went, Stockard would make a clean fight. Feeling so sure of his tactical superiority, he had no need to cheat. But once they touched swords—

He thought again of the general's conditions for releasing Frances, and realized his claim to tactical skill was legitimate: Thought it seemed rash to stay around and lure his adversary into a duel, knowing that in a day or two a posse would consider Frances dead, and close in on him, he had created a situation entirely within his control.

The object was to prove himself superior to the Kansas City gunsmith, both as a sharpshooter and a tactician. So, with too little time for a prolonged cat-and-mouse hunt, the problem had been to get them both into a small area. Otherwise, considering the vastness of the dueling ground, the stalking could go on for days.

The arena he had chosen was the ground around the cemetery. Henry would have to stay close to it until he knew that Frances had been released. But that would be so close to dawn that he would not dare crawl around among dry branches and loose rock and risk being picked off as he sought strategic leverage.

Stockard had him where he wanted him—and the duel had not even started.

His own advantage, he reckoned, was that he had acquired the map—knew where Stockard's alleged “command post” was located—where a second gun would be hidden. Yet even that might be part of the general's cunning: feeding him false information. And why the hell, he wondered, should Stockard bother with a second gun? To set in motion some bizarre tactic he had been dreaming of for years?

Henry swore. Trying to decode the message of the map was like cracking walnuts with his teeth. Yet that second rifle had to have some special meaning to Stockard—be part of a maneuver so original that it would go down in military history as Stockard's Gambit, a trick to make it absolutely clear that for strategy he was right up there with Leonidas at Thermopylae.

However! Had he forgotten that Budge Gorman couldn't read? That he couldn't have understood the underlined word,
DESTROY
, at the bottom of the map? In this case, it would be Henry who had the advantage....

If ...

By midnight he was in the brushy canyons and stony ridges south of the church. Since the general had no idea from which direction his opponent would be coming, it seemed unlikely that he would be hoping to spring an ambush.

Henry managed to read his watch by starlight, and figured that with luck he would have a half hour of darkness in which to find the trap, test its teeth, try to fathom why it was there.

West of the church, the wash bottlenecked down and the hills on both sides overhung the little stream. The hillsides were dotted with small trees and rocks which in the darkness were almost indistinguishable. He rode through them with care, his head swiveling back and forth like an owl's.

But when he reached the bottom of the wash, he found it too brushy to ride. The stream itself was choked in manzanita thickets. He would crawl downstream through them if necessary, but the dun could not crawl, so he left him on the hillside above the thickets, tied him so that he could not wander in and spoil the chess game.

He put the gun on safety before entering the thickets. A twig could fire a gun as well as a man's finger. Moving with care, he twisted and crawled a passage through the brittle manzanita. Underfoot were rocks and a mat of dry leaves. Once he was blocked by a manzanita branch he could not get over, under, or through. He started whittling on it, but manzanita was tough wood, and he spent ten minutes cutting through it. Finally he was able to bend it cautiously and break the last few fibers. He moved the branch aside and crawled on.

The streambed grew dry; the creek had gone underground. Every few yards he had to stop, hold his breath, and listen. Then he would struggle a little farther through the thicket. The tension he felt was exactly like that of a night patrol. Finally he felt his feet getting cold and wet, and knew the stream had resurfaced.

That meant he had reached the crossing below the church.

He rose to his feet and took a long, painstaking look at the cliffs. High above, on his left, the cliff leaned away from the gorge, and he knew the ruins were up there.

A stone's throw ahead, the thickets ended, and he could see the shine of water in the middle of the sandy wash. Foot by foot, with held breath, he moved downstream until the sniper's dome was on his right. Stockard would not be up there tonight. Though the butte commanded the whole county, he had no spotter this time to guide his shots.

He was down here somewhere. Or up in the cemetery; or in the church. Or would he consider Rip's stone house a good ambuscade? And what about the mine?

He felt a powerful foreboding that the man was close, and he slipped the safety off the carbine and, still in the middle of the stream, went to one knee. He was now technically behind enemy lines. The challenger had had all night to stretch his trip wires and set his traps, and the darkness was profound. He rose to steal farther downstream, breathing shallowly and with extreme care and moving with exaggerated caution. Chilled and soaked, each foot explored the sand before setting itself.

There was a sudden, eerie change in the feel of the air. He halted.

The sound of a breeze in the piñon trees was part of the difference, for the feeling of being enclosed had lessened. Was he feeling and hearing the meadowlike opening of the side canyon? He felt sure he was. From here on he was like an infantry point man whose sole job was to attract enemy fire.

A few steps more and he stood exactly where Stockard had sketched the rifle on the map for his illiterate messenger. He knelt on the sand and raised his head. Overhead the sky was black, but above the cliffs it bleached down to a cold bottle-green. Holding his watch inches from his eyes, he could just make out the time: five o'clock. He was late. He should now be in the cemetery, firing a shot to let the general know he accepted his terms.

He stole a few minutes more to search among the small shrubs and rocks at the edge of the stream. He bumped into a log he remembered, and wondered if the gun might lie on it. But his groping hands found nothing. Now the eastern horizon had lightened to a pale apricot. Crouching, he stared at the camp until he could make out the stump, and after that the fire ring took shape, and then the rock house beneath the cliff. He had his bearings, and he turned to leave. But as he did so, he stepped on something in the water and sprawled in the shallows. His Winchester clattered on the stones. He waited for a shot from the general's ambuscade.

A woman screamed:
“Henry—no!”

Swearing, he scrambled to his knees, his rifle dripping but at the ready. Her voice had come from the camp area. He supposed she was tied there, perhaps to the very stump on which her husband had died.

Then the general's voice barked, from somewhere beyond the camp: “Madam, if you raise your voice again, I'll have to kill you! Do you understand?”

“Understand—!”

Henry put the sounds together and decided that Stockard was barricaded behind the wall; that Frances was tied somewhere in the camp. It was impossible in this light to find either of them, so his only choice was to dance to Stockard's tune.

But first he looked for the thing on which he had tripped, and found it: Rip Parrish's rifle, engraved bejeweled, and wet. His fingers roved it, read the
LET 'ER RIP
! engraving, found the gun cocked, and finally left it exactly where he had found it—in Stockard's command post.

Henry stumbled through rocks and brush to the cemetery trail, blundering noisily up the cliff to the blighted little orchard. He went through the dead trees to the graveyard, where he stopped to get his breath, gazing down on the wash as a few landmarks emerged from the darkness. Then he pointed his carbine into the sky and fired a shot. A covey of doves exploded from a thicket near him in a startling, whistling explosion.

Now it was his turn to wait, sitting on a stone cross with his rifle across his knees. According to the general's conditions, he was now to release his hostage. Henry thought he would. Finding the Winchester had convinced him that Stockard intended to follow his own plan of battle.

He replaced the spent shell in his gun and watched small feathery clouds turn pink across the sky, listened to birds coming to life, and began to see the details of the camp below him. The cold gray picture taking shape reminded him of the moments before an attach—watching the place where you feared to go but were going nevertheless. There was a familiar empty feeling at the pit of his stomach.

Now, below the bluff, a big-bored rifle roared. The sound of it made Henry grin—it was the modified '85 Winchester with its big charge of powder and heavy bullet. He saw the flash, too, and nothing modest about it, either. It told him that the general was barricade behind the stone wall beyond the camp. He had, if his word was good, released Frances, and was inviting Henry to move in on him. Keeping his eye on the wall, Henry started from rock to rock down the cliff trail. With the light still so dim, such caution seemed unnecessary. But the Hunter and his eye were no mean combination.

Near the bottom of the cliff, a black, volcanic ridge cut across the trail, low and uneven and resembling the ruin of an ancient fortification. Henry settled himself behind it and began fussily, soldier-fashion, to rearrange the furniture. He needed a rifle loop, so he stacked a couple of flat stones together and peered through it at the scene below. The wash appeared quiet and pretty, birds taking baths in the shallow water, the trees obscuring much of the camp but the executioner's chair standing out boldly.

Then he uttered a yelp and ducked.

A bullet had ripped across his barricade and smashed into a small tree just behind him; he heard the big boom of the shot an instant later. Birds near him flew into the brush. A large animal, probably a deer, clattered down the wash. He huddled behind the rocks, stealing glimpses of the wall. Judging by the heavy smoke drifting from them, Stockard was firing black powder, which probably meant his sweetheart gun. The old savage must like the smell of black powder, its slow, sure power; and perhaps the memories it brought—the nostalgia of the old Apache-killing days....