The Last Hard Men (10 page)

Gant smiled and tugged at a black nostril hair. His thick lips peeled back. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am.”

“Climb aboard, missy. Time to go.”

Four

Carrying the tearstained note, Sam Burgade went, as if against his will, into his daughter’s room. It was sunny in there, the muslin curtains stirring in a warm breeze, womanly things scattered around in disarray, drawers flung open, the wardrobe standing ajar.

Burgade’s face kept changing. Muscles stood ridged at his jaw hinges and the bones at brow and cheek became harder, more prominent.

He pushed his solemn glance at things in the room as if to engrave them indelibly on his memory. Then he strode out of the house and marched, not running, around half the block to Packers little grocery. Packer had a telephone. Burgade got through to the sheriffs office.

Noel Nye’s voice came at him, scratchy and distant “Oh, there you are. Listen, that big noise from up on the hills, it was them. They blowed up the smelter safe. Left one of their own dead behind—one of my boys recognized him, Lee Roy Tucker. It was them convicts, all rat. They tooken off with a coupla hundred dollars petty caish.”

“That’s not all they’ve taken,” Burgade said. “Susan’s gone.”

Nye came into the house wiping his face on his shirtsleeve. His face in all its clubbed ugliness was full of forlorn dignity. “Captain, I cain’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Yeah.” Burgade’s scalp contracted.

“Well, we doin’ everthang we can to get her back, Captain. Everbody owns a horse and a gun’s out there beatin’ the brush for sign.”

“Out where?”

The sheriff spread his hands. “Mostly up in the mountains back of the smelter.”

“They didn’t go that way. They had to come by here to collect my daughter. They didn’t have her with them when they robbed the smelter, did they? Well, then—they must have come this way. From here they could only head up the valley toward Phoenix or up into the Catalinas.”

“Sure, Captain, you’re rat. Too much goin’ on rat now, I reckon—I ain’t been thanking straight. Hell, I better not set around here and jaw all day.” He clapped on his campaign hat and swung to the door.

“I’m coming with you.”

“But—”

“She’s my daughter, Noel.”

“Sure enough. Hell, come on, then.”

At noon a council of war was held in the sheriffs office. Reports came in by telephone from the edges of the city. Nothing came in from beyond the town limits; the cross-country wires were down somewhere, doubtless cut by Provo’s men. It might take the linemen a day to find the breaks and repair them.

“In the meantime,” Sheriff Nye said judiciously, “let’s sort out what we do know. They’s probably eight of them. Five men was seen at the smelter office but one’s dead, Tucker. That’s four, and one to hold the horses makes five. Sixth man down the road between the smelter and town to cut the telephone. Seventh and eighth at both ends of Tucson to cut the wares. All rat. We got to figure they all of ’em armed to the teeth. They cut crosst along the Rillito, I reckon, so they must of rendezvoused somewheres up in the foothills of the Catalinas. That’s where most of our people are lookin’ now. Captain, how do you tote it?”

Burgade was sitting toward the back of the room, dry-washing his hands. Heads swiveled toward him—the mayor, the chief of police, the undersheriff, the editor of the
Star
, three or four councilmen, the county supervisor, and the prosecuting attorney. They all watched him with grave concern.

“They’re on horseback,” Burgade said slowly, weighing his words. “You can’t hope to block off the roads and railroads and catch them that way. They’ve got to be tracked, the old way, by men on horseback. That’s how I tote it.”

The mayor said, “But is that wise, Sam? If they catch sign of pursuit won’t it put Susan in danger?”

“She’s in danger with them at all times,” Burgade said in a flat voice. “They expect to be tracked. Provo’s not a stupid man. He took my daughter because he wanted revenge against me—a personal thing. But he also took her because he wanted a hostage, and that means that wherever he’s planning to go, he realizes he won’t be able to hide his back trail. If he planned to head directly into Mexico and hide out in the Sierras he’d have killed Susan by now—she’d only slow him down. No, he——”

“Wait, Sam,” the prosecuting attorney said “I don’t know how to put this so it won’t twist the knife. But how do we know they haven’t already killed Susan?”

“They made her pack several changes of clothes.”

“Is that conclusive enough?”

“It is to me. Provo wants to keep her alive. He knows if we find her dead, nothing on earth will stop me from finding him and putting him to the most painful death it’s possible for a man to have. No. She’s alive. As long as she’s alive with him, I bleed and he knows I’m bleeding and he also knows I’ve got to keep my distance.”

“The goddamned bastard’s clever,” the mayor said. “As clever a fiend as——”

“Let’s not waste time calling him names.” Burgade’s eyes were flinty, glittering, unfathomable: he kept his feelings strictly to himself. His voice was level, under total control. “There’s no reason why any of you should abide by my judgment any longer. I’m the one who created this disaster. I’m responsible for what’s happened this morning—Susan wouldn’t be gone and the smelter office wouldn’t have been blown up if my scheme hadn’t drawn Provo here. Replacing that vault will cost thousands—you might advise the manager that I’m prepared to make restitution to whatever limits my savings can cover. Now, as to the——”

“Nonsense,” the mayor exploded. “You can’t possibly be held to blame for the mindless animal savaging of these beasts. If anything, the smelter’s in your debt—you advised them to postpone their payday, otherwise the vault would have been full of cash.”

“That’s neither here nor there,” Burgade said. “We’re getting off the point. I don’t have the power to insist that anybody heed my advice after what happened this morning, but what I’m going to do is provision myself with a horse and some weapons and get on Provo’s track. I intend to stick to the track until I can get my daughter out of their hands and then I intend to kill Provo and his crew the way you’d kill a pack of rabid wolves, I’m speaking for myself. I’d be obliged for company but I’ve got no authority to ask for it.”

He put his hands on his knees and stood up slowly, feeling old in his joints, feeling as if a fist had slammed him low in the belly and crumpled him. Dry-eyed, he walked to the door.

He hired the best horse Ochoa had in the stable and a good solid double-rig saddle with plenty of concho strings and a leather rifle boot and a long skirt behind the cantle across which provisions could be strapped. He had to hold in the nervous prancing gelding on his way down the crowded streets; the horse danced along half-sideways. He tethered it to the gatepost in front of his house and went inside to make up a field pack for himself.

He chose each item with studied care. A lightweight rawhide rope, sixty feet long, coiled in a tight ring. A two-quart water canteen. Blanket-roll and rain slicker. Folding pocket knife and a nine-inch fighting knife in a leather scabbard slotted for threading over a gunbelt. Antiseptic and bandage cloth. A folding razor, not for whisker-shaving but for use as a weapon, a slicing blade, and a snakebite remedy. Gloves and a fleece-lined mackinaw for the high country, if the trail should take him that way. Flint-and-wheel firelighter and a waterproof oilskin pouch of sulfur matchsticks. His old Army-style mess kit, with its accordion-collapsible cooking pot and coffee cup, its mated locked cookpans and utensils. Soap, a spare shirt, underdrawers, socks, a thick soft pair of Hopi moccasins, a coil of strong fine fishing line, twine ball, towel, field glasses, steel picket stake, rope hobbles. He packed it all together with tight efficiency, most of it inside the, blanket-roll and the rest in saddlebags which he left as empty as possible to accommodate food and ammunition.

He went into the front room and unlocked the gun chain. Took down the Springfield bolt-action .30-06. He weighted the saddlebags down with ammunition and went outside carrying canteen, blanket-roll, saddlebags, and rifle. Stowed them all aboard the horse and climbed up into the saddle and rode at a trot around to Packer’s grocery. He went inside and bought enough provisions, as concentrated as he could find, to fill a small gunnysack, which he tied on top of the blanket-roll with piggin’ strings.

That was it, then. He couldn’t think of anything he’d forgotten. He put his foot in the stirrup and gathered the reins and hoisted himself up. It was a stiff climb for an old man: he had to lift his right leg high over the pile of provisions. He got settled with half his weight on the balls of his feet in the wood stirrups, adjusted the reins in the fingers of his left hand, tugged his hatbrim down tight, and clucked to the horse.

Sheriff Nye came up the street with a mounted posse—young Hal Brickman, very graven-faced, and eight or nine deputies.

“Here you are,” Nye said. “Thought we missed you back at the house.”

“Why,” Sam Brigade said, “I’m obliged, Noel.”

“My job, ain’t it, Captain?”

They found the camp in Rose Canyon at about four in the afternoon. There was no mistake about it because a bit of cloth clung to an obvious branch. It was torn off Susan’s sunbonnet, the one she wore around the house on washday.

“Message from Zach Provo,” Burgade drawled. The surfaces of his eyes glittered like hard gems.

Nye said, “They cain’t have more than four, five hours’ jump on us’” He turned back to his horse. “Come on, the trail don’t get no shorter while we set here staring at it”

Burgade saw Hal Brickman’s eyebrows contract. The young man was staring around the creek-bank camp ground with a grief-stricken look that was no sham; he had kept it to himself on the ride up from Tucson but he was beginning to look as if he was ready to let loose. He cut a faintly ludicrous figure in his narrow snap-brim hat and dude jodhpurs, a revolver buckled awkardly around his waist, high up in one of those Army-style holsters with a protective snap-down flap. If he’d carried his gun inside his saddlebag it might have been a little harder to reach, but not much. Still, his earnest anger was genuine and he had not whimpered. In other circumstances, Burgade might have had a great deal of room for sympathy toward him: Hal’s anguished face was evidence enough of the sincerity of his love for Susan and the agony of not knowing what he could do to save her.

Nye was down on one knee. “Look here, Captain.”

Burgade went over to him and leaned over to focus his attention on the ground at the point of the sheriffs finger.

“One of them horses got a tie-bar shoe here, lakly to hold in a soft hoof.”

“That’ll leave a distinctive print,” Burgade said. He walked forward leading his horse, seeing where the tie-bar track went. There was a big muddle of prints where several horses had trampled one another’s tracks but toward the upper end of the clearing it got sorted out and Burgade turned back to gather his reins and climb into the saddle. “They went on up the canyon.”

“Ain’t trying hard to hide their tracks, that’s for sure,” Nye said.

Hal Brickman brought his horse up to the head of the column. “Look, I’m not sure about all this.”

Sun and wind wrinkles gathered at the corners of Burgade’s eyes. “Nobody is, Hal.”

“No, I mean won’t they be likely to harm Susan if we crowd them?”

“They’ll be more likely to harm her if we don’t.”