The Last Hard Men (16 page)

Hal Brickman’s eyes widened. “You mean kill Susan.”

“That’s it. If I don’t show up where Provo can see me in the next twenty-four hours, she’ll be dead, and he’ll see to it I find out about it.”

Nye’s voice began to climb unreasonably. “But god-damnit, Captain. S’posin’ you do show up? S’posin’ you take his bait? What good’ll that do Susan?”

“Maybe he’ll make a trade,” Burgade murmured.

Nye stared at him. “You for Susan, you mean.”

“He might do it.”

“Jesus goddamn Christ.”

The deputies came out of the shack, followed by two uniformed Navajo police who stood on the porch and folded their arms and watched while the posse got mounted. Burgade said, “I’ll have to ride back with you until we’re out of sight.”

Little gray birds flitted soundlessly from the roof of the police shack to the treetops up by the spring. Burgade locked both hands around the saddle horn and hauled himself up by an effort of will. Riding away from the village, Nye said to him, “Jesus, Captain, you ain’t in no fit shape.”

“Shut up.”

They batted south along the tawny earth, everybody in a bitter frame of mind. It took forty-five minutes to get beyond the line of sight of the Castle Butte village. Nye said, “Maybe you ought to ride back at least as far as the line. You know damn well they gonna come out here in a little while to see if we kep our word.”

“I can’t waste that much time, Noel.”

The posse came to a ragged halt. Nye’s unrevealing eyes swept bleakly across them. “Moorhead, you mand swappin’ horses with the Captain? I believe you got the best horse of the bunch there.”

“I’ll keep this one” Burgade didn’t want to have to dismount and climb up again. He said, “But I’d take it kindly if some of you’d let me have a little spare food and a couple of canteens.”

“You heard the Captain. Pony up, boys.”

Hal Brickman kneed his horse forward. “I could use some provisions too, Sheriff.”

Burgade said, “Forget it, Hal.”

“No. I’m going with you.”

“I appreciate the gesture, Hal, but—”

“If I turn back now and anything happens to Susan, I’ll feel exactly the same way you’d feel. You’ve got to see that.”

A gust of wind came along, like a breath from an oven. The hovering glare had given Burgade a headache. He studied Hal over a long stretch of time and finally he said, “You stand an excellent chance of being killed if you ride with me. You accept that?”

“Yes, sir. I know I’m a greenhorn but I can shoot. I’ll do what you tell me to do.”

Nye said, “God knows you could use the hep, Captain.”

“All right, Hal. It’s your decision.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me, for God’s sake.”

They looked back a couple of times and saw the posse’s dust receding to the south. Burgade chose a westerly course that kept them below the horizon, running along dry watercourses and the groined notches between low hills. “We’ll circle around and try to pick up their tracks north of Castle Butte.” The strong sun slashed at them, hot breezes raked them with sinister abrasive caresses, there wasn’t a vestige of shade anywhere; sweat was sticky in the small of his back, in his palms, in his crotch, on his lips and throat. He had got inured to the smell of himself.

An eagle passed high overhead with a steady wingbeat. The empty land was a match for Burgade’s emptiness of spirit. Sixteen million acres, Nye had said, and that was just about exactly the size of it. The Reservation sprawled all over the high desert, overlapping the boundaries of four states. Most of it was just like this—a leafless sun-blasted furnace, broken here and there by craggy mesas and cutbank arroyos and the deep-canyon tributaries of the Colorado: the Grand Canyon was just a little way to the northwest.

It was a hard-mouthed horse, a small tough gray gelding. Burgade set a pace to conserve the animals—walk, trot, canter, then walk again. The gray fought the bit at every turning.

Hal didn’t speak unless spoken to. It was a silent ride for the first hour, and then, partly to keep himself awake, Burgade began to talk. “Can you use that gun?”

“I said I could, sir.”

“I know what you said.”

“I’m a good target-shooter. I’ve never shot at a man.”

“Think it over, then. If the toughs see you with a gun in your hand they’ll assume you know how to handle it. It’ll only encourage them to use theirs first.”

“Yes, sir. But I don’t imagine they’ll need much encouraging from me.”

“Yes, I expect that’s so,” Burgade said. “Look, they’re on the run from the hangman. They killed two prison guards and left a man dead at the smelter. That makes them all equally guilty of first-degree murder in the eyes of the law. Now, even leaving Susan aside, you know what that means.”

“Yes, sir. I have a pretty good idea what they’ll do to anybody who gets in their way.”

“Keep your head down, then, and don’t smile at any strange faces. These men are quick and they’re short-fused.”

About four in the afternoon they found tracks. Burgade didn’t dismount for a close-up look. Hal said, “How do we know these are the right tracks?”

“Not likely to be more than one party this big out here today.”

“Maybe they’re older—maybe they’re from a week ago. How can you tell?”

“By the amount of dust the wind’s blown into the prints. These are only a few hours old. Look there at the horse droppings.”

There was a line of muffin-droppings, undoubtedly still soft and warm: they were still green.

The tracks went straight into the northwest. They kept moving into the waning afternoon. To keep from falling asleep Burgade told Hal everything he could remember about Provo and those of Provo’s men he had known. Hal seemed to take it all in—Portugee Shiraz’s fondness for knives, George Weed’s extraordinary skill with guns, Provo’s weakness for unnecessary complexities in trying to outguess his opponents. It was the bewildering intricacy of Provo’s scheme that had tripped him up twenty-eight years ago. “He’d have got away clean if he hadn’t tried to be quite so tricky. He may be making the same mistake this time.”

“What was his mistake?”

“He didn’t run for it when he should have. He decided to bluff it out.”

“I never did hear about that. How it really happened, I mean.”

“The Santa Fe trains used to stop for water west of Winslow on the way up the Flagstaff grade. Provo planted a whacking big charge of blasting powder along the ties where he knew the express car would stand. He didn’t know much about explosives but he didn’t take any chances. Blew up the whole car—disintegrated it sky-high. There were several guards inside, it blew them all to pieces. Provo picked up the gold while the smoke was still settling and inside of three or four minutes he was headed out on his horse. He had a bandanna mask and he didn’t figure on anybody recognizing him. He shouldn’t have taken that chance. If he’d been a little smarter he’d have sent his wife away before he robbed the train, and he’d have met her in Mexico later on. We’d never have found him.”

“But you did. How?”

“Three or four people on the train recognized him.”

“Even with a mask on?”

“Two of them were Indians. They’d known him for years. He’s got a hunched way of moving, very quick, tense. And they recognized his horse and his clothes. There wasn’t any mistake about the identification.”

“But how’d you catch him?”

“He walked into it. He spent five or six days back in the redrock country—up where he appears to be headed now. He buried the gold somewhere back there and then he went right back home to his hogan down near Salina Springs. We were waiting for him.”

“Wasn’t his wife killed?”

The sun dried the spit in Burgade’s mouth. It was a moment before he answered. His words had a dry rustle. “She was.”

“I understand he blames you for that.”

“It was my bullet that killed her.”

Hal didn’t say anything. He looked sorry he’d asked the question. They went down the steep bank of an arroyo, leaning far back in their saddles.

Burgade said, “Provo was being clever. When we showed ourselves he tried to bluff it out. Denied the whole thing. It was no good, it tripped him up. When he saw we weren’t buying it, he elected to try to shoot his way out. I returned his fire. His wife was behind him, inside the hogan where none of us could see her. My bullet went through Provo’s thigh—I was shooting to knock him down, not kill him. Went right through him and struck his wife in the throat. She was a damned handsome Navajo girl, expecting a baby. I have regretted it every day for the past twenty-eight years.”

“If he made a break for it with a gun, he had to expect the consequences. I don’t see how you can go on blaming yourself forever, sir.”

“I don’t blame myself. I just regret it happened. It was an accident, which Provo doesn’t choose to accept.”

“An accident he brought on himself. And on her.”

“Just so,” Burgade said stonily. “But you understand it hasn’t been an easy memory to live with, regardless of who was to blame.”

The sun threw a last burst of light along the cloudy horizon. He saw one pale star. They kept running north-westerly, following the tracks through a country which was starting to buckle and heave. Into the breaks of the canyon country. In the next hour the darkness condensed and a heavier mass of cloud moved in. By eight o’clock the night was viscous as syrup. Burgade halted the gray and said reluctantly, “Can’t track till those clouds blow over. Let’s step down and eat.”

“Yes, sir. We could both use some sleep.”

“We’ll see. We don’t want to give them too much of a lead. But it’s just as dark where they are as it is here, and the country’s rougher up that way. They’ve probably been forced to stop too. Anyhow we can get a little rest until the clouds move on.”

“You don’t think it’s going to rain, do you? That would wash out their tracks.”

“It won’t rain tonight,” Burgade said, with only a glance at the clouds.

They loosened the cinches and hobbled the horses. Hal broke out provisions and they ate a cold meal; there was no risking a fire. Pemmican and hardrock biscuits, tinned peaches and canteen water—that was their supper. Afterward Burgade mumbled, “No point trying to stand guard. They won’t double back yet. Get some sleep. I’ll wake you.” Without waiting to see if Hal obeyed, he lay back on the ground with his hat for a pillow and stared at the underbellies of the clouds. He was in a disoriented haze; he had spent so many days fighting to keep awake he was sure he was too tired to sleep. The waking nightmare of reality rubbed inside his brain like coarse grit, driving him toward madness. He saw little likelihood he would ever emerge from it; he had put out of his mind the possibility of surviving this. To get Susan out alive would be miracle enough.

Staring at the black sky, he carefully opened small gates to let Susan’s haunting image flow into his mind. In a while her face hovered before him and he could hear her singing the way she did sometimes in the kitchen, in her small true voice.

He wondered if Hal’s thoughts were like his own. Hal was a good boy. Boy, he thought. Hal was thirty-three or thirty-four, a successful mining engineer—no boy. He handled himself well and had not complained of the endless hours of rough riding. If Hal had a basic weakness, Burgade thought, it was not cowardice or squeamishness. But Hal tended to be too impetuous. He had been an athlete in his school years; he was handsome and self-confident and a lot of things had come easily to him. There was a chance his very abilities would be his downfall. His athletic coordination was great, like his stamina—but if he’d been a little less agile, a little more accident-prone, he’d have taken his knocks by now, learned his lesson, learned how to be more cautious.

Burgade’s mind drifted. His exhaustion was physical, emotional, mental, all compounded by tense strain carried to the taut limits of tolerance. Sleep moved toward him, silent and black.

He awoke fuzzily. He was lying on his side. He did not stir; he kept his eyes shut and his breathing deep and even. Someone was behind him.

He heard a foot crunch gravel and the tentative clearing of a throat, and he made a face and rolled over. “Next time you come up behind a man,” he said, “announce yourself. I almost blew your head off.”

Hal said, “I was deciding whether to wake you up. The clouds have cleared off.”

“Time’s it?”

“About two, by my watch.”

Burgade looked around. Dust around the horned moon was a luminous ring. The light was enough to see by. “I slept six hours,” he said. “Too long. They’ve got another hour or two on us now.”

“From what you say,” Hal observed, “I expect they’ll wait for us to catch up when they get to wherever it is they’re going.”

Burgade grunted. He looked past Hal and saw the two horses standing thirty or forty feet away, saddled and ready. Hal had packed everything up. It annoyed Burgade slightly: people were always doing things for him, this trip. But what irritated him far more was the fact that the noise hadn’t awakened him.
I can’t sleep again until we’ve finished this business
, he decided.

The sleep hadn’t revived him. He felt logy and weak. He stumbled once on his way to the horse. But Hal was considerate enough not to try to help him climb into the saddle.