A heat wave shimmered in front of him, throwing up a wall of moving glass, and Kerrigan fired twice more through it until he saw the frantically spurring figure of Donnelly fade from sight.
He flipped out the third smoking shell and rose almost leisurely. He removed his brown hat and wiped at his forehead with a sleeve and put the hat back on again. His left hand burned as he shifted the barrel and instinctively reached for the loops of his cartridge belt, pushing the long shells into the magazine with a thumb.
He went back to where the big red horse stood like a statue.
Maybe, he thought, it was a mistake. Only time can give the answer to that one. Maybe I should have killed LeRoy with the first shot and stopped the whole shebang right here. But Tom might not know they had failed until I got around to telling him as a surprise. Huh!
He flicked the hot-barreled rifle back into its boot, took a drink from his canteen, mounted and rode out into the desert again.
He camped briefly at sundown to give the horse a small feed of oats and relief from the saddle and afterward he rode on most of the night, knowing they couldn't trail him in the darkness. From hidden caves many miles away the bats darted here and there on a nightly hunt for winged insects and their favorite of all foods, the long-tailed scorpions. The coyotes prowled on a hunt for rabbits and field mice. They stopped and listened to the passage of a lone rider in the darkness and now and then one of them barked derisively; and when one of the old loafer wolves—the bachelors with claws badly worn from following the rocky trails alone—let go with a hoarse howl the coyotes fell silent.
Put a coyote skin over your head, Kadoba the Apache had explained, and you can crawl within arrow distance of the watching antelope…
The miles rolled by, and the country changed in the varying major latitudinal life zones. The Tropical Sea Level Zone on the river at Yuma was far behind Kerrigan to the south. The Transition Zone of the Mogollon Plateau lay fostering to its great, rough, eroded bosom a vast, uneven sea of green forest. Ponderosa pine and blue spruce and aspen. Douglas fir and juniper, some birch and oak. Mountain streams flowing into the headwaters of the Gila to start their Columbrine journeys southward through Yuma and on to the gulf of Baja California.
It was northern Apache country, and at its worst the past three or four years.
Old Victorio and his Warm Springs raiders might be down at Lake Guzman in Chihuahua, making life hell for Mexican villages and haciendas, and even cutting a few telegraph wires over across the border in Texas now and then out of pure cussedness. But Loco and his small, elusive band of tough fighters weren't. They'd just returned to the high country after a breather over in New Mexico because it was their country. Scorning soldier "peace" and telling the troops from Fort Whipple and other posts to try and catch them. Leaving their women and children on the reservation to be cared for by the Government while they roamed and raided.
It had been while on a secret visit to see his wife that Kadoba had found a soft-bellied, well-fed reservation Indian in his jacal and been caught by Apache police after cutting his woman's throat. In the confused official mix-up, so commonplace at the time, the case had been cleverly juggled by Judge Yeager Eaton into his own court. A court composed of military officers likely would have sent Kadoba to the army's new escape-proof military prison on Alcatraz Rock in San Francisco Bay for a couple of years; and this thing Loco, and especially the reservation Apaches attending the trial at Globe, would have understood.
But an old White Eyes man who was not a soldier had sent him to Yuma for life.
For that stupid official blunder many people, including those going to and from Tom Harrow's new gold strike at Dalyville, had paid a disastrous price under the guns the esteemed "Colonel" had sold Loco for raw gold.
On a late afternoon Lew Kerrigan dropped warily down a sharp declivity and worked the red horse through thick underbrush until he came to a small stream where the water splashed over bright stones. Kerrigan dumped warbag and saddle on the ground preparatory to making camp. He took a double handful from his meager supply of oats, put them into a nose bag, and went over to Big Red. The horse turned his broad head and nuzzled at him before the feed bag was slipped on.
Night came down and the stars were out clear and cold up above, blinking to the eye from infinite space. Kerrigan would be in Pirtman to see Kitty Anderson tomorrow, and the thought warmed him. Two years now since he'd seen her, six months since Mangrum had stopped her letters.
Then suddenly he found himself wondering about Carlotta Wilkerson and the thought came to him that he'd had her on his mind much of late. Maybe because she'd been the only woman he had seen for so long.
He finished his supper and then carefully doused his tiny fire. The years of wrist and shoulder coordination had returned, and the sagging cartridge belt wasn't heavy around his waist any more. The night birds twittered in the trees…
Sometime during the early-morning hours the big red horse filled his great lungs with air and expelled it a little faster than usual, enough that Kerrigan heard the sound and came awake fast. He could see Big Red dimly in the darkness, a blocky outline of horse beneath the trees, head and neck high, ears forward.
He was facing south, the direction whence he'd brought his rider several hundred miles.
Kerrigan lay there on his flat belly, hugging the ground, the .45-90's flat-headed hammer drawn back under his right thumb. Big Red breathed a slobbering warning.
It might be a bear that had smelled the odor of bacon grease, but a rock rattled suddenly and somebody followed the sound with a grunt. If Loco's band had spotted him that afternoon and closed in for the kill at dawn, there wouldn't be any rocks rattling. A white man unaccustomed to crawling in the darkness had made those sounds.
Kerrigan lined the sights of the repeater and the heavy roar of 90 grains of exploding black powder went rocketing out across the country for miles. He thought, Damn, the fat is in the fire now, and heard a man scream a startled oath. It was followed by the crashing run of somebody through the underbrush. The man's unexpected terror had galvanized his reflexes into flight before he'd had time to think.
Kerrigan rolled over catlike three times to get clear of the flash area. He heard the voice of LeRoy cursing angrily, and then curse again as somebody else went excitedly trigger-happy and emptied a six-shooter. Bullets drummed through the underbrush around and above Kerrigan and were followed by a scream of anger from Hannifer LeRoy.
"You thickheaded jackass! We want him alive. He can't find Apache gold for Harrow and the rest of us if he's dead!"
In the silence that followed, the crash of the rifle came again as Lew Kerrigan coolly drove another .45-90 slug of lead squarely into the center of the area where the orange flashes of revolver fire had come from. And there was no startled yell this second time. Nothing but a threshing of legs out there in the brush as a man died, kicking convulsively.
"Hey, LeRoy, you stupid damned fool," Kerrigan called.
A moment of silence. And finally, "Well, what do you want?"
"I could have turned on you a dozen times and probably got all of you. I could have killed you with the first shot back there among the lava beds and sent the rest of these curs running."
"Then, why didn't you? Maybe we could have cut around in front and done some ambushing of our own. But we wanted you alive."
"I wanted you alive back there, too. To go crawling back to Tom Harrow and tell him I'm still coming."
There was no answer and he shifted position again. He had no illusions about Jeb Donnelly. In a game like this the ex-marshal, despite his massive bulk, was more dangerous than all the others put together.