I don’t think he even looked at the others, but started off down the road we had come up, only stopping to pick up his Colt gun and shove it in his holster. Down just past there he left the road and started up the slope, moving pretty quickly through the greasewood and other brush.
Dr. Favor woke up first. He yelled at Russell. Then Mendez was out on the road looking up at Russell, and Dr. Favor had run off into the brush on the other side of the coach.
I started down then, taking the grainsack our provisions were in and my blanket roll. By the time I was on the road, Dr. Favor was coming out of the brush with his little revolver and Mendez’s sawed-off shotgun. Mendez and the McLaren girl were still watching Russell.
“He’s running,” Dr. Favor said. He was not at all calm and at that moment I thought if the shotgun was loaded he would have fired it at Russell.
“We need him,” Dr. Favor said then. He knew it right then. He knew it as sure as he thought John Russell was an Apache Indian and we were afoot out in the middle of nowhere.
That’s when the rest of us came wide awake. The McLaren girl said, “I wouldn’t have any idea where to go. I don’t think I even know where we are.”
“We’re maybe half way,” I said. “Maybe more. If we were over on the main road I could tell.”
“Then how far’s the main road?”
Favor shot a look at her like he was trying to think and she had interrupted him. “Just keep quiet,” he said.
It stung her, you could see. “Standing out here in the open,” she said, “what good does keeping quiet do?”
Dr. Favor never answered her. He looked at Mendez and said, “Come on,” handing him his shotgun, and they hurried out to where Lamarr Dean’s horse was, Dr. Favor skirting around Lamarr Dean’s body which lay spread-armed like it had been staked out, but Mendez stopped there to take Lamarr Dean’s Colt. Then they were both at the dead horse, kneeling there a minute, Favor pulling loose the saddlebags while Mendez got the waterskin. They didn’t bother with the Henry rifle, or else it was under the horse and held fast.
While they were at the dead horse, the McLaren girl said, still watching them, “He’s not even thinking of his wife. Do you know that?”
“Well, sure he is,” I said, not meaning he was actually thinking about her, but at least concerned about her. What did the girl expect him to do? He couldn’t just chase after Braden. That wouldn’t get his wife back.
“He’s forgotten her,” the McLaren girl said. “All he’s thinking about is the money he stole.”
“You can’t just say something like that,” I said. I meant you couldn’t know what somebody was thinking, especially in the jackpot we were in right then. A person acted, and thought about it later.
It was getting the things from Lamarr’s horse that took time, the reason we were not right behind Russell or had him in sight anymore by the time we got down the road past the cutbank and started up the slope.
Dr. Favor, with the saddlebags over one shoulder, kept ahead of us, following the same direction Russell had taken. The slope was not very difficult at first, a big open sweep that humped up to a bunch of pines along the top; but, as we were hurrying, it wasn’t long before our legs started aching and getting so tight you thought something would knot inside and you’d never get it loosened.
We were hurrying because of what was behind us, you can bet all your wages on that. But we were also hurrying to catch Russell, feeling like little kids running home in the dark and scared the house was going to be locked and nobody home. Do you see how we felt? We were worried he had left us to go on his own. In other words, knowing we needed Russell if we were going to find our way out of here alive.
When Dr. Favor reached the trees he hesitated, or seemed to, then he was gone. That’s when we hurried faster, all worn out by then. You could hear Mendez breathing ten feet away.
But there was no need to hurry. As we reached the top there was Dr. Favor standing just inside the shade of the trees. Russell was just past him. He was sitting down with his blanket open on the ground and his boots off. He was pulling on a pair of curl-toed Apache moccasins, not paying any attention to Dr. Favor who stood there like he had caught Russell and was holding him from getting away, actually pointing his revolver at him. Dr. Favor’s chest was moving up and down with his breathing.
Mendez moved in a little closer, watching Russell. “Why didn’t you wait for us?” he said. Russell didn’t bother to answer. You weren’t even sure he heard Mendez.
“He doesn’t care what we do,” Dr. Favor said. “Long as he gets away.”
“Man,” Mendez said. “What’s the matter with you? We have to think about this and talk it over. What if one of us just ran off? You think that would be a good thing?”
Russell raised his leg to pull a moccasin on. They were the high Apache kind, like leggings which come up past your knees. He began rolling it down, stuffing the pants leg into it and fastening it about calf-high with a strap of something. He didn’t look up until he had finished this.
Then he said, “What do you want?”
“What do we want?” Mendez said, surprised. “We want to get out of here.”
“What’s stopping you?” Russell said.
Mendez kept frowning. “What’s the matter with you?”
Russell had both moccasins on now. He took his boots and rolled them inside the blanket. Doing this, not looking at us, he said, “You want to go with me, uh?”
“With you? We all go together. This isn’t happening to just one person,” Mendez said. “This is happening to all of us.”
“But you want me to show you the way,” Russell said.
“Sure you show the way. We follow. But we’re all together.”
“I don’t know,” Russell said, very slowly, like he was thinking it over. He looked up at Dr. Favor, directly at him. “I can’t ride with you. Maybe you can’t walk with me…uh?”
For a minute, maybe even longer, nobody said a word. Russell finished rolling his blanket and tied it up with a piece of line he’d had inside.
When he stood up, Mendez said-not surprised or excited or frowning now, but so serious his voice wasn’t even very loud-he said, “What does that mean?”
Russell looked at him. “It means I can’t ride with them and maybe they can’t walk with me. Maybe they don’t walk the way I walk. You sabe that, Mexican?”
“I helped you like you’re my own son!” Mendez’s voice rose and his eyes opened so that you could see all the whites. But Russell wasn’t looking. He was walking off. Mendez kept shouting, “What’s the matter with you!”
“Let him go,” Dr. Favor said.
We stood there watching Russell move off through the trees.
“What do you expect?” Dr. Favor said. “Do you expect somebody like that to act the way a decent person would?”
“I helped him,” Mendez said, as if he couldn’t believe what had happened.
“All right, now he’ll help us,” Dr. Favor said. “He won’t have anything to do with us, but we can follow him, can’t we?”
Nobody thought to try to answer that question at the time, because it wasn’t really a question. I thought about it later, though. I thought about it for the next two or three hours as we tried to keep up with Russell.
It was about 3:30 or 4 o’clock when the holdup took place, with already a lot of shade on this side of the hills. From then on the light kept getting dimmer. I mean right from the time we started following Russell it was hard to keep him in sight, even when he was out in the open.
In daylight the land was spotted with brush and rock, dead and dusty looking, but with some color, light green and dark green and brown and whitish yellow. In the evening it all turned brown and hazy looking, with high peaks all around us once we’d gone on down through the other side of the pines out into open country again.
I say open, but by that I mean only there weren’t any trees. I don’t mean to say it was easy to travel over.