He took the manacles off his wrist, stood up, and walked over to his saddlebags. He dropped the manacles. He’d pack them later. Right then there was something he was much more interested in. He leaned down, with his hips protesting, and lifted up his saddle. His revolver lay where he’d hidden it the night before. It was the one with the six-inch barrel that he normally carried. The pistol with the nine-inch barrel had been in his saddlebags. That was the one that Jack Shaw had found and taken with him. Longarm reached down, picked up his gunbelt, and strapped it on. Then he opened the gate of the cartridge cylinder and spun it. There were five shells in the revolver, and more lying out in the desert, if he could find them. He shoved the gun into the holster. It was time to get packed up and get to making tracks. Shaw already had a three-or four-hour lead, but Longarm felt like he knew where the outlaw was headed. He might not be, but if Longarm could pick up a little sign, he felt sure he would, sooner or later, come upon the man. He wondered what Shaw had left in the corral.
It had taken him over a half an hour to get packed up, get a horse saddled, and put a second horse on lead. Every move had hurt him, and consequently, everything had seemed to take twice as long to do. He had been correct in assuming that Shaw was going to leave him the worst of the horses. Shaw had even taken the bay that Longarm had been riding. He hadn’t thought so much of it the day before until Longarm had picked it out, but now he seemed to have changed his mind. The two horses he’d left were not much to begin with, and they’d been given hard usage and damn little feed. Longarm couldn’t do anything about the feed for the time being. They’d just have to travel like they had full bellies. At least they’d been well watered the last few days.
So far as food went, the horses weren’t the only ones getting shorted.
Shaw had not left Longarm so much as a can of tomatoes. He’d also taken a bottle of Longarm’s precious Maryland whiskey. Longarm was left with barely half a quart. But that was all right. If matters went as he hoped, he expected to be in a town the following night.
Once back to civilization, he could get fresh ammunition and some food and feed for the horses.
One thing that had surprised him was that he’d had two hundred dollars in folding money in his saddlebags, stuffed into the pocket of a clean shirt. Either Shaw had missed it or it was too little for him to bother with. The man, Longarm thought, was a killer but not a thief. That was a fine situation for you.
By two o’clock the prairie felt like a furnace, and he didn’t reckon he’d covered half the distance to the original line cabin. Shaw had gone to no trouble to try and hide his sign, even if he could have in the loose dirt of the country. The tracks of three horses were as plain as day. A half an hour after he’d last looked at his watch, he found an empty tomato can where Shaw had obviously dropped it. The man had just punched a hole in it with his knife and then sucked all the juice out of it.
Longarm felt sure that Shaw was heading for the line cabin. That, Longarm knew, was where the money had been hidden. He didn’t for a second believe that nonsense about some canyon. There was probably a canyon, all right, but it was a very small one that Shaw had dug somewhere around the cabin, though where that was, Longarm had no idea.
If he succeeded in catching Shaw, the first thing he was going to ask him was where he’d hidden the money. If he wouldn’t tell, Longarm was going to try and beat it out of him, and failing that, offer to let him go in exchange for the truth. Things like that ate at Longarm’s vitals. He couldn’t stand to be fooled like that. He’d known the day before that the money was at the cabin, but he just couldn’t figure out where. It hadn’t made any sense that Shaw would have hidden that amount of cash up in the mountains somewhere. Too many things could happen to it. Hell, squirrels could come along and chew it up to make a nest. Anybody could accidentally find it. No, you didn’t rob that much money and then walk away without having it near your side.
It was a long day. Longarm had plenty of water out of the canvas bag Shaw had left for him, but nothing besides that except half a cigar, and water and cigar smoke weren’t all that filling. The horses were looking gaunt, and there was no reason for them not to be. Being an outlaw’s mount was not a good job in the general scheme of horse business. There were better jobs, like working as a carriage horse for a banker, or maybe being a lady’s pleasure horse and working every other Sunday. There was the hardship of the sidesaddle, but ladies didn’t weigh very much and you had plenty of time to stand around in the pasture and eat and get your strength up.
Longarm did not ordinarily dwell on such matters as what job was best for a horse. He figured maybe the sun was getting to him. But then, anything was better than thinking about the report he’d have to write if he didn’t recapture Shaw. As it was, he’d been on sticky ground about transporting a prisoner from one territory to another, but that part could be made understandable with the culprit in hand and given the circumstances. But if he lost both the prisoner and the stolen money, it was going to put a far different perspective on the situation. And he wasn’t just talking about handing Billy Vail a good laugh for his mistakes. This was serious business and might well lead to a reprimand or worse. Anyway you looked at it, it wasn’t going to look good on either his record or his reputation. There’d be no excuses either. He’d had the prisoner in hand. His only job, besides recovering the money had been to get Shaw behind bars. He’d failed at that. Shaw had outsmarted him, and that was a matter no lawman could have against him.
He had the faint hope that Shaw really had hidden the stolen money in a canyon in the last foothills he’d traveled through before reaching the high prairie. If that was the case, Longarm would be in an ideal spot to cut the outlaw off after he had retrieved the money and turned south again toward Mexico. But it was becoming clearer and clearer, as the day wore out and the tracks of the three horses headed relentlessly west, that Shaw was heading for the cabin. Had he been going north toward his canyon, he would have bent off to the right some time back.
It got hotter. Longarm had planned to ride one horse half of the distance and then switch. But he had further decided, at the pace he was making, that he’d wait and ride the other animal the next day.
They were both about equal, with nothing outstanding to choose between them. The horse he was on was a little bigger, but he was also a little fatter than the tough-looking pony that Longarm had on a lead rope. But not fat enough. The lard was rapidly melting off him under the desert sun. The horse had been standing in somebody’s barn or feed lot for too long. He was soft and not used to such work. Longarm was taking it especially slow because he couldn’t afford to have the horse quit on him. The only thing worse than having two such horses in such country was having only one.
By his watch it was closing on four o’clock when he sighted the cabin. He didn’t have to look for it. If he’d kept his head down and done nothing more than watch the tracks of Shaw’s horses, he would have run right into the thing. As best he could figure, he was about three or four hours behind Shaw, maybe more. But he had no intention of setting in to chase the outlaw. For one thing, the horses wouldn’t have lasted, and for another, he was pretty sure he knew where Shaw was heading. After the horses had rested and drunk some water, he’d reconnoiter. He felt sure he’d find Shaw heading in exactly the direction he expected him to be.
There was a dead horse in the corral behind the cabin. It was the muscled-up dun that Shaw had been riding. There wasn’t a mark on him.
It was clear he had just gone sour from the work and the pace Shaw had set. Probably Shaw had let all three of his hot, worn-out horses drink their fill at the barrel, and the horse least likely to stand it had foundered and rolled over and died.