Watchman continued along the backside of the ridge about two miles, keeping to the trees, and circled the end of it with his rifle across his saddle horn and all his senses keyed up atavistically. They rode in a spread-out single file, fifty feet apart, and Watchman was alert to the possibility of tripwires stretched across his path: God knew how many more grenades the fugitives were armed with.
They reached the creek at a point more than two miles below their original crossing. Watchman looked both ways with considerable care before he put his horse across and ran into the aspens. He didn’t circle to the right; he went straight ahead through the fringe of sycamores and leafless aspens, angling up a little slope so that when he reached the edge of the trees he was on an elevation overlooking the scrubby flat they had crossed two hours ago. The sun threw long shadows across the flats and it was not hard to make out the dotted shadow-line of two groups of tracks emerging from the trees quite a distance to the south and crossing the flat. One set belonged to the abandoned horses and the other set was the tracks Watchman and Vickers and Stevens had left two hours earlier.
“It doesn’t have to mean they’re still in there,” he said. “They may have seen what we were up to and decided to go around behind us and clear out. But they were still in there until recently, we know that much, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve stayed put and decided to wait us out.”
“All right,” Vickers said testily, “we’ve killed a couple of hours and most of the daylight we had left. What bright idea comes next?”
“We go in after them.”
He rode slowly back to the creekbank and turned left to ride upstream, keening the forest, scouting for tracks. About a half mile downstream from the point where the object had rolled down the slide to the creek, Watchman dismounted. “One of us stays here-that’s you, Buck. If I sing out bring the horses along fast. Vickers, we go on foot from here.”
3
“If anybody starts shooting don’t crawl. It just makes you a slow target instead of a fast one. Run like hell and get behind a tree. If we lose touch stay put. Don’t move. I’ll find you.”
“You don’t have to treat me like a novice Boy Scout.”
Watchman shook his head and said, “Just give me room, then-don’t crowd too close behind me,” and moved away.
He stayed inside the trees some distance back from the creekbank, moving upstream parallel to it. The sun had gone beyond the ridge; shadows shifted and settled. The snow was soft and loose and his boots sank through the surface without sound. As long as he was traversing snow that had not been disturbed he was fairly confident there were no boobytraps and so he was able to move at a steady speed through the trees. At any point an unseen rifleman might open up on him but if you used that possibility as your basis for movement you would never move at all. The trees were without leaves down here and it was possible to see eighty or a hundred feet in most directions, even with the light fading, and he was willing to gamble that the range of his visibility was as great or greater than the effective range of any rifle in these trees: it only took one twig to deflect an aimed bullet.
He had glimpses of the stream off to his right and when he estimated he was at the right point he stopped and turned and began to move, much more slowly now, toward the stream. Vickers was too close behind him and he made a hand signal that slowed Vickers down and put ten yards’ distance between them.
He had brought Vickers along rather than Stevens because he wanted Vickers where he could see him. Leave Vickers off by himself and he might start shooting at anything that moved and it might turn out to be yourself.
From forty feet inside the trees he caught his first glimpse of the body in the creek. He crouched down and moved forward a further ten feet and studied it.
The body lay on its stomach with its arms and legs asprawl, face buried in the creek. From the gray hair that floated out from it he surmised it was the one called Hanratty. Either that or a stranger who’d got in their way.
Vickers crawled up beside him. “It could be booby-trapped.”
“Likely is.”
“But we need to know who he is.”
That was true: they needed to know how many guns there were against them.
Twilight ran red along the crest of the ridge above the shale slide. Watchman studied the lie of it. Thick pines growing close together surrounded the rockslide in a horseshoe the ends of which descended to the far bank of the creek. If Hargit and his men were waiting in ambush they could be anywhere along that fringe and still have a good field of fire across the creek. On the other hand they might be gone by now, counting on their pursuers to lie up in these woods for a while investigating, giving Hargit time to get clear.
The first thing to do was to find out which it was, and the second thing to do was to be ready to take advantage of whatever disclosures Hargit might be kind enough to make.
Watchman moved back a few yards and picked up one of the dead saplings the storm had blown down; they were all over the woods. He chose one that seemed long enough and hacked off branches with his sheath knife until he had it trimmed to his satisfaction. Dragged it past Vickers and laid it on the ground. He positioned himself behind the bole of a sycamore trunk and pushed the sapling out toward the creekbank as if it were an oversized pool cue. It reached, just; he pushed the end into the corpse’s armpit and let the sapling lie like that, where one good shove would overturn the corpse, but he didn’t shove it yet. He left it there and slid back into the denser trees and said, “We can’t spend half the night here, we seem to be agreed on that much. If they’re not around here we need to know that, and if they are we’ll want to draw their fire.”
“You’re asking for a volunteer.”
“That’s right,” Watchman said evenly, and watched his face.
Vickers said, “Tell me what you’ve got in mind.”
“Get behind that sycamore and get ready to roll him over. If there’s a grenade under him you’ll hear the handle click-drop flat behind the tree and cover your head. Now either he’s booby-trapped or he’s not. Either way I want you to make a little run after you’ve flipped him over. Run out into the open three or four paces as if you’re going out to have a closer look at the corpse. Give them enough time to see you but not enough time to snug down their aim. Three or four steps, and then break right and dive into those trees on your belly. Then run back through the trees and hope they take a few shots at you.”
“I see. And you’ll be where?”
“Down there.” Watchman pointed toward the lower end of the pine-forest horseshoe. “We’ll be on horseback and if you can draw their fire I’ll be able to spot their muzzle flashes. We can get close pretty fast on horseback, before they’ve had time to fade back into the timber, and we’ll have a crack at them. How about it?”
Vickers thought about it, visibly. Watchman looked at the sky through the bare treetops. Dusk; a handful of stars already showing on a field of navy velvet. Moonrise in maybe half an hour. “All right, we’ll try it,” Vickers said.
“One other thing. I’ll need to know if that’s Hanratty. You’ll get a look at him when you flip him over. If you’re pretty sure it’s Hanratty fire three quick shots as soon as you have time.”
“Then what?”
“You’d better stay right here so I’ll know where you are. I know you don’t like that but if you come chasing along after us you’re likely to get yourself shot at by both sides.”