Chetopa stepped forward, then raised his rifle over his head.
“Dlo Binanta!” he shouted as loudly as he could. The words rolled back from the hills.
“Dlo Binanta!”
“Dlo Binanta, do you hear me when I say I am not afraid of you?” Chetopa shouted.
“Dlo Binanta, do you hear me when I say I want you to come for me?
“Dlo Binanta, do you hear me when I say I will kill you?”
“... kill you, kill you, kill you?” the words echoed back.
Falcon MacCallister was some one hundred yards away from the Indian encampment, standing behind a saguaro cactus and hidden by the dark.
“Now you hear me, Chetopa!” he called back. “I, Dlo Binanta, will kill you and all who ride with you. I will kill Kwazi, Mensa, and Turq as I killed Natanke.”
“Ayiee, he is a devil! He knows our names!” one of the Indians said, his voice quaking with fear.
“Before the sun rises, another of you will die!” Falcon shouted.
“Will die ... will die ... will die!”
The words echoed and reechoed from every corner of the desert, just as Falcon knew they would. Because of the echoes, Chetopa was unable to place him by sound. Nevertheless, Chetopa fired where he thought Falcon was, and again the night was lit by the muzzle flashes of discharging rifles.
The echoes had Chetopa so badly confused, however, that he didn’t have the slightest idea where Falcon was. As a result, he and the others were firing in a totally different direction.
Falcon remained in the darkness, watching, until once more Chetopa realized that he was only wasting ammunition. Then, when the Indians quit firing, Falcon moved back through the darkness until he found his horse.
“Still here, I see,” Falcon said to the horse. “Did you enjoy the show? I hope so, because it’s just beginning.”
“Seems to me like we should be to Mesquite by now,” Dagen said. He twisted around on his horse and examined the countryside, trying to figure out where he was.
“Yeah,” Monroe said. “We didn’t ride this long from Mesquite before we decided to start back.”
“I didn’t say we was goin’ back to Mesquite,” Fargo said.
“The hell you didn’t,” Dagen replied. “That’s exactly what you said when we was in that line shack having our supper.”
“That’s right,” Monroe seconded.
“I said we was goin’ back,” Fargo said. “I didn’t say we was goin’ back to Mesquite.”
“Well, if we ain’t goin’ to Mesquite, just where the hell are we goin’?”
“We’re goin’ to back-trail and see if we can find Ponci.”
“Back-trail?”
“Yeah. Look, the truth is, I figure the son of a bitch is dead somewhere. And I figure to find him before someone else does. Because whoever finds him is going to find our money.”
“How do you know he is dead?”
“You heard what the doctor said same as me,” Fargo said. “He said if Ponci didn’t get that leg cut off, he was goin’ to die. Well, Ponci didn’t get the leg cut off.”
“But the doctor give him all that medicine,” Monroe said.
Fargo snorted. “Laud’num ain’t real medicine,” he said. “It don’t do nothin’ to cure you; it just stops the pain for a while. No, sir, our Ponci boy is lyin’ out here dead somewhere, and he’s got our money with him.”
“So, how are we goin’ to find him? I mean, we come up the trail after him and we didn’t see him nowhere,” Dagen said.
“Like as not, when it got real bad he pulled off somewhere, figurin’ to rest up some. Only he didn’t get rested up. What he got was dead.”
“You’re sure he would’a come this way?” Casey asked.
“Where else would he go?” Fargo asked. “He lived in Mesquite before he joined up with me. We went to the right place, all right. We just got there too fast is all.”
“So, what are we lookin’ for?”
“Anyplace that might make a good spot to hole up for a while,” Fargo said. “A big rock stickin’ out, maybe a gully, or a cave.”
“A cave!” Dagen said, snapping his fingers.
“What?”
“I know where one is,” Dagen said. “And Ponci knows it too, ’cause he pointed it out to me once.”
“Where?”
“It’s about ten miles south of Mesquite.”
“All right, let’s go there,” Fargo said, urging his horse into a quicker pace.
It was about three o’clock in the morning and Falcon was downwind of the Indian encampment. He could smell them ahead: the body odor, the grease in their hair, and the pungent aroma of horseflesh gradually giving off the warmth of the sun from the day before.
Once again he had left his horse behind, and once again he had slipped forward through the night, his knife clamped in his teeth as he crawled, slithered, and moved from cactus to rock, from rock to mesquite bush, from mesquite bush back to cactus.
There had been some discussion among the Indians of posting a guard, but they finally decided that if the five of them stayed together, one man couldn’t hurt them. And with that sense of security, they had thrown out their blankets and now slept in the cool night air.
Because he was moving with such caution, it took Falcon almost one hour to advance the last hundred yards. Now, he was less than ten feet away from where the five men were sleeping.
When Falcon issued his challenge just after supper last night, he had called out the Indian names, doing so because he knew it would unnerve them. He knew the names only because he had heard all of them being used, but except for Chetopa, he did not know one Indian from another.
Falcon slithered on his belly for the last ten feet, then looked at the Indian nearest him. He didn’t know who it was, but he knew who it wasn’t. It wasn’t Chetopa.
Falcon hesitated for just a moment, thinking it would be better for him to go to each of the sleeping Indians until he found Chetopa, then kill him. He finally decided that the risk was too great. Let Chetopa and the others awaken tomorrow to find still another of their number dead.
Falcon put his hand across the Indian’s mouth and pressed hard, squeezing his nostrils closed as well. The Indian woke up, then looked up at Falcon with eyes that were wide with fear. Falcon plunged his knife into the Indian’s heart and twisted it around, cutting vital arteries and chambers within that organ.
The bright look of fear in the Indian’s eyes faded fast as he felt his life slipping away from him. Within a few seconds they were opaque and lifeless. Falcon looked at the others, to see if any of them had been disturbed by the action, but not one of them awakened.
Once again, Falcon took a scalp, and this time, using the knife of the Indian he had just killed, he pinned the scalp to the Indian’s chest.
Falcon was awakened at sunrise the next morning by the screams of anger, grief, and terror from the Indians. They had found his calling card.
“There,” Dagen said, pointing. “That’s the cave I was talkin’ about.”
“Dismount here,” Fargo said. “Monroe, you hang onto the horses. Dagen and Casey, come with me. We’ll come up on both sides, so if he is in there looking out, he won’t see us.”
Pulling their pistols, the three men advanced toward the side of the hill, running forward at a crouch. Fargo went up to the right of the cave opening; Dagen and Casey went up to the left.
Fargo picked up a rock, and indicated by a sign that he was going to toss it into the mouth of the cave. Both Dagen and Casey cocked their pistols to be ready.
Fargo threw in the rock and they waited, but nothing happened. He indicated then that they should get closer to the cave opening.
“Son of a bitch! What is that smell?” Casey asked as they got closer.
“Fargo,” Dagen called. “Do you smell that?”