Obie Macklin watched Tree go to sleep, then picked up his rifle and walked past the three trussed prisoners to where Mordecai Gant stood bulky against the sky. Macklin spoke in a low voice: “I hope to God this works.”
“You thank Floyd’U catch us up tomorrow?”
“Maybe. I ain’t worried about Floyd. It’s Cooley I’m thinking about.”
“If Floyd don’t get here first, Obie, we got to do it ourselves and get the hell out of here before Cooley shows up with that fucking army of his.” Gant glanced across the camp at Caroline, lowered his voice still more, and said, “Cooley ain’t gonna find them messages you left for Floyd, is he?”
Macklin said, “Cooley wouldn’t know where to look-I hope.” He followed Gant’s glance and saw Caroline watching them. That lit Je blonde catamount didn’t trust nobody at all. He made a note to watch out for her-she had a gun and it wouldn’t be smart to assume she wouldn’t use it.
Gant said, “Maybe we ought to do it now.”
“You that hungry for somebody’s blood?”
“I don’t mind,” Gant said. “We ought to do it and git shet of it and git the hell out of here.”
“Go ahead and try if you want to. Me, I keep remembering the way he handles that sliphammer gun of his. I’d just as soon wait for help. Hell, that was the whole object of setting this thing up.”
“How hard you think Tree’d fight to save Wyatt Arp’s hide?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“You funny, Obie, real funny. Sometime you gonna laugh yoseff to death.”
“Screw you, Mordecai.”
Gant scowled. “Some reason you don’t want to go on living, Obie?” he asked with soft, bloodthirsty insinuation.
Macklin laughed bitterly. “Living? Hell, I never even wanted to be born.” He turned and moved away.
The third day was the heartbreaker. They got all the way up the mountain saddle only to find that the far side was a sheer cliff. Nothing to do but retrace and go around: it took hours. When Tree finally found a pass that crossed over, he halted his horse to the crest to look back, and saw two armies of horsemen doggedly descending the slopes five or six miles back. The two groups were a mile apart, separated by a hogback ridge. Tree’s pinched mouth formed a slash across his face like a surgeon’s wound.
Caroline said, puzzled, “They look like they’re hiding from each other.”
Wyatt Earp said, “I recognize that white horse-Floyd Sparrow’s. Trying to beat Cooley to us.”
Mordecai Gant laughed coarsely. “Lookin’ to skin your hide, Arp.”
Earp looked at Tree with venom. “This game’s rigged, isn’t it.”
“Not by me,” Tree answered shortly, and led them through the pass; He had been spotted; the pursuers lifted their pace.
The far side was a long, sweeping downslope. They crossed at a canter. Up above was a sawtooth tangle of peaks, the highest in this range-Continental Divide. Beyond that, it would be mostly downhill; but it was still three days to Denver.
He tried to stretch the hour’s lead. They found a spring, watered, and walked the horses downslope in the creek, then came to the confluence of a tributary and turned deliberately upstream in the secondary creek. It was out of the way but it might confuse pursuit. Tree led them out onto a shale slide that made dangerous footing but concealed all sign of their passage. When they had gone a mile beyond, he discovered Macklin wasn’t with them: Macklin trotted up from behind and saw his look, and said casually, “Thought I better have one more look back the way we come.”
“See anything?”
“Not a thing,” Macklin said, and pushed on.
They breathed the horses at intervals but made no noon halt. At two they spent fifteen minutes in a creek, going upstream and thus losing a mile’s progress to gain concealment; at a tortuous chasm Tree tossed big rocks across to the far side until he had overturned a fair number of loose stones to expose their damp undersides. It would take pursuers an hour or more to get over to that side. Tree led down the near side to the belly of the gorge, which took them by a series of rock-floored hairpin twists down through the upper elevations of timber forests. They entered groves so thickly massed at the treetops that no sun got through to the ground. Moss and decaying growth made easy footing for the horses but left clear sign. The riders had to ward off branches and duck under tree limbs. Once, in the center of the timber, Tree called a halt to blow the horses and listen for pursuit. He turned his head slowly to catch any sounds that might come rolling down the long-sounding forest corridors. He heard nothing-which in itself was not reassuring-and led on, noticing vaguely that Obie Macklin was occupying his nervous hands by sharpening his knife on stirrup leathers.
Distances in the high-country air deceived the eye. The high peaks that had loomed within obvious bullet range that morning were still ahead of them in midaf-ternoon, when they climbed past timberline into stunted marginal growth. The air had a clear, gemlike quality. Tree halted to give the canyons behind him a long inspection; doubtless the two pursuing bands were down there under the trees somewhere-the question was, how close?
Warren Earp said, “God damn it, I wish they’d show themselves.”
Wyatt said testily, “Take it easy, boy, take it easy.” It made Tree look at him. The deep voice, calm on the surface, had a strained, false timbre.
Warren said, “What the hell you mean, take it easy? My damn wrists are just about to start bleeding and we’re unarmed and hogtied and right back there we’ve got a pack of stinking miners wanting to lynch both of us.”
Caroline said, with acid, “Don’t you think your friend Cooley can take care of a few worthless miners?”
“Not if they get to us first,” Warren said, looking as miserable as he probably felt. He hadn’t whined much, which was to his credit, but the strain was getting to him now. There was, Tree observed, a surprising amount of sand beneath Warren’s bravado. A lesser man would have crumbled by now-he had expected it to happen, and found himself curiously pleased that it hadn’t. Now, after the one minor outburst, Warren clamped his mouth shut and turned to stare stonily ahead.
They climbed another mile and Tree looked back again, saw nothing, and urged the weary horses on. Caroline drew alongside and crinkled her nose at him. At that moment Josie Earp, looking down the backtrail, said, “Oh, shit-Oh, Jesus Christ!”
Tree’s attention whipped down the mountain. He saw them then-Floyd Sparrow’s bunch, the white horse in the lead, coming up from the trees not three miles below.
Josie said, “Sweet Jesus, get us out of this.” She was talking to Wyatt.
Wyatt put his hooded eyes on Tree and said, “Don’t you think this damned foolishness has gone far enough now?”
It was Caroline who said, “What’s the matter-afraid you won’t make it to Denver?”
Earp’s eyes, flashing bright for a moment, receded under drooping lids; he said nothing more.
Dead weary, Tree pushed them on. He kept looking back, kept getting glimpses of Floyd Sparrow’s determined gang, and knew without being told exactly what Sparrow wanted.
The hard pressures of pursuit, fatigue, vigilance constricted him like iron hoops drawn painfully around his chest. He glanced at Wyatt Earp and knew the man was getting rattled. He felt acutely embarrassed, as if he had blundered in on Earp’s privacy. All during these endless hours of riding he had communicated very little with Earp but he still hadn’t shaken the possibility he was doing Earp an injustice, Rafe or no Rafe. Nothing was simple, he thought; particularly in questions of guilt. There were no innocent men.