“As long as you’re with me, they’ll let you stay.” Provo’s glance moved on. “Portugee?”
“I guess.”
“Quesada? Will?”
Nobody said no.
“Let’s go, then.”
Six
The sun burned everywhere it struck and the air was like coarse wool, so hot it was hard to breathe, and the dust was in Sam Burgade’s teeth. Sunday, late afternoon: the heat lay in an intense shimmering layer along the high plateau, and dust devils funneled erratically in yellow wheelings of sand, twigs, and leaves.
Burgade’s eyes were raw with fatigue. He was filled with the agony of muscles that cried out from punishment after long disuse. He pulled up his dirt-caked horse on the hillside and tasted the posse’s dust and unslung his field glasses for perhaps the thousandth time.
Down across the shallow bowl, past a fringe of scrubby trees, there was a sun-scraped ranch house. It had been painted, probably less than two years ago, but the ravenous sun had bleached all color out of it. The field glasses brought it up close and clear: the eaves hung with cobwebs and the man who sat on the porch was as filthy and ramshackle as the place itself—a gaunt gray-stubbled figure in a black clawhammer coat, dusty and drab and shiny from long years of wearing. The man had one leg bandaged and propped up on a small wooden crate; a bottle of whiskey hung in one clawed gray hand.
“The tracks go down there,” said Sheriff Nye.
“So do we,” Burgade said, and put his horse forward.
The old-timer on the porch had veinshot eyes. He spat tobacco juice off the porch and waited for the posse to come in. Then his face changed and he said, “If it ain’t Sam Burgade.”
Burgade tried to make out the features in the porch shade. The old man cackled: “Shit, Sam, you don’t recognize me.”
“Rinehart. Dutch Rinehart.”
“Sure I am.”
It was beyond belief. This old caved-in wreckage of a man. Burgade remembered him: full of spit and beams, top horse-wrangler on the Hatchet ranch. Burgade wiped a hand across his face to conceal his awe and the dismal rage of knowing he was himself just as old and used-up as the half-drunk human carrion on the porch.
Burgade was looking at the bandage wrapped unsanitarily around the spindly old leg. The old man was a strange sight in clawhammer coat and dirty white drawers, no trousers. “You all right, Dutch?”
“Ain’t but a bullet hole. Went through me clean. I’ve had worse.” The bleary eyes surveyed the posse. “Shit, you still in the man-tracking business, Sam?”
“Looking for Zach Provo, Dutch.”
“I didn’t get their names,” the old man said dryly. “They were eight or nine of ’em. Scairt the pants off me, as you can plainly see.”
Sheriff Nye said, “It was them shot you?”
“Yair, I sure as hell don’t go round shootin’ myself.”
“Why’d they do it?”
“I guess to keep me from walkin’ into Snowflake and telling the law they was here,” Rinehart said, with an amazing lack of rancor. “I only had but six or seven head of horses here but they tooken off with ’em all. You catch ’em, Sam, I’d be obliged if you get me my horses back.”
Burgade had climbed down; he walked up onto the porch and said, “Better let me have a look at that, Dutch.”
“No, never mind. If you happen to ride through Snowflake you might ask Doc Travis to drop out here.” Rinehart waved him away. “Shit, I’m all right. Take more’n a forty-five-caliber hole in the leg to do me much damage. It went clear through—bullet’s in that wall over there. I stuck a hot running-iron through it. Cauterized up fine.”
Behind him, Burgade heard young Hal Brickman whisper an oath in amazed horror. It made Dutch Rinehart grin. “These young ones ain’t got no i-dee what tough is, do they, Sam?”
Burgade’s face had closed up tight. He said in a taut hoarse-weary voice, “They had a girl with them.”
“Yair. Sure was a looker.”
“Was she all right, Dutch?” Burgade had to lick his dry, cracked lips.
“I guess. Hell, she was alive. She didn’t look as if she cared much if she was alive or dead. Like she just didn’t give a shit either way. But I guess she was all right. Why?”
“She’s my daughter.”
“Oh, Jesus. Oh, Christ, Sam, I am sorry.”
“How long were they here?”
“Long enough to rope out all my horses. Listen, you get your hands on them, my Rocking Chair brand ain’t hard to pick out. I’d be obliged.”
“How much of a jump have they got on us?”
“Six, maybe seven hours.” Rinehart spat an amber stream at the ground. His lips peeled back in a mostly toothless smile. “They the toughest bunch I seen in a good spell. That skinny little Mex didn’t bat an eye when he shot me. Just took aim, casual like, as if I was a tin can for practice. I swear I didn’t really think he was gonna do anything until the damn gun went off. He wasn’t even mad. Jesus, I’m sorry about your girl, Sam. I hope you run them down.”
“I will,” Burgade said. “Thanks for your time, Dutch.”
“Hell, I wisht you could set a spell. You and me ain’t jawed in years, we got a lot of catching up to do.”
“Take care of yourself. We’ll send the doctor out.” Burgade went to his horse and climbed up, anguish in all his joints. He turned the horse and heard Nye say behind him, “One little thing, Mr. Rinehart—you happen to notice which way they headed?” Nye’s voice was dry and Burgade didn’t miss the implied rebuke. Getting rattled, he admitted to himself, but he kept right on going and barely heard Rinehart’s reply:
“Northeast. You want to watch out for them hard cases, mister, they don’t—”
Burgade rode out of earshot. Past the deputies and Hal Brickman with his sunburnt, bleak, tired face, and kept on riding, not waiting for the others, angling out to the northeast and scanning the ground for sign. There was an urgency in him and Nye remarked it when he galloped up: “Easy, Captain, let’s don’t windbreak these horses.”
“Another day and they’ll be across the line, Noel.”
“Then let’s get ourselves on into Snowflake and make a few telephone calls, get a couple posses moving out of Winslow and Holbrook to head them off this side of the line.”
But the phones were dead in Snowflake, as might have been expected: the wires had been cut outside the town at both ends. They dispatched the doctor to Rinehart’s and rode on into the dusk.
They had been fifty-six hours on the trail now. Time and heat and jurisdiction boundaries had pared the posse down and changed the personneclass="underline" only one of Nye’s deputies was still with them; the rest had gone back to Pima County to be replaced by men from Coconino and Navajo counties. Posses were out all over northeastern Arizona, New Mexico had squads combing the badlands, both Utah and Colorado had statewide alarms out. But it was a big wilderness. Provo had slipped through, cutting every wire he came across. The fugitives had avoided most towns and main roads; they had raided horse ranches frequently enough to keep supplied with fast mounts, and if they were sleeping at all they were doing it in the saddle, on the move.
The moon came up, a horned crescent not yet in its first quarter, only a thin rind; but there were no clouds and the starlight was good enough for tracking. Until they got into the chopped-up rocklands. Here it was all shale and petrified wood and there wasn’t a chance of picking up sign at night. Nye started to curse. “Christ, we know they’re headed north, but northeast or northwest now? That line’s two hundred mile long. They can cross it anyplace.”
“Provo had it planned out this way,” Burgade said. “That’s why he hasn’t covered his tracks before. He knew he’d lose us along here.”