Weed’s head rocked back against the ground. Burgade heard Hal gasp.
A few tiny raindrops came down through the trees. Burgade felt one strike the back of his hand. His knuckles began to hurt. “I can beat on you for a while, George, until my hands get tired. And then I can start cutting you up with this rusty knife of yours. I don’t mind if you bleed to death.”
He heard Hal’s taut breathing, full of disapproval, but he didn’t look around. He only said, in the same calm voice, “Now, you know Provo doesn’t give a damn about you, George. He picked you to come out here because he figured you were the most expendable of all of them. When you don’t come back he’ll know I’ve got you. But it won’t worry him. He won’t do anything about it. You don’t owe him anything, George. And you may as well forget about that buried gold of his, because you’ve got no chance to get at it now. Either I slice you up and leave you here to bleed to death, or you tell me what I want to know, and I’ll leave you tied up until I’ve done my business here and then we’ll take you back to the law. That’s your choice.”
“Choice between you killing me and the law hanging me? Hell, Burgade, you got to do better’n that.”
“Maybe if you tell me what I want to know, Provo’ll kill me. Then all you’ve got to worry about is getting yourself untied. You might get away clear.”
Weed showed a double row of white teeth. “Now, there’s a thought, ain’t it?”
“Where are they, George? Where’s my girl?”
Weed told him.
Nine
Shelby came awake irritably. Somebody was kicking him in the butt.
“Come on, get up. Your turn to stand guard.” It was Joaquim Quesada. Shelby rolled over and saw it hadn’t been a kick after all. Quesada had been hitting him with the stock of his rifle.
“Jesus,” Shelby complained. “The hell time is it?”
“Quién sabe?” Quesada lay down and wrapped a blanket around him.
Shelby picked up his .30-30 and walked off a little piece, and sat down in the grass. It was a surly night, the sky was black and wild. Dim suggestions of enormous cloud banks drifted overhead. Somewhere to the west he saw the reflections of sheet lightning, a flicker through dark mist: it meant the lightning was somewhere beyond a thick haze of falling rain.
Provo had picked the most exposed spot on the map to camp. Shelby huddled in the chill night and tried to see out across the meadows. Menendez was sitting up on the far side of camp, by the horses, watching that way. The grass was cropped down short—Navajo sheep had grazed it and moved on. There wasn’t a tree for half a mile in any direction. The flat dish of grass was surrounded by mountainsides. A creek came down out of the peaks and ran along the lower end of the meadow before it spilled over a waterfall into a canyon beyond; the creek-bank trees, maybe a thousand yards away, were the nearest cover of any land. Shelby felt isolated, exposed, and nervous, even though he knew there wasn’t a rifleman alive who could make a bullet count at that range.
They had come down into the meadow by a round-about switchbacking route. When Provo had chosen the campsite, out in the middle of the grass, Gant had exploded in anger. Provo had ignored him completely: the only remark he made was, “Rivers can be as changeable as women. That creek’s changed its course some since last time I was here.”
Portugee had yelled and bitched. It was a setup for an ambush. They could be surrounded. It was a trap. Menendez had laughed at him. Provo had said, “Only two men after us. How’s two men going to surround anybody?”
Shelby knew he was right. It made perfect sense. Burgade couldn’t come within range of them without showing himself on the meadow. There was no cover. But what the hell did Provo intend to prove by all this?
And there was another worry. He could already begin to make out the vague shadow-streaks of falling rain above the slopes immediately to the west, illuminated by frequent bursts of lightning. In a few minutes the storm would be on top of them. It could conceal Burgade if he came then.
Shelby unfolded his oilskin slicker and put his head through the poncho hole. He laced it up around his throat and sat with the poncho flowing around him, a tent that covered him from the neck down. He stared into the cool opaque night with wide eyes and kept shifting his grip on the rifle. Once, he thought he saw something move in the corner of his vision; he whipped his head around and stared. Nothing. He swallowed and glanced across at where Menendez was sitting, but he could no longer make out Menendez’s shape in the impenetrable black.
He knew his fear was irrational. They were eight against two—or anyhow seven against two; Weed hadn’t come back yet, but nobody expected him before dawn. But groundless or not, fear was a constriction against which Shelby pushed with increasing resentment.
The drumming crash of the thunderstorm awoke the others; there were rustlings and stirrings, men wrapping themselves in oilskins. Shelby walked over to where Susan Burgade lay. Provo had tied her hands behind her and hobbled her ankles. Someone had thrown an oilskin across her. Shelby couldn’t tell if she was awake. She didn’t stir when he bent down over her. He straightened up after awhile and walked back to his post.
There was rain. It came down hard and sudden, as if dumped out of buckets from treetop height. Fierce lightning licked across the sky in fragments and stabbed toward the earth, brought down by metal in the mountain rocks. Inside of a minute the water was funneling out of the trough of Shelby’s hatbrim, dripping down the back of his neck, getting inside the collar of the slicker. Within a few more minutes he was soaked through.
“Easy, Mike. It’s me.”
Provo’s voice made him jump a foot off the ground. Shelby turned and said, “Christ, Zach.”
“Can’t see anything in this rain anyway. Let’s you and me go sit with missy.”
“She’s all right. I just checked her.”
“I know. But Burgade might take a notion to come in tonight, use the rain for cover. If he does, he’ll try to find his girl and ease her out of here without us seeing him.”
Shelby went, with him to the girl. She hadn’t moved. Provo didn’t sit down. He stood above the girl, a tall lean shadow in flowing oilskins. Shelby sat down on the wet ground and brooded miserably into the rain. A shaft of lightning sizzled down not half a mile away and thunder crashed immediately. The rain was a steady splashing racket.
The waiting rubbed his nerves. He tried to occupy himself by making plans, thinking about the gold, deciding step by step where he would go and what he would do. Australia, he thought. Or East Africa. Ride from here up across the Four Corners into the Rockies. Get outfitted in respectable clothes in Ouray or Silverton, so he wouldn’t attract attention. They probably had his picture on post office walls, but he had an ordinary young face, likely nobody’d spot him if he just used his head, kept calm, didn’t act like a fugitive. Ride the coach on up through Grand Junction and up into the Jackson Hole country. Up past the Tetons through Cody, on up by Butte and Helena and right through into Canada. If the money looked short he’d knock over a country store or two, but do it at night and wear a mask so nobody’d see his face. Keep moving, that was the trick. As long as you kept moving and didn’t shackle yourself to anybody else, you’d be all right. Loners always had the best chance because there was nobody to betray them.
That was why it bothered him staying here. He didn’t want to rely on Provo or anybody else; and he didn’t like standing still like this. But he’d invested his time and he had the money coming to him. He was going to stick it out until Provo came across with the gold. And Provo would. There wasn’t going to be any double-cross. Not with seven of them against Provo. If he got balky about leading them to the gold, they’d make him talk. Provo was tough, all right, but no man alive was that tough.