Chapter 11
Having figured out that the ambush site was not really far from the town, Wolf thought that it was definitely worth while riding back along the grade to see where they went. It was, in point of fact, several miles over six in any way but as the crow flies; and though the railroad goes straight as far as possible, the mountain which housed the pass in which Luke was setting up a base was too hard to make for anything but a lazy curve around it, adding some distance, but equally, making the going easier. Wolf would easily cover the distance in daylight after coming back down to the town, and did not intend to push the pace. He came to the end of the viaduct, and settled down in some rocks to make a cold meal, and leave his horse cropping the turf on the side of the railroad. Having satisfied his own hunger and slaked his thirst, he went looking at the place the bandits had all stood in horror as the train kept on going, without stopping for them to rob the paychest in the caboose.
Their feet were obvious enough.
Wolf thought the bandits were absolute amateurs at hiding their trail. They had crossed the railroad, which meant that it was highly likely that they would be using one of the three towns Luke had marked first as their supply. They might even have a permanent camp out of town. Wolf intended to be careful.
The trail led up and over the tailings where the grade had been blasted through, the first invading weeds colonising and softening the profile of the broken stone. It was hard to track through such rubble, but the plants could be bent under foot. The apex of the mound could be disturbed, setting of miniature gravel avalanches, burying plants, or uprooting them and carrying them down. Where the bandits left the track was a story written in large letters for a competent tracker.
Of course, from the point of view of the bandits, one had to know where they were when they left; and this time, the train had not stopped, so they might assume nobody knew they were even there. They did not know that two young men had been looking for them, and had guessed where they might be, before being proven correct.
Whatever the reason, the bandits had been perhaps a little lax in their leaving.
Wolf actually checked for other, stealthier sign, in case this was a false trail; but he found nothing else.
This meant one of two things.
Either the bandits had withdrawn so skilfully that Wolf missed their sign; or it was the genuine article.
“Careless, mighty careless,” muttered Wolf, who did not believe for one moment that any bandits could hide sign from him. He might have believed it of Luke; but then, Luke was a man who did all that he undertook with a thoroughness and professionalism few could match. It takes time to learn to move through the landscape like a ghost of its own vegetation. Luke had taken the time, with training from his Cherokee friends. Wolf reflected that bandits rarely went to the trouble to do anything with expertise. Even shooting. He and Luke put in time daily with targets unless tracking, where silence was necessary. Most bandits did their practising when using their guns in action. Some put in more time, but not the concerted effort Luke had shown him made for effortless gun use when in action. Like the Cossack hopak dance Luke had taught him, which made a man limber and strong. Bandits were bandits for the simple reason that they would not put their time into making their money as honest men. This had been a revelation to Wolf, when he had worked it out for himself. He had grown up thinking that there were the good men, and the bad men, and such things would never change. But what it boiled down to was that there were the conscientious men, and the lazy men, and a significant proportion of the lazy men went bad. And that some conscientious men could get tempted by a lazy solution, and go bad, and in their case, they went very bad.
It gave, however, an edge to the lawman, outgunned and outnumbered as he usually was, to prevail over those who could not be bothered, for an ounce or two of effort, to be masters of their field. And that edge was the difference between rule of law, and rule of terror.
Wolf was something of a philosopher when he was on his own, and the back of his mind pondering, whilst the conscious part was tracking.
Into the mountains, the tracking was less easy; the passes were bare stone, little vegetation. But there was some, and it could be bent aside, twigs broken, plants crushed under a careless hoof. Here, a man dismounted, and left the print of his boot toe in softer dirt. Here, a sleeve snagged on a thorn and left a thread. It was painstaking work to track, and Wolf could not move fast. He began to look for somewhere to spend the night.
He settled for the ground near a spring, which trickled sullenly out of the ground. Fresh water was always good. It sprang from under a rock, ran for thirty feet and vanished into a crack in the rock. Perhaps it emerged again, lower down, having collected enough to make it laugh and chatter about the underground caves it had passed through on its way. Wolf smiled to himself at such whimsies, and the line ‘caverns measureless to man,’ from some piece of poetry from a school reader which ran through his head.
Against the rock was as good a place to sleep as any. He dug down into such soil as there was, with the folding spade he carried, and searched for rocks to add to the scrape and roof it over, to hide the glow of fire from unfriendly eyes. The fire would be meagre, for the lack of vegetation, but he twisted grasses into sticks to add to it, and found a piece of treasure in a fallen sapling which had slid down the slope in a small landslide. He made a bran mash for his horse, and a mess of beans and wild herbs for himself, with a chunk of bacon in it. It was enough, and he left some to eat cold for breakfast. He carried fennel seeds as a matter of course, to add flavour, and to reduce the flatulence caused by beans. Wolf did not think anyone was tracking him, but a man farting was always going to draw attention to himself, as a man who had hot food in him. And Wolf did not want to attract four legged predators any more than two-legged ones. He collapsed the firepit onto itself, to keep the stones hot, wrapped himself in his blanket, and went to sleep.
He woke just before dawn, refreshed and ready. He drank at the trickle of water, washed, ate his corn hash, and washed his cookpot, which had served as his food bowl as well. His horse had cropped such short turf as there was to find, and lipped water at the spring with soft, velvet lips. And they were back on the trail, now three days behind the bandits. But that did not matter. Steady always beat speedy. Another school memory, of Achilles and the tortoise. Wolf neither knew nor cared who Achilles was; some warrior from some dead Old World culture, he thought. He always thought it a stupid story, but one could explain it if Achilles was a lazy bastard like most bandits, and disrespected the tortoise to go to sleep, certain he could catch up the slow reptile. Wolf saw a land turtle, which was what the story meant by a tortoise, and took it as a good omen, moving the creature into a patch of sun with a few succulents. The head, swiftly withdrawn, came out again and the mouth opened wide to munch on the stonecrop.
“Have a good life, little brother,” said Wolf.
He set off again, on foot, his horse ambling after him, snacking when there was vegetation to attract it.
Wolf was happy to go at his own pace, and continued thus for several slow, long days, and was glad not to be on horseback when sign at eyelevel turned him off the trail, Someone had gone to the trouble of brushing any hoofprints with a branch, a trifle carelessly discarded; and a bush sprawling across the valley wall, in front of a cleft was, on closer inspection, tied to a tree, making it look as if nobody ever went that way.
Clever; but not quite clever enough. The twine was dirtied and did not show, but the bush was never going to look quite natural, and the branch used as a brush lay with the bright scar at its end where it had been torn from a tree further down the trail, which he had noted, and left where there were no trees of the same kind.
Wolf suspected that the cleft led into a blind valley, and the extra care went to cover a hidden base. And he might even be watched. He turned away, and went onward, until he could duck under an overhanging rock definitely out of sight of anyone concealed above the valley as a lookout. He did not think there was anyone; he did have that crawling feeling between his shoulder-blades of a man who is watched, that strange, inexplicable sensation which cannot be explained by science, but which any tracker, hunter, or hunted knows to exist, regardless of science.
Wolf tethered his horse, off the pass in a small glen which, any other time, would have seemed like an ideal camp site. There was grass, if slightly sparse in nature, to keep it contented, and a pool of water which smelled fresh enough; and he wanted to be free of being followed. Wolf, on his own, could blend with vegetation. He ghosted back the way he had come, up the side of the pass, where there were spindly trees, holding tenaciously into the meagre soil. But trees they were, and Wolf passed between them like his namesake, a silent, almost invisible predator. He observed the tied-down bush. He could see no sign of anyone watching. No twitches to it. He moved past it the other way, and crossed the trail. He crept along the steep wall, dropping to his belly for the final approach. Stealthily, skilfully, Wolf went under the bush, proud of his skill, proud of knowing that even Luke could not do so well, and knowing that Luke would be proud of his friend, not jealous.
Through the hedge, he could see nothing at first; the valley opened beyond the cleft, and curved.
And then he smelled a whiff of tobacco smoke, and heard a man’s shout.
They were here, right enough. And not keeping much of a guard on the way in.
Here, Wolf very nearly made a mistake.
Pride whispered in his ear that if he could move right into the valley, he could draw a plan of the camp, and take it to Luke.
Caution spoke in the other ear, that he did not know for certain what was ahead, and that a place with one way out was a trap. And he had a sudden urgent feeling that he wanted to get out. Wolf went backwards as stealthily as he had gone forwards, and, clearing the entrance, followed his instincts to go up, scrambling to a rock above the tree to which the bush was tied, on which he could lie flat.
His instincts had not lied, and his skin crawled to think that had he gone forward, he would almost certainly have been captured in a part of the cleft with no cover.
The man on the horse came from the direction in which he had been going, and Wolf recognised him as Scarface Porkins, one of the gang, his coarsely-handsome features marred by a knife scar across his cheek, narrowly missing the eye. He gave a curious whistle, which Wolf memorised. Presently, the bush was untied.
“Any news?” asked a laconic voice.
“Angel-Face and Flinty were taken,” said Scarface. “Some Injun bounty-killer, and a sod-buster. I’m plum tuckered out, but I got the supplies. Tell Barney we wasn’t betrayed, jus’ bad luck.”
Wolf interpreted this to be Barney Magree, the gang’s leader.
“Barney won’t be pleased.”
“I can’t help that; the game’s played out if we don’t have Angel-Face. Unless we can recruit a con-man named Baby-Face Bellamy. Seemingly, he works as a mild-mannered drummer, clergyman, or school-teacher.”
“Got any goods on him?”
“Poster, and a report from the Sheriff,” said Scarface. “Any chow going? I sure could use a rest and something to eat. There’s a hot shot bounty-killer in town, fellow called Mortensen. I winged him, and he put a hole in my hat, but it was a bit unpleasant there for a moment, despite us paying off Sheriff Richardson.”
They moved out of earshot, and Wolf blessed his luck.
He could find out from Jim Carstairs in which town Richardson was sheriff, and maybe have him wire for Mortensen, and see if the man was amenable to working together. If he was winged, he might be happy to go shares on the seventeen thousand dollars. Seventeen thousand dollars split three ways was not as good as split in half, but then, five thousand six hundred and some dollars each was better than losing all of it because of the interference of a bounty-hunter acting in rivalry.
Wolf shrugged philosophically. A year ago, the idea of earning five thousand dollars for a month’s work would have been out of his league.
