Relentless

5

It wouldn’t have taken half an hour to reach the ranger cabin if it hadn’t been for the drifts. A good part of the way the horses were up to their bellies in snow. Twice Watchman had to double back and find another way around.

At the summit the wind was still brisk but nothing like the previous day’s gale. Ramps of snow lay against two sides of the cabin all the way to the peaked roof line. The spindle tracery of the wooden watchtower loomed above the cabin in silhouette against the clouds. Watchman signaled a halt at the side of a twenty-foot boulder and took a good long time to look the place over. He didn’t see any smoke at the chimney but that didn’t need to mean anything. The blowing snow had almost erased a line of indentations in the crust that emerged from the cabin door and made an abrupt right turn and disappeared down over the far crest. It could mean they had moved on; it could mean they had laid tracks to invite their pursuers into an ambush. Watchman dismounted and dragged his rifle out of the saddle boot. Without the need of instructions Buck Stevens got down with his rifle and braced his aiming arm against the abrasive side of the boulder, training the rifle on the cabin door. Watchman nodded to him and struck off on foot to make a wide circle and come in at the cabin from its blind side. When he looked back he saw Vickers coming after him.

The scatter of boulders made it possible to keep cover until he had come up within twenty feet of the cabin. When he stopped Vickers bumped into his back and muttered, “Sorry.”

“Keep a little distance,” Watchman said, and swept the summit with a careful inspection. Nothing stirred except the wind and snow. He looked across the little flat and made a hand signal to Buck Stevens, and Stevens’ hat lifted and fell in acknowledgment. Watchman stripped off his right glove and put it in his pocket; fitted his hand into the rifle’s trigger guard and sprinted for the side wall of the cabin.

He was ready to drop and slide but his run drew no fire. Against the cabin he spent a good while listening. Heard nothing and glanced back. Vickers was still in the rocks, training his rifle on the cabin. Watchman nodded to him and Vickers made his run, skidding to a stop beside him.

Watchman went along to the front corner of the log shack and poked his head out. Stevens had the door covered but that didn’t keep anyone in the farther rocks from having it covered too.

The snow right in front of the door had been churned up and was brown with mud, thinly covered with a fresh white fall that had coated it since the tracks had been made. Watchman tried to judge how long that might be but it was hard to estimate-ten minutes, maybe two hours; the cabin roof overhung it and a lot would depend on the changes in the wind during the past hour or two.

A few blunt icicles hung from the edges of the roof. Watchman eased around the butts of the corner logs and moved along to the door, and stood there studying it and studying the rocks beyond. Vickers’ head appeared at the corner, an inquiring lift of eyebrows, and Watchman held up a palm to keep him where he was.

There was a padlock hasp, badly bent; no lock. What held the door shut was a wooden throw bar, a dowel handle of which protruded through a slot in the face of the heavy plank door. You had to slide the dowel about eight inches to the right. Watchman thought about that for a while, not touching the door, and after he had considered the temptations he went back to the corner and said, “Wait here. Don’t touch the door.” And looked both ways and jogged over to Buck Stevens’ post in the rocks.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing, I hope. Hand me that coil of rope, will you? Thanks.”

“Want me to stay put?”

“Yes. Make noise if anything moves.”

Watchman carried the lariat back to the cabin door and dropped it on the ground. Vickers was scowling at him. Watchman said, “Be a good idea if you went over to those rocks for a minute.”

“Why?”

“Just prudent,” Watchman said. He picked up the noose end of the rope and pulled it down tight into a small loop. Then he made sure the coil of rope lay properly on the ground, and gently hung the little loop on the dowel handle of the door bar. He did this very gingerly. Finally he reached down for the free end of the rope and began to pull it slowly. The rope began to uncoil, not disturbing the latch.

Vickers had gone over to the rocks and Watchman backed toward him slowly, paying the rope out. It was a fifty-foot lasso and he went back into the rocks with the end of it. “Duck down behind that rock now,” he said, and Vickers finally got the idea and took cover.

Watchman pulled the rope around back of a boulder and kept pulling until he heard the door latch begin to scrape in its slotted guides. It looked as if they hadn’t booby-trapped it after all, but he didn’t regret taking the time to be sure… And then the rope met resistance, he gave it a brief final tug, and a blast of explosives blew the cabin door out.