Relentless

1

“Damn it, some thing fell down that mountain,” the FBI agent argued. “Suppose it was one of their pack horses. It got away from them and they let Walker’s horse go too, they didn’t have any more use for it. The two horses got together out here. It makes sense.”

“Then where’s the pack saddle?” Buck Stevens asked. He leaned over to pat one of the horses.

The two animals had trotted up amiably when Watchman had led the party out onto the flats. Watchman had taken a look at them and taken a harder look at their tracks, which led back toward the aspens at the foot of the shale slide, and that had drawn their attention to the long raw trench something had gouged out of the snow down the length of the slide.

The abandoned horses were a bay and a blue roan and they both had Lansford’s brand on them. One of them had an empty rifle boot strapped to the saddle.

Vickers was going through the saddle pockets but he didn’t come up with anything that looked like a clue. Watchman sat with his hands folded across the saddle horn, squinting toward the shale slide seven or eight hundred yards away.

Vickers got mounted in his ungainly way and fumbled for a cigarette. “I suppose the next step is to go in and see what it is. Whatever fell down that hill is probably still there.”

Watchman, still thinking, did not reply. Buck Stevens whipped off his hat and chased the two riderless horses off to the south, driving them along like a cowboy with a lot of whooping and slapping of his hat against his thigh, until the two horses ran into the pines. Then Stevens trotted back to rejoin them. “They’d have tagged along otherwise. We can always pick them up on the way back for Walker and Mrs. Lansford.” His face changed: “If we come back.”

Vickers said, “Don’t be ridiculous,” and pulled the walkie-talkie out of his saddlebag and punched it up and talked into it, and listened, and said, “Still nothing.”

Watchman wasn’t surprised. Walkie-talkies didn’t have much of a daytime range and the bulk of the mountains lay between here and Constable Cunningham.

They had had no contact with the outside world for more than twenty-four hours and Vickers was obviously restless about that. By now the case would be in all the headlines and on all the networks. Probably journalists had descended on San Miguel in battalions with sound trucks and camera crews. All that potential publicity and here the nominal commander of the chase was incommunicado in the wilderness. It made Watchman smile a little. Actually it probably wasn’t the reporters so much as his own superiors who had Vickers worried: right now there was probably a good bit of apoplexy in Phoenix and Washington.

Vickers inquired drily, “Is there some compelling reason why we’re just sitting here?”

“Could be.”

Buck Stevens said, “We were getting ready to fix up an invitation for Hargit and his crowd. It looks like they may have beat us to it.”

“Now I do recognize that,” Vickers said. “I may learn slowly, but I do learn. And it may amaze you to know this but I’ve had a small bit of experience with criminal types in my time. Now I’d suggest we don’t follow the horse tracks into those trees. It might well be a trap, as you say, but we can’t very well sit here until we get boils on the off-chance of avoiding an ambush. The thing to do is swing to one side and get into those trees over there”-he pointed off to the left, then swung his arm to the right-“or over there. Come in from one side or the other and, if they’re in there waiting for us, flank them.”

During the FBI agent’s pedantic sarcasms Watchman was looking and thinking. Stalking and being stalked in country like this required levels of sophistication considerably beyond what Vickers was willing to credit. A good deal of the maneuvering consisted of double and treble bluffs. At the single level you set up an ambush which you hoped your enemy wouldn’t detect, you waited for him to walk into it, and you jumped him. At the double level you set out an obvious invitation, making it so obvious that your enemy would take pains to avoid it, because you expected him in avoiding it to fall into another trap you had set. At the treble level you set up an invitation so obvious that your enemy would recognize its clumsiness as a fraud and would come ahead and investigate it because he believed you didn’t expect him to investigate it. You could go on working out reverse bluffs like this to infinite levels but in the end your only real guide was your own judgment of your enemy’s level of sophistication-and his judgment of your judgment of it. It wasn’t only Hargit’s woodcraft that had to be taken into account; it was also Hargit’s assessment of the intelligence of his pursuers. You would set a different kind of trap for a crafty man from the kind you would set for a fool. In a way it was exactly like the psychology of the game of poker; and Sam Watchman was a fair poker player.

Now Hargit had set out an obvious invitation. It had to be one of two things. A trap or a time killer: something calculated to draw the police into an ambush, or something calculated to keep them busy circling slowly around because they thought it was an ambush, to give Hargit plenty of time to get away while his pursuers fooled around in the woods here.

In two hours it would be sunset. Hargit probably felt his chances of escape would be far better after dark. Possibly they were, but the clouds were clearing off and there would be a three-quarter moon tonight.

Vickers was scowling at him. “Did you hear what I said?”

“Does it matter?” Watchman was cool because he was running out of patience with him. “We’ll circle it. I want to find out if they’re still in there.”

“Circle it? How far out?”

Watchman made a sweep with his arm. It encompassed the aspens in front of them and the mountain above, with the shale slide at the center.

“Do you have any idea how long it will take us to make that circuit?” Vickers demanded.

“I’d say an hour and a half. Maybe two.”

“And give them just that much more of a lead on us.”

“You can go right on in straight up if you want to. I’m tired of arguing with you. Come on, Buck.”

In the end, of course, Vickers came along.