Relentless

2

It took almost the two full hours. They entered the aspens about a quarter mile upstream from the point where the long snow-trench ended at the creekbank; so far they had crossed no tracks except those of the two abandoned horses. They went up through the pines and over the crest of the ridge, and ten minutes down the back of it Watchman began to circle to the right. About half a mile along the back of the ridge they found the tracks of the seven horses where they had come in from the southwest and gone up to the top of the ridge above the shale slide. This was where they had come in; it remained to be seen where, or if, they had gone out.

Watchman continued along the backside of the ridge about two miles, keeping to the trees, and circled the end of it with his rifle across his saddle horn and all his senses keyed up atavistically. They rode in a spread-out single file, fifty feet apart, and Watchman was alert to the possibility of tripwires stretched across his path: God knew how many more grenades the fugitives were armed with.

They reached the creek at a point more than two miles below their original crossing. Watchman looked both ways with considerable care before he put his horse across and ran into the aspens. He didn’t circle to the right; he went straight ahead through the fringe of sycamores and leafless aspens, angling up a little slope so that when he reached the edge of the trees he was on an elevation overlooking the scrubby flat they had crossed two hours ago. The sun threw long shadows across the flats and it was not hard to make out the dotted shadow-line of two groups of tracks emerging from the trees quite a distance to the south and crossing the flat. One set belonged to the abandoned horses and the other set was the tracks Watchman and Vickers and Stevens had left two hours earlier.

“It doesn’t have to mean they’re still in there,” he said. “They may have seen what we were up to and decided to go around behind us and clear out. But they were still in there until recently, we know that much, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve stayed put and decided to wait us out.”

“All right,” Vickers said testily, “we’ve killed a couple of hours and most of the daylight we had left. What bright idea comes next?”

“We go in after them.”

He rode slowly back to the creekbank and turned left to ride upstream, keening the forest, scouting for tracks. About a half mile downstream from the point where the object had rolled down the slide to the creek, Watchman dismounted. “One of us stays here-that’s you, Buck. If I sing out bring the horses along fast. Vickers, we go on foot from here.”