Sliphammer

Twelve

Eight hours of hard travel brought them to a frothy stream that came slicing down out of the eastward mountains. The noon sun was brass-brilliant, its heat cut by altitude; tall crags loomed high above them against the sky. The canyon was green with lush growth, its walls upended in stark, steep tilts that climbed, tier after tier, toward the great, high Rocky Mountain passes at twelve and thirteen thousand feet. The tall timber was an admixture of lance-like conifers and silver-barked aspens. The forest floors made for silent passage across deep beds of pine needles; the trees grew so close together that even without undergrowth travel was difficult.

Gnats and dragonflies hovered above slack eddies where the stream made a bend across massive rocks. Tree called a brief halt to water the horses, remove the gags, and get proper clothes on the prisoners. Josie went with Caroline behind a pinon to protect her saddle-scraped legs with petticoats; the Earp brothers were untied one at a time and watched with alert care. When Warren said, “I got to take a leak,” Obie Macklin went with him-with a gun-and Tree stood by the horses, watching Mordecai Gant make faces at Wyatt Earp. Gant was on the prod, trying to egg Wyatt Earp into reaction, but Earp was having none of it, ignoring Gant.

Wyatt Earp had simmered soundlessly since dawn. Now he went to a tree and sat down with his back to it, lifting and bending one knee. He put his rawhide-manacled hands in his lap and stared passionately at the roaring stream.

Macklin herded Warren into sight. Tree walked over to Wyatt Earp and said, “How’re you making it?”

Earp glanced up at him; instead of answering, he said, “Where’d you pick up those two ass holes?” talking about Macklin and Gant.

Tree said, “Does it matter?”

“They’re scum.”

“That’s why they’re handy.” Tree took his pipe out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. He seldom lit it but the stem was tooth-scarred from chewing. He said, “If I’d been alone last night you’d have let out a bellow that would’ve brought an army on the run. But you couldn’t trust Gant not to kill Josie. You trust me too much-that’s why I needed him.”

“Trust you? That’s not the point.” Earp looked up-he was taking some strange satisfaction from this. “The point is, I couldn’t trust you to handle Gant.”

“Same thing.”

“I knew that wretch a long time ago. He used to ride for Phin Clanton. He’d carve up his own mother if he could get a good price for the pieces.”

“I expect he would,” Tree muttered, without heat. Gant and Macklin were too far away to hear but he glanced that way anyhow.

Earp said, “I’m not in the habit of making empty threats, so listen to me. If that scum lays one finger on my wife I’ll have his guts for guitar strings-and yours with them. Clear?”

Tree, surveying the camp, said in a mild, abstracted voice, “You don’t give any orders here-maybe you ought to bear that in mind.”

Warren Earp was sitting on the rocks, massaging his bare foot; he seemed to have picked up a splinter. Josie and Caroline reappeared from behind the pifton clump; Josie went directly to Wyatt, sat beside him and reached, awkwardly with bound hands, for his fingers. When she looked up at Tree there was white heat in her eyes.

Gant and Macklin sat gnawing on strips of jerky, hunkered on their haunches like a pair of unshaven cavemen, watching the Earps with bloodshot eyes and waiting-maybe hoping-for a false move. Gant’s eyes played across Josie’s supple body with sensuous lust: he even licked his lips. Tree had no intention of reining him in; Gant’s too-obvious lust would keep Wyatt Earp too mad to concentrate on other things.

The air was thick and heady, laden with the scent of pine resin. Insects buzzed around the horses. Caroline moved around restlessly, a. 38 birdhead revolver in the waistband of her Levi’s. Her flannel shirt enclosed her abundant milkmaid breasts without concealing their weighted, soft curves. Her feet stopped, she turned and laid her eyes directly on him, but he couldn’t fathom her expression.

He turned to face the three Earps and said, with strong projection, “Pay attention, I’m going to make a little speech and I’ll only make it once.”

Josie tossed her head. She didn’t say horse shit-she didn’t have to. Warren glanced at him derisively and went on rubbing his foot. Wyatt was the only one of them who gave him full attention. Whatever was in his mind didn’t show on his leonine face.

Tree said, “It must’ve taken Cooley a little while to discover you were gone, and a little while more to find out I’d disappeared too. They’ll put things together soon enough-they’ll know we didn’t take the train, they’ll start hunting for tracks and sooner or later they’ll find them, the time it takes depending on luck more than anything else. I have no doubts Cooley’s on our backtrail with his whole gang.”

Warren’s mouth twisted; he said, “Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you pulled this idiotic stunt.”

Tree ignored him. “We can’t outshoot all of them. But we’ve got two advantages, one of which is that we’ve got you three for hostages. The other-and I state this plain at the risk of boasting-I survived a few years fighting Indians by playing the Indians’ own game a little better than they played it. I don’t mean to leave Cooley a plain trail to follow. When we pull out of here we’ll ride upstream in the creek and from time to time I’ll pull one or two other tricks. If I catch any one of you trying to leave sign for Cooley to pick up later, I’ll tie all three of you facedown across your saddles in a dead-man ride. Not very comfortable after the first few hours. I hope you all understand I mean that.”

He saw Josie shudder and knew he had scored the point. Earp scowled at him and had nothing to say. Warren Earp was concentrating on his foot as if he hadn’t even listened.

Tree added softly, “If that doesn’t persuade you, I might think about turning Gant lose on Mrs. Earp. Understood?”

Wyatt Earp looked at him, in the eye. After a moment he switched his attention to Gant and the smile that settled on Earp’s face was as chilling as any expression Tree had ever seen.

Mordecai Gant said, “Maybe I’ll just turn me loose on her anyhow, huh?”

“Not before I say so,” Tree said. He wheeled, trying to catch Gant off guard: “Any objections?”

Gant shrugged. “You runnin’ this thang.”

Obie Macklin uttered his brief, nervous laugh.

“All right. Mount up.”

They put the prisoners on their horses, lashed their bound hands to the saddle horns and ran a tether rope through the three bridles. Mordecai Gant held the lead end of the rope and led the way out of camp, splashing upstream in the shallow, fast running creek. Tree posted Macklin and Caroline at the rear, and splashed past Gant to ride ahead and scout, not wanting to get beyond earshot but needing to find a route that wouldn’t box them into a blind canyon.

When he came to a long barren strip of granite that shelved down to the edge of the stream, he tied the horse and climbed the slope on foot, avoiding the risk of leaving iron horsehoe scars on the rock. At the top of the ten-minute climb he had a commanding view of the country through which they had climbed steadily the past few hours. Gunnison was somewhere southwest, many miles out of sight in the tangle of hills and canyons. On this exposed height, the wind was turbulent; but there was no sign of rain clouds anywhere on the great dome of the sky. That was both good and bad. Heavy rain might wash out their tracks; but the mud left behind after a rain would just as easily retain sign.

Somewhere about two days’ ride to the northeast sat Leadville, which Tree planned to give wide berth; Gunnison’s telegraph, without doubt, had already alerted Leadville’s mining bosses; possibly Leadville was throwing its own posse into the field. Law was law, but the Governor had not personally signed the extradition warrants, and moguls like Wayde Cardiff could be depended on to interpret politics their own way and tell their lawyers to dream up high-sounding legal justifications after the fact. He had no doubt Reese Cooley was on the trail by now with supplies, remounts, and enough guns to decimate an infantry platoon. And Cooley wouldn’t mind leaving Tree and his three companions in unmarked Rocky Mountain graves if it would get the Earps free.

But if Cooley’s posse was on the track, it wasn’t close enough to be seen from this vantage point. The country seemed so peaceful and uninhabited that when he took a deep breath the air tasted fresh-clean as if nobody had ever breathed it before. The only signs of life were twittering birds, clumps of crickets, and a mountain antelope which showed briefly in a clearing beyond the stream, several hundred yards below him. The antelope froze, alerted by the approaching racket of the riders in the stream bed; it wheeled, with the signal spots of alarm snowing bright on its rump, and disappeared into the thick stand of aspen from which it had emerged.

Tree looked forward, into the rising passes, and chose what looked like a good route. Fixing it in mind, he scrabbled down the steep tilt of rock to his horse, got mounted, and waited for the others to come up. He thought he was studying the problems ahead, but when the riders came in sight and he saw Caroline, fluffy and blonde on her wiry sorrel pony, he realized he had been thinking about her with most of his mind. Thinking about her unsettled him-the mere fact that he was thinking of her at all made him uneasy. He spoke gruffly to Gant and turned his horse into the stream to lead the way.

The afternoon was a steady progress, without haste; they had no change of horses, they had to conserve the ones they had. Twice more he rode considerably ahead to check out the land above; once they had to retrace a quarter mile and choose another canyon. At two o’clock by the sun they had left the original stream and led their horses across half a mile of gravel and broken boulders, mounted up and ridden around the circumference of a high-grass meadow; since then, by sundown, Tree had not spent much effort trying to conceal tracks-it would have taken too long and he was fairly sure Cooley was not close enough to justify the time.

When the sun went down he examined the peaks with close scrutiny, imprinting on his mind the shape of the land which darkness would soon make invisible; he was resolved to keep moving as late as possible. They didn’t stop to eat until the last twilight had drained out of the sky; and after the brief, tireless meal, they went on.

The intimate enclosure of darkness brought fantasies more vividly alive in his mind. The singing, silky warmth of her body, imagined as it must be; he only drew himself up with anger when he realized he was rehearsing in his mind the act itself-taking her with rough quickness, somewhere on an open mountain meadow, a quickness matched in his wishful thinking by her own eager, ready hungers.

He halted the column three hours after dark: visibility was too poor to go on. They had been moving for eighteen hours with only a few brief halts; his rough estimate was that they had put at least seventy miles behind them, all of it uphill and tough. Obviously seventy traveled miles didn’t put them seventy straight-line miles from Gunnison-in as-the-crow-flies distance Gunnison was maybe forty miles behind-but it was a good jump; with luck it would let them hold a healthy lead. He was less concerned with human fatigue than with the horses’; his first act was to order the animals unsaddled and hobbled. Not sure of the country, he had brought grain sacks across three saddles; now they fed and watered the animals before sprawling to eat and rest. There was no campfire; the meal was cold, basic, and cheerless. The currents of rage and hate didn’t need speech to sustain them-even Macklin and Gant maintained a morose silence; the long day’s ride had been a shakedown, it had reduced all of them to fundamentals. But as Tree sat against a rock washing down smoked beef and biscuits with metallic water from his — canteen, he found himself unable to take his eyes or his mind off Caroline. She ate nearby, her sturdy body carelessly at ease on the pine needles, propped on one elbow; there was just enough light to see the reflected surfaces of her big, startled-doe eyes. He thought she was looking right at him but he couldn’t be sure; he did not look away.

Macklin got up without being told, went to Warren Earp and tied him to a pine trunk. Taking the hint, Moradecai Gant lumbered toward Wyatt and Josie, who lay on their sides with their heads together, murmuring. Gant uncoiled a rope and said something in a crude, harsh-laughing voice which made Wyatt Earp look up at him and spit deliberately on the ground at Gant’s feet. Gant began to growl in his throat. Tree levered himself upright and said, “All right, Gant,” and went across the camp, taking the rope away from Gant and kneeling to pass it around a tree and snug it to Earp.

Wyatt Earp’s jut-jawed face was clamped tight; his big shoulders bulged. In the dimness his eyes were colorless. Tree heard his breathing; there was no talk. He tested the lashings and then got to his feet and said to Josie, “Come over here with me.”

“Nothing doing,” she said.

Tree shook his head. “Don’t argue, girl. Nobody wants to hurt you but if you make it tough-”

“You touch me,” she retorted, “and I’ll kick the shit out of you.”

In the darkness he heard Wyatt Earp’s chuckle. Earp said, “She’ll try it, too. Watch out for your balls.”

Gant said, “Shut you mouth, Arp, or I’ll knock your teeth rat thew your backbone.”

“Gentle down,” Tree said over his shoulder. He took Josie by the bound wrists and dragged her ten feet away. It was easy pulling, across the slick pine needles. She kicked and argued but he finally got her trussed to a pine. He had to have them separated, though it gave him no pleasure; together they could untie each other.

Gant came up and was standing right there when Tree finished the job and stood up. Gant yawned in his face; Gant’s breath made him turn away. Leering down at Josie, Gant said, “You don’t get no chanst to shove him between your tits tonight, little plum, but how bout me? My hands ain’t tied.”

From ten feet away, Obie Macklin said, “Forget it, Mordecai. Ain’t nobody else could make her happy after that big stud Earp got through with. her. He knows how to bang them.” Macklin’s nervous laugh was overlaid by nasty spite; there was something sadistic in the way he liked to bait Gant.

“That’ll be about enough,” Tree said mildly. “Both of you bed down. I’ll take first watch.”

He waited until Gant and Macklin had rolled up in their blankets, made one more tour of the three prisoners to check their lashings, and walked uphill to post himself with his back to a pine trunk and a rifle across his lap. Starlight filtered down faintly through the trees; it was a chill night, stillness disturbed only by the easy rustle of occasional breezes and the crackle of dead pine needles whenever someone stirred on the ground. Caroline was a soft, dark mound on the earth twenty feet below him. To take his mind off her, he watched the others and thought about the events that had brought him here. Now that it was done, he had contempt for the hesitation that had made him walk so gingerly around Wyatt Earp. That restraint had not been a fear of Earp; it had been a fear of discovering his own limits-a caution that masked the fear of failure. He had seen Indian foot races in which there were always a few runners who held themselves back, didn’t commit themselves fully to the race, because they preferred to lose than to risk going all out. If you knewyou had held back, then you had an excuse for failure. He hadn’t recognized that in himself until now; it made him feel both regret and freedom. He had made his share of mistakes but it was to his credit that he learned something from every one of them.

He wondered what mistake he had made with Rafe and with Caroline; something to be learned there, too. He remembered the things she had told him and he wondered if it could be true that she had accepted Rafe as a substitute for himself. In his own straightforward world that didn’t make sense, but perhaps in hers it did; women were woven of subtle complexities beyond the understanding of men. He thought of getting up and going down to her and saying, flat out, All right, let’s talk about how you used to be in love with me. For that was what she had implied. But of course he didn’t do it. It might open up a wound he had tried to ignore for so long he didn’t think he could break the habit.

As if reading his thoughts, she stirred in the shadows and came up the slope and sat down beside him. At first she didn’t talk. Her toe described small circles in the earth. She looked up; her face hovered before him. There was a telltale thread of moisture on her upper lip and her eyes were very wide open. She murmured, “Damn it, Jerr, I feel shy with you.”

He thought, right here and right now in this moment he loved her.

She said, “You’ve got hooks.”

“In you?”

“I know you never meant to,” she said. “Maybe it’s just that I need somebody-feeling this way about you, maybe it’s just something to ease the loneliness.”

He drew her close, feeling her spine beneath his fingers, and put his mouth on hers, hard, until she gasped for breath. It was a staggering sensation: it rocked him down to his toes. He pulled away from her and muttered, “Better cut this out.”

“Jerr-”

He said, “Let’s end up liking each other, all right?” He was cross with himself.

Caroline said, “Are you thinking about Rafe?”

“I don’t know what I’m thinking about.”

“Rafe’s gone-as if he never was. I know that sounds-”

“I know,” he said, more harshly than he intended. “I was thinking about something else, though. Goes back a long time. All the way back when I first met you.”

“I didn’t think you’d remember.”

“Why,” he said, “I spent a long time trying to forget it.”

“Whatever for?”

“Caroline,” he said, “I was a scraggy Government scout with a drunk Indian wife someplace back in the hills, her gone to fat and me consigned to squaw-man cantinas on the wrong side of town. No reason for you to look twice at me.”

“There was plenty of reason. Don’t you know what kind of man you are?” She touched his cheek. “I thought you never noticed me.”

“If I said I stayed away for Rafe’s sake it’d be a lie. Maybe I was afraid you’d turn me down. You got pretty deep in my guts and I fought that.” When he looked at her, her lips were parted. Abruptly, wordless, he took her by the hand, swept the camp with quick inspection, and took her up through the trees. Her head moved before him; she swayed forward and gave her lips for his kiss, making a kitteny little sound in her throat and suddenly pressing against him with tugging urgency. They twisted down, opening and sliding clothes, their breath coming quick; she touched him gently and hot sensation raced through him. His hand cupped her buttock; he moved down, grinding his hardness against her. She was mouthing words: “Oh, yes; please, please, now!” His hands stroked her, caressed the melon breasts that came springing free of the open shirt. They rolled on the ground of soft needles, kicking off pants; with ruthless quickness he plunged himself into her, a great stab of his shaft rodding into her feminine softness, a hot, throbbing velvety snugness. Her fingernails scraped and dug his back and he was thinking, This is crazy, it’s the wrong goddamn place for this, and then there was no more thinking, there was only heat and flame, her nails raking his back, their bodies lunging on the silent, soft bed of pine floor.

She sighed warmly and wriggled and gave him a serene, unhurried kiss; he wanted to He with her, her breasts in his hands, but he said, “We are goddamn loco,” and got his pants on and went down through the trees with his rifle. In camp nothing stirred; the prisoners lay asleep. He put on his hat and laid the rifle across his crook’d elbow, still tasting the flavor of her skin on his tongue. She came out of the trees tucking in her shirt and he saw the happiness glowing in her face and felt an overwhelming warmth course through him, an unreasoning reaching out of his heart. He felt absurdly pleased with himself, and grinned at her idiotically.

She came close and brushed him with her lips; she said, “It’s all right, isn’t it? I was so afraid it would come between us-remembering Rafe, I mean.” Her face changed; she was looking toward the sky, not meeting his eyes, and she said slowly, “I do feel guilty about it. I can’t help it. And so do you. But it wouldn’t be any good if we didn’t feel like that.”

“Maybe it’ll take a while to sort it all out.”

She said, “Is your back bleeding?”

“I don’t know-I don’t mind.”

“I never did that with-” she began, and stopped. He took her hand in both of his. She smiled briefly and said, “Fm sorry, I won’t do that again. I love you, Jerr, I always did.”