'I think I'll just ride out and check the brands on those horses,' Call said. 'I don't know why those men would let those horses stray. They seemed like competent men.' He put his horse into a short lope. Before going a quarter of a mile, he surprised two mule deer, a doe with a fawn. They had been bedded down, but jumped up and scampered off. In the clear air he had misjudged the distance to the horses a bit; they were farther from camp than he thought. While Call was watching the mule deer, his horse shied at a badger that waddled out from behind a sage bush, practically at the horse's feet.
The horse crow-hopped a time or two, just enough to cause Call to lose a stirrup.
He had the horse almost calmed down and was searching for the stirrup with his foot when the first bullet struck him, low in the chest. Careless, he thought; too careless, and now I'm shot. He whirled his mount and yanked his rifle from the saddle scabbard, but his hands were so stiff with cold that he dropped the weapon. Just as he did, a second bullet smashed his knee and evidently went through and wounded his horse, for the horse squealed and began to buck. A third shot hit his arm. Call was trying to hang on; he couldn't afford to be thrown, not with the bullets coming so fast and so, accurately.
They seemed to him to be coming from under one of the stray horses. Careless, he thought again. He's shooting from under the horse, and I rode right out to him. Then he lost his seat and was thrown hard, in the direction of the rifle he had dropped. Fortunately, he was able to reach the rifle. He had to work the lever with one hand, but as soon as he could sit up he began to fire in the direction of the horses.
One of them raced away, but the other stood exactly where it had been, hobbled, probably, so the rifleman could shoot from underneath it, hidden by the sage.
There was a final shot--it brought down Call's horse.
All he could do then was wait, in the hope that the killer would be foolhardy enough to come and try and finish him off. After the shot that killed his horse, there was not a sound from the northwest. Call knew he would have to try and staunch his bleeding soon. He had been hit three times, and the bullets were heavy caliber. His left arm and right leg were smashed for good; the arm was practically shot off. When he looked at his knee, he saw bone fragments through the hole in his pants. The first wound, the one in the chest, was bleeding more than it should. If he didn't staunch it soon he might faint, and if he fainted, he was lost, and probably Lorena, too.
Call raked up a little sand and covered the chest wound with it, pulling aside his shirt. The sandy poultice quickly grew muddy with blood, but it was the only way he had of staunching the blood flow; he kept raking sand and patting it onto his chest.
He raised up only high enough to see that the hobbled horse was still there. Any higher he couldn't risk.
He felt a deep shame when he thought of Lorena, back at the camp alone. She would have heard the shots, and he hoped that she would run.
There were ranches to the south. Perhaps she could survive long enough to reach one of them, if the killer didn't strike her, too. He had brought her with him, and then failed to protect her--the very thing he had mentioned, and the very thing he had feared. Now he himself might be dying. The chest wound probably involved a lung. He could feel the bullet like a nut inside him when he coughed. Call knew he should not have let the killer know that he'd got his rifle--that was another mistake. Now there was little hope that the killer, Joey Garza probably, would expose himself at all, and even if he was reckless and let himself be seen, Call knew it would only be luck if he could hit him, shooting one-handed.
He had botched the matter completely; everything was his fault. He had known in his gut that someone was following them, someone so clever that unending vigilance was essential. But the fact that the cowboys had apparently lost two horses, a normal thing, had distracted him to such an extent that he had just ridden out casually, as he would have under normal circumstances, to have a look.
Now a clever boy, shooting from under a hobbled horse, had done what all the fighters he had engaged with over four decades--Kicking Bird, the Comanche; the Kiowa Pedro Flores; and outlaws of all description, both Mexican and American--had failed to do. He was hit, and hit soundly. Probably only the fact that his horse was restive caused the first bullet to miss his heart. It hadn't missed it by much, at that, if it had missed it. Perhaps it was his heart's blood he was pumping out.
Once before, he had been hit by a bullet.
That bullet was fired by an Apache, as Call was about to cross the Pecos River with Gus McCrae's body, on the long trek back from Miles City, Montana, where Gus had died.
But that bullet had merely lodged in his side and had touched no vital organs. It was a nuisance, mainly; it pained him at times, but Call didn't regard it as a serious wound and had never bothered to have it cut out. The Apache had shot from a considerable distance, too; the bullet had been almost spent when it hit him. It didn't stop him from crossing the river, or from burying Gus McCrae where he had wanted to be buried.
Now Call knew he was so badly hit that he would be lucky to live. He didn't expect that he would live and didn't care, really, if he could only kill Joey Garza before he died.
He felt that he had to kill him; it was the only way to provide any measure of safety for Lorena. And not just Lorena, either. There was Pea Eye and Brookshire and Deputy Plunkert to think of. The ease with which Joey Garza, if it was the young bandit, had drawn him in range, and the consistency of the shooting, was a shock. Shooting from under a horse was an old, old trick. The Indians had done it routinely. Call reproached himself bitterly for carelessness, for assuming the horses were strays. But he knew that he could reproach himself for a year and not alter the truth, which was that someone, Joey Garza most likely, had outsmarted him easily and shot him, probably mortally. What made the failure worse was that the burden of his error would be visited upon people who had depended on him. It would be visited on Lorena, and probably on Pea Eye and Brookshire and Deputy Plunkert, too.
Call remembered Mox Mox, and the Cherokee killer, Jimmy Cumsa. He considered the possibility that they had lured him out of camp.
Perhaps it was Jimmy Cumsa who had shot from under the tethered horse. But Call didn't think so.
Mox Mox was like most outlaws, careless and lazy. He had made camp in a place that laid him open to easy ambush. He had posted no guard. Nothing he had done had been smart or well planned.
Crouched behind a sage bush, one arm and one leg useless, Call felt a desperate need to slay his murderer before he died. He felt the wound in his chest; it seemed to him the bleeding was slowing. He might have an hour--he might have more--but he doubted he had much more.
He didn't think his opponent was Mox Mox, or the Cherokee, either. They ran, and he imagined they would keep running. But someone had followed him, and waited while he was in Fort Stockton, and then had picked up the
