trail when he and Lorena left town. It was the sense that he was being followed that caused the terrible ache in his neck, Call was sure of that. Never before in his life had he been unable to backtrack and surprise a pursuer. Rarely had he encountered an outlaw with the patience to wait outside a town for three days, in bitter cold, until his prey took to the trail. Most outlaws acted on impulse. They rarely planned, and when they did plan, the slightest hitch was likely to cause them to abandon their plans. Many an innocent citizen had fallen because some bank robber saw a deputy sheriff approaching as the robbery was in progress. Usually, the robber started shooting; rarely was the deputy the one killed. Old ladies chatting with a teller got killed, or merchants who picked a bad time to make a deposit got killed.

Call knew that successful bandits had their reputations inflated by rumor. The press helped bandits get names for themselves. People in small towns, who were bored most of their lives, thought bandits were colorful. The newspapers printed the gossip, and pretty soon everyone on the frontier would get the notion that a certain bandit was invincible, when in fact, few of them were particularly able, or more than moderately smart.

But the person who had put three bullets in him in less than five seconds was exceptional. Call knew his first mistake had been a reluctance to believe that the Garza boy actually might .be exceptional. He had assumed that his was just another case of inflated reputation. He had only begun to suspect differently when he hadn't been able to catch Joey Garza following him. Call had known it, when the boy had ridden up almost before he was out of sight, and killed Roy Bean.

Yet he hadn't acted on his knowledge. He had eaten Lorena's bacon, drunk her coffee, and loped out to check the brands on two horses, as if Joey Garza was any other killer.

He had failed in vigilance, and now he was paying for his failure. That had always been the way of the frontier. If you failed in vigilance, you usually died. Rarely would the frontier permit a lapse as serious as the one he had just made.

Call considered that he had always been able to draw on more will than most men possessed. He could keep riding longer and keep fighting harder than any man he had worked with. He had never considered himself brilliant, and as a rider or a shot he was only average. But he could keep going in situations where others had to stop. He had never quit a fight, and the fight he was in now demanded just that persistence of him. He might be dying, but he couldn't quit until he had killed his killer. If he failed, all his effort would have been futile, and the lives of people who trusted him deeply would, in all likelihood, be forfeit.

Call risked sitting up for a second to see if he could catch a glimpse of the rifleman.

The hobbled horse was exactly where it had been.

But Call saw no one--not a movement, not a hat, not a glint of sun on a rifle barrel.

He flattened himself on his belly and began to push the rifle ahead of him. He wished he could simply cut off the useless arm and the useless leg.

The leg was the worst--he didn't look at his knee, but he knew it must be nothing but bone fragments. The pain was beginning, and when he moved, sharp points of bone tore at what flesh was left. The arm he didn't feel. He pulled himself along on his one good elbow. For a while he pushed the rifle ahead of him, but he soon abandoned the rifle and took out his pistol instead. If he got a shot at Joey Garza, it would likely be at close range. If it wasn't at close range, he would probably miss anyway, particularly if he tried to shoot a rifle with one hand.

Every few minutes, Call raised up. His vision annoyed him. He couldn't see sharply.

He could see the horse but not the shooter. It angered him. His eyesight was no longer adequate to the work he had tried to do. No doubt Gus McCrae or Charles Goodnight, men renowned for the sharpness of their vision, would have seen the boy under the horse while still safely out of rifle range. Either one of them could have seen that the horse was hobbled, and have avoided the bullets. He had tried spectacles but found them irritating, and he had not provided himself with any for the trip. That little neglect was another reason he was shot and dying.

Call kept on crawling. The hobbled horse had been some two hundred yards away when the shots came. Call wiggled for nearly half the distance, the pain in his leg growing more terrible with every movement. He left a trail of blood on the sand and on the sage bushes as he crawled. But he began to grow weak, and he began to feel light- headed. He saw that he wasn't going to make it to the hobbled horse. He wouldn't last that long.

Besides, the boy might not even be there. He might have been so confident of the wounds he had given that he had simply slipped away. Call felt his strength failing. He had crawled a long way, but he was still just half the distance to the horse, and had still not caught one glimpse of human movement.

He decided to tempt the boy, if the boy was there. He would show himself; maybe the boy would want to laugh at him, taunt him, shoot him again. If so, Call might be lucky enough to get off two or three pistol shots. If he was very lucky, he might put the boy down.

It was a gamble, of course. He had never shot especially well with the pistol, and the Garza boy would not likely be such a fool as to come close.

So far, the Garza boy had been no sort of fool at all.

But it was a chance--his only chance. In another few minutes, he might pass out. Already he had lost so much blood that his hand was unsteady.

Call wished he had kept pushing the rifle. It would make a fair crutch, something to support him when he stood up. But he had foolishly left it. He would just have to teeter as best he could and hope the Garza boy would be amused enough to expose himself.

Very carefully, Call got into a sitting position. He had his pistol on cock. He got his good leg under him and rested a minute. When he tried to take a deep breath to steady himself, he coughed. Again, he felt the first bullet, like a nut in his chest.

But he gathered himself, wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his good arm, wiped the blood off the gun with his shirttail, and slowly eased up. The hobbled horse was still hobbled. Call could see nothing beneath it.

Then he heard a movement to his left and shot three times at the sound. It had sounded like a human footstep--Joey Garza had probably been sneaking up to finish him. But to his immediate, bitter disappointment, Call saw that it was only the mule deer he had scared earlier. He had shot the big doe. She bucked a few times and ran off, the fawn bounding after her through the sage.

Call knew it was no good. It was a failure; a botch. Joey Garza had left.

He might have already found Lorena and killed her.

Perhaps Joey wouldn't bother with her. After all, he had killed the bounty hunter, and there would be no one

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