The other man came into sight leading a horse that was limping badly where balls of ice had formed in its hoofs.
The Indian went back into the shelter and reappeared with a rifle and Walker’s face crumpled. The Indian stood up and shot the animal in the head.
The horse fell right beside Walker and the Indian put the rifle away and came out again with a hunting knife. Faint streaks of light flashed fragmentarily from the blade when it moved toward the horse and plunged in, opened a great slit in the dead horse’s belly. The Indian methodically gutted the horse, throwing the insides away in the wind, and the smell of escaping gases made Walker turn his face away. He began to lose consciousness, not unpleasantly; sleep drifted vaguely into his mind and somehow his concentration focused on the numbness of his bad tooth.
They were shaking him violently. He tried to push them away but they kept shaking him and finally he cursed thickly and opened his eyes.
The Indian said, “Come on-get inside.”
“Inside what?”
The Indian began to tug him toward the dead horse. He saw a gaping maw: flap of hide folded back, several ribs torn away. “Inside,” the Indian said. “Pull it shut over you. It’s going to stink like hell but it’ll get you warm, keep you thawed out.”
The smell nauseated him. The woman was kneeling beside him. Her slender fingers reached out. “Thank you.” Eyes full of concern.
The Indian shoved him into the carcass. The hide flapped down, closing him in stinking warm darkness. The heat enveloped him and there was no wind. He sagged against the sticky wetness of his black cavern and gagged on the stench. He felt an insistent hammering behind his eyes; the beat of his heart was loud; needle pricks quivered the flesh of his hands and feet and face, and sleep rolled his head against the warm rib cage of the dead horse.
CHAPTER 7
1
Watchman batted his hands together and thrust them under his armpits and squeezed into the lean-to. The woman was lifting the mess-kit cup of instant coffee off the Sterno. She sucked at it and passed it on to Buck Stevens and said to Watchman, “Do you charge extra for the coffee or does it come with the rescue service?”
“The coffee’s free. So’s the weather.”
“Do you think he’ll be all right?”
“He’ll be fine.” Maybe a touch of frostbite, but not serious. The temperature wasn’t all that low; it was the wind effect that seemed to drive it down. Without shelter you could die out there but the pilot would pull through now.
Paul Vickers was blowing his nose, giving Mrs. Lansford a bloodshot look. He was taking the weather badly. He had lost his hat in the blow and his hair stood out in wild disorder. “I’d like to know what really happened up there-why this man helped you get away. What he expected to get out of it.”
“Maybe he found a streak of humanity in him.” Mrs. Lansford said it a bit sharply, as if in rebuke.
“I don’t see that. I don’t want to put down your gratitude to the man, Mrs. Lansford, but if he thinks that will get him off he’s mistaken. Two men have been murdered-by this man and his friends.”
“I don’t think they’re his friends.”
“Then why was he with them?”
Buck Stevens stirred in the back of the shelter. “Can’t you leave her alone? Why don’t you just shut up for a while?”
Vickers’ head whipped around. It was the first time the rookie had talked back to him and it seemed to catch him off guard: he didn’t know whether to bluster or sneer or ignore it. He twisted his gloved knuckles, looking cranky.
Watchman’s voice was rusty, tired; it had been a bad day for them all. “Let’s all settle down and try to get some rest.”
Vickers turned to him. “They’re right up the mountain there.”
“Then go get’em, tiger.”
“I know my limits, Trooper. I couldn’t find that cabin in this storm to save my life. But you could.”
“Look at your watch, Vickers.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“The sun’s going down. Another half hour and what little light we’ve got will be gone. We’re not going anywhere for a while-neither are they.”
2
It had to be the fire-lookout station they were heading for; Watchman had known that by midmorning, before the blow had hit, following the tracks and seeing which way they were heading. They were boxing themselves into a series of step-up mountain passes that could only lead them toward the ranger cabin and once he had determined that much it had become unnecessary to track them; he had been able to keep moving after the blizzard had wiped out the tracks. Vickers, who was an indifferent horseman and a stranger to mountain weather, had slowed them down but they had kept pushing it until the middle of the afternoon when Vickers’ horse had gone lame with ice- split hoofs and they had come under the lee of the cliff. By that time Watchman had no clear idea of their position but he had a feeling they were not too far below the summit; the trees, briefly glimpsed in slack flurries of snow, were stunted up here and that meant they were close to timberline. It might have been possible to continue but with odds of three against five, with the woman being held hostage, and with the blizzard likely to confuse things beyond control there was no point in trying to close in on the cabin.
The fugitives most likely believed they had left pursuit far behind. If they had reached the shack at all it could be assumed they wouldn’t leave it again before the storm blew over: its comfort would be too compelling and there was nothing outside except the risk of dying in the snow.
Of course there was a good chance they had never reached the cabin. Maybe they had got separated in all this madness and were perishing one by one on the exposed flanks of the mountains. Maybe they had given up their try at the summit and doubled back, passing their pursuers unseen in the wheeling murk, heading back down toward the plain. But if they had done that they would run into police lines sooner or later and Watchman doubted they had tried that; when they hadn’t fallen for the bonfire invitation he’d set by the abandoned trucks he’d accepted the idea that the fugitives were well led by a man confident of his wilderness skills.
Probably they had reached the cabin. If they had they weren’t going anywhere for a while. Here under the cliff he had called a halt and built the shelter.
The woman had stumbled right into their camp for several reasons, but mainly because this was the only way down from the south face of the summit-the rest of it was too jagged, too crowded with boulders-and because it was a reasonably narrow trail, the same trail the fugitives had gone up. Mrs. Lansford had meant to come this way, it had been no accident of fate; it was the way she had arrived, it was the way home. She had known that if she managed to get down the trail a little way she would find at least a bit of protection from the wind because there were trees and boulders and mountain shoulders to hold back the storm.
Once out of the full brutality of the wind she had stopped and waited for quite some time on the trail, waiting for the pilot Walker, but he had not appeared and she had known she couldn’t wait forever.
In the end she had had to assume Walker wasn’t coming: either he wasn’t coming this way-he had gone down the other side of the mountain or taken shelter somewhere near the cabin-or he wasn’t able to come at all because the others had retrieved him or killed him.
