The next step wasn’t any easier, nor the next. He said aloud, “Hell, I feel two inches shorter. Maybe three. Maybe four.”
He could feel the pain as a constant, beginning in his right shoulder, jumping over to his backbone, and then spreading downward all the way through his hips, then down to his knees, and finally to his ankles and feet. “What a job,” he said wearily. “But it shore beats working.”
He made it to his blankets, and then eased himself to the ground. For a moment he sat very still, letting the pain do its best, letting the pain just go ahead and consume him as he relaxed his body into it. He had learned a long time ago that you only made matters worse if you tried to fight pain. If you tried that, all you did was stiffen up and make your muscles rigid, and wear yourself out in the fight. And it was a useless fight because the pain was going to win no matter what you did. The best way to handle it was to sit back and let it come, accommodate yourself to it. That way, after a while, it got to be a part of you so that you didn’t notice it so much anymore. But you had to be willing to be patient and sit there and relax and get used to it.
It didn’t make it hurt any less, but after a while you got so you didn’t notice it so much.
He took another hard hit off the bottle, but did it slowly and resolutely. He was very conscious that had many hours ahead of him with the sun beating down on his head. That, at least, was a good thing. The sun might not do him any other good, but it would at least bake some of the hurt out of his bones and muscles and joints.
Finally he reached back over his blankets, got his canvas jacket, and dragged it to him. The key was still in the right-hand pocket. It was a round steel key with teeth on the end and little wings to turn it with. It was about the size of a pistol cartridge. In the dim light he could see numbers die-stamped on the side of the key. He looked for a matching set on the manacles. There was a set of numbers, but they didn’t match those on the key. He contemplated the keyhole in his left manacle. It was a round little hole with notches that hopefully matched the teeth on the round little key. Hopefully he stuck the key into the hole. It fit. He tried turning the key to the left. Nothing happened. He frowned. With not much optimisum he turned the key to the right. It went halfway around and he felt something click inside the manacle releasing the ratchets. He felt the cuff come loose.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. He opened the cuff and removed his left hand. To the inside of the little cabin he said, “What the hell they put numbers on ‘em for if they all fit the same?”
With confidence he transferred the key to his left hand and tried the right cuff. The key went into the hole with no trouble, but nothing happened no matter which way he turned it. “Aw, hell!” he said aloud. “Now what the hell am I supposed to think. Damn it!”
He kept jiggling the key back and forth in the hole, turning it left and right, trying it in different positions. Nothing seemed to work.
For a moment he stared at a far corner of the cabin. He was damn near better off cuffed than like this. He’d have two feet of cold steel swinging off the end of his right wrist. That ought to make for some exciting times, trying to saddle a horse or use a revolver.
He got up and went over to the fireplace. His jackknife was there. He opened it, but the blade was too thick and not sharp-pointed enough to go in the hole. He was on the point of giving up when he saw the fork lying in the tin plate that Shaw had used. He picked it up. By tilting it sideways he could get two of the tines deep inside the lock.
He prodded and pushed the fork into the hole, slowly working it around the circle. Nothing happened. Sometimes when he would press with the fork a certain way he’d feel something give, like it was being pushed into place. He kept up the poking and pushing, circling and circling the keyhole. All at once the cuff released. He felt the ratchet bar that encircled the bottom of his wrist come loose. He said, “Well, now I will be damned. Any prisoners I take from now on are going to eat with a spoon.”
He took the manacles off his wrist, stood up, and walked over to his saddlebags. He dropped the manacles. He’d pack them later. Right then there was something he was much more interested in. He leaned down, with his hips protesting, and lifted up his saddle. His revolver lay where he’d hidden it the night before. It was the one with the six-inch barrel that he normally carried. The pistol with the nine-inch barrel had been in his saddlebags. That was the one that Jack Shaw had found and taken with him. Longarm reached down, picked up his gunbelt, and strapped it on. Then he opened the gate of the cartridge cylinder and spun it. There were five shells in the revolver, and more lying out in the desert, if he could find them. He shoved the gun into the holster. It was time to get packed up and get to making tracks. Shaw already had a three-or four-hour lead, but Longarm felt like he knew where the outlaw was headed. He might not be, but if Longarm could pick up a little sign, he felt sure he would, sooner or later, come upon the man. He wondered what Shaw had left in the corral.
It had taken him over a half an hour to get packed up, get a horse saddled, and put a second horse on lead. Every move had hurt him, and consequently, everything had seemed to take twice as long to do. He had been correct in assuming that Shaw was going to leave him the worst of the horses. Shaw had even taken the bay that Longarm had been riding. He hadn’t thought so much of it the day before until Longarm had picked it out, but now he seemed to have changed his mind. The two horses he’d left were not much to begin with, and they’d been given hard usage and damn little feed. Longarm couldn’t do anything about the feed for the time being. They’d just have to travel like they had full bellies. At least they’d been well watered the last few days.
So far as food went, the horses weren’t the only ones getting shorted.
Shaw had not left Longarm so much as a can of tomatoes. He’d also taken a bottle of Longarm’s precious Maryland whiskey. Longarm was left with barely half a quart. But that was all right. If matters went as he hoped, he expected to be in a town the following night.
Once back to civilization, he could get fresh ammunition and some food and feed for the horses.
One thing that had surprised him was that he’d had two hundred dollars in folding money in his saddlebags, stuffed into the pocket of a clean shirt. Either Shaw had missed it or it was too little for him to bother with. The man, Longarm thought, was a killer but not a thief. That was a fine situation for you.
By two o’clock the prairie felt like a furnace, and he didn’t reckon he’d covered half the distance to the original line cabin. Shaw had gone to no trouble to try and hide his sign, even if he could have in the loose dirt of the country. The tracks of three horses were as plain as day. A half an hour after he’d last looked at his watch, he found an empty tomato can where Shaw had obviously dropped it. The man had just punched a hole in it with his knife and then sucked all the juice out of it.
Longarm felt sure that Shaw was heading for the line cabin. That, Longarm knew, was where the money had been hidden. He didn’t for a second believe that nonsense about some canyon. There was probably a canyon, all right, but it was a very small one that Shaw had dug somewhere around the cabin, though where that was, Longarm had no idea.
If he succeeded in catching Shaw, the first thing he was going to ask him was where he’d hidden the money. If he wouldn’t tell, Longarm was going to try and beat it out of him, and failing that, offer to let him go in exchange for
