the spare pistol in that wagon ... if I could get to it.
Then, far behind me, I heard a loud halloo.
That stopped me, and I stood for a moment, catching my breath and listening. It must be that somebody had found some sign, and had called the others. At least, I had to read it that way. From now on, they would know they were hunting a living man.
If they knew of the wagon--and I had to take it they did--they had little to worry about. How many were hunting me I had no idea, but they had only to string out and make a sweep of the country, pushing in toward the wall of the mesa. Using the river as a base line, they could sweep the country, and then climb the mesa and move in on the wagon. It left me very little chance for escape.
My mind shied from thinking of my condition after that fall. I knew I was in bad shape, but I was scared to know how bad, because until I reached Ange and the wagon there was just nothing I could do about it. Right then I wanted a gun in my hand more than I wanted medicine or even a doctor. I wanted a gun and a chance at the man who had ambushed me.
Using the stick, I could sort of hitch along in spite of my bad leg. It didn't seem to be broken, but it had swollen until the pants seam was likely to bust; if it kept on swelling I'd have to split the seam somehow. My hands were in awful shape, and the cut on my skull was a nasty one. I had a stitch in my side, as if maybe I had cracked some ribs. But I wasn't complaining--'rights I should have been dead.
When I was shot I had been standing on a point on Black Mesa, which tied to Buckhead Mesa on the southeast. The canyon where the cypress grew seemed to reach back toward the west side of Buckhead, and from where I was now standing it seemed to offer a chance to follow it back up to the top of Buckhead. So I started out.
You never saw so much brush, so many trees, so many rock falls crammed into one canyon.
Fire had swept along the canyon a time or two, leaving some charred logs, but the trees had had time to grow tall again, and the brush had grown thicker than ever, as it always does after a fire.
One thing I had in my favor. Nobody was likely to try taking a horse up that canyon, and if I knew cowpunchers they weren't going to get down from the saddle and scramble on foot up the canyon unless all hell was a-driving them.
A cowhand is a damned fool who will work twenty-five hours out of every day if he can do it from a saddle. But put him on his feet, and you've got yourself a man who is likely to sit down and build himself a smoke so's he can think about it.
And after he thinks it over, he'll get back in the saddle and ride off.
It was still cold ... bitter cold. I tried not to think of that, but just kept inching along. Sometimes I pulled myself along by grasping branches or clutching at cracks in the rock. Cold as it was, I started to sweat, and that scared me. If that sweat froze, the heat in my body would be used up fighting its cold and I'd die.
Once I broke a hole in the ice and drank, but most of the time I just kept moving because I'd never learned how to quit. I was just a big raw-boned cowboy with big shoulders and big hands who was never much account except for hard work and fighting. Back in the Tennessee hills they used to say my feet were too big for dancing and I hadn't any ear for music; but along about fighting time I'd be there--fist, gun, or bowie knife. All of us Sacketts were pretty much on the shoot.
By noontime I was breasting the rise at the head of the canyon. Only a few yards away the rock of the mesa broke off sharply and dipped into another canyon, while the great flat surface of Buckhead lay on my right. It was several miles in area and thickly forested.
Crawling back into the brush, I settled down to rest a bit and to try thinking things out. My head wasn't working too well and my thoughts came slow, and everything looked different somehow. I kept passing my hand over my forehead and scowling, trying to rid my eyes of the blur.
Near as I could figure, Ange and the wagon were now about three miles off, and moving as I had to, it might take me to sundown to cover that distance. Long before that, every inch of the mesa top would be scoured by riders who would seek out every clump of brush, every tree, every hole in the rocks.
Nobody ever denied that I was a tough man. I stand six feet three in my socks, when I own a pair, and I weigh a hundred and eighty, most of it in my shoulders and arms. I ain't what you'd call a pretty-built man, but when I take hold things generally move.
But now I was weak as a sick cat. I'd lost a sight of blood, and used myself almighty bad. The way things stood, I couldn't run and I couldn't fight. If they found me they had me, and no two ways about it ... and they were hunting to kill.
There was no way across that mesa but to walk or crawl, and there was no place a rider couldn't go.
It looked to me as if I needed more of a weapon than that hand-axe I had in my pocket.
Turning around, I crawled deeper into the brush and burrowed down into the pine needles. My head ached, my eyes blinked slowly. I was tired, almighty tired. I felt wore out.
Ange, Ange girl, I said, I just ain't a-gonna make it. I ain't a-gonna make it right now.
I was trying to burrow deeper, and then I stopped all movement when I heard a horse walking on frozen ground, but the sound faded off in the distance.
My head felt all swelled up like a balloon, and I couldn't seem to lift it off the ground.
Ange, I said, damn it, Ange, I
...
Chapter two.
Leaning my shoulder against the rough bark of a tree, I stared at the empty clearing, unwilling to believe what my eyes saw.
The wagon was gone!
Under the wide white moon the clearing lay etched in stillness. The surrounding trees were a wall of blackness against which nothing moved. Within the clearing itself, scarcely two acres in extent, there was nothing.
To this place I had come after hours of unconsciousness or sleep, after hours of fitful struggle for some kind of comfort on the frozen ground, in the numbing cold.
Only when darkness had come had I dared move, for riders had been all about me, searching relentlessly. Once, off to the right I heard faint voices, glimpsed the flicker of a fire.
How many times they might have passed nearby I had no idea, for only occasionally was I even fully aware of things around me. Yet with the deepening shadows some inner alarm had shaken me awake, and after a moment of listening, I rolled from the pine needles in which I had buried myself, and taking up my stick, I pushed myself to my feet.
All through my pain-racked day I had longed for this place and dreamed of arriving here. In the wagon there would be things to help me, in the wagon there would be weapons. Above all, Ange would be there, and I could be sure she was all right.
But she was gone.
Now, more even than care for my wounds I wanted weapons. Above all, I was a fighting man ... it was deeply grained in my being, a part of me. Hurt, I would fight; dying, I would still try to fight.
A quiet man I was, and not one to provoke a quarrel, but if set upon I would fight back.
I do not say this in boasting, for it was as much a part of me as the beating of my heart. It was bred in the blood-line of those from whom I come, and I could not be other than I am.
This it was, and my love for Ange, that had carried me here. Ange, who had brought love and tenderness to the big, homely man that I am.
Ange knew me well, and she knew I was not a man to die easily. She knew the wild lands herself, and she would have believed that she had only to wait and I would return. She would not willingly have left this place without me, knowing that even if I suffered an accident I would somehow return.
And now a curious fact became evident to me. This place, to which I would be sure to come back, was not watched. None of the searching men were here in this most obvious of places. Why?
The simplest reason was that they did not know of it, though a wagon is not an easy thing to conceal, nor are the mules by which it was drawn, nor the cattle. But now they were not here.
Hesitating no longer, and using my staff, I limped into the clearing and stopped where the wagon had
