He gathered the horses, rigged them, and put on the packs. He was sweating by the time he mounted up, but a light breeze cooled his shirt and his cocked hat as he set out on the day’s ride. Relaxed, he heard the song of a meadowlark rise above the prairie as the horse hooves clomped and swished through the grass.
Fielding and his string rode into the sheep camp in early afternoon. Wald himself lived up by Fort Laramie, so he had a couple of hired hands at this place—a camp tender as well as a herder—and the tender was usually at camp alone. As Fielding rode into the dusty site, a long-haired black-and-white dog came out of the shade and barked until the tender emerged from the tent and rasped a couple of words.
Fielding recognized the tender as Prew, a beardless person with a bulldog face and a trunk that went down like a barrel from the shoulders to the hips. Fielding had heard of women who worked and lived their whole lives as men, among men, without anyone knowing the difference, and he wondered if Prew was one of these. The camp tender was not unfriendly, just offish in an intangible way, so Fielding preferred to unload the supplies and be gone.
“Whatcha got?” asked Prew, in the same harsh voice.
“Salt in the first one, grain in the second, provisions in the other three, my stuff on top.”
Prew said, “Get out of the way” to the dog, then came around to stand by as Fielding untied the knots.
In a few minutes, Fielding was emptying the panniers. The camp tender handled fifty-pound sacks of salt and sixty-pound sacks of grain with no trouble, and the process moved right along. When Fielding had all the camp goods unloaded, he distributed his own gear and got things tightened down again.
He looked at the sun, which had moved over but was not slipping yet. “Plenty of time left,” he said. “If I can water these horses, I can get started back.”
“Good enough,” said Prew. “Glad you made it. Sheep was runnin’ low on salt.”
As Fielding put the sheep camp behind him, he was glad to be on his way. He didn’t mind sheep, though sometimes the tallowy smell hung in his nostrils, and he didn’t mind sheepherders. They worked for their living, and they took good care of their horses, fed them well and hardly ever pushed them to more than a fast walk. All the same, he was relieved to have this job done and to be traveling light.
He made good time and was able to camp in the same spot as the night before. He didn’t get the horses picketed until sundown, and when he did, he paused to appreciate the yellow-and-orange sky above the rim as the shadows laid a velvet softness on the rocks and grass and trees along the slope.
He fed the last of his own grain to the horses in the morning, and he had them all watered and loaded before the day had warmed up. With the sun at his back, he led the pack string out of camp. Before long the trail curved so that the sunlight fell on his left side, and without the benefit of a breeze, he continued sweating. He hoped for a breeze up on top.
Without dismounting he rested the horses for a couple of minutes before starting up the grade. The trail was not very steep to begin with, but after the first quarter-mile stretch it made a turn and began to climb at a sharper pitch. The horses behind him snorted and blew, and their hooves crunched in the hard, grainy path as the party moved uphill in order.
Fielding gazed at the sandstone wall he was traveling through. Tiny ledges supported tufts of grass and small bushes. Cedar trees grew in narrow clefts. Up where the trail turned again, the rock that had seemed like a gateway loomed on the right. If a man watched the land close up for too long, things seemed to move on their own, so he let his eyes rove around. He looked across empty space at other sections of the wall. He shifted in the saddle and watched the horses and their packs laboring up the slope behind him. His eyes came back to the trail ahead, and still a rock seemed to move.
He stopped the buckskin, a habit of second nature when he saw something out of place. He had a full awareness that this was a poor place to stop the horses, where they would have to stand leaning forward and work to keep from slipping on the loose surface. But rocks did not move.
He slid from the saddle, wrapped the lead rope around the saddle horn, and lowered the reins to the ground. The trail was barely wide enough for him to walk sideways past the horses, but he needed to get to the second set of panniers. The movement he had seen was up the trail on his right, beyond the turret-shaped rock. If someone had ducked out of sight, the person would have a hard time seeing what the delay was. He would have to wait.
Fielding reached into the pannier and pulled out a burlap sack. After making sure that it was open at both ends, he edged back to the first packhorse, the gray one. Crouching, he lifted the front left foot of the horse and slipped it through the open sack. Bunching the burlap so that it resembled a sash or large band, he twisted it once, twice, three times, then fitted the other hoof through the opening at the other end.
With the horse hobbled, he backed out and stood up. He let out a long breath and hoped everything held. The buckskin was good at staying ground-hitched, and between the lead rope and the hobbles, Fielding hoped to have this train pretty well stalled where it was.
He unstrapped his spurs and put them in the pannier where he had taken out the burlap sack. Feeling around, he laid hold of a length of quarter-inch rope. With it in his hand, he made his way to the end of the line and tied the sorrel to the back end of the dark horse. Then he went around the sorrel and crossed the trail. After drawing his six-gun, he moved to the base of the rock tower and peered over. A small canyon fell away, steep but not impossible. If he could get around the formation without dislodging too much loose rock, he might be able to come up on someone. Meanwhile, he hoped nothing would spook the horses.
Once over the edge, he saw a game trail about fifteen yards below. It looked like his best bet. He picked his way down to the trail and, leaning in toward the declivity of the canyon, took slow, quiet steps forward. He knew that sounds carried upward in places like this, so he kept an eye out for rocks that would slip beneath his feet.
Things always looked different from below. He could not see the trail above, only the rocks that overlooked it. He had no idea which crevice, if any, might hold a man in waiting.
The heat of the sun was stronger here, where it reflected off the rocks and crumbling soil. The smell of sage and dust came to his nostrils. A fly landed on the back of his sweating hand, and he made a small motion to shake it away. A velvet orange ant climbed across an open space of dirt an arm’s length away. Tufts of goat-beard grass held on to small knobs of earth, and daggerlike clumps of yucca rose at eye level. The rocks passed above him.
Though it seemed like an hour, he knew it had been but five minutes since he had slipped away from the trail. He squinted in the heat. Then as he looked up he stopped in midstep and set his foot straight down. Above in the rocks he saw a pair of scuffed brown boots sticking out of the legs of a pair of brown canvas trousers. A man was still waiting.
Fielding passed below, taking more care than ever to keep from making noise. In another minute he could no longer see back around a buttress of rock that jutted out, but he marked the spot in his mind. Now he looked for a way to climb out. He holstered his gun and forged ahead.
Another three or four minutes took him up out of the canyon on his left and onto the ledge, where a faint breeze cooled the sweat on his face. He was still not up on the flat itself, but the trail was not so steep here. He sidestepped down to the trail itself. Staying close to the edge where the grass grew and where the rocks would keep him from being seen, he worked his way back. After about sixty yards, he climbed up onto a sandstone ledge. From there he walked forward in a crouch, with his hat tipped to keep the sun out of his eyes.
When he came to a crevice, the man was not there. If he had not sneaked away, he was in the next one. Fielding eased down into the opening, came up on the other side, and crossed the next rocky surface with his gun drawn. As the crevice came into view, the scuff of Fielding’s boot heel caused the man to jerk around and sit up in a kneeling position.
Fielding would have recognized him sooner if had been wearing his black hat, but he was wearing an older gray one with a smaller crown and brim. Between that and his black vest and dust-colored work shirt, the man looked like a giant horsefly. As Fielding focused on the shaded face, he saw that the usually dull-lidded eyes were open in surprise, and the fellow’s mouth hung open. Now Fielding had an answer to the question of whether Foote had gone north with the harvest crew.
“What are you lookin’ for?” asked Fielding.
“Nothin’ much.”
“That’s not what it seems like.”
Foote regained some of his arrogance right away. “You don’t own this place,” he said.
“Neither do you.” Fielding waved his six-gun. “I don’t like someone lyin’ in wait for me on the trail.”
“How do you know what I was doing?”
