So this, he thought, is the way it ends. Filled with doubt and roaring emptiness, he tramped down to the thicket where the gelding was tied. Valois came toward him, calling out as Grant was about to step into the stirrup.
“Where do you aim to go from here?”
Grant shrugged. For the moment he didn't care what trail he took or where it led him.
“Dagget's going to be fit to kill when we turn him loose,” the runner said. “We won't be able to hold him long. We can lie to him, tell him that you kept us at gun point so we couldn't untie him. Even so, we've got to let him go pretty soon.”
Grant climbed heavily to the saddle. “Give me a few minutes, and then...” He shrugged, and hauled the gelding around to the north.
“Just a minute,” Valois called. “Dagget's going to be a wild man when he starts after you this time. He'll burn up the telegraph wires—within a few hours the borders will be watched so a coyote couldn't slip through.”
“That's a chance I'll have to take.”
“But I thought of something. A few months ago I stumbled onto an old dugout about five miles up Slush Creek. It's dug into the creek bank and grown over with weeds, built years ago by one of Payne's boomers, I guess. Far as I know I'm the only one that knows about it. It might do as a hideout. It would beat trying to cross a border crawling with U. S. marshals!”
Grant scowled. “Maybe. But I couldn't keep my horse, and I'd need supplies.”
“Let the horse go; more than likely he'll come back to Sabo, which won't tell Dagget a thing. I can bring you supplies and another horse later.”
“I'm not asking you to get mixed up in this any more than you already are.”
Valois grinned. “I'm already in it as far as I can get.”
Grant hesitated only a moment. “I guess I didn't expect this much help. A fool doesn't deserve it, but...” He lifted a hand in a solemn gesture of friendship. “Thanks. I'll be looking for the squatter's place as I head north.”
He put iron to the big gelding, and the black wheeled and settled to an easy lope to the north. When they reached the gentle incline that sloped gently up to the rim of the basin, he turned briefly in the saddle and saw Valois still standing there, and he saw Rhea standing straight as an arrow beside the bunkhouse, but he was a long way off by then and couldn't see what her face was like. And he wanted to lift a hand to her, to indicate with some small gesture that he had not asked it to end this way, but his male pride lay hard and cold inside him, and he turned bleakly and raked the gelding with blunted spurs.
Time sped now; he had never known it to pass so quickly. He ticked off the seconds and minutes in his mind and forced himself to hold the big black to an easy lope. Minutes counted now; time was the lone sheer thread that held him to freedom, and it was running out at an appalling rate. Five minutes he had—possibly ten—and then Rhea and Valois would be forced to let Dagget go. Even so, they would have trouble enough explaining the delay to the marshal.
To avoid attention and suspicion, he kept to the well-traveled freight trail as long as he dared... but the minutes were flying by. At last he hauled the gelding around and peered down once again on that lacy wilderness of derricks where an endless, twisted chain of wagons crawled like black ants over the frozen prairie. And he could see the slanted roofs and flapping canvas of Sabo, and far to the west the endless chain of wagons disappeared on the horizon where Kiefer lay. But the thing that he was looking for was somewhere else, on the other side of Slush Creek. And he came suddenly erect in his saddle and a faint, fleeting grin split his face as he saw the tiny figure of Turk Valois flogging the marshal's horse. His taut nerves relaxed and he sat easy in the saddle, watching the animal bolt for the lower reaches of the frozen stream.
Valois thought of everything! And he had guts, risking Dagget's wrath to buy more time for the escape. Grant shook his head in vague bewilderment and wondered how Rhea could doubt a man like that.
The pale winter sun was falling behind the rolling brown lulls to the west when Grant came upon the ancient dugout that Valois had mentioned. He would not have seen it if the runner hadn't pinpointed the place for him, for it was dug into the side of the claybank and years of slow erosion had brought the earth down on top of it, making it shapeless and inconspicuous. And the covering of earth had grown up with grass and tall weeds, and not even the sagging stockade door was visible to a casual searching, hidden as it was behind a spearlike thicket of mullein.
Grant hesitated for one long moment on the opposite bank. Somewhere behind him Dagget was raging. Already the telegraph would be sending out its staccato warning and U. S. marshals and state law officers would be gathering on the borders to head him off.
To run or hide—the decision had to be made quickly. If he stayed here he would have to let the gelding go, for the animal would be a dead giveaway when Dagget's men came through this way. And they would come through soon enough.
He didn't like the idea of being afoot in the middle of the Creek Nation, without provisions, literally trusting his life to a man who owed him nothing. Yet, the dugout, if not warm, would at least keep him from freezing. And it was unlikely that Dagget would expect to find him in a place like this.
He beat his arms together, hunching into the bitter wind that swept down through the canyon of naked cottonwoods, realizing that he had to trust Valois. He could not fight Dagget's wrath alone.
With cool deliberateness, he rode the gelding on past the dugout and dismounted a hundred yards upstream. Here the ground was frozen hard as flint, carpeted with brown, brittle bunch grass, making a trail almost impossible to follow. With numb fingers he unbitted and threw loose the cinch, stripping his meager gear from the gelding's back. Without a moment's hesitation he cracked the black across the rump and stood for a moment watching the startled animal bolt upstream for perhaps fifty yards then turn slowly and start walking back toward Sabo.
The decision was made, and there was no backing out. The rest was up to Turk Valois.
Bleakly, he took up his saddle and roll and made his way back downstream to a log crossing. Carefully parting the curtain of weeds, he paused in front of the stockade door sagging obliquely on one leather hinge, and a kind of bitter humor welled up inside him as he thought of his hard-scrabble farm in Missouri. So much had happened that he hadn't had time to think back or feel regret. But he had plenty of time now, he thought wryly—it was all he did have.
He shoved the door inward and it ripped from its rotten hinge and went crashing to the ground. Gently he eased his rig to the ground and stepped into the cavelike darkness of the dugout. Once this place had meant hope to someone, maybe to some awkward cowhand like himself who had held visions of owning his own land, being his own boss, in some vague way hoping to make something of himself.
But from the looks of things, the man who built this dugout had come on bad luck, too. Likely the cavalry had routed him out of here, as they had so many of Captain David L. Payne's misguided Boomers.
Grant searched his windbreaker for a match and held the flaming sulphur above his head as he surveyed the place. A lot of work had gone into the building, a lot of useless work. First the clay creek bank had been dug out, and then Cottonwood logs had been cut and split to side the dirt walls of the cabin. A crude sod fireplace stood against one wall, and a chimney fashioned of sticks and mud had once reached up through the top of the dugout. And perhaps there had been furniture here once, homemade or hauled in by wagon, but the floor was bare now. Only the fireplace remained; the mud chimney had long since crumbled and disappeared. And dirt sifted down like sporadic rain between the huge log beams of the ceiling, and before long it would fall in completely and fill up with more dirt and no one would ever guess that a man—a family perhaps—had lived here once.
Grant dropped the match and let the flame go out. There was too much here that reminded him of himself and he didn't want to see any more of it.
In the failing fight from the outside he opened his roll and spread his blanket in the corner of the room; then he propped the door in place, blocking out the cutting wind, and a sheet of blackness came down on the only available light.
I'll wait, he thought. That's all I have to do. Valois helped me once—twice—and he'll do it again.
And he felt his way to the corner and sat on the thin blanket, cursing himself for not thinking to bring provisions. But there hadn't been time to think of provisions. There had been time to run and that was all.
He didn't want to think, but there was little else to do in the tomblike darkness of the dugout. He drew his revolver from his waistband and busied himself with cleaning it, but that wasn't enough to stop the aimless procession of thoughts that passed through his mind.
