Ellery Queen's The Golden 13, page 25
Strothers smiled. “Now look, Constable. . .” He was watching the loop in Melvin’s hand.
And that was when Rudd stepped in and slammed Strothers to the ground with the butt of his rifle. Melvin drove in quickly then. Strothers was enough for the two of them for a while, but they got his arms tied behind him at last.
The little automatic, flat, fully loaded, was tied with strips of green cloth from Castagna’s pants leg to the inside of Strothers’ thigh. Castagna cursed bitterly, clinging to the saddle horn with his one good hand.
“Why didn’t you search him right at first?” Jaynes demanded angrily.
“It takes more steam out of them to let them go right up to where it looks like it’s going to work,” the sheriff said. “Build a fire, Pryor. We may as well eat again before we split up.”
Strothers chewed his meat with good appetite. He had straggled like a wolf, but that was done now and his intelligence was at work again. “What tipped it, Constable—the cigarettes?”
“Partly,” Rudd said. “You wouldn’t have left both packs with Sam unless you figured to be with him soon. That wasn’t too much, but I knew you would never go back down the river and let them say Ora L. Strothers was caught asleep and gave up without a fight You really were asleep, too—on purpose.”
“Sure. I got the nerve for things like that. It made it look real.” Strothers’ good nature was back, but he was not thinking of his words. His mind, Melvin knew, was thinking far ahead now, to another plan, setting himself against walls and locks and ropes and everything that could be used to restrain a man physically, pitting his fine mind against all the instruments of the thing called society.
There was a lostness in him that appalled Melvin. Strothers was a cold wind running from a foggy gorge back in the dawn age of mankind. The wind could never warm or change or remain confined. Compared to Strothers, Sam Castagna was just a lumbering animal that knocked weaker animals out of the way.
“You would have taken Castagna with you, if you could have knocked a couple of us off and got to the horses?” Mel-vin asked.
“Sure,” Strothers said. “We planned it that way.”
That was talk to be repeated in the prison yard, to be passed along the corridors of the cell block. Talk to fit the code. But not to feed the vanity of Ora L. Strothers, because it was a lie. Let Castagna, lying feverishly on the ground in Melvin’s jacket, believe what Strothers said. Castagna had been left behind to build up the illusion that desperate men would surrender without a fight. That he was injured and had to be left was not primary in Strothers’ mind; it was merely helpful coincidence.
“Which one of us was to ‘ve been first?” Melvin asked.
Strothers wiped his lips. “You, I thought. Then I changed my mind.” He glanced at Jaynes.
“Yeah,” Jaynes said. “I read you like a book. I wish you had tried something, Strothers.”
The two men stared at each other. The antagonism that separated them was as wide as the sky.
“I’ll bet you’re the one shot Sam,” Strothers said. “Did you shoot Joe Weyerhauser, too?”
Jaynes did not answer. Watching him, Melvin thought: he lacks the evil power of Strothers’ intelligence, and he lacks the strength of natural good. He doesn’t know what he is, and he knows it.
Strothers smiled. “I’ve taken half a million from the banks and never had to shoot a man. You, Snake Eyes, you’re just a punk on the other side because you don’t have the guts and brains of men like me. How about it?”
Jaynes leaped up. His wasp voice broke when he cursed Strothers. He gripped his rifle and stood with the butt poised to smash into Strothers’ face.
“Whoa there, Jaynes!” Sheriff Rudd said, but it was not he who stopped the rifle. With his legs tied and one arm bound behind his back, Strothers looked at Jaynes and smiled, and Jaynes lowered his rifle and walked away. After a few steps he turned toward the creek and went there, pretending to drink.
Barker and Pryor stared at Strothers. “Don’t call me any of your names,” Barker growled.
Strothers looked at him as he might have glanced at a noisy child; and then he forgot them all. His mind was once more chewing facts and plans, even as his strong teeth chewed meat.
If this man had been led by Marty Kaygo, what kind of man was Kaygo? thought Melvin.
Rudd said, “I’ll take everybody in but you and Jaynes, Melvin. Do you feel up to staying on the trail?”
There was no place where a plane could set down to pick up Castagna. Two and a half days out, Melvin estimated. Rudd would need five men to keep an eye on Strothers day and night. They were out of food, too.
“All right,” Melvin said.
Jaynes had overheard. He came back from the creek. “I’m staying, too.”
Strothers smiled.
“I’ll send the green plane over Shewalter Meadows three days from now,” Rudd said. “With grub. Now what else will you need?”
“Send me another coat,” Melvin said. “Send Jaynes another sleeping bag. We both better have packs, too.”
The sheriff nodded. He put Strothers on a horse and tied him there. They lifted Castagna to the saddle again. He was going to suffer plenty before they reached the highway. Castagna looked at Melvin and said thickly, “Thanks for the coat.”
Strothers smiled at Melvin from the corner of his eyes. The smile said: Chump!
A hundred yards down the creek a logging road took off to the left, and there went the tracks of Marty Kaygo. Melvin and Jaynes walked into second-growth timber. The sounds of the horses died away. Under his belt Melvin was carrying the pistol he had taken from Strothers.
Jaynes said, “I damn near smashed that Strothers’ ugly face.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You can’t hit a man tied up like that, not even a pen bird.”
“No.”
“Of course not,” Jaynes said.
The road began to angle to the right, along a ridge.
“This won’t take us straight to where the plane spotted Kaygo,” Jaynes said. “Let’s cut into the timber.”
“I’m staying with his tracks. I don’t know what that plane was circling over.”
The road turned down the ridge again, on the side away from Shewalter Meadows. Kaygo’s tracks were still there, but Jaynes was mightily impatient. “I’m going straight over the ridge,” he said.
“Go ahead,” Melvin answered.
“Where will I meet you then?”
“At the Meadows.”
“You sure?” Jaynes asked doubtfully.
“This old road runs into one hell of a swamp before long. I’m betting he went to the Meadows, but I’m going to follow his trail all the way.”
They separated. Melvin was glad. He wanted to reduce the chase to the patient unwinding of a trail, to an end that was nothing more than law and duty; and he could not think of it that way so long as Jaynes was with him.
Where the swamp began, Kaygo had turned at once up the ridge. There was something in that which spoke of the man’s quality, of an ability to sense the lie of a country. Most city men would have blundered deep into the swamp before deciding to turn.
Jaynes was right about down-timber on the ridge, fire-killed trees that had stood for years before rot took their roots and wind sent them crashing. Melvin went slowly. Kaygo had done the same, and before long Melvin noticed that the man had traveled as a woodsman does, stepping over nothing that could be walked around.
Kaygo would never exhaust himself in blind, disorderly flight. What kind of man was he?
Going down the west side of the ridge, Melvin stopped when a grouse exploded from the ground near a rotting spruce log. He drew the pistol and waited until he saw two others near the log, frozen in their protective coloration. He shot one through the head, and five more flew away.
Now an instrument of the law had broken the law for a second time during this chase; but there were, of course, degrees of breakage. A man like Strothers no doubt could make biting comments on the subject.
Melvin pulled the entrails from the bird and went on, following Kaygo’s trail. The man had an eye for terrain, all right. He made few mistakes that cost him time and effort, and that was rare in any man crossing unfamiliar, wooded country.
A woodsman at some time in his life? Melvin went back over Kaygo’s record. Thirty-five years old. Sixteen of those years spent in reformatories and prisons. An interesting talker. Athletic. Generally armed, considered extremely dangerous. Approach with caution. The record fell into the glib pattern of the words under the faces on the bulletin board in Rudd’s office.
Gambles heavily. If forced to work, seeks employment as clerk in clothing store. . .There was nothing Melvin could recall to indicate that Kaygo had ever been five miles from city pavements.
The sun was getting low and the timber was already gathering coolness in its depths when Melvin came out on a long slope that ran down to the Meadows, two miles away.
Where the sun still lay on a bare spot near a quartz outcrop Melvin stopped, puzzled by what he saw. The mark of the steel butt-plate of Kaygo’s rifle and the imprint of his shoes, one flat, the other showing no heelprint, said that Kaygo had squatted near the ant hill; four cigarette butts crushed into the ground said that he had been here for some time.
Coolness had diminished the activity of the ants, but they were still seething in and out of their dome of sand and pine needles; and Kaygo had squatted there for perhaps an hour to watch.
It was Melvin’s experience that some perverseness in man causes him to step on ant hills or to kick them in passing. This one was undisturbed. Kaygo had watched and gone away. Melvin had done the same thing many times.
What if I have and what if he did also? he asked himself. Does that change what I have to do? But as he went on, Melvin kept wondering what Kaygo had thought as he squatted beside the ant hill.
Near dusk Melvin lost the trail where the wide arm of a swamp came up from the drainage basin of the Meadows. But Kaygo was headed that way, Melvin was sure. One gentle turn too far to the left, back there on the long slope, would have sent Kaygo into the ragged canyons near the lower end of the Meadows.
He must have spotted the place from the top of Clover Mountain; but seeing from the heights and finding from a route through timber-choked country are two different things.
Kaygo had a fine sense of distance and direction, though. I can grant him that, Melvin thought, without feeling anything else about him to impede my purpose. The purpose—and Melvin wondered why he had to keep restating it—was to bring Marty Kaygo out, dead or alive.
On the edge of Shewalter Meadow, where the grass stood waist-high to a man all over the flooded ground and the beaver runs that led to the ponds out in the middle, Melvin stopped behind a tree and scanned the open space. There was only half light now, but that was enough.
Beavers were making ripples in the ponds and trout were leaping for their evening feeding. The Meadows lay in a great dogleg, and the upper part was cut from Melvin’s view by spruce trees and high willows. The best windfalls for sleeping cover were up there, and that was where Jaynes would be, undoubtedly.
Let him stay there tonight alone. Sooner or later Melvin would have to rejoin him, and that would be soon enough. Melvin went back into the timber and cooked his grouse. He ate half of it and laid the rest in the palm of a limb, head-high.
The night came in with a gentle rush. He dozed off on top of his sleeping bag, to awaken chilled and trembling some time later. The night was windless, the ground stony. Melvin built up the fire and warmed himself by it before getting into his sleeping bag.
Dead or alive. The thought would not submerge.
One Kaygo was a vagueness written on a record; Melvin had learned of another Kaygo today. They made a combination that would never give up.
If Melvin had been here just to fish and loaf, to walk through the dappled fall of sunshine in the trees, and—yes, to be caught away from himself while watching the endless workings of an ant hill; to see the sun come and go on quietness; to see the elk thrusting their broad muzzles underwater to eat; to view all the things that are simple and understandable. . .then, he knew, he would be living for a while as man was meant to live.
You are Bill Melvin, a deputy sheriff. He is a man called Kaygo, an escaped murderer.
Dead or alive. . .
He came from dreamless sleep when the log ends of the fire were no longer flaming but drizzling smoke across a bed of coals. He felt the presence near him by the rising of the hackles on his neck, from deep memories forgotten by the human race.
Carefully, not breaking the even tenor of his breathing, he worked one hand up to the pistol on the head shield of the sleeping bag.
The man was squatted by the fire with a rifle across his knees. His curling brown hair caught a touch of redness from the glow of embers. The light outlined a sandy beard, held steady on wide cheekbones, and lost itself in the hollows under massive brows. The man’s trousers were muddy as high as the knees where the fabric was strained smooth by his position. They might have been any color. But there was no doubt that the shirt was green.
The face by itself was enough.
It was Marty Kaygo.
He was eating what was left of Melvin’s grouse.
He turned the carcass in his hands, gnawing, chewing; and all the while his face was set toward the shadows where Melvin lay.
Slowly Melvin worked the pistol along the edge of the ground until, lying on his side, he raised it just a trifle. The front sight was a white bead that lined across the coals to Kaygo’s chest. Melvin’s thumb pushed the safety down.
Kaygo’s long rifle cartridges—just spots of lead that could sing over space and kill. Kaygo the cop-killer. Speak to him, tell him to put up his hands and let his rifle fall. If he swung the rifle to fire, the pistol could also sing and kill.
From where did the whisper come that fire and food must be shared even with a deadly enemy? From the jungle all around that might pull them both beneath its slime an instant later?
The sabre-tooth tiger and the great reptiles were out there in the night. And men were men together, if only for a moment. The jungle was not gone, merely changed.
Melvin let the pistol rest on the ground.
Marty Kaygo rose. He was not a tall man. Even in his prison shoes he moved lightly as he stepped to a tree and replaced the carcass of the grouse. He grinned, still looking toward where Melvin lay.
And then he was gone.
Melvin lay a long time before he fell asleep again. When he rose in the bitter cold of morning he went at once to the dead fire. There were the tracks. He took the grouse from the limb. One leg was untouched.
Staring out to where the first long-slanting rays of the sun were driving mist from the beaver ponds and wet grass Melvin held the chilled grouse in his hands.
What’s the matter with me?
The truth was, Jaynes was Melvin and Melvin was Jaynes, great developments of the centuries; and Kaygo did not fit where they belonged. But. . .
Melvin shivered.
He went out of the timber into the sunshine, and he sat down to let it warm him while he ate the rest of the grouse. There before him, leading through the gray mud out toward the wickerwork of the beaver dams, were the tracks of Kaygo. He had crossed the boggy ground by night, walking the beaver dams above deep water, returning the same way. It was not an easy feat even in daytime.
I wish I could talk to him, Melvin thought. I wish. . .
The shot was a cracking violation of the wilderness quiet It came from somewhere around the dogleg of the Meadows.
Melvin went back to the camp site and got his gear.
Before he turned the dogleg he saw Jaynes coming toward him. Jaynes stopped and waited.
“What the hell happened to you, Melvin?” There was blood on Jaynes’s shirt.
“I followed his trail, just as I said I would. You shoot a deer?”
“Yeah. That’s one thing there’s plenty of here. Kaygo’s around. I saw his tracks in the upper part of the Meadows last night. Well get him. I know every inch—”
“Let’s get at the deer.”
They roasted meat, and then Jaynes was impatient to be off.
“Just hold your steam,” said Melvin. “We’ve got another two days before the plane drops chow, so we’re going to start drying some of this meat.”
“There’s lots of deer.”
“We’ll dry some of this. We don’t know where that plane will drop our supplies, or what they’ll be like when we get to them. And you’re not going to shoot a deer every day, Jaynes.”
They cut the meat in thin strips and laid it on the gray twigs of a fallen tree until the branches were festooned with dangling brown meat. Camp-robber birds were there at once, floating in, snatching.
“How you going to stop that?” Jaynes asked.
“By staying here. I’m going to do some smoking with a willow fire, too. Take a turn around the Meadows. See what you can find out. You know every inch of the land.”
“I’ll do that.” Jaynes took his rifle and strode away.
He was back at noon. “Where’d you camp, Melvin?”
Melvin told him.
“Well, he was there, this morning. He crossed the swamp and went back the same way. He’s in the timber on this side somewhere. He’s getting smart now about covering his tracks.”
“What’s he eating?” Melvin asked cleverly.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. He slept one night under a windfall. Where’d he learn that, Melvin?” Jaynes was worried.
“I think it must come to him naturally. He’s probably enjoying more freedom right now than he’s had in his whole life.”
Jaynes grunted. He eyed the tree that was serving as a drying rack. “Hey! Do you suppose we could pull him in with that?” He looked all around at the fringe of trees. “Say we go down into the timber on the other side and then circle back to that little knob over there. . .About three hundred yards.” Jaynes rubbed the oily sheen of his rifle barrel. “One shot, Melvin.”
“You think he’s hungry enough to try it?”
