The Warhunter 3, page 16
Chapter Twenty-Seven
HUNTER GAVE GRAHAM the best instructions he could before leaving the wagon train. He told the wagon master to head straight for the Humboldt Sink. After the slaughter last night, and with all the livestock they captured, chances were the Utes were satisfied and had pulled out of the desert. But that didn’t mean there might not be other roving bands of Utes. The wagon train would have to be on its guard.
Graham assured Hunter he’d have every available man and woman who could carry a gun walk or ride along the perimeter of the westward-moving wagon train. With a little luck, they would make it.
Hunter wished him that luck, and a lot more.
The two men shook hands.
And then Hunter rode to the southwest. Glancing behind him, he saw the wagon train slowly disappear over the horizon. They would reach California. Hunter felt certain of it. But what about Ella? Was there a chance that the two of them would ever see the Pacific? Was Ella even alive?
The thought sent a chill through Hunter in spite of the hundred-degree heat. Ballantine had threatened to kill the women if Hunter came after them. But what fate would befall the women if Hunter didn’t go after them? Could Ballantine be trusted?
The answer was obvious. But Ballantine wasn’t the only problem. With the women in the hands of Hal Murdock and the Taggerts, anything could happen ... all of it bad. Hunter could only hope that he’d catch them before it was too late.
He had no trouble, however, catching up to Eric Bryce. The reporter was on foot, pulling his worn-out horse by the reins.
“I see you’re making good time,” said Hunter sarcastically.
Bryce didn’t answer.
“That horse of yours is all used up,” he added.
“I know,” the reporter scowled. “I was a damn fool. I admit it. Now leave me alone.”
“I can’t do that. If I leave you alone, you’re gonna die out here. I figure the next best thing is for you to get on this spare horse and come along with me.”
Bryce stopped and looked up at Hunter. “I appreciate this,” he said. “You would be within your rights to ride right past me.”
“Never mind the speeches, just hurry up and pull your saddle off that cayuse and get it on this other horse. How much water do you have left?”
“About half a canteen.”
“Feed it to your horse before you let him go. At least he’ll have a chance of lasting a day or so, and maybe in the meantime some Utes will find him.”
Bryce did as he was told.
“One last thing,” said Hunter, as Bryce mounted the fresh horse.
“What?”
“From now on you’re taking orders from me. This isn’t going to be a debating society. What I say, goes. No arguments. You understand?”
Bryce nodded.
“Okay, then. Let’s go.”
They rode in a heavy silence, neither one of them speaking. The two men were in love with the same woman. But for all they knew, that woman might already be dead.
Hunter was a little bit ahead, setting a slow but steady pace. Bryce, with considerable difficulty, restrained himself from rushing past him.
At midafternoon, Hunter broke away from the wagon tracks and cut across the open sands toward a pile of rocks about a quarter of a mile away. Bryce followed close behind him.
When Hunter reached the rocks he dismounted and picketed his horse in the shade.
“What are you doing?” demanded the reporter.
“What does it look like I’m doing? If you’re smart you’ll do the same. The horses need the rest and so do we.”
“But we’re catching up to them. We can’t stop now!”
“This is the last time I’m telling you, Bryce. We’re doing things my way, remember? It’s the hottest part of the day. The horses are tired, and we’re tired. We haven’t slept since the night before last. It isn’t going to do us any good to catch up to Ella and Nadine and then be dead on our feet. There’s no telling what we’re gonna meet up with, so we’ve got to have at least a little bit of our strength. Now shut up, get down off that horse, have something to eat, and get some sleep. And, goddammit, stop second-guessing me!”
They stayed there in the shade for the better part of three hours. The sun moved across the clear blue sky and scorched the earth below. But when Hunter opened his eyes, the shadows were getting long and the temperature was beginning to fall. It was time again to ride.
Hunter shook the reporter awake and once more Hunter led the way, making slow but steady progress. But when the sun went down, Hunter spurred his horse into a canter. Bryce stayed right with him. They covered a lot of ground, the horses enjoying the run in the cool desert air. Hunter suddenly pulled his horse up short and swore. “What’s the matter?” questioned Bryce.
“They’ve driven their wagons off the sand. We’re on some kind of rock shelf. I’ve lost their trail.”
“What do we do?”
Hunter took a deep breath. “This rock shelf can’t be that big. We’ve got to find out where they left it. Somewhere there are going to be wagon tracks coming off the rock and back into the sand. We’ve got to find those tracks as fast as we can.”
“Can we do it in the dark?” asked Bryce.
“We’ve followed their wagon tracks up to now in the dark, but we’ve only got a couple of hours of moonlight left. We’ve got to get lucky. Come on.”
Hunter led Bryce to the point where the sand turned to rock. “We’ll have to gamble,” said Hunter, “that they won’t keep heading deeper into the desert. If they go much further in this direction, they’ll hit the northwestern shore of the Great Salt Lake. To avoid that, they’ll probably cut directly west when they come off this rock. What we’ll do is skirt the rock on the west side, looking for their tracks—”
“And hope you’re right,” added Bryce.
“Yeah. And hope I’m right.”
They walked their horses, studying the ground, hour after hour. They walked almost six miles, but the rock shelf didn’t end, and they didn’t find any wagon tracks leaving it.
And then the moon fell below the horizon.
There was no point in going on till the morning. Hunter didn’t say so, but it was evident in his gestures and on his face that he felt defeated. Somehow, he had to help Ella and Nadine. But first they had to be found.
“Better get some sleep,” Hunter said wearily.
“You think we’re going to be too late?” Bryce asked softly.
Hunter’s face tightened. Through clenched teeth he said, “At first light we’ll start looking for those tracks again.”
“Yes, but is it going to do any good?” Bryce persisted. “After tonight, will—”
“Shut up!” snapped Hunter. And then, even against his own belief that it was probably too late, he defiantly shouted: “We’ll find them! Tomorrow, the day after—I don’t know when—but we won’t give up till we find them!”
Bryce understood that Hunter was holding on to only a thin thread of hope. He silently nodded his head. “I’ll take care of the horses,” he offered. “You look pretty beat.”
Hunter took a few deep breaths and let his emotions settle back behind the hard shell that had momentarily cracked.
Bryce unsaddled the horses, rubbed them down, and gave them some water to drink. When he finished, he settled down in the sand, his head on his saddle, and lay there near Hunter.
“Are you awake?” whispered Bryce.
“I’m awake,” he said irritably. “What is it?”
“I’ve been thinking I ought to tell you something,” Bryce replied haltingly.
“About what?”
“It’s something I figure you ought to know now ... because later you may not believe me.”
“Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“If anything should happen to Ella, I—”
“Listen,” Hunter cut in angrily, “I don’t want to hear—”
“Let me finish!” said Bryce. “I’m just trying to tell you that Ella loves you. I tried to win her, but she told me she was going to see it through with you. If you want Ella, all you have to do is tell her so.”
“All I have to do is find her,” sighed Hunter. “Then I can tell her.”
“We’ll find them. Just like you said,” Bryce mumbled, wishing he could believe his own words.
The two men were silent. Neither man, however, tired as they were, felt much like sleeping. Too many thoughts filled their minds—fears, regrets, hopes—all of these things, and more, made it impossible for them to close their eyes.
Bryce sat up. “There’s something else I think I should tell you,” he said. “But I’ll be breaking a confidence if I do it.”
“Is it important?”
“I don’t know. It’s not important now, but it could be later. Something might happen to me, and that’s why I figure I ought to tell you about it.”
Hunter stared at Bryce, waiting for him to speak. “Did Ella ever tell you anything about her past in Philadelphia?”
“No,” admitted Hunter. “She never even told me she came from Philadelphia.”
“She sent a letter to someone there—a Mrs. Elizabeth P. Scofield—and there wasn’t any doubt about the fact that Ella had been in some kind of trouble back there. She said she was keeping a promise by sending that letter, but she didn’t want anyone to know she was sending it.
“The reason I’m telling you this is because something is troubling her and she won’t let me help her. Maybe if she gets out of—I mean, when she gets out of this mess,” he hastily corrected, “maybe she’ll open up to you. I figured if you knew about it, you might make it easier for her to tell you.”
“You care for her a lot, don’t you?”
Bryce smiled sadly. “I think I’ll be glad to be getting back to New York.”
“Like I said this morning, back at the wagon train,” Hunter stated, “your heart’s in the right place. You’ll find someone who’s right for you.”
“There’s a woman who works in a tavern on lower Broadway—her name is Carolyn. I’ve been thinking about her an awful lot lately. I sure hope she’s been missing me.”
Hunter smiled.
“Ah hell,” said Bryce, suddenly awash in self-pity. “She’s probably forgotten all about me by now. For God’s sake, I’ve been gone for five months!”
“She’ll remember you,” said Hunter. “I’d bet my boots on it. How could anyone forget a cocky sonofabitch like you?”
Bryce had to laugh. “I guess I sometimes rub people the wrong way, don’t I?”
“You certainly do. Now how about we both shut our traps and try and get a little shut-eye, huh?”
“Yeah … Right.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
AFTER A LITTLE while, Bryce dozed off. Hunter, however, wasn’t so lucky. Sleep was the farthest thing from his mind. He was thinking about Ella, and about what Bryce had told him. All along, he had been afraid that he had lost her love. It wasn’t so. She was his ... if she was still alive.
Hunter cursed the darkness, for it seemed as if the night would never end. Somewhere there were tracks and he had to find them—and soon.
Had an hour passed since Bryce fell asleep? Or was it just a few minutes? For Hunter, time was standing still. All he could do was stare at the stars and urge them to hurry across the sky and bring the dawn.
It wasn’t until he became so restless that he had to stand up and pace that he heard the faint sounds that were being carried on the wind.
He stopped pacing. He held his breath and listened.
Gunfire. It was coming from the south. The wind swirled away, changing direction, but Hunter was sure he had heard it.
“Get up!” shouted Hunter at the sleeping reporter.
Before Bryce could stumble to his feet, Hunter was already half finished saddling his horse.
“Where are we going?” asked Bryce. “It’s still too dark to track.”
“We don’t have to track. All we have to do is listen. Get saddled up and check your guns. And stay with me. We’re riding flat out to the south!”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know for sure, but it sounds like trouble. This could be our last chance, so let’s move it!”
Moments later they were both in the saddle, galloping due south. They could hear nothing except the sound of their horses’ hooves. And they could see nothing except the black of the night. Yet on they rode, Hunter gambling on a wisp of sound carried on the desert wind.
With each mile they covered, Hunter’s doubts began to grow. Was it really gunfire he heard? Perhaps it was just an odd sound in the wind ... or maybe it was all in his mind.
But he dared not stop now. Hunter had to believe in his instincts. He had to believe in himself and not give in to his doubts.
They drove their horses on, taking the animals to the limit of their endurance. And then, above the pounding hoofbeats, somewhere ahead in the dark, they heard it plain and clear: gunfire, and plenty of it.
“This way!” shouted Hunter, cutting slightly to the southeast. Bryce stayed right behind him. They were riding straight toward the sound of the battle, now less than a mile away.
The false dawn was just beginning to break. Angling to come in on the fight from the east, Hunter was using what would be a blinding desert sunrise to their best advantage.
Reflecting off the white sands, the bright sunrise illuminated the desert in a dazzling burst of light. Up ahead were the three wagons Hunter and Bryce had been chasing. Beyond those wagons was a small war party of Utes, dug in and keeping the wagons under a steady barrage of rifle fire.
With the sun in their eyes, the Utes couldn’t see the two riders. For that matter, neither could Charles Ballantine, Murdock, and the Taggerts.
Hunter pointed to Bryce’s left and made a circling motion. Then he pointed to himself, indicating that he was going to the right, in the opposite direction, and that he too would circle completely around.
Bryce waved back that he understood, and the two riders peeled away from each other, the reporter reaching for his six-gun, and Hunter pulling the Colt-Paterson repeater out of his saddle scabbard.
The glaring radiance of the sun behind them, they came around the wagons, Bryce on the south side, Hunter on the north, like two luminous, shimmering, otherworldly creatures. They rode like streaks of brilliant light—sharp, long shadows and blinding reflections dancing off them, changing with every driving, pounding stride of their galloping horses.
They seemed to be coming out of the sun itself. Then from out of the dazzling light came the orange flame of gunfire, and Utes began to color the desert sands with their blood.
Hunter’s first bullet struck an Indian in the neck. Only as his eyes dimmed with death was the Ute finally able to see the man who had killed him. Hunter’s next slug slammed into a Ute’s shoulder, knocking the Indian’s rifle out of his arms.
Bryce, on the Ute war party’s other flank, was doing equal damage. He shot a Ute square in the chest, and another he hit in the elbow, smashing the joint into a useless mass of broken bone.
Firing as they went, Hunter and Bryce rode right over the top of them. They churned through the Ute war party, shooting straight down, and then raced with empty weapons back into the blinding sun, finishing their circles well behind the three wagons.
“Load up!” ordered Hunter.
“We making another run at them?” Bryce asked breathlessly.
“No. We’re heading straight for the wagons. If Ballantine or any of the rest of them point a gun at you, shoot ’em down. But don’t fire unless you have to. We’re gonna need those men to get outta this.”
“Let’s hope they realize that they need us too,” said Bryce, shoving shells into his gun.
“Keep your muzzle pointed at the ground,” advised Hunter.
Bryce nodded. He was ready. They spurred their horses and charged the wagons.
To their great relief, they weren’t fired upon. It wasn’t necessary. Cal Taggert had shoved the hot muzzle of his Colt into Nadine’s mouth. Next to him stood Hal Murdock, his arm around Ella’s throat, his pistol shoved into her back.
“Better throw down them guns!” ordered Murdock. “If ya try anything, we’re gonna turn these lovely ladies into cold meat, and that’s the plain, hard truth.”
Hunter looked around, gauging the situation, and saw Charles Ballantine leaning up against a wagon wheel, holding a bleeding arm. Then something caught Hunter’s eye. He looked up, out beyond the wagons, and smiled.
“The guns,” repeated Murdock with a smirk. “Throw ’em down.”
Hunter shook his head.
Calmly, with complete confidence, he said, “There’s two reasons why you won’t pull those triggers. The first is that if you kill ’em, in the next second me and Bryce here will cut you and your cousins down so fast you won’t even have a chance to blink. And the second—”
“You’re full a shit,” challenged Murdock, cutting Hunter off. “You didn’t ride all the way out here, followin’ us, just to see us blow these women apart. Stop jawin’ and throw down them guns!”
“You didn’t let me finish,” Hunter said easily, looking Murdock straight in the eye. “The second reason you’re gonna let those women go is because there’s a big war party of Utes coming.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“Come on, Murdock. Use your brains. Why would a small band of Utes dig in and try to pin you down? Can’t you see it? They were the advance guard of a much bigger war party. And if we don’t get the hell outta here fast, it won’t make a damn’s worth of difference if you kill us or we kill you, cause we’re all gonna be dead anyway.”
“You’re talkin’ through your hat,” scoffed Murdock.
“Am I? Have Ballantine take a look out west. See if he doesn’t tell you there’s a dust cloud out there that’s moving this way.”
Ballantine didn’t wait to be asked. He looked and saw just what Hunter said he would see.
“He’s telling the truth,” said Ballantine.
Murdock took the gun out of Ella’s back. Cal Taggert, following his cousin’s lead, withdrew the muzzle of his pistol from Nadine’s mouth.
