Louis L'Amour (18 page)

Only my dream wasn’t dead. Until a few days ago it had just been lying there, starving for lack of hope. In a sort of way Ann made it come alive. There was never a thought in my mind that she was for me. She had breeding, education, a background suited to a woman like her. Philo was a tough, strong man who had to be somewhere to use his toughness and his strength, but Ann …?

I was thinking about these things, but at the same time I was realizing that they would have picked up our trail by now and they would be coming on. They would make pretty good time, in spite of the fact that their horses would be showing the wear and tear of hard riding, too.

The place I’d picked for a stand wasn’t much, just
a buffalo wallow without much shelter, and they could ride around me and leave me sitting without ever knowing I was there unless I opened fire. Yet I had a hunch they would hold to what trail we had left and would come up to the stream right near by, and they would stop there for the night, or at least for a rest. It was an easy camp, a far more likely place than where we had stopped, for we’d had to think of hiding our fire.

Not that I didn’t still have a chance if they continued on, for I could still walk. And in fact, over many miles, a man can walk down a horse—it has been done.

But I felt sure they would stop. Their horses must be badly beat, their grazing had been poor, and they had been ridden hard even before Bohlen started after us. And if they did stop, I would have one of their horses.

All my life I’d been fighting one way or other, and here and there I’d used my brains, such as they were. Mostly I’d just waded in swinging, and the thing that kept me winning—for I’d won ninety per cent of my fights—was simply that I’d never been willing to realize when I was licked. A time or two it had seemed like it, only something kept me swinging and I’d finally won.

It wouldn’t be that way this time. This was a shooting matter. These men wanted to kill me … or some of them did … and they had to kill me.

So I waited, sitting there in my dusty clothes, needing a wash and a bite of food. And I figured my chances were down to nothing.

The sun was warm, there was a dark edging of wet
earth around the patches of snow, but the melting had about let up for the time being. Evening wasn’t far off, but it was still clear in the west where the sun was setting. All of a sudden, sitting there alone in the stillness, all the tiredness that had been piling up for days swept over me.

My eyelids grew heavy, and my muscles sagged. It felt comfortable, sitting there in the waning sun. The slight breeze was cool, but not unpleasant. I stood up and looked all around, but there was nothing in sight. Sitting down again, I made myself comfortable against the side of the wallow.

How long had we been running? How long since I’d had a full night of sleep? When all of this was over, if I was still alive, I was going to sleep for a week. But I had to stay awake now, for they would be coming at any time.

Again I stood up and looked carefully around. Nothing … nothing in sight, anywhere. Soon it would be getting dark. I sat down, and dug through my pockets, hunting for the stub of an old cigar, but I didn’t find one. Hunching deeper into my coat, I waited.

Suppose they did not follow our tracks, but went on and laid an ambush somewhere up the trail? It was possible, but not probable, I thought.

My eyes were tired … I’d close them for just an instant.

I was half asleep when the rush of hoofs brought me up with a start and I lunged to my feet. A loop sailed out of nowhere and whipped around me, jerking taut as the horse sat back hard on his haunches. A
second rope slapped me in the face as it circled my throat.

“Hold him like that.” Roman Bohlen swung down from his saddle, drawing on a pair of heavy gauntlets. He was smiling as he walked toward me.

The others sat their horses, their faces expressionless. I’d worked with several of them, and one of the men who had a rope on me was Red Hardeman, a tough cow-puncher whom I’d whipped in a brutal fight at a dance a couple of years back. He had no reason to like me.

“I was expecting you to lay back and wait for us, Pike, because you’re a damned fool. Now I’m going to give you something you’ve needed for a long time, and then we’re going to catch up with the rest of that crowd and make an end of this.”

The ropes held me tight. I was wearing my sheepskin coat, which impeded movement anyway, and the ropes had pinned my arms to my side and had a strangle on my neck.

Roman Bohlen was a big man, and strong. As he walked up to me he had the nastiest expression I’ve ever seen on a man’s face. He drew back his gauntleted fist, and then he drove it at my face, but Eddie Holt’s training had been good. Without even thinking about it, I pulled my head aside and the punch skimmed by.

Bohlen fell against me, and then he jerked back as if he’d gone crazy mad and started slamming me with both hands. He hit me once and my head rocked, then he hit me again. Deliberately, I braced my feet and stood there, determined not to go down. He struck me once more, then he tripped me, and when I
fell he kicked me in the ribs again and again. Only that heavy coat kept him from smashing my side in.

How long he kept it up I had no idea. At first the blows stunned and hurt, then I became half sick with pain, and after that I was almost numb to the blows that followed. Yet I kept my senses. Finally, arm-weary, he stopped and stepped back, his hands hanging.

“All right, take your ropes off!” he said, and kicked me again in the side.

“Pike!” he yelled at me, and when I fought to reply, I couldn’t, for my lips were smashed and my jaw swollen.

But he had turned away. “The hell with him!” he said. “Let’s get out of here. This one isn’t important, anyway.”

The saddle creaked as he mounted. “Red, you’ve hated his guts for a long time. I leave it to you.
Kill him!
”

Vaguely, I heard the pound of the hoofs as they rode off, and I forced my eyes open and looked up.

Red Hardeman sat his horse not fifteen feet away, and he held his Colt in his hand. I know he was thinking of the beating I’d given him, and of how we had never had any use for each other. And now he had me cold-turkey, and helpless.

“I’ll say this for you,” he said, “you got guts.”

He lifted his pistol and laid the sights on my head, and he held them there. I didn’t have strength enough to move, and no place to move to if I had.

The muzzle of that pistol looked bigger and bigger. Then deliberately he shifted his aim about six inches and fired.

The muzzle flowered with flame, the slug smashed into the earth beside my head. He re-cocked his pistol, took dead aim, holding on a spot right between my eyes, and then again he shifted his aim and fired. The concussion was terrific, but when I opened my eyes he was sitting there looking down at me from those utterly cold gray eyes. Coolly, he blew the smoke from the muzzle of his gun and, turning his horse, rode off after the others.

The drum of his horse’s hoofs faded, but I could not move. I lay staring up at the low gray clouds that now covered even that far-off place where the sun had gone down, but at last something stirred inside me, some some strange, crying need to struggle back, to survive. So I rolled over on my face.

My body ached with the dull throb of bruised and battered muscle and bone. Yet somehow I got my hands under me and pushed myself up to my knees. One eye was closed, the other a mere slit, and when I lifted my fumbling, bloody hands to my face they recoiled in horror. It was swollen out of shape and torn into what must be an awful mask.

Grasping the edge of the wallow, I pulled myself up. But my legs gave way and I fell, my chin hitting the ground so heavily that a thousand new pains started in my skull. After a minute I tried again, this time digging my fingers into the half-frozen soil and pulling myself up out of the wallow.

It took all the strength I had, and I lay there on the ground. Far off I seemed to hear shooting.… So then it was no use—they had caught up with my friends and were murdering them.

The cold of the earth seeped into my bones, and I
shook with a chill. One hand reached out and grasped a tuft of grass and pulled my body toward it.

A drop of blood fell from my face and made a bright crimson spot on my sleeve. I stared at it dully for a moment, then I got my hands under me and began to crawl forward. This time I must have crawled several feet before I collapsed again, and then I passed out from weakness.

I woke in the night to cold and a raging thirst. Reaching out, I got a handful of half-frozen snow and thrust it at my mouth. I felt the tearing of partly closed cuts, and my jaw creaked with pain at the effort to open my mouth, but some of the snow got through. It melted, and a slow, delicious trickle started down my throat.

My body ached, but again I got to my knees and started forward. After a few minutes I came abreast of a rock and, catching hold of it, pulled myself up, clinging to it until my legs stopped trembling.

Staggering, I started forward. Somehow I would get to Miles City, and when I got there I would find Roman Bohlen. Somehow, some way, I would find him.

It was that thought which saved me, which drove me on through a terrible, agony-filled night, when I staggered, fell, climbed up, and fell again. Twice I spilled over creek banks to the ice below but each time I managed to get up, and struggled on.

The coming of a sickly gray dawn found me still walking and falling, still getting up again. My hands were bloody, my body ached, every step wrenched a groan from me, but I kept on. Somewhere up ahead was whatever remained of my friends, for the shots I
had heard could only have meant that Bohlen and his outfit had closed in around them.

There is something to be said for hatred under such circumstances. Certainly, without it I could never have gotten myself off the ground, not as much as ten feet from where I started.

The distance was measured at first in feet, but finally I came to measuring it merely in paces. To look ahead, to try to imagine covering the bitter miles would have been impossible. If I could manage just the next step, I was satisfied.

One of my hands—I had no memory of this—had been stomped on. It was lacerated and terribly swollen, but the fingers could move, though with so much pain that I had no intention of trying to use that hand.

One or more of my ribs might be broken … they felt like it. I was cut, bruised, and battered, and that, coupled with the exhaustion of the days before, had left me with almighty little to travel on but nerve.

And hatred.

I wanted most of all to kill Roman Bohlen.

Sometimes I was out of my head. Sometimes the horizon seemed to dip and waver around me. Walking and falling, I doubt if I made a mile that first day.

Toward nightfall something moved off to my right. Later, I glimpsed it again.

It was a wolf. No coyote, but a big old gray lobo, and he was stalking me.

They’d taken my guns and my knife, and I couldn’t even find anything for a club. I had no defense against him.

A wolf will not tackle a man. I’d been told that
since I was a youngster, and I believed it … up to a point.

That old lobo out there knew I was all in. He knew his time would come; and a wolf, like a buzzard, has a vast patience at such times. Sometimes I think only man is in a rush about things. Most wild animals, with no sense of time to speak of, they can wait. They know how to wait.

He might get me tonight. It might be tomorrow or tomorrow night—he wasn’t in a rush about it.

Once, when I fell down, I lay for several minutes without moving. I seemed only half conscious. When I moved to get up, there was the wolf, sitting there, not fifty yards away, tongue lolling out, watching me.

H
E MADE ME mad, sitting there, just waiting for me to give up, and so damned sure he was going to have me when I couldn’t go any further. So I got up and started on, and I had a sort of notion that I might move briskly enough to persuade him the wait would be too long. But I saw at once that he wasn’t being fooled. Nevertheless I kept going. Several times I stopped for a handful of snow, but I kept on going until it was too dark to make out landmarks, and with no stars to be seen, I was afraid to travel on for fear of going out of my way in the wrong direction.

About that time I struck my first streak of pay dirt. It wasn’t much—just a thick clump of willow and chokecherry with a couple of cottonwoods on the bank of a small frozen stream, but the thing was, there was a lot of debris around, so I searched my pockets again and found a couple of matches. On the under side of an old dead tree I found some bark which I frayed in my fingers. I broke off some tiny twigs and found some dry moss, and then struck my match. The first one took flame, and soon I had a good fire going.

They’d left me for dead, and by this time were far away, so I had no worry about having a fire, and it
was something badly needed, both for warmth and for bracing up my morale, or whatever they call it.

No searching of my pockets yielded anything to eat; not a crumb could I find. But the warmth of the fire was making me sleepy, and I hovered close to it.