The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [30]
He went into the front room and unlocked the gun chain. Took down the Springfield bolt-action .30-06. He weighted the saddlebags down with ammunition and went outside carrying canteen, blanket-roll, saddlebags, and rifle. Stowed them all aboard the horse and climbed up into the saddle and rode at a trot around to Packer’s grocery. He went inside and bought enough provisions, as concentrated as he could find, to fill a small gunnysack, which he tied on top of the blanket-roll with piggin’ strings.
That was it, then. He couldn’t think of anything he’d forgotten. He put his foot in the stirrup and gathered the reins and hoisted himself up. It was a stiff climb for an old man: he had to lift his right leg high over the pile of provisions. He got settled with half his weight on the balls of his feet in the wood stirrups, adjusted the reins in the fingers of his left hand, tugged his hatbrim down tight, and clucked to the horse.
Sheriff Nye came up the street with a mounted posse—young Hal Brickman, very graven-faced, and eight or nine deputies.
“Here you are,” Nye said. “Thought we missed you back at the house.”
“Why,” Sam Brigade said, “I’m obliged, Noel.”
“My job, ain’t it, Captain?”
They found the camp in Rose Canyon at about four in the afternoon. There was no mistake about it because a bit of cloth clung to an obvious branch. It was torn off Susan’s sunbonnet, the one she wore around the house on washday.
“Message from Zach Provo,” Burgade drawled. The surfaces of his eyes glittered like hard gems.
Nye said, “They cain’t have more than four, five hours’ jump on us’” He turned back to his horse. “Come on, the trail don’t get no shorter while we set here staring at it”
Burgade saw Hal Brickman’s eyebrows contract. The young man was staring around the creek-bank camp ground with a grief-stricken look that was no sham; he had kept it to himself on the ride up from Tucson but he was beginning to look as if he was ready to let loose. He cut a faintly ludicrous figure in his narrow snap-brim hat and dude jodhpurs, a revolver buckled awkardly around his waist, high up in one of those Army-style holsters with a protective snap-down flap. If he’d carried his gun inside his saddlebag it might have been a little harder to reach, but not much. Still, his earnest anger was genuine and he had not whimpered. In other circumstances, Burgade might have had a great deal of room for sympathy toward him: Hal’s anguished face was evidence enough of the sincerity of his love for Susan and the agony of not knowing what he could do to save her.
Nye was down on one knee. “Look here, Captain.”
Burgade went over to him and leaned over to focus his attention on the ground at the point of the sheriffs finger.
“One of them horses got a tie-bar shoe here, lakly to hold in a soft hoof.”
“That’ll leave a distinctive print,” Burgade said. He walked forward leading his horse, seeing where the tie-bar track went. There was a big muddle of prints where several horses had trampled one another’s tracks but toward the upper end of the clearing it got sorted out and Burgade turned back to gather his reins and climb into the saddle. “They went on up the canyon.”
“Ain’t trying hard to hide their tracks, that’s for sure,” Nye said.
Hal Brickman brought his horse up to the head of the column. “Look, I’m not sure about all this.”
Sun and