The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [31]
“No, I mean won’t they be likely to harm Susan if we crowd them?”
“They’ll be more likely to harm her if we don’t.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but that doesn’t make much sense to me.”
Noel Nye said, “Gentle down, son. This is just as • hard on the Captain as it is on you. You got to trust us to know what we doing.”
Hal’s tortured eyes swept from face to face. “Look, you know all about manhunting and fighting and I’m just an engineer, I’m a greenhorn here, and I admit it. But I don’t care about bringing these men to justice or getting revenge or anything else. I just want to try and help make sure Susan isn’t hurt.”
“That’s what we all want,” Nye said. “Son, you bound to take our word for it, we know what we doing—the Captain knows what he’s doing.”
Burgade’s bleak glance simmered on the trees up-canyon. Hal spoke rapidly, his voice climbing, starting to lose control: “If we push them they may get rattled—God knows what they may do. Suppose they panic? Suppose they split up and run for it? They won’t leave Susan behind, alive.”
Burgade said, very mild, “Then what do you suggest?”
“My God, I don’t know, but shouldn’t we take it easy?”
“And let them get clean way, you mean,” Nye said. “What good’s that going to do her?”
Burgade said, “We’re wasting time,” and put his horse up into the trees.
At the head of the canyon the tracks took them along the sloping side of a scrubby hogback and up toward the dip in the center of a high-ground saddle. Burgade unsheathed his field glasses and played them over the higher stretches ahead. Magnification made the sun-struck pinpoints of mica reflections strike his eyes like needles. A dry layer of heat lay along the mountains; the slopes lifted steeply toward tall-timber country and timberline beyond, the bald ten-thousand-foot summits of the Catalinas. Along here it was mostly loose sun-whacked earth and boulders, bucking up toward the Windy Point district.
He didn’t see any sign of movement but that was no surprise; the great shoulders of these mountains could hide—and had hidden—armies. The Chiricahua Apaches had fought a campaign up here, using the torturous canyon mazes as a stronghold against Hitchcock’s struggling troopers, Three decades ago Burgade had tracked renegade Indians and outlaw fugitives through this patch of the Rockies, and nothing had changed; the crags and gorges were as immutable as time. It was a stiff ankle-busting climb to the passes, but once down the far side it was a fast level run up the flat bed of the San Pedro Valley toward the high pine country of central east Arizona and the lava badlands beyond, or the Apache and Navajo country to the north. Or, if Provo had turned south along the San Pedro, he would have an easy trail along the Southern ‘Pacific Railroad spur to Bowie, from which he could disappear in any direction—east toward Lordsburg and El Paso, south through Cochise’s old battlefields into Mexico, west into the chopped-up Huachuca country around Tombstone. Down in that lower right-hand corner of Arizona you could hide out for fifty years without being found, if you didn’t mind the heat and the rocks and the total lack of greenery. Cochise and Geronimo had proved that. But Burgade had a feeling Provo wasn’t going to turn that way.
The posse climbed steadily into the waning afternoon. There was no talk. Nobody knew what they were going to do if they did somehow catch up with the fugitives; nobody wanted to talk about that, except Hal Brickman, and Hal kept his own counsel after Burgade’s rebuff.
Burgade had ideas how to handle it, but there was no point in spelling them out until the time came. In the meantime his old backside was starting to get saddlesore already and he concentrated his attention on the faint scuffmarks and dents of the fugitives’ track.
Just on sunset they climbed out of a canyon thick with clawing manzanita and saw the juniper-piñon slopes rising ahead, northeast, while a swift grade fell away to the right toward the lower pass and Spud Rock in the Rincon