The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [35]
He turned quickly, breaking up the tableau. “Come on, missy, put it in the saddle, all right? Or do I have to pick you up and tie you on?”
Riva rode point, because he seemed able to communicate things to a horse that nobody else could. Riva picked the path in the starlit dark, and the rest followed at a steady slow-climbing pace. Susan sat her saddle loosely, weary, resting both hands on the saddle horn because she didn’t have any reins to hold—Quesada had the reins, he was leading her horse. They weren’t taking any chances with her. Provo had tied one of her ankles to the stirrup leathers to insure she wouldn’t try to jump off her horse and run for it in the darkness. She had bent down once to try and shift the knot, because it was digging her ankle bone painfully, but the man right behind her—Menendez—had spoken sharply and gigged his horse close and threatened to slash her with his quirt, and she had straightened up and ridden in silence after that.
She felt grit-dirty inside the homespun dress. It seemed clear that Provo intended to push straight through the night, only stopping now and then to breathe the horses. At this rate she wondered how long he expected the animals to last, let alone their riders.
Through the first few hours of the night ride she swung from mood to mood like a lunatic, weaving from one extreme of emotion to another: terrorized dread that made her tremble violently and repress screams of fear; furious rages that made her want to claw the eyes out of all their faces—she had wild violent visions of tying them all to stakes and building huge fires around them—and left her weak, drained; dirges of self-pitying resignation, waiting for them to kill her and be done with it; frightful fantasies in which she saw them holding her down, spreadeagling her, venting their sweaty lusts upon her body; spates of cynical uncaring exhaustion in which she went numb, told herself to just mark time until it was over—hope to survive it, and ignore whatever might happen in the meantime.
Finally they reached the summit of the pass and started down the long eastward slope toward the San Pedro River. It must have been well past midnight, although she was not versed in reading the time by stars. Her body was slack, moving loosely with the jolts and shifts of the saddle. The hot rages and icy terrors had cooled and thawed within her; fantasies had dulled, resolve had dissipated. It was no longer necessary to force indifference upon herself. She was too washed-out to care anymore. She swayed as if she were asleep; she was not asleep, but neither was she altogether awake. A kind of peace had settled on her, a protective daze from which she did not expect or want, to emerge.
* * *
The first shadow-streaks of dawn caught them in the foothills, still heading for the river. They were not hurrying the pace but they had kept moving steadily, eating up ground. Someone rode by and passed her a cold hard biscuit and a strip of dried beef, and when she had eaten them she looked up and saw it was Mike Shelby, watching her gravely, holding his horse alongside hers. He handed her a canteen and she drank from it greedily. She didn’t think to hand it back to him, and he took it gently out of her grasp, capped it and slung it over his saddle horn. He seemed to smile a little in the dawn, and then he dropped back toward the tail end of the column.
Daylight grew steadily; it seemed to revive some of them. Portugee Shiraz pulled up beside her and said, “You want some grub, lassie?”
Menendez, behind her, said, “Shelby already fed her.”
“Tryin’ to get the inside track,” Portugee said, and cackled unpleasantly. “Well, that’s all rat, I reckon maybe we all get a turn at you ’fore this is over, lassie. Soon as we get time to stop awhile. Hey, Menendez, she’s a real looker,