The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [41]
It took them three quarters of an hour to reach Castle Butte. The citizens were up and around: several fat women in elaborate dresses, full of suspicion, watched them ride in. If anybody recognized Zach Provo there was no sign of it. A heavyset Indian in a khaki shirt and a cowboy hat low over his eyes came out onto the porch of the trading post and Provo spoke to him in a tongue Shelby had never heard before. The Indian tipped his head back to see out from under his hat and grinned briefly with very bad teeth and rattled off something to which Provo responded with a grunt and a nod. Provo turned and spoke over his shoulder:
“Get on up to the spring there, under the trees. Get cleaned up and eat and try to get some rest. I’ll be along in awhile. Got some business to transact here. Shelby, you look after missy, she’s your responsibility, hear?”
Shelby knew what that meant. He hadn’t missed the way Gant and Portugee and Quesada had been watching Susan Burgade. It was a mystery to Shelby why Provo cared one way or the other about the girl’s virtue, since Provo wasn’t much of a moralist under the best of circumstances and the girl’s father was the one man in the world Provo hated more than all the others combined. But presumably there was a reason for it. Shelby didn’t want the assignment but he could see why Provo picked him for it. Probably figured he was too young to have eyes for an older woman—she had to be anyhow ten, twelve years older than Shelby—and besides, Provo trusted him more than most of the others. Shelby didn’t know whether to feel flattered or hurt by that, but at the moment he was too tired to care. He didn’t want to sit up nursemaiding Miss Burgade, he resented the assignment, and so he was curt and rude to her when he untied her leg from the stirrup-leather and let her climb down stiffly; he stuck close to her while she went over to the spring and splashed water all over her head and face. She was still wearing the homespun dress she’d had on when they’d first seen her—there hadn’t been time for anybody to change clothes. This was the first stand-down they’d had since Friday noon, and it was now what, Monday morning? He’d lost track.
Some of them had the knack of sleeping in the saddle. Provo, for one; Provo hadn’t looked at all tired when he’d disappeared into the Agency police shack a hundred yards back down the slope from the spring. Riva, of course—Riva had been born on a horse; Riva was fussing over the horses now as if they were expensive Thoroughbreds on a racing paddock and he was their trainer, instead of him being an ex-mountain bandit and them being ordinary old quarterhorse plugs from some working outfit outside Winslow. Riva went around loosening all the cinches and dumping the saddles and blankets, making sure all the horses were within browsing distance of graze tufts, and rubbing them down one at a time with a currybrush he’d stolen somewhere back along the trail.
Not everybody was that solicitous or energetic. George Weed was flat on his back; he started snoring within two minutes after they got dismounted. Portugee Shiraz took the time to find a comfortable bed of leaves under a shade tree fifty yards from the rest of them; Protugee was asleep too. Shelby wished to hell he could do the same, but he wasn’t of a mind to disobey Provo’s instructions—not yet, at any rate. He wasn’t going to follow Provo blindly into the jaws of death but he was willing to suspend resistance until he saw imminent danger. Until then, Shelby judged, he was better off with Provo than without him.
Cesar Menendez sat crosslegged, off a bit from the rest of them, his rifle across his lap, watching with a sleepy-eyed smile, his eyes squinted up so that Shelby couldn’t really tell if he was awake or asleep until he saw Menendez stretch like a cat and roll up a cigarette from the makings he’d pinched off that beat-up old wrangler he’d shot in the leg. Menendez dragged on the cigarette and jetted smoke.
Shelby washed some of the grit off his face and told the girl to sit down under a tree and sleep if