The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [52]
He heard the intruder long before he saw anything. The man was trying to be silent but he couldn’t help giving himself away. The wind had died, the creek was beyond earshot, there were no sounds at all to muffle the intruder’s movements. Whoever it was, it wasn’t Provo. Most likely it wasn’t Menendez or Taco Riva, either. Those three—and possibly Quesada—would know better than to move as fast as this one was moving. The sound was off to the right, perhaps a hundred feet away and coming forward on the far side of the horses.
The intruder halted for a while and almost went around behind the wire ring. Probably scouting in a crisscross pattern—but Burgade didn’t want him to circle away. He began to sweat in the cool darkness. The revolver stirred in his fist.
Hal stiffened. Burgade touched his shoulder to keep him quiet. Then he had a piece of luck. One of the horses stamped its hoof to get rid of an insect.
The soft thud echoed through the forest. The intruder, wherever he was, froze for several minutes. There wasn’t a sound. Burgade could imagine him, turning his face slowly to try to pick up tiny sounds on the flats of his eardrums; keening the night, staring into the darkness as if to burn it away with his gaze.
It was a long time before the intruder moved. Then the faint sounds of his travel crossed from right to left. The man was coming in toward the horses. Burgade lifted the revolver higher in his fist and settled his elbow against his knee.
He still couldn’t see the man. He heard him move in from that northerly quadrant, moving a few yards at a time and stopping to listen again. A stray breeze roughed up the pine needles briefly; it must have carried man-smell to the horses, for one of them whickered tentatively, a very quiet throaty sound in the night. The intruder recognized the sound and kept moving forward. He couldn’t be more than a few yards from the tripwire but Burgade couldn’t see a thing over there. Several trees were in the way. The tripwire itself was in his line of sight, but he didn’t know whether he was going to be able to see the man that far away even if he did step into the view-line: it was fifty feet away and the darkness was intense.
He could hear the taut dry constrictions of Hal’s breathing. The intruder seemed to have halted behind the trees just outside the tripwire. Within fifteen or twenty feet of the horses. The man must be able to see the blanket-wrapped dummies from there, the saddles and gear lying about. He would suspect the dummies for what they were. But his mission was to alert Burgade, not to evade him. The man had to move.
But he didn’t. A drop of sweat formed on Burgade’s forehead, ran down his nose, and dripped onto the back of his left hand. Had the intruder spotted the tripwire? Burgade’s grip on the .45 tightened. He suppressed the sudden urgent need to reach around and scratch the small of his back.
Then the intruder moved, crossing fast from pine to pine—Burgade saw his outline quite plainly, and then, between the trees, the tripwire caught the man just above the ankles and spilled him.
The man fell toward the ground with quite a bit of noise, grabbing at branches to stop his fall. Burgade ran forward five paces, the noise of his own movement covered by the intruder’s tumble, and stopped with a clear view of the man.
“I’ve got a gun aimed at you, friend. Don’t move a whisker.”
The intruder hesitated, both elbows on the ground; but it was all right. He’d made his decision when he hadn’t started shooting at Burgade’s first word.
Burgade moved slowly forward, holding the revolver balanced on the man. “Come on, Hal.”
The intruder was an amorphous shape in the poor light. But any movement would draw Burgade’s fire, and the man seemed to realize that. He didn’t stir.
Burgade stopped six feet from him. He handed the torch to Hal and got the matchstick out of his mouth. “Stay behind me. Light that and let’s have a look at him.”
The match exploded into light. By that illumination Burgade took one step forward and kicked the rifle away from the intruder’s black fist.