The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [54]
Weed showed a double row of white teeth. “Now, there’s a thought, ain’t it?”
“Where are they, George? Where’s my girl?”
Weed told him.
Nine
Shelby came awake irritably. Somebody was kicking him in the butt.
“Come on, get up. Your turn to stand guard.” It was Joaquim Quesada. Shelby rolled over and saw it hadn’t been a kick after all. Quesada had been hitting him with the stock of his rifle.
“Jesus,” Shelby complained. “The hell time is it?”
“Quién sabe?” Quesada lay down and wrapped a blanket around him.
Shelby picked up his .30-30 and walked off a little piece, and sat down in the grass. It was a surly night, the sky was black and wild. Dim suggestions of enormous cloud banks drifted overhead. Somewhere to the west he saw the reflections of sheet lightning, a flicker through dark mist: it meant the lightning was somewhere beyond a thick haze of falling rain.
Provo had picked the most exposed spot on the map to camp. Shelby huddled in the chill night and tried to see out across the meadows. Menendez was sitting up on the far side of camp, by the horses, watching that way. The grass was cropped down short—Navajo sheep had grazed it and moved on. There wasn’t a tree for half a mile in any direction. The flat dish of grass was surrounded by mountainsides. A creek came down out of the peaks and ran along the lower end of the meadow before it spilled over a waterfall into a canyon beyond; the creek-bank trees, maybe a thousand yards away, were the nearest cover of any land. Shelby felt isolated, exposed, and nervous, even though he knew there wasn’t a rifleman alive who could make a bullet count at that range.
They had come down into the meadow by a round-about switchbacking route. When Provo had chosen the campsite, out in the middle of the grass, Gant had exploded in anger. Provo had ignored him completely: the only remark he made was, “Rivers can be as changeable as women. That creek’s changed its course some since last time I was here.”
Portugee had yelled and bitched. It was a setup for an ambush. They could be surrounded. It was a trap. Menendez had laughed at him. Provo had said, “Only two men after us. How’s two men going to surround anybody?”
Shelby knew he was right. It made perfect sense. Burgade couldn’t come within range of them without showing himself on the meadow. There was no cover. But what the hell did Provo intend to prove by all this?
And there was another worry. He could already begin to make out the vague shadow-streaks of falling rain above the slopes immediately to the west, illuminated by frequent bursts of lightning. In a few minutes the storm would be on top of them. It could conceal Burgade if he came then.
Shelby unfolded his oilskin slicker and put his head through the poncho hole. He laced it up around his throat and sat with the poncho flowing around him, a tent that covered him from the neck down. He stared into the cool opaque night with wide eyes and kept shifting his grip on the rifle. Once, he thought he saw something move in the corner of his vision; he whipped his head around and stared. Nothing. He swallowed and glanced across at where Menendez was sitting, but he could no longer make out Menendez’s shape in the impenetrable black.
He knew his fear was irrational. They were eight against two—or anyhow seven against two; Weed hadn’t come back yet, but nobody expected him before dawn. But groundless or not, fear was a constriction against which Shelby pushed with increasing resentment.
The drumming crash of the thunderstorm awoke the others; there were rustlings and stirrings, men wrapping themselves in oilskins. Shelby walked over to where Susan Burgade lay. Provo had tied her hands behind her and hobbled her ankles. Someone had thrown an oilskin across her. Shelby couldn’t tell if she was awake. She didn’t stir when he bent down over her. He straightened up after awhile and walked back to his post.
There was rain. It came down hard and sudden, as if dumped out of buckets from treetop