The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [67]
Nothing. The man didn’t know where he was; the man wasn’t shooting. Patience quickly drained out of Burgade. He could spend forever waiting. He didn’t have time—only this one was left, then there’d be nobody behind him when he went for Provo and the rest. He had to take this one out, and he didn’t want to spend all night at it. He got up and began to move forward.
He moved bent over double; crept from tree to tree. Steady and slow: there was no margin for carelessness. It took him fifteen minutes to cross the two hundred feet to where the man had stood to shoot at him, and when he got there the man had faded away into the night. All Burgade found was the smashed pistol.
His bullet had crushed the slide. It was a .45 automatic pistol. No wonder the man hadn’t hit him at that range. It was hard to hit anything with an automatic. Especially if you’d spent the past few years in prison where you couldn’t keep in practice.… He jerked himself back: his mind had been drifting. What a hell of a time to wander off into speculations about guns and prisons.
Flat against a tree, he swept the surroundings. The man might be right around here, frozen in ambush. Or the man might have gone after the horses to get away.
Gamble that he made for the horses. Burgade moved out. It was a risk, but everything was. The men had been rousted by the grass fire, they hadn’t had time to gather belongings. They’d made their run for it in confusion. It was worth the gamble that the automatic had been the man’s only weapon and that now, without a gun, he was on the run. Burgade took a chance and hurried: he wanted to get the man before he got on a horse and rode out of range.
The noise had driven the horses up in the direction of the mountain passes, but it was doubtful they’d gone very far. Burgade decided to check them out. If he didn’t find the missing man he’d give up on him, get aboard one of the horses, and go around after Provo after scooping up the dead men’s weapons, Gant’s and Quesada’s.…
That’s two, he thought savagely. Two stupid mistakes tonight. Of course that was where the man was headed. Not for the horses. But back to the trail—to get Gant’s gun, or Quesada’s. And by now it was probably too late to stop him.
In a bleak rage, embittered by his own blunders, Burgade wheeled back toward the trail, crowded by urgency. He came swinging past the thick dark bole of a pine, and that was when Portugee Shiraz jumped him with a knife.
His sluggish reflexes wouldn’t have been enough to save him if he hadn’t been moving faster than a man ought to move through dark timber with an enemy nearby. Shiraz plunged out from behind the tree, whipping the knife up in a wicked arc that should have split him from crotch to chestplate. But Shiraz hadn’t expected him to be moving so fast. Shiraz had to correct his aim and when Burgade’s slow reflexes took effect and began to wheel him to one side, the knife lodged point-first against his breastbone with Shiraz’s dark lean weight behind it.
Burgade was in momentum: his unstoppable forward lunge knocked Shiraz’s arm aside. The knife had pricked the skin and scraped the hard bone, that was all, and now he was falling-away to the side in unbalanced reaction to the collision.
Shiraz was faster, surer on his feet. He had his balance now and he was closing fast against the threat of the rifle. Shiraz’s boot slammed down on top of the rifle, banging Burgade’s knuckles against the earth. The knife was whipping forward again but Burgade saw it in time and blocked Shiraz’s wrist with his own; locked his fist around the dark forearm and twisted, pulling, using Shiraz’s own fast-moving inertia to propel him past. Shiraz went right over him. Shiraz’s boot slipped and turned on the hard surface of the rifle and when Shiraz fell, the rifle skittered away into the brush, propelled by his skidding bootsole.
Burgade rolled over violently, away from Shiraz, and fumbled for