The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [70]
But there was nothing else to do but keep taking chances until there were no chances left. Burgade rode straight on down to within twenty yards of the burnt-out meadow. The smell of smoke still hung vaguely in the air, enough to make the horse skittish, but the fire had burned itself out against the damp edge of the woods, and only the trees right along the edge had been scorched. Out there on the flat he could barely make out the scorched remains of Taco Riva’s body, where Riva had fallen off his horse with a bullet in his head and the fire had swept right over him. Heat had sucked the yellow fats out of Riva’s body and he was a pale unrecognizable mass out there with birds picking at him. Burgade turned left inside the fringe of the trees and began to work his way around toward the far side of the big meadow, where Provo had taken Susan last night. Most likely they weren’t still there, but it was the place to start tracking.
Eleven
Up here on the heights wind had stunted the trees and made them hunchbacked, and the steep earth was a spindly web of sunlight and shadow. The four of them stopped beside a rock parapet that commanded the western plain from the summit. From this high rim the redrock cliffs, smoothed and sanded by millennia of hard west winds, pitched down a thousand feet, almost vertically, into the dropaway mountains below and the desert plain beyond. The razorback summit was so narrow that from this vantage point Zach Provo could see across the divide in both directions, east and west, without moving his feet: the precipice to the west, the steplike tiers of wooded mountains to the east—the way they had just come.
Provo removed his tattered duster. The coat had flowed and flapped, ripped on nettles, hampered him terribly, but he had kept it because its pockets were filled with beef jerky and water flask, spyglass and rifle ammunition. He hadn’t salvaged much, there hadn’t been time with flames rushing maddeningly into camp, and he’d had his hands full with the girl. Now he took off the coat and threw it on the ground to free his arms and body from its hampering folds.
Menendez, seeing him throw the coat down, gave him a hooded look that indicated Menendez knew what the act meant. It meant this was as far as they were going.
Provo’s filthy shirt clung to him like the skin of a prune. In his way he had always been fastidious and the stink of himself offended him.
Chalk that up to Sam Burgade too, he thought, and glanced at Susan. She sat with loosely sprawled legs, rumpled, filthy, and too beaten to care. The wind blew her long hair across her face and she didn’t comb it away. There were raw red patches on her face and throat that must have come from Gant’s beard, and Shiraz’s and Quesada’s.
He took note of Menendez’s restless eyes combing the timber slopes behind. A few yards away, Mike Shelby sat down slowly, rocking with groggy fatigue. They were all living on their nerves.
Menendez said, “Let me have that glass, eh?” And put it to his eye and squinted. Following the direction of its aim, Provo saw he was looking down toward the big meadow four thousand feet below and more than four miles east—where they had camped before. It was a flat black waste now, all coals and ashes.
Menendez handed him the glass. “That little yellow patch,” he said, “that most be Taco. I thought I es-seen him go down las’ night. Focking bast—”
“He’s dead,” Provo said. “Cussing won’t help.” He folded the telescope and put it down: he didn’t need it to see the buzzards congregating around the three places on the slopes beyond the meadow. And there was a man on horseback coming up behind them: they had spotted him half an hour ago, a couple of miles below them, patiently tracking. If it was any of their own men he’d be coming along faster. It was Burgade, or Burgade’s partner, whoever that was.
Menendez said softly, “The viejo is quite a esstemwinder, ain’t he?” There was admiration in his voice.
Provo stared at him with eyes hard as glass.
Mike Shelby said in a