The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [74]
“You weren’t up at the creek so I came back. I saw the tracks coming up this way.”
“Lucky you didn’t ride into an ambush.”
“What was that shooting, then?”
“Menendez,” Burgade said. He motioned to Hal to dismount. “Come on—back this way, they’ve got the clearing under a gun.”
He walked slowly up through the pines. It was an effort just talking to Hal: he spoke in short bursts, his breath coming thin and fast. “There’s only two of them left now. Provo and the kid. Up there with Susan.”
Hal stared at him. “What happened to the rest of them?”
“Dead.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Hal said in awe. He caught sight of Menendez; stopped and swallowed.
Burgade said, “Help me get him on his horse.”
“Put my hat on him,” Burgade said.
Hal had to get up on his own horse to reach Menendez’s head. Menendez sat slumped on the saddle, hands tied onto the horn by the ends of the reins.
Burgade pointed along the slope. “Lead his horse over there with you. Wait on the edge of the trees, don’t show yourself. Take a post behind a good big tree and don’t stick anything out except one eye and your rifle. Give me fifteen minutes to get up there and then whip this horse up the trail. And then start shooting.”
“Shooting? At what?”
“The rocks below the summit. Don’t aim higher, you might hit Provo but then again you might hit Susan with a ricochet. Unless you see a perfect target don’t try. Just make noise. It’ll rattle them and the noise will help cover my approach. Have you got plenty of ammunition?”
“In my saddlebags.”
“Get it. When you get over there, take off your hat and fill it with loose ammunition and keep it on the ground beside you where you can get at it fast. Keep a steady volley of fire going—use up everything you’ve got until you get down to the last ten or twelve cartridges. You’ll want to save those, you may need them if they cut me down. You understand it all?”
“I ought to be the one to go up there. You’re in bad shape.”
“I know the drill—you don’t. It comes down to that.”
Hal brooded. “Christ.”
Burgade turned and got his rifle. “Better make it twenty minutes,” he said bleakly. “That’s a stiff climb for old bones.”
He had to go through shoulder-high scrub trees; he went on his belly, and halfway to the top he stopped to study the rim. It was a long razorback parapet. Probably not more than a few yards wide at the top, with the cliff dropping away on the far side. There were big boulders scattered around, smoothed by the wind. Only one way to get up there from here without exposing himself to a withering fire from the rim—go along to the left and circle up through the field of boulders. It would be taking a chance they weren’t waiting there, rather than on top, but he had a feeling they were all the way up on the summit because it was the only place from which they could see down their own backtrail and shoot at pursuers.
By now they would be getting rattled because Menendez hadn’t showed up. They were somewhere along that hundred feet of rimrock, probably looking down the trail, but from here the rocks were in the way, he couldn’t see anyone. He took a deep breath and moved forward again; there wasn’t much time.
In the boulders a hundred feet below the top, he set the rifle down soundlessly and left it there. From here on he’d be within handgun range and a rifle would be unwieldly. He palmed the double-action in his right hand and made his way forward slowly through the boulders, feeling the dig of Menendez’s two six-guns in his waistband. The sun blasted down through the thin afternoon air, striking painful reflections off the rocks. He slipped forward along the high wall of a rock and paused while still behind it, in its thin stripe of shadow. The rim was only sixty or seventy feet above him, up a forty-degree pitch littered with house-size rocks. The passages between them were big enough for locomotives to get through, but there was no way to know what was on the far side without showing himself. He waited, sucking breath silently into his chest with his mouth wide open and gulping.
He heard the sudden rataplan of hoofbeats