“She must be a fine woman.”
Karla grinned. “I like her.”
“Listen,” Falvey said eagerly. “Why don’t you come inside while I have a drink?”
“I don’t serve the bar, Mr. Falvey.”
“I didn’t mean that. Just…so we can talk.”
“There’s a stage due just before eleven and the change team’s not nearly ready.”
“It’d only be ten minutes.” Falvey smiled. He was trying to make the proposal sound offhand.
“I’m sorry,” Karla said. “There’s just not time.”
“Oh, come on.” He was still smiling as he reached out to take her hand, but she stepped away from him. For a moment he stood awkwardly, his arm still extended, then moved toward her again.
Karla backed away. “Maybe you’ve already had too much to drink.”
Falvey stopped. “Karla…I swear, I only want someone to talk to.”
“And I told you I didn’t have time.”
“Karla-” He hesitated, but stepped toward her again as he said more calmly, “Didn’t you ever want to relax and talk to someone? Just talk about anything, as long as it wasn’t important. Even the weather. I mean talk without raising your voice, without arguing, without knowing someone’s going to snap at the next thing you say.” He paused. “That’s all I want to do, just talk.”
“Don’t you talk to your wife?” Karla asked hesitantly.
“Have you ever?”
“Talked to her? A few times. But I don’t know your wife very well.”
“You’re fortunate,” Falvey said.
Karla stared at him. “I think you’d better go.”
“Karla, you don’t understand.”
“Mr. Falvey, I’m not going to stand here and discuss your wife with you.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said what I did. I started wrong.”
“Why don’t you go in and serve yourself?” Karla said. “I’ll come in when I can.”
Falvey nodded. “All right.” He asked then, hesitantly, “We can be friends, can’t we?”
The girl smiled uneasily. “I don’t have any enemies, Mr. Falvey.”
“Damn it, just say yes or no!”
Karla’s eyes showed irritation, and suddenly, anger. “You don’t force friendship! It either happens or it doesn’t happen!”
“I’m sorry-”
“I’m not even sure,” Karla said, “I know what you’re looking for.”
“I’m looking for someone who acts like a human being! Is that too much to ask for?”
“It is when you ask like that!”
“I’m sorry, Karla.” He seemed suddenly very tired. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to talk the way I did.”
“That’s all right.”
“I’ll come back some other time…if it’s all right with you.”
She nodded, then watched him turn and walk back to the adobe. A moment later she heard his horse, the sound fading into the distance.
The yard was quiet.
Then, as she turned to the horse again, an arm came around her shoulders, jerking her off balance, and a hand covered her mouth before she could cry out. She struggled, her nails digging into the arm across her chest, trying to twist away, trying to turn to see who it was, then glimpsing the bare sun-blackened upper arm close to her face she stopped struggling.
She could feel his arm relax. His hand loosened on her mouth, then came away slowly, brushing her lips.
“Don’t call out.” His voice was quiet, close to her face. Karla nodded her head and the hand dropped to her shoulder.
“I’m going to take this horse. You just stand still.”
Karla nodded again. “All right, Mr. Bowen.”
The hands on her shoulder tightened suddenly and pulled her around to face him. “How’d you know who I was?” His face showed open surprise.
“I…recognized your arms.”
“My arms?”
“From this morning.”
“But how do you know my name?”
Karla half smiled. “Mr. Renda told us.” She added quickly, “You jumped off at the grade, didn’t you?”
“Before that.”
“And they couldn’t chase you because of the other prisoners.”
“That’s right.”
“But the trackers are probably already following.”
“That’s right,” Bowen said again. Still he did not move. His hands were on her shoulders and he continued to study her dark face, trying to understand the calm way she looked up at him.
“Then you’d better hurry,” Karla said. “The saddle’s on the wall behind you.”
Bowen turned, almost reluctantly. He bridled the big mare, spread the blanket, and as he swung the saddle up, Karla started to walk away.
“Where’re you going?”
Karla looked back. “To get you some clothes.” She waited as he stared at her and she felt that she could almost read his thoughts. “Don’t you trust me?”
“I don’t know why I should.”
“All right, ride around with those numbers on your pants.”
Bowen shook his head. “I don’t understand you.”
“What would you like to know?” Karla asked.
“Why’re you helping me?”
“I’m not. You’re taking a horse. What good would it do if I objected?”
“The clothes-”
“You would have thought of it sooner or later,” Karla said. “Hurry now.”
Unexpectedly, Bowen said, “Was Falvey bothering you?”
Karla smiled again. “Maybe you’re not in a hurry.”
“Was he?”
“Mr. Falvey was looking for a friend, that’s all.”
“He could use one.”
“So could you.”
“I was trying to figure,” Bowen said hesitantly, “if there was something between you.”
“You’d better think about getting something between you and Renda’s trackers.” She turned. This time he did not stop her and she went on to the adobe.
Bowen was leading the horse out when she returned carrying a blanket roll. “Shirt and pants are inside,” Karla said. “And something to eat.”
Bowen’s eyes remained on her. “I’d like to know why you’re doing this.”
“I’m not sure why myself,” Karla answered quietly. She said then, “If you’re caught, they’ll make it hard for you.”
“Like what, working on a road?”
Karla hesitated. “Did you really steal cattle?”
“Now how would you know that?”
“That doesn’t matter now. Just tell me.”
“Why would you think I didn’t?”
Karla’s shoulders moved, her dark eyes still watching him. “I just have a feeling you didn’t.”
“You can sure simplify things,” Bowen said.
“But did you?” Karla asked again.
“I got to go.”
“Tell me!”
Bowen swung up to the saddle, then looked down at her.
“That man with the beard this morning-Earl Manring-he hired me in Prescott to help him drive a herd, even showed me a bill of sale for the stock. But the second day out we were arrested to stand trial for rustling. The man who’d sold Earl the stock said he never did such a thing and that the bill of sale Earl had was no good, and he said he could prove it because there wasn’t any copy of the transaction in his books.”
Karla said, “Didn’t you have a lawyer?”
“The court appointed one. We didn’t have any money for our own.”
Karla frowned. “But the man who sold you the stock-”
“Sold Earl the stock-Earl already had the bill of sale when I met him. The man’s name was McLaughlin. He took an oath that he’d never seen the bill of sale Earl had before in his life.
“Earl told me he should’ve known better than to deal with a man he didn’t know, and no wonder the stock was offered at such a good price. He said McLaughlin took advantage of him-got his money for the stock, then didn’t register it in his books, called out the law, then even got his stock back. We were arrested one day, tried the next, and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. The fastest trial I ever heard of.”
“And,” Karla said, “you were sentenced to Yuma.”
“Seven years each.”
“You needed a good lawyer,” Karla said thoughtfully.
“We needed more than that.”
“You needed a lawyer like Mr. Martz, the Hatch & Hodges attorney. He’s in Prescott. He’s-” She stopped abruptly, looking up at Bowen.
Bowen shook his head. “The trial’s over.”
“But if he could prove you didn’t know anything about it-”
“He’d be awful good.” Bowen reined the mare around. “I hope I can pay you back for this.”
“Don’t worry about that now.”
He looked down at her and seemed reluctant to leave, then said, “Goodbye, Karla.” That was all.
She watched him circle the corral and disappear into the pines and only then did it occur to her that he knew her name. He could have heard Renda say it-that was it. But he remembered it-that was the important thing.
4
Salvaje, sergeant of Apache police, waited. His eyes, beneath the broad hatbrim, were fixed on the dark rise of pines miles to the east-the hillcrest that overlooked the Pinaleno station. He had sent one of his Mimbres there within minutes of being told of the escape. It was something he always did; for invariably the sign led to Pinaleno. With the rest of his trackers he had followed the escaped man’s trail to this point. If the signal did not come from the pines, they would continue. Sometimes it took a complete day to bring back an escaped man, but seldom longer than that.
And sometimes it was almost too easy. At least this one had not tried to cover his trail. Some of them used devices that only wasted their time: back-tracking and stream-wading tricks that even a reservation child could understand. Doing this even when their objective was almost always Pinaleno and a horse.
But one had to admit that this was better than duty at San Carlos: the endless hunting of tulapai stills and carrying back men of your own people who had jumped the reservation. Here, one had the opportunity to track white men. Salvaje’s father had been a Mimbreno war chief; his mother, a Mexican woman taken in a raid on a Chihuahua pueblo. Salvaje had spent the better part of his life making war against his mother’s people and against white men-the good years of riding with Victorio and Delchay, years that could not be compared with this business of recapturing escaped prisoners.
He waited patiently, one thumb hooked in the cartridge bandoleer that crossed his worn cavalry jacket. He was confident that the signal would come, that it was only a matter of time. What else could an escaped man do but go to Pinaleno?-if he had thought about it at all.
And finally the signal did come-a white-gleaming dot in the pines, then the pinpoint flashes, sunlight reflected on a metal disk and sent to him here, miles away, and what Salvaje had known all along was now confirmed.
It blinked once; then three times in quick succession. The escaped man had left the adobe and was riding to the west. His man in the pines would follow now and signal again if the escaped one changed direction.
Salvaje looked at his men. There were ten trackers here, and now he watched them remove their army-issue shirts and pants, stripping to breech-clouts, then slipping on their cartridge bandoleers again. All of them wore curl-toed Apache moccasins folded and tied just below the knee; and to a man they carried single-shot Springfield carbines.
When they were ready, Salvaje nodded, and they moved off to take the escaped man.
Now the sun was directly overhead. Bowen urged the mare over a cutbank, leaning back in the saddle as the crusted sand gave way and followed them down the slope in a thin dust trail. He entered the cover of trees that grew thickly along both sides of the dry creek bed: cottonwood and sycamore and higher up, farther down the draw, black patches of pine shadowing steep shelfrock. In the dimness it seemed more quiet and he stopped to listen before crossing the creek bed to follow its course through the draw.
He moved carefully, knowing that he was leaving a trail, but more concerned with what might lie ahead than what might be following. Coming this way, he knew, would give the Mimbre trackers time to cut him off. Still, this was wild climbing country, laced with draws and heavy timber to use for cover. South and east from the Pinaleno station were desert flats, and water only if you knew the location of the wells.
Less than two hundred yards farther on, the draw widened and began to rise and here the trees ended. Bowen edged the mare close to the near wall of shelfrock, then moved out into the open and climbed the rise. He stopped then and looked back, down over the green rolling carpet of the treetops.
At first he wasn’t sure. Then there was no mistaking it-a thin wisp of dust hanging motionless over the far end of the draw.
His gaze came back to the long sweep of meadow in front of him. It sloped gradually and narrowed into a trough between two pine-studded hills. He would be in the open for more than a mile. But, he thought, trying to keep himself calm, trying to ignore the uncertainty that was tightening inside of him: You go that way or you don’t go at all.
Then the wind was in his face and the mare was pounding over the thick grama grass, racing for the bottom of the meadow. The trough between the hills, perhaps a hundred yards wide, opened before him as he heeled the mare again and felt her lengthen her stride reaching level ground again.
And suddenly, with the high whining report, with the solid smacking sound of the bullet, the mare went down and Bowen was over her head-rolling, stumbling, coming to his feet as the Mimbre rode out of the pines up on the right slope, then seeing the Mimbre and running hard for the opposite grade, a shot ringing behind him, then another, and he knew he would not reach the trees.
He veered sharply, running now for an outcropping of rocks at the foot of the hill, hearing suddenly the sound of horses rumbling down the far slope. Three shots sang off the rocks as he went down behind them, and abruptly he heard the horses being reined in. Then silence.
Bowen came up slowly. He brought his knees under him, but kept his head low as he separated the brush that was thick between the rocks.
The Mimbrenos were off perhaps eighty yards: eleven of them, all armed and sitting their short, close-coupled horses patiently, taking their time now, as much time as they wanted, to study the rocks. Bowen watched them, wondering why they waited.
If you could think like an Apache, Bowen thought now, you’d know why. All right, then think like a white man. What would you do if you were eleven people and you had one man cornered out in the middle of nowhere? I’d march my eleven people over and drag him out. Eleven what look like Springfields are a match for a pair of bare hands any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
If you’re sure they’re bare hands.
They know you’re not armed.
But that’s one of those things you can know and still want to be clearly sure of. So you’d spread out your eleven people and edge in a step at a time and call out things about coming out with your hands up and not trying any funny business.
Only you never in your life heard of an Apache doing anything like that, so you can cross that off and throw it away.
But however they do it, they’ll try to take you alive. Even if they didn’t work for Renda they’d do that. Only-and there’re a lot of onlys-they can take you back in all kinds of states where you’d still be alive, though you’d just as soon be dead.
Give yourself up, he thought. No…let them work a little bit. You never know what can happen…like getting one of their horses.
How do you do that?
How do you do anything! Just shut up and watch!
Not expecting it, he saw one of the Mimbres ride off from the others. His horse went into a canter heading toward the narrowing of the trough between the two hills. Suddenly then, he turned a tight circle, kicking his horse to a gallop, and he came on a dead run directly for the rocks. Bowen went down and the Mimbre passed within ten yards of him firing his Springfield as he went by.
Bowen came up cautiously. He watched the rider circle wide returning to the rest of the band and as he did another Mimbre rode out. This one also pointed off toward the narrowness, giving his horse room to run before coming around, before making his pass at the rocks. He fired as he went by, the shot glancing off rock and whining up into the trees that were high on the slope behind Bowen.