Devil's Manhunt (Stories from the Golden Age) (4 page)

Tim lay still. He was afraid to wait long, afraid of being encircled. He came up cautiously. A second shot knifed splinters from the rock.

But Tim, having risked it, flung himself backwards and down. He lit on the far bank. A third shot plowed mud at his feet. He ducked into the trees. Behind him he heard Bonnet yelling.

“Fair enough. Fair enough! No hard feelings! Come back for the meat! I’m going back to find Sven!”

Tim cut at right angles and came into position where he could see the stream clearly. Bonnet was retrieving his rifle and beating the water out of his hat. As good as his word, he went back to the bank, placed the knife and the food there. He sauntered off across the meadow, disappearing a few minutes later amongst the trees, eight hundred yards away.

Tim took a deep breath; he dived out of his cover, splashed through the stream and scooped up the packages.

Instantly he sensed motion and leaped aside. One of Sven’s hands barely touched him, and Tim was away again, through the water and up the bank. He glanced back once. Sven was shaking his head groggily, trying to swing around and start his bulk in immediate pursuit.

Tim stretched out a lead of a hundred and fifty yards and carefully maintained it. He eased every time that Sven eased, until they both were traveling at a dogtrot. The country here was steeper and sharper, with fewer trees and more rocky knife-backs.

Tim went straight ahead for some distance. He crossed each successive rise and continued on in a straight line. Then, on the final rise, he turned sharply downhill, leaped from boulder to boulder and dived out of sight in some brush.

He lay still, waiting.

Sven stopped at the top and stared. He looked up the gully and then down it, sniffed like a bloodhound, lifting his head and opening his mouth to flavor the wind. He grunted and went cautiously up the slope.

He worked his way some distance up the gully and then turned back. Warily he eyed the thickets before him, took out his revolver and checked the load. He got down on his hands and knees to peer under the bushes.

Tim’s hand was sweaty on the knife. He released it for a minute and wiped his palm on his pants, grasping the weapon anew.

Sven ducked back and forth. He sniffed and grunted with the effort of kneeling. At length he crept back and looked at the clump of bushes. His small animal eyes traced out the telltale pattern of snapped twigs. Suddenly he stood up.

“Aye vas see you,” he said. “You coom out.”

He waited then.

Tim, not breathing, watched the swinging muzzle of the revolver.

“Aye vas cooming in,” said Sven, but he did not move; the revolver continued to swing in a slow arc back and forth across the brush.

For nearly an hour Sven stood there, waiting, sniffing, listening.

Tim carefully began to strip the twigs from a slender sapling which rose beside him. Once he made a noise.

Sven was instantly on the alert. “You coom out,” he bellowed. “Aye vas tired vaiting.”

Tim carefully inserted the knife through the center of the wood, driving it with short jabs until four inches of it protruded from the far side. It was Bonnet’s knife, sharp, pointed, thin, deadly. Tim checked his ground again. The course of twigs lay along the only obvious opening into the thicket. The knife was pointed in that direction.

Gently Tim brought the sapling back. With the slender top of the sapling, he took himself some distance from where he had been.

“Mr. Bonnet,” yelled Sven. “Coom up, Mr. Bonnet. Oooh, Mr. Bonnet, coom up.”

Tim took a creeper and wrapped it carefully around the bottom of the bush near the knife, then backed off again.

“Coom up, Mr. Bonnet,” cried Sven.

Tim backed up, holding on to the creeper with one hand, bending the sapling into a steep bow with the other. He burrowed into the earth. With a slow pull he caused the bush to bend some distance from him. The instant reply was a shot. A patter of torn twigs and ripped leaves filtered down into the underbrush. Tim gave the bush a violent jerk. Two more shots followed. He pulled the springy growth toward him and then let go. Three shots tore through the brush and the last severed the creeper which Tim had used for his decoy position.

Sven came blundering ahead, tearing up shrubs and breaking small saplings as he followed the previously broken twigs into the tangle. He was grunting and snuffling, fending the bushes away from his face.

“Aye vas got you now, you bet,” grunted Sven.

Tim’s grip on the top of the sapling tightened. The knife glittered wickedly. Pressed close to the earth, he gauged his distance carefully. He waited until Sven was nearly at the sapling’s base and then let go.

The knife flashed in a short arc. The thin, wicked point thunked into Sven’s flesh. Sven, with a howl of pain, lurched to tear himself free from the small trunk. His finger convulsed on the trigger and the hammer struck an empty cartridge.

Tim, the second knife held tight, leaped forward. He gripped the blade as a rigid extension of his arm, drove so hard that his hand sank into the soft flesh of Sven’s abdomen. The
Colt
slapped down and caught Tim across the forehead. The world was curtained from him by a swift cascade of blood. He stumbled backward, feeling the air moving under the powerful drives of Sven’s avenging arms. Tim tripped.

He rolled backward through the thicket, torn by twigs, clawing at his eyes to get them free of the hot slippery flow of his own blood. The wild animal smell of Sven beat against him in waves. Something struck against his foot and moved, then there was silence.

Tim cleared his vision and drew backward. At his feet lay Sven, breathing heavily. His shirt and side were torn by the first knife; the hilt of the second still protruded from his stomach.

Tim started to wriggle away, thought better of it and approached his fallen enemy. He wrestled the second knife out of the stomach and wrenched the first from the tree. The sweet smell of crushed greenery was heavy in the thicket, stronger than Sven’s stench or the salty odor of new blood. Sven’s breath came in hoarse gasps.

Shaking with anxiety lest Bonnet come up, Tim worked himself out of the thicket. He shortly emerged from the far side of it, his clothing torn, his face a caked mass. He clawed his way up the side of the ravine.

Tim vaulted the ridge and slid down the far side. He turned quickly up this ravine and in a few minutes was zigzagging amongst boulders. He was headed toward a grove of tall sighing pines. He ran noiselessly over the mat of dead needles. The sough of trees covered the slight noise of his going.

Chapter Three

N
IGHT
found him hidden and panting. He was between two rocks, voraciously gnawing at the packet of dried meat that Bonnet had furnished.

He had eaten the packet of food halfway before he felt nausea; it was not an immediate thing and he attributed it to the starvation he had suffered. But when he took his next bite he realized that there was a metallic taste to the meat which should not be there. He chewed it experimentally, then the vision of Mr. Bonnet’s eyes glittered before him. In a sudden suspicion he looked at the meat.

It was a piece of venison and it had expertly been slit through the center. Laying it open, he found tiny granules of a white something. He had only just started into the area.

Tim was a mining man; he was too well trained by his hard old master not to recognize arsenic when he saw it.

At first he could not lose what he had eaten, so starved and shrunken was his stomach. Then, when he finally managed it, the raw tissues of his stomach and throat lining churned into one spinning agony. He lay half-fainted and gasping on the rocks.

About midnight he was able to drag himself to water and rinse his stomach. After that he crawled painfully upwards into the cliffs where hunger waited but where no man could track.

For three days Tim huddled amongst the crags, dazed and sick. But when his illness passed his hunger returned and all one morning he lay watching game on the lower slopes. The sight of it maddened him; debating his course for hours, he at last succumbed.

Slowly, watchfully, he crept from the heights, down the cliffs and into the green meadows.

He tried to make a snare but could not, so badly were his hands shaking. The squirrels and the birds mocked him and he wandered here and there, watchful for pursuit but more watchful for his food. Dried grass would not stay his hunger.

At about five o’clock, knife in hand, he began to trail a rabbit. The rabbit would hop a few paces then turn to look back to the man who followed him. When Tim approached, the rabbit would hop further, sit up again and wait, curious.

For about an hour Tim gave no attention whatever to his immediate whereabouts. The rabbit would run off a short distance and wait. Tim would follow on, hoping to get within knife-throwing distance.

Ahead were two large boulders crouched on the slope. Some hidden sense, clarified by his hunger-attuned mind, caused him to look toward the rocks. It was a very small spot of reflected light, but the sun was glancing there from a gun barrel! He was within four hundred yards!

The rabbit was in a slight gully, out of sight now from the rocks. Tim, pretending that his game had gone elsewhere, continued to go through the same evolutions as before, stopping and creeping on as though he still hunted his game. He turned his course at right angles and insensibly drifted lower on the slope toward the stand of pines.

Tim even slowed his pace, his spine crawling as though it already felt the impact of a Winchester’s soft-nosed
slug
. He dropped on all fours as though to examine tracks on the ground. The rabbit had vanished some time since, but such was the terrain that the rifleman would not be able to see this. Once or twice Tim even started back toward the rocks for a few yards to raise the hope for a certain and easy shot at him.

It was very hot. He was near the base of Desperation Peak. A quarter of a mile below and away, the alkali sink stretched out like a white-hot frying pan. Heat waves and dust devils leaped together in a hellish turmoil above its surface.

Tim again adventured toward the rocks, then veered off imperceptibly in the direction of the trees. He studied the ground, now and then looking up to examine the vacant hillsides. Perspiration was rolling like a cold bath under his shirt.

Just this side of the trees were a number of small shrubs in which one could find cover. Tim reached their outskirts.

Suddenly he dived behind a clump of sumac, then lifted himself and sprinted to the next cover. For an instant the rifleman held his fire. Then, as Tim rushed toward the trees, he began to shoot with hysterical rapidity.

Tim was almost to thick cover when the shot struck him; he spun round and tumbled, rolling over and over through the trees of the hillside. The rifleman jumped up better to see the effect of his hit. Tim, deep in cover now, his shoulder numb with bullet crease, crouched behind a pine and stared back.

Sven blundered out into the clear and came down the slope in long, lumbering strides. There was a white patch on him that would be a bandage.

Tim began to shake. He screamed and sprang into full view, sprinting down the hill and through the trees. The Winchester yapped excitedly behind him. Bark and branches showered him.

Tim emerged from the other side of the woods to plunge further. There was nothing between him and the desert now but odd blue gray boulders. Now and then the rifle behind him sounded as he flung himself from cover to cover in his flight.

Then he began to hear shots from another angle. Lingering for an instant he looked up the mountain and saw Bonnet, seated on a rock as though in target practice, patiently waiting for his game to come again into view. Tim now had to flee directly toward the alkali waste.

Below and before him a canyon mouth gaped into the blast furnace of the desert, weirdly shadowed in the slanting sunlight.
Wind devils
played and reeled, and the heat was like a magnet sucking moisture from the body.

Tim, stumbling and footsore, left the canyon and issued into the wind-torn flats, sinking to his ankles in the acrid dust.

The heat which was contained in the powdery alkali was incredible. He felt as though his stumbling legs were being cooked in ovens. Snowshoes alone would have made this white substance passable. The thought of them and the thought of the contrast of temperature was such that Tim looked instinctively to his right to the far-off range, across this waste, where winter’s snow still lingered.

His startled glance stayed fixed in that direction for a minute. Tim veered, his objective hidden now and then by sighing dust devils which seemed to grow in number. There was something lying out there in the desert.

There was very little left of the man, despite the fact that he had been there only a few weeks. He was mummified, for no wolf had adventured here to feed. His burro was lying dead beside him, its legs stretched out stiffly, its fur white with the salts of the alkali.

The man was lying on his side, eyes open, skin so much parchment. Tim stepped beyond him and saw a bullet hole through the back of his head.