  Willie's prisoners rode half a length ahead of him up the steep road out of the gulch. He had searched them both and found no hidden weapon. Both were handcuffed. He had assured them that if either made a false move, he was going to shoot. He meant it and they knew he meant it. Still, the fact that he had got out of town with no challenge from Madrid seemed to confirm Stella's warning that there would be an escape try on the road. The marshal and Mr. Jay weren't going to let him get this pair of dandies to Ellensburg if they could stop it. They crossed the first ridge and began a long, angling descent. Willie's eyes scoured the timber ahead for any sign of life. Now and then he raised himself in the saddle and glanced back. As they neared a bend in the road after a long straight stretch, he saw that a rider was following them. He was a good quarter-mile away, and he was keeping his horse at a fast trot. He didn't look like Madrid, but Willie was afraid to take his eyes off his prisoners long enough to study him carefully. As they rounded the bend, Willie concocted a plan. The road bore sharply to the right here. Half a mile below, it crossed a creek and then slanted back up the side of a massive range of hills and through a little saddle between peaks. Out of sight of the man behind them now, Willie ordered Palma and Bronklin to pull into the trees to the left. It seemed to him that they could cut cross-country and reach the road again as it climbed the hills ahead. The riding would be rough, steep, and slow; they would gain no time by the shortcut. But the chances were that the man behind them wouldn't see their tracks leaving the road here—only Indians were apt to notice such things along a well traveled road. He probably wouldn't miss them till he had reached the bottom of the valley and crossed the creek. There was a straight piece of road there and he would suddenly find that they were no longer ahead of him. He would turn back to discover where he had lost them. At least, Willie hoped he would. He would eventually find their sign and follow it. But by that time Willie and the prisoners would be back on the road a mile and a half ahead. There was a ragcamp a bit farther along which they could reach without fear of being overtaken. Willie planned no further ahead than that. Weaving through the big evergreens made keeping an eye on both prisoners difficult. When they were well off the road, Willie called a halt. While Palma and Pinky jeered and grumbled, he quickly cut a length of picket rope and tied the bridle of one of their horses to the tail of the other. Thus they were forced to travel pack-train fashion and keep together. They wound sharply down-grade, dodging branches, holding the horses to a walk on Willie's order. The creek was deep and its banks were thick with brush and jutting dead-falls, but they finally found a ford and crossed. Then they worked up through forest again and came suddenly upon the road. They rounded the first bend and ran smack into Madrid, who was sitting his horses and waiting. He was a scant ten yards away. He had been watching, had seen them first, and had his revolver in hand. If they had hit the road a hundred yards beyond this bend, they would have avoided him, Willie thought. As it was, he was beaten, and he knew it. He thought of wheeling his horse around and making a run for it. But he knew he would never make it. That revolver in Madrid's hand would drop him at twice the distance. Pinky and Palma, still riding in file with Pinky ahead, had reined up. Willie kicked his horse forward and jumped it into Palma's. This sent the horses of both prisoners into a dance, and Madrid had to rein out of the way. Willie made a grab for his gun but barely got it clear of his belt. Swinging his horse aside with one hand, Madrid pointed his gun at the sky with the other, leveled it with a gentle chopping motion and fired. Willie coughed and teetered out of the saddle to the road. His startled horse trotted ahead of the others, and Madrid casually leaned over and caught the reins. Pinky and Palma calmed their horses and regarded the motionless figure below them. Palma was the first to speak. "And that'll be that," he said. He got down from the saddle with his manacles hands held awkwardly in front of him and unfastened the rope that held his horse to Pinky's. "I'll get the key off him," he said then and walked toward Willie's body. Madrid made the chopping motion with the gun again and shot him squarely between the shoulder blades. Pinky stared in open-mouthed astonishment. He grinned shakily and said, "What's my move, Pete? Go back with you or skidoo?" "Neither," Madrid said, speaking for the first time. He raised the gun again, and Pinky understood. "Pete ... wait...." "So long, cowboy," Madrid said as he pulled the trigger. He drew the extra gun from his coat pocket, fired it in the air, and tossed it to the ground near Pinky. Dismounting he recovered Willie's gun, fired it twice, and dropped it near Willie. In the saddle again, he led the horses up and down the road past the bodies several times to assure a hopeless confusion of tracks. He then rounded the bend, left the road and headed through the forest toward Tunneltown. It wouldn't do to be seen on the road. As soon as he was out of sight, Muckamuck Charlie emerged from the trees, leading his horse. He walked round the bend and, having heard the shots, was not surprised by what he found there. Mumbling to himself, he bent over each man and assured himself they were all dead. Lifting Willie's body under the arms, he dragged it to the side of the road and straightened it out so it looked comfortable. "You were a tyee among them," he said in Yakima. He climbed on his horse thinking that it was a bad business for an Indian to get mixed up in white men's quarrels. He knew of only one white man who would believe him when he told what he had seen. Tesno, as far as he knew, was still with the boiler—or maybe on his way to Tunneltown in response to Vickers' message. Charlie headed his horse eastward—toward Ellensburg—and rode away. Prodding a tired horse, Tesno heard the shots distantly. He kicked the animal into a lope, couldn't hold him there, settled for a wobbly trot. A few minutes later, he met a riderless horse jogging along toward Tunneltown, head held high to keep dragging reins from underfoot. He waved an arm, turning the horse, and hazed it ahead of him. Almost at once, two more horses appeared with empty saddles. With a sense of disaster gnawing at him, he turned these, too. He had an instant of hope when he first saw Willie stretched out beside the road; but even before he dismounted and knelt beside the boy, this faded. Willie was dead. Mr. Jay and Madrid had planned it. Persia might have stopped it and didn't.... He had seen his share of death; mostly, he had turned away from it with a shrug and maybe a muttered prayer, as a man must. Now he remembered the first he had seen, that of a childhood playmate, how he couldn't believe it, and this was like that. He brushed mud from Willie's face with his fingers; he looked around at the road and the forest and the sky. Willie was gone; but the world that he was a part of went on, and he was not gone. It seemed as if the cloak of Time were lifted momentarily and the illusion of past, present, and future dispelled. Nobody ever dies, he thought. Everything we are, everything we do, everything we've ever done, good and bad, goes on forever. This struck him sharply, fleetingly. The cloak fell again, and he was angry. He searched the ground, examined the guns. It looked as if one of the prisoners had had a hidden gun. He had pulled it and shot Willie, who had lived long enough to kill them both. That was how it looked, Tesno thought, but that wasn't how it was. There were three empty shells in the two guns. He had heard six shots. He spent another half hour at the scene, studying it, learning little from the hodgepodge of tracks but fixing every detail in his mind. A train of freight wagons came lumbering along the road then, bound for Tunneltown. The crew found tarpaulins in which to wrap the bodies and stowed them on top of their loads. When Tesno asked if they had met anyone within the last few miles, several of the drivers shook their heads. Then one remembered. "Just an Injun," he said. "Old Muckamuck Charlie who works at the Cle Elum mill." |
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