Brand of the Hunted Page 2

  The horses settled down for the night, the handful of cattle they had brought with them lowed softly for a little while, then they too became silent. But the fires still burned among the wagons. Several of the men were still awake and guards had been posted.

  Lying in his blanket, Neil listened to them, talking softly among themselves, as the long dark hours passed slowly, and the brilliant stars counted out the minutes in their slow wheel across the vast span of the heavens.

  As he lay there he tried to think ahead, to assess the dangers which he knew would be lying in wait for them. For the next two hundred miles or so he could foresee the danger, but being able to foresee it did not necessarily mean that they would be able to overcome it.

  The country to the west, whether it belonged to Sherman or Hollard, had a reputation for sheltering wild ones. Men quick with a gun, men who would shoot to kill on the slightest excuse. A wagon train such as this would be regarded as easy picking to them.

  At the prospect of this he felt his skin tingling, prickling with a faintly uneasy apprehension. Once, in the red firelight, he turned to study the tall, big figure of the man who stood for almost an hour on the edge of the camp staring out towards the west, out across the wide river which they would ford in the morning at first light, and if there were any doubts in Jackson’s mind about the outcome of the drive that stretched in front of them, none of them showed on his face. He seemed confident that they would win through, even though he probably accepted the fact that some of them in the train would inevitably die.

  There was no movement by the big man as he stood on the edge of camp. He seemed utterly absorbed by what he was seeing in his mind’s eye, out there beyond the stretch of the river. Neil drew a deep breath, pulled his blanket more tightly around his shoulders. The fire was dying a little now, the cold of the night creeping into his bones. Except for the guards, the wagon train slept.

  The next morning, after eating breakfast over the rekindled fires, they began the crossing of the wide river, putting the horses into the water even before the sun had lifted clear of the eastern horizon.

  Evenly balanced in the saddle, Neil sat and watched the lumbering wagons through narrowed eyes, alert for trouble. This was always a dangerous moment as far as a wagon train was concerned. Few of the men on the tongues of the great covered wagons were experts, and in the middle of the river the water was deep, the bottom difficult and treacherous, although fortunately the current was slow. It was hard driving, arms straining on the lashings and reins as the water breasted against the horses in a curling whiteness of foam and their feet slipped on the sandy bottom.

  A dark-haired man dressed in leather yelled a sharp order as the water came over the tongue of the wagon on which he sat, the horses surged forward, thrusting against the river. Sam Jessup, Neil remembered the dark man’s name from the previous evening when he had sat with the others around the blazing fire, listened to their talk, their hopes, their fears, their confidence that they would eventually win through to the rich yellow land of Southern California.

  ‘Keep them moving!’ Neil called to the rest of the men as the wagons rumbled ponderously into the river, began the long pull across to the further bank. He knew with a sure instinct that if one wagon faltered here, it could mean they would lose it in the mud.

  There was another man, short and inclined to fatness, driving Jackson’s wagon now, and the big wagon master was riding a high-spirited horse, urging the lumbering wagons forward, his loud, booming voice bellowing even above the rumble of the wheels on the dust of the trail. He turned in his saddle, came riding over towards Neil, his face expressionless.

  ‘Once we cross the river, it ought to be good driving country,’ he observed, nodding his shaggy head in the direction of the flat, rolling ground that lay on the other side of the river.

  Neil nodded speculatively, remained silent, his face tight.

  ‘You still worrying about those cattle men who’ll try to stop us?’ growled the other harshly.

  ‘I am. We won’t see them, not at first. But they’ll see us. It’d be impossible not to spot a wagon train this size. They’ll try to kill us before we’ve gone a score of miles.’

  The last of the wagons crossed the river, the horses straining in the traces as they hauled it up the far bank. Neil and Jackson waited until it was safely over, then put their mounts to the water, took them across.

  The train had formed up, was moving slowly across the smooth stretch of country leading towards the rising curve of a low hill. There was no sign of a trail here, no place where the ground had been beaten flat by the pounding of countless hooves over the earth.

  Around them everything lay quiet and still, with a watchful, waiting quality hanging over it, and Neil felt the muscles of his chest tighten a little in response to the silence. He thought without pleasure of what lay ahead of them, knew the hundred different kinds of danger and death which faced them here in this wild country, and more especially in the Badlands that lay further to the west.

  But before they reached that terrible terrain they had first to make their way over the vast stretch of prairie. He threw a wide, sweeping glance around him, eyes narrowed a little against the vivid red glare of the rising sun, alert and watchful for the first signs of trouble.

  The heat of the day was beginning to lie over the land around them now, the distant horizons shimmering as the dust devils cavorted over the plain.

  Neil spurred his mount, rode out ahead of the train, knew that Jackson was close behind him. They reined their mounts on top of the curving crest of the hill that looked down on to the wide valley spread out before them, a vast stretch of land that lay all the way in front of them towards the mountains in the far distance where the red rays of the sun were just touching the ragged peaks with splashes of crimson.

  ‘They’ll have their beef cattle somewhere about,’ he remarked tonelessly. ‘Ought to be some of their men here, too, keeping an eye open.’

  ‘You mean the Shermans?’

  ‘That’s right. Matt Hollard’s spread is a hundred miles or so to the west of this one.’

  ‘I’m not interested in Hollard, or Sherman,’ said Jackson. He pointed back towards the straggling wagons. ‘All I’m concerned with is getting that wagon train to California. You getting scared now that we’re close to trouble?’

  Neil lifted the reins and set his right foot hard in its stirrup, watched the hardness in the other’s face, the wariness at the back of his eyes. With an effort he controlled the anger that had risen deep within him, choked it down, relaxed his hands where the right one had hovered for a fraction of a second just above the gun in the holster.

  ‘I’m not afraid for myself, and you know it, Jackson,’ he said tightly, forcing evenness into his tone. ‘But there are women and children back there in those wagons, and we surely have to take them into consideration.’

  ‘I’ll answer for every one of them,’ declared the big man dispassionately.

  He turned his head, looked out over the plain, then stiffened abruptly in his saddle, nodded towards the open valley below them.

  ‘Looks as though there may be trouble sooner than we think.’

  A small curtain of dust moved towards them, down on the plain, and Neil saw the three riders spurring their horses in their direction. He nodded in agreement.

  ‘Sherman’s men,’ he said tonelessly. ‘They may decide to give us a warning to turn back while we have the chance; but it’s more likely that they’ll try to gun us down, then ride back with the warning to Sherman. Once they get there, a score or more will ride out on Sherman’s orders to destroy the train.’

  The three riders set their mounts at the slope of the hill, rode up to the crest. The horses they sat were lean and hard, the saddles worn. Each man wore his guns low and their eyes checked the two men sitting there, then flickered in the direction of the slowly advancing wagon train down below on the other side of the hill.

  ‘You know that this spread belongs t
o Jesse Sherman,’ murmured one of the men silkily. ‘He doesn’t like homesteaders moving across it.’

  For a long moment Jackson stared at the three men facing him.

  ‘We’re driving straight across,’ he said flatly. ‘Do you figure on trying to stop us?’

  For an instant there was a perplexed consternation on the face of the first man, then his eyes narrowed to mere slits and he sat a little straighter in the saddle. His eyes were as empty and emotionless as those of a snake, and the thin cruel mouth was compressed to a mere slit.

  ‘Reckon you two hombres have made a big mistake,’ he grated harshly.

  Not once did his gaze leave Neil’s face, and it was as if he had instantly recognised that it was he, and not the bigger man, who was the more dangerous of the two.

  Neil said: ‘Suppose you prove that, mister,’ speaking in an even steady voice.

  This one, and possibly the other two, would be fast men with a gun, he reflected. All three were undoubtedly professional killers, deliberately hired by Sherman to do any dirty work like this for him. Men he could trust because only here, in his employ, would they be safe from the law. There would be wanted posters of these men in sheriffs’ offices all over the territory, rewards out for them, dead or alive.

  There was also an easiness about the way in which the three men sat their mounts and waited, quite obviously certain that they were facing a couple of men far slower with their guns than they were themselves.

  The man’s eyes were fixed on Neil’s face, unblinking, steady. The other was one who watched a man’s eyes for a sign that the other was beginning his draw. That way, thought Neil, he got the signal a split second before his opponent’s hand began its downward move. It gave him an edge, one which had probably been sufficient to keep him alive so far through a dozen gunfights that he might otherwise have lost. A cocky gunfighter, with a strange warped sense of pride, who would not draw first unless he was sure that the man he faced was probably faster than he was.

  Neil could almost read the uneasy balance of the other’s thoughts, the rapid weighing of his chances. Then, suddenly, the man’s stretched patience was gone. His hand moved, striking down for the gun at his belt with the speed of a rattler and, as he moved, so did the two men with him, their hands moving almost in unison.

  Even as their guns lifted into line, two guns threw death at the gunmen, both guns blazing as one. The first man went down grabbing at his chest, the gun tilting from his hand, hitting the dirt a second before he did. The other two sat for a moment, bolt upright in their saddles, expressions of stunned amazement on their hard features. Then they slumped forward in their saddles, arms hanging loosely over the pommels for an instant before they, too, fell and lay still, their mounts shying away. Then there was silence; a dark silence that crowded in on the two men at the top of the low hill.

  Slowly, eyes wider than before, Jackson turned to face Neil, then dropped his gaze to where the smoke still rose from the twin guns in the other’s hands.

  Roughly almost, Neil pouched them, sat forward a little, elbows on the saddle, staring down at the still things on the ground only a little distance away. Guns had spoken on that quiet hill overlooking the vastness of the plain, guns held in the hands of a master craftsman, hands which had moved faster than the eye could follow and had shot to kill.

  ‘If you’re thinking that this might stop the others from attacking us, then you’re wrong,’ said Neil softly, and his words fell into the deep and muffling silence all about them. ‘Sherman will see us all dead for this — and even if we do get through, we’ll have to face Matt Hollard and his gunhawks.’

  Jackson gave a quick little nod, then tightened his mouth.

  ‘We’ll face ‘em,’ he said, with a growing confidence in his voice. ‘And I take back all I said about you being scared to go on.’

  ‘I still think you’re a fool.’ Neil’s voice was still quiet. ‘This is some of the worst country in the whole of the United States, and by the time we’ve crossed to the border the weather will have changed, it’ll be winter, and only a fool would attempt to cross those mountains once the winter snows start.’

  ‘We’ll face up to that when it comes,’ muttered Jackson.

  He pulled hard on the reins, wheeled his mount and rode back down the slope towards the wagon train.

  Moving past the hill, the wagons drove westward. The sun climbed up into the zenith, a flaming disc of fire, burning their skin, the heat shocking back at them from the plain in dizzying waves.

  They nooned in the lee of a tall canyon but there was no shade there, and men sweated and cursed, drooped in their saddles, rubbing the white dust out of their eyes.

  There was mesquite and low cactus here and, further on, from the edge of the camp, Neil could make out where the scrub oak began, dense growths which could give concealment to a whole army of gunhawks.

  This was a place of weirdly etched buttes and narrow gorges, fluted and carved by wind and sand, a rugged and inhospitable stretch of country legally belonging to no man, but claimed by Jesse Sherman, anxious to protect his stretch of grassland some distance to the west.

  The drive began again during the afternoon. There was no place there to make camp that day and both Jackson and Neil were anxious to move on. Deep in the choking dust through which the horses made their way and the wooden wheels of the wagons rolled, the train moved forward in single file.

  Jackson had taken his place on the seat of the lead wagon again and at times he waved encouragement to the others following behind. There were women seated beside the menfolk, Neil noticed, sitting tall in the saddle as he rode a little distance away, women who carried the long-barrelled repeater rifles in their hands, women who would not be afraid to fight alongside their menfolk if the going got tough.

  But he still felt a little uneasy in his mind. Whether or not they were prepared to fight, whether or not they had more rifles and six-guns among them than the band of gunhawks that Sherman would undoubtedly throw against them, he doubted the ability of these people to fight against professional killers, and there was also the one inescapable fact that even if they did succeed in driving these men off, even if they managed to fight their way through, not only Sherman’s country, but Hollard’s spread further along the route, by that time their numbers would be so depleted, their stores at rock bottom, that the survivors would lack the courage or the stomach to fight off the raiding border gangs who were even more dangerous than the gunhawks they were likely to see here.

  On top of that, there would be the long winter days up in the mountains, seeking a place to camp, shelter from the raging blizzards that swept those icy slopes, and then — But what was the use in going on, thinking along those lines? If everyone paused to consider the difficulties that faced them, no one would ever have ventured out into this wild, untamed country in the first place.

  He shrugged off the thoughts, rested himself more easily in the saddle, let the sorrel pick its own gait. When a man had a long way to ride, the best way was the slow way.

  As he rode, his eyes three-quarter lidded to shield off the all-pervading glare, he saw all there was to be seen right out to the shimmering horizons, and he speculated long on the shape of the buttes or the twisted course of a deep ravine with steep razor-backed sides, seeking out any places where a man with a rifle might lie concealed, his mind drawn inward in the manner of a man who often rode alone.

  For the men rolling west with the wagons, it might appear that this was good country, and that the country that lay directly ahead was even better, with rich green grass, watered by great rivers, territory where there could be a coolness that one could not find out here in the middle of the scorched wilderness.

  For him, however, the opposite was the truth. With the trees and grass there would be danger. There it would be impossible to see far, and death could be very close and a man would never suspect its presence until it was too late.

  And there was another danger, one which came from the catt
le that roamed these prairie lands. They were unused to the wagons, would be moving on their muscle, and the slightest wrong move, or the slightest prompting by Sherman’s men herding them, could begin a stampede. His mind baulked at the thought, racing ahead, visualising what could happen if this slow-moving wagon train found itself in the path of a stampeding herd. There would be nothing whatever left of them by the time those countless tons of muscle and beef had smashed their way through the wagons.

  He set a spur against the flank of his sorrel and rode forward, watchful, recognising the places where danger might lie in hiding, but the long heat of the afternoon passed without incident. They saw nothing that moved on the plain around them and, at their backs, the dust settled slowly, dust kicked up by the hooves of the horses and the churning wheels of the wagons.

  There had been dust and heat and a blazing sun, but now, slowly, that sun was descending towards the undulating skyline of the west where the tall peaks of the mountains still seemed as distant, as far off, as ever. Neil estimated that they had moved perhaps ten miles that day, good going considering the fact that most of the wagons had a couple of cows tethered to the back, and at best the wagons themselves could move only slowly and ponderously on their creaking axles.

  Night came out of the east. The sky overhead purpled, then grew dark, and the stars stood out in their thousands, a vast curve of powdered light right down to the far horizons. Twin fires blazed in the camp, but now that they were well inside Sherman territory, Neil placed more men on watch and himself rode the perimeter of the camp, knowing that there would be little sleep for him that night, not with the everpresent possibility of a surprise attack lying heavy on his mind.

  Jackson and Sam Jessup moved forward to join him in the cold darkness. Caught in silhouette by the faint light of the half-moon, horses and riders blended as dark shadows across the uneven ground. Neil sat quite still and waited.