Chapter 6

SOMEHOW A GUN GIVES A MAN stature. At least this gun gave me quite a bit of stature and security as I climbed down from the rim to the canyon floor. It was an old-style repeating Winchester which Jane assured me had been in the Trovillion family since the turn of the century. The gun was aged, but it was efficient. I had plenty of shells, too. At first it had seemed foolish, borrowing the gun. But practical Jane changed that.

"Don't forget," she cautioned, "you're hunting desert foxes."

It was a bit awkward, leaving her. She had saved my life; we had been intimate in a most unusual way. During a single night of storm we had confided a great many secrets and-fears. It all added up to one remarkable girl.

"I'll bring back the gun," I assured her. "Give me ten days."

"I'm not worrying about the gun," she said. "I'm merely wondering how good a fox hunter you are."

I didn't tell her that in Korea I had been quite a good fox hunter-red foxes. Perhaps this was a bit different, hunting them on the desert.

Before I left, she was tight in my arms. A man can learn to care for a girl like this in a hurry. But I still believe in monogamy, and Nan Goodwin already had moved in, a fact that Jane knew. She was an honest girl, and I tried to be honest with her.

"Don't forget that dream!" I told her, over a last kiss. "Don't ever forget it!"

There was a wistfulness about her smile that was hard to interpret.

"You need a vacation," I grinned at her, "When this is over I'm coming back and we'll do the town. I mean it."

"I'd like that, Steve!" Her eyes were bright now. She watched me go, from the doorway of the line shack.

The Potholes. I wondered who had ever named the area. Pretty good name, too. And down there, somewhere, death awaited.

"Don't forget, you're hunting foxes," Jane had cautioned. It wasn't an idle admonition, just to make talk. She had tangled with them; she knew. She even had a scar to back it up.

I pulled up, hugging the shadows of a shelf, wondering just where those two human foxes might be hiding. And wondering, too, whether the woman with them was still on her feet.

"Yes, she's on her feet," I reassured myself. "Geri Lopez is no fool. She'll outwit them some way, if it is humanly possible. She'll not divulge all the things she knows, just enough to keep them interested. She'd play for time, hoping I can get to her in some way."

That was one line of thought. But there was some negative thinking as well. We'd been asleep there on the desert when the attack came. She awakened first, hearing the snarl of the dog. I raised up on one elbow and the club came down with a vengeance. She had seen it, I was positive of that, for my last recollection was her scream of terror.

Okay, she saw the act. She saw me crumple over, unconscious. Perhaps she thought I was dead. There could be no more help from me. She was their prisoner, strictly on her own. Then what could she do under these circumstances?

That was a big question. Most women would panic, grow depressed and melancholy as hope fled. But Geri Lopez was different. She had a lot of stamina, both physical and mental. I knew for a fact that she had kept pace with me that first day in the Potholes, under the boiling noon-day sun.

Even that time she was a prisoner in the Collins' cabin, subjected to the taunting knife, stripped to the waist, an ogling sadistic goon sitting in front of her staring at her provocative mammaries, she had somehow managed to kept her sanity and strength.

After the escape, when we had been intimate on the desert, she was as sexually vigorous as any woman could be. Her strength and stamina seemed unlimited. I hoped I was right, she would need every ounce of strength she possessed to come out of this alive.

Now another question confronted me: which direction? Would she lead them deeper into the Potholes or try to head back for civilization?

Toss a coin?

No, I wasn't so vague as that. I sat there in the shade of the ledge, thinking it out from all angles.

There could be only one answer, I assured myself at last. She would take me into calculation in her thinking, just as I was doing to her at the moment.

Would a woman remember the terrain, the exact flight path, after all these years?

That was another question. But I believed the answer was positive. A man, running, has something indeliably etched on his brain. This woman had been running. I didn't think she would forget a single moment of that mad chase.

So I headed away from the boulder, moved deeper into the canyon.

This was a game now. I realized that they would take no chances. They were not above murder.

Then another question shouted for answer: d they were not above murder, why didn't they complete the job once they clubbed me?

I believe I had an answer to that, too. Even the potential murderer doesn't kill if he can stop his victim short of death. This might have been Zack Collins' thinking when he clubbed me on the desert and forced Geri to accompany him. Geri at the time was nude. Perhaps even this was a factor in my survival.

There was one other important factor: they would not know about Jane Trovillion. They wouldn't know that during the storm I had been safe in the line shack Although the storm no doubt never touched the floor of the canyon, they knew it raged on the flat desert above. They had lived in the shack for long years, observing. They knew all about dust storms. They would assume that in my weakned condition, after the blow on the head, I would almost certainly fall victim of the storm.

So they wouldn't be watching the back trail too carefully. Perhaps they wouldn't be watching it at all, intent only on getting to that distant mesa to see whether Geri Lopez' story-whatever it was-could be true.

Just what had she revealed to them? That she knew something about a forced-down airplane that no one else knew? Perhaps. I didn't think she had revealed the kidnapping to them. It would have no purpose-or would it?

"But what will she do when she gets to the site of the old Maricopa village?" I asked myself. "That's trail's end, the jumping-off place. There will be no airplane. They'll know she was lying. What will she do then?"

There was only one answer to that: she was depending upon me. Somewhere inside her cunning head she was hoping that I would survive, follow them, turn the tables before she was backed into a corner. I had survived the rattlesnake bite. Perhaps that gave me a sort of infallibility. That had to be her thinking.

I pushed ahead,, keeping under cover as much as I could. I had the binoculars, and I kept combing the distant cliffs, the narrow trail between the monolithic barriers.

They were foxes. I didn't want to forget that. Either one of them, holed up in a crag, could gun me down with a rifle at long range.

Time, the blazing sun, two desert foxes. That was the problem, shorn of all its trimmings. Up ahead somewhere was a woman who had been a kidnapper. There should be no sympathy expended on such a person, some tiny voice of conscience reminded me. But somehow I disagreed. She was a very human person today.

She was trying to atone. This alone told me that she had suffered, down through the years.

The terrain changed now. I noticed it first in the color of the walls. The black basalt was gone. The cliffs were just as high and rugged, but the basalt had changed into granite.

I checked my watch. Already past noon. And still not a sign, not a footstep. In a canyon of this kind, the walls themselves are a giant sounding box. The fall of a rock, miles off, is amplified to startling volume. The crunch of a foot in gravel is heard over great distances. The bark of a dog, the sound of a human voice, all bounce off the canyon walls in a confusion of echoes.

I pulled up now, listening. Not a sound. Just that ominous silence, and the sun mercilessly beating down.

Finally I came to a spot where the walls pulled in sharply, a natural wedge. The trail between was a narrow footpath, not wide enough for a wagon to slip through. At the wedge it was ankle deep in sand and shale, blown there by erosion of the wall itself.

I approached the spot with care, for it was a natural ambush. I got down on hands and knees and checked the sand.

There wasn't a footprint of man, woman or dog.

There was no way they could have detoured this spot. The walls were almost perpendicular on either side. Even a mountain goat couldn't have scaled them, let alone three humans, one of them a woman.

Squatting there, wiping my perspiring brow, I came to one conclusion.

They hadn't passed this spot. There could be no doubt. Here the white sand lay unmarked, positive proof.

It had lain there for ages, perhaps. The only indentation in it was the tiny zigzagging print made by a crawling snake.

I shuddered, thinking of the rattler. Instinctively my fingers caressed my arm, where the soreness still was there from the fangs.

A rattler had passed through this wedge since the last windstorm, but no human.

Thinking of that, I suddenly was gripped by a new fear. They had not come this way, after all. Geri Lopez had led them on some other trail! Why?

I squatted there, trying to think objectively. But terror still gripped me.

"She thought you were dead," my little green leprechaum persisted. "She thought you were dead, so her one tiny chance at survival was to head up the canyon, back toward Arroyo Seco. If she could get them back to civilization, she might have a chance.

That had to be it.

Maybe I should have tossed a coin. Old Lady Luck might have been far more accurate than my own thinking.

Time! I had spent the greater part of the morning pushing in deeper. And I had been wrong. Wasted time. Retrace your steps, fellow! Long, wasted hours.

The tension built up as I started on the back trail.

"They're desert foxes," Jane had cautioned. "Remember that!"

Not only were they foxes, but Geri Lopez also was a fox, fighting for her life. I was a man trying to outthink all tree of them.

Suddenly the futility of it all rose up, a natural barrier as forbidding as the granite shafts of the canyon.

"Fool!" the walls kept saying. "Fool, trying to pit your wits against something bigger than you are!"

Back at the sheep camp I had told Jane Trovillion never to abandon her dream, even in her loneliness. My own words were being handed back to me now.

There, up ahead, was the ledge where we had camped, where the rattler had struck. And on the far wall was the trail that Geri had climbed, in search of help. Instead, she had walked into a rat trap.

Then I thought of something else. Further up the canyon, I had made a cache of her bra and panties.

My step quickened. Don't ask me why. Perhaps some futile hope, a slim chance that she had left some message in passing. I was winded when I reached the spot at a dog trot.

"You're growing careless," my conscience challenged. "Better slow down and check the trail ahead, before you walk into a spitting gun barrel."

It was a chilling thought.

There was the cache, just as we had left it. I was positive that no one lurked in the rocks before I climbed up on the exposed shelf. I was equally careful at the cache itself. It just might be large enough to house a rattler.

Gingerly I poked at the rocks with the tip of the rifle barrel, until I was certain that no snake lurked inside.

A rattler in a woman's bra? The very thought brought a grim chuckle to my lips. Ben should have been with me at this moment.

"I've heard of human rattlers in their bras," he would have quipped. "But not the crawling kind."

I retrieved the wispy garments and stuffed them into my pack bag. Just lifting that lacy bra brought back the memory of Geri herself, standing there in the trail, teasing me as she got out of the garment in one of those swift movements that gave me a glimpse of her glorious breasts.

I proceeded now with more caution, hugging the ledges and every bit of cover. I looked for tracks, but the bedrock was swept clean by the wind. Even an Apache would have had trouble tracking his quarry here.

Far ahead there was a flash of light. Just a stab of brightness. Then it was gone.

Imagination? I hunkered there, squinting into the bright glare, wondering whether it was an' illusion or the real thing. Sunlight, reflecting from any bright object, might do it. A woman's vanity might do it. Anything that caught the dazzling light of the sun would reflect the light for a long, long distance.

Was it a clever signal from Geri? Or had my eyes imagined it?

I proceeded with utmost caution now, eyes scaling the cliffs ahead for any spot where a man with a rifle might be hidden to cover the back trail.

The walls frowned down-rotten walls, I realized; the shale piles told me that.

This was something like Korea. Advance, reconnoiter. Repeat the procedure, hoping an enemy sniper didn't outwit you as you gained a few precious feet of ground.

There were two snipers up ahead somewhere, and a woman in a lot of trouble. Two to one, plus a vicious dog. The odds didn't appeal to me.

Days ago we had" covered this same trail, Geri and me. More at ease then. I was in the lead, and she was right behind me. Every time I turned to check on her, I was amazed by her stamina. She was nearing forty, but she had the strength of an ox. Not only strength, but feminine allure. I could still envision the jiggle after she had shed the bra-elongated breasts and muscles so taut there was no sag.

And after the rescue from the cabin, when we had holed-up on the desert, she had been a fireball in my arms, tempestuous and demanding.

Something moved up ahead.

I pulled up the rifle, and again I was in Korea.

I had the same state of mind. These two men up ahead were enemies of our society. I wouldn't hesitate one instance to pull the trigger. If I killed one, or even both of them, I was confident that I would go free under a plea of justifiable homicide. Any jury, knowing the facts, would free me.

There was a huge, rectangular boulder in the trail ahead. It was the size of a six-wheel truck, lay there as if some giant had tossed it from the wall above, partially blocking the canyon bed. Now with the sun high in the southern sky, the boulder cast its shadow into the sandy patch at its base that was the trail.

Something moved here.

I waited, flat on my stomach, poked cautiously around a shale heap.

If it was one of the brothers, he had grown a bit careless. He had cover, of course; but at the moment he was wide open from my vantage point. I poked up the rifle, and wormed higher on the shale bank.

"Good God!" I said. Suddenly I was gripping the rifle barrel, like a drowning man grasping a stick.

I was looking at Geri Lopez.

She lay there in the shadow of the boulder.

She was stark naked.

She was gagged and her hands were behind her back, evidently bound in a hitch, ankles to wrists. She lay there, facing me.

It was unbelievable. The gross cruelty of it was past human thinking. They had trussed her up here after stripping off her clothes, a victim to the sun and to anything that crawled or walked.

Why?

Of course they had first raped her. Satiated no doubt, needing her no longer, they had left her to die.

But that in itself meant something else as well. Evidently she told them that the airplane story was a farce-or they had forced the truth from her. Perhaps, after some torture only they could dream up, she had told them the real reason she was here.

In any event she no longer was of use to them. Thus was a way of payment.

But it could mean something else, as well. It could mean that they were coming back for her. The more I thought about it, the more this seemed logical. She was a beautiful woman, far above the usual type of sex these men might obtain. Her physical voluptuousness was too great for them to use once and abandon. Perhaps they were coming back.

Then she must be alive.

At this distance I couldn't tell. She lay there, facing me, on her side. I couldn't see whether her eyes were open. Her body was motionless.

I lay there, checking the terrain. Even the shale pile behind which I had taken refuge presented its own danger. I gazed up at the rotten wall. Even the recod of a gun might send it crashing down. It had happened before.

I wormed over the shale pile like a giant centipede, an inch at a time. I was watching her face. There was no motion of her body.

Yes there was, too! She saw me. Her eyes were open, staring at me. She was trying to tell me something. Or it was renewed hope I read there. I crawled closer, watching her. She moved her body slightly, as far as her bounds would allow.

I was positive now that she was trying to say something. But the gag in her mouth prohibited that.

She did emit a sound-a low, inarticulate gurgle.

Her eyes were on me, she was trying so hard to tell me something. But what?

I gave one last look at the rotten wall ahead, then I got up and sprinted to her side. In one savage movement, I tore the gag out of her mouth.

It took perhaps three seconds.

I started to scoop her up in my arms, saw that they had driven a peg into a crevice back of her and tied her to it, Indian-fashion.

She was trying to talk, her words thick and in coherent from the swelling induced by the gag.

But she made me understand. "Steve, run! He's-in-the-rocks with-rifle-" She was a decoy. Desert fashion, just as Jane had warned.

I gave one wild look at the opposite wall, trying to find him, then flung myself flat at her side.

Even so I was a target-and she was a target. I was fully aware of that. But there was no alternative at the moment.

I pushed up the rifle, dug frantically for my knife, if I could cut her loose, we could roll to the protection of the boulder's lower corner.

"Whang!"

I heard the crack of the rifle, even as my knife slid forward toward her wrists. He was in some soft of a hole in the opposite wall slightly above us, possibly fifty yards away.

The bullet whistled off the boulder just an inch above my head.

"I can shoot better than they can," Jane Trovillion had said. I hoped that she wasn't exaggerating.

"Steve, run-please-" Geri entreated.

I sliced with the knife at the tough buckskin they had used.

He fired again. Geri made some inarticulate sound. Then the knife was through the thong, and I had her in my arms. We rolled and the bullets screamed off the rock, shattering gravel over us. "Steve-"

We were safe now. I pulled free, pushed up the rifle.

"Don't move!" I whispered. "I'm going through the crevice back of the boulder-"

She didn't answer.

I was on the far side of the big boulder now, crawling through a fissure that was deep and narrow. I prayed that some rattler wasn't holed up there in the shade.

I could see the opposite wall now. He might spot my head, but it would an awfully small target.

I had to lure him out of the hole.

How do you lure a fox out?

I triggered a shot at the spot I thought he might be. He didn't fall for the trick. Nothing moved; there were no more shots.

Then suddenly I got that gleam of light again, and smiled grimly. Evidently he had a rifle with a reflecting bit of metal on it which gave .away his position.

He was behind a rock outcropping at the base of the cliff. The ledge was a narrow shelf, about ten feet above the trail.

"You're not a very good shot," I said to myself. "That first try should have done the trick."

But getting him out into the open was another problem.

If I approached him in the open, it would be like shooting ducks in a cracker barrel.

I slammed two more shots at the rock shelf. Nothing happened.

We both had natural cover. This wasn't too good for me. He had help somewhere nearby. Plus the dog. If he couldn't smoke me out, no doubt his brother would come back to help him. Or they could send in the dog.

And there Was Geri back there in the sun, naked, exhausted, pinned down. They had hidden her clothes. She had to have clothes to protect her body from the burning sun. She had to have her boots to walk.

He slammed a shot in my direction, and it threw gravel into my face. I pulled back No doubt he had a better view than I did.

This was no good at all. Pot-shooting would soon run me out of ammunition, if nothing else. And a stray shot might do the trick.

I saw no way to smoke him out. He commanded the trail in three directions, and his elevation was also an advantage.

Behind the rock Geri moaned.

That spurred me into action.

Back in Korea, if we couldn't get them out of the caves we threw in a grenade, or slammed in a bazooka shell and buried them. Maybe I could bury him.

I looked at the wall towering above his hiding place. The cliff here was terraced, something like an Old World cathedral, spire upon spire.

I found myself looking at one needle-like spire, far above him. Erosion had worked here for centuries, eating away a bit at a time, a grain of sand, a bit of shale.

The needle was directly above him, up perhaps eighty feet. High, but not too high for a rifle shot. I needed a bazooka to do the job right. But the rifle had to serve.

I pushed back into the crevice so he couldn't see me. I sat back on my haunches and pushed up the rifle, aiming at the needle's most vulnerable spot.

Then I squeezed the trigger, not once, but kept squeezing it until the hammer clicked on an empty magazine. Little puffs of dust rose from the needle as the slugs screamed into the rotten shale, one by one.

It wasn't going to work.

There was a dust cloud, but the needle was still there.

Then it happened. Even as I looked, the spire seemed to disintegrate. It came down in a cloud of dust, gathering momentum as it crashed. And of course its weight and size increased as it tore loose the rotten shale in its path.

I sat there and watched it happen, an almost unbelievable sight. First it was just a rattle of rocks. Then the rattle turned into a roar.

He must have heard it before he actually saw what was happening. He came off the ledge, half-turned, eyes on the wall above.

Even at this late moment, he might have saved himself had he thrown his body either to the right or the left. But he stood there, transfixed in fascinaion, seeing his doom and doing nothing to stop it.

I heard his scream, choked off as tons of debris struck him and pressed him down.

I had no emotion whatsoever. It was like stepping on a spider or a scorpion. He had tried to kill me. He and his brother had raped Geri and left her to die.

I got to my feet, stood there and laughed. I am not a hysterical person usually. But I stood there, looking at that dust cloud mushrooming from the cliff base, the huge pile of shale slanting down from the wall, and I couldn't choke back the laugh.

There wasn't a jury in the land that would have convicted me of killing Zeke Collins. I didn't kill him, technically. I didn't even nick him with a bullet.

Mother Nature had killed him. If there was ever any poetic justice in a man's erasure from the landscape, this surely must be it. He wouldn't even need burial at the taxpayers' expense.

The dust sifted away, wafted away. Some day, in some distant century, an electronic giant might scoop up these rocks and find in them the skeleton of a human being. It would be of no consequence, surely.

I reloaded the rifle and crawled back through the crevice to Geri.

I scopped her up in my arms, with a glad little cry, and kissed her on the lips.

Her mouth was soft and warm, but there was very little response.

Suddenly I tasted blood-and fear built in me anew.

"Steve-" The word was choked.

I felt the blood on my hand now as I gripped her nude body, under the shoulder blades.

I eased her to the sand, rolled her onto her left side. The bullet had entered beneath her left shoulder blade, evidently slanted downward. It had not emerged.

"Oh, Geri-" I couldn't go on. I couldn't tell her. I merely sat there, holding her hand, looking at her pale face. There was a bloody froth on her lips, I bent and wiped it away.

"Perhaps-it's better-this way," she said weakly. "I've-never been-free-since that day-we took the baby-"

"Don't talk, honey," I cautioned, calmly as I could. "I'll get you back to Arroyo Seco in some way. I'll fly you into the city. You'll live, Geri."

"No, Steve," Her hand clutched me. "No. Steve please listen. There isn't much time-"

I sat there, her head on my lap, wiping away the blood.

"Steve, they made me-tell. They tortured me with hot sticks-until I couldn't stand it. Steve, they know who the-old Indian is-"

"Geri, don't worry-"

"You've got to hurry, Steve. The other one, and the dog-"

She was gone. I felt the sudden constriction of her muscles, then relaxation. I sat there and held her tightly, trying to reassure myself that it wasn't so.

She was still alive, had merely slipped into a coma. I stretched her out on the sand, bent my head. There was no heartbeat under those glorious breasts. I felt for her pulse. Nothing. She was gone.

I sat there, my eyes filming with tears. I saw the burns at last, on her breasts and abdomen. Bending over her, I cradled her face close to mine and talked to her, letting the anger burn itself through my body, inch by inch.

I looked up at last, at the towering shale pile that was his crypt. It seemed almost sacrilege that I must bury her so near this human wolf. But there was no alternative.

I hunted for her clothes, but I couldn't find them.

I was exhausted when the crypt finally was complete. I piled the rocks high so no maurading thing would ever get to her.

Picking up the rifle and packs, I strode off.

I pulled up at the big boulder, turned for a last look at that cairn of rocks near the wall. Suddenly I was thinking of something she had said, when we started in. When they had stolen the McNaughton baby, abandoning it at the Maricopa village, they had started through this same canyon to make their escape. But her alcoholic husband hadn't made it. She had buried him here. She had not intimated where the grave might be. Perhaps she didn't even know.

But now she was here, with him.