P Deutermann - Spider mountain

Was Jacky moving, too? My cheek brushed up against a softball-sized rock, so I picked it up and pitched it as high as I could over the bushes back in the direction from which I’d come. It made a satisfying thump, but unfortunately it sounded just like a rock had been thrown into the undergrowth. So much for my deception plan. Then I heard something coming from behind me, and the something was making zero effort to hide its approach.

Dogs. Oh, shit, I thought. Nathan’s four-pack had come back and were hot on our trail. No, my trail.

I looked at the little. 25-caliber peashooter and briefly considered using it on myself rather than face the prospect of being torn to pieces by four big beasts.

Except the furry face that finally broke through the bushes was Frack, who was very happy to see me. Frick came through right behind him and took advantage of the fact that I was on the ground to do some serious licking. The problem was that they were making a lot of noise, and if Jacky was near, that shotgun was training around on us. I grabbed a stick and threw it high in the general direction of where I figured the handler was lying, and they took off to retrieve it. They went crashing through the bushes, so I took that opportunity to squirm thirty feet farther to the right under cover of all their noise.

By now I had the rock formation at my back, which meant that Jacky and his erstwhile buddy ought to be between me and my original trail. The dogs were still thrashing around out there, and then they started barking. I winced and waited for the shotgun, but nothing happened. They continued to bark, and they weren’t moving. I decided it was time to close in.

Jacky was propped up against the base of a tree with his back to me. He was trying to bring the shotgun to bear on the shepherds with just his left arm, and he wasn’t doing too well. I could see a pair of boots sticking out of a clump of hawthorn bushes some ten feet in front of him. The shepherds were very aware of the shotgun and kept darting in and out of the line of fire, continuing to bark at Jacky. I was able to creep right up behind under cover of all that dog racket and grab the shotgun out of his hand before he could pull the trigger. He yelled in pain when I did that, and then pressed his left hand over his right arm, as if trying to hug himself. His left hand was covered in blood.

My snap-shot had managed to hit him in the right hand. It wasn’t anything like the old western movies. That. 308 round had essentially exploded his right hand, to the point where there were jagged bits of bone protruding everywhere his palm used to be. He was distinctly gray around the gills, and there was a baby lake of blood under his legs where he’d been hunched over, holding his right hand under his left armpit. His mouth was open and he was taking short, gasping breaths through all that beard. Keeping an eye on Jacky, I checked out the dog handler, but he was either unconscious or dead. Jacky had managed to put a blast of some large-caliber shot into the man’s chest, and he was probably gone.

I turned back to Jacky, shut down the barking shepherds, and squatted down a few feet away from him, keeping the. 25 pointed in his general direction. His whole face was gray now, and his lips were trembling as he slid deeper into shock. I was amazed that he could have fired the shotgun, given the recoil of a ten-gauge. I broke open the action and found two new shells, so he’d also been able to reload after shooting his own man down. He was glaring at me through a haze of pain. I was very aware that Nathan was out there somewhere, possibly with more of his black hats. They had to have heard all the gunfire.

“Where’s the woman?” I asked.

He just looked at me, his eyes squinting with hate. There was fresh blood trickling down between his fingers as he continued to hold his shattered hand against his body.

I repeated my question. He made no reply. I unlimbered the. 308, opened the bolt to make sure there was still a round in there, and then cycled it closed. I stood up and pointed the rifle at his face. As I pulled the trigger, I twitched the barrel a tiny bit high so that the heavy slug smacked into the tree instead. Even so, he felt the wallop and cried out despite his defiant expression. I jacked in another round and this time lowered the barrel to point at his belly. I asked him again: “Where’s the woman?”

“Go ‘head, do it,” he gasped. “Won’t do you no good, anyhow. She gone.”

“Gone where?” I asked. I lowered the muzzle so that it pointed at his genitals. He watched it as one would watch a snake between his legs.

“In the hole, by now,” he said. “She ain’t a’comin’ out, neither.”

“Did you bastards kill her?” I asked.

An evil sneer crossed his face. “Naw,” he said. “Hole does that. Takes a while. Go look, you want to. You’ll see.”

“Where is it, this hole?”

“Yonder,” he said, pointing with his enormous, frizzy beard toward the rock formation. He coughed, and for the first time I saw blood in his mouth and at the end of his nostrils. It was only then that I saw the hole in his shirtfront and realized I’d hit him twice with the same round. He was a big guy, but he was also mortally wounded, and I think he knew it.

“What’d you do with those children? Are they in the hole, too?”

He got a blank look on his face, then understood. He shook his head. “Wasn’t but one young’un up here,” he said. “Grinny got the rest.”

He closed his eyes and his breathing became more labored, as if the effort to speak had winded him. I lowered the rifle barrel. The shepherds were nosing around the motionless dog handler but keeping their distance. I thought I heard a sound over in the direction of the rock formation, but the dogs weren’t reacting. Still, I knew I had very little time left.

I knelt down again to get closer to his face. “I’m here for Nathan Creigh,” I said. “Where is he?”

He started breathing in even shallower gasps, as if building up enough oxygen to speak again. “Camp’s yonder, by the hole. Nathan tole us to find the third man, after he shot t’other one. He’ll be a’waitin’ fer ye. You that lawman what kilt Rue Creigh?”

I said yes.

“Be damned, then. He said you’d be a’comin’. That Grinny would point the way. He’ll be a’waitin’. You a dead man walkin’.”

“Right now I think you’re a dead man talking,” I replied. I pulled his injured hand out from his armpit just to make damned sure he wasn’t holding a pocket gun. He groaned with pain when I moved his wrecked hand. Then I got up. His hat was lying in the grass. I retrieved that and his shotgun, then called in the dogs. I walked fifty yards toward the rock formation and then gave the dogs the hat as a scent target. No dummies, they promptly headed back to where I’d left the bearded man. I called them back in and sent them in the opposite direction. They cut a trail pretty quickly, and we started down the hill to find Nathan, hopefully before Nathan found us.

It turned out that the Creighs had set up a permanent camp just around the corner of the landward end of the big rock formation. All my efforts to be tactically discreet came to nothing when the dogs and I blundered out of the woods and there it was: two ancient, crude log cabins, a fire pit, cages for their dogs, the obligatory junk piles, a privy, and Carrie, sitting with her back to a small tree, a grimly determined look on her face and the end of a rope in her hand. She had her injured hand back under her armpit again. The rope had two turns wrapped around the tree. The rest of it led right to the base of the rock formation.

“Knew you’d show up sometime,” she said. “You have yourself a nice war up there?”