Page 90 of Battle Mountain

He reached to his side and untied the leather thongs that held his shotgun firmly in the saddle scabbard. That’s when he heard labored breathing, and a pained grunt.

A figure staggered around the corner into full view. It was a young man wearing ragged oversized hospital scrubs. He had a gaunt face with haunted eyes and a half-open mouth.

Joe called, “Mark Eisele?”

The man stopped so abruptly that he nearly toppled over. He’dobviously not noticed Joe mounted on Henry in the middle of the shadowed road until Joe spoke to him.

“That’s me,” Eisele said. Then he took a step backward in obvious alarm.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Joe said. “I’m game warden Joe Pickett. I was sent here to findyou.”

Part Six

“This was the peregrines’ true hunting time; an hour and a half to sunset, with the western light declining and the early dusk just rising above the eastern skyline.”

—J. A. Baker,ThePeregrine

Chapter Twenty-Two

It was almostthree-thirty in the afternoon when Joe and Mark Eisele reached the edge of Summit. Eisele was mounted on Henry with Joe leading the mule on foot. Joe wasn’t sure Eisele could have continued to walk back based on his condition.

The ghost town consisted of fewer than a dozen intact structures: aging log cabin homes, the remains of a livery stable and large ramshackle barn, a blacksmith’s shop, a storefront adorned with a faintGen’l Merchsign above the portico, and a large sprawling two-story hotel that looked like it was about to fall in on itself. Among the buildings were eight dented modern travel trailers that had been parked and mounted on cinder blocks to keep them steady.

The mining town appeared to be completely abandoned at first sight, but Joe was wary. He guided Henry off the two-track into a thick stand of twelve-foot-high mountain juniper brush, where they couldn’t be seen from Summit. He helped Eisele dismount.

“I really don’t want to come back here,” Eisele said. “In fact, I never want to see this place again for the rest of my life.”

Over the past two hours, Eisele had told Joe everything he’d seen, heard, and experienced from when he and Spike Rankin stumbled upon the armed team on the ridge while scouting for elk. Eisele said he thought they’d find Rankin’s body in a meat cellar.

“I didn’t go looking for him when I got loose of those restraints,” Eisele said. “I just got out of that old hotel and didn’t stop walking until I ran into you.”

Eisele had pleaded not to go back, but Joe had explained the situation they were in with no way to liaise with the outside world and a dead satellite phone. And he told Eisele that it would take them much longer to go back down the mountain to the trailhead than it would to continue to Summit.

“They have to be able to communicate from there,” Joe said. “Do you know how they do it?”

Eisele said he didn’t, but he thought he’d heard what sounded like one-sided cell phone conversations on the other side of the door in the hotel lobby. Which meant there was either a cell signal available or they were using satellite phones.

“We’ve got to let your father-in-law know you’re alive as soon as we can,” Joe said. “And I’ve got to contact the game warden from this district so she can call off the search and rescue operation.

“So tell me about the layout of Summit and where I might find radios or sat phones.”

“I don’t have a clue,” Eisele said. “All I know about that place is a dark little room off the lobby and what I could hear from outside. I know they have a kitchen somewhere, but that’s about it.”

Joe didn’t press him further. Instead, he reached up and parted two juniper branches so he could get a better view of the ghost town. He saw no one about, and no signs of life.

“Do you think they’re all gone now?” he whispered.

“I think they all left this morning after that meeting I told you about,” Eisele said. “Whether or not they left anyone behind in Soledad City—I don’t know. But I doubt it.”

Joe turned and grimaced at Eisele in surprise. “Did you just say ‘Soledad City’?”

“That’s what they called it.”

“As inAxel Soledad?”

Eisele was emphatic. “Yes. I met him, so to speak, and I heard the name ‘Axel’ time and time again. I heard Double-A call him that. She was the only one who was kind to me. I think if Double-A wasn’t there that Axel would have done to me what he did to Rankin.”

Joe felt his stomach clench and his heart race.

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