Page 110 of The Veteran

‘And if he’s waiting in the trees, with that rifle sighted on us? I don’t want to lose one or two of you guys to prove a point.’

‘So what shall we do?’

‘Hang loose,’ said Lewis. ‘He has no way out of the mountains, not even down into Wyoming, not with air surveillance.’

‘Unless he marches through the night.’

‘He has an exhausted horse and a girl in white silk wedding slippers. He’s running out of time and he ought to know it. Just keep him in sight at about a mile and wait for the spotter plane.’

They rode on with the tiny distant figure in their view. The spotter plane came just before four. The young pilot had had to be called from his work in Billings, where he had a job with a camping store. The tops of the trees that clothed the steep banks of Lake Fork came into view.

The voice of the pilot crackled out of the sheriff’s radio set.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘There’s a lone rider up ahead of us, with a blanket-wrapped girl mounted behind. Can you see him?’

The Piper Cub, high above, winged off towards the creek.

‘Sure can. There’s a narrow creek over here. He’s entering the trees.’

‘Stay clear. He has a rifle and he’s a crack shot.’

They saw the Piper climb and bank over the creek two miles ahead.

‘Right. But I can still see him. He’s off the horse and leading it down into the creek.’

‘He’ll never get up the other side,’ hissed the ranger. ‘We can close up now.’

They broke into a canter, with Braddock, his son and his remaining three gunmen with empty holsters coming behind them.

‘Stay out of range,’ warned the sheriff again. ‘He can still fire from through the trees if you get too close. He did it to Jerry.’

‘Jerry was hovering at six hundred feet,’ the pilot crackled over the air. ‘I’m doing one hundred and twenty knots at three thousand feet. By the by, he seems to have found a way up. He’s climbing out onto the Hellroaring Plateau.’

The sheriff glanced at the ranger and snorted.

‘You’d think he’s been here before,’ said the bemused ranger.

‘Maybe he has,’ snapped Lewis.

‘No way. We know who moves up here.’

The posse reached the rim of the canyon, but the screen of pines blocked the vision of the exhausted man tugging his horse and its burden out on the other side.

The ranger knew the only path down into the creek, but the hoof marks of Rosebud showed that their quarry knew the same. When they emerged onto the second plateau the fugitives were again a speck in the distance.

‘It’s getting dark and fuel is low,’ said the pilot. ‘I have to go.’

‘One last circle,’ urged the sheriff. ‘Where is he now?’

‘He’s made the mountain. He’s off and leading again. Climbing the north face. But it looks like the horse is breaking down. It’s stumbling all over the track. I guess you’ll have him at sunup. Good hunting, Sheriff.’

The Piper turned in the darkening sky and droned away back to Billings.

‘Do we go on, boss?’ one of the deputies asked. Sheriff Lewis shook his head. The air was thin, they were all sucking in the oxygen, night was falling fast.

‘Not in the dark. We camp here till daylight.’

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