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  This man whispered, ‘Come on.’

  Taylor sat up. He’d slept in his clothes, apart from his moccasins, which he pulled on now.

  His faceless companion made an impatient sound and gestured with the rifle towards the door. Taylor couldn’t identify him from his outline or his voice, yet something about him was familiar. Taylor felt uneasy, and maybe afraid. Was this man taking him to safety? Or to vigilante justice outside the adobe, a bullet or a hanging tree?

  Taylor whispered: ‘What is—’

  ‘Shut up and move!’

  The man’s voice showed his nerves were stretched tight as rawhide. So that made two of them.

  Taylor stood. He crossed the room to the door and paused there. The barrel of the rifle poked hard into his back, just above the waist, and he stumbled forward, out into the night.

  There was a strong full moon, white as bone, silver-plating the ground before him. The land was a chequerboard of black and silver, blurring at the edges as a low, persistent wind raked brush and trembled shadows. Both he and the man behind him, framed in the doorway, held still, listening.

  It was very silent. Then a horse coughed and sneezed in the corral. Taylor heard a few small sounds that didn’t fit with the night, off to the left. He found he was studying a low hill where clumps of ocotillo and mesquite swayed with the wind.

  The man behind him said: ‘Come on. We got a horse waiting.’

  Taylor didn’t believe him. His ears told him that something – maybe a man – was hidden in the brush atop the low hill. He recoiled from the black and silver ground before him. He saw himself being shot down as he crossed it. It gaped like the mouth of a trap. A gnawing in his guts told him death waited there. His death.

  The rifleman stepped forward. His boots made a soft rushing sound coming down on gravel, and then there was the sound Taylor had heard as he woke: the clear, ringing music of a jingle-bob spur.

  Taylor flung himself backwards.

  He crashed into the man behind him, slamming him back against the wall, the rifle trapped between them. Taylor swung full about, linking both hands, bringing them against the side of the other’s head. The man reeled and almost fell. Taylor grabbed the rifle; they strained for possession of the weapon, swaying together. Taylor fell backwards, yanking the other towards him. He hit on his shoulders, hooking his feet into the man’s belly then straightening his legs. The man flipped into the air, turned headlong and came down on his back. Air grunted out of him.

  The rifle spun across loose stones, skittering into shadows.

  Taylor squirmed from the earth. His opponent was tough all right; despite his hard fall he was first to his feet. He was a silhouette rising against the stark moon. His right arm was upraised and there was a knife in his hand!

  Taylor came to a crouch; he dodged as his enemy stabbed down. The man lunged past him and ploughed to one knee. Taylor lifted his right knee, catching the other alongside the head and knocking him back on his rump. Taylor stood. His opponent started to rise and Taylor kicked out. His foot caught the other’s jaw with a meaty, satisfying smack. The man toppled and lay on his back, groaning softly.

  Taylor held still a moment, breathing hard. He glimpsed the rifle, lying half a dozen paces away, and stepped towards it.

  Something struck him across the back of the right shoulder, driving him forward. He spun and hit on the same shoulder and cried out in pain. He rolled to his feet.

  He heard the sound of the shot fading. His attention was pulled to the hill where the wind shook arms of ocotillo and mesquite, to a drift of powder smoke there.

  There was a numbness in his right shoulder and damp on his back that might be blood. But fear and excitement pumped through him. He began to run towards cover. He ran Apache style, zigzagging, crouched low. There was another shot but he wasn’t hit.

  Garth fired twice.

  His first shot knocked Taylor down. But Taylor rolled off the earth and started to run, dodging as he did so. Garth drove another shot at the weaving runner. And missed. Taylor made it into cover, vanishing there.

  Garth swore. He saw his plan falling to pieces in front of him. His arms trembled with the anger he felt at Schim, at Taylor, and at himself.

  But his calm reasserted itself. It always did. Nothing licked him, because he’d always keep his nerve, always think his way through whatever difficulty arose.

  As he walked down slope a new plan was already forming in his mind.

  Schim climbed groggily to his feet, both hands to his jaw. Garth heard voices, lights showed in the windows of the main adobe as the shots brought the camp awake. In a few minutes they’d be down here; he had that much time to start his new plan rolling….

  Schim turned his dazed face towards Garth. Blood was coming out of his mouth, leaking down his chin. In a voice that seemed half full of water he asked, ‘You get Taylor?’

  ‘No.’

  Garth saw a knife lying on the earth. Schim saw it too, bent and picked it up. Stooped forward, he must have heard something and glanced back over his shoulder. Surprise showed for an instant in the pale eyes. Then the rifle butt caught his right temple at the end of its swing. Schim fell and lay limply on his face.

  Garth knelt over the unconscious man. He took the knife and raised it. For one second he paused, hearing his breathing, hearing the blood beating in his head. He spent that long thinking what he was going to do; then he drove the knife in to the guard. He’d killed like this before. He knew which ribs to place the blade between, and how to twist the knife as it went home.

  There were lots of advantages to knifing an unconscious man, Garth decided. For example, if you were careful, you didn’t get any blood on you. And Garth was careful.

  He left the knife embedded, thrusting up from the dead man’s back. He considered that a nice touch.

  Taylor ran for some minutes. Then he paused in cover, and listened.

  Sounds travelled far in this clear night. He could hear voices back at Agua Dulce.

  He put his hand to the back of his right shoulder and flinched with pain. His fmgers came away bloody, and his back was damp with it. But he judged this was another crease, barely breaking the skin. He kept running into back-shooters whose aim was slightly off.

  He heard hoofs knock against stone.

  Taylor moved up a ramp of ground, into a circle of small boulders atop this ramp. He focused his eyes on the ground ahead, trying to see through a screen of mesquite and other brush. False dawn was paling the eastern skyline. A large, irregular shape swam up against this hazy darkness. It became a man on a horse, a night guard drifting his horse towards him and Agua Dulce and the gunshots and noise there.

  Taylor crouched, his muscles tensed. That brought sharp pain to his shoulder, which he ignored. He watched the rider loom nearer until he was passing below the very place where Taylor lay. Taylor remembered

  a trick Nachay had shown him and flung a rock, which clattered on stones to the east. The rider turned suddenly, looking that way, and Taylor sprang. He had better luck than Nachay, he carried the man easily from the saddle and left him sprawling, winded, on the trail. Taylor took the man’s pistol from his holster. As the dismounted man lifted his head, Taylor laid the pistol barrel across it. The man sighed and lay stunned. Taylor took his hat, knife, gun and gun belt. He’d drawn a full house: early light showed a Winchester in the saddle boot and a canteen hanging from the saddle horn. Taylor mounted the man’s bay horse and rode.

  Dawn showed them the full, grim picture. A man lying with a knife thrusting from low in his back.

  Four of them stood over the corpse and stared down: Garth, Morrison, Cameron, Buck Evans.

  Morrison asked Garth, ‘You found him?’

  Garth nodded gravely. ‘I was coming over to check on poor old Schim here and I saw some feller running for it. I seen his face in the moonlight. It was Taylor. I took a couple of shots at him but he got away.’

  He thought his story sounded a little thin but Morrison didn�
�t question it. His eyes were on the dead man at his feet. He chewed at his lower lip and a pulse of fury throbbed in the side of his scrawny neck.

  Evans knelt for a moment, feeling the earth, then stood. There was blood on his fingers. ‘You winged him, anyway.’

  Morrison turned his attention to Cameron. ‘Well, you still want to speak up for this feller?’

  Cameron gave him a helpless, stricken look.

  Morrison said, ‘We won’t even wait to see the burying. We’ll get after him right away. Maybe he won’t get far, wounded as he is. One of my hands, Benito, he’s part Navajo. He can trail a man over bare rock.’

  Garth asked, ‘Due process of the law, Eli?’

  Morrison fixed the other man with his fierce blue eyes. ‘I stopped one man from being hung. Because of that, another lies dead here.’ He moved his gaze to the corpse at his feet. ‘A mistake I won’t make again.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Taylor came to water.

  There was a tank at the base of a sheer rock wall, where there was also a little miraculous green, a fringe of verdure from which birds started. It was the only touch of colour in a narrow, sun-blasted canyon. Taylor was uneasy in this place, because it would be too easy to be trapped in here, but he and his horse needed water. There was only a mouthful left in the canteen he’d stolen.

  The tank held run-off water, tasting of the bare rock it had trickled down. In the pool it was green and earthy. But it was easy to dream it was the coldest water ever, pearly liquid from a clear mountain stream, icy on his bloated tongue, whose running music played in his head while he drank.

  He ached into his bones, especially his rump and thighs. He’d been almost all day in the saddle. For maybe ten miles, as he fled the ambush outside the hut, he’d run his horse hard, to get some distance on the pursuit he knew would develop. Then he set about laying a false trail, judging that that was time well spent. But it wasn’t. Ten miles further on, as he’d glanced back, he’d seen trails of dust following. He hadn’t lost his pursuers. One of them, at least, was a damn good tracker.

  Taylor had driven the bay horse hard, across the flats and into the first slopes of the mountains. But the animal had been tired to begin with, and its pace was slow. The bay was staggering when they came to water, making the wheezing noises that suggested it was ruined. By which time it was close to darkness, and both man and horse needed to rest.

  Taylor ate the last of the jerky he’d found in the saddle-bags, and also some mesquite beans and squaw cabbage. There were signs of jackrabbits by the water hole, also wild pigs and mule deer, but he hadn’t time to hunt. He didn’t dare make a fire, with pursuers maybe close behind. He felt a little weak and light-headed from hunger, but these last few days he’d got used to travelling on an almost empty belly.

  As he chewed his cold rations mechanically he tried not to think of his hunger. He thought about his plan, such as it was: to turn himself in to a county sheriff.

  He’d found himself fleeing south. The nearest county sheriff in that direction was in Ore City. Taylor didn’t fancy his chances there – what kind of justice would he get in a rough mining camp, where Jed Garth was a big operator? The likelihood was he’d be turned over to a lynch mob. So, with pursuit barring him from the north, he’d have to keep going south and south-west until Mesilla. That was maybe a hundred miles across bad country, mountain and desert, so whether he could make it was anybody’s guess.

  He realized pursuit had driven him back on his own journey, almost on to the Trail of Lost Souls. He was now pushing into the eastern edges of the Superstitions. He might only be ten miles from Devil’s Pass.

  Taylor lay under his blankets. He’d sleep until dawn, then strike out for Mesilla and, with luck, a way out of this crazy business.

  He dreamed bad dreams. He watched a grim parade of ghosts pass by: the four Williams brothers, Harrison father and son, Ma Kruger, Frau Veidt, Ethan Evans and others, all the people he’d led to their deaths in Devil’s Pass … last of them all Ramon Sanchez…. And Ramon Sanchez was staring at him now, as Taylor came awake.

  But he couldn’t be. Ramon had been dragged to his death behind a running pony. But there he was, copper-skinned and his jet hair cut short, dressed in the white cotton pants and serape of a Mexican peasant.

  Then Taylor saw Ramon’s face was aged, weather-seared and deeply lined and the long moustache that drooped over his mouth was grey at its tips. This wasn’t Ramon but another man, dressed Mexican, another man of Mexican and Indian blood, but old enough to be Ramon’s father. Behind him pink light painted the canyon walls, which told Taylor he’d overslept: it was dawn. He lifted his head and the other man moved too, lifting a Winchester carbine and training the black eye of the carbine on Taylor’s face.

  Other figures loomed behind this man. As each appeared, Taylor felt a new load of fear and despair settle like a cold stone in his belly. Eli Morrison, Buck Evans and Jedediah Garth.

  They were all armed but only Garth had a pistol in his hand, not particularly pointed at Taylor. He said, ‘Put both hands behind your head. Slow. Get to your feet and kick away those blankets.’

  Taylor obeyed.

  Morrison asked Taylor, ‘You figured you’d got away, huh?’ He indicated the Mexican. ‘This is Benito. Just about the best tracker in the territory.’

  Garth said, ‘Search him, Buck.’

  Evans did so. He glared at Taylor with hatred. As he fmished searching, his mouth twisted and he swung. His right fist caught Taylor on the chin and knocked him flat.

  Taylor lay dazed for a moment, then he lifted his head and stared up at Evans. Taylor guessed the man was repaying him for, amongst other things, the fight at the water hole. So he was puzzled when Evans said, ‘You murdering bastard!’

  ‘I never murdered nobody.’

  ‘Tell that to Schim!’ Seeing the blank look Taylor gave him, he said, ‘That feller you knifed in the back, outside the adobe!’

  ‘I didn’t knife anyone in the back!’

  ‘You’re a goddamned liar!’ Evans lifted his fist again.

  Morrison said, ‘All right! That’s enough of that!’

  Taylor got to his feet. He nursed his jaw. He decided that Evans had a considerable punch on him. He spat and there was blood in his spittle. ‘That feller was alive when I left him.’

  Garth scowled. ‘We aren’t gonna stand here listening to any more of your lies! Due process of the law, Eli?’

  ‘He’ll hang all right.’

  Garth turned the Colt in his hand. ‘Why bother with a hanging?’

  Morrison gazed at the other man coldly. ‘No, we’ll do it halfway legal, at least.’

  The merchant sighed. ‘Then we need to find us a tree.’

  Taylor was led at gunpoint a few hundred yards up the canyon, to where horses were picketed. Garth produced some cotton rope and tied Taylor’s hands before him. He tied them tighter than he needed to, smiling slightly when he did so. Taylor filed this away in his mind as another little score to settle with Garth in the future. Of course, that depended on Taylor having a future….

  They mounted, Taylor back into the saddle of the bay. The riders moved off, walking their horses west along the canyon.

  Benito rode well ahead of the others, on point. They came out of the canyon into a basin. This wasn’t a box, like the place where the Cameron party had been trapped and had died. On the far, west side of the basin, there was a way out, a narrow slit in the rock wall where the canyon continued.

  Evans brought up the rear. Taylor rode ahead of him, just behind Morrison and Garth. Garth turned in the saddle and asked Morrison, ‘How come there ain’t never a tree when you want one?’

  Taylor studied the basin walls. There was some timber higher up, but they would have to climb steep slopes to come to it. Maybe they’d find a sturdy enough juniper or white oak further along apiece … that was all his future amounted to: the amount of time it took to find a tree you could hang a man from.

  A
canyon wren was finishing off its morning song. It looked forward to a better morning than he did. He realized he’d been scanning his surroundings without seeing them. This basin had different strata of rock banding its orange cliffs, tidelines of yellow, green, blue, purple and a mix of these colours. It was a picture of harsh, primitive and startling beauty. He supposed the wren’s song was beautiful too, part of the world he was about to be separated from.

  He thought: If I’m going to die, I don’t want to do it on the end of a rope. He didn’t want to die at all. He decided there was too much he didn’t want to let go of just yet. He remembered Fiona Cameron, the last time he’d seen her. What was in the look she gave him? The promise of something? Maybe the promise of a hell of a lot….

  Morrison told Garth, ‘Perhaps we should join up with Cameron’s bunch, before we do this.’

  Taylor asked, ‘Major Cameron’s out here?’

  Morrison looked at him sourly. ‘Wasn’t talking to you.’ Anger made a quiver in the side of the rancher’s neck. ‘You’ve caused plenty trouble to everybody. We got all of Garth’s outfit and most of my hands out looking for you. Major Cameron’s with ’em. They’re back in these hills someplace.’

  Garth made an exasperated sound. ‘Eli, you know that Cameron. He’s soft on this feller. We join up with him, he’ll be arguing for a sheriff, not a hanging!’

  Morrison nodded. ‘And it could be he’s right. Could be I’m in the wrong here.’ Then Morrison seemed to lose interest in this argument, his attention shifted forward and he frowned.

  Taylor followed his gaze. In the mouth of the canyon, off to the west, dust showed. Hoofs drummed. A rider issued from the canyon.

  It was Benito and he was running his horse towards them at full gallop.

  The Mexican was yelling something. But Taylor didn’t need to hear the words.

  He saw them.

  Dust vomited into the basin like surf on to a beach. Seeds of darkness in this dust became men on horseback. He heard distant yelling, and the crack of rifles.