They didn’t know where the Seven Fingers were as well as they thought they did. West of the Rainy Mountains lay any number of watersheds, according to how far west you went. No creek had exactly seven tributaries. Mart had hoped to get hold of an Indian or two as they drew near. With luck they would have found a guide to take them within sight of Yellow Buckle’s Camp. But Sheridan’s long-awaited campaign had cleared the prairies; the country beyond the North Fork of the Red was deserted. They judged, though, that the Seven Fingers had to be one of two systems of creeks.
Leaving the North Fork they tried the Little Horse thief first. It had nine tributaries, but who could tell how many a Kiowa medicine man would count? This whole thing drained only seventy or eighty square miles; a few long swings, cutting for sign, disposed of it in two days.
They crossed the Walking Wolf Ridge to the Elkhorn. This was their other bet—a system of creeks draining an area perhaps thirty miles square. On the maps it looks like a tree. You could say it has thirty or forty run-ins if you followed all the branches out to their ends; or you could say it has eight, or four, or two. You could say it has seven.
The country had the right feel as they came into it; they believed this to be the place Lije had meant. But now both time and country were running out, and very fast. The murder charge against them might be a silly one, and liable to be laughed out of court. But they had resisted arrest by violence, in the course of which Mart had assaulted an officer with a deadly weapon, intending great bodily harm. Actually all he had done was to swing on that damn fool Charlie MacCorry, but such things take time to cool off, and they didn’t have it. No question now whether they wanted to quit this long search; the search was quitting them. One way or the other, it would end here, and this time forever.
Sometimes they had sighted a distant dust far back on their trail, losing them when they changed direction, picking them up again when they straightened out. They hadn’t seen it now for four days, but they didn’t fool themselves. Their destination was known, within limits, and they would be come for. Not that they had any thought of escape; they would turn on their accusers when their work was done—if they got it done. But they must work fast now with what horse flesh they had left.
The Elkhorn Country is a land of low ridges between its many dust-and-flood-water streams. You can’t see far, and what is worse, it is known as a medicine country full of dust drifts and sudden hazes. You can ride toward what looks like the smoke of many fires, and follow it as it recedes across the ridges, and finally lose it without finding any fire at all. Under war conditions this was a very slow-going job of riding indeed. Each swale had to be scouted from its high borders before you dared cut for sign; while you yourself could be scouted very easily, at any time or all the time, if the Indians you sought were at all wary of your approach.
Yet this whole complex was within three days military march from Fort Sill itself, at the pace the yellowlegs would ride now. No commander alive was likely to search his own doorstep with painful care, endlessly cordoning close to home, while the other columns were striking hundreds of miles into the fastnesses of the Staked Plains. Yellow Buckle had shown an unexampled craftiness in picking this hole-up in which to lie low, while the military storm blew over. Here he was almost certain to be by-passed in the first hours of the campaign, and thereafter could sit out the war unmolested, until the exhaustion of both sides brought peace. When the yellowlegs eventually went home, as they always did, his warriors and his ponies would be fresh and strong, ready for such a year of raids and victories as would make him legendary. By shrewdly setting aside the Comanche reliance upon speed and space, he had opened himself a way to become the all-time greatest war chief of the Comanches.
Would it have worked, except for a wobbly old man, whose dimming eyes saw no more glorious vision than that of a chair by a hot stove?
“We need a week there,” Mart said.
“We’re lucky if we’ve got two days.”
They didn’t like it. Like most prairie men, they had great belief in their abilities, but a total faith in their bad luck.
Then one day at daylight they got their break. It came as the result of a mistake, though of a kind no plainsman would own to; it could happen to anybody, and most it had happened to were dead. They had camped after dark, a long way past the place where they had built their cooking fire. Before that, though, they had studied the little valley very carefully in the last light, making sure they would bed down in the security of emptiness and space. They slept only after all reasonable precautions had been taken, with the skill of long-practiced men.
But as they broke out in the darkness before dawn, they rode at once upon the warm ashes of a fire where a single Indian had camped. They had been within less than a furlong of him all night.
He must have been a very tired Indian. Though they caught no glimpse of him, they knew they almost stepped on him, for they accidentally cut him off from his hobbled horse. They chased and roped the Indian pony, catching him very easily in so short a distance that Mart’s back was full of prickles in expectation of an arrow in it. None came, however. They retired to a bald swell commanding the situation, and lay flat to wait for better light.
Slowly the sun came up, cleared the horizon haze, and leveled clean sunlight across the uneven land.
“You think he’s took out on us?”
“I hope not,” Amos answered. “We need the bugger. We need him bad.”
An hour passed. “I figured he’d stalk us,” Mart said. “He must be stalking us. Some long way round. I can’t see him leaving without any try for the horses.”
“We got to wait him out.”
“Might be he figures to foller and try us tonight.”
“We got to wait him out anyway,” Amos said.
Still another hour, and the sun was high.
“I think it’s the odds,” Mart believed now. “We’re two to one. Till he gets one clean shot. Then it’s even.”
Amos said with sarcasm, “One of us can go away.”
“Yes,” Mart said. He got his boots from the aparejos, and changed them for the worn moccasins in which he had been scouting for many days.
“What’s that for?” Amos demanded.
“So’s he’ll hear me.”
“Hear you doing what? Kicking yourself in the head?”
“Look where I say.” Mart flattened to the ground beside Amos again. “Straight ahead, down by the crick, you see a little wilier.”
“He ain’t under that. Boughs don’t touch down.”
“No, and he ain’t up it neither—I can see through the leaves. Left of the wilier, you see a hundred-foot trip of saw grass about knee high. Left of that, a great long slew of buckbrush against the water. About belt deep. No way out of there without yielding a shot. I figure we got him pinned in there.”
“No way to comb him out if that’s where he is,” Amos said; but he studied the buckbrush a long time.
Mart got up, and took the canteens from the saddles.
“He’ll put an arrow through you so fast it’ll fall free on the far side, you go down to that crick!”
“Not without raising up, he won’t.”
“That’s a seventy-five yard shot from here— maybe more. I ain’t using you for bait on no such—”
“You never drew back from it before!” Mart went jauntily down the slope to the creek, swinging the canteens. Behind him he could hear Amos rumbling curses to himself for a while; then the morning was quiet except for the sound of his own boots.
He walked directly, unhurrying, to the point where the firm ground under the buckbrush mushed off into the shallow water at the saw-grass roots. He sloshed through ten yards of this muck, skirting the brush; and now his hackles crawled at the back of his neck, for he smelled Indian—a faint sunburnt smell of woodfires, of sage smoke, of long-used buffalo robes.
He came to the water, and stopped. Still standing straight up he floated the two canteens, letting them fill themselves at the end of their long slings. This was the time, as he stood motionless here, pretending to look at the water. He dared not look at the buckbrush, lest his own purpose be spoiled. But he let his head turn a little bit downstream, so that he could hold the buckbrush in the corner of his eye. He was certain nothing moved.
Amos’ bullet yowled so close to him it seemed Amos must have fired at his back, and a spout of water jumped in the river straight beyond. Mart threw himself backward, turning as he fell, so that he came down on his belly in the muck. He didn’t know how his six-gun came cocked into his hand, but it was there.
“Stay down!” Amos bellowed. “Hold still, damn it! I don’t think I got him!” Mart could hear him running down the slope, chambering a fresh cartridge with a metallic clank. He flattened, trying to suck himself into the mud, and for a few moments lay quiet, all things out of his hands.
Amos came splashing into the saw grass so close by that Mart thought he was coming directly to where Mart lay.
“Yes, I did,” Amos said. “Come looky this here!”
“Watch out for him!” Mart yelled. “Your bullet went in the crick!”
“I creased him across the back. Prettiest shot you ever see in your life!”
Mart got up then. Amos was standing less than six yards away, looking down into the grass. Two steps toward him and Mart could see part of the dark, naked body, prone in the saw grass. He stopped, and moved backward a little; he had no desire to see anything more. Amos reached for the Indian’s knife, and spun it into the creek.
“Get his bow,” Mart said.
“Bow, hell! This here’s a Spencer he’s got here.” Amos picked it up. “He threw down on you from fifteen feet!”
“I never even heard the safety click—”
“That’s what saved you. It’s still on.”
Amos threw the rifle after the knife, far out into the water.
“Is he in shape to talk?”
“He’ll talk, all right. Now get your horse, quick!”
“What?”
“There’s two Rangers coming up the crick. I got one quick sight of ’em at a mile—down by the far bend. Get on down there, and hold ’em off!”
“You mean fight?”
“No-no-no! Talk to ’em—say anything that comes in your head—”
“What if they try to arrest me?”
“Let ’em! Only keep ’em off me while I question this Comanch’!”
Mart ran for his horse.