Micah had ridden more than a mile out of town before it occurred to him he was lacking items essential to a man set on chasing down a man like Greenleigh. For instance, camp food, a fresh box of shells, and a handgun. The food was necessary to sustain himself during the hunt; the shells and the pistol were to protect himself from his quarry.
Sutton's Spartan soul cringed from spending cash money on a handgun he'd likely never need again once Greenleigh was corralled.Thing is, no amount of money ever did a dead man any good.
"Should've kept the girl's pistol," he grumbled, now it was too late. Course, her old Merwin &Hulbert wasn't any prize, he reminded himself. He could sure enough vouch for that. He'd returned the pistol to Caroline this morning with the intention of telling her about the misfire as he faced Hagerstrom in the woods last night. Something to do with the twist open mechanism that allowed for ejection of empty cases, he thought. He'd been spooked, then, for certain. Yet the old shooter had gotten the job done, misfire or not. A dead man was proof of that.
After a mental shrug, he held Sticker to a ground-covering trot. They made good time during the afternoon, even with first retracing the way back to last night's camp. An aroma of burned wood lingered under the trees where, within five minutes of casting about, he picked up King's tracks. The hoof prints were deep, the stride's long, showing the stud had been startled into a flat-out run. Greenleigh was headed north, as expected. The hunt now turned into a horse race.
Micah tried putting himself into the other man's mind. If he were Greenleigh, what would he do? Greenleigh probably didn't figure there'd be much in the way of either retaliation or pursuit. He was no newcomer to this game. He must be used to U.S. law officers giving up at the border--if they ever got close enough to chase him that far. No, Greenleigh wouldn't be worried. Hell! Fast as the stud was, Micah had no doubt they were already safe in Canada, especially if Greenleigh had pushed through the night. What Greenleigh wouldn't be expecting was him, Micah Farley Sutton, hot on the trail and hot under his hat. A man who didn't give two whoops in hell for the border.
The big question was where Greenleigh planned on settling while he waited for any possible furor to die down. Would he go east to Fort Steele? North to Kamloops? Or maybe west, to the coast and the big port city of Vancouver? Micah wished he knew. He'd put Sticker into a lope and be settin' there waiting for the sonsabitch when he showed up.
Hours flowed by as Micah followed King's tracks. Once past the first mile from camp, he saw where Greenleigh had reined the stud in. Since then, the tracks showed the even stride of a horse with a long way to go, traveling no faster than a steady walk. Up to this point, the trail lay close along the Okanogan River. Now, as Micah topped a rise, it branched off. From the higher elevation, he saw Osoyoos Lake lying placid a couple miles farther on, the water a clear greenish-blue in color. He smelled the verdant vegetation from where he was, and an odor of fish drying over a cottonwood fire.
It wouldn't be Greenleigh down there preparing Kokanee, but maybe, if Micah was lucky, whoever was doing the cooking had seen him. Touching spurs to Sticker's ribs, Micah guided the horse through thick stands of trees and brush toward the smudge of smoke rising into the late afternoon sky.
As he came down onto a wide flat area by the lakeshore, Micah discovered an Indian family in residence, their fires the source of the rich odors. What looked to be a ma and pa, a grandma and grandpa, and an assortment of young ones in ages between six and twelve all stopped what they were doing and watched him approach. The women were gathered around a small cookfire in front of the family-sized lodge. The men and young ones, together with a couple of barking dogs, guarded the smoldering coals whose fragrant smoke rose into the racks of fish.�
The men left off gutting their latest catch as Micah came within speaking distance. The women's chatter ceased and the children stared at him slantwise.
"How do," Micah said, his voice friendly. "Nice day for smoking fish, ain't it? Dry and warm, but not too hot. Looks like you made a good catch."
The younger of the Indian men shook long, free-flowing hair from his face and stepped forward. "What do you want?" he said in return, not friendly at all, and with no comment on either the weather or the fishing.
Micah rested his crossed wrists on his saddle horn and tried again. The tribes were justifiably wary of white men riding into their camps uninvited, but they weren't in a habit of making their distrust so obvious. "I'm looking for a man," he said. "A white man. He's riding a blood bay stud he stole from me last night. A tall man with a bushy mustache, and probably wearing a black suit. You folks seen him?"
The Indian glanced once at the others. "No." He bit sharply on the word.
"No?" Micah sat up straight.
"Ain't seen nobody."�
It seemed to Micah, as a little shiver ran up his spine, that the whole family drew in and almost forgot to breathe. So did he.
"Wrong answer," he said, quiet and soft. "Seeing you folks each got two eyes."
The man set his jaw and stared straight at Micah. He let lose with a spate of Indian talk that Micah nderstand no more than one word of, and he could have been mistaken about that one. The speech, and the man, sounded angry.
Micah hardly needed to know the language. He figured he was being told to get the hell off their property, and to do it now. The only thing is, he didn't plan on being harangued by an ignorant Injun, and that was a fact.
"Don't feed me that shit," he said, letting them see his anger. "The stud's tracks run right through your camp." He pointed. "There." His finger moved. "And there. That horse and man are flesh and blood, not spirit critters. When were they here?"
The Indian, Micah observed without pleasure, had forgotten to set down the knife he'd been using to gut the fish. It had a long, thin blade, as perfect for sliding between a man's ribs as for slitting open a fish belly, and it flickered in the last rays of sunlight as the man gestured broadly. The steel came within an inch of slashing Micah's thigh.
He flinched, and almost without his own volition, his hand crept toward the carbine. Doubt flickered as to whether he'd have time to draw it from the scabbard and lever in a shell before the knife got to him. He'd have to be fast.
Micah nudged Sticker with the toe of his boot, spinning the horse until his body came between Micah's gun hand and the Indian. Sticker danced, lunging ahead. The motion forced the Indian into taking a step backward and Micah took advantage of the action to whip his carbine from the scabbard.
He leveled it at the Indian just before the knife began another plunge toward his leg.
The younger of the women screamed, saying something that sounded accusatory. Micah wasn't sure if her words were aimed at him or at her husband, but it was her husband who answered. He never took his eyes off Micah.
"Everybody just hold on a minute." Micah's words dropped into the commotion. "What in hell's the matter with you people? I didn't come here looking for trouble. All I want to know is when this feller come through here. What time? I don't care if he's your long lost brother or the answer to a tribal prophecy."
"You a deputy?" The Indian lost none of his belligerence in the question.
"No. I told you. The law ain't involved. The man stole my horse. I want the horse back. I figured the surest way of getting him was to take care of the situation myself."
The older Indian murmured in the younger man's ear. Slowly, the argumentative one nodded. The two moved farther apart, a stratagem Micah recognized as calculated to divide their danger.
His carbine followed the older one and he saw the other man's eyes narrow. "I asked you folks a civil question," Micah said, soft-voiced. "Seems to me I deserve a civil answer--and a truthful one."
Dead silence hovered, almost visible in its weight.
Micah sighed and pulled the trigger. Brass ejected from the chamber in the aftermath of explosion as, in the moment of surprise, he levered in another shell.
The women screamed and one of the children, a girl on the cusp of womanhood, commenced crying in noisy, hiccupy sobs.�
One of the old man's graying braids slithered from his shoulder to the ground. The man said nothing, although hate flared like a living thing in his set face.
Micah set himself, his eyes on the younger man.
"You best think twice about trying to take me. You sure you want your children to watch you be cut down? And for what? That other gent pay you to keep quiet?" Micah knew he might feel regret if he had to fire the gun again, but not enough to change the course of his actions.
"Tell him!" The younger woman, probably the mother to the brood of children, yelled. "What does it matter?"
"Listen to your woman," Micah said. "She makes sense." The Indian held his stubborn silence. After a minute Micah shrugged, lifted the barrel of his gun and took aim a tad off-center of the old man"s face. The slow, studied menace proved too much for the old woman. She chattered a spate of tongue-tripping language that the younger woman rushed to translate.
"He gave my husband two dollars," she said sullenly, with a defiant glance at the man. "He told us to say nothing if anyone asked for him. He said if we did tell, that he would come back, take one of our daughters and use her."
"Did you believe him?" The twelve-year-old was a pretty girl, not yet ripe, although Micah was aware many men liked tthe young ones.
"Yes. But now you are here and you are going to shoot my father or my husband unless we do speak." The woman raised her hands in a bitter, throwaway motion. "I must choose. My daughter or my husband. Who knows? Mebbee you will kill this man. Or mebbee he will kill you. Then I will ask God if He will make this man forget the way to our camp."
A practical woman. Her notions sort of reminded him of Caroline Pruett. Micah hid an inward smile.
"How long ago since he came through?" he snapped, the sharp bite of the question sounding as though his patience had run out. "That's all I'm asking. No need for all this fuss."
"Soon after the sun was high," the woman said, and from the minuscule slackening of the old man"s muscles, Micah knew she lied. It hadn't been that long. He suspected no more than a couple of hours at the most. The edges of the horse's track were still sharp. But since she had, unwittingly or otherwise, told him in fairly close terms what he needed to know, he decided a little face-saving couldn't hurt.
The muzzle of his carbine came up, pointed at the sky. "My thanks. You've been right helpful."
He wasn't about to turn his back on the young buck, in case the knife might yet hurtle the distance between them. One of Sticker's talents was a little sideways style of shuffle. Micah egged the horse on, showing off, until brush and trees came between him and the camp. Only then did he click the carbine's safety on and thrust the gun back into the scabbard. Straightening the horse out, he shook the reins and put him into a steady lope. North, toward the border. He was catching up.� Slow, but he was getting there.
