We moved on that way for a little, slowly, with Cole hanging out of the saddle, studying the tracks.
“They’re following,” Cole said.
“Any better sense of how many?”
Cole studied the tracks as we rode.
After maybe a mile of silence, he said, “Can’t really tell much. Might be quite a few.”
By midafternoon the trail turned west, and by late afternoon we were climbing. We had to move the animals slower and rest them some. By dark, we were in the foothills of some mountains and the temperature was cooler. We camped under an overhang against the hillside, near a spring. There was grass. We let the animals graze on a long tether. We sat in the dark again that night and ate jerky and hardtack and drank some whiskey.
“We ain’t going to be able to follow these tracks much more if they keep heading up,” I said.
“We can look for broken branches,” Cole said. “Campfire ashes, the leavin’s from a meal, horse droppings, maybe some human waste.”
“If they keep going straight,” I said. “You got any idea where we are?”
“Two days southwest of Chester,” Cole said.
“You know what mountains these are?”
“Nope.”
“You think we’re closing on them at all?” I said.
“Can’t say, but I know Allie ain’t much of a rider. She may slow them down.”
“What are we going to do about her?” I said.
“We’ll figure that out when we get there,” Cole said.
“They’ll use her as a shield, Virgil, why they brought her.”
“ ’Course they will. Wouldn’t you?”
There was no moon. The sky was clouded. With our blankets around us, we sat in near absolute darkness. We couldn’t see each other. We didn’t know where we were. There was only the sound of the animals eating grass, and trickling water, and our voices. It felt like being the only living human thing in the universe.
“Hard business,” I said. “Hard business.”
“It’s all hard business,” Cole said, “what we do.”
“You all right?” I said.
Cole was silent for a time and then he said, “All right?”
“How you feel,” I said. “ ’Bout Allie and all.”
Cole was silent again, and the silence seemed so long that I thought maybe he’d gone to sleep.
Then he said, “Everett, we been together now awhile. Can’t exactly say how long, but long. And there ain’t anyone I’d rather do this work with. You’re as good as anybody I seen, ’cept maybe the Shelton boys… and me.”
“That’s pretty good,” I said.
“And the reason you ain’t as good as the Sheltons or me ain’t got nothing to do with steady, or fast, or fortuitous.”
I knew he meant fortitude.
“The reason the above-named folks are better’n you,” Cole said, “is ’cause you got feelin’s.”
“Hell, Virgil, everybody got feelin’s.”
“Feelin’s get you killed,” Virgil said.
“You tellin’ me you don’t care about Allie right now?”
Again, there was silence. I could hear one of the horses snort, as if maybe he’d gotten an insect up his nose. It was a comforting sound in the vast, black silence. It sounded familiar and calm.
After a while Cole said, “I cared about Allie in town. And I’ll care about her when I get her back.”
“But right now?” I said.
I could feel Cole thinking it over.
“Gimme that bottle,” he said, and put his hand out and touched my leg so I knew where to hand him the bottle. I put the bottle in his hand and heard him drink. Then the bottle touched my leg again and I took it back and drank some.
“Right now,” Cole said, “there’s something runnin’, and I’m trying to catch it.”
I heard him stir around as if to get more comfortable, and then he was silent. I had the first half of the night. I shifted my back a little against the boulder where we were, and sipped some whiskey and sat in the thick darkness and listened.
The next morning, we went mostly on foot, leading the animals. We looked for any sign that would tell us they’d been there, and the sign was sparse. About midmorning, we worked our way around a side of ledge to the top of a valley. In the bottom of the valley was a river that led out into the foothills and, beyond that, to the flatlands. In the flatland, on the south side of the river, was movement. We stopped at the top of the valley and looked at it.
I got a spyglass out of my saddlebag and handed it to Cole. He telescoped it open and looked down at the movement. His eyes weren’t no better than mine. But it was his woman they took.
“Four riders,” Cole said after a while. “And a pack animal. One of the riders is a woman.”
He handed me the glass and I looked. They were too far to make out that it was Allie, but who the hell else would it be.
“Picked up a third man,” I said. “Musta been waiting someplace with the packhorse.”
Cole didn’t answer. He sat motionless on his horse, staring down at the plain.
“We can work our way down to the river easy enough,” he said, “without them seeing us.”
I lowered the glass.
“Then we can sit tight and rest the animals, and us, until the sun goes down and they make camp. Then we can ride out and get close.”
Below us, in the foothills to the north of the river, there was movement.
“That way, we can lay flat and get the lay of how things are,” Cole said. “ ’Fore we go in.”
I put the glass back up to my eye and looked at the movement in the foothills. It was Indians, riding close together among the pine trees, staying behind the hills. It was too hard to count through the glass with much accuracy. But I guessed twelve. I handed the glass to Cole and pointed. He studied the Indians without expression.
“Southern Cheyenne?” he said.
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe Kiowa. I think they’re carrying them little medicine shields like Kiowas have.”
Cole looked some more.
“Might be,” he said. “Make any difference?”
“Nope. Neither one of ’em likes us.”
“Got no reason to,” he said. “How many you count?”
“Twelve.”
“About what I count,” Cole said. “Maybe a few more.”
“They’re doggin’ those folks,” I said.
“Yep,” Cole said.
“They’ll be a problem.”
“Speculate that they will,” Cole said. “Nothin’ we can do about it.”
“No,” I said.
“So we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing,” Cole said, and moved his horse forward and let it begin to pick its way down the side of the valley, with the extra saddle horse behind him.
I followed with the mule. As we got down into the valley, the Indians were out of sight behind the hills. We wouldn’t see them again until we got out of the valley. Then we might see more of them than we wanted to. If the thought was bothering Cole, he didn’t mention it. Nor did he show any sign of being in a hurry. He was going where he was going to go at the pace he needed to go at, and he was taking me with him.
