Uncertain Justice

There was a thing ... an aura about a man meeting another man in a desperate fight and triumphing. If Underwood should fall now, Kehoe would have bested him and Kehoe would be seen in a far different light from just another bail bondsman.

Though obviously badly hurt and worn down by travel, the fugitive began to change in the bounty hunter's eyes. In a moment, Underwood wasn't a wounded man needing help. Instead, the escaped prisoner was just a dark silhouette, a target standing on the other side of the clearing. Underwood's facial features dissolved into blankness; his tired, red-rimmed eyes disappeared as Kehoe began to concentrate on the middle of the other man's mass.

"You almost got away again, didn't you?" Kehoe challenged Miles, his voice rough and belligerent in the grip of unaccustomed dark emotions. "But they got lead into you this time, huh?"

Kehoe looked behind Underwood, looking again for a search party that might not be that far away. His glance came back to Underwood and abruptly he made up his mind. Miles saw decision spread over the man's face and noted the effect on the other's stance.

"We're all by ourselves out here, Underwood," observed Kehoe softly. He hesitated, licking suddenly dry lips as he searched for the words. "Ya know, we all gotta do what we gotta do, you know?" he said. There was a faint tinge of plaintiveness in his voice. "This is just between you and me."

"Of course," Miles replied, speaking for the first time. Stepping quickly to his left, he palmed the heavy pistol on his belt and fired as it came level. His reactions had always been fast and his hand was close to the pistol.

The move caught Kehoe by surprise. He'd expected Underwood to protest ... to beg for his life.

When the wounded man began to speak, Kehoe hesitated, waiting to hear what he would say. It was time lost that could never be retrieved.

Kehoe's finger had been alongside the receiver for safety. It was something taught to all infantrymen. He could no more have walked the wilderness with his finger on the trigger than he could have flown over that same forest.

It took a small, nearly immeasurable amount of time for him to slip his finger into the trigger guard and begin to pull the trigger. From start to finish, once he realized Underwood was pulling a gun on him, it took a tiny increment of time to fire but the minuscule delays still cost him badly. Even so, he got off the first round, but he had to sacrifice accuracy to do it.

Seeing Underwood's hand rising fast, Kehoe hurried and jerked the trigger to fire a round in the direction of the fugitive. It kicked dirt to the fugitive's right and whipped off into the distance. The retired Army officer felt a blow on his lower right ribcage--then a searing pain there--but it didn't stop him from shooting again. He pulled the trigger on the semi-automatic rifle three times, his finger moving as quickly as it could.

Miles continued to step sideways, his motion slightly downhill because of the slope. He saw the stranger's movements were hampered by the big backpack he wore--the butt of the rifle was pushed against it, making it just that much more difficult for the man to correct his aim to the right. A flicker of angry frustration, accompanied by a rising desperation, crossed the other man's face.

Miles heard more bullets rocketing past to his right as he dodged left, the thwack of the nearly supersonic slugs whined away behind him. His arm continued to rise, the elbow bent only slightly now as he thumbed back the hammer and squeezed the trigger again.

A second round smashed into Kehoe's body, jolting him badly. This one hit him in the center of his chest and he sensed something terrible was happening. A sudden desperation quickened his motion. He twisted his body around to bring the muzzle of the AR-15 into better alignment and shot once more. He pulled the trigger again and then twice more as fast as he could, trying to suppress the escaped fugitive's fire.

Miles slipped in last year's pine needles. Without warning, his left leg slid out to his side and abruptly, he was falling. He ignored the fall except to thrust out his left hand to catch himself, trying to get off another round while he still could. With his right arm fully extended now, his finger caressed the trigger, squeezing gently until the hammer slipped off the sear and sent the firing pin forward to strike the base of the cartridge in the cylinder.

Even as the loud crack of the pistol sounded in his ears, Miles felt something slam into the side of his head. He sagged, a puppet with its strings cut. His left arm collapsed and his chest hit the ground, jarring the wound in his side.

Miles tried to catch his breath while he searched for an enemy hidden suddenly in a foggy red haze. He fought a weakness that spread throughout his body. He tried to bring the pistol back up to a shooting position but he knew he was moving too slowly.

He found the other man on his knees, the muzzle of the rifle digging into the soil and out of line with Miles' body. The rifle fell from the stranger's hands, the stock scattering old pine needles and making an audible thump as it hit the ground.

Abandoning his effort to keep his pistol lined up on target, Miles dropped the fist holding the weapon to the ground and watched as the other man tore at his shirt, ripping the buttons off to find out how badly he was hurt.

His chin tucked hard against his chest so he could see, Kehoe stared at the two small holes in the center of his chest. Bright crimson began to flow from both but the welling of blood was brief. The last two rounds had smashed into the center of his chest and it took only a few beats for his heart to destroy itself. Kehoe looked up to stare at Miles as the fugitive struggled to get to his feet.

"No," Kehoe protested, his voice husky and strained. "This isn't...."

His strength left him and he fell forward. He looked wonderingly at a stray pinecone a few inches in front of his eyes. The cone slipped down a dark tunnel until was impossibly far away. He was cold and couldn't feel his fingers any more. There was only darkness.

Miles saw the man's eyes lose their focus and become fixed. The man's hoarse breathing stopped and air left the lungs in a lengthy hiss. The sharp odor of excrement and urine filled the air as the stranger's sphincter muscle and bladder gave way. The left arm jerked and both legs trembled as nerve endings fired, the neurons trying to send messages to a brain that could no longer receive them.

Concentrating on each movement, Miles got his knees under him but could rise no further. Life saving adrenalin was leaching quickly out of his system. It had no effect now. He hurt in many places but the pain was most severe on the upper right side of his head. He looked at the body a few yards away. Except for brown hair stirred by the breeze, the strange man did not move.

"Who the hell are you?" he whispered to the corpse. "And why'd you come after me?" The sun was hot on the back of his neck. It felt good. The loss of blood had made him sensitive to the chill lately and he appreciated the warmth.

"If you're going to kill a man," he said irritably, mumbling to the body over against the trees, "don't be talking so much. Just do it." Come to think of it, there were a number of things he wanted to get off his chest and he'd do that very thing ... just as soon as he caught his breath.

His head hurt badly, the pain a pulsing, bloated monster that threatened to consume him. He stopped, confused. What had been a clearing lit by a brilliant afternoon sun was a ghostly meadow illuminated by a moon shining through the treetops. It was cold.

He was stretched out, belly down on the bare ground without his parka. The vision through his right eye was fuzzy, badly blurred. That bothered him more than the pain. He struggled to sit up.

It took a while. Finally managing to get to his feet, Miles stumbled drunkenly toward the man who'd done his best to kill him. He stooped carefully. He wanted to look at the man's face and pulled at an arm to turn him face up, but the cold night air had accelerated the body's advancement into rigor. The corpse was rigid, its arms and legs frozen into the indignity of sudden and violent death.

In his weakness, Miles couldn't move the body at all. Miles didn't have a clear view of the stranger's features but, from what he could see, he didn't think he had ever met the guy. Too dizzy to stand any longer, Miles dropped heavily to the ground beside the body.

Detached, he strained to recall the stranger as he'd seen him across the small clearing in the forest. There'd been no badge on his chest, the man had never said he was any kind of policeman, and there hadn't been anything on his jacket to indicate he was a member of any of the law enforcement agencies. There was nothing to explain why the man had made the decision to kill Miles.

Monumentally weary, Miles struggled to his feet and tried to figure out where his rucksack was. He'd been ... over there somewhere. His memory was an insubstantial thing, flickering on and off without warning. After a few minutes frustrating search, he found the backpack a few yards downhill and across the clearing. With his right eye closed--he could see nothing but indistinct shapes through it anyway--he staggered to the tree against which his rifle was propped. Clutching at the trunk, he lowered himself carefully to the ground.

It was hard pulling the rucksack over his shoulders. He couldn't seem to get his right arm through the straps on that side. Looking down, he found he was still clutching his revolver and fumbled to get it back in its holster. When he'd accomplished that, he congratulated himself for managing to get the loop of rawhide over the hammer to hold the gun in place. It was a marvelous thing to have done.

Then he thought to punch out the used cartridges and reload but it was too hard to get the thong off the hammer again. He had used three rounds but had another three ready in the cylinder. Dreamily, he contemplated the symmetry of three unused bullets, three expended ones, in just one gun. He nodded his head in satisfaction--and that hurt enough to bring him back to semi-alertness.

He probed with cold, stiff fingers to find a place on the right side of his head where a slug from the stranger's rifle had plowed a three-inch furrow. The cold had partly anesthetized his scalp, or the throbbing of the wound was already so bad the additional pain of his probing was lost in the background. Either way, he was able to explore the wound and tear a wide piece of fabric from the tail of his shirt to wet with water from his canteen.

His shirts sure were taking a beating these days, he thought. He wondered if he had any left that weren't ripped apart for bandages and pads. An amused chuckle escaped his lips. He had to suppress more insane giggles that bubbled up despite a resolve not to. He bit down hard on his left hand to control them. Madness wasn't all that far away if he couldn't stop. There were things that had to get done. He couldn't afford all this foolishness. He nurtured the frustration, using it as an anchor to keep himself centered on what was doing.

He cleaned off the blood as well as he could by feel and mopped off more from around his right eye. It helped him see a little better but there was more wrong with his vision than just being covered with dried blood. Distantly, he knew he had a concussion, if not worse. He couldn't do a damn thing about it though ... and that was so sad. He sighed deeply. It wasn't fair. Ruthlessly, he pressed a hand against the wound in his side. The agony there flashed brightly and brought his thoughts back into focus.

Wearily, he got the rucksack on his back and stood, using his carbine to lever himself up. Warriors from the Wolf Clan helped steady him as he swayed in the rising wind. He held tight to the tree trunk for another minute or two, but he resolutely forced himself into motion when the world slowed its spinning. He couldn't wait to see if the dizzy progression of trees, bushes, and rocks revolving around him would ever fully stop. His pursuers had probably heard the shooting. He had to assume they had. He had to move.

He hurt. He clung to the pain as a drowning swimmer does a life ring. He staggered when his foot came down on a rock that shifted under his foot. Falling, he barely caught himself on hands that were bruised from other falls. His chin on his chest and his one good eye half-closed, he climbed to his feet and lurched into motion again. There was room for only a single idea in his universe; he had to keep putting one foot in front of the other and when he couldn't do that any more, he would crawl.

§

Owens blew on his fingers to warm them while he examined a map by the light of a Coleman lantern, wondering where the escapee had gone. Though they knew Underwood had been hit at least once. They'd found blood spatters on the rock-strewn slope below the stone building but they didn't know how badly he was hurt. Blood had also been found a few hundred yards downstream and on both sides of the river, so they knew he'd gotten across. The fugitive was no longer trapped in the relatively small area between the stream and the rock wall of the mesa.

Trackers found footprints leading away from the river and in a wide circle back behind the marshals' camp. The trackers lost Underwood's trail, though, when two days of afternoon showers, typical at this time of year in the Rocky Mountains, wiped away all trace of the occasional blood drops and faint tracks they'd been following. The trail had been leading south, though, along the lower reaches of the long mountain ridge that formed the eastern boundary of the valley. The law enforcement officers heard some firing down to the south a couple days after Underwood's escape, but 'south' covered an enormous amount of territory.

Owens traced Underwood's known route on the geological survey map, noting the concentric lines that delineated the altitude of the surrounding terrain. The wounded man had climbed the lower slope of the eastern mountain at first, but he'd come down after he was clear of the Marshal's encampment, probably to get to comparatively level terrain for easier travel. If he extended the line Underwood had apparently been following, it looked as if the man was, in fact, trying to get to the south.

It made sense. Wounded and losing blood, Underwood would find it difficult to traverse the steep slopes of the higher mountains. He had to go south towards broad, flat valleys and heavy forests. Yeah, down that way was where Owens would go if he were hurt and needing a place to hide for a while. Owens tapped the map with a pencil, his decision made. He folded it and put it away. He decided to forgo a final walk around the campsite.

The weather had turned bad--someone had yelled an announcement of snowflakes drifting down from the dark a while ago. It was late and he was tired. He still hadn't acclimated to the altitude. He didn't know of anything he couldn't put off until tomorrow.

§

Miles stumbled and fell. He rested his head on the ground. The breeze blew dry, brittle pine needles into his face and the bloody bandage on his head. Tiny pricks of pain provided a moment of coherent thought and he shuddered as an icy wind worked its way through poorly fastened buttons to sweaty skin beneath.

The cold penetrated a delirium that was getting deeper and more difficult to break. The wind blew harder, tugging the front of his parka apart to expose his chest. Worried Wolf Clan warriors caught at his clothing, trying to pull him to his feet.

Able to concentrate for the first time in a long time, he crawled on hands and knees to a blowdown and leaned against the rotting trunk. He took advantage of the momentary clarity to look around and take stock of his situation. Absentmindedly, he brushed a few stray pine needles off his face with a hand he could only barely control.

At least the scalp wound wasn't bleeding anymore. The cold had constricted capillaries running just below the skin, allowing the blood to clot. It hurt, but that meant nothing in itself. It was one among many bits of data, no more.

Detached, he filed the information away and looked down at himself. It wasn't easy. His right eye was covered with blood again but he didn't bother to clean it. It was nearly useless anyway. He was awfully dirty, from what little he could see. He stared at his right hand. He wished he could feel it.

It was dark again. He couldn't remember the day. It took a while to recall why he was out here in the cold and longer to remember where he was going. That settled, he swallowed a long drink of water and carefully set the canteen down beside his leg.

He adjust his leg's position until it was exactly parallel to the line of the canteen's edge, lifting his thigh and moving it in small increments back and forth and refusing to put it down until he had it perfect. Then he saw the arrangement was all wrong. The leg had been there first--it was the canteen that should be required to adjust. He worked until he had them aligned correctly. When the canteen fell over, he admired the sound of the gurgle of water that poured out. He chewed on the jerky and finally got it down. He looked around, moving his head slowly.

Somewhere along the way he'd lost his rucksack. There was a vague memory of tucking it into a crevice in the rocks and laboriously scooping loose dirt and pine needles over it. He hadn't wanted the backpack to be lonely and he'd patted it tenderly for a long while before leaving it. In a detached corner of his mind he was aware how foolish that had been and dimly knew he'd wonder about it some day. Tonight, he had no energy to spare for speculation.

The M-4 carbine was still over his shoulder and, patting the pockets in his parka, he found two full magazines for that weapon and a box of cartridges for his pistol. In an inside pocket, he found more jerky.

His revolver was still in its holster and the large canteen was hooked to his belt. He worked a piece of jerky out of his pocket and began to gnaw on another tough strip of dried meat. He badly needed the energy it would supply. Moving his jaw hurt his head, but it hurt if he just sat there too. He figured it might as well hurt for a reason. He put another sliver of deer jerky in his mouth and chewed mechanically.

Wolf Clan brothers, still with him after four days of painful walking, pointed to the shimmering glow ringing the moon. Bad storm coming they said, conferring among themselves. Big storm, they added.

He nodded, agreeing without interest. The motion made his head swim. It was time to rest. He couldn't make any progress in the dark with no stars or moon to guide him. He nestled closer to the trunk of the old tree trunk and worked hard to force unresponsive fingers to zip the parka up to his chin.

§

The rider reacted quickly, snatching the battered Stetson before it actually came free and jammed it back onto his head. The wind whipped higher, trying to tear the hat away again. Tentatively, Cal MacPherson took his hand away from the crown, waiting to see if it would stay there or not.

NOAA weather radio had warned of a freak cold front coming down from the arctic and it looked like the bad weather would soon be here. Already it had forced him down into the valleys and canyons from the heights where he thought Underwood would be. But if the storm was pushing him down into the lowlands where travel was slower and harder, it probably would do the same to the fugitive.

The visibility was decreasing rapidly. This morning, the hunting guide had been able to see across the valley and beyond to the tall peaks of this part of the Rockies. Still early afternoon, the clouds had closed in and it took a lot of effort and much guessing just to identify the features in the terrain on just this side of the valley. He stopped in the lee of a mass of boulders to give his horses a break from the wind and wondered if he should turn back. The thought was attractive--but he wouldn't do it. He'd been hired to find Underwood and he was going to do that.