So Watchman had a set of limits, beginning and end, and had to work within them: he knew Joe wouldn’t shoot earlier than a given moment, nor would he delay past a certain moment. Between those two moments lay the uncertainty and that was where intuition had to sustain his judgment. And if his intuition was wrong it would be too bad because a mere graze from a .375 magnum would knock him twenty feet across the earth and a solid hit anywhere in the torso would kill.
It was no comfort knowing how likely it was that Joe wasn’t there at all. He had to assume he was there; odds didn’t enter into it.
…. Coming out the bunkhouse door he had the pistol in his fist across his chest, the muzzle under the jacket lapel so it wouldn’t throw a telltale flicker. He paused fractionally on the top step, still under the porch roof, and lifted his head as if to look at the weather; actually he was scanning the ring of trees. He didn’t expect to see anything and he didn’t. He waited long enough to be spotted but not long enough to be shot; he turned past the supporting pillar and went down the steps, taking the top two deliberately and then abruptly jumping the rest when the rain hit him. He broke into a slow lumbering run along the outside curve of the driveway, took four measured running strides and then doubled the pace without warning. Three strides that way and he dropped back to a dogtrot and the sudden noise of the exploding cartridge ripped a gash through the fabric of the rain.
He heard the bullet rip up ten inches of the airplane fountain but he was already reacting then, diving straigh toward the trees and skidding across the grass on his belly.
He slid up against the tiny bole of a juniper and tried to see through the branches. Buck Stevens spoke loudly through the open window to his right: “You’re surrounded, Joe. Unload and come out.”
Watchman had the pistol up but he didn’t want to use it. Stevens said, “You all right Sam?”
“Come on out, Joe,” Watchman said. “Nobody wants to shoot you.”
Then he heard the snap of brush and he took the chance: gathered his legs and ran half the distance to the trees and flopped down before Joe could tag him. But Joe didn’t shoot at all and Watchman wasted a little time before the crawled off to his right and got around the far side of the clump and ran straight into the woods.
In the lofty pine cathedrals the light was murky and rain splattered the puddles, confusing the ear; but Joe was on the run and Watchman heard him—ahead of him and up to the left. There was a dim reflection of lightning somewhere far behind Watchman. He moved toward the sound, going from tree to tree. Thunder crashed back there in the mountains to the north. Watchman had been waiting for it and when it began to roll he broke into a run, knowing that Joe’s hearing wasn’t going to be very acute right now after that magnum charge had gone off right next to his ear.
He stopped forty yards into the woods and listened.
There was the drip of rain and he heard a door slam behind him. His eyes burned through the grey light, seeking corner-of-the-eye movement but when something drew his attention and he stared it turned out to be a squirrel leaping from branch to branch.
Then a little grey bird made a brief racket and spun up into the rain and Watchman swung that way, moving with more care, smothering his sound.
Something had scared that bird. He reached the spot and froze and turned his head slowly to pick up what he could on his retinas and the flats of his eardrums. There was a faint murmur of distant thunder; he hadn’t seen any lightning this time. The rainfall was distinctly thinner than it had been five minutes ago; the edge of the storm was nearby. But no sign of Joe.
He kept moving. His clothes clung and grew heavy inside the slicker and his feet squelched as he walked. The diminishing rain made a spongy hiss. He began to picture Joe squatting in the cool dripping shadows like a malignant mushroom waiting for Watchman with the big rifle lifted; he stopped in his tracks, afraid.
Which way now? He couldn’t get this close and then lose Joe again; it was too much to ask.
Uphill. That would be the instinct: uphill, west, back toward the Reservation. Get off Rand’s property, get back to the sanctuary of the White Mountains.
He went up, angling left because that was west. The curve of the ground took him over a little hump and he keened the dripping forest all the way, looking for sign that Joe had passed this way. But the matted floor of needles retained nearly nothing by way of impressions.
The music of water ahead. He crossed the slope and it became a little louder and he kept moving west, drawn by the sound.
The water came down from the higher reaches; it plunged along like a thick dark tongue, probing its way into cracks and gullies, dividing around tree-trunks and cascading through the creases in the land. As Watchman moved toward it the earth became treacherous with slime because all the run off was sliding down beneath his boots to join the rain-swollen stream.
There was a distinct line of twigs and debris that ran along parallel to the torrent two or three feet higher than the surface of the water and this meant the level had dropped significantly in the past several minutes. Half an hour ago this had been a flash flood. Now it was subsiding but there was still power in it, a tremendous volume of water cascading down onto the plains somewhere out in the middle of Rand’s acres.
It meant something important: it meant Joe hadn’t crossed, couldn’t have crossed. Joe was still somewhere on this side of the river.
And he wouldn’t have gone downstream. Not back into Rand property.
He was above here. Either running or standing to fight; but he was above here.
Watchman clawed his way up from the flooding, up to the spine of the razorback, up the slope of the spine through the lodgepole forest. He heard himself wheezing as if he needed oiling: but Joe was in bad shape too, worse shape probably. Watchman pumped the air in and out and ran on up into the rain, not blinking as drops splashed his face.
He wanted to get to Joe before Joe got beyond the trees because here in the confinement of the pines the range of the big rifle was meaningless; out in the open there’d be no way to get near him.
He ran past the edge of the storm and then it wasn’t raining any more; an aftermist hung in the air and the smell was thick and strong, the pine resin carrying on the mist.
A scar of rocks ran across the slope from north to south, clear of trees in a belt a hundred feet wide. It was boulders and loose broken shale and Joe could be staked out behind any rock. Watchman looked both ways but it went on forever, he couldn’t go around it.
He moved along the fringe of the trees. The water pelted down through the rocks to his left; he moved to the right.
And found Joe’s spoor: the heel of Joe’s boot had left its impression in the earth.
It was an indentation that had been made after the rain because its lips weren’t washed in. Within the past fifteen minutes Joe had come this way and the heel-print pointed straight into the rocks, or across them.
He took it slow and listened to the beat of his pulse. Boulder to boulder; lie up, run, lie up again. Here the shale had been disturbed, the pale dry sides of chips had been overturned. Here the groundwater was still seeping into a depression which therefore couldn’t have been made long ago. Here the side of a boulder had been scraped white, perhaps by the inadvertent scratch of a rifle’s steel buttplate or the buckle of a belt.
The trail of little signs led him straight across the belt of rocks and into the stunted timber above it. Watchman discarded the rain-slicker and Rand’s hat and jacket. He glanced at the sky: an hour’s light left, and things were clearing up ahead of him, ribbons of blue beginning to show through as the clouds broke apart. Sundown soon.