the Bounty Hunters (1953) Read Online Free PDF Page B

his sight it will cease to have ever existed.
    But now you're back and he's going to a lot of trouble to make you quit again. It must be very important to him. What did Madora say: You might be mad enough to do this just so you can throw it back in Deneen's face. Does that make sense? I don't know. But this time there's no quitting. The sooner he realizes it, the better. It will either straighten him out, or drive him crazier than he already is. But it is hard to feel sorry for him.

    Chapter 4
    Early afternoon of the third day, in high timbered country, they looked out over a yellow stretch of plain to see smoke rising from the hills beyond. It lifted lazily in a wavering thin column above the ragged hillcrests.
    From here, Bowers said, it could even be a barbecue. He put his glasses on the spot and focused, clearing the haze, drawing the thin spire closer. He studied the land silently.
    Coming from a draw beyond that first row of hills, he said then. I would say two miles.
    Not much more, Flynn said. A trail cuts through the trough of the hills directly across from us.
    What's there that will burn?
    Nothing.
    A house?
    Not unless it was built in the last six months. It would be a jacale and brush houses don't burn that long.
    Well, maybe it's' He would have said, A wagon or wagon train, but he stopped, remembering the Esteban family that Flynn had described to him being only a day or so ahead of them; and he felt suddenly self-conscious, as if Flynn were reading his thoughts; and he said, I don't know.
    You were going to say wagons, weren't you?
    Bowers nodded.
    They had dismounted. Now they stepped into the saddles and nudged their mounts out of the timber diagonally down the slope that fell to the plain, and reaching the level they followed the base of the hill through head-high brush, keeping the plain on their left. They went on almost two miles until the plain began to crumble into depressions and the brush patches thickened, and when finally the flatness gave way to rockier ground they turned from the hill and moved across slowly so there would be no dust. They were beyond the smoke column, which had thinned, and now they doubled back more than a mile before climbing into timber again, following switchbacks single file as the hill rose steeper.
    Near the crest, they tied their mounts and both drew Springfield carbines from the saddle boots.
    Bowers lifted a holstered revolving pistol which hung from the saddle horn and secured it to the gun belt low on his hip. Watching him, Flynn's elbow tightened against his body to feel the heavy bulk of his own pistol beneath the coat.
    Ready?
    Bowers nodded and they moved up the remaining dozen yards of the hill, brushing the pine branches silently. At its crest the hill flattened into a narrow grove, thick with pi+|ons. They passed through in a half-crouch and went down on hands and knees when the trees ended abruptly in a sandy slope that dropped before them more than a hundred feet. Below, the pines took up again, but here were taller and more thinly scattered. Through them, they could see patches of the trail which passed through the trough of the hill.
    And directly below them, through a wide smooth-sand clearing, they saw the charred shapes of three wagons.
    They were no longer wagons but retained some identity in a grotesque, blackened flimsiness; two of the wagons, their trees pointing skyward and only half burned, were rammed into the bed of the third which was over on its side. The mules had been cut from the traces and were not in sight.
    Smoke from the suffocated fire hung like hot steam over the rubble of partly burned equipment cooking gear, cases of provisions, clothing and bedding heaped and draped about the wagons. The smoke was thinning to nothing above the wreckage, but its stench carried higher, even to the two men.
    A bolt of red material, like a saber slash across the flesh-colored sand, trailed from a scorched end at one of the wagons to the base of a