McAllister 5 by Matt Chisholm

Author:Matt Chisholm [Chisholm, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 19th Century, western action, peter watts, matt chisholm, wild west fiction, western fiction ebook, gunfighters and outlaws
Publisher: Piccadilly Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven

As McAllister headed down into the basin, he knew that he was constrained in a number of ways. He was wounded for one thing and that would curtail his speed and scope on foot. This was serious, for what lay ahead of him most likely would demand fast work on foot. His only animal was a mule, which could mean that with his quarry mounted on the mare McAllister would be left standing. Yet if the affair once more became a flight across the desert the mule would be some kind of an asset, for a mule would go on without water after the best horse had dropped.

His greatest limitation was that he had no concrete idea of where the man could be.

So he gambled. Wounded, the man would need a position which would offer him security and a good sight of the surrounding country. He not only wanted to be out of sight, but he needed to be in a position of being forewarned of anybody approaching him. The nest of rocks where McAllister and Ana had stopped would provide both. The situation called for a kind of mental double-bluff. It was an obvious place to be; therefore the man would not be there. If McAllister thought the place too obvious, he would dismiss it from his mind and not search there.

What interested McAllister was where the man would conceal his horses. They would need to be on grass, but if he hobbled them on the shelf-land, they would be plain to the view of anybody below in the basin. McAllister in a like position would have hobbled one animal on grass at a good distance from the hiding place and kept the other among the rocks to be let out to graze under cover of darkness.

As soon as he was down off the pass, McAllister turned the mule south and made his way first across a wide prairieland and then into deep timber. He rode with the greatest caution, rifle in hand, eyes skinned and ready to shoot at a moving shadow. In the middle of the afternoon he stumbled quite by accident on a hobbled horse. It was the quarry’s own horse, roughly hobbled with rawhide lines which looked as if they had been cut from a lariat. He had sidelined the horse and it was moving quite contentedly as it grazed. It greeted McAllister cheerfully and tried to follow the mule when McAllister started to back-track him. These tracks took him back into timber again, going north, and as McAllister expected were wiped out carefully after a while. McAllister did not waste time hunting tracks again, but continued on north until he came to the edge of timber and looked along the line of the escarpment which was the eastern edge of the shelf upon which the rock shelter stood. From where he had halted he could see distantly the rocks, a small dark smudge in the great sloping stretch of grass.

Now he looked at the sky and assessed how much daylight he had left at his disposal.

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