Free Hombre by Elmore Leonard

just inside the shade of the trees. Russell was just past him. He was sitting down with his blanket open on theground and his boots off. He was pulling on a pair of curl-toed Apache moccasins, not paying any attention to Dr. Favor who stood there like he had caught Russell and was holding him from getting away, actually pointing his revolver at him. Dr. Favor’s chest was moving up and down with his breathing.
    Mendez moved in a little closer, watching Russell. “Why didn’t you wait for us?” he said. Russell didn’t bother to answer. You weren’t even sure he heard Mendez.
    “He doesn’t care what we do,” Dr. Favor said. “Long as he gets away.”
    “Man,” Mendez said. “What’s the matter with you? We have to think about this and talk it over. What if one of us just ran off? You think that would be a good thing?”
    Russell raised his leg to pull a moccasin on. They were the high Apache kind, like leggings which come up past your knees. He began rolling it down, stuffing the pants leg into it and fastening it about calf-high with a strap of something. He didn’t look up until he had finished this.
    Then he said, “What do you want?”
    “What do we want?” Mendez said, surprised. “We want to get out of here.”
    “What’s stopping you?” Russell said.
    Mendez kept frowning. “What’s the matter with you?”
    Russell had both moccasins on now. He took his boots and rolled them inside the blanket. Doing this, not looking at us, he said, “You want to go with me, uh?”
    “With you? We all go together. This isn’t happening to just one person,” Mendez said. “This is happening to all of us.”
    “But you want me to show you the way,” Russell said.
    “Sure you show the way. We follow. But we’re all together.”
    “I don’t know,” Russell said, very slowly, like he was thinking it over. He looked up at Dr. Favor, directly at him. “I can’t ride with you. Maybe you can’t walk with me…uh?”
    For a minute, maybe even longer, nobody said a word. Russell finished rolling his blanket and tied it up with a piece of line he’d had inside.
    When he stood up, Mendez said—not surprised or excited or frowning now, but so serious his voice wasn’t even very loud—he said, “What does that mean?”
    Russell looked at him. “It means I can’t ride with them and maybe they can’t walk with me. Maybe they don’t walk the way I walk. You sabe that, Mexican?”
    “I helped you like you’re my own son!” Mendez’s voice rose and his eyes opened so that you could see all the whites. But Russell wasn’tlooking. He was walking off. Mendez kept shouting, “What’s the matter with you!”
    “Let him go,” Dr. Favor said.
    We stood there watching Russell move off through the trees.
    “What do you expect?” Dr. Favor said. “Do you expect somebody like that to act the way a decent person would?”
    “I helped him,” Mendez said, as if he couldn’t believe what had happened.
    “All right, now he’ll help us,” Dr. Favor said. “He won’t have anything to do with us, but we can follow him, can’t we?”
    Nobody thought to try to answer that question at the time, because it wasn’t really a question. I thought about it later, though. I thought about it for the next two or three hours as we tried to keep up with Russell.
    It was about 3:30 or 4 o’clock when the holdup took place, with already a lot of shade on this side of the hills. From then on the light kept getting dimmer. I mean right from the time we started following Russell it was hard to keep him in sight, even when he was out in the open.
    In daylight the land was spotted with brush and rock, dead and dusty looking, but with some color, light green and dark green and brown and whitish yellow. In the evening it all turned brown and hazy looking, with high peaks all around us once we’dgone on down through the other side of the pines out into open country again.
    I say open, but by that I mean only there weren’t