Free Brian Garfield by Tripwire

suspicious was in danger of getting killed merely as a precautionary measure.
    In a midmorning blaze of heat he reached Tanques Verdes where the four horses ahead of him had watered. Under the shade of the towering algodones Boag went from the trading post to the blacksmith’s stable to the saloon asking questions about the three men with the packhorse. An hour’s questioning convinced him that the three men had not been Mr. Pickett or Stryker. As he had guessed there was one relatively young man, a Mexican, and two middle-aged gringos. One of the two gringos had stayed with the packhorse at all times during the six or seven hours the men had spent in Tanques Verdes four days ago. None of them had said anything that anybody remembered about where they were headed. They had eaten supper and ridden into Mexico at sundown.
    Boag filled his canteen and replenished his food and rode out after them.
    A gauze of dust hung low over the desert. He rode past the heap of stones that marked the international boundary and climbed toward the foothills in Mexico.
    The track was vague and intermittent. Winds had blown the prints over, sometimes for hundreds of yards at a stretch. Boag scowled irritably at the earth and often had to guide on flimsy probabilities: an iron-scratched stone, a carelessly broken greasewood branch where a horse had brushed too close. Every fifteen or twenty minutes he would come across a patch on the lee side of some boulders or brush where the prints of the four horses were still identifiable. He hadn’t lost them but he was losing time with all the circling and back-tracking it took to stay with them.
    In the past twelve hours he had climbed a steady and barely perceptible incline and was probably two thousand feet higher in elevation than he’d been last night; the difference in sun-temperature was apparent and it was no longer impossible to travel by day. He pushed on through the sun hours and only stopped for half an hour to noon on the north side of a hill.
    By now of course somebody back in Yuma would have gone looking for the Uncle Sam and probably they’d found her on the Gila but the tracks had had several more days to blow over and it was not likely any posse would take up the hunt. Johnson-Yaeger would complain to the Territorial Governor at Prescott and in due course an official inquiry would be lodged in Mexico City, probably identifying Mr. Jed Pickett, and as usual it would be put into some dusty drawer and ignored. Mexico City was still busy getting out from under all the problems that had been created by the reign of Maximilian and Carlotta and they didn’t have time down there to poke around looking for gringo fugitives.
    He was relieved not to be burdened any longer by the weighty presence of the old woman and the persnickety little Pilar who wanted to be called Carmen.
    Angling more directly south than before, the tracks led him up across foothills into a minor range of mountains with which he was not familiar; the Geronimo chase had not taken the Buffalo soldiers this far west in Mexico. There was timber up here, the ground was covered with a silent lawn of pine needles and the late afternoon sun flickered through the pines like a moving signal lamp as Boag climbed toward the high passes, keening the ground.
    It was a hard country for tracking; the pine needles did not take impressions and hold them. But the ground was soft underneath and in bare spots they had left hoofprints in the rotted half-mud. It was one of those open mountain forests with no underbrush; the high corridors ran unobstructed between rows of lanced pines and the air was very cool with a sharp coniferous pungency. Boag’s horse moved along with very little sound and for a moment he was reminded of a church he had once rested in, an empty church in some mountain village south of Fort Defiance.
    He was hurrying the horse because he knew there would be no tracking after dark in these woods. At sunset