Free Longhorn Country by Tyler Hatch

escape, and in the dark at that.
    Still, Blaine rode with his fully-loaded rifle out, butt resting on his left thigh, swinging his head from side to side. Having only one eye was more of a handicap than just not being able to see with binocular vision. Swinging the head from one side to the other so as to cover all country brought on a vague dizziness , simply with the motion. It wasn’t enough to make him want to grip the saddle harder, but it didfeel as if he wasn’t quite in full control of his body.
    After he cleared the ridge and picked his way down into a wide canyon with a stream flowing across the sandy floor, the tracks were a little more difficult to find. But he saw the blood spots and the piece of bloody rag where the wounded man had tried to give his injury some attention. Or, maybe even his pard had done it for him, though Blaine, knowing both men, figured this was unlikely. In the world of Hardesty and Rendell, it was Number One first, last and always….
    He had no plan, simply aiming to track these men down now he had started. He had been content to wait a while longer for it was already six months since they had beat him up and taken his eye. But making that move against him and Alamo last night – well, that was a declaration of war as far as Blaine was concerned.
    This time he would end it – and he aimed to ride away the victor.
    He trailed the men coldly and relentlessly, clear through the canyon and into some draws where they had doubled-back and swung off at a southern tangent, trying to cover their tracks all the way. But though he had been only four years old when Morgan had taken him from the Comanche, he had already had a basic knowledge of tracking small animals. During his months of recovery just recently, Running Bird had shown him how to follow man tracks, and the poor covering-up methods that white men used. He had shown Blaine something of an Indian’s way of covering tracks and Blaine wasastounded: no wonder Alamo and his men had found nothing at the riverbank when Running Bird and Long Head had whisked him away with his injuries.
    But although he soon uncovered the trail Hardesty and Rendell had tried to hide, he didn’t realise how close behind the men he was. Likely the injured man had slowed them down and he wondered at this, having expected the unharmed one would have ridden on and left the other to his fate. He knew now it was Rendell who was wounded, having found, half-buried, a torn, blood-stained neckerchief that he recognized: it was heavily soiled with sweat and dirt and he recalled Clint Rendell had worn that same neckerchief for weeks at a time before rinsing it perfunctorily in a creek’s murky water. Besides, the man’s horse had left meandering tracks as if the rider wasn’t in full control of the reins.
    But he was closer than he knew.
    The rifles blasted from the high rocks. One bullet geysered gravel a yard in front of the swerving sorrel. The other tugged at his buckskin shirt where it hung in a loose fold across his chest.
    Naturally, they had blind-sided him, shooting from his right.
    Blaine was going out of the saddle, kicking boots free of the stirrups, holding his rifle high as he tipped his body to the left. He kicked the horse with a boot as he fell and it whickered, lurched, then ran off, instinctively hunting cover in the lower clump of boulders.
    Blaine rolled swiftly towards a line of brokenrocks, hearing the dull rifle shots as his body crunched across the gravel, his boots scrabbling wildly, seeking purchase so as to thrust him into shelter . Before he made it, two bullets flung rock chips against his hat and he ducked his head instinctively, squirmed in and sprawled as flat as possible.
    Breathing hard, dust biting at his nostrils, he turned his face with his good eye uppermost, searching for the gunsmoke. It hung in a pall in the still air. If he had been pursuing his quarry in open country the breeze would have whipped it away or shredded it. This