Free the Quick and the Dead (1983) by Louis L'amour

blackened from many fires, to fill his cup.
    He was a tall, taciturn man in a buckskin shirt, homespun pants, and a battered black wool hat.
    "Well? What happened?" Booster demanded.
    The Huron sipped his coffee. "Good man," he said shortly, "very good man."
    "Did you get him?"
    "Maybe." The Huron sipped coffee then shrugged. "Maybe not. In the morning we will see."
    "You didn't trace him down? You mean maybe he's lyin' out there?"
    The Huron ignored the comment until he had eaten a strip of jerky, and then he said, "One does not go into the bush after a grizzly."
    "I'll be damned," Shabbitt took his cigar from his teeth and regarded it, then brushed the ash away. "I don't understand you, Huron. Sometimes I think you're less an Injun than a white man, and an eddicated one to boot."
    The Huron offered nothing, merely sipping his coffee. Finally he straightened up, rinsed his cup and walked to his bed.
    As he lay down he stopped, just before stretching out. "He is a good man. If he is not dead, somebody will die."
    "Come daylight," Ike Mantle said, "I'll have a look around. If he ain't dead, he better be."
    Con Vallian had been hit hard and he knew it. Near the base of a tree he pulled moss from the tree and packed his wound. The bullet had gone through his thigh, but no bones were broken. After a moment's rest, he pulled himself up by clinging to brush and with a staff made from a broken branch, his rifle clutched in his left hand, he started on.
    He made a hundred yards or so before he had to stop. He leaned against the bole of a tree, resting, panting heavily. By daylight there would be wolves on the scent, and he had to have left some blood sign back there. They would find that, then come after him.
    Finding a small stream, rushing knee-deep after the rain, he stepped in and worked his way up stream. It would fool nobody, certainly not the Huron, but it might slow them down. He knew that a tracked man will usually come out of a stream on the same side he went in, but he went out on the opposite side, pulling himself up where the rocks were waist high.
    For a few minutes he sat there in the rain, then with rifle and staff, pushed himself to his feet. He stood there, wavering from weakness, trying to make out his surroundings. A wink of firelight caught his eye ... it was several hundred yards off, no doubt the camp of the Shabbitt outfit.
    He made a dozen wobbling steps on the rock ledge before he had to step off, found another bare rock and managed to get to it. There was a long log going the way he wished to go, but he shied away. When it was wet like this the bark might slip off in places and that was the sort of sign the Huron could read at a dead-run.
    He staggered on, hitching himself along. Twice he fell. Once he crawled for several hundred yards, then managed to get up again. When he got to where his horse had been, it was gone.
    Even in the darkness he could see the white end of the broken branch. Frightened by something, a lion or wolf, probably, the horse had broken free and run off.
    He wasted no time in cursing his luck, for that never helped. He did pause long enough to think the situation through, for much depended on what happened next.
    They would not know his horse had run off. They would find its tracks and his and would conclude that he had mounted the horse and ridden away. Clinging to the bush he pulled off his boots, cut a rawhide string from the fringe of his jacket and tied them together by the loops and slung them over his shoulder.
    He walked on. What to do? It would do no good to go to the McKaskels, and their wagon was far away now, at least a mile and in the wrong direction.
    His first idea had been the best. He would go to the Indians. He had a rough idea of where their camp might be, and he started for it.
    What followed was nightmare. He hadn't gone fifty steps when he tripped and tumbled into a ravine, losing his staff, but clinging to his rifle. How long he lay there he didn't know nor even