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  The camp and herds were moved into the environs of Limon the next morning, and shortly thereafter, Milo and Bookerman became aware of just how desperate was the true plight of Colonel Wheelock and his followers—almost out of ammunition, very low on food of any sort, their hunters not daring to go outside the perimeter lest they be ambushed and slain by the marauders.

  For all that there were thirty-odd families in the settlement, there were only fifteen adult men, including Wheelock himself; augmented, perforce, by a few of the bigger boys, they were all the fighting force now available, in the wake of the numerous and vicious attacks and the subsequent deaths from wounds sustained during them. Trying to farm by day and guarding the settlement by night, and doing it all on little food, these men and boys looked and moved like zombies, all save Wheelock, who seemed to possess depthless reserves of strength and vitality.

  Two days after the arrival of the column in Limon, an attempt was staged by the brigands to run off some dozens of horses from the herd. For them it was a failure, exceedingly costly in their blood.

  Nineteen of them were killed outright, and three were so severely wounded that they could not escape and so were captured; perhaps six or seven got away, but from the trail that they left, it was clear that at least a few of them bore wounds, too.

  Of the captives, one died of a combination of shock and blood loss soon after being taken, and another was shot out of hand when he drew and tried to use a hidden pistol, so there was but one left for Milo and Bookerman to interrogate.

  When Bookerman, in his capacity as physician, determined that the prisoner was as ready as he would be at any time soon for a session of questioning, he summoned Milo, Harry Krueger and two other members of the council, about all that could crowd into the cubicle with any degree of comfort.

  "Gentleman, this prisoner gives his name to be Junior Jardin and claims the age of twenty-six, which roughly tallies with his physiological development. He follows, he avers, a leader called Gary Claxton, who along with most of his men is from Utah; Junior and a few others, however, were born in and around Durango, Colorado, and joined this group when it passed through their natal territory."

  Milo stepped forward to where the propped-up prisoner could easily see him and demanded, "How many men did your pack number as of this morning? And where is your base located? Answer me truthfully, if you know what's good for you, for you're entirely in our power, now."

  The bandaged man just sneered, then coughed, hawked and spat a blob of yellowish mucus at his interrogator. "Fuck yew an' all your buddies, yew shithaidid fucker, yew!"

  Milo smiled and nodded at Harry Krueger, saying, "There speaks fear, Harry, as I told you. This sorry specimen knows that his chosen leader and the few straggling dunces who trail after him are simply too weak, ill armed and gutless to offer us any real threat. They're likely no more than another of these tiny little knots of skulkers with their pitiful spears and clubs and knives, too stupid and unskilled to make good use of a gun even if one fell into their clumsy hands."

  His voice dripped scorn and contumely, and these stung to the very quick and pride of the unsophisticated Junior Jardin.

  "An' thass all yew knows, too, yew asshole yew!" he burst out with heat. "Old Gary, he done got hisse'f more'n sixty mens long of us. An' we most of us got real army guns, too, what old Gary brought up from Utah with 'im, an' soon's we gits us more hosses . . . aw, piss awn yew, ail yew!"

  Then he clammed up. Not one additional word could threats or guile elicit from him; not even several slaps and buffets did any more to accomplish their purposes.

  Outside the cubicle, out of range of Junior Jardin's ears, Milo said, "Clarence, have you got any sort of drug that might work on him? We have simply got to know exactly where those bastards are holed up, for forty to fifty men armed with Ml6s pose a considerable threat to us all, either here or on the march, and Wheelock's people are dead meat the moment we pull out."

  Bookerman shrugged. "I've found drugs of the sort you mean, here and there, but they are so old that I'd be afraid to use them, unless we had more than the one captive. However, Milo, I know a few tricks myself. Let me try one of them on him."

  Chapter X

  At the doctor's direction, they moved Junior Jardin to a heavy, solid wooden chair and secured his arms, legs and body thereto with straps and rope.

  Taking a handful of the long, lank, dirty hair. Bookerman tilted the prisoner's head far, far back, then said, "Milo, you are a strong man—take a good grip of his head and keep it in just this position when the time comes . . . should Mr. Jardin here choose to remain uncooperative and force me to do an agonizing thing to him."

  After a moment of searching his bag, the physician turned to display a single stainless-steel teaspoon. With a broad, sustained smile, he walked over to stand before the trussed-up Jardin.

  Despite the smile, his voice was infinitely sad, regretful, a little chiding, as one might speak just before punishing a willful, stubborn, chronically disobedient child. "Junior, we wish to know the present location of your group's base. Please tell us, now, for if you do not, I am going to have to do something that will hurt you more than any pain you ever before have felt. Nor will that pain go quickly away, Junior. What I do will maim you for life; you never will be able to forget it, either waking or sleeping.

  "Well, Junior? We are waiting for you to tell us where your base is located. Where is your group's camp? Please tell us."

  "Shit, yew ain' ascarin' me, fucker!" said the plainly terrified man. "I done been beat on afore this. Yew can go fuck yerse'f." But his voice was not nearly as strong as on previous occasions, and he licked repeatedly at dry lips.

  Bookerman sighed. "Oh, Junior, Junior, I am certain that no mere beating would convince you to cooperate with us, and therefore I suppose that I must do what I must do to you.

  "Milo, grasp his head and hold it tightly just as I have shown you."

  When the prisoner's head was immobile in Milo's strong hands, Bookerman came closer and held the shiny teaspoon before the wide, bulging eyes. "Look well at this instrument, Junior. You see here a simple teaspoon. But with this commonplace utensil, I am going to remove your left eyeball. When once I have begun, I'll not stop until your bloody eyeball is out and lying in the palm of my hand. Do you understand? So if you wish to tell us what we wish to know, if you wish to live the rest of your life with two eyes, rather than with one eye and an empty, ever painful socket, do so now."

  He sighed again, admonishing, "No, no, Junior, squeezing tight your eyelids will not save your eye from me and my spoon. Only will the telling of the location of your camp, your base, prevent my permanent maiming of you."

  "D . . . don' know!" stuttered the captive, in an agony of obvious terror. "P . . . prob'ly moved on by now, enyhow."

  "Oh, Junior, Junior," sighed Bookerman. "You lie so ineptly. But perhaps you will wax more loquacious when you have but one single eye remaining and my bloody spoon is poised to remove it as well. Now, Milo, hold him absolutely rocksteady. You, Herr Kruger, assist him, bitte."

  Milo could not be certain that the doctor meant to really carry out this threat until, to the ear-shattering screams of the prisoner, the trained fingers of the surgeon slid the bowl of the spoon expertly, precisely between the eye and the socket.

  "Oh, sweet Jesus God, no . . ." shouted Jim Olsen, then vomited on the floor with a gush and a tortured retching. The other council member simply fled in horrified silence, slamming the door behind him.

  The vials which Bookerman had personally prepared were transported to the isolated farm in a large Styrofoam cooler filled with icy spring water and slung between two smooth-gaited mules in a canvas tarp stiffened with boards.

  The volunteer archers had practiced for several days with identical glass vials filled with a liquid of equal weight, so they knew just how to aim arrows to which vials of nitroglycerin had been taped behind the blunt target points.

  Milo had been loath even to go near the c
ases of ancient, deteriorating and thus highly unstable and deadly-dangerous dynamite, but not so Dr. Clarence Bookerman. The doctor himself had boiled the sticks, skimmed off the nitroglycerine, then poured it into glass medicine vials, actions which called for a degree of courage and cool nerve that not even Milo felt he could have summoned up. He reflected yet again that the doctor was simply full of surprises.

  The early-morning drizzle of nitroglycerin-laden arrows blew in most of the roof, blew out sections of walls and three doors of the sprawling farmhouse and did even worse damage to the barn, setting it fiercely ablaze. Claxton, who turned out to be a burly, hairy man in his mid-fifties, and his crew, half clad and still groggy with sleep, a few of them clutching their rusty Ml6s, stumbled and staggered out the enlarged openings where doors had been to face a terrifying and unwavering line of leveled muzzles—rifles, shotguns and full automatics-interspersed with the winking points of hunting arrows in drawn bows.

  Milo sincerely wished that they all had come out shooting. There was no question of the fact that these predators had to die; they were just too dangerous—armed or unarmed, ahorse or afoot—in their numbers and degree of savagery—to let loose to terrorize any other of the scattered survivors. But Milo also knew that cold-blooded murder was beyond him.

  It was then proved to not be beyond the man who stood beside him, Dr. Bookerman. With an inarticulate shout imbued with a tone of alarmed warning, the physician opened fire on the mob of marauders, loosing short, controlled bursts of automatic fire. And, as he must have known would happen in the tense, keyed-up situation, every other weapon joined his within a bare eyeblink.

  A few of the band of bushwhackers managed to flee back into the wrecked, smoldering house, only to be hunted, rooted out and killed by the now blood-mad raiders, Wheelock's contingent, at least, set on long-overdue revenge for past incursions.

  Claxton did not look at all imposing as he lay dying on the blood-soaked ground before the wrecked house. The three bullet holes in his torso stood out markedly against his graying skin, and his thick beard and furry chest now were thick with blood, providing a feast for the flies that swarmed the charnel yard.

  There was no fear in the bloodshot eyes that looked up at Milo where he squatted beside the fatally wounded leader, only pain alloyed with wonder.

  "How come for you to shoot us all, feller? We won't no particle of danger to a bunch size of yours, the way we was out here. The mosta us dint even have our rifles, you know—them mortar shells or grenades or whatever it was you used just had plumb took the fight outen my boys."

  "The same reason," Milo replied gravely, "that you pour boiling water into a barrel of rats—your kind, you spoilers, are a bane to the existence of folks who are breaking their asses trying to keep themselves and their families alive. Or, I could quote you Scripture to the effect that 'those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword'; you and your pack existed by violence, and that's how you, most of you, were killed."

  Claxton choked briefly, then weakly pushed himself up onto his elbows and coughed violently, sending a frothy, dark-pink spray from his mouth. Moaning, he eased himself back into a recumbent posture, breathing raggedly, wheezing loudly, his eyes shut and a series of strong shudders racking his body and limbs. Thinking him on the point of death, Milo had started to arise when the eyes opened again and Claxton spoke once more.

  "How the fuck did you bunch of murderin' bastids find us, anyhow? It was never no fires was lit here by day, and even the boys as come back wounded or dyin' covered their tracks damn good, the way they was taught to, and I had me three overlapping layers of guards around this place, day and night."

  Milo nodded again. "Yes, I know, Claxton. With an organizational mind like yours and your leadership abilities, it's too bad that you didn't choose to work for people, instead of against them. We had a devil of a time taking out your sentries without alerting you here last night.

  "As to just how we found you. We . . . ahhh, 'persuaded' one of the raiders who came after our horse herd to tell us exactly how to find this place."

  "Who?" Claxton demanded. "Who finked on us?"

  "He calls himself Junior Jardin," Milo replied.

  Claxton shook his gory head and snorted weakly. "No way, feller, no damn fuckin' way! Lissen, I knows that lil boy, he's done been my lover nearly a whole year now, and I knows he's tough as they come. You could of beat him plumb to death and he wouldn' of finked on me and the boys."

  "Yes, Claxton, we tried beating him and he just laughed and sneered and spat at us, for all that he was wounded when we got him. But my . . . my associate was able to prevail upon him to tell us everything."

  "How?" asked Claxton, still disbelievingly.

  "He pried out the young man's left eyeball with a teaspoon, Claxton," was Milo's answer. "When he showed him his own eye in the bowl of that spoon, dripping blood and other fluids, and promised to do the same to the other eye as well, Junior Jardin decided to tell us everything we asked of him."

  Rage and loathing momentarily lit Claxton's glazing eyes. "God damn you, you heartless fuckers! You slanged me and my boys as spoilers and all, but, feller, you bastids is worse than us. I never would of done nothin' that bad, that common, to no man I ever took alive. You all goin' to hell, you knows that, don't you?"

  "Quite possibly, Claxton, quite possibly . . . but well after you. As for . . ."

  But Claxton could no longer hear him, he saw; the outlaw leader had at last died.

  There was precious little worth taking from the farm, save ammunition that might or might not ignite, rifle magazines and parts, and some knives, axes and other tools and utensils. The few head of horses were in such bad, ill-cared-for condition that they were simply turned loose to join the wild herds. The small herd of cattle looked to mostly be diseased, so they were put down, lest their malady spread to the wild cattle and other hoofed game of the region.

  Milo thought that he had seen pigpens that had been cleaner than the interior of the blasted house, and he was surprised that disease or infections had not cut down the men who had lived in such filth long before the bullets had done so. Even the sty inhabited by the Tahoe City biker contingent years ago had been scrupulously clean compared to this unholy mess, but that may have been partially because that long-dead pack had had dozens of women and male slaves to maintain their home base, water that still ran from faucets and even electricity.

  Claxton and his group, however, had never taken prisoners, male or female, coldly cutting down everyone not killed in an attack, so they had had no slaves to do the household chores that they clearly had never themselves chosen to do, preferring to live in their own stink and slops until they were ready to move on to fresh quarters and recommence the same disgusting cycle.

  When the house—what the explosions had left of it—and the dead bodies had been thoroughly searched and anything of any use taken, the men dragged their victims into the structure and then set it afire in several places before mounting and starting the long ride back to Limon.

  Subsequent to several heated meetings of the enlarged council, a very important decision had been hammered out. Most of Wheelock's people would move on, out onto the prairies, with the bulk of the newcomers, there being just too many memories of a sad or painful nature now connected with Limon and its environs for them, and their place would be taken by those few Snake River and Cheyenne families still dead set on a settled, farming life rather than the nomad herding-hunting-gathering existence chosen by the bulk of them for their futures.

  While Milo hated to leave behind men and women whom he had known for thirty and more years, men and women whom he first had met as scared, helpless urban boys and girls suddenly marooned in a pitiless wilderness, he also realized that he could no longer guide them. They were all become self-reliant adults, parents of their own children and grandparents, as well, in a number of cases; if they had decided that the settled life was best for them, they were right to choose it, and it would have been unfair
to Milo to use his emotional leverage to try to shake that decision. He could only wish them all well and move on eastward with the majority.

  This they did. The farmers willingly traded their carts for the lands and buildings that they were taking over, settled on their shares of the herds and immediately commenced feverishly hurried attempts to put in a late crop to help sustain them until next year's harvest time, their goodbyes to their lifelong friends being necessarily brief.

  The long, snakelike column of wagons and carts, of riders and walkers, of herds and herdsmen and herd dogs crawled out, eastward-bond, along the ancient, deteriorating Interstate 70. They made but few miles per day, and detachments halted at each single house or farm or ranch or settlement to search for recent signs of human life and to ferret out anything that might be of use or of value to the people as a whole for their survival.

  On the wider, more level, less overgrown stretches of the highway, they were able to travel two and even three teams abreast and therefore increase their speed of march, but then, often as not, they would be forced to wait or to go into camp early in order that the laggards and the fractious herds could catch up. But, sometimes, hours or even days were lost when the entire train found itself confronted by washed-out bridges and broad sections of roadway, necessitating dangerous fording or wide-swinging bypasses or filling and smoothing out sections of former road with earth and rocks and brush and tree trunks.