Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,40
case he was out of luck, or they’d disposed of it farther from the house, possibly by burning or burying.
He parked in the shade of one of the trees in the rear yard and went straight back, carrying the binoculars. At first the ground was flat, sparsely covered with sage, but after about two hundred yards it rose in a series of low benches, cut here and there by ravines. He climbed up and turned to survey the flat, sweeping the glasses slowly back and forth over all the ground between there and the house. Nothing. He went on, following the course of one of the twisting ravines for several hundred yards, crossed it, and worked his way back down another. The sun was blistering, and sweat ran down his face. Thirst began to bother him, and he wished he’d taken a drink of the water before he started. A jackrabbit burst out of a clump of sage and went bounding off. Heat waves shimmered off the rocky ridge just beyond him to the north. It was a half hour later, and he was a good quarter mile from the house when he found it.
A steep-sided gully about twelve feet deep led off from one of the ravines, and at the bottom of it, half-covered with dead tumbleweeds, were the remains of a fire and a heap of blackened tin cans and broken bottles. He backtracked, found a place to climb down into the ravine, and followed it up to its steep-sided tributary. He entered it, feeling the brutal heat within its constricting walls, and smashed and shoved the old tumbleweeds out of the way.
He found a short piece of stick left over from the fire and began to probe carefully through the pile, separating and cataloging its contents. The labels were all burned off the cans, of course, but at least a dozen of them were food tins—the tops removed completely with a mechanical can opener—in addition to seven fruit-juice tins—punched—and forty-five beer cans. He paused, baffled, as he was tossing the beer cans to one side. Nine of them were tied together with short lengths of copper wire, three in one string and six in another, the same as the ones he’d found out in the flat.
He shrugged and threw them behind him. He could puzzle over that later. There were a number of battered aluminum trays that presumably had held frozen food of some kind, a mustard jar and a pickle jar, both unbroken, and the pieces of what appeared to be two whiskey bottles. Next was a large buckle. It was fire-blackened, and whatever had been attached to it was completely burned away. Then he poked out a short length of stranded copper wire, its insulation burned off. Then another buckle, the same size and shape as the first, and several more scraps of wire, and finally, at the bottom of the whole thing, he began to uncover the cigar tubes he’d been certain he would find. Some of them were flattened and bent and all were scorched by the fire, but there was no doubt they were Upmanns. On a few of them part of the name was still legible. There were twenty-three of them. He tossed the stick aside and stood up.
There was no way of knowing how many people had been here or whether some of the others had been smoking the cigars as well as his father, but even so they could have remained four or five days with the amount of supplies they’d used. They’d obviously had camping equipment, including an icebox and a stove of some kind, and it was possible the heavier vehicle had been a pickup camper. There was little or no chance anybody had seen them while they were in here, since the place was out of sight of the road, but somebody might have seen them coming or going. The thing to do now was report it to Brubaker as soon as possible so he could start questioning the people who used the road. He went back and climbed out of the ravine. Sweat was pouring off his face, and his shirt was stuck to him all over.
He started toward the house but had taken only a few steps when he stopped abruptly, looking out over the flat beyond it. A plume of dust had appeared over the rise just this side of the gate, and the vehicle at the head of it was coming this