Watchman had crossed the stream before the moon came up and posted himself on horseback in the lower fringe of pines about forty feet downstream from Buck Stevens. If Hargit’s bunch was here at all it was most likely dug in somewhere along this flank of the horseshoe perimeter because only on this side would they have an easy back door to escape through. If they were here they were somewhere in the two-hundred-yard stretch of woods above him.
His first thought had been to pick a position with a good field of fire and wait for Hargit to open up. The sound and spark-flash of gunfire would give away Hargit’s position and give Watchman a target to shoot at. But then he had vetoed the idea. It would have been playing the game by Hargit’s rules. To Hargit this was a military exercise and in military exercises the objective was to annihilate the enemy: keep shooting at one another until only the winners survived. But that was warfare, not police work, and it wasn’t Watchman’s job to indulge in pocket battles. The highway patrolman’s oath said “apprehend and arrest”; it didn’t say “kill.”
He had discussed it with Stevens: “They’ll be spread out a little and one of them’s bound to be closer to us than the others. I want you to keep the other two pinned down while I take out the first one.”
Stevens had given him a lot of arguments, some of them unarguably logical, but a crazy notion had lodged itself in Watchman’s head and he had turned Stevens’ objections aside. Now he removed his gloves and checked to see that the flap of his service-revolver holster was within easy reach but he didn’t lift his rifle out of its scabbard; he removed his left foot from the stirrup and locked his fists down in tight handholds on the saddle and got ready to make his run.