Cougar Tracks, page 4
He sat against the earth, legs spread, and was silent.
Cougar’s eyes flashed as he moved to the tree himself, using its cover against any onrushing attackers, but there were no more shots, no footsteps of men approaching on the run. Carefully, he crouched and patted the man’s pockets, coming up with a chamois purse of some weight that had been tucked into the gunman’s belt.
Curious, Cougar had started to open the purse when he heard the thunder of guns from across the arroyo.
‘Dammit!’ They had gone after D’Arcy.
Cougar headed back toward the rockpile at a scrambling run. He slipped and went to one knee as his boot struck an unseen tree root. Still the shots rang out across the arroyo. He could see darker smoke rising through the low clouds. They continued to ring out. Six, ten – too many to continue counting. Cougar reached the arroyo at a run and half-slid, half-fell down to its rocky bottom, clambering up the far side frantically, the fingers of his free hand clawing at the mud, tearing themselves on rock.
Reaching the crest he forced himself to slow: it wouldn’t do to charge headlong into the bullets. They rang out occasionally still and then stopped abruptly, only a few lingering echoes drifting on the wind through the rain. That could be good … or it could be a terrible sign.
It was terrible.
Easing through the trees, rifle at the ready, his chest rising and falling with exertion, hair washed into his eyes, Cougar came upon the site of the massacre.
Both horses were down, dead. The blue roan looked up at him with black, stony eyes. The black horse of D’Arcy had been riddled with bullets.
‘Cougar.…’ The voice was only a rasping whisper. Cougar recognized it, though, and he moved toward its source.
D’Arcy was among the rocks, propped up to allow him to fire back at his attackers. One arm hung uselessly at his side and there was blood on his shirt front even with the constant rain washing it away.
‘Where are they?’ Cougar asked, crouching beside his friend.
‘Gone … think they went looking for you. Don’t know.…’ D’Arcy’s voice trailed off weakly.
Looking around the notch carefully first, Cougar placed his rifle aside and opened D’Arcy’s shirt. The wound in his chest was more bloody than serious, it seemed. A flap of flesh showed where a bullet had glancingly struck rib bone and exited. It was probably a ricochet, he estimated.
The one in the upper arm had been a solid hit. Cutting away the sleeve of D’Arcy’s shirt Cougar found a jagged, furrowed wound slashed across D’Arcy’s shoulder.
‘Can you move it?’ Cougar asked.
‘Maybe. I don’t want to try,’ D’Arcy answered with a sickly grin.
‘All right. Try to stay alert and keep watch for me. ‘I’ve some bandaging in my saddle-bags.’
‘Sure,’ D’Arcy grunted. Already his eyes were closing of their own accord, the lids drawing down as if by unseen weights. He fought against the closing curtains. He was deathly pale and now he began to tremble as shock set in. Cougar put a hand briefly on his friend’s arm and scuttled toward his dead horse.
He yanked the saddle-bags from beneath the stiffening blue roan and moved back to where D’Arcy sat dismally in the rain, teeth chattering, his eyes only slits.
‘We’ll patch you up,’ Cougar said gently.
‘Yeah … all we need’s a new arm to screw on,’ D’Arcy answered, trying for a humorous note and a smile that just didn’t work. Cougar smiled back and set to it, doing what he could with what he had to work with, which wasn’t a whole lot.
D’Arcy passed out before Cougar had finished with the wound in his side, splashing it with carbolic and stitching it up clumsily with gut.
For the arm he could do little more. The bone wasn’t broken, but the muscles themselves were peeled back. The bullet had mushroomed on impact and torn tendons and meat to shreds. Maybe a surgeon could have repaired them, but Cougar was no surgeon. There was nothing he could do but apply the disinfectant and bind arm and shoulder up as tightly as possible. Already Cougar knew that Calvin D’Arcy’s arm would never be of much use to him again, and only time would tell if it was going to have to be removed. Cougar’s unhappy guess was that it would be a job for a sawbones.
‘Now what?’ he asked himself as he finished his grisly work and sat back on his heels, hat tipped back, studying D’Arcy and the aftermath of the ambush.
His enemies were still out there waiting for another propitious moment to finish their deadly task. Probably, as D’Arcy had guessed, they had circled back looking for Cougar after hearing the shots below, leaving D’Arcy for dead. By now they would have found their own dead accomplice and might be on their way back to finish the job. Or, he considered, they could be waiting, holding their position in the rain, just watching – after all, they now knew where Cougar was.
Thinking about the man he had killed, Cougar took the chamois purse he had taken from the body and opened it. There were only a few items in it: a tooth from an adult, a molar; some gold money; six new-minted double eagles; a couple of foreign-minted gold pieces; and a note written in a language Cougar didn’t comprehend but assumed to be German.
He put these items back in the purse, pocketed it, and made his decision without wasting more time on consideration. General Crook himself, who had learned his own frontier warfare tactics from the Indians, had promulgated the theory of constant movement, never allowing oneself to be pinned in a known position. Cougar’s position was known – therefore he must move no matter the dangers and difficulties involved.
Cougar squatted down, hoisted D’Arcy in a fireman’s lift, and started off beneath the weight of his wounded friend into the rain and confusion of the night. Moving through the deepest brush he could find, he wended his way westward through the fits of the drenching storm. He slogged his way upslope over long ridges rife with pinyon and blue spruce, down and up canyons where freshets flowed, taking every trail a horse could not easily follow.
It was a heartbreaking march. The legs grew leaden, the muscles stiff and swollen, the mind blurred. It was enough to break a man, a forced march with a hundred and sixty pounds on his back, but then, Cougar was not an ordinary man. He was born with great size and a massive heart.
At fourteen he had killed a man quite by accident. He was as big as most full-grown men already at that age, stronger than most from chopping the wood, cutting hay, and moving stone to care for the family’s poor Ohio farm. His father had gone off to the War and never returned with the rest of the Ohio Volunteers. Cougar came early to manhood.
The army officer who had insulted his girl cousin and tried to grab her from the seat of the buckboard couldn’t have counted on a raw-boned kid menacing him. But Cougar, who had been raised on duty, toughened by his arduous young life, taught by his father to be always unafraid, had protected the girl in the only way he knew – with bare hands clenched into fists like granite blocks, impelled by shoulders like those of a blacksmith – and the officer had fallen dead in the mud of the Troy, Ohio street.
Cougar had fled in the middle of the night, his mother having packed him a small get-along bag of provisions, handing him his father’s old Hawkens rifle, kissing him drily.
‘You were a man today,’ the old woman had said as her small, dry hands held his thick, meaty-knuckled ones. ‘Go and make your way as one now.’ Then she had turned and walked inside the cabin, closed the door and drawn the latchstring and Cougar was left alone in the world.
He had worked his way West as a wagoneer’s swamper, growing stronger and world-wiser yet. After the teamster had broken an axle on his rig at Fort Ransom, Dakota Territory two years later, Cougar, already tired of his trade, volunteered for the army. He was just sixteen, but no one had questioned the age of this tall, broad, self-confident young man with the sandy hair and strange, gray-green eyes. The Sioux and the Cheyenne were talking war and the army was accepting all capable volunteers.
Cougar was more than capable. He fought as an enlisted man for two years before, tiring of less-than-adequate officers and NCOs, he put himself forward as a scout and, under the tutelage of an old canny man named Spanner and a young Osage Indian called Cornhawk, became one of the best trackers on the far plains.
Cougar had seen war in Dakota and Wyoming, in Apache country along the border, and on the broad plains with the Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux. He had lived through the smoke and fires of hell before he was twenty-one.
He was no longer so young, but he hoped he had grown wiser. What lay ahead of him now would take all that he had learned in the years gone past. And if he did fail this time it would not be a battle that would be lost, but a war.
FIVE
The manzanita was thick, the sage heavy with water. The night was coming in. A crimson bow seemed to be arched above the last misted yellow ball of the sun on the western horizon. The storm clouds, finished with their mischief, were breaking up, speeding away on the cold winds. The man in the buckskin shirt trudged on across broken hillsides, his burden weighing heavily across his broad shoulders.
Cougar couldn’t count the number of times he had slipped and fallen that day, bringing a groan from the lips of Calvin D’Arcy, how many times he had paused for breath as his lungs ached savagely, how often he had stopped to look uncertainly along the backtrail for his pursuers. He only knew that the day had seemed endless, the miles covered few, and with each mile he was forced to travel in this plodding fashion, the nearer he was to failing in his mission. He would arrive too late, if not at all.
General Crook was hundreds of miles away and he was afoot on bad country with a badly wounded man. They would never be able to stop Reineke, never be on time to head off the coming disaster. Once, during a brief, rain-soaked rest, D’Arcy had lifted his hand and said with what seemed to be the last of his breath, ‘Just get out of here, Cougar! Damn you, leave me here.’
Cougar had given him no answer but a stubborn shake of his head, and after a few minutes more he had again hoisted his friend and slogged on through the rain, into the wilderness and the coming darkness of falling night.
Now, stumbling across the broken, treacherous ground of the hillslope, he was forced to admit to himself that he was going to have to work his way down to the flats into more open country if he was to have any chance of finding some sort of settlement, any sort of habitation before D’Arcy perished. Cougar scoured the country beyond and below him again. It was a gray and folded land beneath the breaking cloud cover. Nothing moved but the wind-drifted clouds themselves. He and D’Arcy had not talked about it, but both knew they were well into Comanche country now. They had trusted to their horses, much larger and stronger than Indian ponies, and to their weapons to keep them from danger. Now, afoot, there would be no escape at all if the Indians came hunting.
A few miles back Cougar had seen the remnants of an ill-plotted railroad spur and an ill-conceived town on the plains: twin rusted rails ending abruptly at a pile of ashes and burned timbers. The Comanches had spoken clearly: ‘No farther.’
Cougar swayed a little as he hefted his burden and started on again under shadowed skies. D’Arcy still lived; Cougar could feel the involuntary movements of his body from time to time, a hand that occasionally clenched Cougar’s shoulder in thanks or in silent plea. D’Arcy was alive, but for how much longer? How much could a man endure?
Cougar found a narrow, grassless canyon and started down it, aiming once again for the flatlands. The sunset had diminished to a purple glow above the canyon rim. The wind, not abating with the cessation of the rain, nudged at his back as he worked carefully along the rocky canyon floor.
He rounded a bend in the canyon walls and stopped dead.
The fire was small but it glowed plainly in a hollow cut into the dark canyon wall, splashing the bluff behind it dimly with moving light and shadows. Cougar drew back into the darkness and stood motionlessly in the thickness of gathering night, remaining absolutely still, watching. D’Arcy moaned softly and Cougar eased him to the cold ground where he lay without movement.
Then, with his rifle in his hands, the hammer drawn back, Cougar crept downward.
There were only two possibilities that he could think of: it was those men who had been hunting himself and D’Arcy, or it was a Comanche hunting party. No one else would be traveling this godforsaken, war-bound section of country.
Cougar was a silent, wary creature of the dark, drawn inexorably toward the faintly flickering fire; a night creature both repulsed and fascinated by its heat and light.
He paused to listen, to look up and down the canyon, away from the fire, but he saw nothing and heard nothing. There was only the overpowering scent of damp sage burning, the distant bark of a coyote, and the hushed sound of rain-heavy sand sloughing from the damp, dark walls of the long canyon.
Cougar debated, and then, deciding there was no choice if D’Arcy were to survive, he moved nearer yet to the fire. If they were his enemies he meant to see them first, for as old man Spanner had once told him, ‘The last one to know is the first one to go.’ Cougar meant to know.
What he discovered was so far from what he had expected that it was at first startling, then, in an inexplicable way, angering.
The white man stood near the smoky fire, clearly silhouetted before the canvas top of the covered wagon that rested at some distance behind him. The man sipped coffee and glowered down at the low fire, muttering indistinctly once in a while. He wore a white shirt, black trousers, a black vest. The shirt was open at the neck, but Cougar suspected by its cut that it usually supported a cellophane collar and black tie. The man was small, unusually deep in the chest, but not healthily so, giving a pigeon image to his physique. His hair was dark, thin, slicked back carefully. He was clean-shaven and used many nervous motions of his free hand to accentuate whatever it was that he was muttering.
If the sight of this man in the wilderness was startling, what Cougar saw next was incredible. A woman came from around the wagon, her dark hair pulled back neatly into some sort of knot, her body trim and high-breasted. She wore a white blouse with a black velvet choker around her slender neck and a divided black riding skirt brushing the tops of her boots as she walked.
The man saw Cougar first as he emerged from the shadows into the ring of firelight and he dropped his cup, his eyes goggling as he stuttered: ‘Who are you?’ He dropped back an involuntary step at the sight of the wide-shouldered intruder in his camp.
‘Carroll Cougar, and what manner of fool might you be?’ Cougar responded roughly.
‘“Fool”?’ It was the girl who replied sharply. ‘How dare you call my father a fool – whoever you are.’
Cougar answered evenly, ‘I call any man a fool who’s out wandering in this country, drawing a wagon, leading a girl, building a fire the size of a barn for the Comanches to see.’
The man ignored all of Cougar’s speech and replied in a quavering voice, ‘I am Dr Morris White. This is my daughter, Ellen. If yours is the Western manner of hospitality, God save the South.’
‘What sort of doctor might you be?’ Cougar asked hopefully.
‘I am a doctor of medicine, sir,’ White responded, puffing up a little now, steadying his voice. ‘And may I say, sir—’
‘There is such a thing as luck in this world, then,’ Cougar interrupted. ‘I’ve a badly injured man with me. I’ll bring him in. Grab your bag, sir. You, girl,’ he commanded, ‘prepare him a bed.’
The girl’s mouth opened in astonishment and anger, but she had no chance to answer as Cougar spun on his heel and slipped out again into the darkness, returning with D’Arcy slung heavily across his shoulder.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ the doctor asked before Cougar had placed his friend on the hastily made bed the girl had spread on the ground near the fire.
‘Gunshots. I’ll have coffee – you see to him,’ Cougar said peremptorily. Again the girl opened her mouth to reply, but her father called to her before she could speak. Cougar only heard her mutter the word ‘rude’ as she turned to fetch her father’s medical bag from the wagon. Cougar poured himself a cup of coffee and hunched down near the warm glow of the fire, his buckskin shirt steaming with the heat. He tossed a few more sticks of brush on to it and frowned. Let the girl think what she wanted. All he cared about was seeing that D’Arcy was tended to. The opinion of that little slip of a girl mattered nothing to him.
The doctor unwrapped the bandages Cougar had so hastily bound D’Arcy’s wounds with and the rudimentary stitches he had administered and said to Cougar, ‘You’ve butchered him.’
‘There wasn’t a whole lot to work with, nor time to do it better,’ Cougar growled back.
Muttering under his breath, the doctor got to work, occasionally asking his daughter for something. Cougar didn’t watch them at their work, nor did he watch the fire. He looked constantly up their backtrail, knowing he still had enemies out there, not knowing if they had managed to cut his sign. In the darkness and rain he thought not, but if they spotted this fire they would be certain to come calling.
He did not feel that he had put these two in danger by coming here. They had put themselves into it. Waddling across Indian country in a wagon with no one to fight for them but themselves, which they seemed ill-equipped to do, was nearly criminal in its stupidity. Cougar felt only grateful that Fate, which had played him so many dirty tricks in his time on this earth, had this once condescended to place help for D’Arcy across his path. His friend was a good one and he would certainly have died on the trail the way things were going. Cougar had long tired of burying good friends in desolate, unmarked graves.
It was nearly an hour later when the doctor, dabbing at his forehead with a folded handkerchief, sleeves rolled back, approached Cougar and told him, ‘He hasn’t got a real good chance. Gangrene is apt to set into that arm. It’s badly shattered.’
‘You’ve done what you could, I expect,’ Cougar answered.
‘We’ll need some assistance lifting him up into the wagon,’ the doctor said sourly. Obviously, he had taken no immediate liking to Cougar’s brusque manner. Neither could that be helped, Cougar reflected. This was not the time or situation for niceties. Let the two of them think what they liked about him.
Cougar’s eyes flashed as he moved to the tree himself, using its cover against any onrushing attackers, but there were no more shots, no footsteps of men approaching on the run. Carefully, he crouched and patted the man’s pockets, coming up with a chamois purse of some weight that had been tucked into the gunman’s belt.
Curious, Cougar had started to open the purse when he heard the thunder of guns from across the arroyo.
‘Dammit!’ They had gone after D’Arcy.
Cougar headed back toward the rockpile at a scrambling run. He slipped and went to one knee as his boot struck an unseen tree root. Still the shots rang out across the arroyo. He could see darker smoke rising through the low clouds. They continued to ring out. Six, ten – too many to continue counting. Cougar reached the arroyo at a run and half-slid, half-fell down to its rocky bottom, clambering up the far side frantically, the fingers of his free hand clawing at the mud, tearing themselves on rock.
Reaching the crest he forced himself to slow: it wouldn’t do to charge headlong into the bullets. They rang out occasionally still and then stopped abruptly, only a few lingering echoes drifting on the wind through the rain. That could be good … or it could be a terrible sign.
It was terrible.
Easing through the trees, rifle at the ready, his chest rising and falling with exertion, hair washed into his eyes, Cougar came upon the site of the massacre.
Both horses were down, dead. The blue roan looked up at him with black, stony eyes. The black horse of D’Arcy had been riddled with bullets.
‘Cougar.…’ The voice was only a rasping whisper. Cougar recognized it, though, and he moved toward its source.
D’Arcy was among the rocks, propped up to allow him to fire back at his attackers. One arm hung uselessly at his side and there was blood on his shirt front even with the constant rain washing it away.
‘Where are they?’ Cougar asked, crouching beside his friend.
‘Gone … think they went looking for you. Don’t know.…’ D’Arcy’s voice trailed off weakly.
Looking around the notch carefully first, Cougar placed his rifle aside and opened D’Arcy’s shirt. The wound in his chest was more bloody than serious, it seemed. A flap of flesh showed where a bullet had glancingly struck rib bone and exited. It was probably a ricochet, he estimated.
The one in the upper arm had been a solid hit. Cutting away the sleeve of D’Arcy’s shirt Cougar found a jagged, furrowed wound slashed across D’Arcy’s shoulder.
‘Can you move it?’ Cougar asked.
‘Maybe. I don’t want to try,’ D’Arcy answered with a sickly grin.
‘All right. Try to stay alert and keep watch for me. ‘I’ve some bandaging in my saddle-bags.’
‘Sure,’ D’Arcy grunted. Already his eyes were closing of their own accord, the lids drawing down as if by unseen weights. He fought against the closing curtains. He was deathly pale and now he began to tremble as shock set in. Cougar put a hand briefly on his friend’s arm and scuttled toward his dead horse.
He yanked the saddle-bags from beneath the stiffening blue roan and moved back to where D’Arcy sat dismally in the rain, teeth chattering, his eyes only slits.
‘We’ll patch you up,’ Cougar said gently.
‘Yeah … all we need’s a new arm to screw on,’ D’Arcy answered, trying for a humorous note and a smile that just didn’t work. Cougar smiled back and set to it, doing what he could with what he had to work with, which wasn’t a whole lot.
D’Arcy passed out before Cougar had finished with the wound in his side, splashing it with carbolic and stitching it up clumsily with gut.
For the arm he could do little more. The bone wasn’t broken, but the muscles themselves were peeled back. The bullet had mushroomed on impact and torn tendons and meat to shreds. Maybe a surgeon could have repaired them, but Cougar was no surgeon. There was nothing he could do but apply the disinfectant and bind arm and shoulder up as tightly as possible. Already Cougar knew that Calvin D’Arcy’s arm would never be of much use to him again, and only time would tell if it was going to have to be removed. Cougar’s unhappy guess was that it would be a job for a sawbones.
‘Now what?’ he asked himself as he finished his grisly work and sat back on his heels, hat tipped back, studying D’Arcy and the aftermath of the ambush.
His enemies were still out there waiting for another propitious moment to finish their deadly task. Probably, as D’Arcy had guessed, they had circled back looking for Cougar after hearing the shots below, leaving D’Arcy for dead. By now they would have found their own dead accomplice and might be on their way back to finish the job. Or, he considered, they could be waiting, holding their position in the rain, just watching – after all, they now knew where Cougar was.
Thinking about the man he had killed, Cougar took the chamois purse he had taken from the body and opened it. There were only a few items in it: a tooth from an adult, a molar; some gold money; six new-minted double eagles; a couple of foreign-minted gold pieces; and a note written in a language Cougar didn’t comprehend but assumed to be German.
He put these items back in the purse, pocketed it, and made his decision without wasting more time on consideration. General Crook himself, who had learned his own frontier warfare tactics from the Indians, had promulgated the theory of constant movement, never allowing oneself to be pinned in a known position. Cougar’s position was known – therefore he must move no matter the dangers and difficulties involved.
Cougar squatted down, hoisted D’Arcy in a fireman’s lift, and started off beneath the weight of his wounded friend into the rain and confusion of the night. Moving through the deepest brush he could find, he wended his way westward through the fits of the drenching storm. He slogged his way upslope over long ridges rife with pinyon and blue spruce, down and up canyons where freshets flowed, taking every trail a horse could not easily follow.
It was a heartbreaking march. The legs grew leaden, the muscles stiff and swollen, the mind blurred. It was enough to break a man, a forced march with a hundred and sixty pounds on his back, but then, Cougar was not an ordinary man. He was born with great size and a massive heart.
At fourteen he had killed a man quite by accident. He was as big as most full-grown men already at that age, stronger than most from chopping the wood, cutting hay, and moving stone to care for the family’s poor Ohio farm. His father had gone off to the War and never returned with the rest of the Ohio Volunteers. Cougar came early to manhood.
The army officer who had insulted his girl cousin and tried to grab her from the seat of the buckboard couldn’t have counted on a raw-boned kid menacing him. But Cougar, who had been raised on duty, toughened by his arduous young life, taught by his father to be always unafraid, had protected the girl in the only way he knew – with bare hands clenched into fists like granite blocks, impelled by shoulders like those of a blacksmith – and the officer had fallen dead in the mud of the Troy, Ohio street.
Cougar had fled in the middle of the night, his mother having packed him a small get-along bag of provisions, handing him his father’s old Hawkens rifle, kissing him drily.
‘You were a man today,’ the old woman had said as her small, dry hands held his thick, meaty-knuckled ones. ‘Go and make your way as one now.’ Then she had turned and walked inside the cabin, closed the door and drawn the latchstring and Cougar was left alone in the world.
He had worked his way West as a wagoneer’s swamper, growing stronger and world-wiser yet. After the teamster had broken an axle on his rig at Fort Ransom, Dakota Territory two years later, Cougar, already tired of his trade, volunteered for the army. He was just sixteen, but no one had questioned the age of this tall, broad, self-confident young man with the sandy hair and strange, gray-green eyes. The Sioux and the Cheyenne were talking war and the army was accepting all capable volunteers.
Cougar was more than capable. He fought as an enlisted man for two years before, tiring of less-than-adequate officers and NCOs, he put himself forward as a scout and, under the tutelage of an old canny man named Spanner and a young Osage Indian called Cornhawk, became one of the best trackers on the far plains.
Cougar had seen war in Dakota and Wyoming, in Apache country along the border, and on the broad plains with the Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux. He had lived through the smoke and fires of hell before he was twenty-one.
He was no longer so young, but he hoped he had grown wiser. What lay ahead of him now would take all that he had learned in the years gone past. And if he did fail this time it would not be a battle that would be lost, but a war.
FIVE
The manzanita was thick, the sage heavy with water. The night was coming in. A crimson bow seemed to be arched above the last misted yellow ball of the sun on the western horizon. The storm clouds, finished with their mischief, were breaking up, speeding away on the cold winds. The man in the buckskin shirt trudged on across broken hillsides, his burden weighing heavily across his broad shoulders.
Cougar couldn’t count the number of times he had slipped and fallen that day, bringing a groan from the lips of Calvin D’Arcy, how many times he had paused for breath as his lungs ached savagely, how often he had stopped to look uncertainly along the backtrail for his pursuers. He only knew that the day had seemed endless, the miles covered few, and with each mile he was forced to travel in this plodding fashion, the nearer he was to failing in his mission. He would arrive too late, if not at all.
General Crook was hundreds of miles away and he was afoot on bad country with a badly wounded man. They would never be able to stop Reineke, never be on time to head off the coming disaster. Once, during a brief, rain-soaked rest, D’Arcy had lifted his hand and said with what seemed to be the last of his breath, ‘Just get out of here, Cougar! Damn you, leave me here.’
Cougar had given him no answer but a stubborn shake of his head, and after a few minutes more he had again hoisted his friend and slogged on through the rain, into the wilderness and the coming darkness of falling night.
Now, stumbling across the broken, treacherous ground of the hillslope, he was forced to admit to himself that he was going to have to work his way down to the flats into more open country if he was to have any chance of finding some sort of settlement, any sort of habitation before D’Arcy perished. Cougar scoured the country beyond and below him again. It was a gray and folded land beneath the breaking cloud cover. Nothing moved but the wind-drifted clouds themselves. He and D’Arcy had not talked about it, but both knew they were well into Comanche country now. They had trusted to their horses, much larger and stronger than Indian ponies, and to their weapons to keep them from danger. Now, afoot, there would be no escape at all if the Indians came hunting.
A few miles back Cougar had seen the remnants of an ill-plotted railroad spur and an ill-conceived town on the plains: twin rusted rails ending abruptly at a pile of ashes and burned timbers. The Comanches had spoken clearly: ‘No farther.’
Cougar swayed a little as he hefted his burden and started on again under shadowed skies. D’Arcy still lived; Cougar could feel the involuntary movements of his body from time to time, a hand that occasionally clenched Cougar’s shoulder in thanks or in silent plea. D’Arcy was alive, but for how much longer? How much could a man endure?
Cougar found a narrow, grassless canyon and started down it, aiming once again for the flatlands. The sunset had diminished to a purple glow above the canyon rim. The wind, not abating with the cessation of the rain, nudged at his back as he worked carefully along the rocky canyon floor.
He rounded a bend in the canyon walls and stopped dead.
The fire was small but it glowed plainly in a hollow cut into the dark canyon wall, splashing the bluff behind it dimly with moving light and shadows. Cougar drew back into the darkness and stood motionlessly in the thickness of gathering night, remaining absolutely still, watching. D’Arcy moaned softly and Cougar eased him to the cold ground where he lay without movement.
Then, with his rifle in his hands, the hammer drawn back, Cougar crept downward.
There were only two possibilities that he could think of: it was those men who had been hunting himself and D’Arcy, or it was a Comanche hunting party. No one else would be traveling this godforsaken, war-bound section of country.
Cougar was a silent, wary creature of the dark, drawn inexorably toward the faintly flickering fire; a night creature both repulsed and fascinated by its heat and light.
He paused to listen, to look up and down the canyon, away from the fire, but he saw nothing and heard nothing. There was only the overpowering scent of damp sage burning, the distant bark of a coyote, and the hushed sound of rain-heavy sand sloughing from the damp, dark walls of the long canyon.
Cougar debated, and then, deciding there was no choice if D’Arcy were to survive, he moved nearer yet to the fire. If they were his enemies he meant to see them first, for as old man Spanner had once told him, ‘The last one to know is the first one to go.’ Cougar meant to know.
What he discovered was so far from what he had expected that it was at first startling, then, in an inexplicable way, angering.
The white man stood near the smoky fire, clearly silhouetted before the canvas top of the covered wagon that rested at some distance behind him. The man sipped coffee and glowered down at the low fire, muttering indistinctly once in a while. He wore a white shirt, black trousers, a black vest. The shirt was open at the neck, but Cougar suspected by its cut that it usually supported a cellophane collar and black tie. The man was small, unusually deep in the chest, but not healthily so, giving a pigeon image to his physique. His hair was dark, thin, slicked back carefully. He was clean-shaven and used many nervous motions of his free hand to accentuate whatever it was that he was muttering.
If the sight of this man in the wilderness was startling, what Cougar saw next was incredible. A woman came from around the wagon, her dark hair pulled back neatly into some sort of knot, her body trim and high-breasted. She wore a white blouse with a black velvet choker around her slender neck and a divided black riding skirt brushing the tops of her boots as she walked.
The man saw Cougar first as he emerged from the shadows into the ring of firelight and he dropped his cup, his eyes goggling as he stuttered: ‘Who are you?’ He dropped back an involuntary step at the sight of the wide-shouldered intruder in his camp.
‘Carroll Cougar, and what manner of fool might you be?’ Cougar responded roughly.
‘“Fool”?’ It was the girl who replied sharply. ‘How dare you call my father a fool – whoever you are.’
Cougar answered evenly, ‘I call any man a fool who’s out wandering in this country, drawing a wagon, leading a girl, building a fire the size of a barn for the Comanches to see.’
The man ignored all of Cougar’s speech and replied in a quavering voice, ‘I am Dr Morris White. This is my daughter, Ellen. If yours is the Western manner of hospitality, God save the South.’
‘What sort of doctor might you be?’ Cougar asked hopefully.
‘I am a doctor of medicine, sir,’ White responded, puffing up a little now, steadying his voice. ‘And may I say, sir—’
‘There is such a thing as luck in this world, then,’ Cougar interrupted. ‘I’ve a badly injured man with me. I’ll bring him in. Grab your bag, sir. You, girl,’ he commanded, ‘prepare him a bed.’
The girl’s mouth opened in astonishment and anger, but she had no chance to answer as Cougar spun on his heel and slipped out again into the darkness, returning with D’Arcy slung heavily across his shoulder.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ the doctor asked before Cougar had placed his friend on the hastily made bed the girl had spread on the ground near the fire.
‘Gunshots. I’ll have coffee – you see to him,’ Cougar said peremptorily. Again the girl opened her mouth to reply, but her father called to her before she could speak. Cougar only heard her mutter the word ‘rude’ as she turned to fetch her father’s medical bag from the wagon. Cougar poured himself a cup of coffee and hunched down near the warm glow of the fire, his buckskin shirt steaming with the heat. He tossed a few more sticks of brush on to it and frowned. Let the girl think what she wanted. All he cared about was seeing that D’Arcy was tended to. The opinion of that little slip of a girl mattered nothing to him.
The doctor unwrapped the bandages Cougar had so hastily bound D’Arcy’s wounds with and the rudimentary stitches he had administered and said to Cougar, ‘You’ve butchered him.’
‘There wasn’t a whole lot to work with, nor time to do it better,’ Cougar growled back.
Muttering under his breath, the doctor got to work, occasionally asking his daughter for something. Cougar didn’t watch them at their work, nor did he watch the fire. He looked constantly up their backtrail, knowing he still had enemies out there, not knowing if they had managed to cut his sign. In the darkness and rain he thought not, but if they spotted this fire they would be certain to come calling.
He did not feel that he had put these two in danger by coming here. They had put themselves into it. Waddling across Indian country in a wagon with no one to fight for them but themselves, which they seemed ill-equipped to do, was nearly criminal in its stupidity. Cougar felt only grateful that Fate, which had played him so many dirty tricks in his time on this earth, had this once condescended to place help for D’Arcy across his path. His friend was a good one and he would certainly have died on the trail the way things were going. Cougar had long tired of burying good friends in desolate, unmarked graves.
It was nearly an hour later when the doctor, dabbing at his forehead with a folded handkerchief, sleeves rolled back, approached Cougar and told him, ‘He hasn’t got a real good chance. Gangrene is apt to set into that arm. It’s badly shattered.’
‘You’ve done what you could, I expect,’ Cougar answered.
‘We’ll need some assistance lifting him up into the wagon,’ the doctor said sourly. Obviously, he had taken no immediate liking to Cougar’s brusque manner. Neither could that be helped, Cougar reflected. This was not the time or situation for niceties. Let the two of them think what they liked about him.
