Twisted Hills, page 11
“Sit still,” Kelso growled at him. “They’ve seen us. Don’t slink away like a sheep-killing dog. We ain’t done nothing.”
“Hell, I know it,” said Charlie Ray, trying to recover. “I’m just ready to get going.”
“Well, settle down,” said Kelso. “I want to hear what our pal Jones has done to curdle their milk so bad.”
“Yeah, me too,” Hazerat said. He chuckled. “It’s awful damn hot to be traveling afoot.”
As they watched the riders draw closer, they saw Sam go down and tumble and roll a few yards along the rocky trail until he managed to raise himself back to his feet.
“Now, you know that had to hurt,” Charlie Ray said with a cruel grin.
The three sat staring until Dolan, Galla and the two Mexican vaqueros rode up and stopped a few feet in front of them. Kelso touched the brim of his oversized sombrero toward Dolan and Galla. Then he leaned sidelong in his saddle and looked at Sam.
“Howdy, Jones,” he said, giving a mocking wave of his hand. “What brings you out running on such a day as this?”
Galla handed the rope over to one of the vaqueros. He raised his hat and wiped a bandanna across his sweaty forehead.
Dolan grinned and gave a nod back toward Sam.
“Segert asked us to air him out a little. Must’ve thought he was spending too much time indoors. Ain’t that right, Jones?” He looked back at Sam, who stood bowed at the waist, trying to catch his breath. His hat was gone, his clothes ragged. His tied hands were bleeding from stone cuts. He didn’t lift his head.
Dolan gave the Mexican a nod; the Mexican yanked on Sam’s rope, forcing him to look up.
Sam’s face was covered with welts, cuts, bruises and dried blood. His blackened eyes had swollen almost shut.
“I said, Ain’t that right, Jones?” Dolan repeated.
Sam still didn’t reply. He stood swaying in place, but with his shoulders level in spite of his ordeal.
“Guess he didn’t feel like stopping,” Dolan said to Kelso. He gave a shrug. “What brings you three out this way?”
“Tired of sitting in town so long,” said Kelso. “After two weeks of feeding worms, I thought I best get to moving around some. Any word from Segert on when he might need some gun hands?” he asked.
“No,” said Dolan. “But it won’t be long. So don’t wander off too far.”
“We won’t,” said Kelso. He looked at Mickey Galla and said, “Mick, what brings you over from Madson’s bunch? Wasn’t they feeding you well enough?”
Galla looked him up and down, and gave him a bored half smile. “Don’t you suppose if I thought it was any of your business, I would have written you a letter about it?”
“No offense intended,” said Kelso.
“Preston, the only time you don’t offend is when you keep your yapping mouth shut,” said Galla. He sat staring hard at Kelso.
Kelso ignored the muscle-bound gunman’s insult and turned to Dolan to change the subject. He nodded toward Sam.
“Jones there had Rudabell’s bull bag on him earlier today,” he said.
“I know,” said Dolan. He sat staring, offering no more on the matter.
Uncomfortable with Dolan’s silence, Kelso felt he had to say more.
“Told me he found ol’ Curtis dead, and took it off him,” he said, hoping for more of a response.
“So I heard,” said Dolan. He sat staring again.
Damn it to hell. . . . Kelso fidgeted and looked all around.
“All right, then, we’ll be seeing you,” he said. He jerked his horse’s reins and veered over to the edge of the trail and started around the four. Passing Mickey Galla, he saw him give a smug grin as he observed Kelso’s large sombrero.
“If you run across any Apaches, keep your britches up, Preston,” he said. “You’ve got nothing left to lose on top.”
“Smart son of a bitch,” Kelso grumbled under his breath.
Galla chuckled, watching the three leave. Then he turned to Dolan and said, “How much farther to that water basin?”
“Two miles, maybe less. Why?” said Dolan. He started to turn his horse back up the steepening trail. But he stopped, seeing Galla bounce down from his saddle and walk back to where Sam stood bowed and panting.
“Hear him, Jones?” Galla said. “Two more miles to water.” He patted Sam’s sweat-drenched shoulder. “Hell, there’s no need in you having to walk that far.” He bent quickly, picked Sam up by his knee and his throat and raised him high over his head.
Dolan sat watching the feat of strength in awe.
Just as quickly as Galla had grabbed and lifted Sam, he slammed the Ranger down flat on his back in an upswirl of dust. What little breath Sam had left burst from his lungs.
“Jesus, Mick,” Dolan said at the sound of Sam hitting the trail and lying limp. He gigged his horse forward to where Galla stood brushing dust from his shirtsleeves.
“All right, vaqueros, pull him these last miles,” Galla said to the two Mexicans. “It’s too damn hot for a white man to walk.”
“Check yourself down, Mick,” Dolan cautioned him. “We got to do this thing the way Segert wants it done.”
“I know that,” said Galla. He looked up at Dolan. “But have you ever had somebody slam a rifle butt into your nose?”
“No, I haven’t, but—”
“It hurts like hell—I can tell you that much,” Galla said, cutting him off. He adjusted his raised shirttails back into his britches and turned to his waiting horse. “So, there’s that,” he concluded.
• • •
For a mile and a half the Ranger tried to force himself back into consciousness, but he was too battered and exhausted to collect himself and struggle back up to his feet. Realizing that the horses dragging him were now at a walk, he struggled instead to keep his head up off the rocky trail and bore the impact of the ride on his left shoulder, which he kept tucked in a way to protect his chin.
The last few minutes of the ride, he began hearing the sound of rushing water to his right, but he dared not shift his shoulder and head around to see where the sound came from for fear he would not manage to regain his protective position. Most of the pain he had felt earlier from the dragging had turned to a dark numbness that he was grateful for. Yet there was still enough pain from the dirt and grit in his eyes and his mouth to make up for it.
Outlast it. . . . Outlast it. . . . Outlast it . . . , he repeated over and over to himself. At length a soothing darkness fell over him and he turned loose of the trail and let it disappear from beneath him.
After what felt like no more than a few seconds, a hand was laid heavily on his shoulder and shook him roughly.
“Has the son of a bitch died on us?” Sam heard Dolan ask Mickey Galla.
Sam gave no response. Instead he kept his swollen eyes shut, listening, needing to gather enough strength to make one last attempt to save himself should the opportunity arise.
“Naw, he’s alive,” Galla replied. “Damn shame too,” he said, drawing Sam’s Colt from behind his gun belt, where he’d stuck it earlier. “Now I’ll have to waste two bullets on him.”
“Two?” said Galla.
“Yeah,” said Dolan. “One to kill him, another to keep him that way.” He cocked Sam’s Colt.
“Killing him with his own gun,” Galla remarked. “You must be cold as ice.”
“I never claimed to be otherwise,” said Dolan. But as he spoke, he uncocked Sam’s Colt and let it hang in his hand. “First, let’s get some water and let him simmer awhile. I hate killing a man, him not even knowing it.”
“Yeah, me too,” said Galla as the two turned and walked away. “It just ain’t the same as seeing their eyes get real big and scared looking.”
“I bet this one don’t look that way when the time comes,” said Dolan.
“Yeah, how much?” said Galla.
“How much what?” said Dolan.
“You said you bet,” said Galla. “I say, how much?” He grinned.
“Five dollars,” Dolan said. Then he chuckled. “And you said I’m cold as ice. . . .”
Sam lay listening to their footsteps move away from him, across the rocky trail. No sooner had he thought them out of sight than he began to test his ropes. First the one around his hands, then the one around his bloody wrists.
Tight . . . too tight . . .
Struggling against his returning pain, he cocked his boot around until he could see his spurs, the big rowel broken off one and only a stub sticking out. With all of his waning strength, he cocked his boot around at what he would otherwise consider to be an impossible angle and began picking at the rope around his waist with the sharp stub.
Even in his half-addled state, his mind flashed on the young Apache warrior who had done much this same thing to escape the scalp hunters. Same circumstances, same desperation. But the thought was gone as quickly as it came to him. Right now, his own survival was all that mattered. When the picking and cutting caused the rope to come apart, he looked through swollen, bleary eyes in the direction of the two gunmen and the two vaqueros—the sound of them through a sparse stand of young pine saplings, their voices mingling among the sounds of the rushing stream.
As soon as he had freed his bruised and cut hands, he untied the lariat knot at his waist, loosened it and wiggled out of it. As quickly as he could, he belly-crawled off the trail toward the sound of the stream just beyond a rocky edge. Reaching the edge, he looked down, seeing the water swirling and thrashing along twenty feet below.
“The son of a bitch is getting away!” he heard Galla’s voice cry out behind him. A gunshot erupted from the trail, and a bullet struck a rock four feet from Sam.
“Shoot him!” Dolan’s voice shouted. Another gunshot erupted. But now the Ranger had pushed himself over the rocky edge.
Luckily the water was deep enough. But just barely, he noted to himself, holding his breath, sinking, and at the same time feeling the current roll him along, sweeping him downstream. He heard more gunshots resounding in the distance, from that world moving away behind him. Bullets streaked down though the water in looping half circles and fell away to the rocky bottom.
To stop himself from tumbling along forever, he spread his arms and grabbed at stones his size and larger, his battered hands pulling him ever upward through the cool swirling pool. When he had laddered himself up the rocks, his face came up above the surface so suddenly that it caught him by surprise. He let out his remaining breath, but with his boots filled with water, he dropped back under before he managed to recatch it.
The water had him. He dragged himself with his hands, back up the stones, strangling on water, swallowing it, coughing it out, his oxygen gone, only more water with which to replace it. Yet he felt himself moving upward again, only this time taking forever.
This is drowning. . . . This is drowning. . . .
Then, as suddenly as before, just as the world started growing dark and silent around him, he plunged upward into the world of air, his boots seeming to weigh more than he himself. He bounced along now in the swift water, his heavy boots serving to at least keep him upright, like a human buoy.
But it was water much more shallow now. Thank God. . . . He bounced and bobbed along, seeing a sandy, gravelly bank to his right, knowing that above it lay the trail—the same trail that would bring the gunmen down on him any minute. He knew he had to work his way to that gravelly bank and get up out of there.
Even as he told himself what he had to do, he had already begun scrambling against the current and the rocky bottom, pushing himself shoreward with hands and feet, scrambling through chest-high water that pushed with the force of a raging beast. But as he struggled, coughing, strangling, heaving up water, he began to feel that raging beast lessen its hold on him. The water was soon at his waist, then lower, and lower.
Finally he found himself splashing through water at his calves, then at his ankles. Stumbling forward in his heavy boots, staggering unsteadily, he reached the shoreline and dropped to his knees and swayed back and forth for a moment. Huh-uh, can’t stop now, he warned himself. Get up, get moving!
He tried. He pushed himself halfway to his feet. But that was as far as he could go. He had forced himself as hard and as far as he could. He had lost all of his strength, his energy; he had become a spinal creature, operating strictly on the pulsing remnants of nerve signals between mind and body. And now even that left him.
He stopped there in the dirt like a run-down clock, his arms outstretched slightly to the side, and pitched face forward onto the cool wet gravel. A looming blackness moved in around him and swallowed up his senses. He couldn’t even struggle against it. He moved along in the blackness much the same as he had moved along in the swirling current, except this was by far more peaceful. In this blackness, he lost all sense of time.
He only realized he’d lost consciousness when the voice of the gunmen standing above him forced him to regain it.
“I don’t know how he made it this far,” he heard Galla say, standing over him. “But this is as good a place as any, I expect.”
Sam looked up at him and Dolan and saw them waver in place, as if he was looking at them through a watery veil. He heard one of them lever a round into a rifle. Didn’t he . . . ? He drifted, certain the sound came from his own Winchester. He drifted some more, for how long he did not know. But in what could have been a second, or an hour, he was stirred by the sound of another voice.
“Joe? Joe, wake up. We must hurry,” he heard Lilith say in a hushed and harried tone. “They will be coming for you.”
“Lilith . . . ,” he whispered. He managed to open his swollen eyes enough to see a foggy image of a woman kneeled over him.
“Can you hear me, Joe? Can you stand up? Here, let me help you to my wagon.”
“I—I can walk,” Sam said, pushing himself with all his strength, yet still only managing to get onto his knees. He tried again, this time with Lilith looping his arm over her shoulder.
“Quickly, quickly,” she said in a lowered tone. “I have seen what these men are capable of doing. They will kill you, and they will kill me for helping you.”
“Then . . . why?” he asked, staggering to the rear door of the peddler’s wagon only a few feet from the water’s edge.
Lilith half shoved him inside the wagon and over onto the bunk bed.
“Why? you ask,” she said. She quickly placed a pillow under his head and laid a canteen up under his arm. “I help you because you helped me. I saw what they did to you in town, and I followed you here.” She looked off in the direction of the gunmen farther upstream. “Now I must leave you and pull this wagon out of here before they arrive.”
Sam nodded, but her words were already growing farther and farther away.
Chapter 12
When Sam awakened again, it was in the long shadows of evening. He had felt leaves and vines brush along the wagon’s side the last few yards. Then the wagon had jostled to a halt alongside an ancient and grown-over stone ruins that had pressed itself so long against the mountainside that the two had become one—the mountain having taken in man’s orphaned hybrid creation and fostered it to its stony bosom. As the peddler’s wagon had stopped, a panther stood up atop a vine-clad wall, spun silently and vanished in a wisp of fur and claw.
Sam stood shakily in the darkness of the wagon, braced against the side frame, when the rear door opened and Lilith stepped up inside.
“Where . . . are we?” Sam asked, feeling cracks in his swollen lips reopen when he spoke.
“Somewhere safe where we will not be found,” Lilith said quietly, as if not to disturb the quietness of the ruins.
“We left tracks,” Sam cautioned her.
Without reply she slung a loaded knapsack to her shoulder, picked up a small lantern and stepped back to the open door.
“Come,” she said, gesturing him down through the open door. “You must lean on me.”
“I can walk . . . I think,” Sam said, everything looking grainy and offset through his swollen eyes.
Yet, when he stepped down to the ground behind Lilith, pain in his ribs and shoulders caused him to falter and almost fall. She grabbed his arm and steadied him.
“We must take Andre and go deep into the mountainside,” she said patiently, drawing him to her side. “Tomorrow or the next day, perhaps you can walk. Tonight you can help us both by doing as I say.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sam said quietly, allowing his weight to shift a little onto her as they walked to the front of the wagon. When they stopped beside Andre, the wagon horse looked around at Sam and seemed to perk up. He twitched his ears.
“Look, Joe,” Lilith said quietly. “Andre remembers you—he likes you.”
“I like you too, Andre,” Sam managed to say through his pained lips. He reached out a bruised hand and rubbed it down the horse’s soft, warm muzzle. “Obliged for the wagon ride, Andre . . . ,” he said.
“Don’t thank him just yet, Joe,” Lilith said. “You have a longer ride ahead of you.” She helped him lean against Andre’s side as she unhitched the horse from the wagon.
“Are we far from Agua Fría?” Sam asked.
“Yes, far enough anyway,” she said. Then she gestured for him to climb atop the horse’s bare back. With her pushing his rump upward, he managed to fall over atop the horse and straighten up some, in spite of the overall pain from being dragged. She hefted the knapsack from her shoulder up behind him and patted it down in place. Sam turned enough to place a hand on the sack to steady it.
She shook her head and smiled a little at his inability to not take part in things.
“Old habits,” he offered in a lowered voice, trying not to disturb his cracked lips.
With a length of leather rein she looped around Andre’s muzzle, Lilith led the horse forward through a courtyard of waist-high weeds, of wild grass and ironwood brush and ironwood trees grown up through the petrified limbs and carcasses of its generations past.
