CHAPTER 9
“Shit! Wake up, Bo, wake up!”
As awareness seeped back into Bo’s brain, he recognized Scratch’s voice as the silver-haired Texan spoke urgently to him. A terrible stench filled his nostrils, and he wondered if that stink was what prompted Scratch’s exclamation. It sure smelled like they were rolling around in some sort of dung.
Something wet and slobbery prodded his face. Bo forced his eyes open and found himself staring at close range into the beady little eyes of a massive hog. He yelled as he jerked away from the beast. Then someone grabbed his arm and hauled him up and out of a sticky, stinking morass that tried to drag him back down.
As he staggered to his feet, he looked over and saw that it was Scratch who had hold of him. At least, he thought it was Scratch. He couldn’t be sure, because the hombre appeared to have been smeared from head to foot with a mixture of mud and other foul substances. Bo wondered suddenly if he looked the same way. He considered the likelihood to be pretty strong.
His eyesight was blurry because of gunk dripping over his eyes. He tried to wipe it away, but his hand was even filthier and just made things worse. Scratch tugged at his arm and said, “They threw us in a damn hog pen! We gotta get outta here ’fore those blasted porkers get us, Bo!”
Bo knew his friend was right. He saw a number of huge, muddy, bloated shapes around them. A bunch of hogs like that could consume anybody unlucky enough to fall in among them, and nothing would be left of the poor son of a bitch.
With the mud of the hog wallow dragging at their feet, Bo and Scratch fought their way toward the pole fence that surrounded the pen. They didn’t know where they were, other than in a heap of trouble, but they could figure that out later, after they made it over that fence, away from the hogs. They reached it and began climbing, a task made more difficult by the slippery mud that coated their hands, and everything else.
Hogs snuffling hungrily around their legs added urgency to their actions. They struggled to the top of the fence and swung over it, but both Texans lost their grip as they did so and fell hard to the ground on the outside of the pen. At least now they were where the hogs couldn’t get at them, so they were able to lie there and catch their breath for a few moments.
Not that they wanted to breathe much of that stinking air. Bo coughed and gasped and tried not to think about how much of the mud must have gotten in his mouth. As he and Scratch pushed themselves to their hands and knees and began to crawl away from the pen, both of them started spitting as hard as they could.
They made it about twenty yards before they collapsed. That was far enough so that the smell wasn’t quite so bad. They could still smell themselves, though, and that was a terrible reek.
“We gotta…we gotta find some place to wash off,” Scratch said.
Bo lifted his head to look around. He heard the bubbling, chuckling sound of running water, and after a moment he located what appeared to be the Animas River. He and Scratch were lying on a hillside. The stream was at the bottom of the slope, about fifty yards away.
Bo’s eyes followed the river back along its course. He saw the sturdy wooden bridge in the distance, maybe a quarter of a mile way. That meant they weren’t far out of Mankiller. They could walk back to the settlement.
But not looking and smelling like this. They had to clean themselves up first. Then they could take stock of the situation and figure out what to do next.
“Let’s see if we can…make it to the river,” he suggested to Scratch.
They fought their way to their feet and began stumbling down the hill. The rocky banks of the Animas were about eight feet high, but they weren’t so steep that the Texans couldn’t slide down them. That’s what they did, coming to a stop on a narrow strip of grass at the edge of the water.
They were about to lean forward and plunge their mud-caked heads into the chilly, fast-flowing stream, when a rifle shot blasted somewhere nearby and a bullet kicked up dirt and gravel just a few feet away. As Bo and Scratch froze, a voice ordered harshly, “Don’t move, you filthy bastards!”
Bo turned his head and saw a man coming toward them along the riverbank. He was a little below medium height and seemed to be almost as wide as he was tall. He wasn’t fat, though. Instead, he bulged with muscle all over. A derby was pushed down on his bald head, and a red handlebar mustache curled over his mouth. He had a short, black cigar clenched between his teeth in one corner of that mouth.
He kept Bo and Scratch covered with the Spencer repeating carbine he had fired a moment earlier. He jerked the barrel a little and said, “Get away from that water!”
“Mister, we just want to clean up,” Bo said.
“I know what you want to do. My claim’s downstream, and I don’t want you fouling the water with all that pig shit.”
“You can’t expect us to just stay like this!” Scratch protested.
The man shrugged wide shoulders. “It’ll dry and crack off after a while.”
“By then we’ll be dead from the stink!”
“Yeah, well, you should count yourself lucky that you’re not filling up the belly of some hog by now.” The man’s face became even more grim. “You wouldn’t be the first fellas to wind up disappearing in the Devery hog pen.”
“The Deverys own those hogs, do they?” Bo asked. Somehow that idea didn’t come as any surprise to him.
“Yeah, sure. You boys get crosswise with that bunch?”
“Before I answer that, tell me…your last name wouldn’t happen to be Devery, would it?”
The man’s face darkened with anger. The tips of his mustache seemed to bristle with outrage.
“It would not,” he said. “My name is O’Hanrahan, Francis Xavier O’Hanrahan, and I’m no relation to those
