Bud raised his head off the snow, blinking furiously to clear his eyes. He saw a man dressed in buckskins with a bow and arrow.
'You're a damn Injun!' he cried.
'I am Anasazi.'
Bud saw an arrow being fitted to the bow.
_What the hell is an Anasazi?_ he thought, slipping toward unconsciousness again, remembering what he'd been told about Frank Morgan.
But who the hell was this Indian?
--------
*Twenty-six*
As Bud was surrounded by a swirling gray fog, what he'd been told came back to him.
* * * *
Darkness came to the snow-clad mountains. Rich Boggs was hobbling toward the cabin at Lost Pine Canyon on seriously frostbitten feet. Cabot Bulware was behind him, using a pine limb for a crutch, they told Bud afterward, describing every step of their painful journey.
'It ain't much farther,' Rich groaned. 'I can see the mouth of the canyon from here.'
_'Sacre,'_ Cabot said, limping with most of his weight on the crutch. 'I be gon' kill that _batard_ Morgan if I can get my hands on a horse and a gun.'
'I just wanna get my feet warm,' Rich said. 'The way I feel now, I ain't interested in killin' nobody. I think a couple of my toes fell off.'
'Who was the old man with Monsieur Morgan?' Cabot asked. 'I hear Ned say Morgan always work alone.'
'Don't know,' Rich replied, his teeth chattering from the numbing cold. 'Just some old son of a bitch in a coonskin cap with a rifle.'
'He be dangerous too,' Cabot warned. 'I see the look in his eyes.'
'You're too goddamn superstitious, Cabot. He'll die just like any other man if you shoot him in the right place. I can guarantee it.'
'My feet are frozen. I go back to Baton Rouge when I can find a horse. I don't like this place.'
'I ain't all that fond of it either, Cabot,' Rich said as they moved slowly to the canyon entrance. 'It was a big mistake to side with Ned on this thing. I never did see how we was gonna make any money.'
'I do not care about money now,' Cabot replied. 'All I want is a stove where I can warm my feet.'
'Won't be but another half mile to the cabin,' Rich told him in a shivering voice. 'All we've gotta do is get there before our feet freeze off.'
'Boots, and horses, are what we need,' Rich announced. 'If they didn't leave our horses in the corral, we're a couple of dead men in this weather.'
'I feel dead now,' Cabot replied. 'I don't got feeling at all in either one of my feet.'
* * * *
As night blanketed the canyon Rich added more wood to the stove. He and Cabot had dragged the dead bodies outside, but a broken window let in so much cold air that Rich was still shivering. He'd taken the boots off Don Jones's body and forced his own feet into them. Cabot was wearing boots and an extra pair of socks that had once belonged to Mack.
They'd found two pistols and a small amount of ammunition among the dead men. Ned and the others had taken all the food; thus Rich was boiling fistfuls of snow in an old coffeepot full of yesterday's grounds.
Five horses were still in the corral even though the gate was open, nibbling from the stack of hay, and there were enough saddles to go around.
'I am going back south in the morning,' Cabot said with his palms open near the stove.
'Me too,' Rich said. 'I'm finished with Ned and this bunch of bullshit over gettin' even with Frank Morgan. There's no payday in it for us.'
'I've been dreaming about a bowl of hot crawfish gumbo all afternoon,' Cabot said wistfully. 'This is not where I belong.'
'Me either. I'm headed down to Mexico where it's warm all the time.'
Cabot turned to the broken window where Don had been shot in the face. 'What was that noise?' he asked.
'I didn't hear no noise,' Rich replied.
'One of the horses in the corral ... it snorted, or made some kind of sound.'
'My ears are so damn cold I couldn't hear a thing nohow,' Rich declared. 'Maybe it was just your imagination. All I hear is snow fallin' on this roof.'
Then Cabot heard it again.
'Help ... me!' a faint voice cried.
'That sounded like Jerry's voice,' Cabot said, jumping up with a pistol in his fist.
