wasn’t likely to be awake at eleven at night, was she?
Jenny’d skin him, though. It was a terrible thing, he thought, to be ruled by women. Then he pictured Megan MacDonald. Well, there were exceptions to every rule, he thought, and grinned.
It did rain, and while Jason was outside, beaming and standing stark naked in his front yard with a bar of soap in his hand, miles away the wagon train was getting the worst of the dust storm. The wagons had been tightly circled and all the livestock had been unhitched and brought to the center, but the wind screeched through the wagons like a banshee intent on revenge.
Young Bill Crachit thought that maybe God was mad at them for giving up on the dream of California, and he huddled inside his old, used wagon, praying.
The Saulk family, two wagons down, held their children close, hoping it would just stop. Well, Eliza Saulk did. Her husband, Frank, had the thankless job of trying to hold the wagon’s canopy in place: The train had lost three already to the torrent of grit and dirt and cactus thorns. He was around the far side when, out of nowhere, an arm of a saguaro hit him in the back like a bag of nail-filled bricks. He went down with a thud, but was helped to his feet a moment later by Riley Havens, who yanked the cactus, stuck to Frank by its two-inch spines, free.
Blood ran down Frank’s back in a hundred little drizzles, soaking his shirt, and Riley helped him back up inside the wagon. “Saguaro!” he shouted to Eliza. “Get those thorns out!”
Never letting go of the children, she moved back to her husband, gasped, “Oh, Frank!” and immediately began to ease him out of his shirt.
Riley left her to take care of her man and struggled next door, to the Grimms’ wagon. Their canopy had blown off earlier. It had taken four men to chase it down and get it tied back in place. And that had been before the wind came up so damned hard. He doubted they could repeat their performance.
All was well with the Grimms, except that their dog wouldn’t shut up. He was a cross between a redbone hound and a Louisiana black-mouthed cur, and the wind had brought out the hound side of him, in spades. While he yodeled uncontrollably, the Grimms had covered their heads with blankets and quilts, trying to hold off the noise of him and the storm. Riley hollered, “Shut up!” at him a few times, but it made no difference, and so he moved on to the next wagon and left the howling beast behind.
The raw wind still raked at his ears, even though he’d tied his hat down with one scarf, then covered his nose and mouth with a second one. But the crud still got through somehow, worked its insidious way up his nose and into his mouth. His eyes were crusted with it, and even his ears were stuffed.
The wind picked up—although how it managed, he had no idea—and one of the horses reared. He felt it more than saw it, because the horses were circled twenty feet away, in the center of the ring of wagons, but he knew what had happened. Somebody’s gelding or mare had fallen prey to another of those thorny chunks of cactus that the wind seemed intent on throwing at them.
He made his way through the roar, falling twice in the process, but at last reached the distressed animal. Lodged on its croup was a fist-sized chunk of jumping cholla, which, in this case, might have jumped all the way from Tucson, as far as Riley knew.
He pulled it free, then pulled out what spines he could see. It was all he could do, but the horse seemed grateful.
Slowly staggering, he made his way to a new wagon to check in and give what reassurances he could. Which weren’t many. He swore, this was the last train he was going to ferry out or back.
He was done.
2
Back in Fury, it was still raining come the morning, although it had settled into a slow but steady drizzle. And it didn’t take much water for an Arizona inhabitant to forget the dust, Jason discovered. When he walked down the street to the office, he didn’t pass a single water trough that wasn’t filled to the brim. And grimy from all the gritty, dusty cowhands helping themselves to a free bath. Jason pitied the horses that had to drink from those troughs.
Surprisingly, there hadn’t been that much wind damage. To the town, anyway. Ward Wanamaker told him, before he went home for the day, that the east side of the surrounding stockade wall looked like God had been using it for target practice.
Jason didn’t feel like walking around the outside of the town, so he walked past the office and all the way down the central street, to the steps that would take him to the top of the wall. Every wall, his father had taught him, had to have places from which men could defend the interior, and this one did, around all four sides. When he reached the top, he stood on the rails that also ran around the inside perimeter, and looked down.
Ward had been right.
Cactus—clumps, arms, and pieces—covered the outside of the wall, and at the base was enough vegetation to start a small forest. If anybody in their right mind would want a forest of cactus, that was. And then he got to thinking that a forest of cactus just might be a good thing for the outside of that wall. He knew that cactus would just send down roots and take off, if you threw a hunk of it down on the ground. And they sure had a good rain last night, that was for sure. Hell, the stuff was probably rooted already.
He decided to leave it. It’d be just one more deterrent for Apache, and he was all for that.
He figured the stuff stuck to the wall would eventually fall off, leaving spines and stickers behind to discourage anyone who might try to climb in, too. If they made it past the cactus forest, that was.
“Oh, get a grip on yourself,” he muttered to himself. “Stuff only blew in last night, and here you’ve got it six feet tall in your head!”
Shaking his head, he went back down the steps and started up toward his office. But he paused before going inside. He wondered if he should have a word with Rafe Lynch. He decided he should, but he put it off. Frankly, he didn’t want it to turn into a confrontation and he was afraid that Lynch could do that pretty damn fast.
Actually, he was afraid that Lynch could rope, tie, and brand him before he even knew he was in the ketch pen.
