“The Brazos Devil,” Thorp said grimly. “This poor beast is ripped up just like the Lavery boys were. They didn’t even look human anymore when the monster got through with them.”
Longarm swung down from his saddle and knelt beside the gruesome remains. He touched the dark pool surrounding the horse. The blood that hadn’t soaked into the ground had dried into a sticky, congealed mass. Longarm touched it with his fingertips and then rubbed them together, grimacing. “Probably happened yesterday,” he said. “The horse wandered around for a day after he ran off the second time; then this happened to him.”
“You recognize the animal?” asked Thorp.
Longarm nodded. “It’s the gelding I was riding when I caught up to Rainey and Lloyd. There’s not much hide left on the body, but what there is of it is gray. And that’s my saddle.” He sighed. The McClellan saddle had been ripped in two and was soaked in blood. He wouldn’t be using it again, nor anything in the saddlebags.
His Winchester wasn’t in the saddle boot, though, and that was curious. He stood up and began walking in ever-widening circles around the horse, ignoring the curious stares of his companions. After a few minutes, he bent over and reached into a clump of brush. When he straightened, he was holding a rifle.
“Got some blood on the stock, but I can clean it off,” he said. “The critter was curious enough to pull my rifle out of the boot, but when he realized it wasn’t anything good to eat, he threw it away.”
“He?” Thorp repeated.
Longarm shrugged. “Who knows? Those who have seen it say the thing’s half-man, so I don’t feel right calling him an it.”
Thorp shook his head and said, “Anything that could do this to a horse … I’m not sure any part of it is human.”
The man had a point, Longarm thought. He had seen horses pulled down by wolves and mountain lions that looked like this one, but he never would have dreamed that something which walked upright could do such damage with his—its—whatever—bare hands. Longarm felt a little shiver go through him.
While he searched for his rifle, he had also been looking for tracks. He resumed that search now, and several yards away from the horse’s body he found some. “Look here,” he told the others. They joined him, and he pointed out the prints. The sharp claws on the gigantic feet had really gouged out the soft loam of the ground in places. Longarm said, “Those are the same sort of tracks I found the other day after Rainey started screaming.”
All four of the men peered closely at the misshapen footprints. Singh muttered something that sounded like “Yeti.”
“What’s that?” Longarm asked.
“A legend in the part of the world Singh comes from,” Lord Beechmuir explained. “High in the Himalayan Mountains, a creature supposedly exists that is part man and part monster, dwelling in the eternal snows of those slopes. I’ve often thought about going there and attempting to bag one of the beasts.”
“Well, it doesn’t snow very often in these parts, but I reckon the Brazos Devil could be a distant relation. What do you think, Singh?”
The expression on the Sikh’s bearded face was fierce, but he shook his head. “It is not for me to say.”
“Suit yourself.” Longarm turned to Lord Beechmuir. “Think you can track the critter?”
“We shall certainly try. Are you going to continue to accompany us, Marshal?”
Longarm thought about it, then nodded. “Anytime anything’s going on around here, the Brazos Devil seems to be somewhere close by. Maybe if we find him, we’ll find Rainey too.”
“And my wife,” Thorp put in.
“Sure,” said Longarm. “Mrs. Thorp too.”
But in his heart, he no longer believed that. He had heard about what the Brazos Devil was suspected of doing to the Lavery boys and Matt Hardcastle. but hearing about those atrocities and actually seeing what had been done to this horse were two different things. He couldn’t believe that any woman unlucky enough to fall into the hands of such a savage creature would still be alive weeks later.
And even if Emmaline Thorp was still drawing breath somewhere, it was unlikely that she was sane. Some female captives who had been carried off by the Comanches had lost their minds from the brutality with which the Indians had treated them. It had to be a lot worse being held prisoner by the Brazos Devil.
Longarm no longer doubted the existence of the creature. He had seen enough now to be convinced. Something was out here in these woods, something the likes of which folks had never run into before. Longarm had always been skeptical of such wild stories in the past, but now he believed.
And whether he wanted to admit it or not, he was a mite scared too.
Chapter 12
Only a fool never experienced fear. Longarm had been scared plenty of times in his life, first as a farm boy in West-by-God Virginia, then as a soldier in the Late Unpleasantness. Once, when he was cowboying after the War, he had gotten caught in front of a stampede on a stormy night. He would never forget the rumble of hooves and the clashing of horns behind him, the noises blending with the roar of thunder and the crackle of lightning, as the crazed herd chased and closed in on him. If he hadn’t had a good pony under him that night, he would have been mashed into the dirt of Indian Territory and left bloody and unrecognizable. As it was, he had been able to race out of the path of the stampede at the last minute, but the memory of that belly-churning, throat-clutching fear would always be with him, living a life of its own there in the back of his mind. Likewise, he had been in plenty of tough scrapes since he’d started riding for the Justice Department. There had been times when he fully expected to die and felt the fear any sane man would feel at that prospect.
But now the sensation crawling along his spine like a woolly-worm was different, and he sort of understood why some folks said the fear of the unknown was the greatest fear of all. Better the devil you know, the old saying said, rather than the one you don’t. Under the circumstances, it was mighty apt.
Longarm, Lord Beechmuir, and Singh followed the tracks of the creature while Thorp returned to the others to lead them in a circle around the horse’s body. Booth did not want his wife to get too close to the slaughtered animal. Helene had already seen enough to upset her. They all rendezvoused on the far side of the gully and pushed on north.
