“Damn it, Rainey,” Longarm said, angry now because once again he had lost that gray gelding and all the gear that was on the horse. “Tell me what you saw.”
Rainey’s mouth worked some more, but the sounds that came out were nonsense. Longarm sighed in disgust. Rainey was completely incoherent with fear.
Maybe there were some tracks on the ground, Longarm thought. He went over to the spot Rainey kept staring at and brushed aside some of the leaves that had fallen from the oaks. The ground underneath was fairly soft and took prints well.
Longarm frowned. There were tracks there, all right, but none like he had ever seen before. He hunkered down to get a closer look at them.
At first glance the prints looked like they might have been made by a pair of bare human feet. But even though Longarm had known some old boys with pretty big clodhoppers, he had never seen human feet large enough to make tracks like these. The prints were easily more than twelve inches long. More like fifteen or sixteen, Longarm judged.
It was possible, Longarm supposed, that a fella could grow big enough to have such enormous feet. Some of his previous assignments had taken him to circuses and carnivals, so he was aware that some truly surprising freaks of nature popped up from time to time. But a man couldn’t grow pads and claws like a bear on the front of his foot, and for all the world, that was what these tracks looked like: half-man, half-bear.
Suddenly, an eerie cry floated through the air. The sound made Longarm’s head snap up, and he felt the skin on the back of his neck prickling. Instinctively, he reached for the butt of his gun. The call had the strangest quality to it Longarm had ever heard. It was almost human, but not quite. On the other hand, it didn’t sound like a critter either. It had too much of a man-sound to it for that.
Coldness trickled down Longarm’s back like a vagrant drop of winter rain creeping past an oilskin slicker. He was very glad that the cry seemed to come from a good distance away.
Rainey started sobbing.
Longarm took another look at the strange prints and then stood up. He figured Rainey had gotten a good look at whatever had left those tracks and made that sound. Obviously, the thing was enough to spook even a hardened outlaw. Longarm stepped closer to the tree and looked at Rainey’s wrists. He hadn’t noticed it before, but they were scraped raw and bloody where Rainey had tried unsuccessfully to pull them out of the handcuffs. Rainey had been desperate to get away.
“Don’t worry about it, old son,” Longarm told the whimpering outlaw. “Whatever it was, it’s gone now, and I don’t reckon it’ll be back. Chances are, it was just as scared of you as you were of it.”
Rainey didn’t even seem to hear him. The man just kept making sounds like a whipped puppy.
Longarm glanced at the tracks again. He might be able to follow the thing’s trail, but he had a prisoner to take care of and the job came first. At least, that was the way he was going to look at it.
Chapter 3
Just as Longarm had expected, the bacon he’d been frying was nothing but charred little strips of unrecognizable blackness. He didn’t care; he had lost his appetite again. If he wanted, he could gnaw on one of those hard biscuits while he was in the saddle, because he was sure of one thing. He and Rainey were getting the hell out of there.
Rainey’s sobs had subsided. The outlaw slumped against the rough bark of the post oak’s trunk, his arms wrapped tightly around it as if by holding on to the tree he could also hold on to his sanity. He looked much too shaken to try anything, but Longarm hadn’t lived this long by being careless. He unfastened one side of the cuffs and then stepped back quickly, bringing up the Winchester that he had tucked underneath his arm while he freed his prisoner.
Rainey didn’t move. He just kept hugging that tree.
Finally, when Rainey didn’t respond to the lawman’s orders to get mounted, Longarm moved closer and took hold of Rainey’s shoulder. He had to practically pry the outlaw away from the tree, and when he did he saw there was a large wet stain on the front of Rainey’s trousers. That wasn’t a surprise considering how frightened Rainey had been. Besides, he had complained about being cuffed to the tree before he’d had a chance to relieve himself. Longarm felt a little guilty about that now.
But only a little, and the feeling faded even more when he recalled how Rainey and Lloyd had been about to bury him alive only a few hours earlier. He wasn’t going to waste perfectly good pity on a hardcase like Rainey. “Come on,” he growled. “Either get on that horse and come with me, or I’ll leave you here, Rainey.”
At last something Longarm said seemed to get through to Rainey’s stunned brain. He began shaking his head, and the motion became more vehement, almost violent. He understood the threat, and evidently it was the worst one Longarm could have used. Rainey headed for the chestnut.
The outlaw’s arms and legs were trembling, making him awkward as he climbed into the saddle. His eyes darted back and forth constantly as if he expected the horror to reappear at any second. Both of his hands tightly gripped the saddlehorn.
Longarm tossed the burned bacon onto the ground, cleaned the frying pan with sand from the riverbed, then put it away. He swung up onto the Appaloosa and inclined his head to the east. “This looks like as good a place as any to cross the river. Cottonwood Springs can’t be more than ten miles the other side of the Brazos.”
Rainey paid no attention to him. Longarm grimaced and rode close enough to reach out and take the chestnut’s reins. He dallied them around his own saddlehorn for a moment while he refastened the cuff around Rainey’s wrist. Rainey didn’t put up a fight, didn’t even seem to notice what Longarm was doing, in fact. He was too busy looking every which way for whatever had scared him.
For a long moment, Longarm studied the outlaw’s face. If there was the slightest chance Rainey was trying to pull some sort of trick so that he could escape, Longarm wanted to nip that hope in the bud. The fear on Rainey’s face and in his eyes seemed utterly genuine, though. Longarm shrugged, loosened the chestnut’s reins from his saddle and held them, and nudged the Appaloosa into an easy walk.
The bed of the Brazos was almost a hundred yards wide at this point, even though the river itself was much smaller at the moment. Still, the crossing wasn’t without its dangers. Closer to the center of the streambed were patches of quicksand that had to be avoided. The water itself was only about eighteen inches deep and the current was sluggish, but again, there were perilous spots where a man and a horse could be pulled down.
