Longarm and Rainey reached the eastern side of the river without incident and rode up onto the bank. A ridge ran along this part of the Brazos, with rocky bluffs at the top of the slope overlooking the stream. The climb was fairly steep, but the Appaloosa and the chestnut managed it with no trouble. When they reached the top, some instinct made Longarm rein in and look back over his shoulder. Down below, across the Brazos, he could see the place where he and Rainey had meant to have their noon meal.
Longarm halfway expected to see some sort of monster hunkered there in the clearing, drawn back perhaps by the smell of the burned bacon. But there was nothing, only the peaceful-looking riverbank. Longarm’s eyes probed the trees on the far side of the Brazos, but he spotted no movement.
That in itself was a mite strange, he realized with a slight frown. Those oaks should have been full of birds and squirrels. Autumn wasn’t so far advanced that all the critters would have headed for their winter homes. At this moment, however, the far side of the river seemed devoid of wildlife.
It was as if the birds and squirrels, which were oftentimes smarter than folks gave them credit for, were hiding out from something that scared them too.
Longarm gave a little shake of his head and turned back to face east. Unless he got completely lost, he and Rainey could make Cottonwood Springs well before dark. Suddenly, that seemed like an even better idea to Longarm than it had earlier.
Longarm had run into more than his share of strange things over the years. He had tracked the Wendigo, the mythical beast of the Plains Indians, and tangled with murderous mechanical men. His job had put him on the trail of ghosts, grave robbers, mad magicians, and cannibal Indians. He had heard tales as well about the so-called monsters that lurked in the lonely places of the frontier. Some had their source in the stories of the Indians, like the Wendigo and the legendary Sasquatch. Texans had their own yarns, like the one about the monster of Caddo Lake, over in the piney woods of East Texas, and Longarm remembered hearing about a horrible creature that was half- man and half-goat living along the Trinity River northwest of Fort Worth. Then there was Espantosa Lake, down in South Texas, which was supposedly haunted by the ghosts of Spanish conquistadores who had been thrown in by their Indian captors and dragged to their deaths by the weight of their armor.
But those tracks he had found, along with the look on Rainey’s face and the way the prisoner was acting, made Longarm feel about as downright creepy as he ever had. He would be glad when they reached Cottonwood Springs and got back among normal folks again.
The farther they traveled away from the Brazos, the better Longarm felt. Rainey calmed down a little too, and stopped twisting his head around so that he could constantly peer in fright over his shoulders. Instead he sat hunched forward in the saddle, his eyes downcast, not paying attention to much of anything. At least he was quiet and not causing any trouble, and Longarm was grateful for small favors.
When Longarm’s appetite returned, he took out one of the biscuits and used his pocketknife to cut hunks off it. He had to suck on the pieces of biscuit like they were hard candy for a while before he was able to chew them, but they were surprisingly filling. Rainey didn’t nod, shake his head, or even look up when Longarm offered him some of the biscuit. Longarm shrugged. If the outlaw wanted to go hungry, that was Rainey’s lookout. When Longarm was finished with the biscuit, he took a cheroot from his vest pocket and regarded it critically for a moment before putting it in his mouth. The cigar was a little bent from when he had fallen into that grave, but it wasn’t broken. He scratched a lucifer into life, held the flame to the tip of the cheroot, and puffed contentedly on it.
Not long after leaving the vicinity of the river, Longarm and Rainey came upon a wagon road that ran east and west. Longarm nudged the Appaloosa onto the trace and headed east, leading the chestnut with Rainey on it. A couple of miles down the trail they reached a crossroad. Wooden signs nailed to a post informed Longarm that the crossroad ran south to Fort Belknap and the town of Graham, while the northbound trail would have taken them to Cimarron Springs and Archer City. To the west, the way they had come, the main road led to Fort Griffin, and to the east, the direction they were headed, lay Cottonwood Springs. Ultimately, Longarm recalled, this road would take them to Jacksboro, Decatur, Boyd’s Mill, and Fort Worth. For the time being, however, Longarm would settle for Cottonwood Springs, where he could find a doctor to tend Rainey’s wound, then maybe lock the prisoner up in the local jail and enjoy a bath, a hot meal, and a night’s sleep in a hotel bed. Longarm sighed in anticipation at the thought.
The rest of the trip to Cottonwood Springs passed without incident. It was after the middle of the afternoon when the two riders came within sight of the settlement. The first things to be visible were the steeples of a pair of churches, one on each end of town. Knowing how folks in this part of the country felt about religion, Longarm was confident that one of the houses of worship was of the Baptist persuasion and the other was likely Methodist. It had always amazed Longarm how people could almost come to blows over whether it was best to be a dunker or a sprinkler. He subscribed to the theory contained in the old hymn “Farther Along We’ll Know More about It,” so he tended to be tolerant of other folks’ beliefs.
As Longarm and Rainey drew closer, the lawman made out more buildings. He hadn’t passed through Cottonwood Springs during his wanderings in the past few days, so he wasn’t sure how big the town was. It looked to be good-sized, which buoyed Longarm’s hopes of finding the place equipped with both a doctor and a sturdy jailhouse. “Come on, Rainey,” he said as they reached the point where the wagon road turned into the main street of the town. “Let’s get that bullet crease tended to.”
“Damn well about time,” muttered Rainey, and the outlaw’s surly response let Longarm know that Rainey was getting somewhat back to normal. The man had been silent ever since before they had crossed the Brazos.
Longarm hipped around in the saddle to look at Rainey. “You ready to talk about what you saw back there?” Longarm didn’t particularly want to bring up the subject, but his curiosity got the best of him.
Rainey shook his head, stone-faced. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I didn’t see nothing.”
Longarm reined in and frowned. “Hold on there, old son. You mean to tell me you didn’t see something that made you start screaming like a banshee?”
“I didn’t see a thing,” Rainey said stubbornly.
Longarm glowered at the outlaw. “Then why’s your voice so hoarse? I’ll tell you why—it’s from all that yelling you did.”
Rainey shook his head.
Longarm took out another cheroot and stuck it in his mouth unlit. His teeth clamped down hard on the cylinder of tobacco. If that was the way Rainey wanted to be about it, fine. What had happened back there at the Brazos didn’t have anything to do with Rainey and Lloyd trying to murder him, and it didn’t affect the mission that had brought him here, which was to apprehend the pair of outlaws. With a grimace, Longarm turned around and prodded the Appaloosa into a walk.
