watching.
He made three more efforts before he finally, by some miracle of rage at himself, got the leg over and his rump into the saddle. Dismounting, he realized now, would be almost as painful. But that did not matter now. Now he could travel. He lifted the reins and spoke to Brute.
“Get on, you bastard,” he said—and Brute moved off among the willows. Sally trailed obediently behind at the end of the rope that tied her to Brute’s saddle. Jeebee could no longer see Wolf. He did not know if the other was with him now or not. But he no longer had any doubt that Wolf, if alive, would be likely to catch up with him somewhere. In any case, it did not matter. Jeebee was moving, and he was traveling upstream toward the foothills.
By midday, he was exhausted and called a halt. He left the horses, having no choice, with their gear on, and slept on the ground beside them until nearly dark. With nightfall he went on, taking a chance and leaving the willow bottoms of the stream for a more direct route overland to the foothills, as he had seen them at the end of the day.
Later on, he was never able to recall this part of his trip with any clarity until he saw the burning buildings. In the saddle at last, he had begun to have hopes of making it into the foothills in one night’s ride.
It was true it was a night placed on top of a day that had asked the most from him. But he had given that much before and assumed that he could do it now. However, to a certain extent he was still worried about the painkillers he might have to take to help him reach his goal. It seemed to him he had heard of army surgeons in field hospitals during the war in Vietnam becoming hooked on Dilaudid because they had had to operate twenty-four hours around the clock and taking the drug was the only way they could do it.
But the Dilaudid was the only thing that could get him through. As it turned out, it did; but it was not easy. He was still holding off on his first pain pill of the trip, now that he was mounted and moving. But even with the horses going at a walk, he found riding hard. It was not so much that he could not deal with the pain on a minute- to-minute basis. It was the problem that the tension in him from his defiance of it was wearing him out. It was a matter of bracing himself against a new surge of pain each time Brute’s hooves struck the ground, jolting his hurt body. But there were things even beyond that to deal with.
One of these was the question of how to place his hurt left leg. Both in the stirrup and out of the stirrup it was uncomfortable. He had deliberately shortened the stirrup on that side and he was grateful now he had. But even that position was not good. In the end he put his toe, only, in it, and tried to forget his leg was there.
As the meager moonlight appeared with the rising of the moon to help him on his way—thank God the sky was clear and also that the horses were good at picking their own way in the sense of knowing where to put their feet—it became impossible to ignore the fact that riding in this position with his left leg hanging down was asking for trouble. He took a Dilaudid. Once it had gone to work to make him more comfortable, with great effort he pulled his left leg up with his hand until his knee was partly crooked around the pommel and the leg itself was held mostly near the horizontal.
This was a dangerously loose way to sit the saddle, even with Brute at a walk. He was not sure how long he could go on with it, without doing some kind of further damage to the leg. Thank God the knee would bend at least that much.
Normally, even at a walk like this, three to five hours of traveling should have brought them safely into the hills. They needed to find a place well above any of the ranch houses, a place where both he and the horses could hide overnight.
The fact was, he thought suddenly, he was standing up to the ride better than he had expected. Along with the action of the Dilaudid, there seemed to have come to his aid a sort of semi-hysteric state of determination to make the ride.
It was a state not too different from the shock he had gone into during his encounter with the bear. In this condition, the early hours of the night passed something like a bad dream, in which he was partly insulated from the physical cost of what he was doing and against any tendency to feel so exhausted he had to stop.
He ended by not getting down from the saddle at all, after one or two attempts, simply because he was afraid of getting down and not being able to make the climb back up. If that happened, he would be caught out here in the open, for around him there was nothing but sagebrush and open ground that should have had a certain amount of grass. It was bare partly from the drought of the last few years but would have been treeless even in a wet year. Somehow, he must keep moving until he got to a place where he could hide, both himself and the two horses with their burdens.
In the end he passed into an almost completely dreamlike state in which only a corner of his senses and vision kept watch normally. His vision, even, seemed to adjust unnaturally well to the reduced light of the partial moon, so that he felt he could see where they were going and the ground ahead of them as well as if it were daylight. But the small, sane corner of his mind kept insisting this could not be true.
Still, it was in this condition that, somewhere after midnight, the sane part of him noticed a glow on the horizon. It had to be after midnight because the moon was already starting its descent, which would leave him feeling his way in a nearly complete dark, with nothing but stars to light him along.
The glow came from directly ahead of him. It waxed and waned in curious fashion. He rode directly toward it, fascinated, for some distance, before realizing he was seeing the light of a large fire up ahead of him somewhere.
The hallucination of daylight vision in his present state did not completely shut out a sense of caution. As soon as it sank in on him that the light ahead was that of an unlikely large fire—the kind of fire that a ranch house and buildings might make—he began immediately to circle away from the direct line he had been taking toward it. It was a move as instinctive as that which had pulled him toward it.
He circled to his left, going wide but not so wide that he would not be able to get a view of whatever it was that was burning, when he got closer to it.
With the Dilaudid inside him, his mind was still clear as the minds of those surgeons in Vietnam must have been. A burning ranch house might well have attracted help from neighbors, which meant that there could be a number of people around the blaze.
On the other hand, if a lot of people were there, they still were most likely to be occupied with trying to put the fire out. Moreover, he knew how deceptive light like this could be. After staring into such flames for a little while, even a short distance away from it, everything would seem lost in utter blackness.
He should be able to pass fairly close with some safety from being observed.
Perhaps.
CHAPTER 23
Jeebee had moved out to his left in his circling movement to the point where he estimated he would pass the fire at better than a hundred yards to its left.
Accordingly, he now altered his course back toward the foothills, heading toward the high blackness ahead where the stars speckling the night sky ceased at an undulating horizon of blackness. The moon was already down.
There was only the slightest of night winds cooling Jeebee’s right cheek, but the flames ahead burned brightly. As he got closer he could see that outbuildings, including the tall barn, were being fiercely consumed by flame. The ranch house at first had looked almost untouched. But now he began to see a little tongue of flame that appeared and disappeared, running flickeringly along the eaves on the closer edge of the roof, on the side of it he would be passing.
Also, as he got closer, he began to hear the sounds of voices—voices raised in yips and yells, like the voices of those at some wild revel. He also began to make out the black silhouettes of figures dancing and running about. Occasionally he saw a figure of a riderless horse among them.
The first thought of his weary brain was that he must be looking at the home of some unfortunate rancher who had incurred the enmity of his neighbors. The way Jeebee himself had is unconsciously done back in Stoketon, Michigan.
Then he rejected this idea, along with another, that perhaps the figures he saw were neighbors who had
