Will somewhat clumsily grabbed a handful of mane and the rein and swung up onto the pinto’s back. The horse snorted, sunfished a couple of times—which Will rode easily—and was ready for work. “Gettin’ a tad bored standin’ around, no? Well, let’s go out an’ play. Shark,” he said, using the “down” motion. “You stay here, pard.”
He would have preferred a saddle under him, but Will rode as well bareback as did any Indian. He gathered up some rein and put leg pressure on both sides of the horse. The pinto took off fast—real fast. All four of his hooves threw clumps of dirt behind him, and he stretched to run like a greyhound. Slick had been fast. This pinto was faster, Will realized.
He leaned back a bit and tapped the horse’s snout with the hackamore. The pinto broke his run in a single pace and dropped his rear legs behind him, skidding to a long, sliding stop.
“Holy God,” Will whispered. For a horse to drop to a sliding stop from a full gallop like that wasn’t only the result of fine training. It was an irrefutable indication of a hell of a mount.
He swung the pinto into a large figure eight, again at a gallop. The horse picked up his lead—the leg and hoof he followed as he turned—at every change. Will tightened the eight and then tightened it again, to the point where the horse was leaning far to his side making the turns, Will leaning with him rather against him, a part of the animal rather than baggage he carried.
Shark’s expression showed his curiosity as to what Will and the horse were doing. When they first lit out, Shark matched the horse’s speed, running a few feet to Will’s right side. But when the maneuvers began—the sliding stop, the tighter and tighter figure eights—the dog moved away from the dust cloud and watched the action with all the interest and intensity of a child watching a traveling puppet show.
Will was dripping perspiration, and the salt was irritating to the healing flesh of his face and arms. The pinto’s chest was frothy with sweat, and his flanks dripped water like a leaky roof during a rainstorm. Even sitting still and merely watching, Shark’s tongued lolled out from between his jaws, dripping saliva—the canine equivalent of sweat.
All three of them drank from the sinkhole. Will rubbed the horse down with handfuls of scrub, but walking him to cool him down was futile: sweat broke as soon as they stepped out from the shade to the stunning power of the sun.
Will was hungry and so was his horse. Shark was doing just fine with rabbit, but Will couldn’t drive the images of a beefsteak with all the fixings and a bucket—maybe two or three buckets—of cold beer from his mind.
There was another hunger, too, that was goading Will: the deaths of Hiram, his wife and his daughters, and those of Austin and Gentle Jane, which burned within him hotter than the fire in the mercantile, hotter than the hottest flames of hell.
He leaned back against the twisted trunk of a desert pine.
While Will and his dog slept away the hottest part of the day, fat gray clouds began to gather in the east, seeming to battle one another, churning and boiling high above the prairie. The temperature dropped slowly as the front approached. The clouds brought about an early dusk. The first drops of rain were tiny, almost mistlike, with no power behind them. The following wind, however, changed all that. The temperature continued to fall like an anvil. Will was shivering—a strange and unfamiliar sensation after week after week of stultifying, unremitting heat.
Still, the weather had done Will a grand favor. The already lackadaisical and possibly/probably drunk outriders would be huddled into themselves in the rain and chilling wind, making their rounds only because they feared One Dog’s punishment if they failed to do so.
Fine, jagged lines of lightning, like cracks in good glass, did little to illuminate the prairie. The thunder, distant, was more of a sensation than an actual sound: a deep, barely audible series of reports like the cannons of a far-off battle.
When it was full dark, Will grabbed a handful of rein and swung onto the pinto’s back. He didn’t need to call Shark. The dog was at the horse’s right side, coat tight to his body and slick with rain. Will held the pinto to a fast walk as he headed toward Olympus.
He secured the horse with the rein draped over a boulder and another rock pressing on the leather. The pinto snorted a couple of times as Will and Shark went off on foot, but quickly settled down.
The lightning and thunder had moved closer, and the flashes in the sky were like the sharp white light of a photographer’s magnesium. The thunder was much louder, gigantic crackling booms that seemed to sweep the prairie with the raw power of their sound.
Shark walked close to Will, and when a blast of thunder roared over them, he moved closer, his side touching Will’s right leg. Will rubbed the dog’s shoulder as they walked.
Shark saw the rider and stiffened. Will dropped to his stomach and motioned Shark down. The next stroke of lightning showed a man on horseback, poncho wrapped around everything but his face. His right hand held a rifle out in the driving rain.
Will didn’t want to use his .45. Even in the storm the crack of the discharge would carry, and he wasn’t quite sure how close to the town he was. Will clutched his knife. He could probably tackle the man off his horse, but the rider could well make enough noise to draw more men. Shark pressed against him as a blast of thunder followed a hissing, menacing streak of lightning. Will slid his knife back into his boot sheath.
“Shark,” he said quietly, “get him,” at the same time using the forward arm signal. The dog moved close to the ground, stopping when lightning struck. He looked like a rock or perhaps a clump of brush.
The rider paid no more attention to Shark’s approach than he did to anything else around him. In fact, all he saw was the poll of his horse’s head, because his own head was tilted downward to let the rain run off his hat.
The rider was apparently circling the town. He was also obviously drunk, slumped forward on his horse’s back, mumbling to himself. Or perhaps he was singing. It was impossible to tell from the racket of the storm. He was moving toward Will, and Will didn’t bother to do anything evasive other than quieting his dog’s menacing growl.
The wind seemed to chase itself in all directions at once, first one way and then another in a bit of a second, whipping in translucent, ever-shifting curtains.
As Will watched, three events took place simultaneously: A terrific slash of lightning speared the ground not thirty feet from the rider, decimating a small boulder. At the same moment Shark threw himself at the rider, sinking his razor-sharp fangs into the back of the man’s neck, just below his head, hurling him from his horse to the ground. The rider screamed but his scream was cut short as Shark, his grip secure, snapped his entire body to one side, severing the man’s spine.
At the same time, the brilliant, searing white flash illuminated another rider to Will, moving in the opposite direction, hunched in his saddle, as his cohort had been. He wasn’t quite thirty feet away when the lightning struck and Shark wrenched the other from his horse, and the lightning gave the second rider a view of an impossibly rapid attack—and he heard the crunching snap that ended the outlaw’s life. Further, the attacking creature was flying, already in the air when the lightning struck.
“Wampus!” the rider screamed in a high-pitched, panicked voice and buried his heels into his horse’s sides. Slipping, sliding, almost going down, scrambling in the mud, the horse whirled, and, running almost blindly, raced off into the storm, his rider lashing him with the reins.
Will’s pistol had been in his hand the slightest part of a second after the opposite-riding man and horse came into view. He shook the rain from his .45 and holstered it. Sending Shark after the second renegade made no sense, given the storm and the darkness. Further, the rider would be constantly looking behind him and a lucky shot could drop the dog.
