doin’. I should be back in two days.”
“How long you figure it’ll take these boys to get here?”
“Beats me. ’Pends on where they’re at an’ if they care to do some fightin’. Seems to me the ones that ain’t dead will get here, one way or t’other. If I’m wrong an’ they don’t come, why we’ll take the renegades on our own selves, just like we been doin. An’ we wouldn’t have lost nothin’ but a couple days.”
Ray saddled his horse.
“You watch your back,” Will said.
“You do the same.”
Ray set off at a lope. Before long he was out of sight. There was still enough dew on the ground that Ray’s horse didn’t raise a finger of dust that pointed at him.
Will piddled around camp after Ray was gone, accomplishing nothing more than gathering up more scrub and mesquite for the fire. He considered sending Wampus out for a rabbit, but he wasn’t really hungry, and he was weary unto death of eating jacks. Wampus followed Will at his heels as he paced—so closely, in fact, that when the man stopped rather suddenly the dog walked right into him.
“Damn,” Will said, “we’re as nervous as a pair of ol’ whores in church. This isn’t what we signed on for—to sit around a camp doin’ nothin’.”
He shook out his saddle blanket. Once, many years ago, he’d tossed a blanket onto the back of a good horse—a blanket that had a good-sized scorpion attached to it. It’d taken him months before he could get a blanket on that horse without it going berserk. Will eased the blanket onto the pinto’s back and dropped his saddle into place. Even the horse craved some action: he danced and snorted and tossed his head. When Will mounted, the pinto put on a minor bucking exhibition, sunfishing, kicking out with his rear hooves, doing some twisting and turning.
Will enjoyed the workout as much as the horse did. They rode back toward Olympus at an easy pace, and on his way he came upon a fine piece of good luck. There weren’t many shaggies left—the skin hunters had shot hell out of the once-gigantic herds—but there were still wandering groups of a dozen or so.
Will came upon a gimp, a yearling with a severely twisted and damned-near-useless right front leg. He had some fat to him, although not much. Still, he’d been able to graze when the rest of the herd stopped. Something had spooked the other buffalo—probably the outlaws—and they’d stampeded, leaving the gimp behind. It was only a matter of time before the wolves or coyotes made a meal out of him.
Will untied the latigo that held his throwing rope at his right knee and shook out the kinks. He hadn’t carried a lasso for some time, but Ray had convinced him to do so. “You never know when you might need to string up a Injun,” he’d said.
He cut the pinto hard in front of the buffalo and dropped a loop over his head, at the same time swinging his horse in the opposite direction, pulling the gimp off his feet. Will piled off his horse and followed the rope down to the bawling yearling. He placed his knife perfectly into the critter’s heart. It died almost immediately. He slit it from gut to touch-hole, scooped out the innards, sawed off its head, and retrieved and coiled his rope. He tossed the heart and liver to Wampus. He’d pick up the partially butchered buffalo on his way back. “No more damned jackrabbits,” he said. “Not for a few days, anyway.”
They rode on. As he had the night before, he tied his horse a good three quarters of a mile from the lip, and Will continued on foot, crouching. He noticed that Wampus was trembling. “Jesus,” he said, “you for sure got a taste for that renegade blood, don’t you?”
The sun was fully risen now and the day promised to be yet another fifteen hours of unremitting heat. Will’s shirt was soaked within a few minutes of walking. They spooked a rattler. They never saw it but they for sure heard its castanets of warning. Wampus began to trot over to the sound. Will’s snapped fingers brought the dog back to his side.
Will crawled to the edge of the lip and looked down at Olympus. The two blackened, shriveled husks that had once been living men remained chained to the fence posts, almost obscured from sight by masses of flies.
Boozing for the day had already begun and there was racket from the inside of the saloon. Outside, several Indians wandered aimlessly, faces blank, hands hanging at their sides. A few mumbled incoherently.
One of the Indians seemed intent on climbing the slight rise from which Will watched the town. He was as clumsy as a drunk on a rolling log—he fell several times. When he struggled to his feet the last time, his lips and mouth were encrusted with sand but his face retained the same expressionless, zombielike semblance.
Wampus growled, but stopped when Will elbowed him.
For some reason, this babbling, weaving, mindless creature flared Will’s temper to full blaze.
The renegade topped the rise twenty feet from Will and Wampus and saw neither man nor dog. A sharp ammonia smell reached Will almost immediately. The front of the Indian’s Union Army pants were soaked to the point of dripping. There was another wretched stink, too—that of long-dead carrion or an overloaded outhouse with a too-shallow pit.
Will snarled as he raised his arm and pointed at the renegade. Wampus was off in half a heartbeat, silent, belly close to the ground, ivory eyeteeth glinting in the sun.
Wampus hit this one from the front, his bowie-knife-sharp teeth in a death clamp on the man’s jugular. Blood spurted as if from a well spigot, but amazingly, the renegade fell almost gently and completely soundlessly. After a moment the blood stopped gushing. Wampus released his grip and stepped back. He sat, staring at the corpse, almost if he were bemused by it. Will watched silently, wondering what the dog would do next.
Wampus stood, moved ahead a step, and sniffed the blood at the renegade’s throat. Then he stepped back, sat, pointed his muzzle at the sky, and howled long and loud, the eerie sound echoing about the valley, washing over the town, resounding again and again, quieter each time, until it died.
There was nothing, Will realized, that was at all canine about that howl. It was all wolf, the kind of ululation that sent shivers up and down a person’s spine. Ray certainly knew his critters.
“Perfect,” Will smiled. “The wampus strikes again—this time in
He clicked his tongue at Wampus and the two of them hustled back to where the pinto was tied. Will loosened his rope once again, wrapped the loop around the front legs of the carcass of the shaggy, tied off on his saddle horn, and rode back to the camp. He was sure there was no reason to hurry. This last manifestation of the wampus would keep the outlaws huddled in their gin mill, shooting at shadows and hearing sounds that weren’t there.
Will tied up to the buffalo carcass and dragged it along behind him almost to the camp. Then, he began his makeshift butchering. Wampus watched avidly, hungrily, drooling, tongue hanging out several inches. Will hacked off a section of ribs a yard long and handed them over to his dog. “Here ya go, pardner,” he said. Wampus took the ribs from Will gently, but as he trotted off, he flicked his prize onto his shoulders and back—the same way Will had once seen a timber wolf making off with a lamb. Will refused to let the thought linger. Still, that instinctive movment of the jaws and head . . .
The steaks were things of beauty. Will was able to carve away six of them of about two inches or more thick. They were nicely marbled with fat. He hated to waste the chops and the other cuts of meat, but he had no choice. He and Ray had no way to carry that much meat, and it would go rotten in a day or so under the sun.
True to his word, Ray rode into camp the evening of his second day out. He looked terrible: red-eyed, dust covered, slumped in his saddle, his weariness like a weight he could barely carry.
Ray’s horse had fared no better. The animal’s chest, neck, and flanks were gray-white with the froth of dried sweat, and his muzzle was damned near dragging on the ground. Will watched them approach. The horse wasn’t quite staggering, but he was weaving pronouncedly.
Ray rode past Will without speaking, directly to the sinkhole of tepid, foul water. He got down from his saddle like a ninety-year-old man and fell face-first into the sinkhole, his horse’s face next to his, both drinking like they’d hadn’t had water in years.
When Ray pulled his face out of the muck, his first words were, “You got any booze? I don’t want to hear any bullshit about my pledge to myself: a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. Now, you answer my question.”
Will scrounged through his saddlebag and came up with an almost-full pint of rotgut. He tossed the bottle to Ray. “Ain’t up to me to judge nobody,” he said, “ ’specially you, Ray.”
