enough, can keep up the right amount of covering fire, and move from gun port to gun port right fast-like, he’ll be harder’n a double-buried Alabama tick to root out.”
Boz eyeballed the sky and then gazed west. “Still got plenty of daylight left. How long’ll it take us to get to this place?”
“No more’n an hour,” Lavender said, as he came to his feet. “Just give me a few minutes to saddle up, gents, and I’ll take you right on up there to it.”
22
“... THIS SPOT GIVES ME A CASE OF THE CREEPIN’ WILLIES.”
HALF AN HOUR later, according to my Ingersoll, we sat our froth-covered animals beneath the only tree I’d seen since leaving Honus Lavender’s pleasantly shaded cabin next to the creek. The stunted but green and amazingly leafy, live oak had achieved just enough height to offer the most desirable kind of shelter from a anvil- melting south Texas sun. The bloodred sphere pounded on our dripping heads with a crushing heat that could only be likened to the thudding rumble of springtime thunder.
Over baked shoulders, the boiling globe hovered about two fingers above the parched horizon. On their wiggly way to heaven, heat thermals squiggled upward from the desiccated terrain in the manner of earthworms being fried alive in an iron skillet.
A bead of salty-tasting sweat trickled into my eye like a tiny river, coursed down a dusty cheek, then dove into the corner of my mouth. I wiped the droplet away with one finger and flicked it into the dense air, as I peered through my five-segment, calvary-surplus telescope. Tried, with little in the way of satisfying success, to make sense of the uninviting scene laid out before us.
A good two hundred yards distant, at the lowest point of a saw-shaped, gently descending cup of sloped sand and scattered bolders, sat ole Felthus Duvall’s abandoned house. Fortresslike, the mortar-and-stone dwelling jutted from beneath a thick shelf of jagged rock like an ugly wart on the earth’s reddish-brown rump. The entirety of the viewable earth between us and that man-made cave appeared totally barren of life. Not a single blade of grass, clump of weeds, flower, or bush grew within a hundred feet of the bleak, sinister-looking dwelling.
With surprising abruptness, the stunted breeze that had followed us to that spot like an old dog looking for a handout seemed to die. It sucked away, as though frightened by something unseen. Something larger, more dangerous, more deadly. It left us surrounded by an unearthly stillness—a troubling, nerve-jangling quiet. To this very instant, I can close my eyes and easily reacall a feeling of eerie uncertainty and apprehension about the entire, peculiar setting.
I rocked back in my saddle, as if involuntarily trying to move away from what I could not see, or know. And in spite of the day’s brutal, body-sapping heat, an unwelcome, sweat-drenched chill crept up my horse-weary spine. A baffling, creeping kind of eerie gloom wrapped clammy fingers around a backbone that ached. Got the uneasy feeling some invisible, iron-fingered fist had delivered an unexpected crusher of a blow to the spot directly between my shoulder blades. Remember as how I grimaced. Then, I twisted sidewise, as though some stealthy back shooter was about to dry-gulch me from the open maw of a dark alley on a moonless night.
“Don’t know ’bout you fellers, but this spot gives me a case of the creepin’ willies. Just can’t imagine, for a single second, why anybody’d want to build a place to live way the hell and gone out here.”
Boz nodded and added, “Think you’re right, Lucius. Cain’t see a damned thing to recommend this particular spot. Looks exactly the way I’ve come to imagine what the surface of the moon must resemble. Or some place in hell, or maybe the ass end of the whole world. Only a damn sight harsher.”
“’S why I lives down by the water,” Honus Lavender mumbled and toyed with the hammers on his shotgun. “Done been a complete mystery to me why ole Duvall built this place way out here. Spot sure’s the dickens got nothin’ to recommend it, far as I’ve ever been able to tell anyhow.”
Boz, Glo, and I grunted our mutual concurrence with Lavender’s assessment.
“As many times as I’ve been up to this spot,” Honus continued, “still don’t like bein’ here. ’Course when you’re tryin’ to keep the Comanche from killin’ you and your family, in the most horrid fashion imaginable, like ole Duvall was, guess you’d do whatever necessary to make certain that didn’t happen.”
“Impossible to know another man’s heart or mind,” Glo offered.
“Don’t matter none ’bout the heart or mind, Mistuh Johnson,” Honus said. “They’s ghosts livin’ in that place. Worst kinda ghosts. Evil spirits and sech.”
Boz forced a crooked grin and shook his leonine head as though more than a bit amused by talk of ghosts, spirits, and such. He used his long glass as a pointer. “There’s a corral at the east end of the house, Lucius. Pair of horses pinned up back there right now. Both of ’em look to be unsaddled. Horrifyin’ thought, but I’d bet the girl’s still down there.”
Tapped my own scope against one chap-covered leg and said, “Wonder how ole man Duvall managed to get water to this place?”
“No need to worry none on that problem,” Honus Lavender quickly offered. “They’s a well inside the house. Appears Duvall even imported a custom-made hand pump from back East once he got ’er dug. Not sure how far down the man had to go ’fore he struck plenty of liquid. Musta been pert deep though, and a hellacious job for a single feller with nothin’ but a shovel to accomplish such a task. Anyway, them folks as are still inside, if they’s the ones you’re lookin’ to find, have access to water, and plenty of it.”
Those words had barely fallen from Honus Lavender’s lips, when a high, thin, piercing wail rolled up that sandy slope and boxed all of us across our ears like an open palm. While muted by stone walls and distance, the sound of the girl’s pitiable scream sent prickly chill bumps charging up and down my spine.
“Well, that for damn sure rips the rag off the bush,” Boz said, then snatched his coach gun from its bindings and hopped off his animal.
The rest of us quickly followed Boz’s lead, hit our feet, and grabbed for the heaviest weapons we carried.
Before things got out of hand I said, “Wait, now. Gotta go at this with some thought be—” Another round of stomach-churning screams stopped me cold. I paused ’til the screams died away and I could get my breath back. Figure I was talking about a mile a minute when I finally said, “Honus, you’re familiar with the interior of the house. Want you to draw us up a quick sketch of the floor plan. You can do it right here in the dirt.”
“No need to draw nothin’, Mistuh Dodge,” Lavender said. “ ’S all just one big room. Long as the front facade and maybe ten, twelve feet deep.”
“No interior walls?” Boz said.
Lavender gave his head a vigorous shake. “None as I recall, Mistuh Tatum. One long, easy-to-defend room. That’s it.”
“How ’bout furniture? Any furniture left?” I said.
A puzzled look played across Lavender’s deeply creased face. After some seconds of head-scratching thought, he said, “Just some old busted, broke-down stuff. Not much really. Only complete piece as I ever seen was the remnants of an iron bedstead.”
“Where?” Boz demanded.
“What you mean, Mistuh Boz?”
A hurried urgency spiked in Boz’s voice when he snapped, “Where in the room? Front corner? Back corner? Which end of the room when we go through the door?”
Lavender gazed into Boz’s eyes as if staring at a man who’d lost his mind. “What you mean, when we go through the door? If’n we go and step one foot too close to that place, and Mad Dog Cutner just happens to take a gander outside, he’ll cut us down pocket high faster’n God can get here and stop the killin’.”
A loud metallic click snatched everyone’s attention my direction when I broke open my shotgun and eyed the primed and ready loads. Another barely discernable, trilling screech clawed at my ears as I snapped the weapon shut, then thumbed the hammers back.
“Ain’t got no choice in this particular matter, Mr. Lavender,” I said. “Once we’ve left this spot, we’ll head for the front door quick as we can hoof it.”
“Then what?” Lavender said as though stunned and amazed.
Big popper propped on one shoulder, Boz said, “Then, me and Lucius’ll each blast hell outta one side of the
