“You ain’t dead.”
“I can see by the looks of your face you ain’t St. Peter waiting for me at the gates of heaven neither.”
Bass watched McAfferty’s eyes close, then flutter open again in the fading light as day slowly gave way to night. “Sundown, Asa.”
“What happened?”
Scratch looked up. “Animals bolted on us.”
“Might as well be dead now. No horses. Been this long, and no horses.”
“You been out of your mind, Asa,” he explained. “We been … been covering ground.”
“Don’t matter, I s’pose. ’Thout them horses,” he whispered wearily. “‘For
How he wished McAfferty wouldn’t keep on spouting about their being without horses now. Peering behind them, Bass declared, “I don’t see nothing. Maybe they give up.”
“’Pache don’t give up,” said the cracked, swollen lips. “We’re in a fix anyways you set your sights,” Bass admitted as he rocked up onto one knee and started to stand. “Damp powder and no way to dry it, that’s our fix here and now.”
“Leave me,” McAfferty demanded. “Find some water.”
“Night’s coming on. Ain’t gonna leave you—”
“Best leave me when it gets dark.”
He brooded on that, again measuring horizon after horizon, then brought his eyes back to that bluff ahead of them where the rise of land lay smeared in contrasting layers. “Maybeso I’ll figger to go see where them horses run off to. Foller tracks. Catch one up. Come back for you.”
Scratch started to rise onto the other leg, painfully. “You rest. I’ll … find us some water.”
“Get water or there ain’t no sense coming back for me.”
Something strange in the voice yanked him back to stare down at McAfferty’s face once more. There was a new, distant look in those dust-caked eyes. The haunted look of a man teetering on the precipice of the eternal and staring into the bottomless void at the instant his feet were about to give way.
Titus briefly touched Asa’s shoulder, laying his hand there in the hollow, where he swore he could feel the rattle of each of McAfferty’s shallow breaths.
“I’ll be back,” he whispered. “Shortly.”
After watching the eyes close within that dark, sunburned face, Bass struggled back onto his wobbly legs, uncertain of each step as he commanded his feet to shuffle forward beneath his weight. Yard by painful yard he slowly ascended what remained of the gentle slope toward that rise from where he figured he might look over enough ground to spot the runaway animals disappearing toward the striated bluff, its hues beginning to darken as the light continued to fade from the desert sky.
A soft breeze met him in the face as he neared the top of the slope. Something more than a choking, sand- dry wind—bearing with it a hint of some new scent on that warm air as he dragged it into his nostrils.
At the top his legs stopped beneath him suddenly of their own accord. It was better than lunging on over, only to have to come back up, he figured. His eyes began to descend to the base of the bluff as he drew in another of those mercifully blessed breaths of that new air. Then spotted the five animals below him.
No more than three hundred yards away at the bottom of the gentle slope, they stood among a scattered profusion of belly-high brush and boulders that had tumbled from the side of the nearby sandstone bluff. At least the animals had found some cover for the two of them to hole up in—someplace where they could make it a little tougher for the Apache to get at them than it would be out on the open flat.
He needed to get one of the saddle mounts and lead it back for Asa. Couldn’t leave him out there now that night was coming. No matter that the dark might conceal him from their pursuers. The Apache would likely have no trouble following tracks beneath the stars and that thin rind of a moon until they bumped right into the half-dead white man.
“Then they’d make me listen to your screams all night,” Bass brooded to himself as he forced his legs to wobble down the slope toward the animals huddled in the brush. “Damn you anyways, Asa McAfferty—for making me listen to them cut on you slow while them bastards tear you gut from gizzard like one of their goddamned animals they was getting ready to eat. Maybe even hang you over their fire.”
One leg at a time, he braced a knee and swung the other leg forward.
“You ain’t gonna make me listen to that, you son of a bitch. I’m gonna get you down here with these damned animals … if I have to drag you in my own—”
He lurched to a halt. Watching the horses and that pretty mule of his, all with their heads bent low, snuffling, as if they were grazing.
Then, as the warm breeze quieted its evening sigh, he heard their noisy drinking.
A whimper broke free of his throat as his feet lumbered forward on their own, hurrying him on down the slope toward the animals. Now he saw how they stood up to their knees in the stream. Its semiglossy surface lured him on, glittering in the dim, silvery shine of those first stars and rind of moon.
Shoving his way past the huge, dusty rumps and heaving sides of the burdened animals, Bass waded ankle- deep into the dark liquid ribbon some fifteen feet across. Not just water—but one helluva lot of it!
Collapsing onto his knees, Scratch flung himself forward, landing face-first into the cool stream. Wagging his head back and forth deliciously beneath the surface, he drank and drank and drank as he remained submerged. Then yanked his head out and sputtered, sucking in a long breath, the warm evening air singing past his tortured membranes as his lungs swelled to bursting.
Down under he dived again, reveling in the glorious sanctuary this much water gave him, feeling it finally soak through the thick buckskin of his war shirt, wetting the linsey-woolsey shirt, making it all clammy against his sunburned chest and back.
Flipping his head back, he yanked off the soppy hat and hurled it back toward the bank, suddenly aware of just how much his long, curly hair weighed as he flung the mass of it back over his shoulders. In the next breath he rolled over onto the sandy river bottom. Now he leaned back, slowly back, until he was submerged right up to his chin—just the way he had dreamed he would when his last vestige of hope seemed about as far away as those distant, jagged lines of lightning that savagely split the sky asunder.
Now they would survive the night. Here they could fort up the next day until they regained their strength. They could drink their fill until the following night, when they would press on toward range after range of the distant mountains dark against the twilit sky. Perhaps they stood some small chance of making it back to Taos. Perhaps they …
Bass sat upright in a noisy gush of water, feeling the liquid sluice off him as he gazed up the long slope toward the high ground. Beyond that rise, somewhere on down the other side, lay Asa McAfferty.
Feeling renewed, strong enough to clamber out of the water, Scratch seized up the reins to his own animal as he dragged its muzzle out of the water.
“Don’t want you getting loggy On me,” he scolded it as he yanked on the reins.
For a moment the horse protested, then reluctantly allowed Titus to pull it around and climb into the saddle, water pouring out of his leggings and off the twisted fringes at the bottom of the war shirt, spilling in sheets down over the saddle as he tapped his heels into the ribs before stuffing his moccasins into the stirrups.
“Hep-hep! Let’s git!”
The horse was slow getting him back up to the top of the rise, but it was far better than trudging up the slope on his own two legs. At the top his eyes began to search the sandy ground for a dark object large enough to be McAfferty.
Bass spied something to the left, and a few moments later he hauled back on the reins, staring down at the body a heartbeat before he dragged himself from the saddle, wet leggings gluing themselves to wet saddle. His leathers weighed as much as a trap sack.
