It felt as if the very air around him were sucking him dry.
Not anything like the steamy country back where Bass had grown up along the Ohio and the Mississippi: where a man slowly simmered in his own juices.
Out here far beyond the western slopes of the southern Rockies they had confronted an unimaginable heat, the air around them so hot, Scratch figured it could boil fat off a flea. The sunlight grew so intense that several times a day Scratch swore his skin was shriveling, becoming just as crisp as those cracklins his mam used to fry up for him back in Kentucky … so stark and white was the radiance all around him that it felt as if his eyes were melting while he struggled to focus them on the dancing horizon, everything shimmering in the distance through the midst of that incomprehensible heat.
And the farther south they pushed, the hotter it became.
They desperately needed to find water for their animals, for themselves, before there was nothing left of him but a cracklin like those pan-fried pork rinds his grandpap had so loved to eat. Just to find a pool in some stream deep enough for him to sit—even to lie right down in—submerged right up to his chin so every square inch of his body could soak up that blessed moisture.
Titus didn’t know what was worse: sizzling beneath his thick buckskin war shirt as they plodded on hour after hour, or how the sun’s powerful rays penetrated right on through that old linsey-woolsey shirt he wore under the buckskin, soaking up the sweat. This morning both he and McAfferty had decided to strip to the waist about the same time, lashing their garments behind their saddles as they kept on moving. It didn’t take long for Scratch to realize just how big a mistake that was.
By midafternoon, with the sun still hanging high and seemingly reluctant to begin its slide into the west, Bass realized he was growing light-headed. Strangely … dreamlike. Everything he peered at around him had an unreal quality to it, shimmering, all the edges ill defined and watery, every object pale, all but translucent as they were swallowed up in the endless waves of heat rising from sand and rock and brush alike.
Up ahead of him a few yards McAfferty slowly keeled to the side in his saddle, tipping so far this time that he spilled off in a heap, sprawled on the hot-baked hardpan.
Of a sudden it became an insurmountable struggle for Bass to get the reins pulled back and halt his horse. He sat there a moment, huffing with exhaustion, wavering in the saddle himself, staring at McAfferty’s body lying just as twisted as one of his sister’s sock dolls on the sand-flecked, sunburned grass while he sorted out just what he would do to get himself off his horse.
His head swimming, Scratch leaned until he felt all his weight shifted to his right leg, pain crying out in that foot stuffed in its wide cottonwood stirrup. As he brought his free leg up, he lost control, spinning out of the saddle, losing his balance, careening onto the ground, landing on his back to stare at the pale, fiery sky and that unblinking yellow eye, with that one foot still tangled in its stirrup.
It took only a moment for him to realize that the ground beneath him was on fire, so hot he wasn’t sure he might not just burst into flame himself. In a dizzying surge of effort, Bass kicked his foot free, rolling to the side so he could rock back onto his knees. That accomplished, he brought one leg under him, reached up for the stirrup, and pulled himself onto his feet—gasping for air. Lunging forward on legs that weren’t quite heeding his commands, Scratch stumbled across the last few yards to McAfferty’s side, where he gratefully sank back to the burning ground.
After a painful struggle he managed to get Asa rolled onto his back. Sand and flecks of the gold, withered grass clung to the man’s oak-brown cheek and forehead, plastered there above the stark white whiskers. As Bass bent over McAfferty’s face, hovering above it to peer closely at his partner, he put Asa in a shadow. Almost immediately the eyes fluttered open into no more than crusted slits, grains of sand embedded in his damp eyelids.
Asa’s cracked lips quivered for a moment, his parched, bloated tongue trying to form the words until he spat them out. “C-cut me.”
“Cut you?”
“Knife,” the bleeding lips instructed. “Cut my wr-wrist.”
“Use my knife?”
Slowly McAfferty nodded as if his head weighed more than their trap sacks. “Here.” But it was some time before Asa urged some movement out of one of his red, burned arms and pointed at the other wrist. “You cut. I’ll suck.”
It still didn’t make sense. “Cut you so you’ll bleed?”
“Suck … bl-blood.”
“I can’t cut you—”
With what had to be the last vestige of the man’s strength, McAfferty grabbed a handful of Bass’s long brown hair and tugged on it hard enough to pull Titus right down toward his face.
“Only ch-chance,” Asa croaked with a voice so dry it sounded like a dry rasp being dragged across coarse cast iron. “Blood … save me … till we … get to the river.”
Then with an exhausted gasp Asa released his hair, and Scratch slowly raised his head, squinting below that wide brim of his hat to peer off at first one horizon, then another, and finally in a third, endless direction. Nothing of any promise in sight.
“Yeah, Asa. You just hol’ on. The river ain’t far now.”
But he knew McAfferty wouldn’t make it … unless he cut the man. With a trembling hand Scratch reached around to the small of his back to drag the skinning knife from its rawhide sheath. His vision was blurring, his eyes stinging more and more from the sweat and the blowing sand: red, raw, bloodshot. Scratch didn’t know for sure if it was the salty drops seeping into them, or perhaps that his eyes were simply starting to melt, oozing out of their sockets and right on down his cheeks into the thick beard.
After he had blinked, and blinked some more, to clear them for a moment, Bass peered down to find McAfferty’s head slumped to the side, the man’s eyes half-closed, only the whites showing in that glare of brutal light.
Painfully, Scratch dragged his knees across the hardpan earth, scooting right up to Asa’s shoulder, where he jabbed his left arm under his partner’s neck. With his fingers locked under McAfferty’s armpit, he heaved against the dead weight. That effort made his stomach threaten to hurl itself against his tonsils. He bent over the body, gasping as he squinted his eyes shut, then groaned, gritting his teeth the moment he heaved against the weight once more.
Succeeding in getting McAfferty’s shoulders propped against his thigh, Bass shuddered from that last terrible exertion. With a raspy sigh that felt as if he had swallowed cactus needles, Scratch dragged Asa’s far arm across his lap. Clamping the wrist in his left hand to steady it, he laid the sharp edge of the blade against the inside of the wrist … then suddenly found himself staring at that line where the dark saddle-leather-brown hide of the hand ended and the sunburned crimson began as it climbed up the man’s white skin.
He gritted his teeth, resolute.
Across that tan line he compressed the blade into the reddened flesh, struggling to focus his eyes again, to whip his mind back to the task before him … until he suddenly realized he was watching the man’s blood oozing from the laceration.
“Asa,” he gasped in hope. “Here, Asa.”
Letting the knife spill from his right hand, Titus grasped hold of McAfferty’s chin at the same time he raised the bleeding wrist toward Asa’s mouth.
Rubbing the wound against the cracked lips, Scratch murmured, “Here. Suck, Asa. Suck, dammit!”
But his partner did not move.
In despair Bass rubbed the wrist back and forth over the dry, cracked lips, still without response from McAfferty. Titus dropped the wrist and slapped a flat hand across Asa’s cheek.
The eyes fluttered, clenched, then slowly opened as McAfferty’s thick, blackened tongue came out to lick at the lips.
“That’s your blood, dammit!” Scratch whimpered down at his partner. “Suck … suck it now or you’re … you’re done.”
It took all he had left in him to grab the wrist again and drag it to Asa’s mouth, holding it there against the lips as McAfferty’s eyes closed and his lips parted, tongue flicking out to taste the blood. Then Asa finally began to
