tableau would stand right out on the flat, baked desert for many miles around. Those horses and that mule ringing two near-dead, completely stupid niggers … a pair of men waiting for the buzzards to come circling above them in the clear, pale, steamy sky. Waiting for those naked brown Apache to pick up their trail again.
“B-bass.”
It took some doing, but Titus slid his head off his arm, raised himself on an elbow, and made his face hover somewhere over McAfferty’s.
“Night c-coming?” Asa asked as the shadow crossed his eyes.
“Not near soon ’nough.”
McAfferty’s brow sagged with despair. “God d-deliver us …”
Bass waited a while, then admitted how likely it was that McAfferty was sleeping again. As much as he wished he could, something down inside his gut nagged at him the way a tiny cockleburr got itself hitched under a saddle blanket and chafed the animal, irritating the horse’s hide until that animal fought to throw off its torment.
Licking his lips, Scratch again tasted the blood. Blinking, he found that this time his eyes did not sting with sweat, nor swim with blurry images. Grunting, Titus straightened, sitting right up beside McAfferty in that shady ring of horseflesh. Alongside his head hung the wide wooden stirrup on Asa’s Mexican saddle. It would do about as good as anything.
Seizing it first in one hand, then with the other, Bass took a deep, hot breath and began to pull himself onto his knees. The weakened horse whinnied, protesting at the sudden shift of weight on its saddle as the animal peered back at him.
“There … there, there,” he tried to coo.
Astonished to discover he was already up on one knee, Titus pulled with his arms, pushed with his legs, lunging up with an arm to snag that wide dish of the saddlehorn. Pulling still more as his knees began to straighten, his head suddenly fuzzy again, light as cottonwood down.
He gasped in surprise, relieved to find that he was standing.
Forced to squint into narrow slits now that he was no longer protected in the horses’ shade, Scratch peered across the distance—struggling to focus through the shimmering, dancing heat waves streaming up from the monotonous ground and that ocean of low brush struggling just to survive beneath a fiery sun. Then he turned slightly, clinging desperately to the saddlehorn with that one hand, the other arm draped around the cantle. Slowly he turned a little more, gazing far, far out into the distance. Checking for a smudge of dust, looking for any betrayal of black, beetlelike forms swimming watery along the shimmying horizon. He did not allow himself another deep breath of the superheated air until he had peered in all directions.
Nothing. Almost as if he and Asa and their animals were the only living things for hundreds of miles around. But, then, he knew better. The Apache were somewhere out there. Following on foot through the broken country. Likely the red bastards had already reached this flat, endless stretch of valley at the base of the rocky mountainside and were coming on. Tracking the white men and their half-dead animals.
Should they drop the animals now and fort up, preparing for the inevitable?
There wasn’t any question that the Apache would follow them, relentlessly. Both he and Asa knew it. The warriors had been dogging their trail for the better part of five days already. Pursuing the trappers right on through the cleft in the mountains, across the plateau, driving them right on down into this sea bottom of a desert.
There wasn’t a reason in all of God’s creation why the Apache would give up now. Especially when the trappers’ horses were slowing, when the white men hadn’t come across water in three days … when the sonsabitches could waltz right in on him and Asa come nightfall.
More than ever, Bass realized he had to get them to some shelter. Trees … not a prayer of finding that much cover out here. Maybeso some rocks to hunker behind. By a miracle perhaps they would happen upon some animal’s den out of the sun and out of sight near a narrow stream. Water and shelter, both.
Which did a man need more right now? he brooded hopelessly, his mind unable to cling to one thing for too long.
Plain enough to see they needed water and shelter, both.
But to get the strength to push on as long as it would take to find that water and shelter, Scratch realized he needed more blood. He needed to open up one of the horse’s ears. Maybe even open up a leg back of the pastern.
Daringly, he hobbled away from Asa’s saddle, inching his way toward his own horse’s neck and up to its head, struggling to focus on the ear. But of a sudden he stopped, stumbled to the side and made for McAfferty’s packhorse. Its ears were bigger. He ran his hands over one of them, finding it all the thicker, jug-headed cayuse that it was. Best to cut Asa’s animal. Besides, he rationalized, if it meant that he might have to coax some additional bottom from his own horse in the hours to come, then the smart thing for him was to bleed McAfferty’s mount.
Wobbly there beside the big head, Scratch pulled out the skinning knife while he positioned the ear in the flat of his hand. As he brought the knife close, one of the big eyes rolled back as if to inspect what the human was about to do.
“Easy, boy,” he murmured at the gelding.
It was all he could do to keep his balance on those watery knees, to hold the horse’s twitching ear steady as he drew the knife down one of the fat veins.
The blood burst readily from the wound as he yanked the knife away, immediately poking his head beneath the ear, his dry mouth flung open, its blackened, bloated tongue protruding like a huge strip of half-dried buffalo liver, doing his utmost to catch every precious drop of that hot stream of life. Milking the ear from the wide base, he continued to steadily stroke toward the cut he had made, squeezing gently below the wound as the horse began a slow, circling sidestep. For every one of its moves, Bass moved—always staying right with that drooling wound as he licked and swallowed until the animal finally relented and stopped so Scratch could pull gently down on the base of the ear, urging the big head closer to his own face. Now he pressed his lips right against the open vein, lapping every bit as greedily as any man would suck at fresh marrow bones pulled warm and toasted from the fire.
The hot, thick liquid dribbled from his lower lip, down his chin into his gray-brown whiskers.
Suddenly he drew back for a moment, gasping for breath—as his lungs felt the shock of the heated air. He clenched his eyes shut and sucked some more of the warm blood.
Finally sensing his stomach lurch in revolt of the warm fluid, Bass pulled away, gasping again.
It was a few moments before he realized he was standing there on his own. No longer was he barely holding himself up, braced against the horse. As he tugged down the floppy brim on his felt hat, Scratch felt his stomach slowly settle. Perhaps it had made peace with the blood.
To straighten his shoulders now, draw himself up, and flex his arms and knees—all made him feel one hell of a lot better than he had for days.
He blinked his eyes and stared off into the distance: first here, then there as he licked his lips, conscious of the blood’s sharp metallic tang coating his mouth. They had maybe as much as three hours till dark. Less until sunset … but something more than that until it would be dark enough for them to venture forth without being spotted by the Apache out there, somewhere in the distance.
No sign of a dust cloud, but then—the Apache wouldn’t be the sort to raise a cloud of dust, would they?
Squatting beside his partner in Hannah’s shadow, he slowly raised McAfferty across his leg again. “We gotta push on, Asa.”
“G-go on ’thout m-me.” The voice sounded hollow, thick with despair.
“Help me get you up,” Scratch demanded.
“Leave m-me. Lo, I travel through the deserts—”
“I ain’t leaving you,” he argued, shifting himself beside McAfferty.
“Just y-you go on ’thout—”
“Shuddup, you stupid idjit.”
Pulling Asa’s arm straight out from the shoulder, Scratch ducked his head under it. Looping his right arm around McAfferty’s thigh, he rolled his partner and struggled to get both his legs under the man’s deadweight as he rocked back—settling as much of the load right over his shoulders, then his legs, that strongest part of his body.
Weaving, wobbly at first, he quivered as he steadily rose with Asa slumped across his shoulders. Steadying
