invisible crack said to exist between the world of a man’s everyday reality and the unseen realm of spirits and haunts, shades and hoo-doos.
Never a man who was incapacitated by the fear of what he could see, Scratch was beginning to think he had forgotten to stay awake, that he had drifted off to sleep in the mind-freezing bluster of the storm and was already in the process of dying … maybe even dead already—now that the roar of the wind had suddenly faded as if a door had been closed behind him. Probably dead, he thought. Maybe this is hell itself, looming right here on the other side of what had always been the sky—a hell of dark and cold, a void absent of all light and warmth. Why, even the stars had never seemed this far away. Was this his dying? Would this cold and ceaseless wandering be the endlessness of all time for him?
Of a sudden his horse jerked its head up and snorted, snapping Bass to attention. His senses responded, tingling, every fiber of him suddenly electrified. Just ahead the shadows shifted. The packhorse whinnied, then Sweete’s animal sidestepped and pulled at the reins warily. Scratch could not remember his mouth ever being so dry.
Slowly a liquid shadow congealed at the horizon, as if a sliver from the black of night had itself oozed down upon the pale luminescence of the snowy, barren landscape. Closer and closer it advanced on Bass as he considered turning one way or another, to flee what he could not fully see. Then, the shadow’s form sharpened on the bluish background hue of the icy snow and gradually became a rider. A huge horse, the figure seated upon it flapping as if with wings. It made him shudder to remember the tales from the Bible learned at his mother’s knee, a terrifying mythology come to haunt a young boy’s nightly dreams with frightful visions of winged horsemen racing o’er the land, bringing pestilence, destruction, doom, and death in their wake.
But … this was only one horseman. Bass looked woodenly left, and right. Only one rider come charging out of the maw of hell—
Its cry was almost human, even childlike. He might almost believe the oncoming creature’s shrill cry called out solely for him.
Surely the maker of that disconcerting sound was attempting to deceive him, to make Titus Bass believe it was a human voice that had reached his ears. Something in that cry discomfited him … but he steeled himself, stiffening his backbone against their impending clash. No, he decided. He would not heed that mournful cry coming from the throat of that devil’s whelp. Instead, he would prepare to fight its cold death with a fire of his own. Scratch clumsily wrapped his wooden hand around the big butt of the pistol stuffed in the front of his belt and pulled the weapon free. He doubted whether the lead ball could harm this winged creature of no substance, merely passing through the horseman—
“Po … !”
That part of the eerie whisper reaching him now was even louder still, as the figure continued to take on more shape, less fluid now.
Scratch’s red horse stepped sideways, then he righted it with a savage tug on the reins. Damned animal was fighting him more now than it had when they were both being mangled in the teeth of the storm. Not a single reason for its actions but pure contrariness, he supposed. No blowing snow clogging its nostrils or blinding its eyes. Only reason for it to fight him was that dumb beasts could damn well act consarn and contrary in the presence of a formless demon. As if the beasts of the earth had some sense that man did not possess which warned them of what might not really be there—
“Popo!”
As the sound reached his muffled ears, Titus turned slightly to look off to his right for Shadrach. The man had his eyes closed, matted with icy snow. Likely sleeping. “You hear that?” he asked.
Sweete did not stir.
“Jehoshaphat,” Bass grumbled, wondering for the first time if Shad was dead and frozen. Losing all that blood. It was the blood, after all, that kept a man warm, wasn’t it?
As that dark figure loomed closer he pulled back the hammer on the pistol by inching it along the wide, tack- studded belt he had buckled around his heavy elkhide coat. From beneath the specter’s hood came a high-pitched, shrill whistle—strange and wavering, not at all human … but a sound Titus felt he knew. All the more uncomfortable again, and that discomfort made a haven for the fear to grow. He realized he could reckon on hea specter’s sound in another place, another time. But the high, shrill whistle did not fit here and now.
Raising the pistol at the end of his wooden arm, he brought the muzzle to bear at the onrushing spirit that had just kicked its horse into a lope, gaining speed across the dull glow of snow left between them.
The haunt whistled again—at which Bass’s horse and the pack animal threw back their heads and whinnied. That proved it to him. This evil spirit had the power to command the dumb beasts of burden, to make them revolt against man.
“G-go b-back to hell!”
As his words croaked from his throat, the specter’s flowing arm came out, and up, yanking back the hood from its evil face—
“Popo! It’s me!”
He blinked. Then again. His mouth gone all the drier. By the everlasting! This screaming hoo-doo had taken on the shape of his oldest boy!
“I’ll send you straight to hell right here and now!” Titus roared angrily, pained to his marrow that this haunt would know exactly how to pierce his heart with fear and confusion—
“Popo! I come out to find you!”
“You go make your magic on some other poor child! I’m half froze an’ I ain’t in no mood for none of it—”
“My mother asked me to—”
“F-flea?” he stammered, baffled by the spirit’s use of the Crow tongue.
“It’s me, Popo!” the youngster pleaded as a gust of wind whipped his long, black hair across his face. The boy brought up a blanket mitten and tugged the wool muffler off his chin.
“D-d-damn!” Bass shrieked. “It is you, son! What in the name of tarnal truth?” And then he remembered not to shove so much American at his boy, not near so quickly. “What you doin’ here?” he asked in Crow.
“For a long time after it became so cold, so dark, I begged my mother, told her I could find you, but she did not believe me,” Flea explained as he halted his horse and Scratch’s came to a stop alongside it.
“My heart overflows with joy to see you!” Titus bellowed as he leaned woodenly to the side and seized the boy in his arms, squeezing, pounding, hammering the youth exuberantly.
Once Scratch had leaned back and touched Flea’s face with his left hand as if he were unable to believe the boy was really there, he asked, “Your mother did not want you to leave the place where you made our camp?”
“No.”
Shadrach came to a halt beside them, all the horses raising wispy clouds of vapor in that small knot of man and beast. Sweete started to clumsily pull at the wool scarf that had protected his face.
Bass snorted, “So you waited until your mother was asleep, then you left on your own?”
Flea smiled. “I do not think she was really asleep. Only pretending to sleep. She knew how I wanted to come, and I believe she wanted me to find you. It had been so long for the dark, with no moonrise—”
“This means your mother will be angry with you,” Titus said, patting the youngster’s leg. “And she will be angry with me if I don’t punish you for going against her wishes.”
“But I found you.”
“Perhaps that will soften her anger.” Bass pointed off in the direction Flea’s dim hoofprints led toward the horizon, eventually disappearing. “How far did you come to find us?”
“Not far,” Flea declared. “I called to your horses all the way here. I whistled for them too.”
“C-called for our horses?” Sweete asked.
Turning to the wounded man, Titus said, “The boy, my son—I didn’t tell you—he can talk to horses. Has a special medeecin to understand what they say to him too.”
Flea added, “I called out to them in the darkness, Popo. Every step of the way I came.”
“And that’s how you knew where to find us in the storm?”
Flea wagged his head, bewildered. “W-what storm?”
“You didn’t come searching for us because of the storm that blew down on this ground where we went to hunt buffalo?”
“No,” and the boy shook his head in confusion, “there was no storm this night.”
