He found cigarette stubs tossed to one side, barely visible in the fading light. These were hand-rolled. Later, he reined up when he spotted a crumpled piece of paper on the ground. He dismounted, picked it up, and smoothed it out. It was a label from a package of pipe tobacco. The name stamped on the paper was PIEDMONT PIPE TOBACCO.
“Careless,” he said to himself. “Or sloppy.” He tucked the paper into his pocket and climbed back into the saddle. He did not know who he was following, but he knew damned well the riders were not Apaches.
When it grew too dark to see clearly, he began looking for a place to throw down his bedroll and spend the night. He found a spot partially hidden by stool, chaparral, mesquite, and yucca, rimmed by prickly pear. There was grain in his saddlebags for Nox, and he would chew on jerky and hardtack and make no fire.
He dismounted, hobbled Nox, fed him half a hatful of grain. As he walked around, his spurs went
It was full dark when Zak lay down on his bedroll, unholstered pistol by his side, within easy reach. Bats plied the air, scooping up flying insects, their wings whispering as they passed overhead. A multitude of stars glistened and winked like the lights of a distant town, their sparkles made more brilliant by the inky backdrop of deep space. The moon had not yet risen when he closed his eyes and thought about his father and how he had met his gruesome death.
Ben Trask had used a fireplace poker to burn Russell’s flesh. He had stripped off his prisoner’s shirt and pants, applied the red hot iron to his arms and chest. Then he had touched the poker to his father’s testicles, as his men looked on and laughed at Russell’s screams. When he had found out what he wanted to know, Trask made sure that Russell died a slow death.
He cut open his belly with a surgeon’s precision until his father’s intestines spilled out in blue-gray coils. Trask and his men had watched his father die, heard him beg for a bullet to his brain. They watched the elder Cody die slowly, his great strength drained from him, his tortured breathing descending to a rasp in his throat before it turned into a final death rattle.
Zak knew all this because a Mexican boy, Jorge Vargas, living next door, had watched it all through his father’s window, powerless to help, his family gone to market that morning when the men rode up and entered Russell’s adobe home.
From Jorge’s description, he knew the man who had killed his father. Their paths had crossed before, in a Pueblo cantina when he and his father had come down from the mountains, following Fountain Creek. Ben Trask had a reputation even then. A hardcase. A gunny who preyed on prospectors and miners, a merciless killer without a trace of conscience.
All in the past, he thought, and no more grieving for his father. Instead, a vow he had made when he found his father’s body and learned the story of his death. If there was such a thing as justice in the world, then Russell’s death demanded it. An eye for an eye. A life for a life.
Zak folded into sleep, descended to that great ocean of dream where the events of the day were transformed into an odd journey through bewildering mazes inside massive canyons, where guns turned into unworkable mechanisms and people’s faces were ever-shifting masks that concealed their true identities, and horses galloped across dream-scapes like shadowy wraiths and every shining stream turned to quicksand beneath the dreamer’s awkward and clumsy feet.
It turned cold during the night, and Zak had to pull the wool blanket over him. He awoke before dawn, built a quick fire and boiled coffee. He never looked at the flames and stayed well away from the glow, scanning the horizon, listening for any alien sound. He relieved himself some distance away in a small gully and covered up his sign. He was sipping coffee as a rent appeared in the eastern sky, pouring cream over the horizon until the land glowed with a soft peach light that grew rosy by the time he had finished and put on his spurs. He checked his single cinch and gave Nox a few handfuls of grain, then let him drink water from his canteen, which he poured into his cupped left hand. He checked his rifle and pistol, rolled up his bed and secured it inside his slicker behind the cantle. He did not eat, a habit he had formed long ago. When he went hunting, it was always on an empty stomach.
Gently rolling country now, bleak, desolate, quiet, as the sun rose above the horizon, casting the earth and its rocks and flora into stark relief. The rocks seemed to glow with pulsating color, and the green leaves of the yucca, the pale blossoms, took on a vibrancy that Zak could almost feel. It was the best time of day in the desert, still cool, yet warm with the promise of diurnal life returning to a gray black hulk of territory glazed pewter by the moon, now only a pale ghost in a sky turning blue as cobalt.
He rode over a rise, following the pony tracks, and there it was, nestled in the crotch of a long wide gully that fell away, then rose again several hundred yards from its beginning. An old adobe hut, still in shadow, stood on a high hump of ground, nestled against a flimsy jacal that joined it on one crumbling side. A mesquite pole corral bristled on a flat table some two hundred yards away. Zak counted eight horses in the corral, some with noses buried in a rusty trough, another one or two drinking out of half a fifty-gallon drum, next to a pump outside the corral.
Six of the horses were small, unshod, pinto ponies, actually, while the remaining two were at least fifteen hands high and were shod. They were rangy animals, looked as if they hadn’t seen a curry comb or brush, and he could almost count their ribs. None of the horses looked up at him, and Nox didn’t acknowledge them with a welcome whinny, either.
A thin scrawl of smoke rose from the rusted tin chimney set in the adobe part of the dwelling. It hung in the motionless air below the gully’s rim. It appeared to be coming from an untended fire, possibly one that had been banked the night before. There was no sign of life in either the adobe or the jacal, but Zak knew someone had to be inside. He debated with himself for a moment whether to ride up to the door or walk up and hail the occupant.
It took him only a moment to decide. A man on foot was not of much use in such country. Whoever lived there could be off at a well or hunting jackrabbits for all he knew, and could return at any moment. If he was off his horse, he would be caught flat-footed and might lose Nox. There could be a number of men inside the hut, and more out roaming around.
He rode up to the door without being challenged.
He loosened the Walker Colt in its holster, slid the Henry rifle out of its scabbard a half inch.
“Hello the house,” Zak called.
He waited, listening.
