The Tears of God

“Where do you reckon they got to?”

Nate cast about for sign. Their horses had left plenty. The tracks pointed to the southwest.

“That’s damn peculiar. I thought Pawnee country is to the east.”

“It is.”

“Then why the blazes are they heading southwest?” the Texan wondered.

Nate wondered, too. Given Kuruk’s wily nature, there was no predicting what he was up to.

They retraced their steps to their mounts and began the hunt in earnest. And what a difference the sun made. Nate could hold to a rapid gait with little threat from logs and boulders and low limbs.

The Pawnees had ridden hard, which mystified him. They weren’t running away. Kuruk wouldn’t give up so long as breath remained in his body, and the other warriors would want revenge for their fallen friends. It was almost as if they were in a hurry to get somewhere.

Nate had assumed they didn’t know the country, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe they had been there before.

Another possibility occurred to him. Maybe after last night Kuruk expected Nate and a lot of other whites to come after them. Maybe the Pawnees were riding hard to find a spot to spring an ambush.

The tracks entered a dense forest of mainly spruce. A thick carpet of fallen needles muffled their hoof falls. No other sounds pierced the quiet. Not the warble of a bird or the chatter of a squirrel.

A disturbing sign. Nate held the Hawken across his saddle. Here was as good a place as any for the Pawnees to strike. Maklin evidently felt the same; he rode with a hand on one of his silver-inlaid pistols.

Nothing happened. They emerged from the shadowed woodland into a sunny meadow. Several blacktailed does fled. Two cow elk stared and then imitated the does.

The tracks led across the meadow into tall firs. Here, the shadows were deeper. Once again the wild creatures were unusually quiet.

The short hairs at the nape of Nate’s neck prickled. He would almost swear unseen eyes were watching. They went another mile and came on a clear ribbon of water. The tracks showed that the Pawnees had stopped to let their horses drink. Nate did the same. He scoured the brush, ready to seek cover at the first hint of danger. But all he saw moving was a butterfly.

“I don’t like this, hoss,” Maklin commented.

“Makes two of us.”

“I have the feeling we’re being led around by the nose like a bull on a rope.”

“Makes two of us,” Nate said again.

The Pawnees had stuck to the stream bank even though the waterway twisted and turned like a crazed snake. It made for slow going, another puzzlement given that until now the Pawnees had been riding like Mohawk- topped bats out of Hades.

Nate began to have second thoughts. There was just him and the Texan against seven warriors. Many a man had fallen prey to his own overconfidence, and he could be another.

The firs were so close together that at times there was barely space for the bay to pass between them. It gave Nate a feeling of being hemmed in. He never knew but when a Pawnee might pop out from behind one of the trees and let fly with a barbed shaft.

Another mile, and still nothing happened.

Maklin cleared his throat to ask a question. “Do you reckon this Kuruk wants to take you alive?”

“He’s said as much,” Nate said. “The better to torture me. Why?”

“Less chance of you taking an arrow between the shoulder blades.”

The tracks climbed. In due course they were out of the firs and at the edge of a broad tableland dotted with stands of pine and deciduous trees interspersed with grassland. A park, the old-timers would call it. As picturesque as a painting.

“This makes no damn sense,” Maklin grumbled.

Nate relaxed a bit. There was nowhere for the Pawnees to hide except the stands, and the track didn’t go anywhere near them. In one a robin was singing. He spied movement in the high grass, but it was only a gray fox running for cover.

A mile more brought them to an unusual sight that high up in the mountains: a buffalo wallow. At one time buffalo had been common in the mountains. Shaggier cousins of their prairie brethren, they hid in deep thickets during the day, coming out at dawn and dust to graze. The wallow was old and had not seen use in a long time.

Nate skirted it as the Pawnees had done. He went perhaps fifty yards and came on another. Soon he passed a third and then a fourth. Once a sizeable herd had called the tableland home.

Maklin had been content to stay behind Nate, but now he brought his horse alongside the bay. “How much farther before we turn back?”

“I never said we were.”

The Texan frowned. “I wish you had told me.”

“It makes a difference?”

“I didn’t count on staying out all night. Blunt is leaving tomorrow, and if I’m not there he might head out without me.”

“You can turn back if you want and no hard feelings,” Nate assured him. He didn’t add that he hadn’t wanted the help anyway.

“I don’t run out on a pard. I can always catch up to the freight wagons. Those oxen are molasses with hide on.”

A glint of light in the distance caused Nate to draw rein. He took out the spyglass. At the tableland’s western boundary rose a serrated ridge heavy with growth. Beyond, slopes rose like stepping-stones to the Divide. Fully half a dozen peaks glistened white with snow.

“Anything?” Maklin asked.

“It’s peaceful,” Nate responded.

“Too much so. I feel like a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.”

Nate shortened the telescope and put it back in his parfleche and rode on. He thought of Winona and how much he missed her. Another wallow appeared on the right, its bottom mired in shadow.

“Notice anything about the tracks?” Maklin asked, interrupting Nate’s reverie.

Nate glanced down. The prints were still in single file, their depth corresponding to the softness of the soil. “They’re not riding fast anymore.”

“Not that. They’re going from wallow to wallow as if they’re looking for something.”

The notion struck Nate as humorous. The only thing in wallows was dirt. The buffalo liked to urinate in it and then roll around to cake their hides and ward off flies and other pests.

Belatedly, the notion dawned on Nate that maybe the Pawnees weren’t looking for something in the wallows. Maybe they were looking for a wallow deep enough to hide in. Even as the thought crossed his mind, a shadow at the bottom exploded into motion and hurtled up over the edge at him.

Nate’s Hawken was pointing the other way. He had no time to turn it to shoot, but he did raise it to ward off a flash of steel. The warrior drew back the knife to stab again. There was a crack behind them and a hole appeared in the Pawnee’s temple while simultaneously the other side of his head burst in a shower of skin and bone and blood.

The warrior staggered a few steps and fell.

Nate jerked the Hawken up, but there was no one else to shoot. The man had been the only one in the wallow. The high grass was undisturbed. He glanced back at Maklin and the smoking pistol in Maklin’s hand. “Thanks.”

“I was a shade slow.”

Only after Nate was sure no others were going to attack did he climb down and roll the dead warrior over.

“Why just this one? Why not all of them at once?”

“Your guess is as good as mine would be.” So much for Nate’s idea that Kuruk would try to take him alive. He scanned the tableland ahead. “Could be they thought there would be more of us and they didn’t want to risk all of