It was a state not too different from the shock he had gone into during his encounter with the bear. In this condition, the early hours of the night passed something like a bad dream, in which he was partly insulated from the physical cost of what he was doing and against any tendency to feel so exhausted he had to stop.
He ended by not getting down from the saddle at all, after one or two attempts, simply because he was afraid of getting down and not being able to make the climb back up. If that happened, he would be caught out here in the open, for around him there was nothing but sagebrush and open ground that should have had a certain amount of grass. It was bare partly from the drought of the last few years but would have been treeless even in a wet year. Somehow, he must keep moving until he got to a place where he could hide, both himself and the two horses with their burdens.
In the end he passed into an almost completely dreamlike state in which only a corner of his senses and vision kept watch normally. His vision, even, seemed to adjust unnaturally well to the reduced light of the partial moon, so that he felt he could see where they were going and the ground ahead of them as well as if it were daylight. But the small, sane corner of his mind kept insisting this could not be true.
Still, it was in this condition that, somewhere after midnight, the sane part of him noticed a glow on the horizon. It had to be after midnight because the moon was already starting its descent, which would leave him feeling his way in a nearly complete dark, with nothing but stars to light him along.
The glow came from directly ahead of him. It waxed and waned in curious fashion. He rode directly toward it, fascinated, for some distance, before realizing he was seeing the light of a large fire up ahead of him somewhere.
The hallucination of daylight vision in his present state did not completely shut out a sense of caution. As soon as it sank in on him that the light ahead was that of an unlikely large fire—the kind of fire that a ranch house and buildings might make—he began immediately to circle away from the direct line he had been taking toward it. It was a move as instinctive as that which had pulled him toward it.
He circled to his left, going wide but not so wide that he would not be able to get a view of whatever it was that was burning, when he got closer to it.
With the Dilaudid inside him, his mind was still clear as the minds of those surgeons in Vietnam must have been. A burning ranch house might well have attracted help from neighbors, which meant that there could be a number of people around the blaze.
On the other hand, if a lot of people were there, they still were most likely to be occupied with trying to put the fire out. Moreover, he knew how deceptive light like this could be. After staring into such flames for a little while, even a short distance away from it, everything would seem lost in utter blackness.
He should be able to pass fairly close with some safety from being observed.
Perhaps.
CHAPTER 23
Jeebee had moved out to his left in his circling movement to the point where he estimated he would pass the fire at better than a hundred yards to its left.
Accordingly, he now altered his course back toward the foothills, heading toward the high blackness ahead where the stars speckling the night sky ceased at an undulating horizon of blackness. The moon was already down.
There was only the slightest of night winds cooling Jeebee’s right cheek, but the flames ahead burned brightly. As he got closer he could see that outbuildings, including the tall barn, were being fiercely consumed by flame. The ranch house at first had looked almost untouched. But now he began to see a little tongue of flame that appeared and disappeared, running flickeringly along the eaves on the closer edge of the roof, on the side of it he would be passing.
Also, as he got closer, he began to hear the sounds of voices—voices raised in yips and yells, like the voices of those at some wild revel. He also began to make out the black silhouettes of figures dancing and running about. Occasionally he saw a figure of a riderless horse among them.
The first thought of his weary brain was that he must be looking at the home of some unfortunate rancher who had incurred the enmity of his neighbors. The way Jeebee himself had is unconsciously done back in Stoketon, Michigan.
Then he rejected this idea, along with another, that perhaps the figures he saw were neighbors who had come to try and help. He could hear shots now, though whether they were being fired into the air, from the ranch house, or at the house, was impossible to tell.
He realized at last, with a cold clutching at his guts, that what was happening to the ranch house was most likely to be an attack and destruction by one of the large, semimilitarily organized bunches of nomadic raiders. If so, these were the kind of people Nick Gage had spoken of as the only real danger to Paul’s wagon.
Such gangs lived from moment to moment and had no interests in leaving even a peddler alive because they might want to trade with him again next year. By next year these later-day Comancheros might well be dead, or hundreds of miles away.
They literally lived off the land, and off what still remained on it. They survived by staying away from cities and moving continually, fast enough so that no local group could be mustered in time to oppose them successfully.
When he was level with the burning buildings—all burning now, because the roof of the ranch house was also on fire—he stopped. Awkwardly, he turned in the saddle enough to reach behind him with his good hand and fumble out the binoculars that had been Merry’s special gift to him.
He put the heavy pair of glasses to his eyes, then had to take them down again to readjust their focusing knob. After several adjustments and subsequent trying of the binoculars, he got the scene around the burning ranch in sharp focus.
There was a strange ludicrous effect to what he watched. The silhouettes of figures running or riding back and forth between him and the flames had an unnatural appearance, like black marionettes of heavy cardboard dancing to invisible strings before the fire. It was as if they held some wild celebration that had now gotten out of hand, so that something frenetic drove them to their antics before the leaping red light.
As he watched, one of the black figures fell, ignored by the rest. Apparently there were those still alive in the ranch house who were firing back at their attackers. But none of the defenders could last long. A good piece of the roof over their heads was now a-flicker in several places. Soon the house itself would become an inferno. He put the glasses away and rode on. The memory of what he had just seen—the lurid red flames, the black figures, and the air of orgy—was painted in his mind even as he himself passed, unseen. His own pains and discomforts took him back into them, and away from what he had just seen. He kept moving.
Almost immediately, he was away from the ranch and into sloped ground. Brute grunted and leaned to the slope, and Jeebee himself leaned forward in the saddle. He was empty with fatigue. After a while he stopped the horses for a moment and turned Brute’s head back so that he could look down at where he had traveled.
There was a ridge now between him and the ranch, so that he could no longer see the fire. But against the starry sky the glow of flames was much less. He knew he had not gone so much farther that with the glasses and on the ridge top behind him, he would not be able to see whether the raiders were still there when the sun rose. But he wanted only to go forward to personal safety. He started the horses moving again. Shortly, he was into trees, pine country.
The trees closed around him after a while. He told himself that if he could only find a stream to water the horses, he would stop at last. Luck was with him. He crossed a wide-open slope, slippery with shale rock, where the horses went gingerly, and came out through a fold to a little open spot among trees where he could hear water running. A few yards further brought him to a small flow of water that headed generally in the direction of the ranch buildings below.
With great and painful effort he dismounted, tied the horses to trees, and left them with some grass around them at the edge of the small stream.
He did not even have strength to unpack or unsaddle. It was hard on the horses but he had reached his limits. He slid down from the saddle, took the water bag from his saddle, and the crutch. He then worried a
