by Leon Loy
“Why did you agree to come with me, Doc, if you do not believe she is alive?”
Holliday resumed staring into the fire. “Because it is my intention to bring the wrath of God down upon that lowbred miscreant, Buck Hester, and whomever has aligned to his devilish cause.”
He looked at the doctor, and added, “Just in case God is tempted toward mercy.”
16
Buck and Joe sat on opposite sides of the river, positioned high enough on the limestone bluffs to see for miles in every direction. It was Buck’s intention for them to keep watch until late-afternoon. If no one was discovered approaching the breaks by then, he would feel confident that Harold had not been followed. His brother was often overconfident, a fault which Buck considered dangerous.
As the hours passed, his thoughts turned from concern about someone following Harold, to the girl back in the cabin. He could not keep out of his mind the memory of her shapely form as she bathed in the creek. He had felt her body against him, smelled the fragrance of her hair, even came close to kissing her enticing full lips, yet had delayed the gratification of taking her as he desired. Now that Harold had returned with the money, there was no reason to hold back any longer. It was no secret Harold wanted her, too. What was to prevent Harold from having a go at her while he was sitting out here in the sun?
This thought troubled him to such an extent that before mid-afternoon, he descended his lookout, got on his horse and started for the cabin in the cottonwoods, leaving Joe at his lookout.
Sparrow was not sure where Buck and Joe were in the bluffs, so she picked her way through the brush lining the north bank, moving upstream. The prickly branches and thorns of the thick growth near the river ripped the thin dress she wore and impeded her progress, but she knew she could not risk traveling in the open. In an hour, she covered scarcely half a mile.
The going was made more difficult because of her hands being tied together. She dropped the holster and gun, and searched the ground until she found a large rock that had been cracked. Picking up the large rock, she dropped it on other rocks until it broke apart. Holding one part of it firm between her feet, she worked the rope on her wrists over the jagged edge of the rock until its cords frayed, and then broke loose.
Across the river, she could see a broad basin, bordered by low, steep bluffs, with a dry creek bed running through the middle of it. She removed her tattered dress, rolled it up and tied it around her waist, and buckled the gun belt just beneath it. She would need the dress in the night, when the temperature dropped.
Easing out from cover of the brush, she ran to the edge of the river and splashed across, holding the revolver out of the water with one hand to keep it dry. On the other side, she paused long enough to roll around in the reddish mud, dulling the white of her undergarments. She rubbed mud over her skin as well. When the men came looking for her, this would help her blend in with the terrain. Then she crawled away from the river through a patch of scrub oak and into the basin. Keeping close to the bluffs, she ran as fast as she could.
After several miles, the basin narrowed, the creek bed becoming just a slight depression meandering southward into the vast prairie. Finally, she felt secure enough to stop and catch her breath. The mud on her skin had dried in the hot sun and was now flaking off. The cliffs and hills of the breaks could barely be seen in the distance.
Her heart beat against her breast, even after resting for nearly a quarter of an hour. Hope that she would actually succeed in getting free from Buck and Joe began to seem real.
The sun was now beginning its descent to the west. She set out across the open prairie toward the south, without water, food, or proper clothing. But she was alive and free.
Out there somewhere was Texas, and her husband.
17
A fog settled over the river around midnight and remained until the sun cleared the horizon in the morning. Rested, Caleb rode through the night, keeping a distance from the river. The elevation gave him a better view of the surrounding plains in the moonlight, with less brush to obstruct the mare.
As the fog lifted, he could see the terrain near the river changing far to the west. The level plains which had bordered the winding stream for the past three days gave way to high bluffs and low limestone hills, lit up in the morning sun like stacks of gold coins—the Cimarron breaks. He touched the sorrel’s sides with his spurs and set out at a gallop.
An hour later, he descended into the river bed and followed its path through broken limestone cliffs and boulders. He proceeded cautiously, his carbine across his pommel, searching the banks for any sign of a trail, camp, or hideout. Three times he crossed the shallow river to one side of the bank and then the other.
Over the clacking of his horse’s hooves on the rocks of the riverbed, he heard a shot ring out. He halted the mare, and listened. About a minute later, a couple more shots could be heard upriver. He urged the sorrel to a gallop along the river’s edge toward the sound.
Buck was blind with fury when he didn’t see his brother outside the cabin. That meant one thing, he thought. Harold was with the girl inside. He cursed his own stupidity for leaving him alone with her.
“Harold,” he called, leaping off the back of his horse and running to the doorway with his revolver in his hand. “I’ll kill you. I swear to God, Harold. I will kill you!”
He tore through the burlap and dived inside. Rounding the table, he kicked chairs aside, and then tripped over Dr. McCarty’s bag of ransom money. As he fell, his gun discharged into the dirt floor. He scrambled to his feet and pointed it at his brother lying on the bed.
“Look at me, Harold!” shouted Buck.
Harold didn’t move. And the girl wasn’t in the bed.
He glanced around the small room, keeping his gun on his brother. “Where the hell is she, Harold?” he said. “What did you do…”
Then he saw the blood. Harold’s head and body was soaked in blood, as was the bed. He leaned over the body and saw the wound in his brother’s neck. He touched the blanket. The blood was nearly dry.
Buck kicked his way through the chairs and fell through the doorway onto the ground outside. His face went white. He wretched until his stomach was empty, then he sat in the dirt.
Joe came galloping through the trees. “Are you shot?” he asked, dismounting.
Buck looked at him, his eyes wild. “She’s gone, Joe. She’s gone!”
Joe went inside the cabin. A second later he came out, carrying the bag of money. “Harold’s dead, but the money’s still here.”
“I don’t care a damn about the money,” Buck cried. “She killed him, Joe. She killed my brother.”
Joe glanced at the rope corral. “She’s on foot. All the horses are here.”
Buck began to gather his wits. “She won’t get far on foot.”
“She slipped right past us, and we didn’t even see her,” Joe said.
“I’m going to find that red bitch, and gut her like a hog,” Buck said, getting to his feet. “You take the north side of the river, and I’ll take the south. We have to find her.”
“What if she took off across them plains?” Joe said.
Buck paused to consider it, and said, “She’d be a fool to do that.”
“She is a Ind’n,” Joe said.
Buck mounted his horse. “Take her alive, Joe. I’m going to do to that red bitch what I should have done to her from the start.”
“I told you,” Joe said.
“Shut up,” Buck shouted back, heading for the trees.
Joe grinned and said to himself, “I told him.”
Sparrow kept walking south after leaving the little basin on the Cimarron. Her feet were bruised and cut from the rocky ground, even though she tried to land her steps on clumps of grass. There were no trees, only prairie stretching as far as she could see. She was hungry and thirsty, and even though every mile put
her further from Buck Hester, it also took her further away from her home in Dodge City. She wasn’t even sure Caleb was still in Texas. And even if he was, how could she ever find him? How would he find her? She fought back the despair as she staggered on over the hard ground. Whatever fate awaited her on this barren expanse, she knew she could not turn back.
About mid-afternoon, as she topped a slight rise in the prairie, she saw a rabbit on the ground ahead of her. Crouching low, she removed the revolver and prepared to shoot. The ears of the rabbit were in view above a clump of tumblegrass. As she raised the gun to take aim, she heard a man’s snore coming from beneath the rabbit.
Rising up, she saw the source of the snoring. There, lying on the ground was a man with a rabbit carcass pulled over his head, sleeping. His blistered and peeling skin was as red as any Indian she had ever seen, yet this was not an Indian but a white man.
Keeping the revolver aimed in his direction, she said, “You. Wake up.”
Eb jumped at the sound of a human voice. In his near delirious mental state, he thought perhaps it had come from an angel. He sat up, but all he could see was prairie. Then, he heard the voice again, from behind him.
“Over here,” the voice said. “Look over here.”
He turned around to see a woman, clad in tattered and soiled undergarments, pointing a gun at him. She was every bit as filthy as was he, with long, messy hair framing her head like a lion’s mane. But even behind all that dirt, he could see she was beautiful.
“What…what are you?” he stammered. His mind was not clear, and he wondered what kind of angel she was. The dirt puzzled him.
“What are you?” she shot back.
“Are you an angel? Did He send you?” Eb asked, his mind still dazed.
She frowned. “Did who send me?”
“You know…God. Did He send you to me?”
“No. God did not send me. No one sent me. I am Sparrow. Where is your horse?”
Something she said bounced around in his head, but he couldn’t immediately think of what it was. “My horse is gone,” he said, “I don’t know who took it.”
“I am looking for my husband,” she said. “But I don’t know how far away he is. He is in Texas. Did you come from Texas?”
“Texas. Yes, I came from Texas. It’s a long way from here. If you ain’t an angel, where did you come from? And where is your horse?”
Realizing this strange little man didn’t seem to pose a danger to her, Sparrow let the revolver down, but kept it in her hand. “I came from Dodge City. Buck Hester and his brother took me, but I escaped from them. I do not have a horse.”
His addled brain cleared enough that he remembered what it was bouncing around in his head. He had heard her name before. The man who burned O’Riley had said Sparrow was his wife’s name; the half-breed woman O’Riley had held captive in one of his whore cribs and later sold to Jeremiah Lee.
“Your name is Sparrow?” he asked. “Did you used to stay in Fort Griffin, down near the river?”
The question surprised her. How would this stranger, stranded and alone on this far away prairie know about her? “Why do you ask this?” she asked back.
Realizing it would not be in his best interest to reveal his involvement with O’Riley, Eb attempted to abort the topic.
“Where are you going, Miss, way out here without a horse?”
“I am going to Texas to find my husband. Why did you ask me about Fort Griffin?”
“No reason,” he lied. “I was just askin’.”
“Tell me who you are. Do you know my husband?”
“How would I know your husband?”
Sparrow was annoyed at his avoidance of her question. Intuition told her this stranger held information about Caleb. She decided to press him further, and pointing the revolver at him, she asked, “Why did you ask me about Fort Griffin?”
This was no angel sent from God, Eb decided. But she might be a demon sent from hell to torment him.
“You ain’t no angel, at all,” he said, beginning to tremble. “Who sent you?”
She could see the man was not right in the head, but she wasn’t ready to give up just yet. “You will know sooner than you wish if you don’t answer me,” she said.
“All right. All right,” he said. “A man who said he had a wife named Sparrow came to Patrick O’Riley’s whorehouse in the Flat. He set fire to O’Riley, and told me to git, or he’d burn me, too.”
She wondered if she had heard him correctly. “He set fire to him. You mean, to kill him?”
“Fire usually does that to a man doused in kerosene.”
“Was this man’s name, Caleb Thomason?”
“Yes, that was him. He was one cool son of a bitch. Served O’Riley right, though. The fat pig deserved what he got.”
Sparrow almost dropped the revolver at this startling information. It made sense now, his leaving her in Dodge City. Caleb had intended all along to go to Fort Griffin to kill O’Riley, a mission he knew she would never approve.
“What about the girls?” she asked, her mind still racing.
“Oh, he let them girls go free,” Eb said.
A rush of emotions washed over her, nearly taking her breath away. First, there was the shock of learning the true reason behind Caleb’s leaving her in Dodge City. Then, she felt anger at him for doing so, followed quickly by a swell of pride that he loved her so much he would undertake such a mission.
“I been cursed ever since I left there,” Eb continued. “Everything has been against me: the sun, the ground, the Injuns. Even white men have shown me no hospitality. So, go ahead and put a bullet in me, Miss. You’d be doing me a favor.”
He pulled the rabbit off his head and looked at her in a way that said, take your best shot.
“I will not shoot you,” she said, looking past him toward the southern horizon. “How far is it to Fort Griffin?”
“How far? Too damn far to walk. I don’t even know how long I been riding, and don’t know how far I would have to ride, still, to get to Dodge City. But as my horse run off, and you ain’t got a horse, it don’t much matter.”
She put the revolver in its holster and walked closer to him. She could see that he was very thin, and his eyes were sunken in dark sockets. Skin was scaling and peeling off his face and arms.
“Will you go with me, to Fort Griffin?” she asked.
He made a pitiful little laugh, and said, “Lady, I wouldn’t go back to that hell hole for no reason what-so-ever. If you ain’t going to kill me, I think I will just sit here until my horse comes back.”
She looked around at the vast expanse of prairie, and said, “Your horse may not come back.”
“Then I will just sit here and maybe the next time someone comes by, it will be a real angel.”
Not wishing to waste any more time in the hot sun arguing with a crazy man, she said, “I have to go,” and started walking away.
Eb set the rabbit back on his head and watched until she disappeared in the distance. It was all a dream, or a vision, he decided. That never just happened. It was a cruel joke God was playing on him, reminding him of his humiliation in the Flat.
“You think You are funny,” he said, squinting into the sun. “Now that you haven’t killed me yet, I think I will just get up and walk out of here. What do you think about that? That Kiowa said there was three rivers, and I got one more river yet to cross.”
He gathered his Hawken and pouch, and started down the rise. He had gone only a few dozen yards when he stepped onto a stack of limestone rocks and heard a sound which froze him in his tracks. A prairie rattler was coiled on the rock, less than six feet from him. Then he heard another. And another. All around him, rattlers were crawling from their den beneath the limestone.
Slowly, he reached behind him for the Hawken. The movement triggered the nearest rattler to strike.
It bit Eb just below the knee. He backed away, stepping on another one. Two more rattlers struck, landing bites in each calf. He tried to step over them, taking more bites until his legs hurt too bad to walk, and he fell on the rocks.
Lying on his side, he took hold of a large rattler, catching it behind the head, and stared into its elliptical yellow eyes.
“So, it is You,” he said. “You came for me, after all.”
18
Doc Holliday and Dr. McCarty guided their horses down through the bluffs and across the river toward the grove of cottonwoods.
“You see these tracks?” Holliday said, pointing at the sand. “They crossed the river here and went into that creek. There’s a trail from the creek through the trees. See it?”
The doctor had already spotted the narrow path which disappeared through the trees. “Yes, I do. We may have them, John,” he said.
“Draw your weapon, Doctor,” Holliday said, as he pulled his Colt from his shoulder holster.
They followed the path through the cottonwoods slowly, revolvers drawn. Ahead of them in the trees, a horse and rider appeared so suddenly that Holliday’s horse reared, nearly throwing him out of the saddle. The rider charged by, nearly colliding with him. He could see it was Buck Hester. Following close behind him was Joe, holding Dr. McCarty’s medical bag in front of him.
As Holliday fought to regain control of his mount, Dr. McCarty pointed his gun at Buck and said, “Stop, or I will shoot.”
Buck leaned over his horse’s neck and dug in his spurs, this time slamming into McCarty, causing even his horse to jump. The doctor’s revolver discharged, but the shot was high. Buck rode out of the grove, through the creek, and into the river.
Joe, seeing he wasn’t going to make it past them, attempted to turn his horse through the trees. He pulled his revolver, twisted around in his saddle and fired in Holliday’s direction. The bag fell to the ground, spilling the money.
The dentist’s face lit up like a child receiving a coveted birthday present, his blue eyes flashing. “Hello, Joe,” he sneered, cocking his Colt and leveling it at Joe, whose horse began to spin. “You dropped something.”
