by Ralph Cotton
Looking back toward the coach through the blowing rain, Sam saw the coach door fly open and the man and woman spill out into the mud just as the two coachmen made it to them.
“Hurry!” he shouted back at them as the two coachmen helped Weir and Jenny onto their feet. “Get a horse, get yourselves out of here, fast!”
Even as Sam spoke, another hard cracking sound ran along the crumbling edge of the trail. Two more feet of trail dropped thunderously out of sight. The roan whinnied and reared as the woman came running, the two coachmen right beside her supporting the drummer between them. Sam held the roan by its reins as he shoved the woman up onto one of the coach horses. Sam reached for the drummer as the coachmen approached.
“Get out of here yourself, Ranger!” shouted Dawson, he and Long shoving the man up over a coach horse’s back. Dawson turned the big horse and slapped it soundly. Water splashed on its rump. As soon as the man took off right behind the woman, Dawson turned to the Ranger and shouted, “Long and I are gone, Ranger! Don’t worry about us! Get out of here!”
Sam saw the two of them jump atop two coach horses and turn them quickly. As they rode away through the blowing rain, Sam slapped the fifth coach horse on its rump and sent it running along behind them. Farther up the ravine, another loud ripping of wood and crack of rock resounded. A hard surge of roiling black water splashed high in a powerful spray above the ravine cut.
“Let’s go, horse,” he said to the roan, jerking its head down sharply enough to get control and jump up into the wet saddle. The roan spun two full circles before Sam got it focused and straightened and racing away alongside the high slapping spray of water rising above the edge of the washed-out trail. Twenty yards along he heard the hard wrenching sound of earth tearing away from the hillside.
Looking back over his shoulder, even in the gray rain-whipped darkness, Sam saw a wide swath of trail fall away from beneath the stagecoach. As the coach fell out of sight, he saw the ledge trail crumbling, falling away, the jagged edge drawing closer behind him and the roan. In the black, angry darkness ahead of him, he heard the terrified whinny of one of the coach horses and the long, deep-toned scream of one of the men. Yet he saw a trace of neither as the roan raced along ahead of the crumbling trail that appeared determined to consume them.
As wind and rain seemed to stop and collect itself for another hard round, beneath the Ranger the roan suddenly made a terrified and enraged sound like none he’d ever heard. He felt the horse attempt to stop by backpedaling, sliding, lowering onto its rear shanks, its rear hooves still pumping and kicking against the broiling floodwater replacing the crumbling land behind it.
To their front, rear and right, the trail was gone except for the few yards breaking away beneath the roan’s wildly flailing hooves. The Ranger saw the only way to go. In desperation he jerked the roan’s reins hard, putting the animal onto the rising rocky hillside to their left. The animal whinnied in fear and rage, but followed the Ranger’s demands.
Sam slapped his reins back and forth on the horse’s withers; he pounded his boots to its side, goading it upward, the horse belly-crawling, digging, Sam feeling the rock ground at his boot toes. The horse bawled loudly but kept climbing, inch by inch, up the steep wet hillside, the floodwater raging, licking at them from behind.
As the horse turned quarterwise onto its side, Sam saw his chance to roll free of the saddle onto his feet and keep climbing forward beside the animal, pulling on its reins until the horse righted itself on its belly and half rose on its hooves.
“That’s it, get up, climb! Climb!” the Ranger shouted, seeing the roan begin to make headway on the hillside. Yet no sooner had the horse started to gain its footing than the water and dirt at its hooves fell away. Sam felt one rein break in his hand, the other slide from his grasp. He saw terror in the roan’s eyes as the horse reared high in a broad flash of lightning, spilled backward, pawing at the black sky, and whinnied loud and long as the raging water swept it away.
Sam looked on, shocked.
The roan was gone; there was nothing he could do about it. All he could do was try to save himself. The sound of the roan’s tortured whinnying grew distant, soon overcome by the roar of water and the rumble of more thunder overhead. With the water still blasting against the crumbling hillside, Sam climbed, wallowed, dug and pulled himself upward through a downsurge of mud and rain. At times he rose half-crouched only to be knocked back down. Other times, he pulled himself upward on his belly until at last he found a jagged rock summit and threw himself over onto it.
He lay spread-eagle for a moment a torrent of muddy runoff water passing over him on its way over the edge of the hillside. Near exhaustion, he lay gasping for breath, his face cocked away from a hard-blowing rain.
All right . . . all right, I’m going, he reasoned with himself, his instincts and will insisting that he get up, keep moving, free himself of this perilous place. Yet, as he tried to push himself to his feet, the same crushing force of wind and water hammered him back down, reminding him there was still no letup.
He crawled on, upward across deeply stuck boulders, while the rushing water ate away at the ground holding them in place. When he reached one that was wide enough to cling to for a moment, he lay across it like some human sacrifice until he’d gained enough strength to continue crawling.
Nearing the top of the hill, he felt a hard pounding of water across the back of his shoulders as he pushed forward through a wide, short waterfall. Then suddenly, when the downfall of water had moved back across his hips, he stopped and felt a dry, warm breath of air from a deep black hole in the earth lying before him.
An overhang, he thought, feeling a sudden gratefulness toward this merciless terrain.
“Thank God,” he managed to say aloud, dragging forward until he freed himself from the cold slice of the waterfall. There he lay flat-faced on the dry musky-smelling ground. This will do, this is good. . . .
Yet, even as relief and hope kindled a glow inside him, his thoughts were interrupted by a low, menacing growl from the blackness lying in front of him.
Oh no! A panther. . . .
Now it came to him, the muskiness he smelled. It wasn’t just the smell of earth. It was the scent of cat. He had crawled inside a panther’s lair. He should have recognized it sooner. But you didn’t, he told himself.
As the growl continued strong and steadily, only a few feet from his face, he reached a wet hand slowly down his side and to his disheartened surprise felt his empty holster. All right, the Colt was gone. Still, he wasn’t leaving here. Not on a night like this, he through wryly . . . not without a fight.
Before trying to reach farther down to the knife in the well of his boot, he realized in that second that not only his knife but his boot itself was missing; and he stopped cold.
I’m not leaving, he said silently to the growling cat. Knowing the cat could see him, but he could not see that cat, he slowly searched with his hand along the ground up and down his side until he grabbed a rock the size of a large apple. He gripped the rock tight as the cat’s growl grew, then fell. It sounded as if the animal had moved closer to him. He heard deep rattling in the animal’s breath as he imagined it looming over his body. Yet he managed to lie as still as death, the rock in his hand offering little hope should the cat decide to kill him.
In the night behind him, lightning twisted long and sharp in the sky, giving only a thin shadowy outline of the big cat. Thunder followed, erupting like cannon fire as if besieging earth and all lying above and below it. The Ranger caught a glimpse of the shadowy outline as it shrank back farther into the heavy blackness.
All right, then, he thought, again speaking silently to the cat, trying to calm himself. We can get along here, you and me. We can get along.
He kept a firm grip on the rock and lowered his face to the dry, musky ground. In front of him, the big cat continued to growl, but the sound fell from a t
hreat to more of a continuing warning. To his relief, he heard a slow brush of padded paws as the animal crept farther back into the overhanging blackness. He imagined that somehow the cat had reconciled itself to him being there, and why. Neither was the hunter here, and neither was the hunted. Outside, man and cat shared a common enemy. Until that enemy passed, they had to allow for each other no matter how combative and begrudging their attitude.
He wasn’t welcome here, he understood that. Yet here was where fate had landed him. He lay silent and still in the blackness, clenching the rock in his fist, while the sound, the presence, the fear and at length the essence of the big cat fell away into a deep empty darkness.
Outside, the storm raged.
Chapter 5
In the midst of that electric night, a dreaded sleep forced itself upon him. It was a thin, icy sleep from which he awakened sharply with the slightest sound or supposed imaginings his exhausted mind could conjure. More than once he could feel the panther looming over him, staring down quizzically like a house cat at a wounded rat. He felt its breath on his neck, but each time his eyes sprang open and his hand gripped a rock, he realized the cat was not there. All that loomed above the mouth of the cave was the damp, heavy night, its dark presence divided only by intervening streaks of silent lightning.
At some point near a flat gunmetal dawn, the Ranger instantly tensed as he felt the cat’s paws touch down on his back, first at his shoulders, then at his hips as the animal raced across the length of him. This time it was real, he realized. He hadn’t managed to raise the rock an inch when he heard the cat dart through the diminishing veil of muddy water behind him and run off into the flooded terrain.
He let out a breath and rested his forehead on the dirt for a moment, realizing that none of this was a dream, not the cat, not the storm and not the roan washing away from him on the crumbling hillside.
What a night.
He caught a glimpse of the big stagecoach sinking out of sight on a rolling sweep of floodwater. Then he thought about the people—the driver, the shotgun rider and the two passengers—and he pushed himself up onto his elbows. Feeling the rough overhang on his sore shoulders, he backed out through the cold muddy waterfall and down three feet onto the rocky water-cut hillside.
He waded—one boot, one sock-covered foot—across a knee-deep flume of runoff filled with twigs, a cache of dead scorpions, floating berries and chunks of cactus. Across a rock, a bull rattlesnake was in its death throes, flattened and bloody across its middle. Its head was swinging and thrashing aimlessly. Seven feet across the natural rock-lined flume, he stepped up on a foot-high rock edge and looked down on the sporadically flooded land below. In the cold windless rain he felt strangely that the night was still upon him. In the gray-black distance, lightning flicked on and off as it had throughout the night.
Through the silvery downpour he looked back and forth across the width of the rolling flatlands, where hills had turned to islands overnight and where lower hills lay submerged to their peaks, strewn randomly about like wet wrinkled backs of surfaced whales. At the bottom end of the ravine, the heavier run of water had gone on, leaving behind it a wider half-circling gravel pan that had drained downward, flattening acres of wild grass in a swirl and spilling over a ledge of rock worn bare from thousands of years of such deluges.
On the other side of that drowned grass plain, he spotted the dark lump of one of the stage horses lying wet and still in only inches of muddy water. For a moment he continued to only stand staring through a curtain of streaking water, taken by the enormity of the flooded land. When the day’s first thrust of wind peppered rain against his side, he took a deep breath, let it out with resolve and pushed himself forward toward the dead horse.
“Start there, and hope it gets better,” he told himself solemnly, holding his wet hand on his brow as a visor against the rain. He made another long sweep with his eyes, before stooping and climbing down over a slick wet boulder and down the wet slippery hillside.
He stopped at the bottom of the hill and saw one of the stagecoach’s doors lying busted, wedged in a bed of rock. A thin stream of runoff water still rippled across the shattered door; the remnants of a canvas window cover floated in place like the sails of some ill-fated ocean vessel.
He stood for a moment over the coach door, looking farther down a shallow-running current. A tangle of coach reins, traces and tacking was bobbing in the water, trapped in a small pool against a large sunken boulder that had managed to not give itself up to last night’s angry torrent. Farther down he saw a wet hat lying in mud where the receding current had left it.
Not his hat, but a hat. . . .
He stepped into the shallow current and made his way toward the hat like a man who sought a great treasure and did not want to appear too anxious to claim it. When he reached the mud where the hat lay, his feet sank to his ankles with each step. But he continued to that spot, picked up the soaked hat, shook it and slapped it against his thigh, then pulled it down onto his forehead against the pouring rain.
“Obliged,” he murmured to anyone or anything who might be listening.
He examined himself, taking stock of what the storm had snatched from him. He was short one boot, with it his boot knife, in addition to his Colt, his rain slicker and his sombrero—now replaced temporarily, he told himself, adjusting the soaked hat. Already he felt better, the cold rain no longer beating down on his bare head.
As he stood assessing himself and his predicament, he heard the sound of a horse whinny in the distance where the shallow runoff ran out of sight over another rocky ledge.
“All right, talk to me,” he said aloud to the unseen animal.
He walked back into the cold water where countless other storms had worn the bottom to solid rock—rough, he reasoned, but better and stronger footing than the mud his feet had sunk in—and he followed the direction of the horse’s single whinny for nearly an hour with no other encouragement until he stopped and sat down midstream on a rock. He slumped there in the falling rain, tired, wet and dejected. Then he perked up and rose to his feet when he heard the horse again, this time much closer, he thought. Drenched, cold, his lips blue and tight from the chilling rain, he pushed himself forward with only the thinnest thread of hope and walked on.
A half mile farther along the path of the receding floodwater, he stopped and stared down at a fresh set of hoofprints sunk deep and clear in the soft gravelly mud. His eyes followed the hoofprints backward to the muddy water, then forward out of sight around a stand of rock. As he tracked the animal’s path, he heard another long, loud whinny resound from the rocks.
“I hear you,” he said quietly, quickening his pace. “I’m coming.”
Following the sound of the horse and its hoofprints for the better part of an hour, he left the flooded desert floor and climbed halfway up a rocky pyramided hillside. From there he looked back down on a thin, muddy ocean drifting serpentine through cactus, rock and standing scrub. He saw more pieces of the shattered stagecoach lying in the mud below him.
Farther downstream he saw the woman’s carpetbag and the man’s satchel lying on their sides, both of them open wide, articles of clothing trailing in the mud and draped over rock and spiked to the broken trunks and tendonlike roots of unearthed cottonwood and piñon.
As he looked down at the articles, a slight movement and the sound of a hoof clop drew his eyes to his right where, as if from out nowhere, the roan had stepped into sight and stood staring at him blankly.
“My goodness,” the Ranger whispered in awe. “What are you doing alive?”
The roan blew out a breath and scraped a hoof on a rock. Sam saw the saddle hanging beneath the horse’s belly, the leather stirrup skirts mud-covered and upside down, flared slightly like some strange new wind guides. The roan’s bit was out of its mouth, its wet bridle twisted sideways down its jaw, a piece of the broken rein still hanging there, dripping
rain. Blood oozed from a cut under the horse’s chin.
Sam took a step toward the roan, but the horse backed away, as if having vowed to choose its company more wisely after last night’s foray.
“Easy, now,” Sam said, not stopping his slow advance until he took the horse by its hanging bridle and rubbed a hand down its wet muzzle. “I know it was a hard night. I was there, remember?” As he spoke he straightened the bridle and checked inside the horse’s lips and teeth before slipping the bit back into its mouth.
“I don’t even know how you managed to do this,” he said, looking at the bit as the roan adjusted it with a twist of its jaws and a curl of its lower lip.
The horse stood still for him while Sam reached atop its back, loosened the saddle cinch and dropped the muddy, wet saddle to the ground.
“Well, look at this,” he said, bemused, seeing first his saddlebags hanging, still tied in place and covered with mud, then the broken stub of his Winchester butt sticking out of the saddle boot. “I suspect we’re both due a turn of luck this morning.”
He reached down under the horse and dragged the saddle out, righting it on the ground. He tugged on the broken rifle and found it jammed deep into the saddle boot. Picturing the floodwater as it rolled the roan over a hard roll across rocks, he saw how the rifle got jammed down hard enough to break the butt stock.
Untying the wet, tight rawhide straps on his saddlebags, he rummaged inside until he found a small pocketknife. He opened the knife and cut at the saddle boot until he had enough room to get his hand down inside and grip the metal chamber of the stockless Winchester. With the carefulness of a preacher handling gold, he twisted and pulled on the rifle until it slipped free of the wet leather and came out in his cold blue hand.
