I rose to my feet, my right knee popped and strained, and nearly gave me away. I’d wrenched it not but six months before in a rock slide while being chased by a handful of testy Blackfeet. But that’s another story for another time, as Jack says. The knee hadn’t yet healed, at least not well, and likely would not ever return to its youthful spry condition. It was loud enough that the girl rolled over in her sleep. I paused and waited for her breathing to even out.
All I wanted to do was find a tree to lean against and let my body do the rest. A man’s latrine duties aren’t something to trumpet about, but I wanted to get that morning ritual over early so I could keep an eye on Thomas. I figured since they were both asleep I could safely risk a predawn visit to the bushes. I was wrong.
I made it to the privacy of our downwind-from-camp latrine, little more than a cat hole. By then gray morning shadows were emerging from the blackness of full night. I gambled I would be out of sight of the camp for a couple of minutes at most. I should have held it.
CHAPTER NINE
It was the girl’s voice, oddly enough, weepy and desperate, that woke me. Rather it roused me from my dazed state. I don’t think I’d been asleep so much as unconscious. My first clear thought was that I’d taken another nasty knock to the bean. I could only imagine what a laugh Jack would have once he found out.
My vision was a blurred mess, and didn’t get better as I squeezed my eyes and tried to focus them. Something was in them, or on them. I shook my head—a mistake, as a sickening dizziness further confounded my addled melon.
I was aware of a noise, a voice, other than the girl’s, bubbling through pond muck. It was my own, trying to speak, trying to make any familiar sound. Breathing was forced and shallow, I wasn’t getting enough air. Felt as if I had a mouth full of wool. Then something ripped and popped, and sweet, cold air rushed into my mouth, filled my windpipe, my lungs. I gulped like a beached fish.
Another something rapped me hard on the side of my head. I fell over onto my shoulder. Whatever was on my face shifted. Now I saw better than I had. I blinked again, several times, looked up and saw full daylight. I squinted—a man stared down at me, he looked familiar somehow, tall, leering with a full set of teeth too big, too bright for a mouth. And all set in a long, pulled horse face. Lank hair, brown, I think, wagged to either side of his face like wet yarn. The mouth said something. My ears weren’t working well, once again. The words came to me as if through mud.
Then he bent out of sight, reappeared, and I saw the canvas water bucket hove into sight, a wash of water followed it and whatever fuzziness plagued me snapped straight up and out of me.
“Gaaah!” The only sound I made for a minute or so. I looked around as noises came to me, more distinct now that the clanging bells in my head receded as if heard from across a plaza instead of nested in the belfry.
Thomas sat a couple of yards from me, his arms awkwardly held behind his back. Ropes lashed around his middle, looped around his legs bent before him, and ended wrapped a number of times around his ankles.
He stared at me, eyes wide, a grimy red bandanna holding a wad of grimier cloth stuffed in his mouth and tied tight around his face. The veins on his neck stuck out like fingers and his face was a red, puffy mess. Tears washed down his cheeks and snot strung from his nose. He’d never looked so bad, but it was his eyes that plagued me.
They stared right at me, the eyes of a five-year-old-boy tagging along behind me all those years ago, begging me to play with him. And if I didn’t indulge him he would lapse into heartfelt tears, and I would catch hell for not tending to my chores. He didn’t ever know, would not have cared, but I could not let him down. And I never had.
Until now. Damn kid and his pleading eyes. What had I done? More to the point, what had I not done?
Guilt and anger washed over me as I turned to face the toothy, stringy-haired stranger. He was laughing at me, braying like a donkey. I blinked hard, rubbed my face against my shoulder and found I could not move my own arms. I was as trussed up as was Thomas. My ankles, too.
“What have you done? What do you want, damn you? Tell me now!” I had intended my words to sound menacing, but they were rubber, toothless.
Through it all the girl sobbed and simpered, standing beside the donkey-sounding man.
“You told me no one would get hurt! Don’t hurt them, stop it!” Her words had no effect on him.
That’s when I saw the other two, a slender man, on the short side, sporting fancy whiskers, and a fat-faced woman. I recognized them straightaway—the devils from the street in Forsaken. The damn bloated cur who’d accused me of accosting her, the one who’d got me tossed in jail overnight on no evidence, the one who’d gotten me robbed by the lawman. So they were without doubt the ones following us.
What I recognized next changed everything. The fat woman wore a distinctive fur hat, a tawny affair with black speckling, proud-crowned and blocked oblong. It bore a triangular snout flattened across the front, widening with the face fur of the handsome lynx it had once been. Two pointed ears, tipped with fine black hairs, jutted from atop.
The back sported the nub of black-tipped tail of the same beast. To my knowledge there was only one such hat in all the world, and it belonged to Maple Jack. He’d made the hat himself, of an animal he’d not wanted to kill, but had been forced to. Another story for another time. But the hat was not something he wore every day. It was something he saved for “steppin’ lively,” as he put it.
It was also a garment he would never, ever give up while breath still filled his old lungs.
“What have you done to Jack?” Even as I bellowed it, my words becoming less muddy with each breath pushing them out, I saw other of his possessions. The skinny, bewhiskered man wore Jack’s beaded knife sheath and his homemade Bowie skinner. He’d looped the belt knife on a thong about his skinny neck. The elaborate beadwork on the buckskin sheath, a gift to Jack from the Flathead battle-widow he had kept winter company with for some seasons now, was as distinctive as was the lynx headpiece. And another item he’d not part with by choice.
“What have you done to Jack!” I barked it again, this time not as a question but as a rage-filled demand. I blinked away blood and somehow struggled to my knees, despite the tight hemp ropes lashed about me like a snake bent on strangling me. They cinched my waist, my arms behind my back, then down to the wrappings around my ankles.
The horse-faced man drew a massive revolver—it, too, looked familiar. And I knew it for what it was—Jack’s old war Dragoon, practically a blunderbuss.
The girl screeched, lashed out at the man. He took a slap to the face and kept on smiling. The woman pulled the girl off roughly, flung her sprawling backward, but I didn’t care what happened to her. My concern was for Thomas, for me, for Jack. What a mess.
I tallied my situation, the odds of accomplishing anything other than getting myself shot, and figured I had the worst odds in the history of games of chance. But what was the alternative, Roamer? I asked myself. Lay low and do nothing? This horse-faced fool had murder on his mind, and I was not about to let him scratch that itch without trying something, anything.
I funneled that pure, eye-shaking rage into forward action, rocking and balancing on my knees. I hoped there was enough play in the rope for me to stand, at least tall enough to launch myself at the homely lout, to use my head as might a mountain ram in battle.
I calculated I had one, perhaps two seconds before he pulled the trigger. He still had to cock the big gun and that was a chore in itself. But my maneuver up off my knees was not so simple or straightforward as I wanted. I made it up off my knees, but the ropes, bound too well, were more than I could stretch, let alone snap. I shouted at the killing muzzle of my best friend’s revolver, and beyond it, the long, grinning, toothy face of my killer.
The gun belched fire and burst with the sound of five train-wrecks. Someone shoved a full-grown tree straight into me. I saw blue sky, the tops of bare trees, smelled the raw stink of a fir
ed gun, heard screams of horses and people as if they were clashing with an orchestra from the netherworld. Then my sight once again blurred, I tasted the bitter tang of metal in my mouth, and I knew no more.
CHAPTER TEN
“This ain’t your day, boy.”
So, I thought to myself, that’s what the voice of God sounds like. Nothing too special about it. If anything, it sounded familiar. Then it fizzled out again.
“You hear me, Roamer? I said you have had one rum run of luck.”
Something nudged me in the arm. It took a few moments of effort, but I came around.
The voice spoke again. “Course, so have we all.”
I kept working on opening my eyes, they felt crusted shut from something—blood? How was that possible and where in hell was I? I recalled Thomas, the camp, the girl, the whispering, tied up, the two, no, three evil visitors . . . a wild cat? A lynx? Jack’s lynx . . . Jack’s knife, Jack’s gun! I had to be dead, shot at close range with that ancient beast of a revolver.
“What . . . hap—”
God’s familiar voice cut me off, stomped right on my words.
“You’re a lucky kid, have me stop along like this. Why, for all you know I could be a thief, a professional gambler, out looking for a stake in the wilderness. But—”
It was my turn to cut him off. “Jack? That you?” My words slurred, ran together.
I heard a rustling sound, then the voice drew close, spoke to my ear. “Course it’s me, boy, who’d you think be fool enough to trail after you?”
I still wasn’t convinced. Couldn’t be him. “God?” The word fell out of my mouth before I could stop it.
God laughed right then, and I knew it wasn’t really him but Maple Jack. I also knew I wasn’t dead. At least not yet. It was a mighty effort to open my eyes. One stuck, but the other popped open. I saw little. “It night?”
“Yes, it’s full dark, boy.”
No wonder I couldn’t see so well.
“How long . . . I been out?”
“Long enough for me to get worried, then give up on worry. You been out a day, near as I can figure.” He touched my lips with a tin cup and I sipped. The water tasted so good, felt so good I gulped, lashed at it with my tongue, spilling it on my chest. I didn’t care.
“Go easy, boy. You been hurt bad. Ain’t out of the worst of it yet.”
“What happened?” I said, forming mushy words to match my muddled thoughts.
“You been shot. I scouted the tracks some, but—”
“Thomas?” I said, cutting him off again, twitching, trying to raise myself up on my elbows. It was not one of my betterthought-out plans. Pain lanced me like lightning bolts thrown from the skies thrown hard at me.
“Near as I can tell he’s alive. Was when they left here. Why else take the whelp?”
I said nothing, so Jack continued. “Scouted here, saw tracks of two men and two women, one of them that fancy girl your brother dragged along, the other a heavy-set piece of work. She leaves big prints. A third person, had to be Thomas, left nothing more to read than drag marks. That’s how I suspected it’s him they took along. Cowards, except the boy, of course.”
My mind was filled with all manner of foolish thoughts tumbling on each other, one after the other, like puppies in a basket at the market, jostling for attention. “Your hat, gun, knife . . . I saw them.”
“Oh, good. I wondered if anything made it out.”
“Out?” I said. “What do you mean?”
Not but a couple of feet away, I saw a figure lit by the campfire, a yellow edge outlining him. It was Jack all right, but something was different. Something about him seemed . . . off. I tried to make sense of it, tried to find a way to ask him something, anything, but sleep dragged over me like a thick blanket and once more I was adrift, a strange, inky current tugging me far from what I knew.
When next I came around, it was full light out. I felt horrible. All over. My head thudded as if it was filled with unending cannon fire, and my body felt much the same. Then I tried to move.
I’d made it halfway to raising myself up on one elbow when someone shook the earth, spun it in a joking cosmic fashion. A flood of dizziness welled up, broke through my weak self, and threatened to drown me once more in blackness.
Jack’s voice came to me again, clearer with each shout. The man is persistent.
“Roamer! Boy—stay with me, you hear?”
I tried to say yes, tried to say anything, but only mustered a weak forward movement with my head. It was enough to stop Jack from shouting, and to rally the cannons into a fresh volley.
Much as I appreciated that man’s doglike persistence, it was fraying my nerves to near snapping. The swirling abated, along with Jack’s voice, and I risked opening my eyes again. Slowly at first, then wider as nothing worse happened.
“Jack?” I croaked. “Water . . .”
He looked down at me. Once again I only saw his outline, this time, though, it was the bright sky behind him. He left, then returned a few moments later with the tin cup filled with water. He held it to my mouth and I lapped at it like a dog.
“Easy now, easy, boy.”
He was closer to me and I remembered what I’d thought hours before when I’d last been awake. My old friend looked different somehow.
“Jack,” I said. “What happened to you?”
“Oh, weren’t nothin’. Don’t worry about it. Get some sleep.”
“No, no . . . tell me.”
Jack closed his eyes and sighed, then sat back on a log. That’s when I got a good look at him. He looked mighty rough—his beard, normally full and fluffy, that he kept mostly clean, was singed and matted along one side, as was his hair. His face along the other side wore a cluster of welts where the skin had blistered. His prize buckskins bore rents and slashes. Blackened spots showed he’d been through an awful time. He was also wheezing as if from exertion.
“Jack, what happened? You look like you’ve been dragged through the gates of hell.”
He grinned, nodded. “Yeah, just about.”
I struggled to sit up, made no progress.
“Okay, okay, don’t get your bustle in a crimp. It was three rascals, a woman and two men, who come along a day after you all left. I seen ’em coming, but they looked harmless. I had ’em set themselves down by the campfire and I offered to make them coffee. They said they’d sure appreciate it, as weary as they were. Told me they was from back East. No kiddin’, says I.” Jack laid a grimy finger alongside his nose, winced as he accidentally poked his blistered cheek.
“I went up to my cabin to fetch my fancy guest cups, you know them new tin ones? Been a year since I had occasion to use them, then all in one week I have two reasons to drag ’em down off’n the shelf. Anyhoo, I turned around to come back out—mumbling as I am prone to do when I have too much on the fire and no way to tend it all.”
Jack stretched his legs, took on a thoughtful look, then resumed his story. “I try to be a decent host, but I didn’t have time enough to wrangle all manner of visitors. I was set to head out the next morning up to Flathead country, don’t you know.
“Rummaging as I was in the cabin, I wasn’t paying enough attention to my guests. That’s when I heard a scuffing sound from the doorway. I looked up and there stood that homely fat woman. A harder-looking face on a female I’ve rarely seen. Looks like she’s been used as a chopping block, then soaked in brine and gnawed on by porcupines.”
That about matched my memory of the woman who’d been wearing Jack’s knife—the same beefy cur who railroaded me back in Forsaken.
“She was in the doorway, twitching her eyes left and right, looking about the place. It’s a mite dark in there without a light, as you know, but I’d seen that look plenty of times before in my travels. A digger looking for goods for the taking. ‘Now see here,’ I told her. ‘I got my guest cups but there’s nothing in here you need concern yourself with, ma’am,’ I said to her. I always try to be polite to the ladies, even when
they have a face like a mud fence.
“Well, she put her hand to her big ol’ bosom, you know the way a woman will do when she feels she’s been wronged, though in my experience that means they’re playacting, and she says to me, ‘Why sir, I have no idea what you mean by that.’
“ ‘Well, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Maybe yes and maybe no, but I have the cups and you all were kind enough to offer up your own coffee beans, so let us adjourn to the campfire. Might be I can help you with your directions and your map.’ That was something they’d asked about when they first bothered me.”
Jack leaned toward me. “But do you know what, boy?”
I shook my head slowly, the cannons still going off in random, thunderous volleys between my ears.
“That hard-looking woman tried to block my path, my own path leading from my own doorway to my own firepit!You might have gathered by now that I had a lot on my mind, for I am usually quicker on the draw than that. I said to her, ‘Now, see here, ma’am, I ain’t up for games. I am about to depart on a journey and I have chores to tend to.’
“She all but manhandled me! I pushed past her, and I no sooner had set foot out the door when I was attacked by her companions. Them two bounders tucked right into me with fists and foul breath and kicks and punches. As I mentioned, I was busy and not in my right mind, else I would have laid those buffoons out cold, I tell you. But they got the drop on me, and next thing I knew they’d trussed me up tighter than bark on a birch. I didn’t go easy, though. I lay there all roped, not unlike how you looked when I come upon you. Only I was squallerin’ like a riled grizz cub.
“ ‘You will regret this, curse your foul hides!’ I shouted all manner of oaths, some of them not fit for a woman’s ear, I will admit. But then again she was about as far from a woman as you are likely to find and still be one, if that makes sense.”
I nodded, hoping he was going to come to the pointed end of the story soon. But you can’t rush a raconteur like Maple Jack. It’s akin to pulling the Dutch oven off the coals before the biscuits have cooked.
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