by Gary Paulsen
They spent that night and the next full day working on the horses. It was one thing for Francis to say they'd ride, another to make certain they could.
The ponies were in a slightly weakened condition at first, and perhaps that was for the best. The pinto still managed to throw Francis twice. Lottie took a small white marc with a circle around one eye, and Billy took a muddy gray pony because he said it reminded him. of the mule and he missed the mule.
“Where'd you get that old mule anyway?” Lottie asked. “You never told us.”
“Two men named Courtwcilcr and Dubs came on me and stole everything I had and left me the mule.”
“Well.” Lottie turned to look at Francis. “I'll bet you fixed those crooks!”
“The mule helped,” Francis said. “But that's another story.”
Luckily only the pinto bucked. The rest needed care. Francis used some of his deer grease to treat the cleaned cuts and bruises so the flics wouldn't get into the wounds, and spent the rest of the day making usable jaw bridles and reins out of the braided picket lines and halters.
They picked one other horse, a reddish mare, for a packhorsc, though they had no true pack to put on her back. They tied the horses to the tree for the two nights they were camped and Francis slept at the base of the tree to be ready in case something frightened them.
At dawn the next morning Francis shook the other two awake. “We're leaving. Come on.” They ate cold cooked meat and before true light they headed out, back in the direction from which they'd come, for the rest of the gold.
Francis led at first, riding the pinto and pulling the pack marc with an eight-foot piece of picket line. They climbed out of the streambed and onto the flat of the prairie. He and the pinto had worked out their differences and he found the small horse quick and responsive, answering to knee pressure, so he could steer with his legs and keep his hands free.
“What about the two extra horses?” Lottie followed Francis, and Billy brought up the rear on his gray.
“Enough is a feast,” Francis said. “We can't lead them all the time so they're on their own. But I think they'll follow.”
And he was right. They fell in behind Billy and walked along as if led.
Francis and the children found that the Spaniard's new burial site had not been bothered. They used Billy's sword—he would not let anybody else carry it—to dig up the gold and silver.
They put it on the pack marc, balancing it on cither side in deerskin pouches. There was no cinch and at first the packs would not stay on. Lottie figured out a way to tie it into the mare's mane to keep it centered. Francis took sonic of another piece of the braided rope that had held the ponies and looped it beneath the marc's belly to keep the packs tied down. It was not truly a cinch but it kept the packs from flopping or coming loose.
They started north again late in the afternoon and by dark they were passing their camp of the previous night.
As before, they began with Francis in the lead. But in time he handed the pack mare over to Lottie and began to range, moving left and right of the ccntcrlinc of their march.
It felt wonderful to be riding again. The pinto was a good horse and with a little grass and rest and water would be a great one. They had meat left from the last kill, enough for two more days, and now they could cover thirty miles and more a day.
At dark Francis came back to the creek bed where some small cottonwoods stood. They tied the horses to trees, each separately, and gathered wood and cooked meat and ate until they were full. They had to dig a seep pool for water—the stream was dried up—but the water was sweet and there was plenty for all three of them and the horses.
Francis then made a circuit on foot with his rifle, moving out half a mile in the dark, and could not sec any sign of light on the horizon or from their own fire.
He had put on a good face for Lottie and Billy, but he was worried. If the ponies had come from the Comancheros, they would be tracking them. But there was no indication that anybody was coming and so he went back to the fire just in time to hear Lottie finish what had apparently been a long story about horses she had known back home.
Billy was sound asleep, and Francis curled up near the tree by his pinto, his rifle in his arms. Soon all three were asleep and there was no sign, not a single indication, that on the following morning Lottie would find the castle in the clouds.
It was strange that Lottie was the one to sec it first. She had just been telling about a book she'd read, or somebody had read, that had men fighting with swords, huge swords as tall as the men, and the men lived in castles … when she looked up and said, “Like that one up there.”
And sure enough there was a castle, or something that looked so much like a castle it didn't matter. It was far off on the horizon, or floating above the horizon, with blue daylight showing beneath the castle and beneath the earth it stood on. It appeared to be made of red sandstone, with buildings on top made from reddish earth and a tower at each end.
“Look close,” she said. “You can sec the people.”
They had been riding close together and at first Francis and Billy couldn't sec what she meant. But when they moved their heads closer to Lottie's line of sight the castle jumped into focus. And she was right. Francis could sec small figures moving, along the roof or the top of a wall, and around the wall at the base and off to the side was a field of what seemed to be corn, dried and golden.
“It's a mirasre,” Francis said. “We've seen them before.”
“Not like this one,” Lottie said. “Not a castle. And not this close.”
“A mirage doesn't have to be far away. Mr. Grimes told me once he saw a mirage of a sailing ship on an ocean while he was washing his face in a stream.”
“But the people.” Lottie pointed. “You can see them so clear….”
They rode in silence for a time—a strange state for Lottie—and Francis had to agree with her. Mirages usually didn't last long, or they wavered in the light, or shimmered and disappeared. This one did none of those things. Instead the light beneath it narrowed and vanished until the structure was clearly connected to the ground and then it started to grow as they rode through the day, higher and higher until even Francis had to acknowledge that it wasn't a mirage at all but a real castle.
Except that as they grew nearer it became clear that it wasn't a castle so much as a small town on top of a butte.
And with that knowledge Francis realized that he was leading two children and a packhorsc carrying a fortune in gold toward a strange village on a strange mountain filled with strange people who might not be friendly.
When evening caught them they were still a good ten or twelve miles from the butte and Francis dropped into a small gully filled with brush and salt cedar and tied the horses.
“We'll make a cold camp. No fire. No cooked meat. Dig a seep hole for water. As soon as it's dark I'm going to move a little closer and take a better look at that place.”
“It's a castle,” Billy said. “Lottie was right.”
“No, Billy,” she said. “It's a town on a mountain. I just thought it was a castle.”
“Still. They'll have food and water and maybe candy wc can buy with the gold. I think wc ought to get up there and see if they've got a store.”
Francis smiled, though it was lost to the others in the gathering dark. They ate some small pieces of cooked, partly dried venison, and then Francis settled them in, and walked off into the dark.
He set a good pace for two hours and covered five or six miles. Then he slowed a bit and walked another four miles in two more hours. He had been moving in a strcambed—dozens cut the prairie surface—and so could not see what was in front, but after walking what he thought might be ten miles he pulled himself up to the edge of an arroyo and took a look.
He was surprised to sec that he was quite close to the butte. The moon helped him to see the small adobe houses. They had a soft, curved beauty in the moonlight, and here and there he saw the light of a fire coining th
rough an opening between two houses. There were no lanterns, nor did there appear to be light from candles or anything like a window. He didn't see a horse herd. But there were several fields of corn plants, dry and apparently harvested last fall, and his mouth watered at the thought of corn bread and gravy to go with the venison….
A sound stopped his dream. A soft sound, close, something brushing, no, some sound he'd heard before. Something sliding. Really close. Not sliding either, more slithering …
The snake hit him just as he realized what it was and saw” it in the moonlight. It didn't rattle, though it was a good four feet long and had close to a dozen rattles. Francis's head had been just over the top edge of the arrovo and his upper right arm lay along the dirt as he held himself there, and the snake hit the muscle in his right arm, down from the shoulder about four inches.
He had some good luck to go with the bad. He was wearing his buckskin and so the fangs did not get in as deep as they might have. And the snake could have hit his neck instead of his arm, which would have killed him pretty quick.
But the fangs did get through into his arm and the snake dropped a heavy dose of venom.
“Ahhh …”
Francis fell back into the streambed, six feet down, and for a second raw panic took him. Jumbled images and words. Stupid, he thought— Grimes had told him once that Apaches didn't like to move at night because the snakes hunted then. He knew that. Should have been more careful. Stupid way to die. Couldn't cut up on his shoulder, couldn't get at it to suck it anyway; too far back to Lottie and Billy. He'd never make it.
The pain was immediate and intense: his whole shoulder was on fire.
How long?
Minutes. He'd heard somewhere that maybe half an hour was all it took. And the bite was high on his body. The poison would reach his brain soon. Or his heart.
He could He down and The right here or he could fight to live. To do that he needed help, somebody to cut the wound, bleed it, poultice it or suck it. Soon. He had to get help. The village.
His mind was fuzzing now, everything becoming blurred as the pain drove him into shock and the venom worked into his system.
He had to keep moving. Make it to the town on the buttc. Keep his legs moving. Not running, had to keep it even, keep his blood from pumping hard and carrying the poison, but keep moving.
Colors now, in flashes. He stopped for a moment and vomited. He thought how silly it was to waste all the venison he'd just eaten.
His arm and shoulder were on fire and he kept seeing visions. Lottie and Billy in the wagon. Billy riding the mule backward. More colors. Gold. Gold bars and silver bars and then a sun exploding in his brain, then going out and out, and he was falling now, first to his knees and almost down before somebody was there, a strange-looking man in a strange costume. Not a man, a demon, no, a wild beast with a mask with bulging eyes there in front of him making sounds he couldn't understand.
“Help …” Francis tried to speak to the monster. “Snakebit. Shoulder. Two children. Help …”
But all that came were more words he couldn't understand and then he was sinking to the sandy floor of the arroyo, first to his knees and then over on his face and then there was nothing.
He could not say if he was alive or dead. It was a dream that became a nightmare, back to a dream, and then to another nightmare peopled with strange beings and spirits, and in it all, through it all, there was horrible pain and sickness.
Later he couldn't remember much—and for that he was thankful. Snatches of scenes came. Lottie was there in front of him, and Billy, and then somebody was turning him over and then there was horrible pain in his shoulder and then something with two heads and corn leaves for hair was looking down at him and saying something he couldn't begin to understand, and then he was sweating, pouring more sweat than he ever had in his life, and something hot was going down his throat, hot and thick and sweet and then salty and then finally, for what could have been an hour or a day or the rest of his life, he went back into nothingness, which at last turned into sleep.
He did not awaken as much as become reborn. His eyes opened the smallest crack and he saw or thought he could see a blurred fence in front of him and that didn't make any sense at all because at the same moment he knew he was flat on his back on some kind of blanket. Ceiling. It was a ceiling with round timbers covered with a latticework of smaller limbs and willows. He was looking up at a ceiling. But how” … when?
His eyes swiveled slightly to his left and he saw Lottie's face. She was sitting on the floor with her face lying on the bed and was sleeping fitfully. He could see her eyelids fluttering. There was light coming through a small doorway that dimly lit a small room not over ten feet square. He was on a bed made of willows in one corner of the room away from the door opening and for what seemed a very long time he could not think on where he was or how he came to be there. He decided he wasn't dead—he didn't think Lottie would be there if he was dead—but at first he couldn't understand how he'd come to be in a room. How could a room be in the prairie?
Then he remembered the town on the butte with the small adobe houses and he knew. “How did I get here?” He said it aloud, or tried to. What came out was a cross between a crow's rasping caw and a hissing whisper.
It was enough to awaken Lottie. “Francis? Arc you talking? Did you say something? Oh, Francis, was that really you? I've been so worried these past two weeks that you were going to The and I would have to live without you that—”
“Two weeks?” That came out better. Actual words, but still rasping and choked off.
She wiped her eyes and sat up and nodded. “Billy will be so glad. He's out hunting rabbits with Two Toes—”
“Hunting?”
“Don't worry, he didn't take your rifle. Honestly , if you asked for that gun once you asked for it a hundred times. I'd bring you the rifle and you'd bold it in your arms like a baby or something and go back to sleep. If I took it away you would wake up and ask for it and go back to sleep holding it. Billy is bunting with a bow Two Toes showed him how to make. I swear, he's been running with that boy so much I think he's turned Indian. He can hit a running rabbit with that thing. They have contests, all the boys, and the winner gets the other boys’ arrows to use. Billy must have had close to a hundred and fifty arrows before they quit shooting with him. Then he started hunting and it was him brought in all the fresh rabbits for you—”
Francis held up his hand. “Too fast. Go back. I guess we're in the village on the buttc—an Indian village. But … how did I get here?”
“Oh. Well, I don't know it all because I still can't talk to them very well because they haven't got a handle on English and I can't get my tongue around their words. Hilly has learned to rattle with them, or at least with Two Toes—that's a boy he's gotten to be friendly with—but all they talk about is hunting and girls—”
“Just what you know. Tell me what you know.”
“Billy and I were waiting with the horses when six men come out of the dark and took hold of us.’7
“Took hold?”
“Not in that way. Not in a bad way. Although Billy had a pretty good go at them with his sword when they first came out of the dark. But they kind of wrapped him up and then they stopped and made signs that they were peaceful and had smiles and motioned that we should come with them. They let us ride the horses but they didn't ride. They trotted along beside us as fast as the horses moved. And they didn't take the pack either, though you could tell they were curious at how heavy it was. When we got here you were already on this bed and there were two old women and a medicine man working on you. I swear, T didn't know what, to think. It was getting light when we got here and even as dark as it is in here I could see you were in a bad way.
“I didn't know why at first and thought they must have hurt you but then they showed me the marks on your shoulder and I knew you were snakebit. They let me stay with you but they wouldn't let mc make none of my spit-and-mud poultice to draw out the poiso
n. It's a shame too; I had Billy drink water and spit in a gourd all day. We must have had close to a quart. But they wouldn't have it—they used sonic junk they made up with water and leaves—so it all went to waste.”
“They saved me?”
“Well, them and me and Billy. Billy hunted rabbits and we've kept a clay pot of rabbit stew to mix with the corn gruel they give you.”
“They must have carried me here from where they found me.”
Lottie nodded. “And there's been at least one old woman with you all the time. They fed you and cleaned you and all but I think they were really just here to keep me from using my spit-and-mud poultice. I tell you, T saw a man bit by a copperhead back home and he was up in two days, not two weeks. He went to a dance and danced the reel all night not four days after he was bit. Of course he was dead a week later but that was because he tried to steal a team of mules and somebody up and shot him and couldn't rightly be blamed on the poultice not working.”
“They stayed with me?”
Another nod. “Until this morning. They turned you over and looked at your shoulder and one of them nodded to the other one and they left. I thought they had given up. Oh, Francis, I was so sure you were going to die….”
“I thought I was dead and then … I just didn't know….”
“They must have known you were going to make it when they left this morning.”
“Well. They were right.” Francis took a deep breath. “If I've been in this bed two weeks they must have taken my clothes.” He raised the thin blanket that covered him and looked under it. “What have they got on me?”
“Well …” Lottie blushed.
“What is this? Some kind of wool diaper?”
“Like I said, we've been feeding you broth and meat for two weeks and you couldn't get up. So we had to—”
“Like a baby?”
“Well, yes. I guess you could say—”
“Where arc my buckskins?”
