At the back of his neck he became aware of the fire against his skin. Revived enough now to raise his head, Bass turned and glanced at the path the sun was taking into the west. They might just stand a chance now … make it through till nightfall. But they damn well needed shade until the sun had limped from the sky.
“H-hannah,” he whispered, able to coax no more out of his throat.
Sucking some more on his wrist, Titus used the tip of his tongue to smear that blood over his lips until they were moistened, then tried to whistle. Nothing more than a faint shrill sound. Beginning to feel hopeful at this small success, Bass watched the half-dead mule roll her big head to the side and peer over at him.
He licked the lips again and whistled. This time she obediently started to turn his way. Then stopped.
“Hannah,” he croaked.
She came on around with his coaxing. The mule worked unsteadily at those next few steps, turning slightly, picking up one hoof at a time beneath her burdens, finally drawing close enough that he could reach out with his bloody arm and grab for the lead rope. On the fourth try he captured the braided rawhide and looped it around the hand. Now he was able to nudge her closer, eventually turning her so that she stood nearly on top of them to block the bright light. So hot had the direct rays become that this sudden shadow seemed like the cooling breath carried by a spring breeze.
It surprised him when his saddle mount came over to join the mule. Nor was it long before one of McAfferty’s packhorses came over to join the others. He let himself collapse to the side in relief. A good thing it was, he thought as he let his head rest atop his elbow on that hot ground—good that horses were a damned sight more sociable than he was.
There in the collective shade made by those near-dead animals, Scratch closed his eyes and sighed, letting his mind drift now that his tongue wasn’t near so swollen with thirst, now that he could feel some saliva beginning to work up at the back of his throat, around that tiny pebble he had stuffed under his tongue back near sunup. In a while he figured he just might have enough strength to get up and cut a horse’s ear for McAfferty.
Not … right now.
In a while.
On that August morning—what seemed like ages ago now—he and McAfferty had hastened back to Hatcher’s camp, eager to announce their plans to set off on their lonesome to the others, who were trudging over groggily to settle by the fire and swill down some steaming coffee.
“Here I thought you was a happy man being part of us!” Caleb Wood sputtered, the first of them to protest.
Elbridge Gray shook his head woefully, pursing his lips until he exploded, “Can’t believe you’d up and leave us now, Scratch—after all we been through together for the last two years!”
Isaac agreed. “And after all we done to take you in with us!”
Their reactions making him feel the first pangs of regret, Scratch nodded and said, “I’ll always be a grateful man, fellas—for all you done by me. But don’t get it wrong just ’cause I aim to make my own tracks now. I’m beholden to you, for always.”
With that sentiment encouraging them, Caleb, Isaac, and Elbridge did their best to caution Scratch against pulling up his stakes and setting off alone with Asa McAfferty.
“Goddammit, Bass,” Simms growled, smearing drops of coffee collected in the broom bristle of his whitish-blond mustache. “You damn well know how many times we had a scrap with the Blackfoot our own selves in the last two years.”
Gray nodded vigorously. “And now you wanna set off with just the two of you niggers!”
“We ain’t going nowhere near Blackfeet country!” McAfferty protested after remaining silent for so long.
But Wood ignored the white-head, jabbing a finger at Bass instead, just as that turkey-wattled schoolmaster back to Kentucky had jabbed once too often. “Pick up and move off from us, Scratch? And here I thought you was our friend!” Caleb glared a moment at McAfferty.
“This don’t mean I ain’t your friend no more—”
Wood fumed, “But I guess you ain’t our friend, are you, Scratch! I s’pose now I can see just how your stick floats—”
“A man does what he thinks best,” Jack Hatcher interrupted the tongue-lashing, immediately shushing them all. “Bass allays been that sort to take the circle. Even though I don’t agree with him one whit … I’ll trust to what Scratch thinks best for hisself.”
“Y-you mean you’re gonna let him go off like this, Jack?” Rufus asked, his voice rising an octave in disbelief.
Hatcher didn’t answer all that quickly. Instead, his unwavering gaze landed on McAfferty. Then he said, “I’ll trust in both of ’em, boys. Ye ’member we rode with both of these men of a time.” Then his eyes came over to fix on Titus. “And now it ’pears that the time for us to ride together’s come to an end.”
“Don’t mean we reached the knot at the end of our days together,” Bass replied, his throat filled with sentiment, suddenly sensing the ghostly presence of so many of those who lived on now only in his memory.
“Ye leaving us … it’s been coming for some time,” Jack explained. “I seen it plain as prairie sun. Some folks need others around ’em all the time—like the rest of these boys. Then … there’s folks like you, Titus Bass. The sort of man what does best left on his own.”
Those words reverberated someplace within him now, like the waves of heat rising off the cast-iron surface of this land.
Scratch didn’t know how long he had been lying there with his eyes closed, his half-cooked mind numb from the dizzying heat, his thoughts running in this direction, then that, just the way Hannah would urinate on this baked and flinty ground, the hot yellow piss streaming off in one little rivulet, then a second, and then another speeding there, finally a fourth narrow dribble fingering across the merciless, endless crust of the flaky sand.
With a cold seizure of his heart, Scratch wondered if he had made a mistake—come so far into this devil’s fry pan to die with McAfferty. Maybeso he came only to prove something to himself.
Could he make it on his own hook?
Or was the real problem that he doubted he would ever be able to trust in another man as fully as he had trusted in those three before they disappeared with near everything he had labored for?
And while he was questioning himself and what he had done: should he have followed McAfferty out of rendezvous back in August? Or had he only been blinded by the prospect of virgin beaver streams where no white man had ever laid a moccasin?
In the end, was he cut out for making it on his own hook?
Hearing Asa groan, Bass reluctantly opened his eyes. It was still shady on him. Peering up, he could see that all of their five animals remained around them. What a sight he and Asa must make, and he tried to chuckle in that taut, sunburned face of his. Out here where nothing green grew tall enough to brush a horse’s belly, their little tableau would stand right out on the flat, baked desert for many miles around. Those horses and that mule ringing two near-dead, completely stupid niggers … a pair of men waiting for the buzzards to come circling above them in the clear, pale, steamy sky. Waiting for those naked brown Apache to pick up their trail again.
“B-bass.”
It took some doing, but Titus slid his head off his arm, raised himself on an elbow, and made his face hover somewhere over McAfferty’s.
“Night c-coming?” Asa asked as the shadow crossed his eyes.
“Not near soon ’nough.”
McAfferty’s brow sagged with despair. “God d-deliver us …”
Bass waited a while, then admitted how likely it was that McAfferty was sleeping again. As much as he wished he could, something down inside his gut nagged at him the way a tiny cockleburr got itself hitched under a saddle blanket and chafed the animal, irritating the horse’s hide until that animal fought to throw off its torment.
Licking his lips, Scratch again tasted the blood. Blinking, he found that this time his eyes did not sting with sweat, nor swim with blurry images.
Grunting, Titus straightened, sitting right up beside McAfferty in that shady ring of horseflesh. Alongside his head hung the wide wooden stirrup on Asa’s Mexican saddle. It would do about as good as anything.
Seizing it first in one hand, then with the other, Bass took a deep, hot breath and began to pull himself onto his knees. The weakened horse whinnied, protesting at the sudden shift of weight on its saddle as the animal peered back at him.
“There … there, there,” he tried to coo.
Astonished to discover he was already up on one knee, Titus pulled with his arms, pushed with his legs, lunging up with an arm to snag that wide dish of the saddlehorn. Pulling still more as his knees began to straighten, his head suddenly fuzzy again, light as cottonwood down.
He gasped in surprise, relieved to find that he was standing.
Forced to squint into narrow slits now that he was no longer protected in the horses’ shade, Scratch peered across the distance—struggling to focus through the shimmering, dancing heat waves streaming up from the monotonous ground and that ocean of low brush struggling just to survive beneath a fiery sun. Then he turned slightly, clinging desperately to the saddlehorn with that one hand, the other arm draped around the cantle. Slowly he turned a little more, gazing far, far out into the distance. Checking for a smudge of dust, looking for any betrayal of black, beetlelike forms swimming watery along the shimmying horizon. He did not allow himself another deep breath of the superheated air until he had peered in all directions.
Nothing. Almost as if he and Asa and their animals were the only living things for hundreds of miles around. But, then, he knew better. The Apache were somewhere out there. Following on foot through the broken country. Likely the red bastards had already reached this flat, endless stretch of valley at the base of the rocky mountainside and were coming on. Tracking the white men and their half-dead animals.
Should they drop the animals now and fort up, preparing for the inevitable?
There wasn’t any question that the Apache would follow them, relentlessly. Both he and Asa knew it. The warriors had been dogging their trail for the better part of five days already. Pursuing the trappers right on through the cleft in the mountains, across the plateau, driving them right on down into this sea bottom of a desert.
There wasn’t a reason in all of God’s creation why the Apache would give up now. Especially when the trappers’ horses were slowing, when the white men hadn’t come across water in three days … when the sonsabitches could waltz right in on him and Asa come nightfall.
More than ever, Bass realized he had to get them to some shelter. Trees … not a prayer of finding that much cover out here. Maybeso some rocks to hunker behind. By a miracle perhaps they would happen upon some animal’s den out of the sun and out of sight near a narrow stream. Water and shelter, both.
Which did a man need more right now? he brooded hopelessly, his mind unable to cling to one thing for too long.
Plain enough to see they needed water and shelter, both.
But to get the strength to push on as long as it would take to find that water and shelter, Scratch realized he needed more blood. He needed to open up one of the horse’s ears. Maybe even open up a leg back of the pastern.
Daringly, he hobbled away from Asa’s saddle, inching his way toward his own horse’s neck and up to its head, struggling to focus on the ear. But of a sudden he stopped, stumbled to the side and made for McAfferty’s packhorse. Its ears were bigger. He ran his hands over one of them, finding it all the thicker, jug-headed cayuse that it was. Best to cut Asa’s animal. Besides, he rationalized, if it meant that he might have to coax some additional bottom from his own horse in the hours to come, then the smart thing for him was to bleed McAfferty’s mount.
Wobbly there beside the big head, Scratch pulled out the skinning knife while he positioned the ear in the flat of his hand. As he brought the knife close, one of the big eyes rolled back as if to inspect what the human was about to do.
“Easy, boy,” he murmured at the gelding.
It was all he could do to keep his balance on those watery knees, to hold the horse’s twitching ear steady as he drew the knife down one of the fat veins.
The blood burst readily from the wound as he yanked the knife away, immediately poking his head beneath the ear, his dry mouth flung open, its blackened, bloated tongue protruding like a huge strip of half-dried buffalo liver, doing his utmost to catch every precious drop of that hot stream of life. Milking the ear from the wide base, he continued to steadily stroke toward the cut he had made, squeezing gently below the wound as the horse began a slow, circling sidestep. For every one of its moves, Bass moved—always staying right with that drooling wound as he licked and swallowed until the animal finally relented and stopped so Scratch could pull gently down on the base of the ear, urging the big head closer to his own face. Now he pressed his lips right against the open vein, lapping every bit as greedily as any man would suck at fresh marrow bones pulled warm and toasted from the fire.
The hot, thick liquid dribbled from his lower lip, down his chin into his gray-brown whiskers.
Suddenly he drew back for a moment, gasping for breath—as his lungs felt the shock of the heated air. He clenched his eyes shut and sucked some more of the warm blood.
Finally sensing his stomach lurch in revolt of the warm fluid, Bass pulled away, gasping again.
It was a few moments before he realized he was standing there on his own. No longer was he barely holding himself up, braced against the horse. As he tugged down the floppy brim on his felt hat, Scratch felt his stomach slowly settle. Perhaps it had made peace with the blood.
To straighten his shoulders now, draw himself up, and flex his arms and knees—all made him feel one hell of a lot better than he had for days.
He blinked his eyes and stared off into the distance: first here, then there as he licked his lips, conscious of the blood’s sharp metallic tang coating his mouth. They had maybe as much as three hours till dark. Less until sunset … but something more than that until it would be dark enough for them to venture forth without being spotted by the Apache out there, somewhere in the distance.
No sign of a dust cloud, but then—the Apache wouldn’t be the sort to raise a cloud of dust, would they?
Squatting beside his partner in Hannah’s shadow, he slowly raised McAfferty across his leg again. “We gotta push on, Asa.”
“G-go on ’thout m-me.” The voice sounded hollow, thick with despair.
“Help me get you up,” Scratch demanded.
“Leave m-me. Lo, I travel through the deserts—”
“I ain’t leaving you,” he argued, shifting himself beside McAfferty.
“Just y-you go on ’thout—”
“Shuddup, you stupid idjit.”
Pulling Asa’s arm straight out from the shoulder, Scratch ducked his head under it. Looping his right arm around McAfferty’s thigh, he rolled his partner and struggled to get both his legs under the man’s deadweight as he rocked back—settling as much of the load right over his shoulders, then his legs, that strongest part of his body.
Weaving, wobbly at first, he quivered as he steadily rose with Asa slumped across his shoulders. Steadying himself, Bass lurched those few steps to the side of McAfferty’s mount, braced a shoulder against the animal, then heaved with all he had to shove the man’s upper body across the saddle.
Asa grunted, half-delirious, as he slid across the hot leather.
“That’s right, nigger,” Titus grumbled. “Hope it hurt you bad as it hurt me to get your flea-bit, crow-bait carcass throwed up there.”
Tossing McAfferty’s reins back over the flat, saucer-shaped horn, Scratch turned, exhausted, then caught his breath in the blazing heat of that unforgiving southwestern desert. Weaving forward, he patted the mule’s neck, murmuring assurance to her.
“I ain’t ’bout to die here. Not now.”
Then stumbled on by to take up the reins to his mount.
Stuffing his l
eft foot into the stirrup, he gripped both hands around the horn—about the size and shape of a large Spanish orange—and managed to drag himself into the saddle. After he had shifted his weight back against the cantle, he brought the horse around, then leaned across to catch up the reins to McAfferty’s mount.
Urging his horse away, Bass clucked at Hannah to follow, his lips too dry again to whistle anymore.
He raised his eyes to the blazing bone-yellow sky overhead, praying his thanks that the mule and McAfferty’s horses chose to follow.
Where they were going, he didn’t have a goddamned idea.
But they had less than three hours to find water, or they wouldn’t last through the following day.
As much as he tried, Scratch couldn’t squeeze away the realization of what that came down to: they had less than three hours to keep their lead on the Apache who were following.
The Apache who wouldn’t be stopping for anything as long as they had a white man’s trail to follow.
18
Just what hell would be worse?
Dying of thirst? Or dying at the hands of those Apache?
One was slow … painful to the point of sheer, unbearable agony it was so slow. While the other was nothing short of a real gamble. It could be fast: taking a stone arrow in the lights, or through the heart, maybe having his head caved in by a war club or his throat slit with a knife as those pursuing warriors closed in for the dirty eye-to-eye of it.
Then again … from what they had decided some days back, the Apache likely could make a white man’s dying such a slow and exquisitely unimaginable torture that he might yearn all the more for this slow death from thirst as his tongue bloated until he could no longer swallow, no longer breathe. A savvy man might just have to prefer this agonizing broil right out under the sun itself to having the Apache hang him upside down over a low fire so that his brain slowly cooked and the blood that pooled in his head was eventually brought to a boil, his own juices so hot steam escaped from his ears.
Crack in the Sky Page 43
