Predators and Prey

by F. M. Parker

  A moment passed and the woman spoke again. “Doctor, I believe his fever is starting to break.”

  “Keep bathing him down with the cold water,” a man’s voice said.

  The force that had held Sam was removed. The wonderful coolness of a damp cloth was placed on his forehead. Then someone began to bathe his chest and arms.

  A fresh cold cloth was laid on Sam’s forehead. The delightful coolness penetrated his skull and caressed his feverish brain. The flaming yellow sun began to withdraw, spiraling swiftly upward, diminishing to a tiny, twinkling star in the far-distant reach of the heavens. The wild hallucinations were gone and reality came flooding in.

  Sam opened his eyes. Everything around him was blurred, formless. He squinted to see, concentrating on something hovering over him. His eyes came into focus. A heavyset, middle-aged woman was looking down at him.

  “Hello,” Sam said in a cracked, raspy voice.

  “Hello, yourself,” the nurse said. She looked closely at Sam. “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Sam Wilde.” He could barely whisper, for his throat was dry as dust.

  The nurse smiled brightly. “Exactly right.” She looked across Sam. “Doctor, our patient seems clearheaded.”

  “So I see,” said the doctor.

  Sam rolled his eyes to look in the same direction as the nurse. An elderly, stooped-shouldered man stood on Sam’s other side.

  “I’m Dr. Byington,” said the man. “And she is Nurse Hanson. Welcome back to the land of the living.”

  “The land of the living is a good place to be,” Sam replied. His head felt woolly and he wished he could talk louder than a whisper. “I’m pleased to meet both of you. Where am I?”

  “In the hospital in St. Joe. Two trappers brought you in.”

  “So Miller and Stamper got me here. How long ago was that?”

  “More than a week,” said the doctor.

  “Nine days to be exact,” Nurse Hanson added.

  “Nine days,” Sam said in surprise. He remembered none of the stay in the hospital, nor the last days that had passed while he floated down the Missouri with the trappers.

  “I’m awfully thirsty,” Sam said.

  Nurse Hanson immediately stepped to a nearby stand and poured water from a pitcher into a glass. She offered it to Sam.

  He lifted his hand to take the glass, and stopped in sharp surprise. The skeleton hand could not be his. The thing was nothing but skin stretched over bones. “What has happened to me?” he asked, turning his hand to view it from several angles.

  “You have been feverish and delirious for a very long time,” the doctor said. “You almost starved to death.”

  “How bad is my wound?”

  “You should have died with a wound that completely passed through your body, and that was made worse by a terrible infection. Both the entry and exit holes have healed. But there is a lump in your stomach. I think a very large cyst is developing, one that is full of pus and the leakage from an intestine that was punctured by the bullet.”

  Sam felt of the hard object. It was as large as two fists and bulged up the skin. “Will I live?” he asked.

  “Perhaps. Unless the cyst continues to grow and ruptures and poisons you. Now you must begin to take nourishment. An important factor will be whether or not your stomach can handle food.”

  Sam noted the doubtful expression on Dr. Byington’s face. He had said Sam should have died. But he had not.

  “I’ll not die,” Sam said. He took the glass of water from the nurse and drank every drop.

  “Nurse, bring Sam clear broth, but just a little,” directed the doctor. He spoke to Sam. “Eat very sparingly at first.”

  “Give him laudanum if he has pain,” said Dr. Byington as he walked from the room.

  Sam slowly sipped the half cup of beef broth Nurse Hanson brought him. Simply holding the cup sapped his strength. He finished and lay back. “Thank you,” he told her.

  “You are very welcome,” the nurse said, and left.

  Sam rolled his head to look around. He was in a room by himself. He must have been a very noisy patient because of his fever, and had been isolated from others. Half asleep and half unconscious, he floated away on a giant black wave.

  Sam awoke with a fire raging within his stomach, as if a blacksmith’s forge was stoked to the limit there with red-hot burning coals. He clamped his jaws to keep from screaming. The doctor may have been correct that Sam’s intestines had been injured by the thief’s bullet. He felt a foreboding that he might yet die.

  But if he died, then the men who had murdered his comrades and shot him would go unpunished. That must not be allowed to happen.

  “Nurse Hanson, bring me some laudanum,” Sam called.

  He heard hurrying footsteps approach along the hallway. Then the nurse’s lamp was floating toward his bed.

  ***

  The days, stretching endlessly for Sam, had crawled into another week. A burning pain rose in his stomach within hours each time he ate. The nights after the evening meal were the worst, his sleep cruel, even with the potent narcotic circulating in his blood.

  After one especially bad night he surfaced to wakefulness and lay listening to the black wind moaning along the street just outside his window.

  He turned his head so that he could look out the window of his room. The hospital had been built on a high bluff above the Missouri River. In the deep darkness the river was invisible. He could see the lights of several of the nearer steamboats tied up at the wharves. The small points of light faded at times, as if they were losing their battle to hold the darkness at bay.

  Sam felt that the ebb of his life-tide was something like the lights of the steamboats, struggling to hold a place in the universe and not be shredded to nothingness. His recent luck had been bad. However, he had no regrets as he reflected upon the events that had put him on the Missouri River and in front of the rifles of the thieves. That had been arranged by Old Man Fate and nothing more. He had freely chosen the frontier, leaving his father’s farmstead in Pennsylvania and traveling west. Danger went with that decision.

  Nor did Sam have regrets about joining with Farrow and his band of trappers. He grinned as he recalled that he had earned only a one-quarter share that first winter trapping pelts in the Rockies. He had learned from that rowdy, tough band of men how to set a trap, skin an animal, to track and shoot with the best of them. Coming down from the mountains in the spring of that first year, the group had been attacked by Blackfoot Indians. Sam had killed two men that day and grew from boy to man. There had been more battles during the next four years, and Sam had brought death to other men. Now he lay on the threshold of being one of those who died.

  The swiftly flowing Missouri River came out of hiding as the morning dusk arrived. Sam could see the west end of the Blacksnake Hills, which lay north of St. Michael’s Meadow. He recalled the legends of the hills. Before the white man came, the Indians forbade bloodshed and weapons there because several tribes believed that God once dwelt on the hills, making the soil sacred. Ailing Indian chiefs of the different tribes were brought great distances by travois to die there. They would be buried on the summits of the hills facing west over the valley of the Great River. The sunsets from the hills were so fine that the Indians believed the rays of the setting sun provided an invisible bridge over which the souls of the departed took a direct road to the next world. This place, called Wah-Wah-Lanawa, was holy, a place of peace and plenty, a refuge and a sanctuary. The Platte Indians acted as custodians of the Blacksnake Hills until the white man crowded them out and built homes on the sacred hills.

  Sam rested, dozing. When he again looked, enough light had come streaking in from the east to allow objects to throw off their colorless night shades of gray and show their true hues. The river was still high and running a muddy brown.

  As daylight brightened, a certain amount of satisfaction came to Sam. If he died within the next few hours, it would be in the sunlight of a day an
d not the sour darkness of night. And if he died at sunset, he might see the Indians’ road to the next world.

  Sam watched the activity of the riverfront increase. Many wagons came and lined up in a long string on Francis Street, awaiting their turns to be ferried across the Missouri. Children played around the high, spoked wheels of the vehicles. Men and women had congregated in groups and stood talking.

  A side-wheeler ferry arrived from the west shore. It tooted its steam whistle three cheery notes as it landed and dropped its gangway onto the dock. The knots of immigrants split, and the people began to move to their wagons. A group of black slaves stirred. Missouri had been a slave state since 1821. The men picked up heavy loads of lengths wood and carried them aboard. The fuel was stacked near the boiler and the blacks filed off the ferry.

  The whistle tooted again and the line of wagons inched forward and eight of them were driven onto the ferry. The ferry pulled away from the dock and tackled the swift Missouri again. Sam envied the people on the ferry.

  Noontime came and Sam ate a little food. He took a dose of the laudanum and slid off into a troubled, jerky sleep. He dreamed he was slashing the throat of the gray horse, and the red blood was pumping out to splash upon the ground. In his dream state his sorrow for the dying horse made him cry. The crying made his wound ache terribly.

  Sam came awake to the whispering voice of Nurse Hanson from near the door. “Dr. Byington, do you think he will recover?”

  “I see no sign of that,” the doctor replied in an equally low tone. “He may well die.”

  “That’s too bad,” the nurse said in a sad voice. “He seems like such a nice young fellow.”

  Sam kept his eyes closed as the doctor and nurse moved away. The words of the doctor, pronouncing his probable death, careened around his mind like ricocheting bullets. He turned to look out the window, to see all the life and activity just beyond the glass.

  The two ferryboats were meeting in mid-river. Each sent a blast of steam-driven noise at the other. The endless stream of wagons was still lined up on Francis Street. The wood-carrying slaves sat waiting. Two boys were chucking rocks into the water of the river.

  Sam knew he must go and join the living, and do it now.

  If he was to soon die, then he must find the murderous fur thieves and kill them now. He steeled himself for the pain he knew would come when he sat up. He slid a leg toward the edge of the bed. The tensing of his stomach muscles sent a surge of pain through him. The leg came free of the sheet and hung over the side of the bed. The second leg followed. He sat up, his teeth clenched.

  The room spun with a rocking motion around Sam. He braced himself with his arms to keep from falling. The weakness caused by the wound and lying in bed so many days had destroyed his sense of balance.

  The room finally came to rest. Sam caught hold of the bedstead and gingerly stood erect. The pain in his stomach rocketed to a crescendo of torment that took his breath. But he stood.

  He found his buckskin clothing in the closet of the room. The garments had been cleaned. He silently thanked the kind person who had done that for him. He dressed, almost fainting when he lifted his arms to slide into the buckskin blouse. Bent forward like a very old man, Sam left the room and went along the hallway.

  “Where are you going?” cried Nurse Hanson, catching sight of Sam.

  “Out there,” Sam said, pointing to a door that opened to the outside.

  “But you are not well enough.”

  “Will I ever be well enough?”

  “Certainly,” said the nurse. She took Sam by the arm. “Let me help you back to bed.”

  He pulled free. “I have something to do that has waited far too long. And it can only be done out there where men live. Thanks for all your help, but now I must say good-bye to you and leave this place.”

  Sam pushed through the door and into the sunlight of the afternoon. The fresh breeze struck him like a tonic. Gone was the smell of medicines, of liniments and salves. A hundred familiar odors flooded his senses. The strongest of all were the scents of the river water and mud, and the pungent horse turds on the street. He moved off, bent forward, stepping gently, his shoulders slumped.

  He withdrew the total amount of money he had in the bank: seven hundred and twenty-six dollars. Surely not a fortune but hopefully enough to feed and shelter him and purchase a gun and horse to use to find and kill his enemies.

  Sam returned the few blocks to the hospital and paid his bill. As Sam was leaving, Dr. Byington called out to him. “Wait a minute, Sam, I’ve got something for you.” He held out a half-pint bottle. “This holds laudanum. It will deaden your pain. But it’s a narcotic and you can become addicted to it, so use it sparingly.”

  “Thank you. I shall.”

  “Come back when you need more.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Good luck to you,” said Byington.

  “I’ll need some,” Sam replied. He could hardly walk, yet he had three men to find and kill. A crazy thing to attempt. But even a dying man had responsibilities.

  ***

  Sam fell as he crossed the short distance from the door to the bed. He hurt awfully. He had used up every ounce of his limited strength. He crawled on his hands and knees to the bed and pulled himself up on it. He took a small taste of the laudanum and re-corked the bottle. Rest. Just a little rest. But exhausted as he was, he was pleased for he had lasted out the day, and on his feet.

  He had purchased a Colt revolver and ammunition at a gun shop, and a long-bladed skinning knife in a sheath at a hardware store. Then a room had been rented, one that had a window and door opening out onto Main Street. Sam had planned to sit and inspect the men passing by in front. But that would have to wait.

  The pain lessened as the laudanum was absorbed into his blood. However, the strong opiate could not remove Sam’s black hate for his foes, as well as his dread of dying before he could discover them.

  Tomorrow he would begin his search. St. Joe was not so large that he couldn’t find the river pirates if they were there. He recalled the few short seconds during which he had seen the decoy man and the other two on the shore of the river. The decoy man was large, barrel-chested, with black hair and beard. And that damnable snow-white skin that had drawn Farrow and the others to their deaths. The horse-faced man would be easy to identify. The third man was different in that he was ordinary, of average height and build, and had a brown beard. Even now Sam was not certain he could pick him out of a crowd. He did not want to kill the wrong man.

  He put his hand on his stomach and felt the bulge of the cyst. The thing was round and hard, like a small green melon. The physician had said that when it burst the poison it contained would kill Sam.

  He removed his hand from the cyst and lay watching a small brown spider hanging suspended from the ceiling on a single thread of web. “I’ll die one day,” Sam said to the spider. “But not right away, for I also hang by a tough thread and I know there’s a little more of it for me to spin out.”

  10

  Hartzell, a Texas Ranger, rode his horse from the woods and crossed the meadow to the stone house sitting on the high bench above the Red River. The door was closed. The man and horse tracks on the ground were old and wind blown.

  The dirt mound of a fresh grave was beneath a large oak tree off a distance to the left of the house. The end of a rope hung from a thick limb of the oak. The Ranger wondered what story lay behind the rope and the grave.

  “Hello, the house,” Hartzell called.

  He listened and watched for some sign of another human being. Only the echo of his own voice replied. He felt that indefinable sense of emptiness that lay about a vacant house.

  “Anybody home?” Hartzell called in a louder voice. The echo of his words came again.

  “Appears we are alone,” he said to his horse, and swung down to the ground. He stepped to the door, pulled the latchstring, and entered the house.

  A table and two chairs sat near the fireplace of t
he big room. Four well-thumbed books were stacked on one end of the table. Someone knew how to read. A small assortment of dishes and cutlery was neatly arrayed on the other end of the table. A pair of handmade bunks made up the only other furnishings. Three saddles with saddlebags lay by the door. Three rifles leaned against the wall. An equal number of holstered pistols lay on the dirt floor near the rifles. A double handful of gold and silver coins were scattered beside the pistols, as if the money had been carelessly thrown there. Hartzell shook his head in puzzlement at the presence of the money.

  He wandered the remaining rooms of the house. The dirt of the floor was packed and perfectly level. The interior walls had been expertly plastered with light-colored mud, and gave a pleasing appearance. Someone had put considerable labor into the house. Every room except for the big front one, was barren, without one item of decoration. It was obvious no woman lived here.

  Hartzell left, closing the door of the house. He mounted and rode upriver along the bench.

  The Ranger spent the remainder of the day roaming over several square miles of land, surrounding the house. In the evening he returned. Again he found the ranch house empty.

  He stood for a time in the doorway of the house and looked at the gold and silver coins that lay glinting in the last of the day’s sunlight. Why was money worth several months of a man’s salary lying so openly in view? He left the house and rode into the woods.

  ***

  Something tapped Nathan Tolliver on the forehead. He came instantly awake but did not stir. The gentle strike of something hard, but lightly wielded, landed again on his forehead. And yet a third time.

  The precise intervals between the blows told Nathan that they had been struck by a human hand. He waited for the next one. None came. He opened his eyes and looked out into the dusk of evening.

  An old Comanche with a burnt-copper face and white-streaked hair squatted on his haunches a few feet distant. He was dressed in worn buckskin, an outfit that once had been splendid, with much quill and colored needlework. A single black crow’s feather was tied to a lock of hair and hung behind his right ear. He held a wooden rod, some three quarters of an inch in diameter and three feet long, extended in Nathan’s direction. The stick was painted with alternating bands of red, yellow, and black from the end and down to a short section wrapped with buckskin. The buckskin section was used as a handhold.