The crutch he ended up with as a result was shorter than he would have liked. But used with care, it did not give underneath him. He also had nothing that could be easily fixed at the top to make a crosspiece to go under his armpit. He ended by making a tight wad of cloth at the top of the prop, which fitted into his armpit. It worked, but cut off the circulation in his arm after a few minutes use.
His first attempt to stand on his feet with this support was comic. But he did get up; and he was supported. He propped the saddle ready so that by still leaning on the staff and holding to it with what strength there was in his left hand, he could reach down with his right and lift it.
It was a heavy load for one arm to lift, let alone for one arm to throw over the back of the horse.
Luckily, Brute was still in an agreeable mood, apparently, and did not sidle around or try to avoid the saddle as Jeebee made an effort to put it on. To Jeebee’s surprise, he still had more strength in his right arm than he had realized.
The way he had been living—and eating at the wagon—had evidently wrought a more permanent physical improvement than he had thought. Also, a certain amount of desperation was at work inside him. If nothing else, even if he had to abandon everything else to escape some danger here, he had to be able to get that saddle on Brute and cinched tight.
It took him nearly two hours to do it. Most of this time was spent in working out a method, using knee and single hand to pull the cinch tight enough so that the saddle would not slip around under Brute’s belly and dump him off the horse when he was mounted. A fall like that, now, would not only be painful but could put him back out of action for several more days.
Finally he got the saddle on and cinched properly. He tried mounting, but that was too much for him, as yet. He unbuckled the cinch strap and dropped the saddle to the ground, again.
With the excitement of working over, he began to realize acutely that it was time for another painkiller. So far he had stuck to three tablets of Dilaudid a day. He was determined not to exceed that so he could be sure to be able to give up the medication at the end of seven days.
However, at the end of forty minutes of rest on his makeshift bed, the pains had eased off. So much so that he thought he might perhaps try getting the saddle blanket on Sally, and at least some of the more necessary items. The blanket was light, he had worked out ways of pulling the cinch tight with his good hand and bracing knee, and Sally was much more likely than Brute to stand still while he put stuff on her.
Accordingly, he struggled back up on his crutch. But to begin with, there was the problem of tying an anchor knot to a ring on the cinch strap one-handed when he had been used to tying it with two. He tried various ways, using not only his knee but as much of the hand on his hurt arm as possible, to hold the rope still while he threaded the end of the rope around and through the metal ring. Finally, eventually, he found a way to get it tied. Then came the relatively easy job of looping the rope back and forth through the other iron rings that secured it to the cinch strap; then finally the almost impossible-seeming problem of pulling it tight and tying the final notch.
This last defeated him. As the sun was sinking, he got the knot tied, but the rope was not pulled anywhere near as tight as it should have been, and there was no telling whether the load might not shift under the movement of the mare as she tried to carry it.
He was worn out, and the pains had come back with redoubled force. It was finally time for him to allow himself another Dilaudid. He took it and collapsed on his bed. He fell abruptly into sleep, but woke up after a short while, hungry.
He had been surviving on the trail mix and some dried beef that Merry had supplied him with when he left. There was enough left of this for two or three meals yet, if he made them very light ones. He compromised by eating only a handful of the trail mix and drinking a good amount from the water bags.
He fell asleep again, still ravenous. He came awake suddenly, feeling alarmed, but not knowing why. The sun was just up. Light was just beginning to flood the landscape.
After a few minutes he heard the sound of a single, distant rifle shot.
He waited, gripped by fear. The sound was not repeated. He guessed, however, that there had been another before it, and that this was what had wakened him earlier.
At all costs, fit to travel or not, he must get away from his present exposed position. Even if it meant taking his next Dilaudid ahead of time.
He struggled to his feet again and began trying to saddle and load the two horses in earnest.
Whether it was the new Dilaudid or what he had learned earlier that made it possible, or whether it was the necessity of leaving nothing behind to signal his presence here, piece by piece he managed to get all the load on Sally and tied down, and Brute saddled.
The sun was high, and he did not like to move in daylight. But the horses were now ready to travel, and he must move with them. He could not risk waiting around here much longer.
Leaning heavily on his makeshift crutch, he got his foot in the stirrup, a firm grasp on the saddle horn, and tried valiantly to swing his bad leg over the back of Brute so that he sat in the saddle. It was a tremendous struggle, but he failed.
He told himself he would not give up. He leaned against the side of Brute, panting, his wet forehead pressed against the leather of the saddle horn. Wolf had meanwhile come back and was standing a dozen feet off, watching.
He made three more efforts before he finally, by some miracle of rage at himself, got the leg over and his rump into the saddle. Dismounting, he realized now, would be almost as painful. But that did not matter now. Now he could travel. He lifted the reins and spoke to Brute.
“Get on, you bastard,” he said—and Brute moved off among the willows. Sally trailed obediently behind at the end of the rope that tied her to Brute’s saddle. Jeebee could no longer see Wolf. He did not know if the other was with him now or not. But he no longer had any doubt that Wolf, if alive, would be likely to catch up with him somewhere. In any case, it did not matter. Jeebee was moving, and he was traveling upstream toward the foothills.
By midday, he was exhausted and called a halt. He left the horses, having no choice, with their gear on, and slept on the ground beside them until nearly dark. With nightfall he went on, taking a chance and leaving the willow bottoms of the stream for a more direct route overland to the foothills, as he had seen them at the end of the day.
Later on, he was never able to recall this part of his trip with any clarity until he saw the burning buildings. In the saddle at last, he had begun to have hopes of making it into the foothills in one night’s ride.
It was true it was a night placed on top of a day that had asked the most from him. But he had given that much before and assumed that he could do it now. However, to a certain extent he was still worried about the painkillers he might have to take to help him reach his goal. It seemed to him he had heard of army surgeons in field hospitals during the war in Vietnam becoming hooked on Dilaudid because they had had to operate twenty-four hours around the clock and taking the drug was the only way they could do it.
But the Dilaudid was the only thing that could get him through. As it turned out, it did; but it was not easy. He was still holding off on his first pain pill of the trip, now that he was mounted and moving. But even with the horses going at a walk, he found riding hard. It was not so much that he could not deal with the pain on a minute-to-minute basis. It was the problem that the tension in him from his defiance of it was wearing him out. It was a matter of bracing himself against a new surge of pain each time Brute’s hooves struck the ground, jolting his hurt body. But there were things even beyond that to deal with.
One of these was the question of how to place his hurt left leg. Both in the stirrup and out of the stirrup it was uncomfortable. He had deliberately shortened the stirrup on that side and he was grateful now he had. But even that position was not good. In the end he put his toe, only, in it, and tried to forget his leg was there.
/> As the meager moonlight appeared with the rising of the moon to help him on his way—thank God the sky was clear and also that the horses were good at picking their own way in the sense of knowing where to put their feet—it became impossible to ignore the fact that riding in this position with his left leg hanging down was asking for trouble. He took a Dilaudid. Once it had gone to work to make him more comfortable, with great effort he pulled his left leg up with his hand until his knee was partly crooked around the pommel and the leg itself was held mostly near the horizontal.
This was a dangerously loose way to sit the saddle, even with Brute at a walk. He was not sure how long he could go on with it, without doing some kind of further damage to the leg. Thank God the knee would bend at least that much.
Normally, even at a walk like this, three to five hours of traveling should have brought them safely into the hills. They needed to find a place well above any of the ranch houses, a place where both he and the horses could hide overnight.
The fact was, he thought suddenly, he was standing up to the ride better than he had expected. Along with the action of the Dilaudid, there seemed to have come to his aid a sort of semi-hysteric state of determination to make the ride.
It was a state not too different from the shock he had gone into during his encounter with the bear. In this condition, the early hours of the night passed something like a bad dream, in which he was partly insulated from the physical cost of what he was doing and against any tendency to feel so exhausted he had to stop.
He ended by not getting down from the saddle at all, after one or two attempts, simply because he was afraid of getting down and not being able to make the climb back up. If that happened, he would be caught out here in the open, for around him there was nothing but sagebrush and open ground that should have had a certain amount of grass. It was bare partly from the drought of the last few years but would have been treeless even in a wet year. Somehow, he must keep moving until he got to a place where he could hide, both himself and the two horses with their burdens.
In the end he passed into an almost completely dreamlike state in which only a corner of his senses and vision kept watch normally. His vision, even, seemed to adjust unnaturally well to the reduced light of the partial moon, so that he felt he could see where they were going and the ground ahead of them as well as if it were daylight. But the small, sane corner of his mind kept insisting this could not be true.
Still, it was in this condition that, somewhere after midnight, the sane part of him noticed a glow on the horizon. It had to be after midnight because the moon was already starting its descent, which would leave him feeling his way in a nearly complete dark, with nothing but stars to light him along.
The glow came from directly ahead of him. It waxed and waned in curious fashion. He rode directly toward it, fascinated, for some distance, before realizing he was seeing the light of a large fire up ahead of him somewhere.
The hallucination of daylight vision in his present state did not completely shut out a sense of caution. As soon as it sank in on him that the light ahead was that of an unlikely large fire—the kind of fire that a ranch house and buildings might make—he began immediately to circle away from the direct line he had been taking toward it. It was a move as instinctive as that which had pulled him toward it.
He circled to his left, going wide but not so wide that he would not be able to get a view of whatever it was that was burning, when he got closer to it.
With the Dilaudid inside him, his mind was still clear as the minds of those surgeons in Vietnam must have been. A burning ranch house might well have attracted help from neighbors, which meant that there could be a number of people around the blaze.
On the other hand, if a lot of people were there, they still were most likely to be occupied with trying to put the fire out. Moreover, he knew how deceptive light like this could be. After staring into such flames for a little while, even a short distance away from it, everything would seem lost in utter blackness.
He should be able to pass fairly close with some safety from being observed.
Perhaps.
CHAPTER 23
Jeebee had moved out to his left in his circling movement to the point where he estimated he would pass the fire at better than a hundred yards to its left.
Accordingly, he now altered his course back toward the foothills, heading toward the high blackness ahead where the stars speckling the night sky ceased at an undulating horizon of blackness. The moon was already down.
There was only the slightest of night winds cooling Jeebee’s right cheek, but the flames ahead burned brightly. As he got closer he could see that outbuildings, including the tall barn, were being fiercely consumed by flame. The ranch house at first had looked almost untouched. But now he began to see a little tongue of flame that appeared and disappeared, running flickeringly along the eaves on the closer edge of the roof, on the side of it he would be passing.
Also, as he got closer, he began to hear the sounds of voices—voices raised in yips and yells, like the voices of those at some wild revel. He also began to make out the black silhouettes of figures dancing and running about. Occasionally he saw a figure of a riderless horse among them.
The first thought of his weary brain was that he must be looking at the home of some unfortunate rancher who had incurred the enmity of his neighbors. The way Jeebee himself had is unconsciously done back in Stoketon, Michigan.
Then he rejected this idea, along with another, that perhaps the figures he saw were neighbors who had come to try and help. He could hear shots now, though whether they were being fired into the air, from the ranch house, or at the house, was impossible to tell.
He realized at last, with a cold clutching at his guts, that what was happening to the ranch house was most likely to be an attack and destruction by one of the large, semimilitarily organized bunches of nomadic raiders. If so, these were the kind of people Nick Gage had spoken of as the only real danger to Paul’s wagon.
Such gangs lived from moment to moment and had no interests in leaving even a peddler alive because they might want to trade with him again next year. By next year these later-day Comancheros might well be dead, or hundreds of miles away.
They literally lived off the land, and off what still remained on it. They survived by staying away from cities and moving continually, fast enough so that no local group could be mustered in time to oppose them successfully.
When he was level with the burning buildings—all burning now, because the roof of the ranch house was also on fire—he stopped. Awkwardly, he turned in the saddle enough to reach behind him with his good hand and fumble out the binoculars that had been Merry’s special gift to him.
He put the heavy pair of glasses to his eyes, then had to take them down again to readjust their focusing knob. After several adjustments and subsequent trying of the binoculars, he got the scene around the burning ranch in sharp focus.
There was a strange ludicrous effect to what he watched. The silhouettes of figures running or riding back and forth between him and the flames had an unnatural appearance, like black marionettes of heavy cardboard dancing to invisible strings before the fire. It was as if they held some wild celebration that had now gotten out of hand, so that something frenetic drove them to their antics before the leaping red light.
As he watched, one of the black figures fell, ignored by the rest. Apparently there were those still alive in the ranch house who were firing back at their attackers. But none of the defenders could last long. A good piece of the roof over their heads was now a-flicker in several places. Soon the house itself would become an inferno. He put the glasses away and rode on. The memory of what he had just seen—the lurid red flames, the black figures, and the air of orgy—was painted in his mind even as he himself passed, unseen. His own pains and discomforts took him back into them, and away from what he had just seen. He kept moving.
Almost immediately, he was away from the ranch and into sloped gr
ound. Brute grunted and leaned to the slope, and Jeebee himself leaned forward in the saddle. He was empty with fatigue. After a while he stopped the horses for a moment and turned Brute’s head back so that he could look down at where he had traveled.
There was a ridge now between him and the ranch, so that he could no longer see the fire. But against the starry sky the glow of flames was much less. He knew he had not gone so much farther that with the glasses and on the ridge top behind him, he would not be able to see whether the raiders were still there when the sun rose. But he wanted only to go forward to personal safety. He started the horses moving again. Shortly, he was into trees, pine country.
The trees closed around him after a while. He told himself that if he could only find a stream to water the horses, he would stop at last. Luck was with him. He crossed a wide-open slope, slippery with shale rock, where the horses went gingerly, and came out through a fold to a little open spot among trees where he could hear water running. A few yards further brought him to a small flow of water that headed generally in the direction of the ranch buildings below.
With great and painful effort he dismounted, tied the horses to trees, and left them with some grass around them at the edge of the small stream.
He did not even have strength to unpack or unsaddle. It was hard on the horses but he had reached his limits. He slid down from the saddle, took the water bag from his saddle, and the crutch. He then worried a blanket out of Sally’s packload. Rolling himself in this, at the foot of one of the pines, he curled up in the blanket and took the Dilaudid he had held off from taking—for so many hours that his exhaustion-dulled mind could not remember their number.
He was instantly asleep.
When he woke, it was dawn of the next day. The sun slanted through the green branches over him.
For a moment he felt perfectly ordinary. Then with a rush, pain and exhaustion closed in on him once more. He was still weak and hungry for rest. For a moment he thought he could not even get to his feet.
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