In answer, the canyon walls reverberated with Skoll’s laughter.
“You are less than fools! You have been granted a boon this day! Don’t waste it!”
“You son of a bitch!” Cole hollered back. “I’ll see you and your bunch buried or burned!”
“You should have accepted my proposition, Mr. Morris! Now...I am not responsible for what happens!”
Alkali had my head in his hands and was jostling me. I was tired.
“Stay awake,” he said. “Keep up.”
I looked over at Plenty Skins’ spot at the back of the cave to see if the red-skinned coward had slipped out during the fight. He was still there with his eyes closed, but dripping blood. It streamed down his face, over his wolf-hide cape, and was running over his bare ankles, pooling in his hands, which were one in the other, palm up in his lap.
Alkali must have seen my look.
“What in hell happened to him?”
Van Helsing was the first at the Injun’s side. He crept up to him carefully, like he was a pile of rattlers.
Plenty Skins’ eyes snapped open, wide and black and crazed.
I don’t think a man among us didn’t jump, and for me, that meant a lot of pain. A lot of pain meant I blacked out once more.
When I woke up, I was in the back of a funeral wagon with only a dead body for company. Cashman was driving, and when he saw I was awake, he told me the corpse was what was left of Ranny Brogan. The kid had made the big trip, but he had sent that big son of a bitch Walker on ahead of him.
Later on Doc Ravell told me after what’d happened at the jail, he’d gone straight to the telegraph office and wired Marshal Ruddles in Bastrop and told him in no uncertain terms that he had to be in Sorefoot with as big a posse as he could muster by sunrise. Then he’d gotten his old pony and ridden out to meet them in the dark, sleeping in the middle of the road till they showed.
Whether it was my line or his that brought help doesn’t matter, I guess. Ruddles and twenty men rode all night and found Riley. They’d all gone straight into Sorefoot and arrested the Judge. Rufus had made a run for it south. Ruddles cut four marshals from his posse and set them on his trail. He didn’t want to besiege the Skoll house until he was sure we were alright, so after commandeering Cashman and his funeral wagon and John Gridley and a few other men from town, he divided his men, leaving half to guard the town and taking out the other half hunting for us. Ravell said they found us hoofing it along the North Road. I don’t know how Cole and the others got me up the rim of that canyon.
I don’t know a helluva lot. By the clock here in the Picayune it is half past twelve. I’m told they deposited me in Cashman’s wagon (I don’t know if it was the only wagon available, or if they thought poor Ranny and I were two of a kind) at eleven thirty and then made straight for the Skoll spread on fresh horses, intending to rescue Mrs. Skoll from her husband if they could. Even Alkali went with, I suppose still hopping on his sapling crutch.
I’m in a good lot of pain, but I have too much typesetting to do to give in yet. I’m leaving a few columns blank on this edition till I hear word. One of them is for the story about Quincey, which that goddamned Dutchman owes me. The other is the obituaries.
My only company is Useless. I don’t know where the damn dog has been to, but he’s curled up beneath my desk now, crushing a knob of bone, waiting for his master to return, I guess.
Just like the rest of us.
CHAPTER 18
From the Journal of Professor Van Helsing
30th Aug
May God help me. I fear I have doomed a poor girl and her unborn babe to death.
I will here record the events which took us from the bottom of Misstep Canyon to our present location.
As morning came full upon us and the light fell across Plenty Skins, who had to our collective displeasure spent the entirety of the skirmish seated at the back of our shelter, I saw that he was coated in blood. I went closer to him with trepidation, as I had not seen him stir during the conflict. He had only closed his eyes in solemn acceptance of death as it began. There was no question there was blood entirely coating him. It was no trick of the early morning light. It was his, judging by the open wounds I observed about his face and neck. There was a goodly gash in his right cheek and a scrape at his hairline, but there was no explanation as to how he had acquired his wounds. The berserks had not come near to touching him, as far as I knew.
Then, as I leaned in close, his eyes suddenly opened. I was close enough to see his pupils fluctuate, shrinking and growing again as though he had been pulled from a dark hole into daylight. He blinked, and held one palm up to block the early light across his face. He mopped the blood away there. He stared at his hands then, and looked up at me.
“They’re gone,” he said, rather than asked.
Before I could ask him what had happened, Mr. Firebaugh called me to Alvin’s side. Our newspaperman had been grievously injured, and had lost consciousness. The berserk he had engaged had done its best to tear him open, and his cuts were very deep. I bound his rent flesh tightly with his own ruined shirt after cleaning the wound as best I could with the bottle he had been drinking from. He was delirious, and it was not certain he would survive.
I made it clear to Coleman and Firebaugh both the imperativeness that we deliver our friend to Dr. Ravell’s care in Sorefoot with all expedience (where I could at least avail myself of his instruments, having lost my own in the fire at Coleman’s). They both set out foraging for material to construct a litter to bear Alvin along. This gave me an opportunity to return my attention to Plenty Skins.
I found him stooped over one of the corpses, that of Vulmere. He straightened and lifted a grisly remembrance to the sky. Vulmere’s red haired scalp, freshly lifted with his gory knife. Plenty Skins gave out a high, keening yip, like that of an excited dog. He turned in place, raising the scalp four times before turning to me, his own blood drying like chains of dark red lightning on his skin.
Though I found his barbaric display repellant, I understood that this was his sworn enemy and so did not dissuade him. When he was finished, I asked him pointedly what had happened during the fight.
“What I told you would happen, Professor. What the dream told me,” he brandished the scalp at me. “I killed Red Hair.”
“Do you mean to say, that monstrous wolf…was you?”
He hunkered down beside me, the very picture of a savage in his bloody wolf skins and bearing his trophy. I had seen that huge wolf, which existed in no field catalog of which I was aware, suffer several wounds at the hands of the berserks. One of them, a great slash opened on its muzzle, corresponded to a cut on Plenty Skins’ face.
“I can’t say what you saw,” Plenty Skins said. “But I told you my dream.” He nodded at Alvin. “Will he live?”
“His cuts are very deep,” I admitted. “I cannot say if his internal organs have been damaged. Let me see your wounds.”
He sat quietly as I wiped the blood from him and inspected his cuts. I could not say if they were self-inflicted. There was no flesh or blood under his nails. Nor could I explain the appearance of the great gray wolf, or how it had been the same shade as Plenty Skins’ long hair and hide cape. I know he did not move from his space in the cave. There was nothing in the loose earth where he sat to indicate as much. But about six feet straight out from the spot, there were huge canine paw prints that began from nowhere.
Had the wolf then been some sort of psychic manifestation? But how could it take a physical form? I was swelling with questions, but there was much to be done and short time to do it in, if we were to save Alvin’s life.
When Coleman and Firebaugh returned, Plenty Skins helped them weave together the dry branches they had found with strips of buckskin from his own clothes and fringe from his bundle. When we had secured Alvin into the makeshift litter, he stowed his wolf skins and shouldered the bundle.
Coleman and Mr. Firebaugh said nothing about the wolf, and nothing to Plenty Skin
s. But I saw their eyes flit across his wounds. Then Coleman and Plenty Skins and I bore up Alvin between us and hiked down the canyon, with Mr. Firebaugh limping behind.
The sun rose higher, but we were cool in the shade of the crevice. We did not make for the treacherous path we had come down in the night. With the litter it would be impossible. Instead we went toward the path we had brought our horses down days ago when we had first encountered Plenty Skins, dancing before his fire.
As we walked, I thought about the dizzying night, and remembered Skoll’s words that morning. I asked Coleman of what proposition he had spoken.
“The day of the party,” Coleman said, “right before the fight, Skoll took me out on the back porch and made me an offer for my land.”
“Fair?” Firebaugh asked.
“It was fair, but I said no.”
I glanced back at Plenty Skins. He had been right.
“I guess he aims to get it one way or the other,” Coleman said.
We labored on through the morning. We passed the burned rock where the berserks had held their ceremony, and there stopped to rest. None of us had eaten or drank since yesterday, and Firebaugh said the water that had long ago carved out the Misstep had gone dry. We did not know to what end we struggled. It was sure that our horses were long gone, either wandered off or claimed by Skoll. Our canteens, still hanging from our saddles, were sorely missed.
We finally reached an ascending trail, and its easy slope was rendered tortuous by our shared burden. With no water, Alvin’s condition became grave. His lips were split and cracked, and his fever high. He mumbled incessantly, words we could not discern. We endeavored not to jostle him, for fear of aggravating his wounds, and the walk up the trail was slow indeed.
We had no means to defend ourselves as we had spent all our ammunition. The nearer we came to the rim, the more assured we became that Skoll’s men would be waiting for us.
Midway up the stony trail our fears reached a crescendo. We heard horses above, and the creak of occupied saddles, and men talking.
We lay low, trying to decide what to do. We could not descend again quickly and quietly enough to avoid alerting them, and we could not continue.
Then Firebaugh volunteered to continue on alone and try and bluff whoever awaited us with his empty pistols.
“You’d never make it, Alkali. They’d hear you comin’ up and burn you down before you made it,” said Coleman.
“They did not fear the guns when they were loaded, Mr. Firebaugh,” I pointed out.
“Might give you the chance to get some cover,” Mr. Firebaugh answered.
“Hell with that,” Coleman said. “I’ll go.”
“I don’t think it’s them,” Plenty Skins said. But no one paid him any mind. I sensed that Coleman and Firebaugh were nervous of him now.
“Well, I’ll let you know. Get on behind them rocks over there,” Coleman said, and before any of us could raise our voices in protest, he was going up the trail.
We struggled to move Alvin’s litter out of sight, and lay around him behind a huge rock.
Mr. Firebaugh kept an eye on Coleman as he reached the top, slinking just under the rim with his gun out.
“What the hell’s he doin?” Firebaugh muttered after a moment.
Peering around the stone, I saw Coleman stand up in full view and lift his hat.
Jubilant voices met him rather than bullets.
It was Ray Bixby, Tom Koots, and Paul Murtaugh, along with a few other young men from the Q&M I did not know by name. They had evaded Skoll’s hunters in the night and hid out in the countryside. They reported that they were the last of the cowboys to have nourished hope that their employer was still alive. What members of their group had not been killed by the berserks had left the county and headed for their homes. All in all there were seven men, and their bedraggled clothes and dirty, unshaven faces were as pleasing a sight as a chorus of flushed faced children singing yuletide carols.
They had heard the gun battle of the previous night and found Ranny Brogan’s body this morning, with the corpse of the towering Hrolf, who had born my invitation from Callisto to the Morris ranch. They had been deliberating as to their next course of action when Coleman had hailed them.
To a man they were ready for warfare, and reunited with their master they were like a pack of loyal hounds straining at the leash. They were happy to see Mr. Firebaugh too, and myself, though a few expressed unease at the presence of Plenty Skins, who remained aloof during the joyous reunion. We watered and ate in good company.
To compound our celebration, a body of horsemen we recognized from afar as not being of the Skoll faction turned off the North Road and came into our camp. Coleman’s plan to have Alvin wire the United States Marshal of the nearby town of Bastrop had proven true. He arrived with four deputies and several men from town.
Marshal Stanley Ruddles was a weather-beaten lawman of angular proportion with eyes like an Irish hillside. He had ridden out after midnight last when the telegraph operator had roused him from his sleep, complaining about an unusual pair of messages coming in for him at an odd hour. Apparently Alvin’s initial message had been unclear and Dr. Ravell, who had witnessed the rescue of Coleman and Ranny from the jail had sent a second message personally. After learning of what had transpired from Dr. Ravell, Marshal Ruddles rescinded Sheriff Shetland’s deputization of the Skolls. Shetland had eluded capture so far and was presumed Mexico bound, but Judge Krumholtz was imprisoned under guard pending an inquiry.
We were not of a mind to scold poor Alvin for his unsteady operation of the telegraph. I explained to Ravell the gravity of his wounds, and my own doubts that he would survive. His loss is yet another outrage which we must attribute to Sigmund Skoll, and I shared the group’s intent to enact retribution upon him. The rage of the wronged had surpassed my own clinical curiosity and Hippocratic empathy for these Scandinavians and their psychological derangements. My only humanitarian thoughts were of Callisto.
Young Ranny’s body was lifted ceremoniously into Undertaker Cashman’s wagon, and Alvin was laid beside him. Mr. Firebaugh was urged to accompany Cashman and Ravell and their guard back to Sorefoot, but as usual he would hear nothing of it. He only demanded fresh loads for his weapons and a horse to carry him.
He was given both.
I warned the marshals what it was we all faced, and outlined the particulars of what they all could expect. They expressed disbelief, but Coleman and Firebaugh and some of the cowboys who had seen the berserks’ powers to ignore pain corroborated my admonitions.
“I know it sounds crazy,” Coleman said. “I know it. But the Dutchman speaks true. These Norgies are like wild animals. You can call it what you will, but they ran the lot of us down into Misstep Canyon and damn near wiped us out, and all without a gun between ‘em.”
“Awright, Cole,” said Ruddles. “I ain’t never known you to go tellin’ windies, but it all sounds pretty peculiar...”
“They’re a peculiar bunch alright,” Firebaugh agreed. “I seen one keep fightin’ with a hole in his neck and a bullet in his bread wallet. Damn near took me with him when he finally went. And if you don’t believe us, Ruddles, you soon will, and you’ll wish you had.”
We were making ready to leave when Plenty Skins took me aside.
“I’m not going with you,” he said.
This shocked me.
“You’ll be safe with me,” I told him. “I won’t let them...”
“It’s not that, Professor,” the old Tonkawa said, shaking his head. “I’m all through here. Red Hair is dead, and the blonde wolves will follow. When too many white men are angry, too many things pass from the world that ought not to. It’s up to the Great Hunter now, to keep his hounds in check. Remember the favor I asked of you, and when you go across the Waters back to the East, maybe you’ll have learned something none of your books can teach.”
He held my eyes for a moment longer, and there was something in his murky amber stare like the passing
of the tide from a lonely shore. He gripped my shoulder in his bony hand, and smiled in satisfaction when I did not flinch away. He released me and went walking down the North Road with his bundle over his shoulder, in the opposite direction from where we were headed.
“Where’s he going?” Coleman asked.
I didn’t know.
I never saw Bill Plenty Skins, or any of his kind, ever again.
It was a long ride to the Skoll ranch, but we were confident that our sudden arrival would catch the enemy unawares. After their long night of mad fury they would be exhausted and spent in the light of day, and it was very possible we might even be able to capture them all without bloodshed.
Marshal Ruddles doubted they would be in the house at all.
“If these Norgies have any sense, they’ll be headed to Mexico.”
“They got a sense,” Firebaugh said. “But they won’t run.”
He had gained a fighter’s respect for their abilities.
With the marshals and the cowboys we had a sizable army to pit against Skoll, nearly twenty-five armed men to his half dozen.
“What worries me is the old Judson house,” Coleman said.
“I know it,” Ruddles agreed. “It is a damned fortress. If they do decide to make a fight of it, we could be in for a good long siege.”
The house loomed as before on the flat plain. I had not realized before how very bare of cover the approach was. There were no trees, and as we rode into the immediate vicinity, a murder of crows took to flight from the tall grass, scattering across the sky like burnt leaves riding a sudden eddy and making for their home in the eaves of the big stone house.
“If they didn’t know we were comin,’ they know it now,” Firebaugh complained. “Damn crows.”
I was reminded of Huginn and Muninn—Thought and Memory, the two ravens who were the spies of Odin. The birds would return to their master’s shoulders each night to whisper in his ears all the news of the Nine Worlds.
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