‘Kind of hot again. Looks like that fever of yourn hasn’t burned itself out yet. Mr. Okie!’
‘Yeah? What is it, Crow? You seen more of those damned heathens?’
‘No. That’s what worries me. If I could see them I’d be happier. Know where they are, then. Nope, it’s not that. Your boy’s coming on real sick again.’
Amy heeled her own animal forward, tugging on the reins that led the pack mule. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m poorly, Mama,’ said the boy.
‘We can’t stop, can we?’ asked Okie, eagerly. Too eagerly, Crow thought.
But this time they didn’t have a lot of choice in what they did. With God knows how many Apaches trying to hunt them down, they had to keep moving on.
The ambush came part of the way through the next morning.
It had snowed during the night. A light covering that had settled everywhere, then frozen around dawn, making the footing dangerous. The burros were skittish and awkward, pulling back as they were forced along a narrow ledge, with the rock wall on their right and a sheer plunge down loose scree to a foaming river, a thousand feet below.
Edgar had become delirious during the hours of darkness and had twice thrown off the blankets, pushing his mother aside, trying to walk off into the snow. Crow had woken and Richard Okie had come scampering back, nearly falling on the slippery stones, holding the boy and leading him back to the shelter of the overhanging cliffs.
As they’d set out that morning, Crow had suddenly thought of Amaryllis Okie and her white powder. A half dozen times every day she’d taken some, but each time it seemed to Crow that the heroin took a little longer to work its easy magic.
‘That stuff might do the boy good,’ he suggested to her.
‘What?’
‘The heroin.’
‘No!’
It was if he’d suggested something so dreadful it has no name. Her jaw dropped under the hood of her cloak and he saw her fingers tighten on the handle of the small purse containing her medicine.
‘It’s for him.’
‘I don’t have too much.’ Her fingers were so tight that Crow expected to see bones break through the frail flesh.
‘He’s your son, Ma’am. And he’s ill. Now I don’t have a lot of skill but it seems that your heroin just might help.’
Despite all of his efforts he couldn’t persuade her to part with any of her precious powder. Crow was disgusted both at her blindly stubborn resistance and at her husband’s refusal to throw his weight against her.
So the boy became more ill, babbling to himself in a continuous mumbling whine as they rode on.
‘Don’t want to see no angels coming after me with great fiery wings and chariots that have sky up by them with faces the color of the sun at day, with the man standing in the corner by the bed where he sits and waits and waits and waits.’
Gradually he relapsed into silence, but he was still carrying a dreadful fever that was burning him up. He seemed to find it hard to swallow even a mouthful of water. His lips were peeling and cracked and his skin was becoming grayish and seamed like old leather. He kept swaying in the saddle and around ten in the morning Crow was forced, against his judgment, to swing Edgar up on the back of the stallion, holding him in front of himself.
The Indians hit them a half hour later.
The snow had started yet again, this time with a kind of emotionless determination. The wind had fallen away, leaving an eerie silence, with just the soundless curtain of white wrapping them coldly in. They were big flakes this time, settling immediately, not being swirled into drifts. Within ten minutes the trail was buried in three inches of snow, more falling every moment.
‘Don’t like this, Crow. Upon my soul, but I don’t care for this at all.’
‘Can’t say I like it much, Okie. Thing worries me is that this seems like it’s going for a spell. Not just a flurry like before. This has the feel of being the real thing.’
Visibility was reduced to around twenty feet. And with the lack of seeing came the uncanny loss of hearing. After so many days of hearing the high metallic clatter of the black’s hooves and the slightly softer note of the burros clicking along in its tracks, there was now just a faint muffled beat of the animals.
Crow suddenly reined in, seeing that the trail ahead dove between high walls of rock on either side. His sixth sense told him that this might just be the place and he paused, waving both the Okies forwards to warn them of his suspicions.
The bullets made that unnecessary.
They spattered around them, plowing up furrows in the whiteness, howling off the bare rock beneath. Kicking up sparks and making the mules shy and whiney.
‘Holy Jesus!’ cursed Okie as his animal pitched him clean off, landing with a thump on his side.
‘Hang on the reins,’ yelled Crow. ‘Don’t let him go! Hang on.’
‘Where are they?’ cried Amaryllis, desperately holding on the back of her bucking burro.
‘Up yonder. They don’t see us well. Come on.’
‘Where?’ shouted Richard Okie, struggling back on his mule, trying to kick it forwards.
‘There!’ said Crow, pointing ahead. Drawing the Colt from its holster and firing off three snapped shots at where he guessed the Apaches must be.
The firing slackened a moment then redoubled, but the bullets were aimed blind and none of them came close enough to do any harm to anyone. Crow was trying to work out from the angle of the shooting whether all of the Indians were perched high on the cliffs, or whether any of them might be lower down, settled behind rocks, commanding the whole trail.
It was hard to tell, blinded by the circling whiteness of the blizzard, but his guess was that most, if not all, of them were up above, firing down.
‘We’ll run through. Follow on,’ he called. ‘Don’t stop, whatever happens. Anyone goes down they stay.’ Without waiting for any objections he kicked spurs into the black’s flanks and moved forwards, ducking in the saddle, firing twice more as he entered the narrow defile, hanging on to Edgar.
It took less than three minutes to get through. Crow used the last round from the pistol, holstering it and drawing the Purdey, cocking it as he galloped, peering ahead through the snow. He didn’t know whether the Okies were behind him or not, nor did he care. It was life and death situation, and only one person’s life mattered to him at that moment. He might have been hired as bodyguard and scout, but with a couple of dozen Apaches blasting away then priorities changed a little.
In the deepest part of the ravine the snow seemed to have funneled into a solid wall of freezing whiteness, crusting on Crow’s face, filling his mouth and blanking his eyes. Visibility dropped to barely ten feet and the stallion dropped from its gallop to a bare canter, terrified by not being able to see more than a few steps ahead, and not all of Crow’s kicking could make it move faster. He clubbed it with the stock of the scatter-gun and yanked so hard on its ear that he drew blood, but it still refused to raise its pace again.
He could hear an animal scream behind him and knew a mule had been hit, but he didn’t look round. Spurring on and keeping …
The Apache came out of nowhere, appearing directly in front of the horse, slightly to the left, holding a smoking Springfield, wrapped in a thick jacket, fur-trimmed, long black hair frosted with snow, held back with a green band. His eyes opened wide with shock as he saw the big stallion almost on top of him and he raised the gun halfway to his shoulder.
Blocked by his own horse’s head, Crow couldn’t get a shot in with the Purdey. He snatched brutally at the reins with his hand, making the black pull to the left, rearing on its hind legs, slipping in the snow and nearly falling.
The Indian tried to evade the horse’s flailing hooves and dived to the side, bringing himself into range of the scattergun.
The shock from the explosion ran clean up Crow’s arm, jarring his shoulder. He’d only used one barrel, but it was more than enough for the young Apache warrior. The shot hit him in the
chest at such close range that he fell backwards with smoke coming off the front of his jacket from the muzzle flash. Blood sprayed up on the neck of the stallion, splashing in Crow’s face as he pushed the animal on past the writhing body.
Moments later he was out of the ravine, in the open, still hidden from the Indians by the driving blizzard. He reined in and looked back into the wall of white, seeing Amy Okie appear, slumped forwards, no sign of the pack mule.
Through the attack and charge, Crow had almost forgotten the boy, Edgar, hanging limply in front of him. The tall shootist was such an efficient fighting machine that he was capable of switching off every other emotion that didn’t directly affect him. Edgar had been no handicap to Crow, who had managed to support him in the wild, blind charge, using his- left arm, keeping the right free for the guns. It may be better not to consider just what Crow might have done if Edgar had been a burden to him!
Amy Okie tried to explain how the pack mule had been hit and had fallen, nearly dragging her off her own animal as it went down.
‘I didn’t have …’
‘Don’t signify much.’
‘But I tried to save …’
Crow interrupted her. ‘I said it didn’t matter, Ma’am. We all got through. Those supplies wouldn’t have fed many corpses. Best we move on.’
She was in tears, clenching her fists across her bosom. ‘You don’t understand!’
Okie was also out of breath, snow across his eyebrows and in his stubbly beard, making him look like a jolly Christmas figure. He tried to shut up his wife.
‘Now, Amy. It couldn’t be helped. I saw it. We’re through and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?’
‘But … No! No!’
She was almost screaming and Crow wondered if she was going to throw a fit of the vapors, If she was he was ready to bend a pistol across her head, The Indians had, for the moment, lost them.
‘Can we get out? Towards the Black Bird?’
Neither of them had paused to ask how the boy was, Crow noted.
‘Yeah. There’s a forked trail here on the map that seems to go around left, down some, then back up. Might give the Apaches the slip.’
Amy was crying. Great juddering sobbing, her shoulders shaking, face buried in her hands. Snow clogged her hair, where her hood had been blown back by the mad rush for safety.
For a moment the snow eased and the surrounding rocks appeared like magic, looming several hundred feet above them. Straight ahead of them Crow saw the main trail, and, just where the map had showed it, the fainter signs of the side track. With the pause in the snowfall he could hear the Indians, not far behind them, calling to each other in questioning tones.
‘Are we at the Black Bird Mine, Mr. Crow?’ whispered Edgar softly.
‘Not yet, boy. But we’re on the way. Come on, folks. Let’s move out of here. Snow’s only passing for a moment. When it comes on back it’ll cover the tracks in minutes and there’s a good chance they’ll lose us. Come on, Ma’am. We got through.’
‘Oh, my God,’ cried Amy. ‘You don’t realize. My bag. I lost it when the mule got shot. I’ve lost all my heroin.’
Around them the snow grew deeper.
Chapter Nine
For the remainder of the morning and on through the long afternoon Crow kept them on narrow side trails. Calling on every vestige of his immense tracking skills to get them along in poor visibility, with their hoof-marks vanishing behind them almost before they’d made them.
The pack mule had been shot and the other burro, Edgars, had cut and run for it at the height of the shooting. Which meant that the sickly boy had to continue riding in front of Crow. Despite the occasional return from the grip of the fever, the lad was clearly sinking. Falling into a kind of coma that lasted until Crow finally allowed a halt for the night.
‘Looks like we might have shaken them off,’ said Richard Okie, stretching as he clambered off the back of his mule.
‘What’s that, yonder?’ asked Amy, finger pointing through the snow flurries to the east of them.
Crow looked, biting his lip as he saw what the Easterner had seen. Smoke, curling up from one of the peaks, around two miles off. Then the snow closed in again, and they were locked together in the soft stillness.
‘Signals?’
The shootist nodded. ‘Must be. Didn’t get time enough to see whether they were saying they’d lost us. Or found us.’
During the early part of the evening, the boy rallied again. Fighting back against the fever, managing to drink some show, melted in Crow’s hands. And even succeeding in chewing a little of the jerky. But he was still painfully weak, shivering under all the blankets that they could spare him. With the pack animal gone, and with the spare mule also lost, there was no chance of further provisions.
‘What can we eat?’ asked the Bostonian, leaving his wife huddled over, knees drawn to her chin, locked in her own misery.
‘There’s enough to keep us going around six days. Water’s no problem.’
‘What happens after six days? Even if we started back now we’d never reach a settlement within that time, would we?’
‘No.’
‘So does that, does it mean …’
‘Means we get hungry, Mr. Okie. There’s facts about surviving you ought to know.’
‘Then tell me. I am always willing to learn from a man who knows, Crow, and I vow that you certainly seem a man who knows a lot.’
‘It’s not hunger that kills. It’s cold and it’s thirst. You can go without eating for … maybe even for a week without dying. Course you get weaker, but you don’t likely die.’
‘So we can make it?’
‘To the mine and back to a place where we can hunt food? Sure. Less’n the snows come in on us.’
‘It seems to be easing somewhat.’
‘Yeah. Some. Taste more on the way. Feel it like iron on my tongue. Too much and we never get out.’
Amy Okie had struggled over to join them. Despite the bitter chill she was sweating. Fingers shaking. Her breathing harsh and shallow. Crow had seen people coming down off morphine addiction and knew the suffering that the woman was due for. Despite the tautness of the skin on her face, Amaryllis was still an attractive woman and Crow felt a prickling in his loins. It had been a long time since he’d laid with a woman.
A long time.
It was odd the way the need came to a man. Might be that you’d be in a warm bed, secure and snug, with a pretty little Mex whore, eager to please. And it might not be right for it. Yet Crow could recall years back, in his early days with the Cavalry, being with a patrol that had gotten itself trapped by some Oglala Sioux. There’d been only one woman with the whites. In her late fifties, fat and ugly, with pockmarked cheeks, constantly chewing tobacco.
They’d looked to be massacred at dawn and an hour before she’d come crawling out to where Crow had been lying, cradling his carbine, and wondering what the sun would bring. She’d touched him, and he’d responded. There’d been no way of doing more than unbuttoning his breeches and she’d upped her filthy skirts. They’d coupled like animals, in the dirt, and it had been just about one of the best damned times he’d ever had.
The Indians had withdrawn and a large patrol had rescued them not long after sun-up. Crow had never seen the woman again. Could scarcely recall her name. Widow …? Hall, was it?
And now he wanted, needed, Amy Okie.
She seemed conscious of his feelings and squatted opposite him, boots heel-deep in snow, her son’s breeches tight across her thighs, rubbed so thin from the mule ride that he could see that she wore no drawers beneath, the light vee of her pubic hair clearly visible through the worn material.
‘Then we may starve? Like the Donner Party?’
‘Could be. They ate each other to keep alive. Ate the corpses. We don’t have any corpses, Mrs. Okie. Not yet.’
Richard glanced across at his son, and his thoughts could be read as clearly as if they were burned on his brow with letters of
fire.
‘The stuff dreams are made of,’ said Crow.
Both of the Okies looked at him, faces puzzled, but he didn’t explain, and they didn’t ask him what he’d meant.
Around nine o’clock that night the snow edged further off, finally stopping altogether around ten. The sky cleared and the temperature of the air dropped dramatically. The snow froze and the stars above them glittered with unfeeling beauty.
Crow sat still, drawing up his knees, keeping his body huddled as small as he could under his blanket, trying to conserve his body’s heat. But it was damnably cold. He’d been up in Oregon in winter, and around Montreal in January, when your spit freezes in the air. But this was an unseasonable chill, and his only hope was that it might pass. Too long of such a frost and they’d all die. First the boy, then probably the woman. Richard Okie and finally Crow, succumbing to the irresistible urge to lie down and sleep.
And never wake.
The woman had insisted that she should take a spell on watch, taking one of her husband’s fancy guns, and Crow had allowed her. Knowing that it would be something to take her mind off the shaking from the heroin withdrawal. She was due back shortly from the small pinnacle of rock a hundred paces north of where they rested. It commanded a view of the trail ahead and behind. With the icy clarity of the bright moon, reflecting off the snow, it would be impossible for any of the Apaches to creep up on them unseen. But with the change in the weather, Crow figured that the Indians would all be huddled up under furs by fires, with their squaws to keep them warmer. The thought made him aware again that he lusted after the pallid, blonde Amy and he stared out across the snow to see if she was returning.
‘Your guard next, Okie,’ he said.
There was no reply, and he realized that the man had fallen asleep.
‘Okie! You’re on guard in a minute.’
‘What? Bless my soul, Crow, but I dreamed that I was out with my sister, near Cape Cod, summers ago, with the smell and sound of the sea and the sun warm on my back. I would have slept on …’
‘Yeah,’ said Crow, disinterestedly. ‘Get ready. Check your guns. And see to the boy.’
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