Hunter looked down at his feet and chuckled. “I reckon I forgot to put my boots back on.”
“You’re as wild as an Indian.”
He grinned as he crouched to pat Bobby Lee. “Wilder.”
“Hunter?” Anna’s voice was suddenly grave. “It’s Angus. Come up and take a look.”
Hunter’s heart thudded. He grabbed his boots and socks out of his saddlebags and followed Anna up the slope past the fire and into the cave. Angus lay at the edge of the firelight, under the skins and blankets. A kettle of water in which a red rag floated lay nearby. Angus lay on his back, another damp rag resting across his forehead.
The blankets quivered as Angus shivered beneath them, his eyes twitching. His forehead glistened with sweat.
“Fever,” Anna said as she and Hunter dropped to a knee beside the old man. “I’ve been trying to get it down all night.”
“Pa . . .” Hunter rested the back of his hand on Angus’s left cheek. He turned to Anna. “He’s burning up.”
“I know. I’m worried.”
“Has he been conscious at all tonight?”
“He’s in and out. When he’s awake, he talks gibberish. A few times he called me Emilia.”
“Ma.”
“He was telling me how sorry he was that he was off in the war when she died. He said he should have been home.” A thin sheen of tears shone in the young woman’s jade eyes.
Hunter rolled onto his butt and began pulling his right sock onto his foot. “I’m gonna fetch Dahl.”
Annabelle placed her hand on his arm. “Hunter, you can’t ride to town!”
“I don’t know what else to do, Anna. I’m not gonna just sit here and watch Pa die. I have to do something.”
“Your riding into Tigerville and getting yourself shot isn’t going to do Angus any good.”
Hunter pulled on his left boot, then his right one. “If I don’t fetch the doc—”
Just then Angus said, “Emilia, honey!”
Hunter whipped his head around, as did Anna. Angus’s eyes were wide open and bright with anxiety. He slid his gaze from Annabelle to Hunter and said, “Oh, Shep, it’s you . . .”
“No, Pa,” Hunter said, scuttling over to his father, placing a reassuring hand on Angus’s spindly shoulder. “It’s Hunter, Pa. Do you know where you are?”
Angus stared up at him, his cheeks flushed with fever. “No . . . no . . .” He frowned, shook his head. “Hunter’s off fightin’ the war.” He gave a crooked, proud grin, slitting his eyes. “A real Rebel devil, I hear too.” He snickered, then quickly sobered. “Shep, fetch your ma for me, boy. Hurry along now. I got somethin’ I have to tell her.”
Hunter glanced at Annabelle kneeling beside him.
“It’s okay, Pa,” Hunter said. “You don’t need to tell her. She knows. She forgives you, Pa.”
“Oh, Emilia!” Angus cried, tears rolling down his craggy cheeks. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for you!”
He squeezed his eyes closed and sobbed for a time, his head jerking. Slowly, he rested his head back against the pillows, sobbing quietly. As Anna removed the cloth from his forehead and soaked it in the pot of cool water, Hunter said, “He’s deep in fever, Anna. If I don’t fetch the doc, he’ll die. He might die anyway, but I have to do something or I’ll never be able to live with myself.”
Anna dabbed at the old man’s forehead and turned her worried eyes to Hunter, nodding. “I know.” More tears glazed her eyes and she choked back a sob of her own. “I know . . .”
“I’ll reach town before light. No one will see me. I’ll have Dahl back here pronto.”
Hunter kissed her cheek and then walked out of the cave. He walked past the fire, stopped, then reached down and plucked a couple of small pine branches off the pile beside the fire ring. He set the branches on the fire, building up the flames a little.
Annabelle strode quickly out of the cave and into his arms. He drew her to him again, hugging her tightly, sensing the fear that gripped her. She had every right to be afraid. They were at war.
She pulled away a little, looked up at Hunter. “Where will this end?”
Hunter grimaced, shook his head. “No tellin’, Anna. But we’re gonna make it, you an’ me.” He glanced into the cave. “You an’ me an’ Pa. We’re gonna make it. We’re gonna make a go of it . . . somewhere.”
Anna stared up at him, smiling and sobbing at the same time.
Hunter kissed her cheek and squeezed her shoulders. “I’ll be back soon.”
She placed a hand over his on her shoulder.
He pulled away, walked back down to where Nasty Pete grazed. Hunter picked up the horse’s dangling reins, stepped into the leather, and rode away.
Annabelle stood by the fire, hugging herself as though deeply chilled, watching the gray-hatted warrior disappear into the shadows of the forest.
* * *
Hunter could have made it to Tigerville from the cave in less than two hours, but while Nasty Pete had deep bottom, he was not bottomless. Hunter had to stop and rest the horse several times, let him graze and drink from creeks.
Still, despite the frustratingly slow travel, Tigerville appeared on the horizon before him around dawn, haphazardly spread across the broad bowl bordered by pine-bearded buttes. The King Solomon Mine was perched on the craggy peak to the east, which was still in deep shadow now before sunrise, though Hunter could hear the ever-present thunder of the stamping mill.
He’d approached the town from the southwest, having avoided main trails and roads. Now he halted Nasty Pete at the base of a low bluff littered with strewn rocks and tufts of sage, ground-reined him, fished his spyglass out of his saddlebags, and climbed the knoll on foot.
Near the top, he dropped to his knees, removed his hat, and crawled to the crest, keeping low. He raised the spyglass, telescoped it, thrust it between a rock and a small cedar shrub, and twisted the cylinder until the town a quarter-mile away swam into magnified vision.
He couldn’t see much except the backs of the buildings on the town’s near side. Even those were obscured by the murky, pale blue light of the early dawn. He couldn’t see much, but, nearly as importantly, he couldn’t hear much, either, especially the commotion he’d half expected to find if the surviving marauders who’d burned his family’s ranch and paid for the transgression with his own hot lead had made it back to Tigerville by now.
Either they were still out in the tall and uncut, making their painful ways back to town, or they’d already made it back and been taken off the street for tending. Hunter hoped they hadn’t made it back. If they had, it was going to be damned hard getting Dahl out of town unseen.
He’d soon find out how hard the job was going to be.
He’d just started to crab back down the bluff when something touched the nape of his neck. He jerked around with an audible start. Bobby Lee pulled his long snout back from Hunter, sat down on his bushy gray tail, and gave a low, whimpering squeal of sneaky delight.
“Bobby Lee, I swear you scared a good seven years off my life!”
The coyote slitted his long yellow eyes and lifted his black lips above his small, sharp white teeth in a delighted grin. No one could tell Hunter coyotes didn’t grin. Bobby Lee grinned.
Hunter blew a deep sigh of relief. He’d expected to see a man aiming a Winchester at his head, though it was damned hard for anyone except his devilish coyote friend to steal up behind him. Hunter chuckled, gave the coyote a brusque, affectionate pat, and crabbed on hands and knees back down the butte.
Rising, he said, “You stay here with Nasty Pete, Bobby Lee.” He dropped the spyglass into a saddlebag pouch and shucked his Henry from its scabbard. “Town ain’t exactly a haven for you an’ me, as I’m sure you profoundly remember from the other day.”
Bobby Lee sat, curled his thick tail around himself, and groaned.
“Stay, Pete,” Hunter ordered, patting the grullo’s long snout.
The grullo gave an anxious whicker and switched its tail.<
br />
Hunter crouched low as he made his way around the base of the bluff and, keeping his eyes skinned for movement ahead of him, began making his way through the tall, dun grass toward the backsides of the main street business buildings. He made his way through the jumble of old, mostly abandoned log cabins, stock pens, trash piles, and leaning privies as well as small garden patches and stacks of split firewood.
Fingers of morning breakfast smoke poked up from a few of the shacks, but he saw no one out and about except a lone man in the far distance chopping wood near the woodpile flanking a tumbledown shanty. There was also a collie dog chasing mice around a pile of lumber behind the mercantile, but the dog was too distracted to pay Hunter any attention.
Hunter made his way through a break between two tall business establishments, careful to avoid kicking discarded airtight tins and bottles, and paused at the mouth of the break, which let out on Tigerville’s main drag. He scanned the street stretching away to either side. A few shopkeepers were either sweeping the boardwalks fronting their shops or hauling out displays, but they were too far away to make him out in the weak dawn light.
It was getting lighter though. He couldn’t dally.
The doctor’s office lay above the law office directly across the street from the break-out where Hunter was making his reconnaissance. Hunter made for the two-story office building, letting the Henry hang low against his right leg, keeping his head down so his hat brim hid his face. He neither walked nor ran but kept his pace somewhere in between, wanting to hurry but not look overly conspicuous should someone be peering out a street-facing window.
As he walked, he saw a saddled horse standing to his right. The horse wasn’t tied. Its reins were hanging in the street as the horse drew water from a stock trough. It hiked a rear leg to scratch its side, and Hunter saw the muddy-silvery lather bathing the mount that had been ridden hard recently.
Keeping his head down, Hunter strode up the stairs that ran along the office building’s right side and knocked lightly on the door at the top. There was no answer, but he could hear voices on the other side of the door. He tried the knob.
It turned.
CHAPTER 30
He swung the door open and poked his head into the doctor’s office outfitted with a desk and several glass cabinets as well as a bookshelf spilling books and papers. There was a heavy medicinal odor. The desk was a mess, littered with papers, thick reference books, and an array of medical utensils and stoppered bottles as well as trays of bloody water.
“Doc Dahl?”
The doctor was speaking to someone behind one of the two closed doors flanking the desk. That someone was cursing and grunting and speaking around what sounded like rocks in his mouth.
Pee-Wee Chaney must have made it to town. The saddled horse outside must have been Chaney’s, though Hunter hadn’t recognized it in the darkness on the trail.
He went in and closed the door behind him. He walked around behind the desk and tapped lightly on the door behind which Dahl was tending Chaney. He leaned the Henry against the wall to his right and unsnapped the keeper thong from over the hammer of his holstered LeMat.
“Doc Dahl?” Hunter called, pinching his nose closed to disguise his voice. At the same time, he slid the LeMat out of the holster.
He had to call two more times before the doctor yelled, “What the hell is it? Can’t you hear me tending another man in here?”
“Big trouble, Doc,” Hunter yelled, keeping his nostrils closed, in case Pee-Wee recognized his voice. “Better come quick!”
Dahl sighed. There was a clink as he tossed an instrument into a metal tray. A footstep, and then the door opened. Dahl stared out through the four-foot gap between the frame and the door. Hunter thrust the barrel of the big LeMat against Dahl’s soft belly and clicked the hammer back. With his left hand, he grabbed a flap of Dahl’s shabby, age-silvered, bloodstained, food-encrusted vest, and drew the man brusquely into the office.
Dahl’s face twisted in anger. “What the hell is—?” He stopped when he saw the cocked LeMat poking his belly.
Hunter pulled the door closed, making the latch click.
Dahl stared up at Hunter, who stood a good head taller, nearly twice as broad. The doctor’s face flushed with anxiety, and his lower jaw loosened.
“Sorry about this, Doc,” Hunter said. “But I myself have more pressing business than that hog-wolloper in yonder.”
“You’re . . . you’re . . .”
“Hunter Buchanon.” Hunter and Dahl had never been formally introduced, but Hunter had seen the sawbones around town, heard him called by name.
“Holy Jesus,” Dahl said, glancing at the closed door and keeping his voice low, “what are you doing in town? That man in there . . .”
“Is likely missing a few teeth, I know.”
“He has a busted jaw and a busted nose to boot. Possibly a fractured skull.”
“There’ll be more where he came from, some in a whole lot worse shape, I’d imagine.” Hunter scowled down at the pill roller glaring up at him. “Chaney burned my ranch. He was there when my brothers were killed from bushwhack. I’m here to take you out to where I got my pa holed up. He’s been shot, and he’s out of his head with fever.”
Dahl pulled his head back in astonishment. “I can’t just leave that man—”
Hunter shoved the LeMat harder against the sawbones’ belly. “Yes, you can. And you will. Or I’ll feed you a pill you can’t digest.” He dipped his chin to send those words home in a neatly wrapped, menacing package. He wasn’t sure he’d really shoot the man just standing innocently before him, but he didn’t want Dahl to doubt it a bit.
The sawbones appeared to buy it. The muscles in his pasty face sagged and a red flush rose in his jowls.
“What . . . what am I supposed to do about him?” Dahl canted his head toward the door behind which Pee-Wee Chaney was moaning and sobbing. He sounded like a deep-throated infant wailing for its mother. “I can’t just leave him. Not like that. I’m sewing . . .”
“You’re gonna leave him just like that, Doc. It’s better than what he deserves.” Hunter pulled the LeMat out of Dahl’s belly and waved it at the room. “Quick, now! Gather up what you need. We gotta split tail outta here fast. My pa is burnin’ up with fever.”
Dahl glanced at the door again. “Christ!”
“Doc!” Pee-Wee Chaney cried, though the garbled plea was nearly indecipherable. “Doc—where’d you go, Doc?”
Dahl stared up at Hunter, deeply conflicted.
“Forget him, Doc. Get your stuff together—now!”
Dahl jerked into action, stumbling around his office and anxiously rubbing his hands on his vest, trying to get his thoughts in order. Finally, he found his medical kit under a coat on his office chair and moved around the office, gathering bottles and tins and instruments he thought he might need.
Finally, he grabbed a sack of cut cloth bandages, closed his medical kit, and grabbed his hat off a peg by the door.
“All right . . . I think that’s everything I’ll need,” he said, breathless, glancing around his cluttered office.
“Let’s go.”
Hunter opened the office door and ushered Dahl through it.
“My buggy’s over at the Federated,” the doctor said as he dropped down the outside stairs.
“No time for a buggy, Doc,” Hunter said. “We’re gonna find you a saddle horse. We’ll be traveling cross-country.”
“Ah, hell,” the doctor complained. “I haven’t ridden a horse in years. The damn beast is liable to snap me like a wishbone!”
“Keep your voice down, Doc,” Hunter said as they gained the bottom of the stairs.
Hunter led the sawbones around to the back of the lawyer’s office and then moved down an alley toward a livery stable at the very south edge of town. Black Hills Livery & Feed was an old place run by Cleve Flowers. It was a tumbledown barn with a couple of split rail fences housing a dozen or so livery cayuses—mostly cavalry culls whose
next stop would be the glue factory.
Cleve Flowers was an old friend of Angus’s and a fellow ex-Confederate hailing from Alabama. He and a friend had come to the Hills illegally before the war to dig for gold but had ended up buying and running a livery and feed barn. Cleve’s partner had died several years ago when shot by a drunk prospector in one of the saloons. Cleve himself was getting too old these days to keep the place up himself but was too tight to hire help.
“Why . . . Hunter Buchanon,” Flowers said when Hunter woke the old man in his side shed sleeping quarters. Cleve gazed up at him, blinking sleep from his watery brown eyes. An empty whiskey bottle lay beside him on his canvas cot. “Good Lord, boy . . .”
Obviously, Cleve had heard about the trouble. He might have even witnessed the shoot-out near the sheriff’s office the other day, seen the death dances of Stillwell’s deputies.
“No time to waste, Cleve,” Hunter said. “I need a horse. And you gotta keep quiet about it. Can you do that?”
Cleve ran a gnarled paw over his nearly bald skull and stared at Hunter as though still half-asleep and dreaming. “Yeah . . . yeah . . .”
“One more thing. I can’t pay for it. I don’t have a dime on me.”
“Don’t worry about it, boy.” Cleve placed his hand against the back of Hunter’s neck and squeezed. “Them goddamn murderin’ Yankee scum! I seen what Stillwell did to you the—make you wipe your feet on the ole Stars an’ Bars.”
He twisted his mouth in a delighted grin, exposing his wreck of tobacco-rimmed teeth. Last night’s supper was crusted in his grizzled gray beard. “I seen what ole one-armed Angus an’ Shep an’ Tye did to his deputies too—and how you made Stillwell howl like a wolf with its leg in a trap!”
The oldster snickered through his teeth. His breath smelled rotten-sour. Hunter’s eyes watered.
“They got us back, Cleve.”
“I know they did.”
Hunter straightened, stepping back away from the cot, as the old liveryman tossed a horse blanket off his spare, bony physique clad in pale longhandles so wash-worn they were nearly see-through, and dropped his bare feet to the floor. “You can have all the hosses you want, an’ I’ll even saddle ’em fer you!”
The Black Hills Page 24