Nora’s sunbonneted head rested against his shoulder as he drove the wagon. This early in the day, and she was already dozing off. But Carl supposed he couldn’t blame her. The baby had been colicky the night before, and she had been up with him most of the time. Life was hard for a woman, especially here. Carl recalled hearing a man say once that Texas was fine for men and dogs but hell on women and horses. Everything he had seen since leaving Arkansas confirmed that.
The wagon bed was heaped high with the household goods they’d been able to bring along. The three bigger kids rode on top of the pile. Carl was yawning as he and Nora swayed on the seat, when one of the young’uns said, “Pa, what’s that?”
“What’s what?” Carl asked.
“Up there ahead of us,” the boy replied. “Looks like somebody a-layin’ on the ground.”
Damned if the sprout wasn’t right. About fifty yards ahead of the wagon, a man was sprawled facedown on the ground, not moving. Carl’s eyes, naturally downcast after the life he’d led, hadn’t even noticed him until now. With a muttered “Hell,” Carl hauled back on the reins. That fella was probably dead, and Carl didn’t want the little ones to see him close up.
Nora roused from her doze as the wagon came to a stop. “What is it?” she asked, anxious but still tired.
“I don’t know yet,” Carl replied. “Looks like somebody may be hurt.” He wrapped the reins around the brake lever and then reached for the rifle on the floorboards at their feet. “I’ll go take a look.”
Nora’s hand closed around his arm for a second. “You be careful.”
“I will be.”
“I mean it, Carl Gafford,” she said. “Anything happens to you so that I’m left alone with these kids, I’ll see to it that you never rest in peace.”
She wasn’t joshing either, he thought wryly as he climbed down from the wagon.
He felt a mite nervous himself as he stalked forward, clutching the rifle tightly. Maybe this was a trick or a trap of some sort. Maybe that fella was a bandit and some of his owlhoot friends were hidden close by. When Carl walked up to him, he might roll over suddenly and point a gun at him and take everything he and his family owned. Lord knows any outlaws who robbed them wouldn’t get much, but it was all they had. A man couldn’t lose much more than that.
He stopped about a dozen feet away, pointed the rifle at the man on the ground, and said, “Hey. Hey, mister! You alive? If you are, you better say somethin’. I ain’t comin’ any closer, and I got a rifle pointed right at you.”
The man didn’t respond. He lay on his belly, with his head turned so that Carl couldn’t see his face. He wore denim trousers like a cowboy, but he was barefooted and didn’t have a shirt on either. If he stayed there like that much longer, the sun would burn his back to a crisp.
“Damn it, I’m talkin’ to you!” Carl squinted at the man, trying to tell whether or not he was breathing. If the man’s back was rising and falling, it was so shallowly that Carl couldn’t make it out at this distance. With every passing second, Carl was more convinced that the hombre was dead.
Instead of going closer, Carl began to circle around the body, keeping the same distance of about a dozen feet and keeping the rifle trained on the man as well. Something began to seem very, very wrong. The man had black hair, and as Carl moved around so that he could see his face, it looked like that black hair had fallen over the man’s features, obscuring them. But the hair was moving....
Carl jumped back and let out a horrified yell as he realized that wasn’t hair covering the man’s face at all. It was a thick layer of flies. His shout startled them enough so that they rose in a buzzing cloud from the man’s head, and what was left behind when they flew into the air was even worse. Carl tore his eyes away from the sight, but not before he saw the red of blood and the white of bone shining through it. The man’s face was gone from about the nose up.
With sickness boiling up inside him, Carl stumbled a couple of steps to the side and then fell to his knees. As he bent forward, he lost the meager breakfast he had eaten that morning before they pulled out for another day on the trail.
“Carl!” Nora called to him. “Carl, what’s wrong?”
He looked up and saw that she had started walking toward him. Resting the rifle butt on the ground so that he could lean against the weapon, he waved her back with his other hand. “Stay there, Nora!” he told her. “Damn it, stay with the wagon, and keep those kids over there! Don’t let ’em get anywhere close to this!”
He pushed himself to his feet, thinking that there was nothing he could do for the man. Digging a grave in this rocky ground would be a back-breaking task and would take all morning at least. It made more sense just to drive on, swinging well around the mutilated corpse, of course, so that the rest of his family couldn’t get a good look at the gruesome remains.
The only problem with that plan was that the gruesome remains suddenly let out a groan.
Carl stared bug-eyed at the man. How could anybody look like that and still be alive? It just didn’t seem possible. Carl backed away. Even though he knew by now this was no trap and that the man was no threat to him, he didn’t want anything to do with this atrocity. He wanted to take his family and leave. Anyway, with such a hideous injury, the man couldn’t hang on for very long. He would be dead soon, and there was nothing Carl could do to help him.
The man groaned again, and the fingers of one hand clawed at the dirt, as if he were trying to drag himself forward.
Carl muttered a heartfelt “Shit!” and advanced slowly. He was just too damned softhearted for his own good, he told himself. But he knew that no matter how badly he wanted to, he couldn’t turn his back and leave this man here.
“Take it easy, mister,” he said as he approached the injured man. When he came closer he saw that the face had been destroyed somehow. He had heard about men who had tangled with grizzly bears and had their faces torn off by a sweep of a giant paw. That didn’t really look like what had happened here. Indians maybe, he thought. Redskins were notorious for torturing folks. Carl glanced around nervously. If savages had done this, they might still be around.
He stepped past the man on the ground and broke into a run toward the wagon. “Carl, what are you doing?” Nora asked him as he came panting up to the vehicle.
“Give me a blanket,” he told her. “And when I give you the signal, drive on over there next to that fella.”
“Is he dead, Pa?” one of the kids asked.
“No, he ain’t, and we’re gonna help him if we can.” Carl looked at his children. “That’s what you do. You help folks if you can. Understand?”
They nodded solemnly.
He took the threadbare blanket that Nora handed him and turned to hurry back to the injured man. As gently as possible, he rolled the man onto the blanket. The man moaned, but didn’t seem to know what was going on. Carl arranged a flap of the blanket so that it covered the ruined face, then stood up and waved for Nora to bring the wagon over.
He motioned for her to pull on past him and then said, “Stop there.” He lowered the tailgate. There wasn’t room for the man inside the wagon bed, so Carl would have to lash him onto the tailgate. As he bent to pick up the shrouded shape, he saw that blood was already soaking through the blanket where it lay over the man’s face. “You kids stay up there in the front of the wagon,” he said, his tone of voice making it clear that he wouldn’t put up with any sass or disobedience.
With a grunt of effort, he lifted the injured man and placed him on the tailgate. He found some rope and tied the man so that he couldn’t roll around or fall off. The man’s chest rose and fell raggedly, and Carl felt a little sick to his stomach again when he heard the breath whistling through the nose holes in the poor bastard’s skull.
The eye sockets were empty, he noticed, nothing left at all.
“Are you sure he’s alive, Carl?” Nora asked.
“I’m sure.”
“What are we going to do with him?”
Carl rubbed at his lean, beard-stubbled jaw. “He needs a sawbones. Nothin’ we can do for him, that’s for sure. So I guess we got to find a town. Back yonder in Fort Stockton, didn’t somebody mention a settlement called Death Head Crossing?”
Nora nodded. “I think so. But I don’t know how far it is. Maybe we should turn around and go back to the fort.”
They had already left Fort Stockton two days behind them, and Carl knew the man wouldn’t last that long. He might not last another hour. He should have been dead already.
“No, we’ll keep goin’,” Carl decided. “That’s the best thing. Maybe we’ll get to that town before it’s too late.”
“What if we don’t?”
“Then we’ll have done our best,” Carl said. “Just like we’ve always done. You handle the mules, and I’ll sit back here with him for now.”
Nora sighed, but she untied the reins, flapped them against the backs of the team, and yelled at the mules until the balky creatures started moving again.
He had said that they would do their best, Carl reflected as the wagon rolled slowly westward, hopefully toward Death Head Crossing.
The only thing wrong with that was a whole life’s worth of evidence that his best was seldom good enough.
Chapter 12
Jackson and Everett were in the Big Bend Saloon around the middle of the day after Luther Berryhill’s funeral. Jasper Whitten, the owner of the place, provided a halfway decent free lunch, and as Jackson put it, “There are things in this world you want to turn down even if they’re free. Lunch isn’t one of them.”
A commotion in the street outside drew their interest. Everett craned his neck to look out over the batwings, but Jackson just glanced in that direction. He seemed half asleep as he lounged back in his chair, but all his senses were alert whether he appeared to be or not. The life he’d led had long since taught him that trick.
“Somebody just drove past in a wagon,” Everett reported. “The way folks were trotting along beside it and yelling questions, there must have been something pretty interesting in it.”
“We should go have a look for ourselves, I reckon,” Jackson said as he uncoiled from his chair and stretched like a big cat. He walked to the batwings and pushed through them with Everett following closely behind him.
They had talked some more about Luther Berryhill’s death and their visit to the Winged T the day before, but neither man had reached any conclusions. Berryhill’s death was just as much a mystery as ever.
But now, as they walked along the street toward the spot where the wagon had halted in front of a building with a doctor’s shingle hung in front of it, Jackson heard Berryhill’s name mentioned by one of the excited townspeople. He strode up to the man, gripped his arm, and said, “What’s that? What about Berryhill?”
The townie glanced over and suddenly looked worried. Just about everybody in Death Head Crossing knew who Jackson was, and while they might enjoy the notoriety that having a famous gunslinger around brought to their town, at the same time they were a little afraid of him. The man swallowed and said, “That fella those pilgrims just brought in, his face looked like poor Lute Berryhill’s.”
Another man said, “I got a good look at him when the blanket he was wrapped up in slipped while they were carryin’ him into Doc Musgrave’s.” A shudder went through him. “I’m liable to have nightmares about that and wake up screamin’ for a week.”
Jackson and Everett exchanged glances. Two men who’d been shot might not have any connection with each other, but a couple of fellas who died in such a mysterious fashion had to be tied in together somehow.
“Did anyone know who he was?” Everett asked.
The citizens around them all shook their heads. “The way that poor bastard looked, there just wasn’t no tellin’,” one of them said.
A new voice rumbled, “Let me through. Step aside, blast it.”
The crowd parted for Sheriff Ward Brennan. The burly, white-haired lawman headed for the door of the doctor’s office. Jackson and Everett were right behind him. No one made a move to stop them until they reached the door, but then Brennan paused and glared over his shoulder at them.
“This is none of your business,” he snapped.
“I’m a member of the press, Sheriff,” Everett said. “The people have a right to know what’s going on.”
“Yeah, well, he ain’t a member of the press,” Brennan said with a nod toward Jackson, “and if you ask me, the people sometimes know too damned much for their own good. But I ain’t got time to argue about it.”
“That man who was brought in can’t be in much of a hurry,” Jackson said. “Not if he’s in the same shape Luther Berryhill was.”
“That’s just it,” Brennan said. “The fella who came runnin’ down to my office to tell me about it said he was still alive.”
Even Jackson’s normally impassive face showed a little surprise at that news.
“Stay out of the way and keep your mouth shut,” Brennan went on, then turned to go into the building. He didn’t try to stop Jackson and Everett from following him.
Dr. William Musgrave practiced medicine in the front rooms and lived in the back. He was a stocky man with a neatly trimmed mustache and a crisp accent that betrayed his Massachusetts origins. He was a lunger and had come west for his own health, in search of a higher and drier climate. West Texas, harsh though it might be in many ways, had been good for him.
Now he was bent over a man who had been stretched out on an examining table. The patient was wearing only a pair of denim trousers, and when Sheriff Brennan got a look at the man’s face, he choked out, “Good Lord,” and turned his head away for a second.
Everett did the same. Jackson thought the young reporter looked a little green around the gills. Like Dr. Musgrave, Jackson studied the injured man stoically, but that didn’t mean he felt nothing. Whatever he felt, though, was his own business.
Another man stood by, looking as queasy as Everett and Brennan. He was tall and gaunt from hardship and hunger. His bib-front overalls and homespun shirt were patched, and the hat that he turned around aimlessly in knobby, work-roughened fingers was stained and shapeless. Even his rundown shoes practically screamed “farmer.”
Jackson recalled the equally drab and worn woman and the passel of kids who had been waiting in the wagon outside, and he remembered how the man he had asked what was going on had said something about pilgrims. The farmer and his family must have found the injured man. The pile of goods in their wagon was evidence that they were moving, and they had come across this grotesquely mutilated hombre in their travels.
But just as Brennan had said, the man was still alive, even though he had no business drawing breath as badly hurt as he was. His chest fluttered rather than rising and falling. He couldn’t have much time left.
Musgrave straightened from his examination and said, “I can’t do anything for him. His injuries are beyond the scope of anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Except for Luther Berryhill,” Sheriff Brennan rumbled.
“Yes, the cases are similar,” Musgrave agreed. “Not precisely the same, but similar. I examined Mr. Berryhill’s body before Cecil Greenwood prepared it for burial, and I was as mystified by its condition as I am by this case.”
Jackson narrowed his eyes and moved a step closer to the man on the table. All of Berryhill’s face had been gone, destroyed by some unknown means. But about a third of this man’s face remained, the lower third.
“He’s still got a mouth,” Jackson said. “Maybe he can talk.”
The other four men in the room stared at him. Finally, Brennan said, “Have you gone loco, Jackson? He ain’t conscious, and never will be again!”
Jackson ignored the sheriff and looked at the medico instead. “What if you gave him a powerful stimulant, Doctor?”
“With the punishment he’s already endured, it would probably kill him immediately,” Musgrave answered.
“But he’s going to die anywa
y, isn’t he?”
“Certainly. With that much trauma and blood loss, no other outcome is possible.”
“Then you wouldn’t be risking anything,” Jackson pointed out, “and he might come around enough to tell us what happened to him.”
Musgrave frowned dubiously, but Brennan said, “What about it, Doc? Is what he’s sayin’ possible?”
“Perhaps,” Musgrave said, obviously reluctant. “But I’d still advise against it.”
“Do it,” Brennan said with a curt nod. “We gotta get to the bottom of this any way we can.”
Still muttering protests, the doctor prepared a hypodermic injection. In a quiet voice, Everett started to explain Musgrave’s actions, but the gunslinger silenced him with a look.
“I know what he’s doing,” Jackson said. “I was the one who suggested it, remember?”
Musgrave lifted the injured man’s arm and injected the stimulant directly into a vein. By the time he lowered the arm to the examining table, the man groaned and tried to stir. Musgrave put a hand on his shoulder to hold him down.
“If you want to ask questions, I’d advise you to do it quickly,” he snapped at Brennan.
The sheriff stepped closer, although it obviously bothered him to do so. He leaned down and said in a hoarse voice, “Who did this to you, mister?”
The injured man moved his head. His ears were largely intact, and he must have heard Brennan. Under the hideous wound, his mouth moved. Jackson and Everett leaned closer too, anxious to hear whatever the man said.
“L-light . . . b-balls of . . . light . . .”
Brennan glanced up. “That don’t make no sense.”
“Who are you?” Jackson asked, ignoring the sheriff’s warning look and the earlier admonition to keep his mouth shut. “What’s your name?”
“M-Matt . . . Harcourt.”
“Damn it!” Brennan burst out. “I know Harcourt. He’s another Winged T rider!”
“H-hand . . .”
Brennan looked down at Matt Harcourt’s hand, then awkwardly clasped it, figuring that was what Harcourt was asking him to do.
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