“Maybe so,” Arlo conceded, thoughts of the slender mother-to-be lingering in his mind as well. “I don’t fancy goin’ back to tell Ma we give up on lookin’ for the woman.” Another concern entered his thoughts then. “What about that Injun woman we killed back up the trail? They might decide to come lookin’ for her when she don’t come back. I don’t care much for just settin’ here till a whole bunch of Injuns come down on our necks.”
That was a concern that had left Bo’s mind as well. “Damn, that is somethin’ to think about, ain’t it?” He changed his mind, thinking that, for once, Arlo was right. “Let’s get the hell back up there.”
* * *
Some thirty or forty yards above them, a terrified young girl crouched beside the trail, stunned moments before by the sudden gunshot that had whistled up through the thick pines just below her. Thinking at first that the shot had been meant for her, Molly had immediately dived for cover in a thicket beside the trail where she lay waiting, shivering like a startled rabbit. After a few moments had passed with no further shots, she crawled back closer to the trail and listened. Over the heavy pounding of her heart, she heard bits of conversation rising from the lodgepole pines at the edge of the ridge overlooking the river. They had anticipated her intention to seek the safety of Broken Hand’s village, and she had almost blundered into their trap. Had it not been for that single gunshot, she would have. A few yards farther down, the narrow trail took a sharp turn around a huge boulder. She moved quickly down to take cover behind it. There she waited, listening, trying to control the rapid beating of her heart.
Weary from a night on the mountain, frightened for her safety, and near devastation from uncertainty for Matt’s welfare, she must now decide whether to make her way around the two brothers and gain the safety of the village, or stay where she was until they tired of waiting. She was almost sick with worry, thinking about what could have happened back up the mountain when Matt returned. She tried not to think about the possibility that he might have blundered blindly into an ambush, and could even now be lying dead back at the cabin. Please, God, she prayed, J can’t face life without him.
Forcing herself to control her panic, she thought again about her options. After thinking it through, she decided the best thing for her and Matt was to get to Broken Hand. He would send a party out to look for Matt. Her decision made, she rose from her hiding place and started to cross over the trail, only to dive back behind the boulder when she heard the sound of horses coming up from below. Lying flat upon the pine needles, afraid to breathe, she watched in terror as Arlo and Bo filed past her on their way back up the trail. Afraid to move until the horses were well past her and she could no longer hear them on the path above her, she left the cover of the rock. Hurrying down the trail once more, her glance was captured for an instant by a dark smear on the pine needles beside the path. In her haste to escape the mountain, she almost dismissed it as insignificant, but something made her pause to identify it. She realized at once that it was blood. A sizable stain of dried blood coated the needles next to her foot. Upon a moment’s investigation, she could readily see where something had disturbed the bed of pine needles, as if it had been dragged from the trail. Following the stains with her eyes, she gazed farther into the thicket and suddenly her breath caught in her throat, causing her to gasp. There, a few yards off the trail, lying in a tangle of vines and brush, was the unmistakable form of a body. Horrifying moments later, she recognized the corpse of Singing Woman, her doeskin shirt crusted with blood and her scalp brutally severed.
Stunned by the grisly discovery of her friend, Molly dropped to her knees, suddenly weakened by her grief. Through tears blurring her eyes, she looked around her as if searching in the quiet forest for the reason for such purposeless slaughter. Why would these monsters kill Singing Woman? The killers had obviously come for Matt, and even though he had no control over their actions, she felt the blame for Singing Woman’s death. Now she must bring this dreadful news to Broken Hand and the rest of the Crow village. Helpless to do anything for Singing Woman at this point, she looked around her frantically in search of something to cover the body. There was nothing. I’m sorry, she thought, and reluctantly left her friend to lie among the brambles.
* * *
Her arm on fire from the strain of bearing most of her body weight as she dangled precariously from a single scrub pine, P. D. Wildmoon struggled to catch a toehold on the rock ledge just below her feet. Blood from the wound in her other shoulder soaked her sleeve, but, in desperation, she was forced to try to hold on with that arm as well. The pain was excruciating, but she knew she could not hold onto the skinny pine with one hand for very long.
It had been pure luck that her arms had caught on the pine when she lost her grip on the edge of the cliff some ten feet above her now. Below her boots, there was nothing but thin mountain air for another two hundred feet to the tops of the trees beneath the cliff. Her rifle lay somewhere among those trees. The test for her now was whether or not she had the strength and determination to save her life. Already, the shallow roots of the pine were giving way under the strain of her weight. Her shoulders were progressing from a state of pain toward one of numbness, as if they were being pulled from their sockets.
The narrow ledge of rock was only inches from the toe of her boot but, straining as much as possible, she still could not gain purchase. The desperation of her situation was rapidly pushing her toward outright panic. When a root suddenly pulled free, causing the pine to drop almost a foot, she thought she was about to fall to her death. She knew that she was not done just yet, however, when she felt her foot settle on the solid rock of the ledge and realized that the tree had swung her in closer to the face of the cliff.
As soon as she took a firm grasp on the rocky face, and decided that she could now release her hold on the pine, her confidence returned, along with a burning determination for revenge. She was not out of danger quite yet. There were perhaps fifty feet of steep cliff face to cross before reaching the safety of a gentler slope, but she had enough space on the narrow ledge to place one foot before the other and ample handholds to keep from falling.
Moving slowly and carefully, she inched her way across the cliff face, testing each handhold before releasing the one before it, her blood-soaked shirt leaving smudges of red on the rock wall. She dared not look down, but kept sliding one foot after the other until she neared the safety of the trees and underbrush that beckoned. Six feet, four feet, two feet, until finally she reached out to grab a handful of thick brush, and pulled herself off the face of the cliff.
On a more forgiving slope at last, she sat down and leaned against a sizable pine tree, feeling totally exhausted, her shoulders still aching from the strain. “It’ll take a helluva lot more than that to kill P. D. Wildmoon,” she boasted as she felt her old sense of confidence restored. Taking a look at the bullet wound in her shoulder, she determined it not to be too serious. Her initial reaction to it was one of anger, for she had never before even considered the possibility of getting shot. As she fumed over the bloody hole in her shirt, she was once again reminded of the loss of her youngest son. Thoughts of Wiley had left her during the perilous minutes on the cliff face, pushed from her mind by the fight for her own life. They returned now to remind her of the vengeance she must have for Wiley’s death.
She took time to consider her present situation. Sitting on the side of a mountain with nothing but a pistol for a weapon—The thought caused her to automatically reach for the weapon, only to discover an empty holster. The pistol was at the bottom of the cliff with her rifle. “Dammit!” she uttered in disgust. There was no decision to be made; she must make her way down the mountainside and search for her weapons. But first, she had to climb back up a short way to see if the horses were still where she had left them. Finding them gone, she hesitated for only a moment while she thought things out. There was still the question to be answered as to where Slaughter was now—back at his cabin, or gone in search of
his woman? The game had taken on a new meaning now. No longer was money the driving force that would keep her on Slaughter’s trail. She longed for his blood, and she swore she would have it. And where were Arlo and Bo? Her lack of control over the situation was rapidly fueling her anger, and she was determined to regain her dominance. Thinking of Slaughter, she vowed, “I’ll hunt that son of a bitch down if it takes the rest of my life.”
It was slow and painful, but driven by the rage of a mama grizzly that has lost a cub, she descended the slope and searched among the tall pines below the cliff until she found her rifle. Looking it over to assess any damage that might have occurred as a result of the fall, she cocked the lever several times, ejecting the cartridges. The action was smooth, and there were no signs of damage other than a few small scratches on the stock. It was one of the new Winchester 66 rifles, and with it back in her hands, she felt whole again, in spite of the wound in her shoulder. She picked up the ejected cartridges and started back up the mountain, not willing to spend additional time to search for her pistol. If luck and the devil were with her, she might catch Slaughter at the cabin.
The climb was long and difficult, made more so by the loss of blood from her shoulder. Driven onward by her lust for revenge, she chose to ignore her wound when it started bleeding again. The image of her youngest son, her favorite, lying sprawled on the ground, his arms reaching grotesquely in death, was the one burning vision that filled her brain. Making her way up past the cliff, she barely glanced at the treacherous ledge that had almost sent her to her death. Striking the game trail where the horses had been tied, she followed it up to the clearing where the cabin stood.
On one knee, her breath coming in short gasps from the climb, she looked the cabin over carefully. There was no sign of Slaughter. Wiley’s body lay where he had fallen, between the corral and the cabin. The sight of it almost made her charge into the clearing, but she forced herself to remain calm. In the meadow beyond the corral she saw the horses grazing, hers and Wiley’s among them, their saddles on the ground by the corral. The other horses were the same ones she had seen in the corral before, which told her that the man she hunted was not there.
She stood up and walked toward the cabin, confident that it was empty, but with the Winchester ready just in case. As she expected, there was no one inside. She then turned and went directly to her son’s body. Standing over the corpse, she could not help thinking how pitiful he appeared in death. He had been slow-witted and clumsy, but he was her baby, and she felt a sudden gut-wrenching sob forming in her abdomen as she peered banefully down at him. “I ain’t got time to bury you, honey,” she muttered, “but I ain’t gonna leave you to the wolves.”
Taking him by his shoulders, she tried dragging the body toward the cabin door. She did not move him more than twenty feet before she was forced to stop and rest, already feeling light-headed and dizzy. For better leverage, she dropped his shoulders and grabbed his ankles. This proved to work much better, and she was able to drag him inside the cabin, although the strain caused her wound to bleed again. Once inside, the grieving mother tried to lift her son’s body up on the bed. It was too heavy for her, so she propped his legs up on the bed, and then managed to lift his shoulders up high enough to get her back under him and shove him over to settle on the blanket. Feeling a little faint after such a minimal exertion, she knew that she must be weakened by the loss of too much blood. Unwilling to rest, however, she pushed herself to continue.
Wrapping the blanket around Wiley, she looked around her, searching for coal oil or kerosene. There was none, but there were live coals in the stone fireplace. A bed of these on the straw tick should prove to be ample to start a fire, she decided. The dry straw in the homemade mattress caught almost immediately. She stacked kindling she found near the fireplace on top of the coals, and soon she had a healthy flame going. Remembering the half-burned corpse that the cur dog had dined upon in the Frenchman’s trading post, she piled everything flammable she could find on top of Wiley’s corpse. She was determined to give her son a complete cremation—there would be no wolves or coyotes feasting on Wiley’s body.
The tiny cabin soon filled with smoke, making it impossible for P. D. to remain any longer to watch over her son. She backed toward the open door as the flames burst into a raging fire that began to lick hungrily at the cabin walls. Satisfied that there would be no grisly remains for the scavengers, as well as nothing left of Slaughter’s home, she backed away from the burning cabin. In her hatred for this man, she wanted to destroy everything he owned and everyone he held dear. If she had not been so weakened by the loss of blood, she would have pulled the pine rails from the corral and piled them on the funeral pyre as well.
When the flames began to climb higher, and the smoke rose high over the treetops, she finally decided it best to vacate the clearing. Weak and wounded, she realized she was in no condition to face Slaughter should he happen to see the smoke and return to investigate before she was ready for him. Even with limbs heavy with an almost numbing fatigue, she looked about her, searching for the best spot to lie in ambush for the man who had killed her son. She had no sooner settled herself behind the same corner where Wiley had hidden earlier, than it occurred to her that it would be wise to catch her horse and saddle it.
Functioning on nothing more than pure, vengeful hatred, the weary woman willed herself to her feet once more, and moved painfully toward the meadow where the horses stood fascinated by the burning log cabin. Feeling a sudden spell of dizziness, she hesitated, uncertain for a moment as to which horse was hers. The animal, a blue roan stallion, recognized his mistress, and came to meet her. “Good boy,” she mumbled, steadying herself with a hand grasping the horse’s mane. Suddenly the afternoon sky became dark, as dark as night, and objects around her lost definition and faded into the darkness. With all consciousness gone, she dropped to her knees and fell facedown in the grass at the stallion’s feet. This was where her sons found her,
* * *
“Look!” Arlo blurted out. “Yonder!” He reined his horse back and pointed toward the body lying still in the grass. “It’s Ma!” He kicked his horse hard and charged into the meadow at a gallop.
“She looks like she’s dead,” Bo remarked, in effect talking to himself, because Arlo was already out of earshot. The sight of his mother’s body did not overly excite him. Unlike his brothers, Bo had never possessed any particular fondness for P. D., having never been one of her favorites. It occurred to him then that Wiley was nowhere around. He prodded his horse and followed Arlo into the meadow. “Where’s Wiley?” he asked when he dismounted.
“She’s been shot!” Arlo said, ignoring Bo’s question, “but she’s still breathin’.” He turned his full attention back to his mother. “Ma,” he pleaded. “Ma, it’s me, Arlo. Can you hear me?”
After a few moments, P. D.’s eyelids fluttered a few times, then opened wide. “I hear you,” she muttered weakly. “I took a dizzy spell. Saddle my horse. We’ve got to catch that son of a bitch.”
“You’ve been shot,” Arlo protested.
“I reckon she knows that,” Bo remarked, then asked, “Where’s the turnip-head?”
It had not registered with Arlo until then that his younger brother was missing. “Yeah, Ma, where’s Wiley? How come he ain’t here?”
“He’s dead,” P. D. replied solemnly. “Shot through the heart by that damn devil we’re after. Now I’ll tell you somethin’ else that’ll sour your gizzard. Slaughter’s the same feller that told us his name was Johnson when we had that run-in with them Injuns.”
“Well, I’ll be . . .” Bo remarked. Looking back at the burning cabin then, he guessed why there was no sign of Wiley’s body. “He got both of you . . .” He didn’t finish the thought as a feeling of concern for his own neck suddenly occurred to him.
“Damn,” Arlo sighed, knowing the grief his mother must be feeling, although, like Bo, he felt no deep emotion over the loss. For P. D.’s sake, he tried to think of some wo
rds of comfort. “Brother Wiley’s gone on to a better . . .”
P. D. cut him off. “We’re wastin’ time,” she said, feeling the return of a small measure of strength now that her two sons were with her. “Bo, saddle my horse.” Turning her attention back to Arlo, she asked, “Where’s the woman?”
“Uh . . .” Arlo hesitated. “I don’t know. We couldn’t find her.” He hastened to excuse their lack of success. “We seen the smoke risin’ up on the mountain, and come a’runnin’ ’cause we feared you was in trouble. Ain’t that right, Bo?”
P. D. glanced at Bo, who acknowledged with a nod of his head as he looked around him for any sign of Slaughter’s return. Feeling some of the previous fire in her veins again, P. D. admonished them both. “You let that damn girl get away?” she shrieked. “She’ll have every damn Injun in that camp up here!”
Seeing no point in both he and Arlo taking the tongue-lashing, Bo led P. D.’s horse back toward the corral to fetch her saddle, as he had been told to do. While doing so, he gave some serious thought toward the situation they now found themselves in. It seemed to him that the advantage had shifted over to the other side. There they were, the three of them, and one of them wounded, on top of a mountain they were unfamiliar with. The girl would most likely make her way back to the Crow camp. And even if she didn’t, the fire would most likely cause some curiosity among the Indians. Then there was the matter of Slaughter out there somewhere. He might have decided to run, but if he was the same man that said his name was Johnson, he sure as hell didn’t seem like the running kind. The situation didn’t look healthy for the Wildmoon family. He decided the best thing for the only member of the family he gave a damn about was to put this mountain behind him. He made up his mind that, if his mama intended to stay, he was leaving on his own.
Vengeance Moon Page 15