Outrage at Blanco

by Bill Crider

  Jink blamed it all on Ben, who, according to Jink, had taken too long to saddle the horses, lost the trail in the first place, and was generally useless when it came to tracking a man through the woods.

  “I found the damn place where he came out of the woods,” Ben said. “If you wanta take over, go ahead. Right now.”

  But Jink couldn’t take over. He was feeling a little dizzy, a condition he attributed to the sun, which hadn’t ducked behind a single damn cloud all day as far as Jink could remember. Anyway, he couldn’t lean down and do any tracking from the saddle, and he was damn sure he couldn’t do any walking. All he could do was complain.

  “I don’t wanta take over. I want you to find the son of a bitch, that’s what I want. I want my share of the money, and I want to stop and rest for a while. That damn sun’s gonna burn a hole in my hat.”

  “I told you we couldn’t stop,” Ben said.

  He was getting tired of Jink’s whining. He was also getting tired of Jink, period. They’d been partners for a good many years now, good times and bad, in prison and out, and they’d always stuck together, but Ben wasn’t exactly the sentimental sort. It was beginning to look to him as if Jink couldn’t hold up his end of the partnership anymore. Ben thought maybe it was time they split up.

  He was sure of it about an hour later when Jink quietly slid out of his saddle and hit the ground. Jink was riding a little behind Ben, and if Jink’s bay hadn’t shied and whinnied when Jink fell, Ben might not have known about it until much later. They hadn’t been doing much talking for the last few miles.

  Ben caught up the reins of Jink’s horse first and tied them to a bush before he checked on Jink.

  Jink’s face was red from more than the sun, and he was sweating heavily. The fever was on him again. He was muttering something under his breath, but it was just gibberish. Ben couldn’t understand a word of it.

  It was getting on toward late afternoon, and the sun was lowering in the west. There was enough of a breeze to cool things off, but Ben didn’t think Jink could even feel the breeze. He grabbed his partner under the arms and dragged him to the shade of a small cedar and propped him up against the trunk. Jink was still mumbling incoherently. His eyes were shut tight.

  Ben left him there and went back to Jink’s horse for a canteen. He opened it, tilted Jink’s head back, and poured a little water into his mouth.

  Jink sputtered out the first swallow, but then he began to drink greedily. Ben had to take the canteen away before Jink drank all the water that was in it.

  Jink sagged back against the tree, and Ben looked at his hand. The bandage that O’Grady had put on the finger was sweated and dirty, and the whole hand looked swollen to Ben. Even the arm was swollen and red.

  “Ben?” Jink said, startling him. “You there Ben?”

  “I’m here,” Ben said, wondering why Jink didn’t open his eyes. “What the hell’s the matter with you, Jink?”

  “Don’t know. Feel funny. Did we eat today?”

  It was a peculiar time to be talking about food, Ben thought, but he said, “No. We didn’t have time.”

  “We got anything?”

  “Maybe some jerky,” Ben said.

  He didn’t think it would be a good idea for Jink to eat jerky, though. Too salty, and Jink didn’t have that much water left in his canteen.

  “Get me some, would you?” Jink said.

  Oh, hell, Ben thought. I might as well.

  He got a strip of jerky out of the saddle bags and handed it to Jink, who bit a piece off the end and started chewing it.

  “Hell of a note, ain’t it, Ben?” he said, continuing to chew as he spoke. His eyes were still closed, and he was talking very softly.

  Ben squatted down so that he could hear. “What’s that?” Ben said.

  “Comin’ to the end of the trail like this,” Jink said. “A hell of a note.” He took another bite of jerky, twisting the strip of dried meat with his teeth to tear off a piece.

  “We ain’t at the end,” Ben said. “We still gotta catch that damn O’Grady and get our money from him.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be doin’ any more chasin’,” Jink said. “You want any of this jerky?”

  “Nope,” Ben said. “You finish it.”

  “Don’t want no more of it.” Jink let his hand fall to his lap, though he did not drop the jerky. “You’re gonna leave me here, ain’t you, Ben?”

  That was exactly what Ben planned to do, all right. There was nothing he could do for Jink, except maybe throw him across his saddle and lead his horse along, and he wasn’t about to do that.

  “Yeah,” Ben said. He didn’t see any need to lie about it. “I reckon I am. You don’t look much like you can do anymore chasin’. Like you said.”

  “Hell of a note,” Jink said. “You gonna leave me my horse?”

  Ben wanted to take the horse along, and if it’d been anybody else but Jink sitting there under that tree, Ben wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But he’d been partnered with Jink too long. He wasn’t sentimental, but he wasn’t completely without feeling.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m gonna leave you your horse. He’s tied right over there.”

  “I might get to feelin’ better, is why I’m askin’,” Jink said. He didn’t open his eyes to look at the horse. “Might wanta catch up with you.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “You probably will.”

  He didn’t believe it for a second.

  “Sure. You gonna leave me the canteen?”

  “Yeah.” Why not? Ben thought. Wasn’t hardly any water left in it.

  Jink didn’t say anything for a while after that, and neither did Ben. Finally Ben said, “I gotta be goin’, Jink. I can’t let O’Grady get too far ahead of me.”

  “I know it,” Jink said. “You go on. Just leave me my horse.”

  Ben stood up and looked down at Jink, who appeared to be three-quarters dead already. Jink didn’t look up, didn’t open his eyes.

  Ben was walking toward his horse when he heard Jink call his name.

  “What?” Ben said, turning back.

  “If you catch up with that son of a bitch and get the money,” Jink said, “you’ll bring me my share, won’t you?”

  “Sure I will,” Ben said. “You know me, Jink.”

  “Yeah, I know you, all right,” Jink said, and Ben could have sworn there was a smile on his fevered face. “That’s what’s got me so worried.”

  They didn’t bury Rawls Dawson after all.

  “I don’t think it would be a good idea,” Jonathan said. “Somebody’s bound to come out here lookin’ for him sooner or later, and most likely sooner than later. If they don’t find him, who knows what they’ll think?”

  “They won’t find anybody else,” Ellie pointed out. “We’ll be gone.”

  She had accepted the fact that Jonathan was going with her. She wasn’t sure why, but somehow the idea didn’t seem objectionable.

  “That’s right,” Jonathan said. “We won’t be here, so we need to let whoever comes know what’s goin’ on.”

  They were back in the kitchen, drinking water again, and it tasted even better this time than before. Jonathan set his cup down on the table. “I think we better leave a note for ’em, let ’em know that I’m all right. We don’t have to mention you.”

  Ellie wasn’t too sure that she agreed. She didn’t want anyone trailing along and interfering with her, but Jonathan eventually persuaded her that the note was the best idea. He found a pencil and a piece of paper in his office, and Ellie printed the note:

  “Three men killed my son and the marshal. They are the ones who robbed the bank in town. I have gone to find them.”

  “Sounds about right,” Jonathan said when he read it over. He took the pencil and signed his name on the paper.

  “What do we do with it?” Ellie said.

  “Pin it on the marshal.”

  They went outside, and Ellie took hold of Dawson’s body and dragged it into the shade
of the porch. She pulled him into a sitting position, his back against the wall, and then she pinned the note to his vest.

  “Somebody better come looking before too long,” she said, wiping the sweat from her forehead.

  “I expect there’ll be somebody before too long,” Jonathan said. “When the marshal don’t show up back in town, they’ll be worried soon enough. We better get on our way. Can you ride a horse?”

  “I have my wagon,” Ellie said.

  Jonathan sat on the porch, took off his hat, and fanned his face. He would have liked to ride in the wagon himself; in fact, he wasn’t certain that he could ride a horse, though he was feeling surprisingly strong.

  “I don’t think that wagon can go where you’ll want to be goin’,” he said. “We won’t be followin’ any roads, and there’s some mighty rough country around here, places where you’d break a wheel before you knew it. I don’t reckon you’re carryin’ a spare.”

  “I can ride, then,” Ellie said. “Do you have a horse?”

  “Ought to be one or two in the barn. And we ought to put the marshal’s horse in there.”

  They took care of the marshal’s horse, and Ellie saddled two of Crossland’s mares.

  Jonathan went back into the house while she was occupied. He wanted to get his pistol.

  It was in its holster, the gunbelt hanging on the same chair where his clothes had been. Jonathan hadn’t worn the rig for a long time, and it felt heavy and awkward when he strapped it on. He had to take up the belt a couple of notches, but it hung on his hips and didn’t fall to the floor.

  He drew the pistol, a .45 Peacemaker, from the holster and held it clumsily. It was heavier than he’d remembered, either that or he’d lost a good bit of strength. He suspected that was the case, and he hoped he’d be able to fire the pistol if he had to. Maybe he wouldn’t.

  He slipped the pistol back into the holster and walked over to the gun cabinet on the other side of the room. There was a lever-action Winchester there. He checked to make sure that it was loaded. It was.

  He went into the kitchen then and took a few cans of sardines and tomatoes from the shelves. He carried them, along with the rifle, to the barn.

  Ellie had the horses ready to go. She’d unhitched her mules and stabled them, and she’d slipped her shotgun into the rifle boot on one of the saddles.

  Jonathan slid the Winchester into the boot on the other saddle and put the canned goods into the saddle bags.

  “Ready?” he said.

  “Yes,” Ellie said, putting her foot into the stirrup and swinging into the saddle.

  Jonathan didn’t find mounting quite so easy. When he swung his leg over the saddle, he felt a wet pain slither through his mid-section, and he bit down hard to keep from crying out. His face went white.

  “Are you all right?” Ellie said.

  Jonathan didn’t answer for a while. He just sat in the saddle, trying to gain control of his breathing.

  “Listen,” Ellie said. “If—”

  “I’m fine,” Jonathan said before she could say anything more. “Let’s go.”

  Ellie looked at him doubtfully. “You don’t look fine to me,” she said.

  “Well, I am.” Jonathan put his heels to the horse and guided it outside. “Are you comin’, or not?”

  “I’m coming.” Ellie followed him out of the barn into the sunlight. “Do you know which way they went?”

  “I think so. But that don’t mean they kept goin’ that way.”

  “Do you know anything about tracking?”

  “Lord a’mighty,” Jonathan said. “What were you goin’ to do if I hadn’t decided to come along? Try to smell ’em out?”

  Ellie shook her head. “I really hadn’t thought that far ahead. I guess I was just hoping they’d be at your ranch and I could settle with them here.”

  “Just settin’ on the front porch, passin’ the time and waitin’ for you to shotgun ’em down,” Jonathan said. “Is that what you thought?”

  “I don’t know what I thought. I just knew that I had to do something.”

  They rode in silence for a few minutes. Then Jonathan said, “I used to be able to track a cow over solid rock. Let one of them critters get away from the herd, I was the one that went after her. I could always find her and get her back. I reckon I can track three men on the run.”

  Ellie, who hadn’t realized that she was holding herself quite so stiffly in the saddle, relaxed fractionally. She allowed herself a little bit of a smile.

  “Good,” she said.

  THIRTEEN

  Jink didn’t even know when Ben rode away. He slept fitfully most of the afternoon, his sleep troubled by crazy dreams so vivid that he was still horrified by them when he jerked awake. He didn’t much want to remember them, but they had engraved themselves on his mind in such a way that they seemed even more real than the tree he was resting against or even the pain in his arm.

  One of them had something to do with snakes, great diamondback rattlers that slithered up to him as he slept and crouched on his chest waiting for him to awaken so that they could strike him in the face. In the worst of those dreams, he was running from the place where he lay with five of the snakes, their fangs embedded in his cheeks and lips, hanging from his face.

  In the other dreams, which were even worse, the Indian woman he and Ben killed up in Oklahoma came back to life and dug up her husband and both of them were chasing Jink across a landscape unlike anything he had ever seen before, a place of high hills made entirely of deep sand that Jink was forced to climb to escape and into which his feet sank deeper and deeper with every step he took, forcing him to use all his strength in freeing his feet from the shifting soil that was fighting to keep them in its grip.

  The man and woman had no difficulty at all; they seemed to float above the sand, and their feet left no prints as they pursued Jink relentlessly. Their bodies were corrupted from having lain so long in the earth, and pieces of them kept falling off, little pieces, like a nose or an ear or a finger, and the pieces made a little trail to show they way they had come.

  What with all the running through the sand in mortal terror from dead people or with snakes hanging from his face, Jink woke up more and more tired every time he dozed off, and a lot less eager to go back to sleep.

  He was thirstier with every awakening, too. His mouth tasted as dry as if he had swallowed the sand instead of running in it.

  He drank all his remaining water in one long gulp, shook the canteen, then threw it aside when he realized that it was empty. It clattered off a rock and lay still.

  It was getting on toward late afternoon now. There was a little breeze from the west, and it was much cooler under the tree than it had been earlier, but Jink didn’t know it. He was burning up.

  He was wearing a dirty black vest over his shirt. The vest was unbuttoned, and he managed to slip it off. His shirt proved too much for him, however. He couldn’t unbutton it, and he didn’t have the strength to tear the buttons off, though he tried. He took off his bandanna and mopped his face and looked off into the distance.

  There was nothing there to see, just a gray lizard that looked back at him for a few seconds before it slipped off the top of a rock and scuttled away.

  “Ben?” Jink said, trying to sit up straighter. He failed and slumped back against the tree. “You out there anywhere, Ben?”

  There was no answer except the neighing of Jink’s horse, somewhere off to Jink’s right. Jink turned his head, and the sight of the horse comforted him somehow. It was as if he hadn’t been completely deserted. He mopped his face with the bandanna again, but the cloth was wet now and it didn’t help much.

  Jink dropped it onto his chest. His eyes closed slowly, and he drifted back into sleep.

  O’Grady was doing fine until his horse threw him.

  They were going down a little rocky hill when the noise of their progress disturbed a dozing rattler. The snake immediately coiled itself into a defensive posture and gave out its dis
tinctive warning.

  O’Grady’s horse stopped short, planting its front feet and throwing O’Grady, who was too surprised to react, over its neck onto the hard ground.

  O’Grady rolled over and over, scraping against the rocks, peeling skin off his hands, arms and face. He brushed by a prickly pear with his left hand and filled the back of it with hundreds of tiny needles before he came to a stop at the bottom of the hill. A few small stones rolled down after him, and dirt filled his mouth and eyes.

  The horse didn’t stay around to watch. It reared up, rolled its eyes, turned, and took of in the direction from which they’d come.

  O’Grady sat up spitting and rubbed the dust out of his eyes with his right hand. He knew better than to get his left hand close to his eyes before he got the prickly pear needles out.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said after he had spit most of the dirt from his mouth.

  The snake shook its rattles again, and O’Grady looked back up the hill. The snake was coiled near a rock in the shade of a live oak not more than three feet tall. Its beady eyes were fixed on O’Grady, and its tongue flickered in and out of its mouth as it watched him steadily.

  O’Grady unholstered his pistol, looked at it to see that its firing mechanism and barrel were clear of dirt, and without really thinking about it aimed at the rattler and pulled the trigger.

  The pistol boomed and the head of the snake exploded. Its body uncoiled and whipped about in the dirt while the bullet tore on through the leaves of the oak and whanged off a rock higher up the hill.

  “And that does for you, spawn of the devil that you are,” O’Grady said.

  He holstered the pistol and began painstakingly to pick the needles one by one out of the back of his left hand. It took a while, but he was patient and he got most of them. Then he got up to see if he could find his horse.

  He told himself that he wouldn’t have any trouble with the gelding. He couldn’t afford to. The bag with the money was still tied to the saddle horn. He regretted having fired the shot, though. It might have spooked the horse, which was nervous anyhow on account of the snake.