by Jory Sherman
“Ben, it looks like the two men here were blown to bits and what was left of their skins was gnawed off. Just skeletons, mostly, a couple of skulls grinnin’ and settin’ apart from a lot of bones. Stinks to high heaven.”
Ferguson let out a groaning sigh.
Trask looked at him.
“Hiram, you didn’t expect no good news here, did you?”
“No, I reckon not. Them were both good boys. I hate to lose ’em.”
“Well, you lost ’em and we’re ridin’ on.” He stared at Grissom and Rawlins. “You boys get mounted. We’re ridin’ on.”
“Hell, it’ll be dark soon,” Grissom said, looking at Ferguson for support. There was none.
“We’ll get you a pet owl, Lou. He can be your eyes. We’re ridin’ on.”
“Yeah, damn it all.”
“You wouldn’t want to stay here no ways, Lou,” Rawlins said. “It’s worsen the place we stayed in last night. The smell, I mean.”
The other riders rode up. Some of them started to dismount. Ferguson put up a hand to stop them.
“We’re not bunkin’ here tonight, boys,” he said. “Trask says we’re goin’ on.” Then he turned to Trask. “It’s another day’s ride or so to the next station, Ben.”
“I know. Just sit tight while I work this out.”
Trask touched spurs to his horse’s flanks and guided him around the adobe. Behind it, he rode some distance, scouting the terrain. When he returned, the sun was nearly set and the faces of the men were in shadow.
“Pablo,” Trask said, “come with me. The rest of you just wait. Roll a quirly, scratch your ass, stretch your legs. But stay close to your horses.”
Trask and Medina rode to the back of the adobe and beyond.
“You can tie your horse to that pile of lumber yonder, Pablo. Anyone comin’ up the road won’t see him. Then you sit in that house and poke your gun barrel out one of the winders. If Cody rides up, he’s going to be real close. He’ll be wearin’ black and ridin’ a black horse, like I said. You might drop him at close range. There’s a back door. Leave it open, and after you’ve killed that bastard and maybe the soldier, you hightail it for your horse and light a shuck. You got that?”
“Yes. I will wait inside the adobe for this Cody and shoot him.”
“Kill him.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you’ll get lucky and he won’t get here until tomorrow, after the sun is up.”
“I have seen dust in the sky,” Pablo said. “He is coming. He is near.”
“How come you didn’t tell me?”
“Sometimes I look and it is there. I look again and it is gone. I think he rides fast and then rides slow. The dust was far away.”
“You got good eyes, Pablo. I’m countin’ on them tonight. You see good in the dark?”
“Yo soy un tecolote,” he said.
“What’s that mean?” Trask asked.
“I am the owl.”
Trask laughed, reached over and patted Pablo between his shoulder blades.
“You’ll do, Pablo. You’ll do right fine.”
When Trask and the others left, the sun had set and the temperature began dropping.
Pablo squatted by a front window, his Winchester resting on the ledge, the barrel pointing toward the road. It was quiet and dark, the sky sprinkled with diamond stars, the moon not yet risen.
He waited and fought against superstition and fear, his stomach fluttering like a child’s on All Hallow’s Eve, when the ghosts of the dead floated on the night air and the faintest whisper would make him shiver as if touched by the bony hand of a skeleton.
He waited and thought about the man he was going to kill. The one they called the Shadow Rider.
Chapter 20
Zak had not ridden more than ten feet before Colleen caught up to him.
One look at her face and he knew she had the bit in her teeth. This was one woman no man would ever best in an argument. He braced himself for what he suspected would be another angry tirade.
“Zak Cody,” she said, lighting into him like a mother hen attacking a hawk in the chicken house, “are you just going to let that dead man lie up there on that hill without a proper burial?”
“Yes, I am,” he said. “There’s no way to bury him proper.”
“Well, you can dig a hole, or cover him with rocks, at least.”
“Wouldn’t do any good, Colleen. And it would hold us back. We have to move on Trask, stop him from rendezvousing with…well, with some renegades who are trying to start a war with the Apache nation.”
“Where’s your respect for the dead, Zak?”
“I don’t respect the dead, I reckon. I respect the living.”
“What? I’ve never heard such a thing. No respect for the dead?”
“No’m.”
“That man needs to be buried. By you. By us. Before we leave.”
“No’m, he does not.”
“Why?”
Zak tried to avoid those penetrating blue eyes of hers, but they were like magnets. They drew his own gaze to them, so he could not avoid mentally plunging into their depths and being snared there like a rabbit in a trap. Her eyes were especially beautiful and magnetic when she was angry. And he was sure that Colleen was hopping mad.
“Be like burying a suit, ma’am.”
“What?” Her eyes flared like twin star sapphires struck with a sudden glaring light.
“The man’s dead, Colleen. Gone. Nothing more we can do for him. It would be just like burying a man’s suit clothes. Senseless.”
“Oh, you are really something, Zak Cody. As heartless a man as I’ve ever met, and I’ve met my share of them, all right.”
“Maybe so,” he said.
“Just to leave that poor dead man lying up there, out in the open, subject to the ravages of weather and vermin, all kinds of awful things.”
“Yes’m. Nature takes care of such. Mother Nature cleans up the messes we human folks leave. Worms are already at work on him. Flies will get at his eyes, start drinking all the wet stuff. Buzzards will pick at him until the coyotes pick up the scent, and then they’ll cart off arms and legs. Ants and bugs will get a share, until there’s not much of a trace. His clothes will eventually rot, his pistol turn to rust. That’s the way life works, Colleen. Dust to dust.”
“Oh, you’re impossible, Zak. I expected you’d show a little compassion, a little respect for—”
“Colleen, the Lakota, the Crow, the Cheyenne, maybe all Indian tribes, always thank the spirit of the creatures they kill for food. So do I. The Lakota say this: ‘Thank you, brother, for feeding me and my family. One day I will die and feed the grasses so your descendants can eat and live and become strong.’ That’s the way life works. Everything alive feeds on something else to survive. When we pluck a fruit or a vegetable to eat, we kill it. When we slaughter a beef or shoot a deer, we are living life, the life the Great Spirit gave us.”
“People are different,” she said. “They deserve some reverence when they die.”
“Why? People are just another animal, as far as the Great Spirit is concerned. Oh, we think we’re smarter than most animals, but I’ve seen animals that have more good sense than a lot of men.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, Zak.”
“Colleen, you haven’t seen all of life. Neither have I. But I’ve seen maybe a great deal more than you have. No death is ever pretty, but it’s just a condition that all creatures must experience. The Indians believe that a man’s spirit lives in his body while he is alive on this earth. After death, the spirit leaves, goes along the star path to a better place.”
“Heaven, you mean.”
“You can call it anything you want,” he said. “The point is that we are all here on this earth for only a little while. When death takes us, we are no longer here.”
“And you believe that?” Her voice had softened, grown less shrill. The light in her eyes was now filled with flitting shadows of doubt.
“Yes, Colleen, I guess I do. Now, we can talk about this later, if you like, but I have a job to do and we’re moving on.”
“I must say, you do give a person food for thought.”
“Thinking can brighten the darkest path, sometimes.”
She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. Her eyes narrowed. Her lips pursed as if she was about to speak, but she pressed them back together and turned her horse away. He did not detect anger, but a kind of puzzlement that she couldn’t unravel as long as she was in his presence. A smile flickered on his lips as he touched spurs to his mount’s flanks. The horse responded with bunched muscles that suddenly released the energy in its legs and hooves.
The sky grew lighter in color and softer in texture as they rode away from the hill, along a path Zak set, parallel to the washed-out roadway, clouds still hiding the rising sun.
O’Hara caught up with Cody, rode alongside him. He didn’t speak for some time and Zak didn’t encourage him to talk.
Finally, the lieutenant cleared his throat.
“Prisoner seems to be doing all right,” he said.
“We haven’t gone far. There should be a stage stop up ahead any minute now.”
“What did you say to Colleen?” O’Hara was blunt, and Zak knew that was what he really wanted to talk about, not Al Deets.
“About what?”
“She seemed pretty upset when we left that Mexican up there on the hill.”
“She wanted me to bury him.”
“And you refused.”
“He’s not buried, is he?”
“Colleen, well, she’s sensitive, I guess you’d say. Delicate, maybe, in some ways. I just didn’t want her feelings hurt. Unnecessarily, I mean.”
Zak said nothing. He let Ted chew on that for a while. The way he figured it, if Ted had something more to say, he would say it.
And he did, finally.
“Maybe we should have buried that dead man, Zak.”
“You think so? Why?”
“A matter of decency, I guess.”
“What would be decent about piling rocks on a rotting corpse?”
“Good lord, Zak, I hope you didn’t say anything like that to Colleen.”
“I hope I didn’t, either,” Zak said.
O’Hara frowned.
Zak was watching the land ahead, his gaze scanning the terrain for any sign of movement, any glint of light on a gun barrel. The sunlight had not broken through yet, but it was stronger now, the heavy purple of the far clouds to the east fading to a light lavender, while some were tinged a pale cobalt, and there were signs that the lower clouds were breaking up, swirled into spirals by the lofty winds. The sun would break through eventually, and the dank coolness that clung to the land would vanish as it bathed in scorching heat.
“You must know what you said to Colleen,” O’Hara said.
“Some of it. Why?”
“I guess it might not be any of my business.”
“It might not,” Zak agreed.
“You’re a hard man to get to know, Zak. I sure can’t figure you out.”
“It’s not important, Ted. You ought to have more to figure out than me. Like how we’re going to bring Ben Trask down and stop a bloody war with the Apaches.”
“Oh, I’m thinking about that, sure. Not much we can do right now.”
“No. Just make sure Trask and his men don’t jump us.”
“You think he might? This early in the day?”
“Trask is capable of ’most anything. My guess is that he’ll look for a good place to dry-gulch us and start slinging a whole lot of lead our way.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Today. Tomorrow, maybe.”
Zak stood up in the stirrups. Ahead, on a low rise, he saw the adobe, just jutting up on the edge of his vision.
“There’s the old stage stop,” he said. “Trask probably holed up there during the storm. He might be there now. Or he might have left a couple of rifles behind to pick us off.”
“Hard to see,” O’Hara said, squinting. “It looks just like the land around it. Same drab color and all.”
“I left two men dead in it last time I was here.”
“You did? Trask’s men?”
“Trask’s or Ferguson’s. They were left there to join up with Trask. There were two men at each old stage stop.”
“You kill all of them?” There was a hollow sound to O’Hara’s voice, as if he were swallowing the words as he spoke them.
“I did.”
O’Hara said nothing. Zak reined his horse to a halt.
“You stay here, Ted. Spread out. I’ll circle and come up from the left side of that adobe yonder. You keep your eyes on the road to your right.”
“You want me to go with you? Maybe one of the men?”
“No. I can tell if there are any surprises waiting for us.”
“You’re in command, Colonel.”
Zak shot him a sharp look, a silent reprimand.
Then he rode on, circling to the left, keeping the horse at a walk so he would not make much noise.
He found the places where Trask had hobbled the horses the night before. He dismounted and broke open the freshest horse apples. No steam arose from the balls of dung. He checked the hoofprints to gauge how old they were, and then, when he had remounted, he rode out, counting tracks, making sure that none doubled back. Then he rode back up behind the adobe and around to the other side. He saw the collapsed wall, the ruins inside. He rode back out front and waved to O’Hara, beckoning him to ride up with Colleen, Deets, and the two soldiers.
Zak dismounted then, checked the front door, looked at the disheveled interior. There was mud inside, along with standing water, debris scattered everywhere.
When Ted rode up with the others, Zak stepped outside.
“What’d you find, Zak?” Ted asked.
“Well, Trask and his bunch spent a miserable night here. They left a good hour or so ahead of us. At this point, he doesn’t outnumber us much.”
“How many?”
“I counted eight horse tracks, but one of them is traveling empty. Probably belonged to that dead Mexican back there.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad, then.”
“Bad enough. They’re all killers and they’re riding faster than we are.”
“You can tell that from the tracks?”
“I figure they’ll let that riderless horse loose when they get far enough away. It will slow them down. And Trask is in a hurry.”
“Now what?” Ted wanted to know.
“We follow Trask. But from here on out, he can dry-gulch us most anywhere. I figure that at some point he’ll ride down to the road so he can make better time. Along here, the road looks pretty bad. Still muddy, still choked with a lot of dead animals, brush, and such.”
O’Hara looked off toward the road, then at the crumbled wall.
“Rain must have damned near drowned them if they were all inside. I wonder why he killed one of his own men.”
Zak looked at Deets.
“He might know,” he said. “What about it, Deets? Any idea why Trask would shoot that Mexican?”
“No tellin’,” Deets said. “He might’ve looked at Trask crosswise.”
“We may never know,” Zak said. He started to walk to his horse. “Let’s keep moving. There’s another old stage stop about a day’s ride from here. Trask might hole up there tonight.”
“You think so?” O’Hara asked.
“I echo Deets there. No telling what Trask might do, but he’ll go there to see if the two men they put there are still alive.”
O’Hara looked at Colleen as Zak climbed back up in the saddle.
A knowing look spread across her face.
“He won’t find them alive, will he, Zak?” she said.
“Not unless they’ve been resurrected. I only know of one such case of that.”
“You’re not only crass and heartless,” she said, “you’re also sacrile
gious, Zak Cody.”
“I wish you’d quit calling me by both my names,” he said. “You make me think of my mother when she was mad at me.”
“Well, I’m not your mother, but you do make me mad.”
O’Hara opened his mouth to say something, but wisely kept silent.
“Thank God for that,” Zak said with a wry smile. He turned his horse and rode up the slope to where Trask’s trail began.
Behind him, Zak heard Colleen give out an indignant snort.
And he smiled again.
Chapter 21
Zak rode well ahead of the others, following the tracks of Trask’s bunch. The others stopped a few times so that Colleen, her brother, Deets, Scofield, and Rivers could heed calls to nature. Colleen, of course, took longer than the others. Zak stopped to relieve himself a few times, too. They all had to use precious water to wash their hands. Ted guarded his sister when she was occupied with those private tasks, staying at a discreet distance, his rifle at the ready.
Zak came across a saddle, saw where Trask and the others had stopped to strip it from the riderless horse. A few yards away he saw a discarded bridle. Attached to the saddle was an empty rifle scabbard, which he did not examine. He saw the tracks left by the horse the outlaws shooed away. He scanned the terrain all around but saw no sign of the abandoned horse.
A while later the tracks left the rough country and joined the road. Zak saw that all of the riders moved much faster over the washed-out road. There were clumps of mud thrown up by the horses’ hooves when they rode at a gallop. He dismounted and broke open a few mud balls to gauge how old they were. Trask, he figured, was now at least two hours ahead of them, perhaps more.
When he reached the road, he stopped and waited for O’Hara and the others to join him.
“So,” Ted said, “Trask is taking to the road.”
“And picking up the pace. He’s a good two hours ahead of us, maybe three. More like three, I’d say.”
“That’s a good long stretch,” O’Hara said.
“We can’t make it up, for sure. We have to spare our horses. Look at that sky. By mid-afternoon we’ll be sweating rivers.”
O’Hara looked up at the sky, saw the swirls of decimated clouds, the basking loaves floating on separate seas of blue, the grated remnants of white carpets floating in the high ether. The sun was blinding by then, coursing slow and blazing toward its noon zenith.