“Just watch what I do, Johnny, and you start on the other side. We're going to build walls, so's we can light us a fire, stay warm all night.”
Ben began shoving spruce boughs against the trees, weaving them into those he placed at the base of the next tree. John did the same until they had a solid wall around the opening in the center. Ben had told John to use the short boughs for the walls. They then put the longer branches across the opening at the top, forming a dome. The needles acted like fringed leather on buckskin sleeves, allowing the water to drip off onto the ground using gravity. The top branches of the spruce which were still attached to the trunk gave them what amounted to several roofs over the one they had made with their hands. The walls were thick enough to withstand the wind and keep the top of the dome from caving in on them.
They stripped the horses of their saddles and saddlebags and the bedrolls, carrying them into the shelter through an opening Ben had left at the bottom of one side that could be closed when they were ready to go to sleep.
He and John collected small stones for the fire. It was pitch dark when they finished.
“Now, we get us some squaw wood for kindling,” Ben said.
“What's that?”
“Follow me and I'll show you.”
John followed Ben as he felt his way through the trees. Ben reached up and snatched the dry twigs that grew beneath the needled boughs. He stuffed these under his slicker.
“You'll find this dry wood at near every pine, Johnny. Now, don't get lost and I'll meet you back at the camp. We still need to find some decent deadwood for the fire.”
John found plenty of squaw wood. The small dead branches crackled when he broke them and brought them down. He made himself fat under his slicker and found his way back to the shelter. Ben had already placed his dry squaw wood in the center of the fire ring and had gathered some rotted wood from deadfalls.
“I hope there's more out there,” Ben said. “We need to get enough wood to last the night.”
“I stumbled over some downed logs out there,” John said. “We'll do it.”
In less than an hour, the two men had enough firewood, Ben figured, to last them through most of the night. It was still raining hard, but they were out of the wind inside their shelter. Ben struck a match and touched it to the squaw wood. Flames licked the dry branches. John piled more wood on as the blaze grew higher. The warmth felt good to both of them.
John sniffed the air inside the dome shelter. It smelled of woodsmoke and spruce, fresh-cut wood, a fragrance that seemed to ward off the cold of the ground, the dampness outside. The rain spattered on the branches above them, the sound a soothing patter that was almost hypnotic.
Ben dug out hardtack and some strips of jerky from his saddlebags and offered some to John. They chewed the modest fare, washing down the crumbs and small pieces of meat with water from their canteens.
“Might be we want to set watches, Johnny. One of us stay awake while the other sleeps. No tellin' about them jaspers. Might come sneakin' up on us, even in this rain.”
“All right.”
“I'll take the first one. Get yourself some sleep.”
John was tired. So much had happened that day, he hadn't had time to think about fatigue. Now that he was warmed by the fire, his belly full, he felt his muscles relax and his eyelids grow heavy. He walked outside to relieve himself, then came back in and lay down on his bedroll.
“G'night, Ben,” he said, closing his eyes.
“Sleep tight, Johnny.”
The fire crackled, the rain seethed through the trees in a steady rhythm that lulled him to sleep within a few minutes. The scent of fresh-cut spruce was like a silent accompaniment to the lullaby of the rainfall.
The last thing he thought of was his father. He saw an image form in his mind, clear and vivid as if it were carved out of fine crystal. It seemed to him that he was there by the fire, smoking his pipe, listening to his wife read a poem from a book called
Leaves of Grass
by a man named Walt Whitman. The poem was about the death of Abraham Lincoln, and he could hear his mother's dulcet voice intoning the words, as little Alice lay curled up on the floor at her feet, sound asleep.
“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd . . .”
12
AS SOON AS PETE RUTTER WAS OUT OF EARSHOT OF THE TWO men he had seen with Luke, he put the lash to his horse and rode at breakneck speed along the trail Ollie had followed bringing them all up there, and had taken going back to Fountain Creek. The rippling boom of thunder seemed to intensify his urgency to get away before those two came after him.
It was that pistol, he thought, and the man holding it. A young man, no more than a pup, but something about him, about the way he treated poor old Luke, sent shivers up Pete's spine and made him want to pee his pants. That face and those eyes. Didn't fit right on a man so young, he thought. Cold, hard black eyes. A face like a choir boy, but chiseled out of granite, the jawline hard as iron, and the way he had looked at Luke. That silver-filigreed Colt in his hand, so fine looking, so deadly, like a pretty snake a-settin' in the sunlight, its colors all shiny as satin and bright as a painted jewel box.
And that old bastard with the Yellow Boy. Pete had a furrow in his left shoulder where a .44/40 bullet had burned a crease like he'd been touched with a hot branding iron. And the left side of Pete's face was scratched up as if wild cats had been turned loose on him. The bastard had barked him with that big Henry, shot a bullet into the bark of a pine tree and sent splinters and a chunk square to the side of his head. He had a knot on his cheekbone big as a plum and probably just as purple. It hurt like fire, and that raw wound in his arm was burning with a fever all its own.
Pete was mad and scared, and he whipped his horse over the rocky, treacherous ground, speeding past trees and brush that just blurred in the corners of his eyes. Lightning burst through the black clouds like jagged rivers of mercury, frying the air itself and sending huge thunderboomers through the Sangre de Cristos like a battery of howitzers. Pete was sweating and feverish, but he was putting ground between himself and that old man and that strange boy with a Colt that had to be worth a good thousand dollars if it was worth a penny.
Rutter knew rain was going to catch him. The very air felt heavy and wet to him and every splash of lightning made his skin jump, made him brace himself for the resulting crack of thunder that put spurs to his horse without his having to touch a spur to its tender flank.
Ollie and the others had not tried to conceal their tracks, and they left marks a blind man could follow. The earth was churned up where the ground was hard, intaglioed with hooved impressions where it was soft. The tracks grew fresher, so he knew he was getting close. He would not take the time to stop and squirrel into his slicker. The fear in him was too great. And he kept looking over his shoulder as if expecting the old man and the young man with the engraved Colt to come pounding down on him, their guns blazing, sounding like the bluster of thunder that cannoned over his head.
The air he breathed now had the taint of ozone. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck and arms. He dashed across a rocky flat and into more trees, then down a shallow bank where Ollie and the others had passed. Rutter rode into a clearing that widened into a meadow fringed by evergreens, and the roaring thunder dogged him as he drove his horse on, into a valley ringed by black clouds pushing against each other, setting off electrical charges that turned the darkness into day as lightning crackled in jagged latticework across a wide expanse. Smoke rose from an unseen tree that had been struck, high up on a slope of staggered pines, their tops shrouded in ground-hugging clouds.
Rutter rode right into a thin line of trees that petered out onto a shale-and-rock-strewn flat. A half dozen rifles bristled in a semicircle of men on bended knees, ready to blow him out of the saddle.
Rutter put on the brakes, jerking his reins back hard against his chest. His horse bent its head as the bit dug into its tongue and the corners of its mouth. The horse's rump dipped as its hind hooves dug in and skidded on plates of gray shale.
“Pete, you almost got your damned head blowed off,” Ollie yelled as Rutter's body swayed backward, then forward as the horse came to a halt. Rutter had to grip the saddle horn to keep from being thrown out of the saddle.
Rutter gasped for breath as all of the men stood up and brought their rifles down from their shoulders. They were all wearing black slickers. They looked like a gathering of highwaymen, with their gleaming rifles and coats pulled back to reveal sidearms jutting from their holsters.
“Shit, you liked to scared me to death,” Rutter said, his words rushing from his mouth in a breathy staccato.
“Better put on your soogan, Pete,” Ollie said. “It's going to get mighty wet here pretty quick.”
“Where's Luke?” Army growled.
“Fritz, bring the horses up,” Ollie said. Then he turned back to Pete. “Yeah, where's Luke?”
“I-I reckon he-he's dead,” Pete said, still panting from lack of breath. He hadn't realized how hard he had been riding and now that the juices of fear were subsiding in him, he was tired, his nerves jangling like a sackful of cowbells.
“What the hell?” Ollie said.
Fritz led the horses out from the trees. The other men took their reins from him and mounted.
“Ollie, let's get to that 'dobe camp,” Mort said. “Else we're going to get fried by lightning or drowned by the damned rain.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ollie said, taking the reins of his horse from Fritz. “You got some explaining to do, Pete.”
Pete knew about the old adobe. They had spent the night there on the ride up to the mining camp. It was an old line shack used by sheepherders, long since abandoned, gone to cobwebs, spiders, rats, and mice, littered with the bones of small animals and human fecal matter. It wasn't a palace, but it had a thick sod roof and board shutters. It would keep most of the rain off their backs and be a lot warmer inside than out, once the storm hit.
The adobe cabin sat atop a hillock overlooking a broad shelf that formed part of a valley. There was a decrepit corral and a lean-to where the sheepherders had stored salt and mineral licks and other materials, such as medicines and stock tanks, wagons, and tools. The riders put their horses under the lean-to, tied them up, then stomped inside the filthy adobe while lightning played its light and energy on and inside the swollen black clouds that pressed down over the land. Thunder met thunder in a clash of sound as the storm began to converge and gather strength, the distant clouds already bursting their swollen bellies, dropping rain in dark, gauzy sheets that looked like veils of black ash.
A few minutes after the men entered the 'dobe, carrying their rifles and bedrolls, the wind blew the first smatterings of rain against the outer walls and shot spray inside. The building shook against the onslaught of a powerful gust, and they could almost feel the tug of the wind as it tried to rip off the sod roof.
“Whoo,” Red Dillard exclaimed, “she's a blue norther.”
Mort Anders leaned his rifle in a corner, kicking away little peppercorns of rat shit from under the place where he rested the stock.
“She's a blow,” he said.
The wind licked at the shutters, rattling them as it sucked and pressed against the weathered wood. Then the rain struck the land around the shack, blasted against the mud-brick walls with tremendous force. The sound was like birdshot spattering against the walls and shutters. The wind howled like some wounded beast under the eaves, and the horses neighed in terror from under the lean-to.
As the men settled down and found places to sit or lean, Ollie dropped his gear and walked over to Rutter, his menacing bulk nearly dwarfing the man.
“I want to hear about them two men we missed up at that miner's camp, Pete. You put their lamps out? And what the hell happened to Luke?”
“Luke bought the farm, I reckon, Ollie. And them two miners come down on us like a cartload of shit.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they was comin' after all of us when me and Luke heard 'em. They had their rifles unlimbered and was followin' our tracks.”
“You get a good look at them? And how come you didn't get the drop on 'em and rub 'em out?”
“Me and Luke split up so's we could dust them off when they rode past. Like, you know, we was flankin' 'em. I drew the old geezer, and he had him a Henry forty-four. Looky here what he done to me.”
Pete slipped his slicker from his shoulder and showed everyone the torn shirt, the raw, bloody furrow in the meaty part of his upper arm. “And he barked me with his second shot, liked to took my head clean off.”
He slipped the slicker back on the exposed shoulder and stuck his neck out so that Ollie and the others could see the side of his face that was scratched and scored by exploding pine bark.
“And then you shot that old geezer dead, right, Pete?”
“No, siree, that geezer had my number, sure as shit, and I lit a shuck. I heard some shots over to where Luke had gone and so I circled around with the field glasses to take a look. I figured I could maybe get a shot at the old fart 'cause he headed that way.”
“And then what?” Ollie's query was accusatory, his tone laden with anger and impatience.
“The other jasper was a kid, not even twenty years old, I figured, and he had Luke down, blood all over him like he just butchered a hog.”
“He shot Luke?”
“He gutted him like a fish. Luke was leaking bowels and beggin' the boy to put him out of his misery.”