Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635) (10 page)

A world-rattling thunderclap woke him. Northwest whinnied. For a second, Colter thought the canyon walls were collapsing on top of him. A lightning bolt blasted the bank of the arroyo just outside the cave, and the redhead leaped nearly a foot straight up off his rump.

Brimstone fetor filled his nostrils. The lightning played along his retinas the way he'd once seen it sizzle along the rim of a steel stock tank.

It took him a long time to get back to sleep.

When he did, he dreamed of Alegria's warm bed and of sunlight caressing him. It was a miserable dream, because while he could see the delicious light, he could not feel its warmth—only the chill of a frozen steel blade sandwiching his beaten body.

He woke and lifted his head from his chest. He felt a patch of warmth on his left cheek and shoulder. Looking out of the cave mouth, he blinked against lemon sunlight angling into the canyon from a clear blue sky and penetrating the cave's opening. Delectable warmth from a sun he'd begun to think had burned itself out.

“Oh, Lord,” he said, feeling the warmth begin to penetrate the chill that still held him fast. Steam rose from the canyon floor—gauzy yellow snakes rising in the sunlight to gently caress the far canyon wall still purple with the lingering night.

Northwest snorted. Colter turned to look at the horse standing facing him and flicking his ears. Colter had opened his mouth to speak, but something to the far left of the horse caught his eye, and he jerked back against the cave wall with a start, his heart fluttering.

Just enough sunlight tumbled into the cave to reveal a man in a gray hat sitting back in the shadows amongst the rocks, aiming a rifle at Colter's heart.

Chapter 15

Colter reached for his rifle leaning against the wall to his right and racked a shell into the chamber so loudly that Northwest lifted his head with a start, snorting. Colter aimed the Henry out from his right hip at the hombre pulling down on him from the cave's heavy purple shadows. He could just make out the man's figure and the rifle in his hands limned with sunlight whose intensity was greatly diminished back there.

He stared at the shooter, his racing pulse gradually slowing. The man wasn't moving. There seemed an unnatural stiffness in the silhouette.

Cautiously, Colter said, “Hey.”

The shadow did not move.

Colter got his stiff legs under him and hauled himself to his feet. He strode slowly across the cave floor, angling toward the left rear corner, keeping his Henry aimed at the man-shaped shadow, and stopped. He frowned down at the bleached skull with gaping black mouth and eyes and nose sockets looking both bizarre and ridiculous in an overlarge metal helmet crusted with grit and grime with only a few patches of gray showing through the spiderwebs.

The skeleton, lounging back against the wall with one leg curled beneath it, wore a steel breastplate with a ridge down the front, and metal plates on his thighs. Fibers of some long-moldered clothing clung to its bony shins, and bits of leather from rotted boots clung by threads to its otherwise bare, skeletal feet and ankles.

A wooden arrow, minus feathers, protruded from the ribs just beneath the breastplate, angling down toward the skeleton's left thigh. Also resting on the skeleton's thigh was a short, stocky rifle, most of the ancient wood having flaked away from the badly tarnished barrel, the end of which flared like a funnel. Colter's sluggish, half-frozen brain recalled the word for the ancient Spanish firearm: blunderbuss.

The conquistador must have crawled in here a long, long time ago, after some skirmish with Indians, and died.

Colter continued to stare down at the skeleton, feeling an added chill climbing his spine. The man's right index finger—merely a slender, jointed bone, was still curled through the blunderbuss's trigger guard. When he'd died, he must have still been expecting an Indian to charge in here after him.

The round eye sockets stared blankly up at Colter. Inside the left one, a small black spider was climbing around. Somehow, the skull seemed to be grinning at him knowingly, jeeringly, and Colter felt a shudder ripple through him.

He stepped back away from the dead man and turned to his horse, who was regarding Colter with a faint look of castigation in his eyes. “Sorry, Northwest,” Colter said, holding his rifle in one hand while caressing the dun's long snout with the other. “I reckon that dead hombre's why you didn't want to come in here last night, huh? Just glad I didn't know about him, or I wouldn't have got what little sleep I did.”

He grabbed Northwest's reins, leading the horse out of the cave and over to the bank of the arroyo, along which grew several varieties of grasses, all of which looked nourishing for the dun. In the arroyo itself, the flood had diminished to a slow-moving creek, which appeared only two or three feet deep. Oddly, even after all the floodwater he'd swallowed, he was thirsty. Northwest probably was, too, but Colter didn't want to risk leading the mount down the slippery back, fearing he'd stumble and fall. Swinging around, he started back to the cave to fetch a cooking pot he could fill with water, and stopped abruptly, staring at the ridge wall.

The cave in which Colter and Northwest had spent the night was not the only cave in the ridge wall. There was another one about twenty yards to the left of it, and more beyond, with more above in tiers, sort of like rooms in a sprawling hotel, with ledges fronting their recessed mouths. Colter stepped back and raised a shaky hand to point as he counted the caves, stopping when he got to twelve because he couldn't see beyond the slight bend in the cliff face about fifty yards to his left.

Some of the caves were fronted by dilapidated ladders made of poles and what appeared to be hemp or rawhide, and rising to the next tier above. Some of the ladders lay on the ledges, crumbling. As Colter scrutinized the cliff face, he realized that it wasn't the actual face of the cliff at all. What he was looking at was a veritable mountain of piled adobe blocks forming a large building of sorts constructed against the cliff, the caves being individual rooms—what one might call apartments. Colter had seen similar Indian ruins in canyons near Camp Grant in Arizona, and there were even a few near the Lunatic Range in south-central Colorado. He'd heard about one near Durango that was almost as large as the city of Denver, and would put this one to shame.

Colter looked across the arroyo, to the other side of the canyon beyond a swirling, sunlit fog. Set back against that cliff wall were more of the same man-made caves built into a giant building made of large adobe blocks. Some of the cave mouths had collapsed, and almost all the ladders over there were gone. Birds wheeled in and out of the black gaps, squealing in the rookery for breakfast, their wings flashing in the warming morning sunlight.

“I'll be damned,” Colter said, running his damp sleeve across his mouth, vaguely enjoying the sunlight bathing him. “Never know what you're gonna run into, do you? Just lucky this canyon wasn't filled with banditos.”

As the other one had been. . . .

He went back into the cave, or apartment, or whatever the hell you'd call it, and felt another swath of chicken flesh rise over him when he raked his eyes across the dead conquistador and his oddly shaped blunderbuss again. He grabbed his soogan and dug around in his saddlebags, pulling out the tin pot he usually boiled beans in. He unrolled his blankets, draped them over a shrub to dry in the sun, then carried the pot down to the arroyo and filled it.

He let the mud and grit settle to the bottom, then took a long drink of the cold water, refilled the pot, and brought it up to where Northwest cropped the grass contentedly, giving his tail frequent satisfied flicks and snorting. Colter set the pot on a low rock near the horse and looked around, giving the canyon a thorough survey, looking for any sign of trouble.

Deeming himself and Northwest alone, he kicked out of his boots and then shucked out of his clothes and the poultice that Alegria had wrapped him in. He laid his duds and boots out where the sun could dry them. Naked from head to toe, he lay down on the damp clay that the sun had already warmed, and loosed a sigh of contentment as the sun began baking the chill from his bones.

He ground his shoulders and buttocks into the warm earth and groaned again. Before he knew it, he was asleep.

The heat woke him when the sun was high in the sky and burning through his eyelids. He got up, feeling only a tenderness in all the places in which the floodwaters had bruised him. His ribs still ached almost as badly as before, and he wished he had another poultice, but the dry air and sun would have to fix him.

His clothes were dry. So were his blankets. He hoped he could find some dry wood, as well, because he intended to build a fire and keep one burning for warmth and cooking, though all the food in his saddlebags was likely waterlogged and fouled and inedible. When he'd gathered all the dry and semidry wood he could find, he'd go out and try to shoot a rabbit or a quail or two, though he didn't like the idea of popping a cap out here and giving his position away. He doubted Machado's men would have followed him through such a storm, or that soldiers from Camp Grant would have penetrated this far into Mexico, but while he did not fear the grave, he wouldn't mind reaching his twentieth birthday.

Since he'd been born, he might as well live as long as he could.

Somehow, despite the “Mark of Satan” on his cheek, he still hoped to have a normal life someday, though he had a vague, unsettling notion that such hope was a child's fairy tale.

Armed with only his rifle, which he took the time to disassemble and clean, and missing his lost Remington, he walked back along the arroyo in the direction from which he and Northwest had been so unceremoniously carried. He didn't have to walk far before he saw several
javelinas
grubbing around a mesquite near a feeder creek to the main arroyo, snorting up beans that had likely been ripped off the tree by the storm. There were three of the wild pigs. Salivating at the imagined smell and taste of the roasted meat—he and Tappin had practically lived off the wild boars at Camp Grant—he got down and crawled until he was snug between a paloverde and a cracked boulder that had leaf-speckled rainwater still puddled on its surface. He dropped a small but plump pig with one shot, grinding his teeth against the echoing of the report's angry crack around the ridges. The echoes seemed to take an hour to die, though it was probably only about five seconds.

Too long in this dangerous country.

Colter hustled over to the dead but quivering
javelina
and, with the knife he kept in his boot, deftly dressed and quartered the pig, leaving the innards steaming beneath the paloverde. He carried one-quarter of the meat back to his camp on his shoulder, grunting against the strain on his battered body. Riding Northwest out to retrieve the rest, he wrapped the meat in its own hide and lashed the bundle behind his saddle with rope. He returned to camp, stowed the meat in the cool cave, away from the flies, and got to work building a fire just inside the cavern with the flint and steel he always kept on hand, sulfur matches often being scarce and unreliable.

For tinder, he used a long-abandoned bird's nest found in one of the other caves. He pulled the tightly woven nest apart and fed the fledgling flame a few strands of dried grass and animal fur at a time, until the one flame became two, then three, and the fire began to consume the rest of the nest in a rush. He added the driest and smallest bits of wood. When the fire was on its way, he added some of the larger stuff and piled the rest of the branches close to the ring so it would dry out faster.

He spent the rest of the afternoon gathering more wood, not caring if it was dry or not. It would dry out fast in the sun by the fire, as he intended to keep the fire going all night and maybe even all day tomorrow. He needed to stay warm, and he needed to rest and heal after his drift down the arroyo. And Northwest could use a few days' cropping the wild grasses.

Besides, he had nothing else to do or anywhere else to go.

He built a spit from the green branches of a willow and roasted a quarter of the pig, leaving the rest of the meat for later. He ate ravenously, chewing the meat off the spit and cleaning the rib bones until they shone in the firelight. He had no coffee, as it had all washed away in the arroyo, but the tequila bottle he'd wrapped in several spare shirts had been spared. Washing the pork down with tequila, and feeling a warm glow wash over him as he sat by the fire in the cave entrance, he watched the sun go down and the stars spread out and sparkle over the canyon.

He no longer minded the presence of the dead conquistador. In fact, he'd started to feel comforted by the dead man's company and, after a few shots of strong drink, found himself calling him Hector. “Look at that, Hector,” he said, sitting back against the cave wall, the fire snapping and crackling before him as he gave his gaze to the sky. “Shooting star! I wonder how far away. . . .”

He slept soundly, warmly, waking only to build up the fire. He kept one ear open for sounds of interlopers, but all he heard were coyotes and, once, the distant screech of a hunting mountain lion.

The next morning he led Northwest down the arroyo a ways, in the direction from which they'd come, to a game trail that led down into the wash and where the grass grew lush. He hobbled the horse in the grass and then walked along the canyon, hoping to maybe find some quail eggs for breakfast, and was surprised and relieved when his Remington appeared, embedded in the thick, still-damp clay of the wash's bottom. He scooped up the old, mud-caked gun, took it back to his camp, where he roasted more of the
javelina
, and set to work taking apart the pistol and cleaning all the parts. Now if he could find his hat, which he'd also lost in the flooded arroyo. He'd have to find another one soon or the Mexican sun would fry him.

He'd just finished his breakfast as well as loading the Remy with fresh, dry cartridges when from down-canyon to his left, Northwest gave a warning whinny.

Colter scrambled to his feet, kicked dirt on the fire, and, despondent that the world was shouldering into this quiet sanctuary, cast a nervous glance up-canyon. Biting out a quiet curse, he rolled the Remington's oiled cylinder across his forearm.