C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
EIGHT
E
ven the long cold winter that followed wasn't enough punishment to absolve me of my guilt and torment. As one blizzard after another swept down upon the high plains the bitterness inside me refused to leave, and instead seemed frozen inside of me, branded there by the searing bite of the Arctic wind cutting everyday with its ice-bladed knife at my imperfect heart. Each day that I walked down to the corrals and saw my good horse gone I promised myself to be a better man, but the simple sanity of such good intentions eluded me, and I felt not one bit different.
I told myself a thousand times I must be crazy, and cursed myself for the weakness that would eventually drive my family from me. My jealousy had caused a festering sore between Barby and I, and my petty, spiteful actions would pick at it until she could bear me no more. You would think that a man so blessed with a beautiful wife and child as I was would be at ease with the turning of earth, but I seemed determined to destroy what I held so dear. If life has taught me anything, it's that the entire human race is as crazy as a shithouse rat, and only through denial and false pretense does it appear otherwise. A little bit of Nero prances madly in the heart of us all, ready to burn down Rome at the drop of a hat.
Hidden from the cold behind the icy collar of my buffalo coat, I rode the frozen prairie daily, wondering if it was Billy that my wife loved and ashamed of such thinking. I followed the long drift of the cattle southward, in a vain attempt to see that my meager herd survived the brutal cold. While my family hugged close to the warm hearth of the home fire, I ventured out to ride alone upon the windswept expanses, with emergency as my excuse.
My travels became aimless, and I stayed out days between the end of one storm and the threat of another. The cold, hard lump of my saddle served as a stone pillow for my head, but my sleep in the cold wilderness failed to bring about anything but tortured feet and fingers. On the brink of the coming snow, I rode up to the Association drift fence on the Canadian, half snow blind, and with a wolf hunger gnawing at my guts.
The last snow was drifted high in places along the fence, and cattle lowed sadly along its expanse for as far as the eye could see. The norther starting to blow had more of their kind marching southward, instinct and their dumb, bovine brains driving them with the wind to die a frozen death against Association wire. I could already picture them piled high, bloated and frozen inside snowdrifts they could not escape.
Visibility was slowly getting worse as the wind whipped up snow on the ground to mix with the fresh snowflakes starting to fall from the sky, and I could just make out the forms of a group of riders headed my way. I could tell by the way they sat their saddles that they had been out in the elements as long as I. They came on with chins tucked down inside their coats, and their horses carrying their heads slanted away from the bite of the crosswind, backs humped against the cold and the prod of their riders' insistent spurs.
It was a hard group of men who faced me with weary, sunken eyes measuring the world with no nonsense at all. The clench of their haggard, unshaven jaws was made harder by the cold. There were five of them, and three of them rode Rocking Chair horses. Billy and Andy were among them, and I thought it strange that they should be north of the fence when their range lay south of the river.
It was the first time I'd faced Billy since I'd sold Dunny, and I uneasily sought to decipher if he knew what I had done. If he knew, he didn't show it, or bring the matter up.
“Are you ready to cut wire?” Billy asked, his voice brittle and smoky as a gust chilled his teeth to the quick.
“I am.”
I had no tools upon my person, except a rope and my two strong hands, but they came ready with gear more suited to the work. As we rode to a place in the fence they'd chosen, my study of their obvious preparation was enough for Billy to understand the question I was fixing to ask.
“The Association has ordered riders out to keep anybody from cutting their fence and letting the drift through, but only a few old diehards are going to weather this storm when they could be sitting in a bunkhouse tending the fire.” His voice carried to me on the downwind side.
“Rocking Chair cattle don't travel against the wind, but a few good men in the north have offered a bounty should any man be brave enough to cut this fence,” he added. Money was just added incentive to do what Billy probably would have done anyway, had he come upon the fence that day.
“Why don't they do it themselves?”
“One of them and two of his hands tried a week ago west of here, and got turned back at the point of a fence patrol's guns.”
“They'll have to shoot me if they catch me, because I ain't watching my cattle die against that fence,” I promised.
“Let's set things right.” Billy pitched a loop upon a fencepost.
The fence creaked sharply as chilled metal and wood succumbed to the pull, and a long section of barbwire fell to the ground. While others cut wire with axes and pliers, I slapped my stiff rope against my leg to beat some life into it. With my saddle horn and my horse's strong back, I merrily joined the destruction. By the time the sure-enough blizzard was upon us we had a mile of fence torn down, and were scattered out to the north funneling the drifting cattle into the hole we'd made.
Maddened by our success, we split up in two groups, to open up other sections of fence before the blizzard drove us to shelter. I rode east with Billy and Andy, thinking that most of my cattle would hit the fence in that direction. We worked with the industry of Satan's minions, slaving gleefully in forges of hellfire, impervious to the growing onslaught of bad weather enfolding us in blowing white. By the time we finished our third hole, I could barely see Andy standing twenty feet from me.
“Let them eat the breaks of the river clean, the Association be damned,” Andy cheered in the storm. We watched the cattle already pouring through, and knew that if the weather continued the drift might come from as far as Nebraska by winter's end.
I tried to tell him we had better find shelter, but my voice wouldn't carry to him. Billy rode to us, and motioned for us to mount up and go. We followed him nose to tail, sure that he had an idea where to go to keep us from freezing to death. The rush of adrenaline I'd felt earlier had left, and I feared we'd be lost in the snow, blind as if we walked on the pitch-black side of the moon.
We'd drug some sections of fence entirely away, while others we had just pulled down to let the cattle walk over. Billy led us through one of those openings we'd just managed to lay over, and the metallic screech of wire rent the air. Billy's horse viciously kicked out a hind foot snagged in the wire, and lunged his entire weight wildly against the end of it. I was sure I saw the horse go down to the ground, but my own horse was shying under me at the excitement. Billy and his horse were just madly pirouetting shapes seen dimly through the storm.
The wire was jumping and jerking with a life of its own, and I knew Billy was down and his horse still entangled in the wire. I fought my frightened mount through the threatening maze of barbs to find Billy pinned down under his thrashing, crazed horse. The animal jerked madly, each jerk burying the wire deeper into his flesh, and the pain and fear making him fight the pull that much harder.
Before I could take any action wire snapped and gave, and Billy's horse lunged to its feet in a run with Billy dragging the ground wildly, one boot hung in the stirrup. I put the spurs to my horse, and he flew along on the wind in the wake of Billy's bouncing form that threatened to disappear before me.
I managed to get beside Billy's runaway horse, but I couldn't get to my pistol fast enough for I'd belted my heavy buffalo coat tight to keep out the wind. Seconds mattered dearly as my friend was drug over the rough terrain. Before a rock smashed his head, or a wild hoof stomped the life from him I leaped from my saddle upon his horse's neck.
My hands latched on to the bridle, and I fought to keep my legs from under the churn of the running bronc's legs. It was all I could do to hang on, and my efforts to stop the horse only seemed to make him run faster. With one hand over the far side of the horse's neck and holding the bridle cheek piece, I risked falling away by reaching to grab the shank of his bit on the near side with my other hand. A strong pull wasn't enough and I tugged with all my might, succeeding in jerking the crazed animal's head around, and sending us crashing end over end to the ground.
The rolling horse was just a blur to me, and the crushing weight that loomed over me for an instant somehow avoided my body. I scrambled on hands and knees to press myself across the horse's head and neck in a frantic attempt to pin him down. The fall must have broken his neck, because he died under me with a deep groan from his massive lungs and one last violent shudder. I looked around furiously for Billy, but found only his empty boot lodged against the top of his stirrup.
Billy's body was a lump in the snow that I crashed over as I ran blindly back along the way we came. I don't think I could have found him in a million years if I hadn't stepped right on him. I feared the worst, but he stirred under me as I righted myself.
“Are you hurt bad?” I asked.
He groaned and muttered something I couldn't make out, and I knew there was no way that he had avoided at least some broken bones. I didn't know the country well enough to get him to help, and my horse was surely still traveling fast in the direction he was going when I left him.
There are such things as miracles, and Billy shoved off my hands and sat up by his own power.
“I'm just skinned up some,” he growled.
Andy couldn't find his butt with both hands in the dark, but he rode a hundred yards in a blinding blizzard right to where we were.
“Can you ride?” I asked Billy.
“I'm all right. My leg's a little stiff, but I think nothing's broke.”
Andy dismounted, and despite Billy's protests we shoved him in the saddle. I motioned for Andy to climb up behind him.
“Is your mind steady enough to remember where you were taking us?” I pressed my head close to Billy's thigh in order that he could hear me.
He merely nodded and kicked the horse forward while I grabbed hold of the passing tail and drug along wearily behind. I don't know how long we traveled, because I was so cold and tired that minutes may have seemed like hours. I badly wanted to live, and I was filled with the simple inspiration to keep my hand wrapped in that horse's tail, even if it meant getting drug when I stumbled.
We started over the lip of a steep grade, and I braced myself against the horse's hindquarters. Blind to my surroundings I thought I felt the ground leveling out, and in that moment I fell and I lost my grip on the only thing keeping me from certain death. My hands grasped wildly ahead of me for the feel of horsehair, but found only the cold, hard ground and snow between my fingers. I braced one knee under me and surged up with the last energy remaining in my cold-weary body. My shoulder smashed against something hard, and a hand slapped my face. Dumb and cold I stared at the face before me, and after a long study recognized that it was Billy shouting at me.
I couldn't understand what he was saying, but I took hold of him and followed where he led. It seemed we only took a dozen steps and I was lying on the floor of a dugout and Billy was fighting the wind to get the door closed.
Long after Andy had a fire going I lay on the floor, wanting nothing more than the comfort of a long, deep sleep. The hard toe of Andy's boot in my ribs moved me to the fire, and the three of us warmed our shivering bodies before the flames. We were all too cold to speak, and we suffered silently as warmth and life flooded back into our flesh.
Unsure how long we would be trapped, we fed the fire stingily and huddled close to its feeble warmth. The storm lasted the night and into the next morning, and our fire started with a pack rat's nest soon ate up the wood of what little broken-down furnishings the dugout possessed. When the wind no longer howled and hissed over the dugout, Andy rose and looked out the door at the frigid aftermath that was the new morning. From where I sat at the fire I could see between Andy's knees the frozen corpse of his horse lying just outside the door.
The thought of how close a blizzard had come to finishing me off yet again left me without words, and I brooded while Billy and Andy stood at the door and discussed our options for removal. I was thinking of my family miles to the north, and wondering if they too stared into a fire, when Billy sat back down beside me.
“There's no snow falling, and the wind has just about quit,” he said.
I felt no relief at the news, and in fact I felt nothing at all, being numb of both body and spirit.
“You saved my life back there,” he said plainly. “I thought I was a goner for sure.”
“You'd have done the same for me.”
“Uh-huh, but I thank you just the same.”
“That's what friends are for.” And as soon as I said it I knew it was true.