The jack moved cautiously back toward the spilled grain. Will fired, taking the rabbit between its long ears and flipping it into the air in an awkward sommersault.
Will struggled to his feet, unsteady, dizzy, and within a few moments he fell on his ass. He cursed again. He needed the jack and it was a sure bet he wasn’t going to be able to stroll over and pick it up.
It took him a while and a lot of hurt, but eventually, on his hands and knees, the sun flogging him, he made it to the jack. He drew his knife from his boot, cut the rabbit’s throat, and drank the still hot, copper-tasting blood. He then split the jack up the middle, dumped its intestines, and gnawed at the raw, bloody, stringy flesh.
There was some shade—precious little of it—begrudgingly yielded by a few desert pines on one side of the water. Will took his jack and crawled to the shade and the water. He drank, ate some more rabbit, and then he slept.
He slept through the day until dusk, plagued by dreams of lakes of fire and flaming demons chasing him, catching him, embracing him. He fought his way to consciousness and when he was fully awake he gently touched his face, for the first time feeling the tissue-thin ripped sacks of ruptured blisters. He stayed under the scraggly trees until he felt he may be able to move.
The remains of the jackrabbit were next to him, barely visible in the fading light. The carcass was warm now, not with the warmth of life but rather with the grotesque warmth of a dead creature long exposed to the sun. He gnawed off a piece of flesh—which had already begun to stink—gagged, swallowed, gagged again, and finally kept the meat down. Two more mouthfuls were all he could bear; he tossed the jack into the prairie.
Will’s mind wasn’t working properly, normally. It took him several minutes to figure out that the snuffling and crunching he heard was the pinto moving about, twenty or so feet from him. The image of the horse in his mind led to the picture of the horse drinking, and at that very moment the intensity of his own thirst almost strangled him. His tongue, fat, sandy, desert dry, filled his mouth and was a lump of foul and useless desiccated meat in his mouth.
Will realized he had to get to that puddle or he’d die. And he couldn’t die; he hadn’t yet taken the revenge that was rightfully his, which now included the killings of Austin and Gentle Jane. He unbuckled his gun belt and let it fall to the ground. He braced himself with a hand to either side, and with all the strength he could find in himself, he pushed to his knees. Panting as if he’d just run a mile, he scuffled his way to his feet. The earth moved under him, undulating, shifting, and jagged spots of red drifted about in front of his eyes. He fell face-first, slamming against the ground with enough force to bring an involuntary yelp from him—a feminine sound, and one he couldn’t recall ever making before. He tried to curse but he couldn’t force words past his swollen tongue, and the attempt started his lips seeping blood once again.
One piece of luck came Will’s way: the pinto had wandered to the sinkhole and was sucking water. Will had a direction; he wouldn’t have to crawl about on his hands and knees seeking the water. The horse moved away as Will dragged himself to the water. His hands found it first and he pushed himself forward, falling chest-first into the muddy, brackish liquid, straining to keep his nose in the air, his mouth sucking water frantically.
The foul water seemed to clear not only his voracious thirst but his befuddled mind. His hands had sunk into the soil beneath the water beyond his wrists—but what he felt was neither sand nor dirt. It was clay.
Will recalled the time when, as a boy, he’d stood gawking at a barn fire and a swarm of hornets found his face and arms. Someone—a neighbor?—had plastered the stings with clay. Its coolness not only eased the fiery pain, but as it dried, it drew out the stingers the hornets had planted in him. Could it help with his burns? Hell, he thought, I got nothin’ to lose.
Will glopped handfuls of the clay, which had the consistency somewhere between a thick liquid and a spongy solid, and spread it over his face and arms. The clay smelled dank, but it wasn’t an unpleasant scent—it was much like that of freshly turned soil in the spring. It was wonderfully cool, and it seemed to draw the pain in the same fashion the clay had drawn the hornet stingers many years ago. He drank more water and then crawled back to the desert pines, which were now merely vague shapes in the dark. He slept deeply and dreamlessly.
The pinto eased his way to Will and, after several moments, nudged him with his nose. This man was acting like no man he’d seen before in his four years of life. The horse had been saddle broke at an early age, and sprint-raced against short horses—what some folks called quarter horses—at age three. He’d never been beaten. He’d known nothing but kindness and feed until the outlaws stole him and burned his owner’s home and barn, and that was only a week or ten days ago. His dim mind told him that this man would eventually rise up and give him fresh, sweet hay and scoops of grain. There was no reason to run off into the prairie. Regardless of his strange actions, this man would take care of him.
He nudged Will again, with no result. After a few minutes, the pinto went back to scrounging the ground for dropped hay.
Dawn was near when a strange, abrasive sound cut through Will’s sleep. Dried clay cracked from his hand and arm as he drew his Colt and thumbed back the hammer.
The sound came again, halted, and then restarted, as whatever it was came closer to Will.
The pinto huffed at the sound, stared in its direction for several moments, and then went back to grazing, obviously not feeling threatened.
The sun was almost clear of the horizon before Will could see what he’d been listening to, weapon ready. A dog—underfed, its mousy coat bare in places from mange—was dragging a stout wooden post attached to its neck by a six-foot strand of heavy wire. The dog, belly to the ground, pulled himself ahead with his forepaws and pushed with his rears. He managed to move the heavy post a few inches with each attempt. Every so often he’d stop, raise his nose to sniff the air—making sure he was headed to the water, Will thought—before starting out again.
Will was on his feet before he realized he was standing. He was weak and still in pain, but the dizziness and the red spots were gone. He approached the dog, pistol at his side.
The dog looked up at Will, its chestnut eyes neither pleading nor begging, but simply acknowledging the man’s presence. Will looked more closely. Frothy blood dripped from the creature’s open mouth, obviously from trying to chew through the wire to free himself. The wire, wrapped twice around his neck, had cut through his coat and into the flesh.
Will forgot his own pain. “You was either a meal or a watchdog,” he said aloud, “an’ them killers just left you when they deserted this camp.” He eyed the post. “Musta took you some time to haul that thing outta the ground, dog, an’ the scent of water musta been drivin’ you nuts. But you kept right on tuggin’. You got a set of balls on you, dog—either that or you’re too stupid to know when to give up.”
The dog’s eyes and ears pointed at Will as the man spoke, as if taking in and understanding each word. Will holstered his pistol. “Let’s get that goddamn wire from ’round your neck,” he said, crouching stiffly next to the dog. He needed both hands to unwrap the wire, and he fully realized that the animal might go for either of his arms or his throat as soon as he was loose.
Will decided it was worth the chance to set the poor creature free.
The wire hadn’t been knotted; its end was twisted around the cruel collar and was easy enough to loosen. The dog’s body trembled as Will touched the wire and his neck, but he didn’t offer to growl or snarl. With a pair of quick, circular sweeps, Will got the wire free. The dog was motionless for a long moment, and then he was on his feet and in a shambling run to the water. He flung his body into it, mouth wide open, and drank, his tongue moving listlessly as the muddy water ran down his throat. When his thirst was sated for the moment he stood up to his hocks in the water and grunted as loud as a sow in warm mud.