As Will watched, three events took place simultaneously: A terrific slash of lightning speared the ground not thirty feet from the rider, decimating a small boulder. At the same moment Shark threw himself at the rider, sinking his razor-sharp fangs into the back of the man’s neck, just below his head, hurling him from his horse to the ground. The rider screamed but his scream was cut short as Shark, his grip secure, snapped his entire body to one side, severing the man’s spine.
At the same time, the brilliant, searing white flash illuminated another rider to Will, moving in the opposite direction, hunched in his saddle, as his cohort had been. He wasn’t quite thirty feet away when the lightning struck and Shark wrenched the other from his horse, and the lightning gave the second rider a view of an impossibly rapid attack—and he heard the crunching snap that ended the outlaw’s life. Further, the attacking creature was flying, already in the air when the lightning struck.
“Wampus!” the rider screamed in a high-pitched, panicked voice and buried his heels into his horse’s sides. Slipping, sliding, almost going down, scrambling in the mud, the horse whirled, and, running almost blindly, raced off into the storm, his rider lashing him with the reins.
Will’s pistol had been in his hand the slightest part of a second after the opposite-riding man and horse came into view. He shook the rain from his .45 and holstered it. Sending Shark after the second renegade made no sense, given the storm and the darkness. Further, the rider would be constantly looking behind him and a lucky shot could drop the dog.
“What the hell?” he asked himself. “Wampus?” The word ticked something far back in Will’s mind, but didn’t bring an image or idea to him.
It didn’t take too long to catch the dead outrider’s cow pony; the animal was underfed, parasite ridden, and scarred with spur and lash welts and cuts. Will approached him slowly, murmuring to him, and was able to take hold of a rein. He saw why his pressure on the rein stopped the diseased horse so easily: the bit in the animal’s mouth was a long-shanked, cruel Mexican bit that cut into the horse’s mouth, stopping and turning him not through training but through pain.
Will was surprised to see that the saddle and saddlebags weren’t Mex junk. The saddle was Texas made. Will could tell that as he ran a finger along the stitching, which was straight and waxed and tight, and the fenders and stirrups hung as they should. He released the cinches—the saddle was a double rig—and unbuckled the chest strap. When he hefted the weight off the animal’s back the horse shook himself like a dog coming out of water. Will cut the latigo that jammed the bit into the horse’s mouth and eased the bridle down the pony’s snout. Both his hands were bloody as he removed the bit. He twisted the seven-inch shanks into shapes that would never allow the bit to be used again, bent the mouthpiece in the middle, and tossed the whole bloody affair out into the prairie.
It took a few moments for the horse to realize that he was free—and then he was gone, as far away from any man as he could get, hooves pounding the sloppy, treacherous mud. The only way a man would stop that horse was with a bullet.
Will went through the saddlebags. He found handfuls of .45 ammunition in each, a bit of beef jerky, a knife that was dull enough to be useless, which he tossed aside, a few double eagles, and a deck of playing cards with pictures of naked women with mules. Those, too, he tossed onto the prairie. He loaded his pistol, inserted rounds in his gun belt, and left the balance of the bullets in the saddlebags.
The dead outlaw had nothing worth taking. His .45 was a piece of junk: grips taped, rusted, trigger as stiff as an oak tree.
The rifle, a single-shot, rusted, sightless chunk of scrap metal, was no better. Will figured firing the goddamned thing would be suicide; the round would probably explode within the corroded mechanism and barrel, blowing his head off. He hurled it into the dark. The gun belt was much the same: worn, uncared for, the cartridge loops uneven and sure to scatter ammunition at a gallop. The man carried neither a hide-out gun—a derringer—or a decent knife. Will and Shark left the corpse for the vultures, Will carrying the saddle over his shoulder.
It would have made sense to fetch the pinto and ride him back to the saddle, but Will wanted some time. The word wampus continued to play in his mind. It was too familiar to recall, and yet it was barely familiar at all. “Damn,” Will cursed as he slogged through the mud.
The storm had calmed considerably, moving on, the rain little more than sprinkles. The dark clouds that had generated the storm had, of course, scudded on their way, and the half-moon shed some light.
The pinto was as Will had left him, although stirred-up mud around him showed he’d done a good deal of nervous shifting about due to the lightning and thunder. Will eased the tattered saddle blanket over the pinto’s back and smoothed it, particularly at the withers—the place where galls are most likely to occur under a new saddle. Will flipped the stirrups over the seat and settled the saddle in position on the horse’s back. The fit was closer to good than to fair, and later, minor adjustments could be made to the seat, cantle, and tree. He wasn’t sure that the horse had ever carried a saddle. He was an Indian pony, and most Indians considered saddles to be merely excess weight, a silly device for a poor rider who can’t control his animal. The pinto stood well under the saddle, though, offering no resistance. “I shoulda known it,” Will said aloud. “You was stolen well after you was saddle broke.”
He pulled the front cinch and set the back cinch, leaving an inch between the leather strap and the pinto’s belly. That strap was intended not to secure the saddle but to brace it and allow it to rise a bit off the horse’s back when the rider was roping or descending a steep grade.
The hackamore and the single rein were fine—the animal was used to both. Will moved both stirrups down a notch. At the same time he looked carefully over the workmanship of the seat, stirrups, and fenders. The leather needed oil and the buckles were showing some rust, but all in all, the saddle wasn’t a bad piece of work.
Will stepped into a stirrup and climbed aboard, setting off at a walk.
Lightning struck not far away, sluicing mud and stone into the air, dropping Shark to his crouching attack position, lips curved back over his eyeteeth, the whites of his eyes showing, his body like a tightly coiled spring. The lightning, the dog, and the blast of thunder brought wampus back to Will’s recollection.
“I ain’t scared of no horse or nothin’ else,” an old Indian bronc buster told him when Will was still a boy, maybe a dozen years old. “ ’Cept, a course, a wampus. That’s a critter the Great Spirit chased down to earth—meanest goddamn thing a man could come across. They can fly, Will, an’ they can kill in a heartbeat. Once one has his eye on you, why, you’re gone, boy. Ain’t nobody escapes a wampus.”
“You ever seen one?”
“If I had I wouldn’t be settin’ here. I seen drawings an’ heard stories, though.”
Will forced a nervous laugh. “That’s jus’ a superstition. Don’t mean nothing.”
“No? I seen the remainders of a fella, a white fella, a wampus took after. Purely tore that man apart—worse’n a painter or bear could ever do. You jus’ pray to that god a yours you never cross one. Ain’t a Indian in the whole of the West don’t know ’bout the wampus—an’ plenty of whites do, too.”
Like many dog owners, Will had begun talking to his dog, sometimes in full sentences, most times in a few words. Of course the animal couldn’t understand any of it, but that fact didn’t stop Will.
“I’ll tell you what,” Will said to the dog walking along at his right side, “that wampus thing give me a good idea. All the Indians are scared, superstitious, an’ them loonies they’re ridin’ with—deserters, gunhands, murderers, rapists, all like that—they’re as crazy an’ scared an’ superstitious as the Indians. Here’s the thing, pard: your name isn’t Shark no more—it’s Wampus. OK?”