As he watched, the horse bearing McAfferty’s body suddenly side-stepped, pulling at the reins Scratch was holding—yanking them right out of his hand. Before he could get his own legs to respond, to kick his mount into motion, Asa’s horse was lumbering away, rolling into a clumsy lope with that deadweight of the trapper slung sacklike over its saddle.
Much as he might want to keep making for the distant mountains, Bass let his horse have its head as he followed vainly behind McAfferty’s animals. In their midst waltzed his ever-loving Hannah, her loads shimmying from side to side as she struggled to keep her footing on the uneven sands.
Wide-eyed were every one of the creatures, their dust-caked nostrils swelling all the bigger as they loped on yard after yard up a long, low rise toward a band of striated white and ocher bluffs looming in the middistance.
Up ahead of him some fifty yards at the top of that rise, he watched Asa’s body slipping to the off side, spilling headfirst onto the hard ground after the horse took another half-dozen steps. His body cartwheeled away from the hooves and came to rest on its back.
Struggling to stop his own resistant mount, yanking back repeatedly on the reins to get it halted, Bass had barely begun to swing his offhand leg over the saddle when the horse suddenly bolted, yanking his hands from the braided loop of rawhide, snatching the big cottonwood stirrup from his left moccasin and spilling him onto his hip.
Dazed, Scratch crawled to his knees and crabbed over to his partner.
“As-Asa,” he croaked, his voice disused in those last dry hours of the chase.
Gripping McAfferty’s chin in one hand, he pulled off the sweat-soaked hat and shook the white head.
“‘I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken vessel,’” he gasped as Bass’s shadow came over his face. “Figgered to lay here till I was dead, Mr. Bass.”
“You ain’t dead.”
“I can see by the looks of your face you ain’t St. Peter waiting for me at the gates of heaven neither.”
Bass watched McAfferty’s eyes close, then flutter open again in the fading light as day slowly gave way to night. “Sundown, Asa.”
“What happened?”
Scratch looked up. “Animals bolted on us.”
“Might as well be dead now. No horses. Been this long, and no horses.”
“You been out of your mind, Asa,” he explained. “We been … been covering ground.”
“Don’t matter, I s’pose. ’Thout them horses,” he whispered wearily. “‘For my life is spent with grief, and my year with sighing: my strength faileth because of mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed.’”
How he wished McAfferty wouldn’t keep on spouting about their being without horses now. Peering behind them, Bass declared, “I don’t see nothing. Maybe they give up.”
“’Pache don’t give up,” said the cracked, swollen lips. “We’re in a fix anyways you set your sights,” Bass admitted as he rocked up onto one knee and started to stand. “Damp powder and no way to dry it, that’s our fix here and now.”
“Leave me,” McAfferty demanded. “Find some water.”
“Night’s coming on. Ain’t gonna leave you—”
“Best leave me when it gets dark.”
He brooded on that, again measuring horizon after horizon, then brought his eyes back to that bluff ahead of them where the rise of land lay smeared in contrasting layers. “Maybeso I’ll figger to go see where them horses run off to. Foller tracks. Catch one up. Come back for you.”
“‘Give us help from trouble: for vain is the help of man,’ Mr. Bass.”
Scratch started to rise onto the other leg, painfully. “You rest. I’ll … find us some water.”
“Get water or there ain’t no sense coming back for me.”
Something strange in the voice yanked him back to stare down at McAfferty’s face once more. There was a new, distant look in those dust-caked eyes. The haunted look of a man teetering on the precipice of the eternal and staring into the bottomless void at the instant his feet were about to give way.
Titus briefly touched Asa’s shoulder, laying his hand there in the hollow, where he swore he could feel the rattle of each of McAfferty’s shallow breaths.
“I’ll be back,” he whispered. “Shortly.”
After watching the eyes close within that dark, sunburned face, Bass struggled back onto his wobbly legs, uncertain of each step as he commanded his feet to shuffle forward beneath his weight. Yard by painful yard he slowly ascended what remained of the gentle slope toward that rise from where he figured he might look over enough ground to spot the runaway animals disappearing toward the striated bluff, its hues beginning to darken as the light continued to fade from the desert sky.
A soft breeze met him in the face as he neared the top of the slope. Something more than a choking, sand-dry wind—bearing with it a hint of some new scent on that warm air as he dragged it into his nostrils.
At the top his legs stopped beneath him suddenly of their own accord. It was better than lunging on over, only to have to come back up, he figured. His eyes began to descend to the base of the bluff as he drew in another of those mercifully blessed breaths of that new air. Then spotted the five animals below him.
No more than three hundred yards away at the bottom of the gentle slope, they stood among a scattered profusion of belly-high brush and boulders that had tumbled from the side of the nearby sandstone bluff. At least the animals had found some cover for the two of them to hole up in—someplace where they could make it a little tougher for the Apache to get at them than it would be out on the open flat.
He needed to get one of the saddle mounts and lead it back for Asa. Couldn’t leave him out there now that night was coming. No matter that the dark might conceal him from their pursuers. The Apache would likely have no trouble following tracks beneath the stars and that thin rind of a moon until they bumped right into the half-dead white man.
“Then they’d make me listen to your screams all night,” Bass brooded to himself as he forced his legs to wobble down the slope toward the animals huddled in the brush. “Damn you anyways, Asa McAfferty—for making me listen to them cut on you slow while them bastards tear you gut from gizzard like one of their goddamned animals they was getting ready to eat. Maybe even hang you over their fire.”
One leg at a time, he braced a knee and swung the other leg forward.
“You ain’t gonna make me listen to that, you son of a bitch. I’m gonna get you down here with these damned animals … if I have to drag you in my own—”
He lurched to a halt. Watching the horses and that pretty mule of his, all with their heads bent low, snuffling, as if they were grazing.
Then, as the warm breeze quieted its evening sigh, he heard their noisy drinking.
Water! They were drinking water.
A whimper broke free of his throat as his feet lumbered forward on their own, hurrying him on down the slope toward the animals. Now he saw how they stood up to their knees in the stream. Its semiglossy surface lured him on, glittering in the dim, silvery shine of those first stars and rind of moon.
Shoving his way past the huge, dusty rumps and heaving sides of the burdened animals, Bass waded ankle-deep into the dark liquid ribbon some fifteen feet across. Not just water—but one helluva lot of it!
Collapsing onto his knees, Scratch flung himself forward, landing face-first into the cool stream. Wagging his head back and forth deliciously beneath the surface, he drank and drank and drank as he remained submerged. Then yanked his head out and sputtered, sucking in a long breath, the warm evening air singing past his tortured membranes as his lungs swelled to bursting.