North of Forsaken Read online

  On the morning of the third day, I could take it no longer. I had to get up. I felt my muscles weaken with each passing minute, and I detest weakness. Suspecting my agitation, Jack surprised me with a stout cane, something he had hacked off and carved himself from the limb of a nearby ponderosa.

  “I thought about what you said, and there is no sense heading back to get the law, the nearest being in Forsaken.” Jack looked at me knowingly. “When the time comes, I will help load your big ass up onto Mossy. We’ll plod along as best we can.”

  I had shared with him the thieving the lawdog there gave me. We were in agreement that folks who feed off others need to be stopped and punished in kind. But that was a worry for another time. We had to catch up with those three who’d done us wrong, and hopefully find Thomas alive.

  I’d never forgive myself if he came to harm, though I knew it was not really my fault he was in his raw fix. If I had to lay blame elsewhere, I’d set it at the feet of that vicious creature called circumstance, always lurking in the shadowy corners at the far edges of life.

  But I wouldn’t do that, for to me that is another way of shifting blame. It’s the action of people who give up, sit back, and let badness happen to them, over and over again. I never have been that way, and I wasn’t about to, as Jack would say, “commence to be that person now.”

  “Jack, we only have one rideable critter between us. Those bastards took Tiny Boy with them. He’s reason enough for me to go ahead and find them. Let alone Thomas. Even the girl deserves help.”

  “You have to be joshing me,” said Jack. “She’s in cahoots with them. Bah, you better get your hat on straight, son, because that little witch is up to no good. Matter of time before she’s caught crouched over a bubbling cauldron, chanting incantations, and turning poor innocent folk into horny toads and lizards and mewling, half-formed beasts too awful for words!”

  “Why, Jack, you are particularly vocal today. Might be you got a good night’s sleep last night?”

  “What if I did? Don’t I deserve it?”

  He stalked off, but I knew he was feeling good and was, for certain, no longer inclined to drag our sorry backsides toward Forsaken.

  If anything could be done to those four thieving, burning cowards, it was up to me and Maple Jack to get it done. And we had already wasted too much time waiting for me to heal enough to travel.

  “We need to leave.”

  “You need to rest up and heal,” said Jack, rummaging in his meager stores. But I knew he was prepping to leave.

  “In the morning, then?” I said.

  “Yeah, I reckon. But it’s foolhardy.” He turned on me, pointing a steady finger, flint sparking in his eyes. “Don’t let me hear you yelpin’ and yammerin’ about how sore you are. It ain’t gonna be pretty.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The next morning we loaded up. Or rather I did. I tried my best to make Jack ride his mule, said I could walk alongside, that it would do me good to stretch my legs. But Jack is as knob-headed as Ol’ Mossback. So there I was, blocked in on both sides by mulishness. Nothing I could do but mount up—with Jack’s help.

  I was as weak as a runt kitten and halfway up to the near-bare back of the mule when I thought how wrong I’d been and how right Jack was, once again. I should have stayed put at least another day or two. Hell, I could have used a month without flustering my blasted body and beaten head.

  Almost from the start, he griped—Jack, not the mule—about how I was too big to be riding the mule, how I would likely collapse the beast to the ground under my bulk. Not what a fellow with a swimming head and a bullet wound wants to hear. Two days before it had been sewed up tight with hairs from the mule’s tail. Jack used one of the needles he kept in the possibles bag always hanging around his neck.

  It was slow going, and with each step I winced and did my best not to groan. It occurred to me, noting the irony, that I sounded like Thomas in that respect. I did my best to stifle my moans and wheezes, hot threads of pain pulsing in my wound, the cannon fire betwixt my ears smacking in counterpoint.

  It took longer than it should have, but it finally dawned on me that Jack had been through his own hellish tortures at the rough hands and boots and torches of those would-be killers. He limped and winced and walked alongside the mule, each step a trial to him. It made me sick to see, for so many reasons.

  “Jack, this is no good, we can’t go on like this. You’re as stoved up as I am and I can barely hang on to this poor mule.”

  Jack stopped, and as if reading his mind, Ol’ Mossback stopped at the same time, looking forward, one ear flicked, waiting for our next decision with more patience than I have ever seen in a human.

  My mentor turned a gray face up to me. To my surprise, he didn’t argue. “I know, boy. But we have to gain some ground. We ain’t been at this but a couple of hours. Let’s give it at least another hour. That’ll put us further along up the trail. Maybe we’ll find some sign.”

  I nodded. “Then help me down, Jack. I can lean against Mossy. If you won’t ride, at least it will give him a rest from hauling my carcass up and down these hills.”

  Jack smiled. “Must be his bony old hide is getting to your soft backside. He ain’t nearly as padded out as that bug soft lummox you ride.”

  “Now see here,” I said, preparing to swing my leg up and over the mule, “there’s no need to work up a case against Tiny Boy when he isn’t even here to defend himself.”

  Jack’s a clever man. He got me talking and thinking about something else while I worked to slide down off the mule. It helped, though not as much as I would have liked. The motion felt like I had a handful of hot coals jammed down inside me. I said as much to Jack.

  “What makes you think I didn’t stuff a few heated-up river rocks in that teensy bullet hole before I sewed her up? You was caterwaulin’ and carrying on so much you’d-a never noticed.”

  Jack didn’t mount up, but after a few minutes of rest, we resumed our trek. I figure out a routine, tried to go it alone without leaning on Mossback for support, but that took too long. I moved about as fast as a porcupine climbs, that is to say . . . not at all fast.

  In that stilted, dragging manner we made our way toward that day’s sunset, working along the trail, following their sign—Tiny Boy’s shoe prints alone were easy to follow, his Percheron hooves are massive. But it almost didn’t matter, as those we pursued took no pains to hide their back trail, suspecting correctly in their minds that they had dispatched the only two people who had the potential to disrupt their plans, whatever they may be.

  We tottered along in this fashion, hours more than I thought we could have—Jack’s stamina knows no limits. To keep my mind from the lances of pain zigging through my chest, I concentrated on this foul undertaking from its beginning. I came up with lots of questions, few answers, and too many threads of speculation. None of it made sense, that was all I could come up with.

  My fevered mind did return to one vision time after time, the face of that pretty but dastardly girl. Or was she? Her shouts and screams in defense of Thomas, of me, rattled in my aching head. Yet the way she threw herself at the man who’d shot me made little sense. Could she have been telling the truth? Why whisper in the dark, likely with the man who had shot me?

  Somehow the more I thought about her, the more I felt certain she was, if not wholly intent on bad deeds, at least not responsible for how events progressed as they had.

  The notions warred and balled up in my mind, and I decided I’d share them with Jack once we were seated at a fire. Maybe he could help me parse them.

  “Roamer.”

  It was Jack, tugging gently on my sleeve. “Roamer, boy, we’ve stopped, reached the end of our tether for the night. Wake up or I’ll leave you standing here.”

  It was still early, not yet nightfall, but the air had grown colder. We’d made decent progress for two stoved-up men and an indulgent mule.

  Jack foraged for late-season herbs and I did my best to rough o
ut a fire spot and not fall over in a heap. I was still dizzy, though I fancy I had improved since the morning.

  Jack packed a new hot poultice on my shoulder and muttered about how blazing red the wound was. He didn’t like it and I wasn’t too thrilled with it, either. That usually meant it was festering inside, and that often led to nothing good, a quick downhill trip with a sudden stop at the bottom—in the form of a hole six feet deep. Still, he kept on muttering and chewing leaves and heating them up and mashing them, and doing lord-knows what else, packing it all on there.

  We made it an early night, I slept like a log and only awoke in full daylight to the sound of Jack fixing a scant breakfast for us. We spoke little, and resumed our trek.

  Neither of us, I’m sure, had a slight notion of what we would do once we tracked down the bastards who did this to us.

  Near the end of that second day, we found the girl.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  We found Carla, the pretty girl whom Thomas doted on, who flatteringly, if falsely, pretended to be smitten with him, the same girl who’d toyed with me when I’d been gathering firewood, the one who’d brought Maple Jack’s gentlemanly ways to bubble to the surface of his gruff old self.

  We found her dead, off the trail, hanging stiff and still from the broad branch of an aspen.

  Her neck was black-purple, her head canted too far to her left, her once-pretty face now sullied, the lips also blue-black, a thick wad of something stuffed in her mouth. It took me a few seconds before I realized it was her own swollen tongue, overflowing her mouth.

  One eye was swollen and slitted, the eye itself barely visible peeking between as if accusing us of being too damn late to be of any use. The other eye had popped, bulging out but staring, thankfully, away, cast toward the trees as if considering them for the first time.

  I’ve rarely seen Jack shaken. The man can keep his emotions tamped down. Says it helps him avoid dicey situations at the gambling tables. But when we saw the girl, we both whooshed out our breaths as if we’d been simultaneously driven hard in the guts by an unseen fist.

  Her long, pretty red-and-white dress, one of two I’d seen her wearing, hung limp all about her. The bottom was soiled with dirt, evidence of having been dragged, perhaps. Her hands were tied behind her back. There was evidence, too, that she had soiled herself in her throes of death, a common occurrence in a hanging. One of her boots lay on the ground, on its side beneath her. How hard she must have kicked to lose it from her foot.

  After long silent moments, Jack shuffled over to where they’d tied off the rope around the tree’s stout trunk. He struggled with the knot.

  “Can’t get it, blast it. It’s too tight, and I don’t have a knife, nothing to cut her down with. The bastards. The bastards.” Still, through gritted teeth he worked his stubby, grimy fingers at the knot, gaining no headway.

  Then I had a thought, a grim, horrible thought, but I followed it anyway. I walked over to the girl and paused a moment, then reached out toward the bottom of her dress.

  “Boy, what are you doing?”

  I turned red, tired eyes on Jack, then resumed my horrible little task. I reached up under her dress, felt along her leg, and was rewarded with the unyielding touch of stiff, cold flesh.

  “Roamer!”

  Jack came toward me and was about to shove me, wound or no, when with a tug, what I’d sought came free in my hand. I stepped back, held out the sheathed Bowie.

  Jack stopped, stare at the knife, at me, rage still seaming his face, red boiling beneath the singed gray beard.

  “A girl has to have protection out here in the West.” It was all I could say. After a moment, when we stared at each other, I wagged the knife. “Cut her down,” I said.

  He reached out for the knife, hesitated, his fingers curling back on themselves, then took it from me gingerly. I followed him to the rope, grabbed the taut angle of it as he sliced, and held it so she wouldn’t drop hard to the ground.

  Jack is a good deal shorter than me, so I motioned to him to hold the rope. He read my intentions and lowered her as much as he could before he ran out of height. I scooped her with my good arm as best I could, easing her to the ground.

  Jack put her boot back on and I checked two pockets on her dress for sign of anything that might tell us who she really was. I found nothing. We used a flat rock and the knife to dig up a grave close by the spot of her death.

  We couldn’t leave her unburied, the mountain critters would worry her corpse until it was nothing but dragged and scattered bones. I don’t care if she was a pretty little devil in a dress, she was someone’s daughter and had not been unkind to either of us.

  The grave was shallower than it ought to have been, but the spot was boney with rock. We did our best to make her appear dignified, straightened her head, closed her eyelids, though in that we were largely unsuccessful, and folded her hands on her belly. We laid curls of aspen bark over her face so the dirt would not press in there, and then we covered her up. Scooping the soil in one dragged handful at a time.

  Lastly we piled the grave long and well with rocks, and in this manner did our best to foil those who would dig her up and devour her.

  At the end, we built a crude cross of branches, and Jack scavenged lengths of pliable root to secure it. I carved the name “Carla” on it, with her date of death, as near to the day as I could make it. Who knows? Perhaps she told the truth, at least in part, and her kin ranched not far from the spot. I would do my best to find out.

  Later, over our grim little fire, I began to tell Jack how I knew about the girl’s knife.

  “I don’t want to know,” he said, his voice tight, cold, and clipped.

  “But I want you to know.” That seemed to settle it. I told him, quickly, quietly, and that was that. I’d not have Jack thinking I was some sort of philandering devil. I should have known better, but his opinion of me matters more than much else in my life.

  “Well, the foulness of it aside,” I said, “we know the vicious bastards we’re dealing with are cruel beyond compare.”

  Jack nodded and sighed. “As my old pappy used to say, ‘You sleep with hounds, you wake up with fleas.’ I reckon she knew what sort she was dallying with when she teamed up with those who did this to her.”

  “I doubt she expected to end up like this. She tried to stop the man from shooting me.”

  “See now, she was a good girl when it counted. That’s what we got to believe, Roamer.”

  All I could do was nod. My throat lumped up once more. “I know it,” I finally managed to say.

  “Let’s get some sleep so we can track the beasts who did this. I have a powerful urge to kill them right back for what they’ve done here.”

  I nodded, in complete agreement.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We lit out early the next morning.

  Jack fired a question at me that surprised me. “What do you think of the notion that your man Thomas is one of them?”

  “One of who?” I said, knowing what he was referring to. “You don’t mean to say he’s in league with the bad apples we’re tracking.”

  Jack shrugged. “It’s a thought. It ain’t like he’s given you cause to think otherwise.”

  “We don’t even know what it is he’s really after, nor them.”

  “We know about the deed, odd as it is. But that’s all.”

  “Well, it’s pretty obvious to me they want the property, or something about it—timber rights, minerals, who knows?”

  “Mm-hmm,” said Jack, not really buying what I was selling, I could tell. And so it went, with us confabulating, as Jack likes to call it, back and forth, slow and steady, hour after hour.

  We kept up our chatter like two foolish birds. It was a feeble effort to fill the air and our thoughts with anything other than the memory of finding the girl as we had. I can safely say we were both disturbed and angry over her death. Somehow, I felt guilty about it, too.

  It was long past the noon hour, and all we ha
d between us were a few handfuls of cornmeal and whatever else Jack had managed to scavenge along the trail—we had no time to set snare for rabbit, and as we had no guns we could bring down no game. The girl’s knife, a useful tool, still carried with it a spooky feeling, though not enough to prevent us from using it.

  As I said, past the midday hour we rested a bit, then resumed our shambling procession up the trail. We were both afoot, as it was far too much work for me to climb on and off the poor mule. Ol’ Mossback is a stout creature, but he’s no Tiny Boy. I had enough to feel guilty over, I didn’t want to add killing Jack’s mule to the list.

  We’d given up on chatter, as neither of us wanted to voice the notion that we were accomplishing next to nothing. Then, rising from the nearest hill in the trail, there appeared before us the outline of a man’s head, then shoulders, swaying side to side as if riding.

  We both saw him at the same time. Jack held out a hand before my belly to stop me. Even the mule stood stock-still, ears perked toward the approaching rider.

  The rest of the man slowly emerged from the rise. He was lit by the sun, and we could not make out his face. But there was something about him that seemed familiar. Wishful thinking, I told myself.

  “Who do you suppose . . . ?” said Jack in a low voice.

  “No idea, but by now he’s seen us as sure as we’ve seen him.”

  “Then let’s hold up here and see what the man has to offer.” It was an obvious response since we were in a mostly treeless stretch, all waving brown grasses and few boulders. The visible rocks and trees were too far off the trail for a pair of slowpokes to make for.

  “You got that walking stick I made you?” said Jack, not taking his eyes from the man.

  “Yep, and you have the knife,” I replied.

  “Yep.”

  We didn’t have long to wait. As soon as a skidding cloudbank dragged itself before the sun, light shone on his face and I saw the man for who he was—the horse-faced brute who’d shot me, who’d been in on setting Jack’s house afire, who trussed Jack, and who seemed the likely culprit to have strung up the girl.