Crack in the Sky (58 page)

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.

Down under he dived again, reveling in the glorious sanctuary this much water gave him, feeling it finally soak through the thick buckskin of his war shirt, wetting the linsey-woolsey shirt, making it all clammy against his sunburned chest and back.

Flipping his head back, he yanked off the soppy hat and hurled it back toward the bank, suddenly aware of just how much his long, curly hair weighed as he flung the mass of it back over his shoulders. In the next breath he rolled over onto the sandy river bottom. Now he leaned back, slowly back, until he was submerged right up to his chin—just the way he had dreamed he would when his last vestige of hope seemed about as far away as those distant, jagged lines of lightning that savagely split the sky asunder.

Now they would survive the night. Here they could fort up the next day until they regained their strength. They could drink their fill until the following night, when they would press on toward range after range of the distant mountains dark against the twilit sky. Perhaps they
stood some small chance of making it back to Taos. Perhaps they …

They
.

Bass sat upright in a noisy gush of water, feeling the liquid sluice off him as he gazed up the long slope toward the high ground. Beyond that rise, somewhere on down the other side, lay Asa McAfferty.

Feeling renewed, strong enough to clamber out of the water, Scratch seized up the reins to his own animal as he dragged its muzzle out of the water.

“Don’t want you getting loggy On me,” he scolded it as he yanked on the reins.

For a moment the horse protested, then reluctantly allowed Titus to pull it around and climb into the saddle, water pouring out of his leggings and off the twisted fringes at the bottom of the war shirt, spilling in sheets down over the saddle as he tapped his heels into the ribs before stuffing his moccasins into the stirrups.

“Hep-hep! Let’s git!”

The horse was slow getting him back up to the top of the rise, but it was far better than trudging up the slope on his own two legs. At the top his eyes began to search the sandy ground for a dark object large enough to be McAfferty.

Bass spied something to the left, and a few moments later he hauled back on the reins, staring down at the body a heartbeat before he dragged himself from the saddle, wet leggings gluing themselves to wet saddle. His leathers weighed as much as a trap sack.

Going to his knees beside his partner, Scratch bent over Asa’s face as he yanked up the long flap of his own breechclout and rubbed the wet wool across McAfferty’s hot face.

With a groan Asa stirred fitfully beneath the insistent rubbing.

Clenching a fist around a corner of the trade wool, Bass squeezed some water out of the thin cloth he held right over his partner’s swollen, blackened lips. Then he wiped the breechclout against the cracked lips, parting them with his fingertips and squeezed some more. When
there was no more water left in the wool, he yanked up the fringed bottom of his war shirt, pulling it aside so he could grab the long tail of the linsey-woolsey shirt. From it he squeezed more water between the slack lips until McAfferty finally sputtered. Then coughed as the tiny stream of water pooled at the back of his throat.

But Asa managed to get it down, swallowing with a harsh, raspy, choking sound while his eyes blinked open. “W-water?”

“I found some.”

“Wa-wa-water,” and he licked his swollen lower lip with the tip of his blackened tongue. “Praise be.”

For some time Titus remained there beside McAfferty, squeezing what was left in the breechclout and shirttail until there was no more. Eventually he raised his partner off the ground, across his shoulders, and stood shakily with the larger man for the second time that day. Stumbling forward, Bass got Asa over to his horse and thrown over the saddle.

“Ain’t far, long as you don’t go and fall off on me again,” he assured as he gently patted McAfferty on the back and took up the reins. “I figger I ain’t got no bottom left in me to get you pulled off the ground again.”

There was no answer but the whisper of the night breeze as darkness seemed to suddenly grip the desert the moment he turned to nudge the horse into motion, like a huge black wing silently passing over the land. Back up that rise he led the animal, straining to reach the crest, where he finally peered down again at the dark meandering line of that narrow river, on over to begin their descent.

He led the horse into the midst of the others about the time Hannah raised her snout and announced her satisfaction with a watery snort. Up to his knees in the river, Bass stopped the horse, dropped the reins then and there, and turned back to grip a hand under each of Asa’s armpits. Leaning back with his own failing strength, Titus tugged far enough to get McAfferty’s legs over the wet saddle with a struggle—then the man’s deadweight took over, and Asa spilled headfirst into the water.

Sinking to his knees, Bass snagged hold of the back of his partner’s long white hair and dragged his head out of the water. Asa sputtered helplessly, so weak he couldn’t raise his own head. He stared up at Scratch, eyes blinking, those swollen lips moving wordlessly at first until he finally got the words out.

“P-praise God for our deliverance.”

“Better you praise these here goddamned horses for smelling water, Asa McAfferty,” Bass grumbled as he turned his partner’s head to the side, supporting the man so his tongue could lap right at the river’s surface.

McAfferty drank, then drank some more, and finally cocked his head so he could peer up at those animals standing about them in the dark river while he shoved long, dripping tendrils of his wet, white hair out of his eyes.

Finally his gaze came to rest on Scratch, those eyes of his glowing once again like twelve-hour coals. “God made these here dumb brutes under us to be thirsty critters, Titus Bass. Verily I say, that same God led these brutes to find us this water.”

Funny thing how a little water could change a man’s whole outlook. Enough that he didn’t mind being clammy and cold as the wind came up and the temperature dropped as if all that day’s heat was nothing more than a long-ago memory.

The desert had a way about it of pointing out to a man just how fickle nature could be. Almost as fickle as damn near every white woman he had ever known. At sunrise the earth began to warm, the cold air slowly dissipating in the mists clinging back in low places. But long before sundown, a man might well vow all he possessed and half his soul in exchange for a patch of shade and a pool of tepid water. And by the next sunrise that man would be shivering, his teeth rattling like bone dominoes in a hardwood box, praying for the sun to rise once more so it could warm the chill from his bones.

For the longest time the two of them had remained in the shallow river, soaking in the cool water as if it were
life’s elixir. And by the time that Bass suggested they get to the far shore and find a place to fort up beneath the bluff, McAfferty was able to clamber to his feet with a little help. His arm locked over Scratch’s shoulder, he hobbled toward the bank.

Titus left him there with his rifle while he went upstream in search of a likely spot among the rocks. And when he got Asa and the animals moved that two hundred yards farther along the north bank, Scratch pulled their buffalo robes from the packs. With them both he wrapped McAfferty against the deepening cold of the desert night, then settled down beside his partner, clutching a pair of blankets around his own shoulders.

He had begun to shiver as the moon rose late, spun toward the west, then fell quickly. Only after it set had he finally warmed within his wet clothing, snug enough that he no longer trembled. Through the long hours his shivering had served to keep him awake, too fitful even to doze. Beside him now in the first graying of the night, McAfferty snored softly, another sound among all the others magnified on the wind that came to him off the desert, moving up the river valley.

He wondered if the Apache had followed close enough to reach them just before dawn. Wondered too if those strong, bandy-legged warriors were the sort to stop now and again in their pursuit just long enough to sleep for an hour or so before they would again take up the chase.

Bass felt his eyes close as the cold breeze sank off the shoulder of the bluff overhead. He hoped he would hear the Apache as they crept up out of the gloom. Maybe even smell them on the dry desert night air.

Fawn’s hands were cool on his skin where she had pulled back the buffalo robe to expose him to her eyes, to her touch. She wasn’t the sort to tease him, moving her fingers across his belly or down the inside of his thighs. Fawn went straight to his manhood: caressing it without preliminaries, massaging it into readiness, stroking it insistently, often impatiently, until she herself took him and drove his manhood within her. Often would he keep his
eyes closed until he felt her moving to straddle him, gazing up to find the Ute woman settling atop him like an ember-lit shadow in the winter darkness of her lodge.

He gazed up now, surprised to find Pretty Water staring down at him. As her moistness clamped around his rigid flesh, he wondered for a moment where Fawn had gone. Wondered where the Ute village had disappeared. Wondered why he had never found them that summer he went looking for them … the summer he was scalped.

This woman riding back and forth slowly atop him was Shoshone. He found her so different from Fawn. Pretty Water was the sort to tease him to the point where he wanted to cry out, to growl at her with her playfulness that he flung her back onto the blankets and thrust himself into her out of the fiery hunger she aroused in him as her fingers barely brushed the flesh around his manhood, but never really caressed it. How she grinned as she watched his penis twitch and grow, even though she wasn’t touching it directly. How she sighed as she gazed upon the growing excitement she had caused. How she groaned when he shoved her legs apart and madly drove himself within her, so crazy had she made him.

There above him she rocked up and back, up and back, raising her buttocks from his thighs just enough to slowly pull him out, then slowly seating him deep within her again….

He felt himself ready to explode as he gripped her small, soft breasts in his hands, wanting so badly to lick the nipples again just as he erupted—

Hannah’s snort brought him awake.

Frantically he dug a knuckle at his eyes, listening.

The mule snorted again, more loudly.

He smelled it too. A change in the air.

What direction was the wind coming from? Bass turned his face into the breeze, drinking deep of all that it could tell him. Upstream. They were upstream … and likely on his side of the river already. Perhaps they had crossed upstream after finding the white man’s trail descending to the bank.

And now they were closing in. Waiting for dawn.

Tightening his grip on the rifle’s wrist, Titus ground his knuckles into his gritty eyes a second time and blinked. Sore and prickly from lack of real sleep, burning from the relentless glare of endless days beneath that wide brim of his felt hat—they felt as if he never would get the grains of sand flushed from them. Red, swollen, so gritty that he wondered if he would ever focus them again.

Upstream. He kept staring upstream through that cleft in the low, waist-high rocks. Watching the light change as he gazed across the gray, shadowy, dreamy texture of boulders and brush and the river’s silvery path through it all.

Behind him one of the horses accompanied Hannah with its own plaintive whinny. They likely felt boxed in back against the tall overhang of the bluff—helpless now with that scent of the enemy growing strong in their nostrils.

Different this must be from anything they had smelled on the northern plains. Thankful too that these animals never grew accustomed to the odor of Indians—no matter where, no matter what tribe.

The light began to bubble a little more, defining edges to the gray of low boulders scattered on either side of the river, giving depth to the black splotches that were the low clumps of brush dotting the banks.

From between the brush and boulders emerged the angular shadows stepping into the midst of the silver ribbon. First there were two, then another pair, then six fanning out in an arrow pointed at the white men.

There surely had to be more.

“Asa!” he whispered harshly, shaking McAfferty’s shoulder.

As the trapper worked at opening his eyes, Bass grumbled, “We got company!”

Sputtering something with his thick, swollen tongue, McAfferty shoved his rifle toward Bass. “Take it.”

Turning quickly to stare at his partner, Scratch asked, “You got you your pistol?”

Painfully, McAfferty worked his fingers around the
curved butt and struggled to hold it aloft. “I’ll get one of ’em for sure—they get close enough.”

“Get that other pistol of your’n too.”

“Saving it for me.”

“For you?”

McAfferty licked at his cracked, bloodied lips. “Don’t let these here ’Pache bastards take you alive, Mr. Bass,” he implored. “Better to go under by your own hand—”

“Shoot myself?”