Sudden Country (20 page)

I awoke with Ben Wedlock's nightmare face very close and his hand shaking my shoulder. I sat up quickly, nearly banging my sore head on the underside of the wagon. "Is it Panther?" I asked quickly.

"He's steady, lad. He'll see morning. I and Blackwater and Eli are off to talk to Knox and the others about that trade. I figured you'd want to be awake in case the injun comes around. I'm holding you to your word, now."

"My word will do that."

He smiled at my irritation. "Sure it will. I been pardnering with cutthroats so long I near forgot what it's like dealing with a gentleman. Er, I'll need your jacket. It's my bony fidey."

"Why not just take me along?"

"I can trust Knox not to fire on a white flag, but I don't know about the rest. You could pick up a bullet. Also I don't trust Pike alone with the injun. He's got a black on for the whole tribe."

"Then why not take him?"

"He goes where Charlie Beacher goes, and Beacher' s looking after Bald Jim. He used to patch us up under Bloody Bill. After me he's the nearest thing to a sawbones for a hundred miles. Fetch him if anything goes wrong with the injun."

I wriggled out from under the wagon and took off my jacket. I was aware of a pair of mounted men waiting on the edge of the shadows, whom I assumed were Eli and Blackwater; also, on foot nearby, the thin wicked presence of Pike. Taking the wrong meaning from my involuntary shudder, Wedlock gave me his own blanket. As he helped me draw it on over my shoulders, he pressed something hard and slippery into my hand. My finger curled around the curve of a trigger guard.

"I'd not trust Pike at a distance of three feet," he whispered. "Remember your promise."

And then he was away, mounting his great sorrel with its damning white blaze now fully exposed to the moonlight. Turning the beast, he looked young and whole, a tower against the sky. In a moment the three were gone, and to all intents and purposes I was alone with Nazarene Pike.

NIGHT OF THE NAZARENE

P
ike said nothing, although I could feel his eyes upon me from the place where he stood with the pines looming dark behind him. He was thinking, I knew, of that day at the Golden Gate Saloon, where I had denounced him as bandit and killer and very nearly proved his undoing. Presently he turned and withdrew, making almost no noise at all in the light underbrush. I tucked the pistol inside my belt and turned in the opposite direction to see to Panther. I nearly collided with Christopher Agnes.

A grin rippled his cherub's face. "Don't wake the snakes, boy. They get up ornery."

I glanced down at the burlap sack in his hand and recoiled from it. "Why do you collect the nasty things?" I asked. "There is no place to sell them out here."

"Man needs pets." From the sack he pulled a rattler as thick as his wrist, and gripping it tightly behind its head, kissed its squat snout. A black tongue fluttered out, then vanished. "Look at him. Old Christopher Agnes's throat all that's on his mind. Dreams about it, I'll warrant. You think snakes don't dream, boy? Fat mice and warm rocks, that's what they dream about. And Christopher Agnes's throat. I expect I got a reputation amongst snakes."

"I would not doubt it." I was afraid to move. I had seen one snake escape his clutches and I was well within striking distance.

At length he thrust it back inside the sack. He looked at me then, and it seemed to me that his own small eyes were reptilian in his round face.

"Think old Christopher Agnes is crazy, don't you, boy? Man likes snakes, he got to be. Well, it's like this here: You can trust a snake to bite, on account of that's why he's on this here earth. With a man you don't always know. Yes sir, you can trust a snake not to be trusted. Remember who told you that, boy."

He walked away, humming to himself–or perhaps it was to the loathsome creatures in the sack.

I shuddered again and climbed into the wagon where Panther was resting, clutching the blanket around my throat. He did not stir when I lit the lantern, but he appeared to be breathing more evenly than before, although his color had not improved. I adjusted his own blanket and left him.

That was Judge Blod's old wagon. Mr. Knox's contained Beacher and Bald Jim, who had been wounded during the Indian attack. I went over there and pulled aside. the flap. A hammer clicked in the darkness.

"It is I, David Grayle," I said quickly. "How is he?"

"He's got a hole in him; how'd you be?" The familiar voice was deceptively pleasant.

"Who is it?" I recognized these sleepy tones as Jim's. He did not sound like a man who ate Indians.

"The brat."

"What's he want?"

I said, "I wondered if you needed anything."

This time I heard a grin in Beacher's words. "Yankee gold."

I replaced the flap. Mention of the gold reminded me of Flynn's map in the pouch in my pocket. I wondered if Mr. Knox would have the presence of mind to play along with Wedlock's assumption that it was in his possession. If the bandits found out it was already among them...

A pair of corded hands clamped onto my shoulders from behind and tore me away from the wagon. I smelled chewing tobacco and unwashed flesh. "You little son of a bitch, I'll teach you to come slouching around men!" A boot hooked my ankle. I sprawled forward.

Twisting, I fell on one shoulder and rolled over onto my back, tugging the big revolver out from under my belt. I fired just as Pike was sliding his coiled whip off his right shoulder. He roared, rocked back on his heels, and clapped a hand to his left side, nearly dropping the whip. I pulled back the hammer a second time. The whip uncoiled then. Suddenly my hand was empty and stinging.

"I'll lay you open!" shrieked Pike.

I threw an arm in front of my face. The lash wrapped itself around my wrist and forearm, burning like flame. He tore it loose, carrying away flesh with it, and reached back to slash at me again.

"Pike! Black Ben says let him be!" Christopher Agnes lunged up behind him, catching Pike's arm in his free right hand. The other still clutched the sack. Pike tore free and slashed at him instead. Backpedaling, Christopher Agnes stumbled and dropped the sack. Half a dozen long black glittering bodies untangled themselves from the burlap. "My snakes!"

I caught a glimpse of a terrified Christopher Agnes whirling and twisting with snakes trailing like tentacles from his arms, legs, and torso, and then I was on my feet and running, leaving the blanket behind. Pike's whip cracked. Something stung me between the shoulder blades and my shirt parted as if a razor had been drawn through it. I plunged into the columns of pines. Footsteps pounded behind me.

Thick branches above me blocked out most of the moonlight, and for a panicky moment I was in pitch blackness. I stopped to avoid a collision. The silence of that cathedral growth played tricks with my hearing; Pike's footfalls, deadened somewhat by the carpet of needles, seemed to echo all around me. I fancied I could hear his labored breathing. As my eyes adjusted, I began to pick my way between the trunks. To my ears I was making as much noise as an elk crashing through heavy brush.

Instinctively I made my way toward the light, and eventually found myself in another clearing at the rock-strewn base of a great cliff that rose before me into darkness. Staring up at its moonlit face, I had an eerie sensation of having seen it before. A faint sound behind me in the pines helped me make up my mind. I began to climb.

The route was seductive, presenting a gentle slope at first, studded with rocks arranged in a kind of natural staircase. Soon, however, it began to steepen, the footing to turn to rubble that sank and shifted beneath my weight, slowing my progress. And then I was climbing almost straight up, curling my fingers around slippery crags and feeling with my feet for ledges no wider than a steel rule. The granite looked white under the moon. I had never felt so thoroughly exposed.

Below me, a sudden clatter of dislodged rubble followed by a curse inspired me to quicken my pace. Pike was continuing the pursuit.

The rock was cold and so was I. Very soon my fingers grew numb. Once, imagining that I had a secure handhold, I started to pull myself up to the next level, lost my grip, and slid two yards, scraping my chest and cheek and taking most of the flesh off both palms, before my right foot caught in a fissure and I stopped with a sickening lurch. I wanted to stay there, hugging the wall and listening to my heart beat. Instead I reached up with one bloody palm and started climbing once again, grateful for the. stinging that allowed me to feel the features in my grasp.

I know not how long I continued to climb. My clothes were sweat through despite the cold, and clung to me clammily. I was in pain from my head injury and the blood on my hands made them slippery. I have lost track of how many times my grip failed me. I was desperately tired and sore in every limb.

Recalling stories I had heard about men and women trapped in high places, I determined not to look down–and so looked down often, only to jerk my gaze away in a fresh paroxysm of dizziness upon glimpsing the forest of sixty-foot pines from a height that made them resemble a bed of grass, and, on the expanse of steep rock that separated me from their jagged tops, scrambling spiderlike in my wake, the hatless grinning angular figure of Nazarene Pike. Dizzy I was indeed, and not just because of the altitude; for I realized that I was living my recurrent nightmare. This time it was real.

There came a point where I could climb no higher. My fingers were cramped, my own weight like lead to my overtaxed muscles. I had attained a ledge above which the wall bulged obscenely, presenting neither hand- nor foothold, and erosion had begun to disintegrate the ledge; shards of shale and broken granite shifted beneath my feet. Behind and below me I heard the breath leaving Nazarene Pike's lungs in little triumphant explosions. When I dared to look down, I saw moonlight glittering on the blood on his shirt and the hideous, gold-toothed grin of my dark dreams spreading over his ratlike face. He had lost his bullwhip, but before I could congratulate myself upon that pass, he snaked a hand behind his head, and when it came forward, the broad blade of a knife as long as my wrist caught the light.

"See old Pike strung up, would you, boy?" he panted. "Soon as I'm through gutting you like a catfish I'll go back and do your injun friend." With his free hand he groped at the ledge where I stood.

It crumbled. He slid with a gasp, clapping the hand holding the knife against the rock to catch himself. The blade scraped sparks off the granite. Then his foot found a purchase and he stopped.

"Thought you lost old Pike, didn't you, boy?" He commenced to pull himself back up.

I waited until he was reaching again for the ledge. As he curled his fingers around it I raised my right foot and brought it down hard on the ledge. A shower of pebbles pelted his face. He cursed, turned his head to protect his eyes, and fell back to his previous perch. This time, before he could resume his advance, I kicked the ledge again. More pebbles fell, then a larger shard the size of a man's hand. Then the slide started.

The entire base of the ledge was a network of cracks where moisture had frozen and swollen, weakening the stone. Now they yawned, tipping out pieces ranging in size from marbles to melons, which in their descent dislodged bigger sections farther down until the entire face of the cliff below my feet fell in thunder. I held on tight, for the very rock was shaking. Stones bounded off Pike's shoulders and grazed his head, carrying with them clouds of dust that choked him when he opened his mouth to scream. I saw him slide, catch himself, and then, as the cliff collapsed, I caught one final glimpse of his distorted, dust-caked face before he joined the avalanche. Seconds after he had vanished, I thought I could still hear his shrieks under the rumbling of the rocks settling at the base of the wall.

Any victorious emotions I might have felt would have to wait; for the very rockslide that had removed his threat had left me with no way to go but up, and as the dust settled, it was all too apparent that the bulge that had impeded my progress had not been altered one whit by the calamity. I had neither the strength nor the leverage to get over it, while below me those features that had allowed me to climb this far had been eradicated. In a phrase, I was trapped.

Nazarene Pike had been in his impromptu grave full ten minutes before I decided to move. To my right, the ledge upon which I stood existed no longer, having peeled away along with the cliff below. I made a half-hearted attempt to grasp at a handhold above me, but I was physically unable to pull myself up another inch, let alone dangle by my ruined hands for the length of time necessary to surmount that outcrop. Instead I began working my way left.

I shuffled my feet inches at a time, steadying myself with palms flat against the wall. This time I succeeded in my determination not to look down, choosing instead to feel the path with my feet. Fresh pieces of support collapsed beneath them, and in several places there were gaps, some so wide I was certain I had run out of road. At these times I came perilously close to giving up and letting go. Then my toe would catch on something solid and I would find the strength to follow it. Once, after perhaps two yards during which the ledge appeared to be broadening without a break, I hastened my pace and stepped into nothing. It was some time after I caught myself before I was steady enough to continue. If I have a reputation now for great patience, it is because nothing I have lived through since has ever seemed as long as that night suspended high over the forests that gave the Black Hills their name.