Sidewinder (8 page)

Felicity squealed with delight when Brad rushed up to her, helped her dismount. She flung her arms around him, squeezed him tight with both arms. She sniffed his manly scent, and her legs crumpled as her knees turned to gelatin. He surrounded her with his own arms and kept her from sliding to the ground.

“Oh, Brad,” she breathed, “I’m so glad to see you, to see you all in one piece.”

“What did you expect?” he chided, smoothing her hair with one hand, tilting her hat back on one side.

“I—I didn’t,” she said, suddenly at a loss for words, her brain muddled with a half dozen images, her emotions rushing up in a tangle of senses. The feel of his warm body, the strong scent of him, the reassuring flex of his muscled arms around her. She wanted never to leave him, never to let him out of her sight again.

Wading Crow dismounted, grabbed the leather bag with the timber rattler in it, and handed it to Gray Owl. He took out the forked stick and tossed it beside the shelter. Then he took off Brad’s hat and carried it to him.

Brad broke his embrace and took the hat, looked it over.

“Thanks,” he said. “And for my horse, too, Wading Crow. And thanks for bringing my wife and Julio up here.”

“
De nada
,” Wading Crow said.

Brad reshaped his hat slightly and put it on.

“You were hurt,” Felicity said.

“A little.”

“I saw blood on your hat.”

“That blood was from the rock that fell on me,” he said. “Don’t you recognize rock blood when you see it, darlin’?”

Felicity laughed, but she wanted to take him in her arms again and check the top of his head. Then she saw his left hand and gasped.

“Did the rock fall on your hand?” she said.

He held it up so that they both could look at it.

“Snake nipped me,” he said. “Gray Owl over there cut me and sucked most of the poison out. Hand’ll be good as new in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

“Oh, you,” she said. “Getting hurt doesn’t mean much to you, Brad.”

“Not much.”

“Well, it does to me.”

“Want me to tie up the horses, Brad?” Julio asked. “Do we ride back to the rancho now? The sky is already getting dark. There will be much rain soon.”

Brad could see that Julio was nervous. He kept glancing toward the two Indians and a muscle in his cheek twitched.

“Find a dry place to tie them up, Julio. Under some big trees, maybe. Unsaddle them and break out the slickers. We’ll be here awhile. I owe these two men my life. It wouldn’t be good to rush off.”

He looked up at the darkening sky. The sun was barely visible now, shielded by thin scrims of clouds that were racing east but being overtaken by the big clouds, some of which were turning as black as anthracite coal.

Julio nodded. He grabbed the reins of Felicity’s horse, Rose, then caught up Ginger’s reins and headed into the timber.

“Come,” Wading Crow said, gesturing to Brad and Felicity. “Rain soon.”

Felicity stopped just outside the shelter, looking up at the top and sides. The shelter was really two lean-tos with a double beam at the top. The Indians had cut small thick spruce trees, trimmed the bottoms, and cut a single branch to make a kind of hook. The hooks were set over each beam and more small spruces were set in the trough between them on small cross-beam supports. There were trimmed tree branches crisscrossed on both sides of the sloping roof, and these, too, had small, hooked spruce trees draping them, so that all of the trees overlapped and offered shelter from the rain and wind.

“This is very nicely built,” Felicity said. “You could almost live in it.”

When she stepped inside, she saw Gray Owl drop the snake out of its bag into a basket. Then she heard all the snakes rattling, and she shrank back against Brad for protection.

“Wait until you see Gray Owl feed them mice and rats,” he said.

Felicity shuddered. Brad put an arm around her.

He took off her hat and stroked her hair. He had the right touch. She began to relax.

“Gray Owl, this is my wife,” Brad said in Spanish. “She is called
Felicidad
, Felicity, in English.”

“With much pleasure,” Gray Owl said in Spanish. “Sit. Do you have hunger?”

“I have a little hunger,” she replied in the same tongue. Then, in English, “Brad, I brought sandwiches for the three of us. But we can share with Gray Owl and Walking Crow.”

“What is sandwich?” Walking Crow asked.

“You will see,” Brad said.

Brad put their hats near the door. He and Felicity sat on a buffalo robe.

“This is where I slept last night,” he told her. “Snug as a bug in a rug.”

She rubbed her fingers in the deep fur of the buffalo robe.

“Nice,” she said, and glanced around at all the baskets. She heard hissing and rattles, and she snuggled close to Brad.

“Can they get out?” she whispered to him.

“Not unless you open a basket and call to them,” he said. “They’ll come a-runnin’ if you do that, like trained pups.”

“Don’t joke about a thing like that,” she said.

“You need to stop thinking about those snakes, darlin’.”

“How can I?”

Brad smiled. He was thinking about the snakes, too. After all, one of them, a sidewinder, had gotten out, and it had sunk its fangs into his hand. He winced at the thought.

In a few minutes Julio returned, carrying saddlebags, three rifles, and three canteens.

He set them down just inside the shelter, next to Felicity’s and Brad’s hats.

He handed two yellow slickers to Brad and kept one for himself.

“I put the saddles and bridles under a deadfall,” he said. “Covered them up good with branches and leaves. We should ride back to the rancho, I think.”

Julio eyed the Hopi and the Arapaho as if they were poisonous snakes, ready to strike at any minute.

“Sit yourself, Julio,” Brad said in Spanish. “We will eat soon and wait out the rain. Maybe it will blow over quick.”

Brad knew that storms in the mountains were unpredictable. They could come up suddenly and blow on by just as quickly. Or, at certain times, they could rage for days, not with just one lone storm but a passel of them, streaming down from the north, one after the other. It was early spring in the Rockies, and this might be just one of those spring storms that lasted only an hour or two.

“We can’t stay the night, Brad,” Felicity said. “We can eat on the ride back.”

“There’s no hurry, is there?” He thought he had detected an odd tone in Felicity’s voice, as if there was more to her thoughts than what she was saying.

“I—I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”

“The brindle cow, she come back,” Julio said, and Brad saw a look pass between him and Felicity.

“She did?” Brad said. “When?”

“This morning, as we were leaving,” Felicity said.

Again, there was a sharp look between his wife and Julio.

“So, we can go back, eh?” Julio said. “Maybe we can ride faster than the storm.”

As if in answer, there was a flash of light inside the shelter. Five seconds later, they heard a loud rumble of the thunder. There was more thunder right behind it, sounding like an empty warehouse full of rolling barrels.

Brad had been counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder. Five seconds.

“That was about five miles away,” he said. “We can’t beat it, and if we ride out there, we’re liable to get fried to a crisp by a lightning strike.”

Wading Crow walked over to the three sitting by the entrance.

“No good ride,” he said. “Big storm. Much rain. Lightning kill like bullet. You stay.”

“But . . .” Felicity started to say, but the look on Brad’s face told her she might want to keep quiet. She knew that look, as a wife knows her husband’s ways.

“We will accept your hospitality, Wading Crow,” she said, and Brad smiled at her, a quick smile that told her she had done the right thing.

“Heap food. Many robes. Plenty wood make fire. Fire make warm. Sleep good,” Wading Crow said, and walked away.

“I never knew Indians could be so polite,” she whispered. “Well, I guess we’ll stay then. After all, we’re not at war with them. I don’t expect they’ll scalp us.”

“Indians learned scalping from the white man, Felicity. And probably some of our other bad habits as well.”

“Oh, you’re just making that up,” she said in a playful voice, then slapped a hand on his chest. She jerked her hand back right away and a startled look flared the light in her eyes.

“What was that?” she said.

“What?”

“When I hit you just then, I felt something. Have you got a bug or a spider on your chest?”

Brad looked down and patted his chest. He had forgotten about the rattles. He had tucked the lanyard inside his shirt and just forgotten about it.

He pulled on the thin sinew and drew out the set of rattles. He shook them in Felicity’s face, and she drew back in shock.

“Oooh,” she said, “get it away from me.”

She scooted away from him a few inches. He continued to shake the rattles and dangled them still closer.

“It won’t bite,” Brad said.

“That’s cruel, Brad. You know I’m scared of snakes.”

He stopped shaking the rattles and slipped them back inside his shirt.

“Gray Owl cut these off the snake that bit me,” he said.

Felicity’s eyes widened.

“Oh,” she said. “Are you going to keep them?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I hope you’re not going to wear them.”

“Well, they’re not much good in a drawer at home.”

“Brad, you aren’t going to wear them around me, you hear?”

“Certainly not, darlin’. Those rattles would give you too much warning.”

“What?”

“Well, sometimes a man likes to sneak up on a woman.”

“Oh, you. That’s not funny.”

“It’s funny to me.” He turned and looked at Julio. “Isn’t it funny to you, Julio?”

“It is a little funny,” Julio admitted, but his heart wasn’t in it. The last thing he wanted to do was get into the middle of an argument between a man and his wife. He pulled his legs up and rested both arms on them, as if he was a turtle drawing into its shell.

“See, Felicity? Julio thinks it’s funny.”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“I’ll keep the rattles as a souvenir,” he said.

“In a drawer. In the tack room. Out in the barn.”

“Whatever you say, darlin’.”

And she knew he wasn’t going to obey her wishes. But she would never let him wear them when they were in bed together. That was a sacred place to her and no place for souvenir rattlesnake rattles. And she knew he would abide by that particular ruling. She scooted back toward him, a sly, coy look on her face.

The shelter lit up with a flash of lightning, and two seconds later a peal of thunder rolled across the skies. The thunder shook the shelter and the ground beneath them.

“Close,” Brad said.

Then they all raised their heads and listened to the first spatters of rain hitting the trees outside and tinking on the spruce boughs. Moments later, the wind picked up, blowing rain inside the hut, lashing the cut boughs, and wailing high in the trees.

Felicity nestled against Brad. He put his arms around her.

“I’m so glad we’re not out there in this,” she said.

In counterpoint to the rain, some of the rattlesnakes, disturbed, began to clatter. Brad felt Felicity shiver against him as a crack of lightning struck within a few yards of the shelter.

Brad could smell the ozone, taste it like copper in his mouth.

He, too, was glad that they were not riding through this storm, out in the open where the lightning danced across the land like an electric lattice.

And the darkness steeped around them while Gray Owl scratched his flint on steel to start the fire. A thousand tom-toms and kettle drums boomed outside, and the rain blew straight and hard, shooting silvery lances through the openings in the spruce boughs.

The wind howled through the trees, cracking limbs, hurtling pine branches to the ground with loud crashes. To those in the makeshift shelter, it sounded like cannon and gunfire, as if armies were clashing in mortal combat all around them. The sky was so dark, it felt like night, and the flashes of lightning only served to heighten the illusion of a great war in the mountains.

The rattling of the snakes inside the baskets reached a feverish pitch, adding to the din. Then the hail fell from the sky and, blown by the wind, sounded like grapeshot striking the trees, both living and dead, littering the ground with white pellets. A few entered the shelter, stung Julio’s back and arms until he moved away from the entrance, and a couple hit the fire, hissed, and melted in almost the twinkling of an eye.

The five people munched on fresh beef sandwiches, packed with mustard, ketchup, and boiled turnip greens. Gray Owl kept the fire bright with fresh wood, and shadows danced to the tune of the hail and rain.