Texas Drive (8 page)

The creek flowed a little faster as he started up-hill a little. It was only two more miles to the spring where the creek had its source. If he didn’t find anything by then, he’d have to make a decision. If he tried too long and too hard to do it on his own, he was helping the Comanches make their getaway. But if he was close now and went back to town, he’d be doing the same thing.

Plunging ahead, he was only too aware, was exactly what Johnny would do, but that made it all the more important for him to push on. It seemed almost as if he were filling in for his absent brother, doing what Cottons had always done.

It was pigheaded, and he knew it, but he also knew he had no choice. Part of him was withering away, and if there was any way to stop it before it had gone too far, he had to try. For all he knew, it was already too late. But he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life wondering when, or if, he had stopped being a man, at least the way the Cotton family had always defined it.

He was less than a mile away from the spring now, and still hadn’t seen a sign. The stream was narrowing perceptibly. If the Comanches’ raiding party had come this way, they would have had to
have gone in single file in another quarter of a mile. That would be no problem, except for the fact they were driving stolen horses. Unless they had them on a string, keeping them in line would have been all but impossible.

Fifty yards later, it didn’t matter anymore. He found the place where they’d come out of the water. Half a dozen unshod Indian ponies and nearly a dozen more wearing iron shoes, Jack Wilkins’s remaining horses, had climbed up the bank, leaving water-filled prints in the short span of soft sand between the water’s edge and the verge of the saw grass. Not more than two hours before, probably more like one, the horses had passed this way. He followed the bent grass for three miles before he realized they were headed for the mouth of Breakneck Canyon.

It was almost too neat.

It was coincidental, more than likely, but there was a kind of fitness to it, too, one that he recognized and that the Comanches would appreciate. They were going to have another go at it. But this time he was on his own.

This time, though, he was not going into the canyon. This time, he would take the long way around and ride the rimrock. If the Comanches were taking the short route on through, he’d have an advantage, maybe offset the odds a bit. If not, at least they would have only the advantage of numbers. The high ground would be neutral.

He worked the switchbacks in a hurry, almost jerking the reins too hard at every hairpin. The loose rock beneath the pony’s hooves skidded and skipped away, bouncing like flat stones on a summer pond, but he didn’t worry about it. The Comanches weren’t stupid. They had to be expecting pursuit. If they had wanted to stand and fight, he’d have run into them long before now. It seemed obvious they wanted to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the scene of the small massacre that had been Jack Wilkins.

No longer the scourge of the Texas plains, they were still a fearsome enemy. But they seemed to realize their days were numbered. The battle at Adobe Walls had taken a heavy toll. Superior in numbers, the Comanche had been outgunned and had their spirit crushed by Kit Carson’s men in the rooms of Bent’s trading post. Most of the Comanches had long since surrendered and accepted the imposed tranquility of the reservation.

But by no means all.

And, as usual, it was the most fearless who refused to be confined. As far as Ted could tell, this was no hit-and-run band who would scurry like frightened squirrels to the reservation and prop one another’s spirits in the middle of the night with reminiscences of the raid. These were
free-ranging Indians, wild red men, avatars of an earlier time.

He’d know for certain when he found them.

IT WAS PAST MIDDAY,
and Ted was beginning to wonder if he had made a mistake. Halfway across the rimrock ledge of Breakneck Canyon, he still hadn’t seen a single sign of the Comanches. In a couple of hours, he’d have to start thinking about going back. There was no way in hell he would spend the night alone on the rim. Not even a madman would risk that.

And Jacob Quitman’s voice still whispered to him, telling him how foolish he was being. Only God can make that kind of decision, Theodore. Not man. Man has no right to judge his fellows, not the way you are doing. And when a man tries to pass judgment on another culture, he is trespassing all the more on alien territory. He flies too close to the sun, and he gets burned. That is a law of nature. It is, even more, a law of God, Theodore.

Or so Jacob would have it.

The first blush of his rage long since faded, reason was crowding him, nudging the passion aside, making him wonder why he was there at all. He wondered, but deep down he knew the answer. It was one he didn’t like, so he chose to wonder still, in hopes that there might be some other, still hidden, reason.

And in the other ear, Johnny kept shouting, trying to drown Jacob out: “You yellow bastard … you yellow bastard.” And Ted knew he wouldn’t be there at all unless he at least half believed that Johnny was right. He was trying to prove something to himself, and to Johnny. It didn’t seem to matter that Johnny wasn’t even there, and might never know what he’d been trying to do.

He could die out here, and when somebody stumbled over the gleaming cage of his ribs, another rack of bones on the dry-as-dust rim of the canyon, no one would know who he had been, or what his name was. And no one would care! Bones were all too common out here. The irony was that bones had no color. A Comanche and a white man, stripped of flesh and sinew, looked the same. After death, the same wind whistled through the white pipe organ, playing the same monotonous song for Comanche and Texan alike.

And Ted Cotton wondered whether that was all he had left. Maybe that’s how he wanted it to end. Maybe he was even right to want that.

Maybe.

But he’d never know; not until it was too late to change his mind.

As he neared the far end of the canyon, he heard something far below him. Almost certain it was a horse, he dismounted. Creeping close to the edge of the rim, he took cover behind a jumble of rocks. Cocking an ear, he strained to hear it again. After a long moment, it drifted up to him, the shuddering whinny of a horse.

Then, metal struck rock, and he knew it was a shod horse. Creeping even closer to the rim, he leaned out to look down into the canyon. Almost directly beneath him, several horses, on a string, shuffled nervously. As he tried to get even closer, one hand slipped on the sandy rock. He landed hard on his elbow, dislodging a chink of stone. He reached for it, but it skittered away from his fingertips and disappeared over the rim.

Ted pressed himself flat, waiting an eternity before he heard the rock land below. The horses nickered, and he heard one or two of them paw at the ground. It was almost as if they sensed something, even at this distance.

He was breathing shallowly, his throat constricting and the air whistling noisily down into his lungs. His mouth was dry, and he tried to moisten his lips with his tongue. The rasp sounded like emery paper and left them as dry as they had been.

A whiff of burning wood drifted up from below.
The Comanches weren’t waiting for him, they were pitching camp. They’d never have risked a fire if they thought someone was on their trail. That tipped the odds a little in his favor. But not much. He repositioned the hand and levered himself up again. Wrapping one leg around a rock, he slid closer to the rim. With his hat off, he peeked out over the rock straight down nearly two hundred feet.

There was no sign of the Comanches. His skin went cold. Maybe they
were
aware of him. Maybe this was all a decoy, while they slipped up behind him. He was suddenly paralyzed. It wasn’t fear. It was that sudden flash of understanding. Life was more complicated than he was willing to see. This wasn’t about life and death, exactly. It was more about the way the two intersected.

The seamless web of connections. Ted and the Comanche he’d killed, Johnny and his dead Indian, Jack Wilkins and the red man who’d lifted his scalp. And now this, just the latest intersection, one of many, each as meaningless as the others, or as meaningful. It all depended on how you wanted to look at it. And what paralyzed Ted Cotton was not knowing. What the hell was he supposed to do? What should he think?

He lay there, stunned by the depth of his confusion. And the silence saved his life.

The whisper of leather on stone, so soft he would have missed it if he had been breathing normally,
made him turn. The Comanche stared at him for a second, then leapt. Ted rolled aside, and the Indian landed heavily, just to his right. The charge carried the Indian to the edge of the rim-rock, and the slippery sand prevented him from stopping.

The Comanche shouted and Ted turned as he started to go over the edge. Instinctively, Ted grabbed for him, catching the Indian by one knee-length moccasin. The Indian pitched over the edge and Ted braced himself for the shock. He arrested the fall, but the Comanche was already out of sight. The soft leather felt smooth under Ted’s fingers, the brave’s weight ripped at his shoulder socket.

Wrapping his legs around a rock, Ted squeezed with his thighs and crooked both knees to lock them in place. Rolling partway over, he was able to get his free hand on the same ankle. He ignored the searing pain in his shoulder and reached out over the edge, groping for something to grab onto, shifting his grip and latching onto the Comanche’s leather leggings.

The Indian squirmed as Ted inched forward. Almost close enough to the edge to look over the rim, he gritted his teeth. Hauling on the leg like a fisherman, he scissored his legs, dragging himself back a few inches. It grew quiet. His elbows scraped the rock, sand whispering between stone and bone as he dragged the Comanche back.

The brave’s left leg swung up and over the rim, and. Ted pulled harder. The pressure eased a bit, and he realized the Comanche was pushing away from the rock face with his arms in some bizarre push-up. The Indian’s hips were almost level with the ledge now. It made pulling easier. Under the soft leather, Ted could feel the hard muscle and the harder bone beneath it.

“Hold on,” he shouted, not even sure the Indian spoke English. He felt silly, but didn’t know what else to do. “Stay still. I’m going to change my grip.”

The Comanche seemed to understand. He lay quiet, and Ted squeezed harder with his right hand, digging his fingers into the legging and curling them. Reaching out as far as he could with the left hand, he latched onto another fistful of leather and pulled. The Comanche’s hips scraped toward him, and he could see the man’s head now, swiveled to the right.

The black eyes staring at him over the red man’s shoulder seemed confused. Terror was there, but it was mixed with something else, some lack of understanding, as if wondering why this white man hadn’t let him go. Was it only to preserve him for some other form of death? The thought flashed through Ted’s mind like a meteor, that this man, whose life he held, literally, in his hands, might have been the one who drove the lance into Jack Wilkins. Maybe it was his knife that had skinned Jack’s skull.

For a second, he thought he should let go, let gravity avenge Wilkins. It wouldn’t, after all, be his fault if the Comanche couldn’t fly. The Indian seemed to sense his thinking, and for a moment, the confusion in the black eyes was gone. There was nothing there but terror, terror that turned to an icy calm. Then that, too, was gone, and there was hatred for an instant, pure unadulterated hatred, and then nothing. The black eyes were suddenly empty. Just blackness, deeper than anything Ted had ever seen.

And he held on.

Straining with every muscle, Ted hauled the Comanche back several inches, then stopped to catch his breath. He dug his teeth into his lower lip and pulled again, far enough for the Indian to raise up on his knees. Ted lay there panting. For the first time, he realized his shoulder hurt from more than the strain. He brought a hand up as the Comanche turned toward him, pivoting on his legginged knees.

Ted felt the slit in his shirt, the sticky blood soaking the severed edges. At the same instant, he saw the knife in the Comanche’s hand. He grabbed for his Colt as the Comanche curled the corners of his mouth in what might have been a sardonic smile. The brave waved the knife, its broad, flat blade catching the sunlight and sparkling for a second, then he stuck the knife into its buckskin sheath and stood up.

Ted felt the sweat on his palms. The Colt was slippery in his grip as he backed away, scrambling on his hips. The Comanche shook his head, the slightest nod, and Ted turned to see two more, watching him. The Comanche stepped toward him, reached down with one hand, and hauled Ted to his feet. Then, without a backward glance, he stepped past. A moment later, all three Indians were gone.

He sat there on the rock, wondering what it all meant. Had the Indian suggested they were even? It couldn’t have been more than that, certainly. It could have been less. A life for a life, it seemed to say. Or did it?

Ted got to his feet and dusted himself off. His shoulder had begun to throb, and he squeezed it closed with one hand, squeezing his Colt in the other. He heard the horses below for a moment, then nothing.

He was all alone on the lip of the canyon. He looked up at the sun. It was already beginning to turn red, slipping low on the horizon. His shadow, tinged with orange at its edges, speared out from him as he turned his back to the sun.

Walking back to his horse, he took several deep breaths, trying to purge himself of the fear and the confusion. The horse backed skittishly as he approached. Snatching at the reins, he got the pony calmed down. Ted clapped a hand on the pommel and hauled himself into the saddle. As he settled in,
he felt something against his leg, something that shouldn’t be there. He looked down. Then, realizing what it was, he leaned over the side and threw up.

Dangling from a rawhide thong was a bloody scalp that could only belong to Jack Wilkins.