Bad Medicine (19 page)

He leaned back a bit and tapped the horse's snout with the hackamore. The pinto broke his run in a single pace and dropped his rear legs behind him, skidding to a long, sliding stop.

“Holy God,” Will whispered. For a horse to drop to a sliding stop from a full gallop like that wasn't only the result of fine training. It was an irrefutable indication of a hell of a mount.

He swung the pinto into a large figure eight, again at a gallop. The horse picked up his lead—the leg and hoof he followed as he turned—at every change. Will tightened the eight and then tightened it again, to the point where the horse was leaning far to his side making the turns, Will leaning with him rather against him, a part of the animal rather than baggage he carried.

Shark's expression showed his curiosity as to what Will and the horse were doing. When they first lit
out, Shark matched the horse's speed, running a few feet to Will's right side. But when the maneuvers began—the sliding stop, the tighter and tighter figure eights—the dog moved away from the dust cloud and watched the action with all the interest and intensity of a child watching a traveling puppet show.

Will was dripping perspiration, and the salt was irritating to the healing flesh of his face and arms. The pinto's chest was frothy with sweat, and his flanks dripped water like a leaky roof during a rainstorm. Even sitting still and merely watching, Shark's tongued lolled out from between his jaws, dripping saliva—the canine equivalent of sweat.

All three of them drank from the sinkhole. Will rubbed the horse down with handfuls of scrub, but walking him to cool him down was futile: sweat broke as soon as they stepped out from the shade to the stunning power of the sun.

Will was hungry and so was his horse. Shark was doing just fine with rabbit, but Will couldn't drive the images of a beefsteak with all the fixings and a bucket—maybe two or three buckets—of cold beer from his mind.

There was another hunger, too, that was goading Will: the deaths of Hiram, his wife and his daughters, and those of Austin and Gentle Jane, which burned within him hotter than the fire in the mercantile, hotter than the hottest flames of hell.

He leaned back against the twisted trunk of a desert pine.
We killed lots of One Dog's crew. The man is crazy, but he ain't stupid. He needed to reward the men who'd lived through the battle, and what better way than to keep the town in his grasp and let the animals go to it—booze, women, whatever? Would One Dog post guards?
Again, he's not stupid. 'Course he would, but would they be sober an' alert? Could be—but it doesn't seem to make sense. He thinks I'm dead and he knows my partners are. But we aren't his only enemies. He'll have riders out.
Will grinned.
And a rider probably means a saddle, a rifle, and some ammunition for my pistol
.
All me an' Shark gotta do is slither in like a pair of snakes.

While Will and his dog slept away the hottest part of the day, fat gray clouds began to gather in the east, seeming to battle one another, churning and boiling high above the prairie. The temperature dropped slowly as the front approached. The clouds brought about an early dusk. The first drops of rain were tiny, almost mistlike, with no power behind them. The following wind, however, changed all that. The temperature continued to fall like an anvil. Will was shivering—a strange and unfamiliar sensation after week after week of stultifying, unremitting heat.

Still, the weather had done Will a grand favor. The already lackadaisical and possibly/probably drunk outriders would be huddled into themselves in the rain and chilling wind, making their rounds only because they feared One Dog's punishment if they failed to do so.

Fine, jagged lines of lightning, like cracks in good glass, did little to illuminate the prairie. The thunder, distant, was more of a sensation than an actual sound: a deep, barely audible series of reports like the cannons of a far-off battle.

When it was full dark, Will grabbed a handful of rein and swung onto the pinto's back. He didn't need to call Shark. The dog was at the horse's right side, coat tight to his body and slick with rain. Will held the pinto to a fast walk as he headed toward Olympus.

He secured the horse with the rein draped over a boulder and another rock pressing on the leather. The pinto snorted a couple of times as Will and Shark went off on foot, but quickly settled down.

The lightning and thunder had moved closer, and the flashes in the sky were like the sharp white light of a photographer's magnesium. The thunder was much louder, gigantic crackling booms that seemed to sweep the prairie with the raw power of their sound.

Shark walked close to Will, and when a blast of thunder roared over them, he moved closer, his side touching Will's right leg. Will rubbed the dog's shoulder as they walked.

Shark saw the rider and stiffened. Will dropped to his stomach and motioned Shark down. The next stroke of lightning showed a man on horseback, poncho wrapped around everything but his face. His right hand held a rifle out in the driving rain.

Damn fool. There's no way in the world that thing will fire.
Will drew his knife from his boot, and he and Shark moved closer, hugging the ground as lightning struck. They became part of the prairie, motionless, simply rocks and scrub in the outrider's eyes—if the man was bothering to look at all. He was a white man; Will saw that. He was riding a saddle on a tall, ribby horse.

Will didn't want to use his .45. Even in the storm the crack of the discharge would carry, and he wasn't quite sure how close to the town he was. Will clutched his knife. He could probably tackle the man off his horse, but the rider could well make enough noise to draw more men. Shark pressed against him as a blast of thunder followed a hissing, menacing
streak of lightning. Will slid his knife back into his boot sheath.

“Shark,” he said quietly, “get him,” at the same time using the forward arm signal. The dog moved close to the ground, stopping when lightning struck. He looked like a rock or perhaps a clump of brush.

The rider paid no more attention to Shark's approach than he did to anything else around him. In fact, all he saw was the poll of his horse's head, because his own head was tilted downward to let the rain run off his hat.

The rider was apparently circling the town. He was also obviously drunk, slumped forward on his horse's back, mumbling to himself. Or perhaps he was singing. It was impossible to tell from the racket of the storm. He was moving toward Will, and Will didn't bother to do anything evasive other than quieting his dog's menacing growl.

The wind seemed to chase itself in all directions at once, first one way and then another in a bit of a second, whipping in translucent, ever-shifting curtains.

As Will watched, three events took place simultaneously: A terrific slash of lightning speared the ground not thirty feet from the rider, decimating a small boulder. At the same moment Shark threw himself at the rider, sinking his razor-sharp fangs into the back of the man's neck, just below his head, hurling him from his horse to the ground. The rider screamed but his scream was cut short as Shark, his grip secure, snapped his entire body to one side, severing the man's spine.

At the same time, the brilliant, searing white flash illuminated another rider to Will, moving in the opposite direction, hunched in his saddle, as his cohort
had been. He wasn't quite thirty feet away when the lightning struck and Shark wrenched the other from his horse, and the lightning gave the second rider a view of an impossibly rapid attack—and he heard the crunching snap that ended the outlaw's life. Further, the attacking creature was flying, already in the air when the lightning struck.

“Wampus!” the rider screamed in a high-pitched, panicked voice and buried his heels into his horse's sides. Slipping, sliding, almost going down, scrambling in the mud, the horse whirled, and, running almost blindly, raced off into the storm, his rider lashing him with the reins.

Will's pistol had been in his hand the slightest part of a second after the opposite-riding man and horse came into view. He shook the rain from his .45 and holstered it. Sending Shark after the second renegade made no sense, given the storm and the darkness. Further, the rider would be constantly looking behind him and a lucky shot could drop the dog.

“What the hell?” he asked himself. “Wampus?” The word ticked something far back in Will's mind, but didn't bring an image or idea to him.

It didn't take too long to catch the dead outrider's cow pony; the animal was underfed, parasite ridden, and scarred with spur and lash welts and cuts. Will approached him slowly, murmuring to him, and was able to take hold of a rein. He saw why his pressure on the rein stopped the diseased horse so easily: the bit in the animal's mouth was a long-shanked, cruel Mexican bit that cut into the horse's mouth, stopping and turning him not through training but through pain.

Will was surprised to see that the saddle and saddlebags weren't Mex junk. The saddle was Texas made. Will could tell that as he ran a finger along the stitching, which was straight and waxed and tight, and the fenders and stirrups hung as they should. He released the cinches—the saddle was a double rig—and unbuckled the chest strap. When he hefted the weight off the animal's back the horse shook himself like a dog coming out of water. Will cut the latigo that jammed the bit into the horse's mouth and eased the bridle down the pony's snout. Both his hands were bloody as he removed the bit. He twisted the seven-inch shanks into shapes that would never allow the bit to be used again, bent the mouthpiece in the middle, and tossed the whole bloody affair out into the prairie.

It took a few moments for the horse to realize that he was free—and then he was gone, as far away from any man as he could get, hooves pounding the sloppy, treacherous mud. The only way a man would stop that horse was with a bullet.

Will went through the saddlebags. He found handfuls of .45 ammunition in each, a bit of beef jerky, a knife that was dull enough to be useless, which he tossed aside, a few double eagles, and a deck of playing cards with pictures of naked women with mules. Those, too, he tossed onto the prairie. He loaded his pistol, inserted rounds in his gun belt, and left the balance of the bullets in the saddlebags.

The dead outlaw had nothing worth taking. His .45 was a piece of junk: grips taped, rusted, trigger as stiff as an oak tree.

The rifle, a single-shot, rusted, sightless chunk of scrap metal, was no better. Will figured firing the
goddamned thing would be suicide; the round would probably explode within the corroded mechanism and barrel, blowing his head off. He hurled it into the dark. The gun belt was much the same: worn, uncared for, the cartridge loops uneven and sure to scatter ammunition at a gallop. The man carried neither a hide-out gun—a derringer—or a decent knife. Will and Shark left the corpse for the vultures, Will carrying the saddle over his shoulder.

It would have made sense to fetch the pinto and ride him back to the saddle, but Will wanted some time. The word
wampus
continued to play in his mind. It was too familiar to recall, and yet it was barely familiar at all. “Damn,” Will cursed as he slogged through the mud.

The storm had calmed considerably, moving on, the rain little more than sprinkles. The dark clouds that had generated the storm had, of course, scudded on their way, and the half-moon shed some light.

The pinto was as Will had left him, although stirred-up mud around him showed he'd done a good deal of nervous shifting about due to the lightning and thunder. Will eased the tattered saddle blanket over the pinto's back and smoothed it, particularly at the withers—the place where galls are most likely to occur under a new saddle. Will flipped the stirrups over the seat and settled the saddle in position on the horse's back. The fit was closer to good than to fair, and later, minor adjustments could be made to the seat, cantle, and tree. He wasn't sure that the horse had ever carried a saddle. He was an Indian pony, and most Indians considered saddles to be merely excess weight, a silly device for a poor rider who can't control his animal. The pinto stood
well under the saddle, though, offering no resistance. “I shoulda known it,” Will said aloud. “You was stolen well after you was saddle broke.”

He pulled the front cinch and set the back cinch, leaving an inch between the leather strap and the pinto's belly. That strap was intended not to secure the saddle but to brace it and allow it to rise a bit off the horse's back when the rider was roping or descending a steep grade.

The hackamore and the single rein were fine—the animal was used to both. Will moved both stirrups down a notch. At the same time he looked carefully over the workmanship of the seat, stirrups, and fenders. The leather needed oil and the buckles were showing some rust, but all in all, the saddle wasn't a bad piece of work.

Will stepped into a stirrup and climbed aboard, setting off at a walk.

Lightning struck not far away, sluicing mud and stone into the air, dropping Shark to his crouching attack position, lips curved back over his eyeteeth, the whites of his eyes showing, his body like a tightly coiled spring. The lightning, the dog, and the blast of thunder brought
wampus
back to Will's recollection.

“I ain't scared of no horse or nothin' else,” an old Indian bronc buster told him when Will was still a boy, maybe a dozen years old. “ 'Cept, a course, a wampus. That's a critter the Great Spirit chased down to earth—meanest goddamn thing a man could come across. They can fly, Will, an' they can kill in a heartbeat. Once one has his eye on you, why, you're gone, boy. Ain't nobody escapes a wampus.”

“You ever seen one?”

“If I had I wouldn't be settin' here. I seen drawings an' heard stories, though.”

Will forced a nervous laugh. “That's jus' a superstition. Don't mean nothing.”