The Shadow Man (23 page)

Jacob held his rifle ready and his eyes probed the thicket of cottonwoods he must reach and pass through. The last rancho on the Pecos had been overrun, and the livestock was moving east to Texas. Never was there a better time for the raiders to waylay and kill anyone following them. Nor a better place. If the Texans left as a rear guard were not as strong as the men who hunted them, then they had an excellent retreat to the east up a draw full of trees.

The nearest gravel bar was reached and crossed. The horse entered the middle stream of water. The edge of the bar was steep, and the gravel and cobbles rolled from under the hooves of his mount. The horse began to fall.

Jacob heard the crack of the rifle above the splashing noise of the horse trying to regain its balance. He felt the tug of the bullet cutting at the neck of his shirt. He'd been shot at, and only the movement of the horse had saved him from being hit.

Immediately there came a second shot, just as the horse straightened and tossed its head. The bullet struck the brute in the throat.

The animal lifted its head, curled back its upper lip, and screamed shrilly. It crashed down on its side with a mighty splash.

Jacob vaulted from the saddle as his horse fell. He landed on his feet in water to his knees. His eyes swept the shore. Two plumes of blue-gray gunpowder smoke floated near the base of a large tree.

His rifle jumped to his shoulder. He aimed to the right and low of one of the smoke plumes. The gun roared. The instant he pressed the trigger, he was scrambling in long, lunging strides at an angle downstream toward the wooded riverbank.

A shrill, undulating war cry sliced the air behind him. He heard a horse running in the river, coming up fast behind him. A rifle boomed from the distant trees.

Jacob cast a fast look to the right. High Walking's horse was breaking stride, falling. The Comanche flung himself into the air. He hit the shallow water hard. Then he was up and still holding his war bow, raced a zigzag pattern toward the riflemen.

A fourth shot rang out. Jacob couldn't tell where the bullet went. High Walking did not slow but continued to run as if he hadn't been injured.

Jacob won the distance to the grove of trees without being fired on again, and raced full-tilt around its outside border. He had to cut off the escape of the gunmen. But even as he closed upon the band of trees that extended up the draw, two horses, one without a rider, flashed by in the green foliage and were gone.

More than one man had fired. Yet only one had fled. Jacob went cautiously to the ambush point.

High Walking was already there. A body lay at his feet. He pointed with the end of his bow at a hole in the man's chest.

“You killed a man you could not see. That is very difficult to do.”

“It was easy,” said Jacob.

High Walking's face twisted into a crooked smile. “Yes, easy,” he replied.

“We have no horses. Now we walk,” said Jacob.

“Not walk. That is too slow. Can you run?”

“I can run,” Jacob said. He turned and with long strides waded into the river to his horse. He stood for a moment and watched the dark blood of the dead beast spreading like slow smoke through the clean water of the Pecos. The death of the faithful mount bit at him like acid.

Hastily he dug out a pouch of lead balls, a horn of powder, and a tin of caps from the pack on the horse's back. A canteen of water was hung over a shoulder. He took nothing else.

High Walking came from the body of his cayuse with a small pack and bow and arrows and joined Jacob at the riverbank. He led off at a fast trot.

* * *

Jacob and the Comanche ran, their footfalls measuring the last minutes of the day. All around them the wild grass, like the guard hairs of some giant wolf, shook and shimmered beneath the yellow sun. Then the sun fell behind the western hills.

The men halted in the gray-purple end of the day. High Walking searched around for a short time, then began to dig with his knife at the base of some low-growing plants with fringed leaves. He pulled the roots loose from the soil and tossed half to Jacob.

“Yampa,” he said.

Jacob grunted his thanks and laid the wild carrots beside him. He was too exhausted to eat. He lay back, feeling the sweat drying and crusting into a thin film of salt crystals on his skin.

Jacob took one deep, weary breath and was asleep.

The soreness reached to the very core of Jacob's bones, making it difficult for him to move. The strain of the grueling footrace with High Walking, and then sleeping on the hard ground without a blanket, had nearly crippled him. He glanced around to check on the Indian.

High Walking was squatting in the morning twilight and cutting at a spineless, low-growing cactus with his knife. The plant had a round, wrinkled top that was almost flat. Its flowers were dry and shriveled, and their once bright pink had turned brown.

Methodically the Comanche cut the flesh of the cactus into bite-sized pieces. He stuffed a large, double handful into his pocket. The remaining portion he gave to Jacob.

“This is peyote,” High Walking said. “Comanche use it in many ways, eat it, drink it as a tea, or breathe its powder up their noses. You must eat some now. Soon you will feel very strong. Also, it relieves the crowded mind and lessens a man's sorrow.” High Walking stuffed a chunk of the peyote in his mouth and began to chew.

Jacob did likewise. The moist flesh of the plant was bland. And yet, as he chewed, he sensed the narcotic effect, a soothing of his nerves and a strengthening of his muscles through the soreness. The dawn around him filled with a pleasant aroma, a familiar one he recognized. It was Petra's sachet. He started to make a hurried look around before he recalled that Petra was dead. The odor was false, a trick of the peyote on his mind.

Jacob stood up. His thirst for revenge had not been dulled by the drug. He picked up his weapons and turned to the Indian.

High Walking saw the burning light in Jacob's eyes. “Now you are ready to run. Perhaps you will be able to keep up with me.” His face screwed itself into a grimace around his own glowing eyes. “Tonight you will have very bad dreams. That is the effect of the peyote as its power deserts you.”

High Walking pointed to the east where a bright swath of red dawn was spreading as the sun burst from below the horizon. “That is an omen. We will spill the blood of our enemies today.”

“Or lose our own,” breathed Jacob in a whisper that only he could hear. But he would take many of Petra's killers into the darkness with him.

* * *

Jacob, trailing his long rifle in his hand, ran beside High Walking as they raced through the heat waves pouring from the hot earth. The vast flatness of the Llano Estacado had swallowed them, and they were lost in the tall plains grass that surrounded them mile upon weary mile. A slow wind moved, tossing the grass reeds into thousands of waves, crests pursuing troughs, as though they were part of the surface of a great sea.

The running men easily followed the trail of the stolen herd of livestock by sign both on the ground and in the air. The thousands of hard hooves had tromped the grass into the brown soil, and the raw trail cut like an open wound in the green prairie. On the vortices of the up-drafts along the trail, vultures were tracing wide, swinging circles before beginning to drop toward the earth.

Down, down they came by the score, to level off above the ground and come up on the scent of a dead sheep or cow.

As Jacob and High Walking approached, the carrion eaters craned their skinny necks and bald heads toward them and hopped around nervously with wings half unfolded. Then, unable to endure the nearness of the running men, the buzzards rose in a cloud, a living black pall that climbed upward.

The men began to encounter pockets of grasshoppers. Soon they were fluttering up in swarms, their yellow wings with black spots clacking and chittering. A coyote feeding on a sheep darted out of the path of the runners. He stopped off a way, with just his head showing above the grass, and watched the men pass by.

In the noon heat Jacob's heart beat rapidly. His tortured breath was rushing with a hoarse sawing sound through his throat. The hollows of his lungs felt as if they were being scalded. His legs trembled with exhaustion, yet he could not stop, for the damn Comanche ran on and on.

High Walking cut a look across at the gray-bearded white man. “The sheep and the Texans cannot be many miles ahead. Can you run some more?”

“You catch them,” Jacob called back grimly between breaths. “I'll be there with my gun.”

Jacob saw the Indian put another piece of peyote into his mouth. Jacob, himself, began to chew on a new piece.

* * *

By mid-afternoon Jacob's breath was sobbing in his throat as he reached the extreme limit of his mortal strength. He opened his mouth to call out that he must rest or die. Then he saw the large gray smudge on the grass-covered plain ahead.

High Walking also spotted the herd of livestock. He halted abruptly and fell to his knees, hunkering low.

High Walking flung a look at Jacob, and his mouth opened in a great, silent cry of pleasure. He gripped his war bow and shook it savagely at the enemy.

Jacob watched the Indian's face, creased and drawn with fatigue. The Comanche's lungs heaved as he caught his wind. His copper-colored skin glistened with sweat, shining like a dark silken cloth. His eyes, sunk in deeply caved-in sockets, burned with his eagerness to kill.

“The livestock of the Texans makes a lot of dust,” said Jacob. “By staying hidden behind it, we can go close. But we must be careful. There are ten or twelve men, and they have horses to ride us down.”

“In the light of the day they are many and strong. In the night we two are stronger, for then we can attack when and where we choose.”

Jacob looked to the west. The sun was barely a finger's width above the horizon. “Soon it will be dark. Let's go on.”

The two men moved like ghosts through the dust cloud that rolled toward them like fog off a winter sea.

* * *

The moon slid out of the east, making the faces of the Comanche and white man oddly animal-like. The men lay in the tall grass and spied on the camp of the raiders. For the last two hundred yards they had snaked forward on their stomachs and now were not fifty feet from a small, yellow-flamed fire.

Jacob looked into the bubble of firelight that held back the night. A covered pot sat boiling in the edge of the bed of coals and flames. He counted five saddles lying scattered about. Bedrolls, two packsaddles, and other supplies were in a mound on the far side of the fire. Beyond those items, and partially illuminated by the flames, was a grove of hackberry trees some ten to twelve feet tall.

A young man with a sheep carcass over his shoulder walked into the light. He dumped his load to the ground. He bent and made cuts with his knife between the tendons and bones of the animal's rear hocks. Thongs were inserted through the openings in the legs, and the body of the sheep was hung from a limb of one of the hackberry trees. With deft, quick strokes of his blade the man skinned the sheep down to the head and stopped there to let the fleece hang and drag on the ground.

The Texan cut the tenderloins from both sides of the backbone. He sliced the long slender pieces of mutton into chunks and dumped them in the pot. Other ingredients were added from a pouch. He built up the fire around the pot.

The grass rustled at a puff of night wind, and High Walking whispered to Jacob, “There is only one man.” There was a tone of regret in his voice.

“I count five saddles, so there are others. The man that escaped at the river has warned them about us. Somewhere out there in the grass or among the sheep, they're hiding and waiting.”

The leader and his lieutenants had gone on to Texas, reasoned Jacob. They would leave these peons to do the hard work of driving the herd of livestock five, maybe six hundred miles to a place where they could be sold.

“These men don't know how close we might be, or even if we still follow,” said Jacob. “So this fellow cooks a hot supper. We have to be patient, for the others will come to fill their hungry guts. Then we'll kill them.”

High Walking turned his black mask of a face to Jacob. “You talk too much,” he said. “I do not need someone to tell me how to fight.”

“I don't want any of them to escape.”

“None will escape. I will kill more of them than you do.”

Jacob grunted his disdain at the Comanche's remark. “Let's leave the cook till last.”

“First we must take their horses and hide them. Then no one can ride away from us.”

“I agree,” said Jacob. “I heard a nicker off in that direction. There'll be at least one guard.”

They crept in a circle to the left around the fire-lit camp. Jacob saw the flock of thousands of sheep and a few hundred cows to the east on the moon-silvered plain. The backs of the sheep were barely visible above the top of the grass. The larger bodies of the cows, casting long shadows, were magnified by the slanting rays of the moon, still low on the horizon. A subdued, weary baaing from the sheep reached him.

In the middle of the herd of livestock, moonlight reflected off a shiny surface. The water from the recent rainstorm had collected in one of the depressions sometimes found on the plain. However, the pond would be very shallow and gone in a few days, sucked away by the hot, thirsty sun.

Jacob saw the indistinct forms of horses. He counted seven of them. Two of those would be pack animals. His judgment of the size of the band of raiders at five had been correct, unless some men were mounted and not in sight. He should be cautious of that possibility.

The two men hunkered lower in the grass and veered farther away. They came up the wind so as not to alert the horses. The moon was behind the grazing beasts, making shadowy silhouettes of their forms.

Jacob stopped. A man had moved among the horses. He was turned as if watching the faint glow of the campfire.