Blood and Gold

Only money, a lot of it, would have brought these men into the wild hill country. So far the trail I had taken from Dodge had led to blood and death . . . and unless they killed me, I vowed this wouldn’t be the end of it.

Footsteps swished through the wet grass as the bandits walked away. But then the man called Lafe came back and kicked me viciously, his boot thudding into my ribs once . . . twice . . . three times. . . . Then the shocking, blinding pain made me lose count.

“Hey, Lafe, how come you’re kicking a dead man?” somebody yelled.

I heard Lafe laugh, a loud, cruel bellow. “For making me stay out here in the damn rain,” he yelled. “That’s how come.”

And he giggled and kicked me again.

Then I knew nothing but darkness and with it came a merciful end to pain.

I woke to a throbbing agony in my head and each gasping breath raked my chest like a red-hot knife blade.

Rain battered at my upturned face and from somewhere far off I heard the angry rumble of thunder. I clenched and unclenched my fists, and to my relief, the feeling slowly returned to my fingers. After a few minutes I was able to move my legs, and I struggled into a sitting position.

My horse was gone, and with it the saddlebags and Simon Prather’s money.

But I had no time to contemplate the disaster that had befallen me. I had to get to the buckskin and go after those robbers.

The rain was still painting the sides of the surrounding buttes and mesas bloodred, and the sentinel trees stood soaked and silent. The wind had dropped some, but the rumble of thunder was much closer and every now and then as the sky banged and flashed white, the buckskin raised his head and stood stiff-legged in alarm.

The horse was getting spooked and I was in no shape to be chasing him down.

I couldn’t tell how badly hurt I was. My head ached and when I put fingers to the right side of my scalp they came away stained with blood.

The men who had bushwhacked me had taken my horse, but they’d left my guns, and I figured, with the arrogance of youth, that they’d made a big mistake.

That I was too sore wounded to follow them never even entered my head. And that was my mistake.

Slowly I fetched up to my feet, and immediately the land around me spun like a weather vane in a whirl-wind, then lurched right and left, so that I figured the mesas were standing on end and the trees were dancing. Nauseous, I sank to my knees and was violently sick, retching up all the coffee I’d drunk a short time before.

I didn’t need anybody to tell me right then that I was as weak as a two-day-old kittlin’ and in a whole heap of trouble.

Off to my left, a lean coyote stepped out of the trees again and looked at me with keen interest, every now and then tossing his head as he licked his chops. To him, I was just a poor, wounded creature that might die pretty soon and provide an easy meal or three.

I directed all my pent-up anger and despair at that coyote, yelling at him to stay the hell away from me and go find himself a rabbit to kill.

Of course, all my hooting and hollering did nothing to ease the mind of the buckskin and he trotted maybe fifty yards closer to the base of the bluff, stirrups bouncing, figuring me for a crazy man.

I guess the coyote studied on things some and reckoned I was still mighty spry because he slipped back into the trees and was gone like a puff of smoke.

Desperately I tried to concentrate, summoning up whatever little strength I still possessed.

Somehow, I had to make it to the buckskin.

Fury drove me. I swore to myself that when I caught up with the long-haired man called Lafe, there would be a new face in hell for breakfast in the morning.

Slowly, painfully, I crawled on my hands and knees toward the grazing buckskin.

As I inched closer, he’d raise his head now and then to look at me, trot away a couple of steps to maintain the same distance between us, then go back to his grazing.

Thunder rolled across the iron sky and lightning forked among the hills around me, plunging again and again into the wet earth with skeletal fingers. A lone cedar growing on the gradual slope of a hill just beyond the bluff suddenly took a direct hit. A deafening crack, accompanied by a searing flash of light, and the tree seemed to explode, branches scattering into the air every which way. Fire spurted as the blasted cedar lurched on its side, the flames dying immediately in the teeming rain.

All this was way too much for the jittery buckskin.

The horse turned in my direction, arched his back, then took off, galloping across the distance between us. Neck stretched out, his eyes rolling white, the buckskin pounded past, his kicking hooves beating on the wet grass like the cadenced thump of a muffled drum.

“Hold up there, boy!” I yelled, in a totally futile effort.

The buckskin was gone, splitting the wind and skinning the ground, and soon he was lost to sight among the crowding grayness of the rain-lashed hills.

Me, I knew I had to go after the horse.