One of the clouds was the shape of a large, old-fashioned hat, with a lacy feather sticking out of its top. His dead wife, Emily, had once worn a hat like that.
It had been purple silk, decorated with a white osprey’s feather. The long pin that held it in place was silver, with a head of Whitby jet. She had worn it to a christening of a close friend’s baby. But the names of the child and the friend had escaped Doc.
“Odd how the memories of so long ago are often as clear as finest crystal,” he mused. “While what I ate to break my fast this morning is as misty as Nantucket in November.” He thought about it. “Bacon and grits with scrambled eggs,” he finally concluded. “And the child was christened Jonquil and the friends were called Tarquin and Hermione Rivett.” He clapped his hands in triumph, making Judas stop his ruminative munching.
The air was heavy with the scent of wild mint, growing in a cluster near the tree behind him. Doc sighed, unable to shake off the passing feeling of melancholy that was lying over the entire group of companions.
“Be a good thing when Master Cawdor and Brother Dix return safely to us, Judas. They are truly our shield and our buckler against the ungodly.” He yawned. “I shall have a quick look out at the valley of death before us, and then we might commence our downward journey.”
He stood, knee joints cracking painfully, rubbed dust from his breeches and stared out over the New Mexico desert, first toward the south, then shading his eyes as he looked toward the coppery fire of the setting sun.
“Feel like Pilgrim, after his battle against the demonic Apollyon, gazing toward the far-off radiance of the By the Three Kennedys! What was it? Was it the golden road to Samarkand? Or the unexpected stranger in the bustling marketplace of Somarra? I disremember.”
Finally he looked toward the north.
It was impossible to guess how far the horizon was. It was bathed in a shimmering mist, with the distant mesas and buttes standing out from it like the beached wrecks of ancient, mastless vessels.
“All it lacks is a vast and headless trunk of stone,” Doc said. “But I can do the looking and the despairing for Now, what can that be?”
There was a faint column of dust, many miles away, rising a hundred feet in the air, the last rays of the sun catching it before the wind dispersed it.
“Is it one of those whirling dervishes of sand? No, it doesn’t seem”
Again his voice faded away as he saw the cause of the disturbance. Moving out of a shallow depression in the speckled desert was a group of people. They were much too far away for the old man to have any chance of making out any details.
“More than one and less than a thousand” was his best estimate.
Doc had lived enough of his disturbed time in Deathlands to know that strangers could often signify danger.
“Best be moving, Judas, and warn the others.” He untied the reins and slapped the mule on the rump when it refused to budge from the fresh grass.
But the minuscule figures, dark-shadowed against the pallor of the land, drew him again and he stood on the narrow plateau, staring.
“The threat from the north,” he muttered. “Always from the north.”
Whomever the strangers were, they might have encountered J.B. and Ryan on the road. And they might easily be ordinary, pleasant travelers.
“Of course they are,” Doc said, shaking himself. “Silly old fool. Seeing danger where there is none.”
He climbed aboard the mule and started the descent toward the valley floor and the spread and his friends.
Chapter Ten
The third day of the journey began with a bright sun peeking over the hills to the east.
“Hope this weather lasts,” J.B. said, wiping the skillet with a handful of fine white sand.
Ryan was busily stamping out the glowing, smoldering remnants of their morning cooking fire. “I figure that the farther north and west we drive in the wag, the colder and wetter it’s going to become.”