It had never occurred to the boy, for even a splinter of a second, that Ryan wouldn’t eventually return safely to rejoin them.
He stood and looked back toward the distant house and to the hills beyond.
It wasn’t quite clear to Dean just why Doc had gone wandering off on this trip on his own. He wasn’t much of a marksman, so it obviously wasn’t for hunting. There’d been a conversation between Krysty and Mildred about it, part of which the boy had overheard.
They’d talked about “finding himself,” though it seemed to the boy that the old-timer had more chance of losing himself up in the high country.
His keen hearing caught a sound behind him, and he turned, his fingers dropping automatically to the butt of his big 9 mm Browning.
It was the crack of a buggy whip. A couple of miles to the west, moving slowly over the trail between the dunes, was an old-fashioned canvas-topped wag, drawn by a pair of horses. It was what Dean knew used to be called a prairie schooner in the old times, even before predark. J.B. had told him that they were properly known as Conestoga wagonsafter the ville in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where they were manufacturedand that the early settlers had ridden in them, with all their possessions, from the Sippi to the ocean.
Now one was lurching toward him.
Dean took a last careful look, seeing that there were two people sitting up on the box, and making sure there were no other wags or riders, before turning and starting to jog back toward the spread.
JAK HAD WATCHED the approaching strangers through a pair of binoculars. “Look ill,” he said. “Man and woman.”
They had taken the usual precautions. Dean on the top floor, by the attic window, cradling his Remington 580. The two women covered the first story, with Krysty making an occasional check out back to make sure that the approaching wag wasn’t part of an ambush. Jak sat on the swing seat on the porch, the .357 Magnum with the six-inch barrel in his lap.
The horses looked exhausted, their chests flecked with crusted sweat. They stopped about fifty yards from the house, as the driver tugged once on the reins. The canvas was lashed tight over the iron hoops, stained with the red-orange mud of the desert.
“Hi,” Jak called, not moving from his seat.
The man was around fifty, shoulders stooped, with a dark beard, speckled with white. The woman who sat next to him seemed about the same age. Her hair was gray and looked to have been badly cut, with bare patches of skull showing through.
With a visible effort, the driver hauled on the brake, looping the reins around it. “We’re tired out,” he said, his voice barely carrying.
“Welcome water horses. Give you meal if you want. Stay night here.”
The woman began to cry, her shoulders shaking. “You mean sleep in a bed?” she asked.
“Guess so.”
The man climbed down, walking around the rig to help his wife off the seat. She was so weak that she nearly fell and hung on to his shoulder.
Behind Jak, Mildred and Krysty came out onto the porch, both holding guns.
“No need for them,” the man said. “We don’t have a bow and arrow between us.”
“Mind showing us inside the rig?” Jak asked, standing and moving toward them.
“No!” The woman almost screamed.
Jak stopped, bringing up the blaster. Krysty and Mildred also covered the strangers while the barrel of Dean’s .22 rifle poked out of the upstairs window.
The man waved his free hand, while struggling to support his distraught wife. “Don’t chill us, folks. I’ll explain a little more after we’ve taken a rest. We got something precious in the wag here. Something could make us a fortune.”
“Don’t tell them, Ronny,” the woman sobbed. “They’ll murder us for it.”
Krysty spoke. “If we wanted to chill you, then we’d likely have done it by now, lady. You got something you figure’s valuable, then that’s your business. Be safe with us. But we have to look inside and make sure you don’t have a dozen armed men there waiting to try and coldcock us. Understand?”