Movement awakened pain. A million tiny prickles came into my numbed leg, but I kept on, as careful as I could be under the conditions, wanting to leave no trail that could be followed.
As I crawled up a bank, my hand closed over a rounded rock with an edge. It was a crude, prehistoric hand-axe.
I remembered that Leo Prager, a Boston college man who had spent some time on Tyrel’s ranch near Mora, had told me about such things. He had spent all his time hunting for signs of the ancient people who lived in that country before the Indians came-or at any rate, the kind of Indians we knew.
For several weeks I’d guided him around, camped with him, and helped him look, so naturally I learned a good bit about those long-ago people and their ways. When it came to chipping arrowheads, I was the one who could show him how it was done, for I’d grown up around Cherokee boys back in the Tennessee mountains.
What I had found just now was an oval stone about as big as my fist, chipped to an edge along one side, so I had me a weapon. Clinging to it, I crawled over the bank and got to my feet.
I could not be sure how far downstream the river had carried me, but it was likely no more than half a mile. And I knew that after I left Ange and my outfit I had ridden five or six miles before reaching that point where I’d been shot.
So I made a start. Under ordinary conditions I might have walked the distance in two to three hours, but the conditions were not exactly ordinary. I was in bad shape, with a game leg and more hurts than I cared to think on. And with every step I had to be wary of discovery. Moreover, it was rough country, over rocks and through trees and brush, and I’d have to climb some to make up the ground I’d lost in the fall.
How many tunes I fell down I’ll never know, or how many times I crawled on the ground or pulled myself up by a tree or rock. Yet each time I did get up, and somehow I kept pushing along. Finally, unable to go any further, I found a shallow, wind-hollowed cave almost concealed behind a bush, a cave scarcely large enough to take my body, and I crawled in, and there I slept.
Hours later, awakened by the cold, I turned over and worked myself in a little further, and then I slept again. When at last the long, miserable night was past, I awoke in the gray-yellow dawn to face the stark realization that I was a hunted man.
My feet, which had been torn and lacerated by the fall and the night’s walking over rocks and frozen ground, seemed themselves almost frozen. My socks were gone, and probably the shreds of them marked my trail.
Numb and cold as I was, I fought to corral my thoughts and point them toward a solution. I knew that what lay before me was no easy thing.
By now Ange would know that I was in serious trouble, for I’d never spent the night away from her side; and it could be that my horse had returned to the wagon. My riderless horse could only mean something awfully wrong.
From the trunk of a big old sycamore, I hacked out two rectangles of bark. Then with rawhide strips cut from my belt with my stone axe and my teeth, I tied those pieces of bark under my feet to protect the soles.
Next, I dug into the ground with the hand-axe and worked until I found a long, limber root, to make a loop large enough to go over my head. Then I broke evergreen boughs from the trees and hung them by their forks or tied them to the loop, making myself a sort of a cape of boughs. It wasn’t much, but it cut the force of the wind and kept some of the warmth of my body close to me.
With more time, I could have done better, but I felt I hadn’t time to spare. My right leg was badly swollen, but nothing could be done for it now. By the time I finished my crude cape my hands were bleeding. Using a dead branch for a staff, I started off, keeping under cover as best I could.
If I had covered one mile the night before, I was lucky, and there were several miles to go. But I was sure that at first they would be hunting a body along the river-until they found some sign.
By the time the sun was high I was working my way up a canyon where cypresses grew. On my right was the wall of Buckhead Mesa, and I’d left Ange and the wagon on the north side of that mesa. I thought of the rifle and the spare pistol in that wagon … if I could get to it.
Then, far behind me, I heard a loud halloo. That stopped me, and I stood for a moment, catching my breath and listening. It must be that somebody had found some sign, and had called the others. At least, I had to read it that way. From now on, they would know they were hunting a living man.
If they knew of the wagon-and I had to take it they did-they had little to worry about How many were bunting me I had no idea, but they had only to string out and make a sweep of the country, pushing in toward the wall of the mesa. Using the river as a base line, they could sweep the country, and then climb the mesa and move in on the wagon. It left me very little chance for escape.
My mind shied from thinking of my condition after that fall. I knew I was in bad shape, but I was scared to know how bad, because until I reached Ange and the wagon there was just nothing I could do about it. Right then I wanted a gun in my hand more than I wanted medicine or even a doctor. I wanted a gun and a chance at the man who had ambushed me.
Using the stick, I could sort of hitch along in spite of my bad leg. It didn’t seem to be broken, but it had swollen until the pants seam was likely to bust; if it kept on swelling I’d have to split the seam somehow. My hands were in awful shape, and the cut on my skull was a nasty one. I had a stitch in my side, as if maybe I had cracked some ribs. But I wasn’t complaining-by rights I should have been dead.
When I was shot I had been standing on a point on Black Mesa, which tied to Buckhead Mesa on the southeast. The canyon where the cypress grew seemed to reach back toward the west side of Buckhead, and from where I was now standing it seemed to offer a chance to follow it back up to the top of Buckhead. So I started out
You never saw so much brush, so many trees, so many rock falls crammed into one canyon. Fire had swept along the canyon a time or two, leaving some charred logs, but the trees had had time to grow tall again, and the brush had grown thicker than ever, as it always does after a fire.
One thing I had in my favor. Nobody was likely to try taking a horse up that canyon, and if I knew cow-punchers they weren’t going to get down from the saddle and scramble on foot up the canyon unless all hell was a-driving them.
A cowhand is a damned fool who will work twenty-five hours out of every day if he can do it from a saddle. But put him on his feet, and you’ve got yourself a man who is likely to sit down and build himself a smoke so’s he can think about it. And after he thinks it over, he’ll get back in the saddle and ride off.
It was still cold … bitter cold. I tried not to think of that, but just kept inching along. Sometimes I pulled myself along by grasping branches or clutching at cracks in the rock. Cold as it was, I started to sweat, and that scared me. If that sweat froze, the heat in my body would be used up fighting its cold and I’d die.
Once I broke a hole in the ice and drank, but most of the time I just kept moving because I’d never learned how to quit. I was just a big raw-boned cowboy with big shoulders and big hands who was never much account except for hard work and fighting. Back in the Tennessee hills they used to say my feet were too big for dancing and I hadn’t any ear for music; but along about fighting time I’d be there-fist, gun, or bowie knife. All of us Sacketts were pretty much on the shoot.