There would be water in the Picketwire where they would camp, and some shelter in the river bottom, if they were lucky. Tom Chantry rode the drag for a while, spelling a rider there, then he moved up into a swing position. After the noon break he took the grulla from the remuda and went scouting.
It was still cold, and he wore a buckskin jacket over his blue wool shirt. He went directly east, riding warily. Twice he came upon pony tracks; each time they were several days old. He held to low ground, climbing the ridges only to peer over the crest, showing himself as little as possible. He was uneasy, and after a bit he took his rifle from its scabbard and held it in his hand.
The wind was raw. He turned up the collar of his jacket, tucked his chin into it, and pulled his hat low. He was studying the ground, then suddenly looked up to see he had ridden right into the bend of an elbow of hills. He must either skyline himself by crossing the ridge or follow along the side until he could reach the cattle trail. It was the country ahead he wanted to see, but caution told him the longer way was best.
He had turned to ride along the side of the hill when he glimpsed a notch, almost at the bend of the elbow, a small gap by which he could get to the other side of the ridge without showing himself on top of it. He swung his horse toward the notch.
His horse scrambled up the last few feet. At the opening of the notch he could see only that it was a sort of cleft in the ridge that seemed to lead all the way through. Old tracks told him the buffalo used this route, so it must go all the way through.
He walked his horse into the gap, traveled about a hundred yards, then suddenly rounded a low shoulder of the hill and emerged on the other side.
He never heard the shot, but he felt the blow. It was as if somebody had struck him suddenly across the side of the head with a whipstock.
He knew he was hit, he felt himself falling, he remembered the necessity of clinging to his rifle. He hit the dirt, smelled the dust that rose, and then he neither felt nor heard anything but the vague sound of his horse.
Cold … icy, teeth-chattering cold. It was cold that brought him to consciousness, it was cold that opened his eyes.
It was night … cold and black, and there was a smell of rain in the air, and a distant rumble of thunder. He was lying sprawled on the earth, the smell of dust and parched grass in his nostrils. He started to move, a spasm of pain went through him. He lay still, wanting no more of that.
He had been shot. He had fallen from his horse. He had been shot sometime in the middle of the afternoon, but if anybody was looking for him they could scarcely find him here.
A spatter of rain struck his shoulders. Shelter … he must find shelter. He risked the pain, and tried to sit up. On the third attempt he made it.
He was still at the cleft of the hills where he had been shot. He felt around him for his rifle … it was gone.
His knife? Gone. He felt then for his money, but it was gone, too. It was only then that he realized how cold his feet were.
His boots were gone.
Gingerly, he touched his head, which throbbed with a
dull, heavy beat. His hair was matted with blood. He got to his knees, then shakily to his feet. He looked around slowly, blinking against the pain.
His horse was gone, too. He remembered then that he had heard it running off. It might not have gone far, and he called out. There was no sound in answer, no sound and no movement but the falling rain.
He staggered to the lip of the cut and looked around, but it was too dark to see anything.
The herd would be ahead and to his left. Taking a careful step at a time, he moved slantingly down the hill, toward the northwest. He stumbled over a rock and fell. When he got heavily to his feet, he realized that the butts of his palms were bloody, skinned in the fall.
Whoever had shot him, had left him for dead— or if not dead, sure to be dead soon.
He fell three times before he reached the bottom of the slope, and by then his socks were worn through and his feet were hurting. He peered about, trying in the distant flashes of lightning to see something he might use for shelter, but there was nothing.
First of all, rain or no rain, he needed some protection for his feet. Fumbling in the debris at the foot of the rocky slope, he found a jagged piece of rock, and removing his buckskin jacket he sawed off the sleeves a little above the elbows. He slipped these over his feet and used thongs made from the long fringes, knotted together, to tie the sleeves around his ankles.
Putting on his coat again, he moved out, walking carefully, trying to avoid the rocks and the patches of prickly pear.
A dark line ahead warned him of trees, and he went even more slowly, wary of Indians who might be camped there. Under the cottonwoods he stood close to a tree trunk and listened to the falling rain and the rustle of water in the creek bed, but he could hear no other sounds.
His eyes searched for a fire, or some evidence of human life, but there was nothing. He worked his way among the trees until he found a place where several bigger ones were grouped together in such a way that their entwined branches made a sort of shelter.
Here he leaned against a tree trunk and closed his eyes with weariness. After a moment he opened them, and his eyes, now accustomed to the darkness, saw a fallen limb from one of the cottonwoods. He went to it and, huddling there in its partial shelter, he leaned back against the tree, and slept.
Around him the rain fell softly, steadily. Overhead the cottonwoods rustled. In the hollow of a tree not twenty yards away a squirrel peered out at the rain for a moment, listening, then tucked its bushy tail around it once more and went back to sleep. … In a saloon in Trinidad a cowhand on the drift lighted a cigar and glanced at his cards. “I’ll take two cards,” he said.
More than a thousand miles to the east a girl in a white dress with lace at the throat looked down the table at her father and said, “Pa, I haven’t heard from Tom. It isn’t like him.”
Earnshaw looked up, and said quietly, “I hope everything is all right with him. I have written to him, telling him what has happened here. Everything depends on him now.”
She was a gentle-appearing and lovely girl, but in the coolness of her eyes now and the set of her chin there was something that reminded her father that she came of pioneer stock. “Pa, I want to go west,” she said. “I want to go to him.”
“That’s impossible. He’s out on the range.
From what I hear it’s very wild country.”
“He may need help.”
“What help do you think you could give? You are
a single girl, and we have no friends there, no one to whom you could go. It would be unseemly.”
“Nevertheless, I want to go.”
“Wait. We will hear from him.”
Chantry awoke, shaking with a chill. He was wet through to the skin, without shelter, without food, without fire. He had lost blood, and he was very weak. He had no shoes, only the crude moccasins made from his sleeves.
He struggled to his feet and clung for a moment to the trunk of the cottonwood. He was shaky and uncertain, but he knew he must move, he must get on. A faint light under the trees indicated that daylight was not far off. He picked up a broken branch from the ground. It was almost straight, and was about seven feet long and almost two inches in diameter. Using it for a staff, he started to walk. For the first time he realized how sore his feet had become, but step by step he went through the cottonwoods to the far side.
By now the herd would be moving, or about to move. To overtake it in his present condition would be impossible. He had left the herd by riding east, and at a rough guess he must be about fifteen miles from Trinidad.