He waited for his boots to touch the water. Wondered what he would do then, go on like a blame fool till he was soaked and cold, or haul up again and tell Bascom Hardy that he’d failed. . . .
He didn’t come to a conclusion. The choices kept walking through his mind as his strong old hands lowered him further—until he realized that if this rope led anywhere, it was not to the water from which Old Nathan drank and drew for the horses.
The cunning man’s mouth worked, but he said nothing aloud. He’d not been able to pray since King’s Mountain; and this was no place for a man to curse.
His arms ached. He sweated with the effort of the descent, but the droplets runneling down the troughs beside his spine were cold by the time they soaked the waistband of his trousers.
Abruptly, Old Nathan began to laugh. He wheezed from exhaustion, but the humor was real enough. It wasn’t every durn fool who had time to see what an all-mighty durn fool he’d been for the last time in his life!
There was Zeb Frawley, who thought he could call down lightning, which was maybe right—and thought he could direct that lightning’s path, which was wrong as wrong, and his bloated body to prove it the next morning. There was John Wesley Ives who’d witched Leesha Tazewell into his bed—and forgot that while Rufe Tazewell didn’t know a lick of magic, he could shoot out a squirrel’s eye at thirty paces; or shoot through the bridge of John Wesley Ives’ nose at a hundred, as it turned out.
Then there was—
The weight came off the cunning man’s arms. The distant echo of his laughter rumbled back to him, as if from the walls of an immense cavern. He felt nothing under his feet to support him, but neither was he falling.
The air around the cunning man was not black but gray, a gray so dense that he could not see his own hands when he raised them to his face. His calloused palms felt rough and loose from the pull of the rope.
“Bynum Hardy!” he called. “I’ve come t’ ye. Now show yerself!”
He didn’t know what he expected; only that he was no longer afraid. He’d faced this one till he beat the part of it that was in him; and for the rest, well, every man had his time, and if this was his time—so be it.
The gray cleared like fog streaming in a windstorm. A long tunnel with a figure at the end of it, then up close enough to touch: Bynum Hardy, twisting like a pat of butter across a hot skillet, and nowhere to go however it turns.
“I played yer games,” Old Nathan said harshly. “Now I’ll hev my side of the bargain. Give me the word t’ take t’ your brother.”
“D’ye know where I am, wizard?” Bynum Hardy said. He spoke through tight-clenched lips, like a man tensing against the pain of a gunshot—knowing that his blood and life ran out regardless.
“Thet makes no matter t’ me,” Old Nathan replied harshly. “Hit’s between you ‘n whoever it was put ye here. Just answer me where yer brother’s gold is at.”
“The gold’s in the pivot log of the well,” Hardy said. “But it hain’t Bascom’s gold.”
Vague figures reached up from behind the dead man, or they may have been wisps of fog. Something constrained and tortured Bynum Hardy, but there was no sign of it to the cunning man’s eyes.
“Tain’t your’n anyways,” Old Nathan snapped. His conscious mind had only loathing for the tortured figure, but the skin of the cunning man’s arms pricked up in goosebumps from the sight. It warn’t fright; only the way his body was contending.
But the righteous truth was, he wanted no more part of this wherever place.
“I’ve told you what Bascom wants t’ hear,” Bynum Hardy said, twitching and grimacing between the words. “Now I’ll tell ye what he must hear. He’s t’ take thet gold and give it t’ them poor folk I wronged when I was alive. Tell him!”