And now I was beginning to get mad … really mad, They had stolen our money, they had been responsible for the death of pa, even though those things might be laid at my own door. If I hadn’t acted like a fool kid and run off, that horse would never have strayed, and pa might be alive this minute.
All the time I felt aggrieved over them taking our money I couldet escape the idea that I’d played the fool myself. But they’d tried three times to kill me. Once when they shot into the restaurant, and again when Doc Sites had laid for me in the dark at the foot of the stairs.
Now they had tried it a third time, and they might have succeeded.
Only now I was mad enough to want to live, mad enough to want to see them in hell and me with my money back.
I’d lost some blood-they’d seen that. But though they knew I’d been hit, they dit know how bad.
I didn’t know how bad myself, but by the size of that wound it didn’t look good.
Two things I had to do now. I had to hunt me a hole and see how bad I was hurt, and then I had to crawl out of that canyon, one way or another.
Once out of the canyon I somehow had to get me a horse and get back to Leadvffle to stay until I was able to ride again.
Pa, he always said there was no stoppin” a man who was set on an idea.
He’d told me of men who kept going, even when they was out of their heads, so I told myself what I had to do, and then I set about it.
just beyond where my horse lay there was an opening in the brush.
It might be where a deadfall lay, but it might be a path, and a path would lead to somewhere.
Crawling, so’s I could drag my leg, I worked my way along the slope, sometimes in and sometimes out of the aspens.
It was a trail sort of, but it was mighty old.
No fresh tracks showed; it hadn’t been used in a long time. I turned down the trail, for I needed water, and it was down in the bottom of the canyon.
It began to rain. The grass and lupine around me were already wet but rain could at t matter to me now.
What I needed was some kind of shelter, some place where I could make a fire, and do something about my wound.
Time to time I thought of that other blow. Had I been shot a second time? Nothing … but no time to worry about that. The thing to do now was to crawl.
Somewhere along the trail I passed out. Now, In stories I’d read sometimes in those dime-novel books that Reese, Sites, and me were always swappin’ around when a man passed out he would always come to himself in a nice bedroom with a pretty girl a-patting his brow.
When I come to it was dark, and wet and muddy. I was face down in the trail, and there was no light, not even a star, no fancy bed, and surely no girl a-patting me. Only the rain.
“You always thought big about what yoed do when you come to manhood,” I said to myself. “Now, boy, you better crawl, or you just ain’t a-going” to make it.” So I crawled.
Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled back in the mountains. I saw the reflection of lightning on the rainslick rocks. I saw the reflection off the rain-wet grass close to my face. I started to crawl.
I towed behind me my blanket roll with my rifle stuck through the string that tied it. There was sense enough in me to hang onto that.
Once I found a pool on the downbfll side of a rock and I dipped my hand into it and drank. I was dry .
dry inside me anyway-from losin’ blood, most likely.
Finally I found a fallen tree, a dead spruce with heavy boughs, and I crawled close to it. It was a fresh fall, the earth likely loosened by the rain. I cut away a few branches with my knife, unroned my blankets, and crawled in further, muddy and wet though I was.
Twice during the endless night I woke up, once from the pain of my wound, another time from the cold. I felt sick and very tired, and when mornin’ came at last, a gray, dull morning with slanting rain and lowering clouds, my mouth was dry, my head ached, and when I tried to stand I was weak and dizzy. But I knew I must move. If I stayed where I was, in the state I was in, I would surely die.
Staggering, I got to my feet, made a clumsy roll of the blankets, and slipped into my slicker … there hadn’t been time before.
Slinging the blanket roll around my shoulders, I worked my way back up the slope to my horse.
For several minutes I listened to the rain, studied the layout, and when I was sure there was no one about, went up to the saddle.
I got the saddlebags loose, tugged the one from under the horse, and then with them over my shoulder I started up the canyon.
They’d said it was boxed in. Maybe. One thing was sure, the way I felt I wasn’t going down canyon to give them a shot at me. As I recalled, there was no cover near the cabin … Id have to break into the open within easy range of it, and they could set right there in the warmth of the cabin and pick me off when I tried to get by.
There was some grub in those saddlebags. Down on the slope I leaned against a tree, because it hurt to bend my leg to sit down, and I ate some jerked beef and a chunk of bread. Then I started on.
My head was throbbing. When I’d made no more than a hundred yards, I had to sit down. I almost fell onto a log and stayed there, panting.
My forehead was hot, and my eyes didn’t seem to focus right.
After a bit I went on, struggling along through trees, over slippery rocks, working my way higher up the canyon.
Presently the canyon narrowed, and a branch came in from the south.
Standing there, swaying a little from weakness, I stared up the branch.
You never saw such a mess. There’d been a blow down, leaving hundreds of trees, fallen and dead, crisscrossing the canyon.
Sometimes a howling wind will funnel down such canyons, all its strength channeled into one tremendous blast. Every once in a while in the Rockies you’ll come on a canyon like that … they seem to suck the winds down them.
This one had blown down most of a small forest, but it had left some trees standing, and others had grown up among them. The place was like a nightmare, but it gave me hope.
Already I could see the rock wall at the branch canyon’s end, and it looked sheer and seemed to promise nothing, but I had just an idea that the mess of dead wood might offer something. They had said there was no way out, but I was willing to bet no cowboy had ridden into that canyon, or tried to climb very far through those fallen trees.
Weak as I was, and fuzzy as was my vision as well as my thinking, I had the wild animal’s urge to escape, to escape and to hide. At the canyon’s entrance I turned and brushed the grass upright where I had stepped. just the bending over almost caused me to fall, and my hip hurt bad.
Turning, I went into the canyon, ducked under one deadfall and half fell over another. I sat down there and swung my legs over a moss-grown boulder and went on. When at last I looked back toward the mouth of the canyon, it could no longer be seen.
Here it was shadowed and still. The whisper of the rain was the only sound, except once in a while the rubbing of one branch against another in some slight stirring of the wind.
Sometimes I fell. My hands were scraped by rough bark when I tried to catch myself. My pack and my rifle caught again and again on branches into which I blundered. But somehow I kept moving because it was in me that I had to move.
I could not let them beat me. I had to get out of here.
I had to make them pay for what they had done, but most important, I had to get that money back.
I had to get it back for those neighbors of ours in Texas.