Abandon
“You sleeping peacefully?”
“Not often. My mind tends to race in the silence and I don’t know how to shut it off. I have these terrible headaches.”
Ezekiel studied the distance. His back ached. The burro tracks continued on as far as he could see, which wasn’t far in the blizzard. He suspected the pass lay just ahead.
“Do you ever experience desperate thoughts?” the doctor asked.
“Desperate? You mean like ending myself prematurely?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“It’s a grave sin, Russ.”
“I’m aware. Don’t mean it ain’t afflicting you.”
“I have, on occasion, considered it.”
“Recently?”
“Last night.”
At this elevation, no trees could thrive, but glancing up ahead, Ezekiel discerned a badlands—vague profiles of rock formations and a small boulder field, drenched in snow and looming like a herd of Gothic monoliths. He turned to his compatriots. Their conversation embarrassed him, a subject he felt uncomfortable being made privy to, though that wasn’t his reason for interrupting. It was merely to advise the Doc to slide his Big Fifty out of the rifle scabbard and keep on the eye in case they were dry-gulched.
Russell said, “You should come by my office, Stephen, let me examine you. Your gums have a blue tinge. Absent a full evaluation, I can’t say for sure, but it could be lead—”
“Doc, I’m sorry to break up your conversation, but—”
The ball made a loud crunch as it entered Russell Ilg’s head through his left eye, taking a large shard of his skull with it on the way out. Then came the thunderous boom that Ezekiel recognized as a big-bore six-gun. The lead ball had knocked Russell from the horse, but his stovepipe boots had caught up in the stirrups, so that he hung upside down, the contents of his skull dropping into the snow as his horse dragged him back down the slope.
Ezekiel dismounted. The snow rose to his waist. He grabbed the Winchester, yelled at Stephen as another report spooked the horses.
“Get off a there, man! You wanna get kilt?”
But the preacher sat stone-faced and frozen in the saddle, staring through falling snow at the two figures darting through the boulder field.
Ezekiel pulled Stephen’s boots out of the stirrups and knocked him off his mount into the snow. “Get back down the slope and stay hid. Take Doc’s rifle if you want and keep your head down.”
A shotgun blasted, and Ezekiel’s horse boiled over, neighing and rearing up on its hindquarters before collapsing.
He crouched in the snow, eyes peeking over the surface as the preacher crawled away, weeping.
Ezekiel scrambled from his dying horse.
After thirty feet, he stopped, gulped down several lungfuls of thin air. He cocked the lever of the carbine, sat up, sighted a rock outcropping forty yards upslope that he suddenly realized was the pass, torn white ribbons of cloud streaming over it, driving the snow sideways, making it impossible to see anything distinctly.
A lead ball zinged past his right ear.
He swung his rifle around, sighted the left edge of a small boulder fifty yards away, and pulled the trigger on a vaquero hat that had peered around the corner.
It disappeared and he cocked the carbine again and clambered to his feet, now fighting toward the boulder field through chest-high drifts, smiling and swelling with all the murderous joy of a boy playing war.
THIRTY-ONE
Ezekiel walked into the boulder field and hunkered down at the base of a broken pitch of rock. He reached into his slicker and pulled the box of .44–40’s from an inner pocket of his sack coat, tore it open, and slid five cartridges into the loading gate.
With the wind subsided and his horse no longer braying, what struck him now was the silence, his senses heightened, everything distilled. The smell of wet rock and gunpowder. The sound of snow falling on his hat. His heart thumping like it meant to bust out of his chest. Burning cold spreading through the left side of his face.
He heard distant whispering, got to his feet, stepped out from behind the rock formation. What lay before him on the gentle downslope reminded Ezekiel of a snowy labyrinth—countless boulders of varying size, some no bigger than a barrel, others rivaling wagons and cabins, bunched together in spots, spaced out in others, and a million places to hide. For a fact, Oatha and Billy had deadwood.
Twenty feet ahead, he spotted what he’d been looking for—tracks in the otherwise smooth, unbroken snow. He waded through the powder, light-headed.
After three strides, he froze. From behind a table-topped boulder came an exhalation. He brought the carbine’s butt plate flush against his shoulder as something edged out from the rock.
He nearly shot a rawboned burro with missing ear tips, buried to its neck and laden with an empty cantia. It stood watching him through large dull eyes.
He moved on through the boulder field.
It had stopped snowing, and that seemed to magnify the silence.
He came to the tracks. Two sets. The snow so deep he had to squat down to find which direction the boot prints pointed, now pushing forward again with what he knew was deluded confidence.
Behind any one of the hundreds of rocks, they were laying for him, and this would all be decided by dumb luck: who saw who first.
The sound of a block of snow calving off a boulder drew his attention, and when he turned back to the tracks, a slouch hat poked out of the snow thirty feet ahead.
The carbine bucked against his shoulder and he lunged behind the nearest rock as a shotgun exploded the silence.
The shooter had disappeared when he peeked around the corner, Ezekiel figuring he’d ducked back under the snow to reload.
He sighted the spot where he’d seen the hat. Had there been only one, he’d have felt at ease staying indefinitely, pinning the man down, waiting for him to lift his head again. But the prospect of a standoff made him nervous with two men in play.
As he debated what to do, he heard the unmistakable snick.
Perhaps five yards behind and a little to the left.
Thought he was dead.
No sound like the hammer of a six-gun going back.
“Y-y-y-y-you go on and, and, and, and, and throw that rifle away.”
Ezekiel remained crouched in the snow, leaning against the rock.
“Swear to God. I-I-I got a bead drawed on the back a your head.”
“All right.” But Ezekiel didn’t throw his carbine aside. He kept a firm grip on the forend stock, a finger in the trigger guard, and turned slowly until he faced the boy standing waist-deep in snow.