IN THE MORNING the threatened rain was closer, moving down from the distant bulks of the Mogollons on a wide curtain of black cloud. The wind was stronger, cutting over the flatlands with a chilling intensity that set the dried-up balls of the Tumbleweed dancing over the sand. Across the forefront of the cloud, thin streaks of fork lightning played, as though the storm marched towards the border like some massive, many-legged insect. When Baum built up the fire, long streamers of sparks blew clear, wisping over the sand like skittering red flies.
The German tugged on a slicker, shivering in the early chill, and set a pot of coffee on the fire before removing the noose from the half-breed’s neck and fashioned a hobble around the man’s ankles; then he freed Azul’s hands from his waist.
Azul groaned and rolled on his back. His knees and arms were numb from the constriction of the rope, and there was a dull ache in his side where his elbow had dug into his ribs.
And there was a memory.
He rested a while, then stretched out, wincing as the blood began to flow again.
‘I gotta piss.’
Baum chuckled, but he still helped the half-breed to his feet. Azul swayed, fresh pains shooting up his legs. Then he hobbled away from the fire, towards the cairn of stones covering Dumfries’s body.
‘Don’t go too far,’ Baum warned.
‘No.’ Azul halted at the piled rocks and began to fumble with his buckskin pants. ‘How can I?’
‘Yeah.’ The bounty hunter laughed. ‘I guess you’re kinda tied up with me.’
Azul got his pants open and directed a stream of urine at the cairn. Across the stones he could see the neck of Baum’s bottle, the cork resting a foot away. He emptied his bladder, staring down at the rocks: Watching the yellow stream splash over yellow boulders, over a colder, clearer color that interlaced the burial mound: the color of fragmented glass.
He finished and began to fasten his pants. Then he cried out and let his body pitch forwards. He twisted as he fell, folding his knees and turning his body so that his left shoulder struck the rocks and took most of the impact. It hurt: the fragments of wind-washed stone were hard, if not sharp. But he got his bound hands on a piece of glass. It was larger than most, a jagged fragment from the side of the bottle, towards the base. It was curved slightly, so that he was able to fumble it into his hands without slicing his fingers.
He stretched over the cairn, back turned towards Baum, and slid the broken glass inside his pants.
There was a moment of pain when the jagged edge cut into his belly, but then he fastened the pants and wriggled clear of the cairn.
Baum came over to help him up.
‘Jesus!’ said the bounty hunter. ‘I never thought this job would include helpin’ a man take a piss.’
‘So let me go.’ Azul stumbled towards the fire, supported by the bounty hunter. ‘I got a thousand dollars in my saddlebags. Take it and let me go.’
He knew the promise wouldn’t work even as he said it. Knew that Baum followed his own path – his own kind of honor – as firmly as did Azul.
There were some men who set out to do a job – to find a man, or build a house, or push a railroad through; to break a horse, or learn how to use a gun, or farmland – with a single-minded concentration that excised anything else. They did it. And they never stopped along the way to think about another path: they just pushed ahead to what they had promised themselves.
Azul could understand that.
He expected Baum’s answer.
‘I saw,’ said the German. ‘But it don’t make no difference. I took a contract, an’ I’m gonna keep it. Hell! In my line of work you gotta do that. I back out on a feller, an’ he’s gonna come after me. It ain’t worth makin’ enemies.’
‘I’m one,’ said Azul. ‘I’ll kill you, if I can.’
‘You don’t get the chance,’ said Baum. ‘I ain’t gonna give it you.’
By the time the horses were saddled the rain had started. The big black cloud was coming down and the prairie was dusted with the heavy spots of the shower preceding the storm. Baum tied Azul’s hands to the saddle again and strung Dumfries’s horse behind. The bounty hunter took the lead, his own pony linked to Azul’s.
By noon the storm was on them. The wind got wilder, and the sun got hidden behind a massive bank of cloud. Lightning danced all around, and overhead there was thunder like the drumming of cannons. The rain built up from a spattering of drizzle to a steady downpour, then took on the character of hailstones.
The horses’ heads drooped, soaking manes lashing against dripping necks. Both men were drenched. It was impossible to see more than a few feet ahead.
Baum called a halt.
They were in a wide gulley, the split something like twenty feet across; the walls four feet above their heads. The bottom was already filling up with water so that the horses plodded through a turgid miasma of sticky mud, their hooves dragging with each step; slowly; ploddingly.
Baum turned his pony towards the high ground, following a shallow flank of sandstone that lifted towards a low ridge.
Azul kneed the gray stallion behind, dragging Dumfries’s mount behind him.
They reached the ridge and followed the sodden trail along to where an earlier flood had cut a cave into the sandstone. It was around twenty feet high and fifteen wide: deep enough that all three horses could find shelter.
Baum dismounted and hobbled the horses. Then he lifted Azul down and stared around the cave.
‘You think we’re all right here?’
‘Don’t you know?’ Azul stretched his legs. ‘You never been in a flash flood before?’
‘No.’ The German shook his head. ‘What happens?’
Azul shrugged, his mouth smiling, though his eyes stayed cold.
‘You get rain like this, the gulley fills up. It rises. It comes down like you never seen water before. It could fill this place.’
‘We’re high enough,’ said Baum. ‘We should be safe.’
‘Maybe,’ said Azul. ‘Wait and see.’
Baum went out to the mouth of the cave and stared down at the gray water that was filling the line of the gulley. It was high as a pony’s chest now, a floating scum of driftwood and dead animals bouncing over the roiling waves. Pieces of wood, tumbleweeds, drowned rabbits, two coyotes floated past; all dancing on the frontal wave of the flood.
‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘I never seen anything like that before.’
His attention was caught by the horrible magnificence of the churning water, his eyes fixed on the tumbling waves that shifted from greasy gray to pure yellow, and then to sandy foam and black.
Azul climbed to his feet, drawing the shard of glass from under his belt.
He ran forwards, lifting his bound hands so as to drop them around Baum’s neck.
The German heard him coming and began to turn, but the half-breed’s arms dropped like a gallows’ noose about his throat, fingers plucking viciously into the sides of the neck as the rope binding Azul’s wrists together cut under the chin and the sharp-edged glass cut into the bounty hunter’s neck.
Baum choked and drove a foot down hard on to Azul’s moccasin. The half-breed ignored the pain, lifting his other leg up in a savage blow that drove a knee into the German’s coccyx. Baum screamed as the tail of his spine broke and shattered inwards, the agony doubling his body over so that he forgot the pain in his throat.
Azul was lifted up, his bound hands still clutched over the windpipe. Baum folded to his knees, reaching up to grasp the half-breed’s arms and swing him in a wide, flailing circle, above his head.
Azul felt his hands come clear of the bounty hunter’s neck, then felt his back land heavily on the rain-slickened rim of the cave. He kicked out, smashing both feet against Baum’s knees.
The German went back, arms still spread wide from his grip on Azul’s arms. The half-breed wriggled round and planted a foot hard into the bounty hunter’s face.
Baum’s nose broke, twin gouts of blood bursting from his nostrils.
Azul kicked again, the second blow snapping of chips of broken tooth and shreds of lip flesh from Baum’s mouth.
He reached up on his knees as the bounty hunter slumped back, right hand fastening on the butt of the Colt. He stretched forwards, bound hands clutching for the gun. And fastened them over Baum’s big fist. At the same time he rammed a knee into the bounty hunter’s groin.
Baum screamed, a high-pitched yell that was compounded of agony and frustration. Azul kicked again, and saw the gun fall clear of the man’s hand.
It pitched outwards, sliding over the rim of the cave to land on the ledge above the roiling water.
Baum lifted his hands and brought them down, fisted, against Azul’s face. Stars danced through the half-breed’s mind, and then a fresh pain churned through him as Baum smashed one knee upwards into his stomach. He gagged, tasting vomit in his mouth, and then both the bounty hunter’s hands slammed against the sides of his neck, and sparks of sickening pain lanced through his mind.
He felt himself shoved away.
Was suddenly aware of nervous hooves drumming against his body. And knew that Baum was gone.
He came upon his knees in the empty cave.
Grabbed a stirrup and climbed to his feet.
Saw the bounty hunter’s saddlebags on the sandy floor. Saw his own beside them.
And snatched the familiar bulk of his own gun from the leather satchels.
It was difficult to cock the pistol with his wrists lashed together, but he did it. So when Fritz Baum came back into the cave he was ready.
The bounty hunter was soaking wet. His hat was gone, and his cropped hair was plastered flat over his skull. His mustache was draggled in streamy lines against his snarling mouth. His face was dripping, water falling from his heavy eyebrows into the slitted hollows of his eyes.
He saw Azul and saw death looking at him.
The half-breed squeezed the trigger of the Colt.
Felt the familiar buck of the gun against his hands.
Saw Baum’s face explode into fragments of bloody flesh.
And fired again:
Once is safe. Two is certain.
The first bullet landed between Fritz Baum’s eyes, ft hit dead center on the bridge of the nose, blasting in through the fragile bone at the front of the skull so that both the orbs were shattered inwards, the sockets folding into a single bloody line like a punctuation mark across the man’s face. The pulpy globules burst out from the cheeks on a twin spurting of blood, dangling down over the ruddy cheeks for an instant before the plunging bullet severed the cords connecting them to the inner parts of the broken skull and pitched them down over the bounty hunter’s chest.
The bullet ploughed on into the softer stuff behind the eyes, churning the brain into a sticky pool that spurted clear of the broken bone at the rear of the skull as the base fragmented and poured outwards.
Baum’s head jerked back, the mouth opening in a silent scream beneath the empty sockets of the eyes. The movement exposed his throat to the second shot.
It went in through the stretched flesh of the bounty hunter’s neck. It cut his Adam’s apple and tore his windpipe apart. The throat was ripped up, the knot of muscle at the front sundered and driven back into the gaping hole torn out by the bullet. Muscle and lead and pieces of bone exploded from the base of the neck on a long column of blood that joined the fountaining of the skull in an awful cascade that splattered thick with droplets of sticky brain matter and blood-rinsed chunks of bone into the flash-flood.
Baum’s gun dropped from his dead fingers, sliding down over the walls of the gully to splash into the oily water beneath.
Then the bounty hunter’s body followed the tool of his trade.
Azul’s shots had blown the man back from his precarious hold on the upper ledge. Now his dead fingers lost their grip and he slithered down the slope along the same path as his gun. The corpse went down the rain-slickened slope like a runaway sled.
It hit the lower edge of the gulley and halted, legs dangling a foot above the rising water, right hand resting over the skid-marks of the lost gun.
Azul found his knives and cut his hands free. He set the throwing blade back inside his right moccasin, and belted the Bowie on his waist, together with the Colt.
Then he went down and kicked Fritz Baum’s body into the water.
The corpse slid clear of the gulley’s bank. It slid away like a tired memory; like a rag tossed off and forgotten because it has been used too much and has no further purpose. The water took it and washed it away downstream. For a while the corpse bobbed on the head of the flood, then it got lost in the darkness and the churning of the water. And after that it disappeared.
Azul went back to the cave.
He checked Baum’s saddlebags and found the letter that had sent the bounty hunter out to kill him. And wondered who would pay so much to see him hung.
He decided to go on to Cinqua and find out.