For the remainder of the morning and on through the long afternoon Crow kept them on narrow side trails. Calling on every vestige of his immense tracking skills to get them along in poor visibility, with their hoof-marks vanishing behind them almost before they’d made them.
The pack mule had been shot and the other burro, Edgars, had cut and run for it at the height of the shooting. Which meant that the sickly boy had to continue riding in front of Crow. Despite the occasional return from the grip of the fever, the lad was clearly sinking. Falling into a kind of coma that lasted until Crow finally allowed a halt for the night.
‘Looks like we might have shaken them off,’ said Richard Okie, stretching as he clambered off the back of his mule.
‘What’s that, yonder?’ asked Amy, finger pointing through the snow flurries to the east of them.
Crow looked, biting his lip as he saw what the Easterner had seen. Smoke, curling up from one of the peaks, around two miles off. Then the snow closed in again, and they were locked together in the soft stillness.
‘Signals?’
The shootist nodded. ‘Must be. Didn’t get time enough to see whether they were saying they’d lost us. Or found us.’
During the early part of the evening, the boy rallied again. Fighting back against the fever, managing to drink some show, melted in Crow’s hands. And even succeeding in chewing a little of the jerky. But he was still painfully weak, shivering under all the blankets that they could spare him. With the pack animal gone, and with the spare mule also lost, there was no chance of further provisions.
‘What can we eat?’ asked the Bostonian, leaving his wife huddled over, knees drawn to her chin, locked in her own misery.
‘There’s enough to keep us going around six days. Water’s no problem.’
‘What happens after six days? Even if we started back now we’d never reach a settlement within that time, would we?’
‘No.’
‘So does that, does it mean …’
‘Means we get hungry, Mr. Okie. There’s facts about surviving you ought to know.’
‘Then tell me. I am always willing to learn from a man who knows, Crow, and I vow that you certainly seem a man who knows a lot.’
‘It’s not hunger that kills. It’s cold and it’s thirst. You can go without eating for … maybe even for a week without dying. Course you get weaker, but you don’t likely die.’
‘So we can make it?’
‘To the mine and back to a place where we can hunt food? Sure. Less’n the snows come in on us.’
‘It seems to be easing somewhat.’
‘Yeah. Some. Taste more on the way. Feel it like iron on my tongue. Too much and we never get out.’
Amy Okie had struggled over to join them. Despite the bitter chill she was sweating. Fingers shaking. Her breathing harsh and shallow. Crow had seen people coming down off morphine addiction and knew the suffering that the woman was due for. Despite the tautness of the skin on her face, Amaryllis was still an attractive woman and Crow felt a prickling in his loins. It had been a long time since he’d laid with a woman.
A long time.
It was odd the way the need came to a man. Might be that you’d be in a warm bed, secure and snug, with a pretty little Mex whore, eager to please. And it might not be right for it. Yet Crow could recall years back, in his early days with the Cavalry, being with a patrol that had gotten itself trapped by some Oglala Sioux. There’d been only one woman with the whites. In her late fifties, fat and ugly, with pockmarked cheeks, constantly chewing tobacco.
They’d looked to be massacred at dawn and an hour before she’d come crawling out to where Crow had been lying, cradling his carbine, and wondering what the sun would bring. She’d touched him, and he’d responded. There’d been no way of doing more than unbuttoning his breeches and she’d upped her filthy skirts. They’d coupled like animals, in the dirt, and it had been just about one of the best damned times he’d ever had.
The Indians had withdrawn and a large patrol had rescued them not long after sun-up. Crow had never seen the woman again. Could scarcely recall her name. Widow …? Hall, was it?
And now he wanted, needed, Amy Okie.
She seemed conscious of his feelings and squatted opposite him, boots heel-deep in snow, her son’s breeches tight across her thighs, rubbed so thin from the mule ride that he could see that she wore no drawers beneath, the light vee of her pubic hair clearly visible through the worn material.
‘Then we may starve? Like the Donner Party?’
‘Could be. They ate each other to keep alive. Ate the corpses. We don’t have any corpses, Mrs. Okie. Not yet.’
Richard glanced across at his son, and his thoughts could be read as clearly as if they were burned on his brow with letters of fire.
‘The stuff dreams are made of,’ said Crow.
Both of the Okies looked at him, faces puzzled, but he didn’t explain, and they didn’t ask him what he’d meant.
Around nine o’clock that night the snow edged further off, finally stopping altogether around ten. The sky cleared and the temperature of the air dropped dramatically. The snow froze and the stars above them glittered with unfeeling beauty.
Crow sat still, drawing up his knees, keeping his body huddled as small as he could under his blanket, trying to conserve his body’s heat. But it was damnably cold. He’d been up in Oregon in winter, and around Montreal in January, when your spit freezes in the air. But this was an unseasonable chill, and his only hope was that it might pass. Too long of such a frost and they’d all die. First the boy, then probably the woman. Richard Okie and finally Crow, succumbing to the irresistible urge to lie down and sleep.
And never wake.
The woman had insisted that she should take a spell on watch, taking one of her husband’s fancy guns, and Crow had allowed her. Knowing that it would be something to take her mind off the shaking from the heroin withdrawal. She was due back shortly from the small pinnacle of rock a hundred paces north of where they rested. It commanded a view of the trail ahead and behind. With the icy clarity of the bright moon, reflecting off the snow, it would be impossible for any of the Apaches to creep up on them unseen. But with the change in the weather, Crow figured that the Indians would all be huddled up under furs by fires, with their squaws to keep them warmer. The thought made him aware again that he lusted after the pallid, blonde Amy and he stared out across the snow to see if she was returning.
‘Your guard next, Okie,’ he said.
There was no reply, and he realized that the man had fallen asleep.
‘Okie! You’re on guard in a minute.’
‘What? Bless my soul, Crow, but I dreamed that I was out with my sister, near Cape Cod, summers ago, with the smell and sound of the sea and the sun warm on my back. I would have slept on …’
‘Yeah,’ said Crow, disinterestedly. ‘Get ready. Check your guns. And see to the boy.’
Groaning with pain at the cold the merchant clambered upright, tottering unsteadily over the rutted ice to stoop and check his son. Laying a hand on the boy’s temple, pulling the blankets tighter around his neck.
‘Seems the same. Fever’s no higher. What do you think?’
‘Doesn’t give a damn what I think. You’d sell your soul to get to the mine, now we’re this close.’
‘I guess it has come to mean a lot. The business back home hasn’t been doing all it might, and that’s a fact.’ He hunkered down alongside Crow, the blanket across his shoulders making him look like a refugee.
‘Make or break, huh? Everything ridin’ on the wings of that old black bird?’
Okie tried a smile, but it turned into a shiver. ‘Must be someone walking over my grave, Crow. Yes, I’ll not deny that if the mine is not there, then I fear we shall return to Boston to find a battling throng of bailiffs and assorted creditors, ready to snatch everything I have ever possessed. I am close to bankruptcy, and that’s the truth, may God help me.’
‘I’m surely glad I don’t have that restin’ on anything. I just figure my concern is bringing myself out alive.’
‘You aren’t going to leave us! We have an agreement!’
‘That lasts long as I want.’
‘I’ll double the money.’
‘Money’s not all,’ replied Crow, seeing that Amy was moving carefully towards them, her duty completed. She was carrying the pistol in her right hand.
‘Then what else? Sweet Mary, mother of Jesus! This cold bites through my marrow. It feels as though my veins are choking with ice.’
‘It looks like I don’t have a whole lot of choice. If the money you’re going to pay me rests on us finding the silver mine, then I’d be a damned fool to pull out. I’ll take the double offer for a start, and thank you.’
‘What did you mean about the money not being all, Crow?’ asked Okie.
The shootist didn’t answer. Sitting and looking past the Easterner as though he didn’t exist. The moon flickered across Crow’s face and Okie shuddered again, thinking that he had never seen such a frightening man. The eyes glittered in their deep sockets like frozen diamonds, staring at Amy Okie as she drew nearer.
‘Oh,’ said Richard Okie, awareness flooding in on him like the bursting of a spring dam. The gunslinger wanted his wife. Wanted to lie with her. That was going to be his price for carrying on as scout and as bodyguard for them.
‘I didn’t say a word,’ he heard. In that softest of voices from the shootist.
‘But it’s Amy that . . .’
Crow still didn’t look at him, eyes locked to the woman. Okie shuffled his feet, the ice crackling under his boots. Trying to believe what was happening.
Life had been so secure until Radley had appeared, dying, with that hunk of silver and the neat map. Now he was out in the frozen deeps of this great wilderness, with one son dead and the other ailing. Considering whether he ought to allow his wife to be ravished by the tall, skinny gunman.
Not even “allow.” That wasn’t the right word. The only hope left in Okie’s life, narrowing like a long tunnel, was the light of the mine and striking it rich.
‘All right,’ he said, quietly. ‘All right with me, Crow. I’ll go stand guard.’
‘That’s good, then,’ replied the shootist, not moving, not looking at him.
As he walked away, fingers round the cold butt of the Peacemaker, Richard Okie swore that the first thing he would buy with the silver, when he’d made it big, was a hired killer to murder that cold-hearted bastard, Crow.
Her husband might have considered that he was leaving his sweet woman to be ravished by Crow. But that wasn’t the right word, either.
When Amy joined the shootist, without having exchanged a single word with her husband, she was almost rigid with the cold and on the edge of a breakdown from her addiction. She knelt down in the ice, close by Crow, and started to weep. Very quietly, but without making any effort to stop herself, great tears falling in the frozen snow, leaving tiny salt craters about her.
‘Crying sometimes helps. I know it’s hard, Amy. I’ve seen a lot of men crying like that when they’ve lost their drugs. Morphine, heroin . . . it’s all the same. You get to depend on it to make life seem good.’
‘Oh, no, Crow. Not to make it seem good,’ she said bitterly. ‘Just to make life seem normal.’
‘It’ll pass.’
‘Sure?’
‘It will.’
She shook her head. ‘I swear it’ll kill me first.’
‘Not unless you let it, Amy,’ he said, putting out a hand and resting it on her shoulder.
‘It will. I’ve dreamed that I’m bound to die in these mountains. I’ll die here with no grave.’
He patted her, feeling her trembling. She was thin, but not desperately skinny, yet it felt as if he was touching a tiny bird, frail-boned.
‘Oh, Crow!’ she said, in a strangled moan, throwing herself into his arms, her own cloak flapping about them both.
Over her shoulder Crow saw Richard Okie turn, still holding his pistol, and stare at the tableau, of his wife in the arms of another man. While the shootist watched he stood still, then turned and disappeared on the spire of rock they used as a look-out. And Crow knew then that he would do well not to turn his back for long on the eminent Bostonian once they’d found the Black Bird Mine.
‘Please, Crow,’ stammered Amaryllis, her hands delving under his blankets, reaching for him. Finding his belt and loosening it, hands cold as death on his maleness. Despite the iciness of her fingers he was roused, ready for her.
‘Goin’ to be difficult,’ he said, his own hands inside her dress, cupping a breast, making her moan as his finger and thumb tightened on an erect nipple.
She misunderstood him. ‘There is no danger. He will not be able to see clearly from there. And we can see him should he return early.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘But you are fearful of being caught!’ she gasped. Rolling down her own breeches to her ankles, drawing his fingers to her moistness. Rubbing at herself and writhing with her own desperate need for him.
‘Mr. Okie doesn’t much mind.’
‘He knows!’
The shock stopped her.
‘Sure. I said I’d go and leave you all if I didn’t get to lay you here and now.’ He paused, considering. ‘I guess I didn’t come right out and say that, but my meaning was plain enough.’
‘And he agreed! Oh, the devil.’
‘I wouldn’t worry overmuch, Amy. Come on. I meant it’d be difficult with all these blankets and the snow. Guess I’ll lay back and you can start with some riding.’
Already the problem with Richard was forgotten. Crow noticed that she was oblivious to her sickly son, lying only-ten feet from them. All she wanted to do was couple with the lethal killing machine called Crow. She’d wanted it right from the first time she’d seen him. Wanted him to hurt her and possess her.
Crow satisfied Amy.
Four times in the next three hours, before it was time for him to leave her and go and take his spell on watch. There was a temptation to simply call out to Okie to stay out there while he pleasured himself, but one thing stopped him. Not fear or remorse or conscience. Okie would be tired and angry, and that made for carelessness. Crow didn’t value sex higher than living.
So after the fourth time he pulled away and tugged up his breeches, wincing at the stickiness. Grinning wolfishly down at the woman as she lay, spread-thighed, the evidence of their long love-making glistening between her legs. Her face was swollen, bruised around the lips and with cuts on her cheeks. A trickle of blood showed on both naked breasts.
She’d whispered for him to be brutal with her, and Crow hadn’t hesitated, slapping her several times, flat-palmed, across the face, digging his nails into her body and pinching her flesh. She’d cried with the shock and the pain, but moaned for him to do it more. Tossing her head, blank-eyed, from side to side, grinding her hips up to meet him as he thrust down into her. Slapping her booted heels against him until he’d stopped her with a fist to the mouth, making her lie still until he’d taken his own pleasure.
As he’d stood up, she’d lain there, his come oozing out of her on the snow, and she’d smiled at him.
And at that moment he’d begun to be aware that Amaryllis Okie might be a very dangerous woman indeed.