Hell couldn’t hurt this bad.
He awoke to white-hot pain that pierced his body. The unbearable agony radiated down his arm and across his chest into his groin, pinning him to the heat-baked earth. The dry burn of the sun overhead sucked the very air from his lungs.
Sims Callahan felt as if he were being branded with fire. He thought that he had died and gone to hell. But dying would be too easy.
Clenching his teeth, he tried to still the pounding in his head so he could think. There was something he needed to remember. Something …
Ben! He had to find Ben. Callahan was afraid that his brother was wounded, lying in the hot sun. His brother was too young to die.
Callahan didn’t know where he was or what had happened, but he knew that if he didn’t get out of the sun, he would die too. A new wave of pain racked his lower body. Then, just for a moment, there was nothing except the realization that now, when his life was about to mean something, it was slipping away. “No!” he whispered, reaching out to find something to grab onto. There was nothing except flat earth and hard rock. He was the only living thing in this hell.
Hours passed—days, maybe—and he lay, unable to move, fighting black-robed Death hovering just at the edge of his awareness. The heat turned to cold. The light to dark and back to fight again. He was growing weaker.
“Are you alive, white man?”
Callahan tried to blink open his eyes to see who was talking to him, but they were sealed shut.
“Who …” he whispered, in a voice so hoarse that he wouldn’t have recognized himself. “Who’s there?”
All he heard was a grunt, then nothing but silence and the feeling of pain. The sun continued to beat down and then a shadow moved over him.
He was being lifted. “No …” he cried out, but felt his voice stick in his throat. His mouth was too dry to speak. Mercifully, Callahan passed out, but not before looking down and seeing an Indian’s moccasins.
A feeling of doom had rushed through the Sioux Indian when he’d seen the black-and-white horse on the mountain ridge—the death horse, his people believed. He’d followed the horse to the wounded man. There was a time he wouldn’t have helped a white man, but that was before a white woman saved the life of his father.
He glanced back at the ridge. The horse was gone. Bear Claw lifted the man and draped him over his horse, mounted, and rode away.
By the time the sun reached the rim of the Laramie mountains, the Indian’s destination was in sight. The man was still alive, but just barely. Bear Claw would deliver him to the valley his people shared with the white medicine woman and her family.
It was up to the medicine woman to save his life.