Chapter Eleven

Sometime during the night John Henry Cole dreamed of bayous and Spanish moss hanging from cypress trees and the blackened smoke of burning plantations. He dreamed of dead horses still in their traces, lying bloated along the road, their legs stiff, their bodies black with rot. And marching along the road were long columns of men in dusty blue tunics, heading straight into the blaze of a setting sun like they were marching to their final fiery death. But something troubled him awake, something that seemed to go right through his flesh and gnaw on his bones. He opened his eyes and saw by morning’s light that he was surrounded by a world of white. In spite of his blankets, his teeth were chattering. The snow that had begun the evening before had continued throughout the night and by now Bledsoe’s dead mule was buried except for one ear sticking up. The air felt so cold, Cole thought, if someone fired a pistol, it would shatter.

Will and Cole had been smart enough to move their bedrolls under the medicine wagon before going to sleep the previous night. It was lucky they had or they might have been as buried as Bledsoe’s mule.

Will stirred from his sleep about the same time Cole did. He sat up and nearly hit his head on the bottom of the wagon as he did. Instead, he caved in the crown of his hat. He removed it and looked at it before punching it up again and settling it back on his head. He blew breath into his hands as he surveyed the wintery scene.

“Well, it is a good thing we stayed here last night and didn’t keep going … else, we’d be out there somewhere under all this snow, maybe fallen down in some arroyo with our legs broke.”

“We’ll play hell picking up Book’s trail now,” Cole said, feeling like his bones were broken as he tried to climb out from under the wagon.

“Maybe that murdering devil himself is laying at the bottom of some arroyo,” Will said. “Who’s to say he could find his way any better in a snowstorm than we could?”

“Well, maybe the storm will have at least slowed him down,” Cole said.

They could hear Bart Bledsoe moving around in his wagon above them.

“I wonder if Bledsoe has any more of that foot medicine,” Will said. “Only it ain’t my feet that hurt as much now as it is my head. Them bitters’s got a kick to them.”

Cole was trying hard to get his parts in working order when he noticed what was wrong. “Will, our horses are gone.”

“What!”

They swept away the snowdrifts surrounding the wagon and climbed out into the sharp glare of sun coming off the snow.

“Maybe they laid down to go to sleep and got covered up,” Will suggested, but they both knew that wasn’t the case.

They saw a line of shallow depressions leading toward the Blue Mountains.

“Well, at least we know they didn’t run off of their own accord,” Cole said after a quick study of the tracks. The tracks had nearly been covered up with snow, but there was still the slight cupping of footprints alongside those of the horses leading off in single file.

“Indians must have come and stole them!” Will said.

“Possibly.”

“I don’t know who else but an Indian would come out in a blizzard and steal horses,” Will stated. “Indians love to steal horses more than they love to hunt or screw their women.”

“Does it really matter whether it was Indians or not?” Cole asked.

“No, I guess it don’t,” Will replied glumly.

Bart Bledsoe appeared from inside his wagon; he had a long woolen scarf wrapped around his neck and was wearing heavy mittens on his hands.

“My, oh, my,” he declared, looking at all the snow. “You were right, Mister Harper, about the storm being a big one.”

“Our horses have been stolen!” Will announced.

“Stolen!” Bledsoe yelped. “But how can that be?”

“They just come in the middle of the night and stole ’em, is how,” Will declared.

“Who would come during a snowstorm and steal your horses?” Bledsoe asked.

“Indians, most likely,” Will said. “They went off toward those Blue Mountains.” He pointed toward the jagged line of peaks in the far distance with his grizzled chin.

“Well, what will we do now without any horses?” Bledsoe said, stamping his feet and slapping warmth into his hands.

“We’ll have to go after ’em,” Will said.

Bart Bledsoe stared hard at the white emptiness but did not see either the horses or whoever had taken them. “But how will you go after them with your sore feet, Mister Harper?” he asked, his voice filling with distress as he stood with his gaze fixed on the vast open horizon.

“My feet are only half sore,” Will replied. “It’s my dang’ head that hurts.”

“You stay, I’ll go,” Cole said.

“I’ll go, too,” Will said.

“With your bad feet, you’d only slow me down, Will. Stay here in camp with Mister Bledsoe.”

Will looked unpleasant about it, but he and Cole both knew that, if Harper went along, they would never stand a chance of catching up with whomever had taken their horses. “You don’t catch up with them by tomorrow noon,” Will advised, “it means they got too good a jump on us … you might just as well turn around and come back.”

At least the thieves hadn’t stolen their supplies along with the horses and mule. Cole made himself a small pack of food and took both canteens of water. Then he took one of the coals from last night’s fire and smudged his cheeks under his eyes to cut down the glare of the snow. Finally he made sure he had enough loads for his self-cocker.

“Ain’t you taking that big Winchester?” Will asked.

“Too heavy to carry if I’m going to travel fast.”

“Well, what if you get a chance to shoot them thieving sons-a-bitches?”

“I’ll just have to shoot them with my self-cocker, Will. I don’t suppose it will matter all that much to them what they get shot with if I have to shoot them.”

“Well, shoot ’em even if you don’t have to for putting us through all this inconvenience,” Will growled.

Cole was already walking away from camp, following the shallow depressions in the snow. Once he got out of sight of the camp, the land seemed as lonely as any he’d ever been in. It struck him that a man could die out in this great emptiness and no one might ever know it; a man could die and his bones could turn to dust and be carried away by the wind and that would simply be the end of his existence. The sad truth of the matter was plenty of men had died just that way.

He walked all that day with the great silence broken only by the crunching of his boots upon the snow and the sound of his labored breath. His mustaches turned to ice, but the rest of him stayed warm because of the pace he’d set. His one advantage over whoever had stolen the horses could be that they might not consider the possibility that anyone would follow them on foot through the deep snow, and therefore might not be in any great hurry. It was about all the hope he had, that and the fact that most of the criminals he’d ever dealt with were not very smart to begin with.

Cole rested for only a few minutes at a time, long enough to catch his breath, sip some water, and have a smoke. He was counting on the horse thieves taking a lot of long rests. Once or twice, he had to force himself back to his feet again. Trudging through the deep snow took a lot more energy than he was used to. There hadn’t been much of his life he could recall not doing his work from the back of a horse. All day he forced himself to keep going, following that single line of tracks toward the Blue Mountains. Gradually the tracks started to become a little fresher.

By late in the day he decided to take a prolonged rest. The sun was beginning to set just over the mountains, casting long shadows of distant pines across the snow. He rested near a meandering tributary that cut through the snow like a wet black snake. He refilled the canteens and boiled a little water for coffee. At least the wind wasn’t blowing like it normally did in that country and that made his rest a little easier. He rolled a cigarette and smoked it while having his coffee. It made him wish he was back in Shorty’s Diner in Cheyenne, having a slice of pie to go along with his coffee before setting out to visit Ella Mims. He’d been thinking about Ella Mims a lot more than he’d planned on. Maybe it was squatting there all alone in a valley of snow with the Blue Mountains off in the distance and the unending silence pressing in on him that caused him to think of Ella again. Hadn’t Wayback Cotton said that one thing about the Big Lonely was that it made a man think about women—the ones he’d known, and the ones he wished he’d known?

Cole closed his eyes against the ache of tired burning muscles. He felt as exhausted as he’d ever been and it was tempting to shallow a place in the snow and just let sleep take over. When he had closed his eyes against the sting of sun glare and when he did it now, white flashes of light burst inside his skull and his arms and legs throbbed with the pain of a thousand needles. He snorted at the thought, but it felt like he had been carrying a horse across his back all day, tired as he felt.

With one great effort, he managed to get back to his feet. The sun had by now gone behind the mountains and a moon as round as a fancy silver buckle had risen in the deepening blue of the sky. In another hour there would be enough moonlight reflecting off the snow so that following the tracks wouldn’t be a problem. If he was right, and the horse thieves didn’t believe they were being followed, they would be in camp somewhere not far ahead of him. If he was wrong—well, he didn’t want to think about if he was wrong.

Cole stopped only long enough to catch his breath, and then would move on again. The thought of catching the horse thieves was all he needed to keep putting one foot in front of the other every time he thought about quitting, that and the thought of maybe someday riding to Nebraska to see Ella Mims again.

After what seemed forever, dawn finally broke behind him over the eastern horizon—a red ball of shimmering sun balanced atop the glaze of icy earth. He stopped just long enough to watch it. It gave him a good feeling, seeing the sun come up again. He moved on.

Finally he reached a point where his legs felt too heavy to take another step. He rested against the base of a bluff and leaned his back against the incline. The fiery pain shot through his legs and into his groin. He caught his breath and tried rubbing life back into his legs and thought of Will and the way he’d tried to rub the pain out of his feet. With the sunrise came a wind that began to blow stiffly, kicking up snow dust. He was somewhat protected by the bluff as he rested, trying to feel the sun’s warmth on his face and hands. It wasn’t much comfort, but it was some. He remembered Will warning that, if he didn’t catch the thieves by noon this day, he should give up and turn back. The question that nagged him now was whether or not he had enough left to make it back to the camp. He didn’t know how far he’d traveled in the last twenty-four hours, but, considering the pace he’d set, it was a greater distance than what he wanted to think about doing again on foot.

He rolled himself a shuck with the last of his makings and took his time smoking it, enjoying the moment. He didn’t know if he’d have that many more moments in his life to enjoy. Being afoot on the frontier, he was at the mercy of just about anyone on a horse, including renegades and road agents. It had been foolish of him not to have carried more firepower. In fact, the thought of carrying that big Winchester rifle didn’t seem like such a burden to him now.

He finished the cigarette and forced himself up the slick rise to the top of the bluff. That was when he saw it. Down below sat a small, weathered cabin with a tin roof that shone dully under the morning light. A crooked stovepipe spewed black smoke. But the thing that really drew his attention was the six horses and one mule bunched together in the corral twenty feet from the cabin. You’d have to have been blind not to spot the speckled bird among the bunch.

He dropped to the ground, hoping no one inside the cabin had spotted him. There was no way of knowing how many were inside the cabin. Between the bluff and the cabin, there was just a lot of open ground. Cole thought for a moment about taking his chances trying to cross that coverless patch of ground, but if someone were sitting in the window of the cabin, he’d be a dead man before he made it halfway. He eased himself back below the brow of the bluff and settled in. He thought about what Will had said regarding the patience of Apaches. If he wanted to steal back their livestock, he’d have to wait until dark to do it.