12

The following morning was almost as quiet as the previous night. Franco got up before everyone except the man on watch duty and brewed a pot of coffee while frying up some cuts of salted bacon. He scrambled some eggs and added chopped peppers, which he considered to be a plain, almost sorry excuse for breakfast. Slocum forgot all about sleeping in his bedroll on the ground near the fire when he caught the scent of that bacon. By the time he’d fixed himself a plate, several others were making their way out of the wagons or from the other bedrolls that had been scattered on the ground near the fire.

Even the children were quieter than normal. Their heads remained cast downward, only to be raised when seeking occasional assurances from parents that were busily glancing along the horizon for silhouettes of unwelcome visitors. Nobody mentioned the topic that had dominated the previous night’s discussion, but it was obvious that everyone was thinking about Spirit Bear. If the strange hunter had wanted to weaken the wagon train by sowing seeds of fear and anxiousness among its members, he’d done one hell of a good job.

As Franco was cleaning up and everyone else was preparing to get moving again, a horse rode in from the north. All eyes fixed upon that horse, and when it got within range, Josiah and Ed pointed their rifles in its direction. The rider came to a stop and raised his hands.

“Lower your guns,” Slocum said while stepping forward. “It’s Hevo.”

Although Ed was quick to respond, Josiah kept his Winchester where it was. “He’s not even armed,” Ed reminded the older man.

“Still don’t mean he ain’t dangerous,” Josiah replied.

Slocum walked by him and slapped the rifle down. “We’ve already been through this. Just stay here and I’ll go have a word with him.”

Hevo slowly approached the wagons, meeting Slocum a bit closer than the halfway point. “Are we to hunt together or not?” the Indian asked.

“We are. Will you be needing your weapons?”

Twisting around to show Slocum his back, Hevo pointed to the blades kept there by a leather strap crossing his chest. “Already have them.”

“When did you get those?”

Hevo smirked. “The old man speaks loud, but not as loudly as he snores. Tell him if I wished him harm, I could have easily slit his throat when I came back for my weapons in the night.”

“If anyone asks, why don’t we tell them I gave them to you?” Slocum said while leading the way back to the wagons. “I doubt he’ll take much comfort from what you said.”

“As you wish.”

“By the way . . . what else did you see when you were sneaking around here last night?”

Hevo looked over at Slocum with a sly grin on his face. The grin didn’t tell Slocum enough, however, to let him know if it was there because of taking the weapons out from under Josiah’s nose or if he might have seen anything involving Slocum and Theresa. The Indian replied, “I came only for the weapons,” which still didn’t put Slocum’s question to rest.

Deciding to let the matter drop, Slocum approached Ed and Josiah. Both men came out to meet them with their rifles held in a low grip.

“So did this one come by for some grub?” Josiah asked.

“No,” Slocum said. “He’s here to ride with us in case this Spirit Bear comes back.”

“I will not ride with you,” Hevo announced.

Slocum turned to look back at him. “Pardon me?”

“I can do more good if Spirit Bear does not see me with the rest of you.”

“What if him or one of them Dirt Swimmers is watching right now?” Josiah asked.

“Then they will still have to divide their numbers if they want to keep watching me after I leave. If they let me go or if they do not yet know I am on the same hunt, they will be taken by surprise. Either way, it works to our advantage.”

“He’s got a point,” Ed said.

Josiah wheeled around to glare at him and say, “You always been on his side!”

“I have?”

“Do whatever the hell you want,” Josiah said while throwing a spiteful wave at them. “Last time I try to be the voice of reason around here.”

“Was there a first time?” Slocum asked. When nobody saw fit to answer, he shrugged and said, “Must have been before I signed on. You want something to eat, Hevo?”

After giving Hevo some food, Slocum sent him on his way and the wagons got rolling right on schedule. Before noon, the clouds parted and the sun’s bright rays flooded everything in sight. The glare from the sky as well as the nip in the air gave everything a sharp edge, like a picture that had been developed in stark contrast. Slocum didn’t allow himself to be lulled into a sense of security, even when the children started singing a song that had James and Michael calling back and forth to each other from their wagons.

When Tom McCauley rode back to the wagons after scouting the trail ahead, a strangely familiar howl rolled through the air. Rather than watch what Tom was doing, Slocum shifted his focus to the ground on either side of the trail. Now that he had an idea of what to look for, he was able to pick out mounds of leaves that seemed to be moving of their own accord.

“Tom! Watch yourself!” Slocum shouted. He didn’t wait for a response before reaching to the boot of his saddle and drawing the rifle kept there.

Reaching for his own rifle, Tom twisted back and forth to get a look at what could have caused such a reaction. The moment he found one of the mounds of dirt and leaves, a shape exploded from it amid an earthen spray. Tom recoiled and fumbled with his rifle, but wasn’t quick enough to get the weapon out before he was beset from two sides.

Yes, Slocum realized. Two sides.

He hadn’t seen the second mound of shifting dirt until it had begun to rise up on the other side of the trail. While Tom was turning toward the first figure, the second was ready to attack him from behind. Slocum placed his rifle to his shoulder, took half a second to steady himself, and fired. The shot flew a bit high and to one side, due to the fact that Slocum was rushed and didn’t want to risk knocking Tom from his saddle.

It was even difficult to say if Slocum’s next shot hit its target. The figures covered in their leafy cloaks moved like wild animals, reaching for Tom with gangly arms and keeping their backs hunched over. Their strange behavior as well as the leaves that flew off them could have been normal or caused by hot lead. Tom fired a shot, but his rifle was pointed nowhere near its target. The panicked reaction did nothing to discourage his attackers from pulling him down from the saddle.

“What the hell are those things?” Josiah hollered as he charged toward the wagons from a different angle. The two men must have split up sometime after parting ways with the wagons.

“Those are the same ones that attacked me and John,” Ed replied as he stood up in his driver’s seat. His Spencer rifle was at his shoulder, and he lined up a shot before pulling his trigger.

The Dirt Swimmers had already gotten what they were after and were smothering Tom’s face with some sort of rag. Slocum reined his horse to a stop, took aim, and squeezed his trigger again. This time, he knew he’d hit his mark. The Swimmer that had been coming up behind Tom was knocked away as if he’d been kicked by a mule. When that one’s body landed in the dirt, three more sections of ground sprang to life.

Where Ed’s gunfire had been calmly focused before, it suddenly became hurried and sporadic. Slocum could see the fear building in Ed’s trembling arms and increasingly unsteady legs. When the howl drifted through the air again, this time much closer than before, his fear built to a new height.

“Damn it!” Slocum said through gritted teeth as he snapped his reins and rode toward Tom’s horse. Even when everyone in that wagon train had been expecting it, Spirit Bear had still managed to scatter them like a bunch of mindless birds.

The Dirt Swimmers almost caught him off guard yet again when another mound of dirt beside the trail stood up. This one was within spitting distance of Slocum’s horse, but he was on the lookout for pieces of terrain that didn’t seem to belong. As he rode, Slocum adjusted his grip on the rifle so his fingers wrapped around it like a club. With one scooping downward swing, he smashed the barrel against the top portion of a leaf-covered figure. Thanks to the swing as well as the horse’s momentum, the impact was enough to send the figure sailing through the air to land in a heap.

More gunshots rang out, coming from Tom, who was still firing wildly without any prayer of hitting anything apart from the ground. Having felt the effects of the stuff the Dirt Swimmers had given him, Slocum knew the big man’s vision was just as clouded as his mind. In fact, when Tom spun toward the sound of an approaching horse, it seemed he might pose as much of a danger to Slocum as the attackers themselves.

After reining to a stop, Slocum swung down from his saddle and held his rifle at hip level. He fired a shot at the first Dirt Swimmer to emerge from the ground, hoping to convince the attacker to back away from Tom. Since two of the other three were coming at him, Slocum couldn’t afford to wait and see if the first one had heeded the warning he’d been given.

Now that he wasn’t under the influence of Spirit Bear’s concoction, Slocum could see the attackers for what they were: rowdy little men wrapped up in some kind of netting made to look like the surrounding terrain. Their covering swayed as the attackers moved, sending leaves and bits of dirt in all directions. As for the men themselves, it was difficult to tell how big they were exactly since they remained hunched over. What Slocum was more concerned about were the weapons in those men’s hands. Two carried pistols and the rest held foot-long blades in a grip that kept the weapons flush against their forearms. They got to Slocum in a hurry, swinging their arms so the blade snapped out at the last moment like the end of a whip.

He used the rifle to deflect an incoming blade and then followed through by bringing his elbow around in a sharp semicircle. Slocum’s arm cracked against the Swimmer’s head, but some of the blow’s impact was absorbed by the netting covering the other man’s face. Even so, the Swimmer staggered back a step before lashing out with a swing intended to open Slocum’s belly and spill his guts to the ground.

Slocum hopped back to clear a path. Knowing he was too close to make good use of the rifle as anything but a large cudgel, he shifted it to his left hand and drew his Colt with the right. Even if he’d been given a dose of Spirit Bear’s medicine, Slocum would have had a difficult time missing his target from such a short distance. He fired and hit the Swimmer in the chest, sending him flailing to the ground.

“You have been warned!”

The last time Slocum heard that voice, it had sounded hollow and unearthly. Now that he didn’t have a peyote mixture clouding his judgment, it sounded very human indeed. He looked for the source and found a tall man about fifty yards away wearing a thick, shaggy pelt over his shoulders like it was a kingly robe. Instead of a scepter, he waved a large stick with something attached to the top. When he waved that stick from one side to another, all of the Dirt Swimmers pulled back and crouched down beneath their netting.

“I gave you a chance to turn back and instead you sullied more of my ground with your feet and wheels,” Spirit Bear said.

“If you’d just step aside, we’ll be on our way,” Slocum said.

The man in the pelt stepped closer. He was still some distance away, but carried himself as if he were close enough to slap Slocum in the face. “You have not seen a fight yet, white man!” Then, he hollered something in a language Slocum didn’t recognize. It must have been an order to charge, because that’s exactly what the Dirt Swimmers did.