Time is measured by clocks, calendars, the turning of the earth and the shifting of constellations, none of which was capable of marking our passage up those mountains. I woke abruptly, and lay for a moment wondering what was responsible, until I realized we’d stopped. I’d grown so accustomed to the pitch and sway of the wagon and the shrieking of the ungreased axles that the sudden cessation of noise and motion had come as rudely as a pistol report. Dusk was all about, turning the sky the shade of eggplant, the zigzag treetops flat black, as if they’d been stamped against it with printer’s ink. I wondered if we’d stopped to rest the animals. The thought that the ghastly shades who commanded them needed to halt for any human reason was too unlikely to consider.
It was dusk, yes: A dusk, anyway. There was no telling how many had come and gone since those two insignificant things, guts from a dead bear and a felled tree, had succeeded where nothing else could, stopping the Ghost. Nearer ground level, wriggles of yellow and orange suggested flames, spaced too evenly apart to belong to anything so random as nature. They twisted and snapped atop narrow posts stuck in the ground, illuminating a broad one-story building pale with whitewash, pierced at regular intervals with paned windows, dark shutters folded flat against the walls, and a proper shake roof. Peering over the side of the wagon, I swept the sweat from my eyes with the heels of my hands, but when I looked again it was still there, a cozy domestic arrangement, with bowls of flowers hanging by chains from a long front porch containing a bentwood rocker and a wicker table. All it lacked was a pitcher of lemonade to complete the effect. Between the torches, I identified similar posts supporting pale oblong shapes: gourds, set up possibly for target practice, although they looked too close to the house for safety.
Half of it, of course, was delirium. The building had to be an illusion. Such a house, the grass around it shorn close to the ground, with homey yellow light glowing through the glass and a blue-enamel mounting block resting beside the flagstone walk, had been transported there in my fever from a neighborhood in St. Louis or Denver, within walking distance of a schoolhouse and a church. It no more belonged in that wild place than a hopscotch court on Cemetery Ridge. The gourds were homely enough to be real.
I was wrong about both, as it turned out; but by then I knew I’d been wrong about almost everything connected with Oscar Childress from the start.
As the creatures dismounted and milled about, unhitching harnesses and opening their trousers to spill acrid-smelling water onto the ground—I swore steam rose from it, although the evening was warm—I looked for Joseph, but by then it had grown too dark to see inside the wagon that had been carrying him. Once again my gaze went toward that impossible house. Piled up against a side wall, just visible in the shifting light of the torches, was a pale heap that struck a gong deep in my memory.
In my ranch hand days I’d supported myself winters hunting buffalo, then switched to wolfing and traded the pelts for bounty. The packs had swollen on the easy pickings of the shaggies’ abandoned carcasses, and when they’d stripped them to the bone, armies of vagabonds had swarmed in to harvest the skeletons for sale to manufactories back East, which fashioned them into buttons, combs, and handles for knives and chests of drawers and pulverized them to press into china for the table and to filter the impurities from sugar. Within months of the last hunt, the plains were scraped clean of any evidence the beast had ever existed, millions vanished in twenty short years. I’d led pack horses piled with wolf pelts through city streets turned into canyons of bone; but soon even they vanished. Where Childress had managed to find so many to refine his coarse-ground cane was another of the mysteries that piled up around him like—well, the bones themselves.
I heard the shink of a pin being drawn from an iron staple, followed by another, and then the tailgate swung down with a rattle and thump of elmwood. A toe struck me in the ribs, shooting a red flare of pain all the way to my torn scalp. My keeper, awake at last, stood stretching, his own bones making as much noise as the tailgate. I pulled myself to my feet before he could aim another kick. I was wearing my old comfortable range Stetson, trained to my head so it wouldn’t blow off in a stiff wind, but I held the brim as I made to step down, because the angle I’d chosen to avoid contact with the sticky lump wasn’t natural. I steadied myself with the other hand on the side of the wagon as I groped for the ground with one foot. Standing on bare earth I couldn’t feel my legs. I took a couple of steps to get the blood flowing, but instead of the pins and needles I expected my knees folded and I pitched straight forward into black.
* * *
At first I thought the whole business of the house and the torches and the pile of bones and the stop itself was a dream, and actually felt the familiar lurching of the wagon; but there was something different, almost alien, about the surface where I lay on my back. I hadn’t slept in the upholstered berth aboard the train in days, and had no idea how long I’d spent stretched out on the weathered boards of the wagon. My muscles and bones had adapted themselves to unyielding planks, beginning with the floor of the locomotive’s cab, to the point where the softness of feathers, ticking, and clean linen—it smelled of cornstarch and fresh air—made them ache. Whoever had carried me here would have been kinder to have laid me on a floor, then a stiff bench, and brought me by degrees to occupy a civilized bed.
Just where the bed was I couldn’t say, even when I opened my eyes. Darkness surrounded me, so black it made my heart clatter. I was sealed inside a padded coffin; cedar, from the sweet scent. I lay breathing shallowly, to avoid exhausting what air was left me, dreading to raise a hand and confirm the tightness of my confinement. My hand twitched, lifted an inch, dropped back to my chest. I pressed my lips tight and willed it to rise again. My arm went up and up and felt nothing but empty air. I opened my mouth wide, exhaled in a whoosh, and sucked in, filling my chest until it ached. I felt as if I’d dived into a thousand-foot lake, touched the bottom, and clawed my way back to the surface with my lungs straining through the last fathom close to bursting. The air was even sweeter than it smelled.
Gradually—glacially—my eyes adjusted themselves, allowing a gray glimmer of light to measure the dimensions of the room where I lay and to suggest a shape for the objects that shared it with me. It was either windowless or the curtains were heavy, because the only source of illumination was a hollow rectangle at the far end where a door didn’t fit flush to the frame. I had no idea if it was day or night, or if the space beyond was lit by the sun or a lamp. It reflected on the curvature of a pitcher near my head, and fell from there to the top of a table or a nightstand within reach of where I lay. Through the corner of my eye I made out a bedpost, curved also, but not well enough to decide whether it was wood or metal, only that it, too, was capable of reflecting light.
They fascinated me, those polished surfaces. Apart from the glass-bezeled gauges and steel of the Ghost and the rails it rolled on, it had been days since I’d laid eyes on anything that wasn’t coarse and light-absorbing; even the lush fittings of the parlor car were a dim memory since I’d decamped to the front of the train.
Something else glittered, as if from its own source of light; the gilded binding of a leather-bound volume lying beside the pitcher on its stand. I brought my face close to the spine and peered, but the room might have been black as pitch for all I could make of the gold-stamped title: It was German. That gave me a good idea of whose bed it was. Two people in that vicinity might understand English and Spanish; it was unlikely more than one would be educated in any other language.
I decided it was night. The air was chill at that altitude without the sun to warm it, and wrapped my face in a cold mask. My arm, cold too, was bare where it lay on a coverlet made from the pelt of some animal and cured to silken softness; doeskin, I thought. Between it and my body was a linen sheet, woven so finely it felt like heavy cream. It covered my other arm. I slid my hand down my body, confirming my suspicion that I was naked.
I felt weak, but my skin was cool and dry. There was no determining how long I’d been there, or how many times I’d been bathed of sweat and the bedding had been changed. Malaria has been with me off and on in all the years since, and the time needed for the fever to break varies. It might have been hours or days.
Carefully, to avoid triggering a relapse, I peeled aside the coverlet and sheet, sat up, gathered energy, and swung my feet to the floor. That amount of effort took as much out of me as I had for the moment; I leaned my shoulder against the bedpost to collect my strength. My bare soles rested on thick wool, a woven rug probably of Indian workmanship. I worked my toes, enjoying its warmth. I’d begun to shiver, and to worry that another attack was on its way.
When the sensation faded, I found the courage to test the extent of my recovery. I shifted my weight forward, grasped the bedpost, and pulled myself upright. The room did a slow turn but ended up stable. I tugged the sheet off the bed, wrapped it around me, closing it at my throat, and went exploring.
Some kind of decoration hung on a wall, a large painting, I thought, but the subject, painted in dark colors and possibly made more murky with age, remained anonymous inside a frame of some dark lustrous wood.
Beyond the edge of the rug the floor was wooden as well, cool and smooth under my unshod feet. There was pine aplenty in the Sierras, and evidently labor sufficient to cut and split and plane and sand it. Such mindless and repetitive work would be ideal for the tiny brains of the men who’d brought me there.
I bumped into something tall and solid. I laid a palm against the door of a wooden cabinet. The cedar smell increased when I pulled it open. I groped inside, felt fabric. I hadn’t been out of my canvas coat in a week, and knew the texture even in the dark. Probing further, my hand found the Gatling cartridge in the pocket where I’d put it. My relief was tinged with revulsion: Who’d be senseless enough to overlook it when he was undressing me, if not one of my doltish escorts? The thought of his hands touching my bare skin made it crawl. It was as if a snake had slithered over me while I slept.
The rest of my clothes, gritty as they felt from constant wearing, were as welcome as the coat with its secret treasure. I let the sheet fall to the floor and stood naked in the stiff Mexican night. I dressed slowly, pacing myself, sitting on the bed to pull on my boots. The effort spent me. I lay back for a few minutes to refuel. I wasn’t quite as weak as a kitten, but I fell short of a full-grown tabby.
Whoever had hung up my things hadn’t been accommodating enough to leave behind my revolvers; but there was no need to be greedy. The fifty-caliber slug slapped pleasantly against my hip when I put on the coat.
I had a fair notion where I was: the plantation headquarters of Major Oscar Childress, thousands of feet almost straight up from Cape Hell.