Relentless

2

Walker felt the numbness of his ears and nose and hands and feet. The wind almost tore the hat from his head and he tied it down around his chin with a ripped-off concho thong. The wind was a swirl of snowflakes and foaming mist; he batted his gloved hands together.

The wind was a sound now, he could hear it frothing through the pines, beating the branches together. It wasn’t yet carrying very much snow; most of it had vaporized into a whirling chalk-dust fog. Walker’s flesh trembled inside the coat: he tried to hunch himself down inside it for warmth.

Burt and the packhorses trailed him on the nylon rope; the woman was in front of him-then Baraclough, then Hanratty, finally the Major in the lead. He could barely make out the Major’s grayish shape swaying in the mist.

The Major had assigned the order of placement and it was easy to see why. It put Hanratty between the Major and Baraclough; it put the woman between Baraclough and Walker; it put Walker between Burt and, at one remove, Baraclough. All the unreliable ones accounted for-and Walker right behind the woman, responsible for her: the Major had told him in a mild voice, Anything that happens to her happens to you. Bear that in mind. It she tries to break for it you had better bring her back. If she gets away from you don’t bother to return-you can forget your share of the money.

Baraclough had wound coat-hanger wire around Mrs. Lansford’s wrists and twisted the ends together with a pair of pliers. Not tight enough to cut the skin but too tight to be slipped. The nylon rope ran from Walker’s bridle through Mrs. Lansford’s wrist bindings to the bridle of her horse. She could get down and walk but she couldn’t get free of the rope.

The wind was against his left shoulder and the horse wanted to turn; Walker had to fight it with the reins. The white horse’s coat had a curious pigmentation that he had seen on a few horses before: when it was wet the white hair turned pale blue-some kind of secretion in the hide underneath. It came up dappled, like drops of blue ink on a white background; that was why this sort of white horse was called a blue roan.

He scrubbed his ears and tied the scarf up around his nose and mouth. An arm of cold wind got into him and shot dry agony through the tooth cavity in his upper jaw.

There was no reckoning the passage of time. The sun was gone, light was draining out of the day. The only way to tell direction was by compass and the Major had the only one of those. Walker closed his eyes up to slits and blinked back the tears of icy wind. They were climbing steadily along the side of a steep slope that seemed endless, doing switchbacks now and then when the Major decided it was time. Walker could feel the shifts by the changes in wind direction. Probably the Major was tacking-so many steps right, so many steps left, trying to keep a balanced compass course somewhere between. But the wind hit the exposed face of this south slope with wicked fury and Walker wondered when they would get behind something that would help break its force.

A swift blast of gale swayed him to one side and he grabbed the saddle horn wildly and when he righted himself he could only just see the whipping tail of Mrs. Lansford’s sorrel four or five feet ahead. The mottled pointillism of whipping snow enfolded him that quickly: now he could only see the blue’s ears, he couldn’t even see the ground, and he bent forward low over the withers in a useless try at evading the hard clout of the blow. Disoriented, he couldn’t tell if they were still climbing or if they were descending. He clung to the saddle and closed his eyes and tried to hide his head between his shoulders.