The Tears of God

Chapter Fourteen

The Pawnee camp was deserted, the charred embers of their fire long gone cold.

Nate expected as much. Still, he took precautions. He drew rein a quarter of a mile below and climbed the rest of the way on foot, Maklin at his side every step.

“Where do you reckon they got to?”

Nate cast about for sign. Their horses had left plenty. The tracks pointed to the southwest.

“That’s damn peculiar. I thought Pawnee country is to the east.”

“It is.”

“Then why the blazes are they heading southwest?” the Texan wondered.

Nate wondered, too. Given Kuruk’s wily nature, there was no predicting what he was up to.

They retraced their steps to their mounts and began the hunt in earnest. And what a difference the sun made. Nate could hold to a rapid gait with little threat from logs and boulders and low limbs.

The Pawnees had ridden hard, which mystified him. They weren’t running away. Kuruk wouldn’t give up so long as breath remained in his body, and the other warriors would want revenge for their fallen friends. It was almost as if they were in a hurry to get somewhere.

Nate had assumed they didn’t know the country, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe they had been there before.

Another possibility occurred to him. Maybe after last night Kuruk expected Nate and a lot of other whites to come after them. Maybe the Pawnees were riding hard to find a spot to spring an ambush.

The tracks entered a dense forest of mainly spruce. A thick carpet of fallen needles muffled their hoof falls. No other sounds pierced the quiet. Not the warble of a bird or the chatter of a squirrel.

A disturbing sign. Nate held the Hawken across his saddle. Here was as good a place as any for the Pawnees to strike. Maklin evidently felt the same; he rode with a hand on one of his silver-inlaid pistols.

Nothing happened. They emerged from the shadowed woodland into a sunny meadow. Several blacktailed does fled. Two cow elk stared and then imitated the does.

The tracks led across the meadow into tall firs. Here, the shadows were deeper. Once again the wild creatures were unusually quiet.

The short hairs at the nape of Nate’s neck prickled. He would almost swear unseen eyes were watching. They went another mile and came on a clear ribbon of water. The tracks showed that the Pawnees had stopped to let their horses drink. Nate did the same. He scoured the brush, ready to seek cover at the first hint of danger. But all he saw moving was a butterfly.

“I don’t like this, hoss,” Maklin commented.

“Makes two of us.”

“I have the feeling we’re being led around by the nose like a bull on a rope.”

“Makes two of us,” Nate said again.

The Pawnees had stuck to the stream bank even though the waterway twisted and turned like a crazed snake. It made for slow going, another puzzlement given that until now the Pawnees had been riding like Mohawk-topped bats out of Hades.

Nate began to have second thoughts. There was just him and the Texan against seven warriors. Many a man had fallen prey to his own overconfidence, and he could be another.

The firs were so close together that at times there was barely space for the bay to pass between them. It gave Nate a feeling of being hemmed in. He never knew but when a Pawnee might pop out from behind one of the trees and let fly with a barbed shaft.

Another mile, and still nothing happened.

Maklin cleared his throat to ask a question. “Do you reckon this Kuruk wants to take you alive?”

“He’s said as much,” Nate said. “The better to torture me. Why?”

“Less chance of you taking an arrow between the shoulder blades.”

The tracks climbed. In due course they were out of the firs and at the edge of a broad tableland dotted with stands of pine and deciduous trees interspersed with grassland. A park, the old-timers would call it. As picturesque as a painting.

“This makes no damn sense,” Maklin grumbled.

Nate relaxed a bit. There was nowhere for the Pawnees to hide except the stands, and the track didn’t go anywhere near them. In one a robin was singing. He spied movement in the high grass, but it was only a gray fox running for cover.

A mile more brought them to an unusual sight that high up in the mountains: a buffalo wallow. At one time buffalo had been common in the mountains. Shaggier cousins of their prairie brethren, they hid in deep thickets during the day, coming out at dawn and dust to graze. The wallow was old and had not seen use in a long time.

Nate skirted it as the Pawnees had done. He went perhaps fifty yards and came on another. Soon he passed a third and then a fourth. Once a sizeable herd had called the tableland home.

Maklin had been content to stay behind Nate, but now he brought his horse alongside the bay. “How much farther before we turn back?”

“I never said we were.”

The Texan frowned. “I wish you had told me.”

“It makes a difference?”

“I didn’t count on staying out all night. Blunt is leaving tomorrow, and if I’m not there he might head out without me.”

“You can turn back if you want and no hard feelings,” Nate assured him. He didn’t add that he hadn’t wanted the help anyway.

“I don’t run out on a pard. I can always catch up to the freight wagons. Those oxen are molasses with hide on.”

A glint of light in the distance caused Nate to draw rein. He took out the spyglass. At the tableland’s western boundary rose a serrated ridge heavy with growth. Beyond, slopes rose like stepping-stones to the Divide. Fully half a dozen peaks glistened white with snow.

“Anything?” Maklin asked.

“It’s peaceful,” Nate responded.

“Too much so. I feel like a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.”

Nate shortened the telescope and put it back in his parfleche and rode on. He thought of Winona and how much he missed her. Another wallow appeared on the right, its bottom mired in shadow.

“Notice anything about the tracks?” Maklin asked, interrupting Nate’s reverie.

Nate glanced down. The prints were still in single file, their depth corresponding to the softness of the soil. “They’re not riding fast anymore.”

“Not that. They’re going from wallow to wallow as if they’re looking for something.”

The notion struck Nate as humorous. The only thing in wallows was dirt. The buffalo liked to urinate in it and then roll around to cake their hides and ward off flies and other pests.

Belatedly, the notion dawned on Nate that maybe the Pawnees weren’t looking for something in the wallows. Maybe they were looking for a wallow deep enough to hide in. Even as the thought crossed his mind, a shadow at the bottom exploded into motion and hurtled up over the edge at him.

Nate’s Hawken was pointing the other way. He had no time to turn it to shoot, but he did raise it to ward off a flash of steel. The warrior drew back the knife to stab again. There was a crack behind them and a hole appeared in the Pawnee’s temple while simultaneously the other side of his head burst in a shower of skin and bone and blood.

The warrior staggered a few steps and fell.

Nate jerked the Hawken up, but there was no one else to shoot. The man had been the only one in the wallow. The high grass was undisturbed. He glanced back at Maklin and the smoking pistol in Maklin’s hand. “Thanks.”

“I was a shade slow.”

Only after Nate was sure no others were going to attack did he climb down and roll the dead warrior over.

“Why just this one? Why not all of them at once?”

“Your guess is as good as mine would be.” So much for Nate’s idea that Kuruk would try to take him alive. He scanned the tableland ahead. “Could be they thought there would be more of us and they didn’t want to risk all of them getting killed.”

“So it’ll be one at a time from here on out? Hell.”

“We’ll just have to keep on our toes.”

“We can always turn back,” Maklin said. “Make them come for you instead of us riding into every ambush they set.”

“No.”

“You’re a stubborn cuss, Nate King.”

Nate looked at him. “I want to end it.”

“I don’t blame you. But it will eat at your nerves, something like this.” Maklin regarded the dead man, and grinned. “Look at the bright side. One more down means only six to go. The odds get better all the time.”

They pressed on. White puffs of clouds floated serenely in the blue arc of sky. A breeze rippled the grass as it might waves in the sea. A pair of finches flew overhead and a doe and her fawn stared but didn’t run off.

This was always the way with the wilderness. On the surface it could be as calm as a lake on a windless day. Under the surface, though, lurked perils galore. Beasts that delighted in feasting on human flesh. Snakes with poison in their fangs, scorpions with poison in their tails. Pitfalls of chance and deadfalls of trees and just plain falls for the unwary. So many dangers the list was too long for Nate to ponder.

The dark underbelly belied the warmth of the sun and the caress of the wind. A man must never forget the duality of the wilds or the wilds would lay that man low.

It was said that Nature was fickle. It was said that “she” was a harsh mistress. Nature had no gender, though. Nature was the order of things, and that order was a doe and her fawn on one hand and a Pawnee with a knife on the other. Life and death, light and dark, peaceful and violent.

Nate had thought about it and thought about it and concluded that if the order of things was a reflection of the Maker of that order, then the Maker must have a reason for things being as they were. But what that reason could be was as much a mystery now as it had been years ago when he first thought about it.

The best explanation he’d heard was courtesy of Shakespeare. Life was a forge, McNair once said, and just as the heat of a forge tempered metal to be hard so it wouldn’t break, so, too, did life temper men and women to make them strong and wise so they wouldn’t break under the adversities.

Nate gave a toss of his head. He was letting his mind wander again. That could prove costly should another Pawnee spring out of nowhere.

The sun was on its westward descent. Gradually the shadows lengthened. Nate began to cast about for a suitable camp and chose a stand of aspens. The trees would shelter them from the wind and hide their fire from the Pawnees. He climbed down and led the bay to a small clear space.

Maklin offered to gather firewood and walked off.

While he waited Nate gathered dry leaves and grass for kindling. He formed a pile, and when Maklin returned, took his fire steel and flint from his possibles bag. It took three strikes. Once the spark ignited, he puffed lightly on the tiny flame. As it grew he added fuel, and soon they had a crackling fire.

Maklin chewed on jerky and stared across at him.

“Something on your mind?”

“You wouldn’t listen if there is.”

“Try me.”

“This is a mistake. I keep saying it, but you won’t heed.”

“Not that again.”

Maklin bit off another piece. “You told me a while back that you had me figured out. Well, I have you figured out, too. You take the blame for Wendell and his family. You take the blame for our wrangler. You want revenge for them as much as Kuruk wants revenge for his uncle.”

“If that’s how you see it.”

“You must not care for your family as much as you claim you do.”

Nate’s head snapped up. “Be careful. They are everything to me. I won’t have anyone say otherwise.”

“Your idea of everything must be different from mine or you wouldn’t be doing this. You wouldn’t make it this easy for your enemies to make your woman a widow and your boy and girl fatherless.”

“That’s going too far.”

“I’m only saying my piece. If it hurts, then it’s true, and if it’s true you can’t hold it against me.”

Nate spent the next half hour examining his feelings. He decided the Texan was only half right, but even half was too much. He did feel bad about the Wendells and the wrangler. He did feel partly at fault. And, God help him, he did want Kuruk to be held to account. He gazed over the fire. “About what you said a while ago. I’m trying to do what’s right.”

“What’s right isn’t always what’s best.”

In his mind’s eye Nate pictured Winona and Evelyn and Zach. “You have convinced me.”

“I have?”

“We’ll head back in the morning.”

“You give your word?”

“If Kuruk wants me, he’ll have to come after me.”

“You’re not as hardheaded as I thought.”

“Maklin?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks.”

Nate smiled and the Texan smiled and their bond of friendship was cemented. But the moment didn’t last.

From out of the dark flew a swarthy warrior. With a fierce yip he swung the tomahawk at the Texan’s head and then he vaulted the flames and threw himself at Nate.