The Hunted Read online

  Norbert shook his head. “I still dunno about this, Rollie. Seems to me we’d be better off if we’d have kept that big boy alive.” The thin man stood hunched by the blazing campfire, shivering. Ever since his fall in the river, he’d not been able to get himself warm. There had been times during the past few days that he wondered if he even caught fire, would he be heated enough inside?

  Rollie tilted his head so far to one side it seemed to Norbert as if the young boss man was going to break his neck. “I say you could give me advice? I ask for anything from you other than to do what I told you to do?”

  “No, I heard you, Rollie. It’s just that . . .”

  “Look.” Rollie’s features softened. “I already told you. That big boy knew too much about Gamble. I expect he even had an idea of what we’re going to get up to. Besides, I happen to know that he is an old outlaw. So that makes us having kilt him the right thing.”

  Norbert’s eyes narrowed. “I ain’t heard about him being an outlaw, and I ain’t never heard nothing about killing being okay, except in war, maybe.”

  “Yeah, well, I have, and when it’s time to tell you, I’ll tell you. But for now, do as I say, okay? I got enough troubles on my plate without you chucking on another helping of them. Now get busy. I got canvas to tie down before more snow comes. We got to put some miles under the wheels today if we want to beat the snow.”

  Norbert tried to take his time, but it looked to him as if Rollie was onto him, because the boss man eyed his progress toward the fire to set alight a torch, then carry it to the wagon where Charlie was laid out in the back.

  Norbert swallowed hard, then lit three spots of the wagon on fire. He hoped that would do the trick—enough to satisfy Rollie anyway. He also hoped that the falling snow would quench the flames before they could do any damage.

  He looked toward Rollie, but the man must have been satisfied with Norbert’s efforts, because he had turned back to readying his own wagon to move on out of the camp. Snow had begun falling and Rollie was doubly determined to head up-trail as soon as possible.

  Norbert mumbled an apology without looking at the wagon. He winced when he heard flames crackle as they sank their flickering fangs into the wagon’s wood.

  • • •

  “Move it out!” Rollie’s voice trailed back to them and soon three wagons, repacked and retarped, rolled forward. The extra animals were tied behind the middle and last wagons and the slow, steady procession headed deeper into the mountains along the rough-cut road toward Gamble.

  In the back of the first wagon, the unconscious woman flopped and clunked with every rut and rock and hole the squeaking steel-banded wheels passed over. Norbert sat sideways in the seat, kept one eye on her.

  “You staring at her ain’t going to make her like you.”

  “I know it.” Norbert shifted, rubbed his knees, still so stiff and sore from the river. “Wanted to make sure she didn’t bounce outta the wagon. Bo and Shiner can’t tie a knot to save their hides.”

  Rollie laughed. It was a relief to Norbert to see him happy. He’d known Rollie for quite some time, and he’d never seen him so belligerent and quarrelsome as lately. Might be the drink. Rollie had been hitting the bottle hard of late.

  “I wish you’d spend some of your eyeballin’ time looking out for savages, Norbert. Between you and me, I will tell you that I didn’t like seeing that gutted, skun-faced man back on the trail. That was raw, that was.”

  Norbert nodded in agreement. “No mistake.” He sat upright and double-checked the chamber on his battle-scarred Henry rifle.

  Chapter 22

  It was the cold wetness that Charlie Chilton felt first. Something touched his face, like light tears, or drops of dew lifting off a flower’s petals when you touch a fingertip to it—just like that, he thought. But no, that wasn’t it. And soon the sweet sensation passed, clouded over by something bigger, like a whole-body headache. Its twinges stabbed at odd intervals, enough that you couldn’t prepare for them, couldn’t suck in a breath to steel yourself before they hit.

  And then rough, ragged hunks of memory of the previous night came back to him, and he knew more with each passing second what had happened. Is this what it’s like to be dead? No, Charlie, no, it ain’t. Not by a long shot, he told himself. You got a whole lot to work through yet, boy. Like all this pain.

  And how do you account for the white light trying to force open your eyes? Should you even let it in? Now, that’s a decision you best make soon, boy. All this and more Charlie told himself in the first few seconds of waking.

  He tried again to open his eyes, still not sure if he was alive. It didn’t take him long to figure out that he was alive, had to be, because being dead, as far as he could guess, what with heaven and all, couldn’t possibly hurt this much. And by gum, did he ache all over!

  The stink of burned, wet wood filled his nostrils, and fought with the bitter, metal-tinged scent of blood and the cloying, sopping smell of wet wool. His ears pulsed with what sounded like echoes from a battlefield—were they screams? And another sound beneath, almost constant, deeper in tone . . . wind maybe? But no, not so haunted as that. More human, and then he knew what the sound was—it was moaning.

  Charlie worked to pull in breath, and the moaning stopped. He coughed, let out what air he could, and the moaning commenced. He did this twice more before it occurred to him, as the fuzz-packed edges of his brain began to clear, that the moaning sound came from within himself.

  If he could hear that, however muddy and far off it sounded, maybe he really was still alive. He tried to speak, coughed, barely heard it, but was rewarded instead with sharp lancing pains from three directions at once. It was as if he were being shot at over and over again, or burned with red-hot sharpened steel rods. His shoulder, the left, and his side, maybe his gut. But the worst pain came from his head.

  Open your eyes, Charlie, he willed himself over and over again. Finally he felt his eyelids begin to crack upward. They were the heaviest things he had ever lifted. In a lifetime of being the one everybody called to help lift a wagon to change a fouled hub, or to drag on a swamp-bogged horse, these eyelids were far and away the most difficult, heaviest things he’d ever had to lift.

  While he worked to at least flutter them, he moved his tongue inside his mouth, felt something odd there, maybe a chipped tooth. What could have caused all of this? None of it made sense. And yet there was a spot of promise that he knew if he could keep on worrying it, somehow he would get answers. If only it didn’t hurt so much to think, to move, to open his eyes, to lie still, to breathe. But he knew he had to keep trying. That was the only way anything ever happened in life, keep on trying.

  He concentrated on the blood taste in his mouth. If he was bleeding, that must mean without a doubt that he was alive. Now open the eyes, Charlie, boy. And slowly, a gray haze, like a film on an ice-crusted stream, let light in. He opened them wider, and he saw brighter light. One eye finally popped open and didn’t reveal all that much, but it did prove that he was alive.

  He pulled in more air through his nose, found one nostril was plugged, as if he’d been clubbed in the face hard by something . . . there it was again, a glimmer of a memory. He chased it, but the pain in his head was too great to allow his mind to roam far.

  And so it went for him. Charlie spent how long he knew not willing each little piece of himself into movement. He wasn’t certain, but he felt as though he had somehow managed to make his fingers move, maybe his toes. Then he was sure of his success because his second eye opened and more bright light came to him.

  Something pressed on him, stiff and cold. Wood of some sort, a board, maybe. It felt close to his face and it smelled . . . charred. So that was what he’d been smelling all this time, burned wood. He lifted his head and an ache joined forces with dizziness to conspire against him. He didn’t care. He had to keep moving, keep trying, and he did, working har
der as each second brought fresh waves of throbbing pain thundering like runaway horses deep in his skull.

  He tried his voice again, found that he had still been pushing out that same low-level moan, a sound he could scarcely hear, as if through layers of quilts.

  Oh, quilts, now, that was a thought he could easily give over to—a big, plush feather bed in a fine hotel, piled high with pretty quilts of scraps in all shapes and sizes, each piece meaning something to someone. To sleep under all those memories. It felt as though it was bringing a smile to his face, though he wasn’t so sure he could even make one of those anymore.

  With the suddenness of a slap, cold wind stung his face, whistled into his nose and half-open mouth and chilled him from the inside out. It also cleared his head when nothing he tried had worked.

  One more bit of effort, one more, then another . . . and Charlie Chilton felt himself pushing upward. Where was he? What way was he facing? He’d read of people in an avalanche who didn’t know which way to tunnel once they came to, so they commenced to digging and wound up dead, found by rescuers later as having gone in the wrong direction, having dug downward even farther.

  Wait, Charlie. Why are you even telling yourself this? You are not in an avalanche—else-wise, how come you feel wood pressing on you and stinking your nostrils and clouding your mind?

  One last try, he had one of his hands partially wedged beneath him now, and he pushed with the effort a man might only use in his last desperate moments. Who’s to say they weren’t?

  The wood began to move and he pushed with his head, felt his pain, and worked through it. Something pressed on his head, eventually moved as he continued shoving, and brighter light cracked through as the wood over his face parted. Daylight! With it came strafing cold, and he didn’t care. It felt so very good to be reminded that he wasn’t dead.

  Whatever had happened, this was one accident that he felt sure he had lived through. A sudden thought paused him. Had there been others with him? Charlie recalled that yes, he had been with other people—faces skittered into view in his mind’s eye. Angry faces, scruffy men, bald, bad teeth, bearded, one of them young and perhaps had once been handsome but now was a boozy mess. Rollie! That was his name, Rollie Meecher. The nephew of the man who owned the freighting outfit.

  But there was someone else, someone important he had to remember—and another face hove into view, as if in a photograph. This face also was not smiling, but unlike the others, it was a woman, and she was smiling with her eyes. Or maybe it was concern. Genuine concern. But for him or for someone else, he did not know.

  And her name came to him, Hester O’Fallon. And she had a sister, Delia. A sickly girl. And they had all been traveling to . . . the mining town. What was its name? Gamble. Yes, that was it. But something had happened and an accident perhaps. He had no idea what had happened or where he was. Somewhere on the trail, then. On the way to that town.

  Cold wind snapped him from his musing reverie. Cold, biting wind that stiffened his half-opened eyes and made them tear at the same time. He opened his mouth and forced out sound, heard it come out as another moan, raw and weak, not at all a sound he was proud of. But at least he was still able to make sound.

  Something gripped him deep inside. It felt as if a long-fingered hand, icy cold, crawled upward from his guts right up through his windpipe, wrapping itself around everything in there at the same time, curling like snaky green weeds trailing and whipping in a low-water creek. Charlie’s only thought was that somehow, after all this work since he’d come awake, now he was finally dying. His eyes snapped open wide and he pulled in a deep draught of air and bellowed. That last face he’d seen in his mind’s eye, the one that now floated in his vision, urged him to not give up.

  Charlie bellowed loud, a harsh, guttural sound, a howl of rage and fear and confusion and anger and hate all at once. The sound of his own mighty voice in his ears gave him tremendous power and he pitched forward, thrusting off himself what felt like timbers, great charred things, as if he’d been buried under a collapsed, burned building.

  He sat up, his chest working hard and fast like a blacksmith’s bellows pumped by a frantic man. Runnels of bloody snot and spittle stringed from his nose and mouth. His head pounded like massive steel hammers ringing on the world’s biggest black anvils, pound, pound, pound, until it felt as if all the cotton batting had been peeled back from his brain and all was clear again.

  His hearing too had become restored. No more was it a dull ringing sound, as if heard underwater. His voice slowed but still rasped in and out, that of a desperate boar grizzly running full out after a last-hope meal. It was a ragged, blasting thing like air shot through shredded paper. The sound slowed and with it Charlie’s raging roar, now dwindling to a grunting moan.

  He was sitting upright, his chest still working with hard-earned breaths, his left arm hung limp, difficult to move. His face felt tight. He touched gentle fingertips to it and felt a crust of something there that had dried, tightening. He scratched at it, looked at his begrimed fingernails, found it to be dark, flaky—blood, dried blood. He didn’t dare dig at it more for fear of opening up some unseen wound that would only bleed anew.

  There was something else that he felt, through the blood, through the harsh new light, as if seeing it for the first time. It was as if he had truly been reborn, as if he had crawled on his belly through an unseen landscape of red-hot steel, through darkness, raw, hot pain, muffled sounds, and the stagnant stench of rot and blood and burned things and the faces of people lost to him.

  But at the end of it, instead of all those stamped-down things pinching out until the last things that made up Charlie Chilton were no more . . . they opened up. Maybe he opened them up. Maybe it was this new and glorious thing touching his face. He opened his eyes even wider in the blinding bright light and saw small somethings falling down on him. Bright things, slow, but many of them. Cold, touching, kissing his burned, battered features. Each by itself did little, but together they felt so good.

  And then the word for them came to his mind and he suddenly remembered everything that had happened to him the days before, the night before. Snow. Snow was falling on him, and though it felt good, it would do little to wipe away the memories of the man who had shot him, who had clubbed him the night before and left him for dead. Rollie, Bo, Shiner, and Norbert. They were all guilty, killers all.

  And what of Hester and Delia? And Mabel-Mae? Of the goods for the waiting people of Gamble? What of them? Wronged to the ultimate degree too? Killed by the bad men?

  Charlie shook his head slowly side to side, as if he truly were that boar grizz he had envisioned himself to be, grunting and relishing the throbbing washes of pain that now had the power to make him feel alive again. And he felt angrier than he had been in a long, long time. The last time had been years before, with the little girl’s death.

  Then he had been angry with himself. Had thrown away the ownership of a gun, his gun of choice the sawed-off, pig-nosed killing steel that he had relied on for so long to scare people, innocent people. To intimidate them. To take from them. Then the little girl had died . . . and that’s when he became angry. He’d worked himself like the lowliest slave he could imagine, someone who was seen as having no worth, but who could not ever escape the stirred rage by dying. He forced himself to be subjected to the long, scar-covered pain of heavy daily labor. He drove himself for years beyond the endurance that most men could take.

  And it helped. Or maybe time was the thing that helped the most. Because after so many years, he was no longer as angry with himself. The anger had not washed away completely, but it had become so covered with scars that he felt, for the first time in a long while, as though he might be able to live with himself, might be able to tolerate himself, even a little bit.

  And that’s when he also began to dream that he might find a place where he could be alone with himself, perhaps with a dog or a mule. If
he were lucky, both. Maybe in a valley somewhere deep in the mountains, in a place where he could never again hurt anybody. A place where he would be a menace only to himself, because that’s what he knew how to deal with.

  That’s when he became angry with himself, the angriest he’d ever been with anybody. Until now. Now those bastards had earned his mightiest of rages. He rocked forward, trying to raise himself up, and stopped. What he saw couldn’t be.

  Wrecked, half-burned wagons and crates jutted, smoking, from a foot of snow, and more was dropping down. He turned, looked around. He appeared to be half-buried in the wreck of a wagon. They must have set the wagon ablaze. But who? Rollie and his boys or the Shoshoni?

  Maybe he’d been wrong; maybe they all had been caught, trapped by the Indians? Then what of the women? Had they all been left for dead? He scooped up a paw full of snow and pressed it to his throbbing face. It came away smudged with red and black. He tried to put weight on his left arm, felt a sting, saw his hand knuckle under, but he kept going. No way was a little wound going to slow him down.

  It took long moments, but he finally made it to his feet. Much had been burned, and other hunks were still smoking. Charlie didn’t see the soft rise of any animal bodies buried under the snow, which might mean that the Indians drove them all off—unlikely since that many animals would be too great a burden in the mountains and tricky to make off with, especially in the snow. He saw no tracks leading away, so he had to assume that whoever did this left before the heaviest snow came. Otherwise he’d see indents and depressions where the tracks were buried.

  The snow that had fallen in the night must have been one heck of a big dumping. It was still snowing, and felt good on Charlie’s hot face and hands, but it had slowed.

  Charlie stepped forward, beginning to shiver uncontrollably. He took that as a good sign, knowing that if he felt something, anything, then he was alive.