The driven hail never seemed to reach the earth: it slanted past him in horizontal planes, skimming the ground and bouncing away like pebbles thrown by children. The storm pummeled him, sliced at his clothes, made his ears sting; the cold felt its way up his sleeves and pried itself inside his clothing and the wind leaned against him with such force that the ground seemed to tilt and whirl under his feet.
He couldn’t trust his sense of direction. Some large object spun violently past him—tree branch? Clump of brush?—and he began to hear bigger hailstones crash and rattle against the wagon.
He saw it dimly when the two Irish rascals looked back again. Their faces were covered with cloth now but their eyes were filled with a secret amusement—and then they were whipped from sight when his foot caught on something and his grip was wrenched from the tailboard and he tipped, fell, rolled, sprawled …
He got up on one knee and swiveled his head from side to side—and couldn’t see anything beyond arm’s length.
The wagon was gone. It might as well have been a hundred miles away.
There was a hollow moment in his chest. Panic.
He shouted. The force of the gale whipped the words away; he couldn’t even hear his own voice.
Where was the wagon? He could see nothing: nothing at all except roiling whiteness. He lurched around on both knees, turned a full circle and found nothing more substantial than the wheeling snow.
The storm shrieked. He stood up and went down again, unable to keep his balance against the relentless pressure of the driving wind. Bits of ice trickled down inside the back of his collar.
A fit of coughing took him.
He thought, A fellow could die quickly enough out here if he didn’t keep his wits about him.
He groped for the rifle, found it, felt at the earth with his hand.
Think now. West wind—it was at the right shoulder. Keep it there. Feel the contour of this ground again …
The road was deeply rutted—various thaws must have rendered the clay into soft muck and it had been channeled deep by the few wagons that had passed. Then the gumbo ruts had frozen, hard as granite. Not likely the wagon could have turned out of the ruts. Not likely, for that matter, that they even knew he was no longer at the tailgate.
Catch up, then. Come on—move.
Knees bent low he waddled forward, leaning to one side against the callous-hard palm of the wind, dragging one foot to keep to the line of the ruts.
It was slow going—treacherous. He tripped, fell down, realized by the sudden stinging that he had bruised his nose. He wedged his feet under him, stood up and proceeded.
He was thinking, in a deliberate and reasonable fashion, that there was a very short limit on the length of time a man could survive weather like this.
Bullets of ice whacked his coat. He heard their muffled but audible slaps. This day was harsh beyond anything in his experience.
The metal eyeglasses hurt like fire. He removed them carefully, folded the stems, slipped them gently into the coat pocket; in this day-turned-night they were useless anyhow.
With eyes all but shut, goaded by desperation, he fought the blast and lurched forward, seldom confident whether he was going uphill or down. All he knew was the cold, the wind and the rutted clay.
At best he would get out of this bruised and half-frozen. At worst … Oh, my darling Edith … At worst he might—
No earthly use dwelling on that. One step after the other. Keep to the ruts. Keep moving.
Impossible to reckon time. Doubts grew in his mind: suppose the wind had shifted course? Suppose he was going the wrong way—back away from the wagon?
The storm bucked and pitched like the devil’s own broncho. Well I have ridden those. I shall ride this one too. He grinned into the bared teeth of the savage animal.
He flinched from the ice-stones; batted his arms across his chest and struggled on. Feeling drowsy now. Clung to a dreamlike sort of half-wakefulness in which a part of his mind knew the other part was drifting. Necessary, the first part told the second part, to fight for sentience.
He plowed into a knee-high pile of snow wedged against a scrub plant and it was a moment before he realized that was wrong: must have lost the road. Felt behind him with a toe and backed up and prodded the earth with his hand until he knew the ruts were there. Which way now—left or right?
It was a sign of the dangerous deterioration of his mind that it took quite a while to remember that the wind needed to be at the right shoulder.
Exhaustion and frostbite. With senses slowly disintegrating he recognized the dangers. He felt the ache in his legs as they began to turn numb; he stamped his feet hard as he walked. Tucked the rifle under his arm and whacked his hands together with powerful beating strokes.
Don’t worry, my darling Edith. I shan’t stop fighting back. Nothing will keep me from our lovely nuptial appointment.
Must feel like this to be blind.
He groped ahead of him, hand splayed …
Abruptly his hand banged into something hard; he stubbed his finger.
He felt at it. Flat vertical surface. Wall? Ridiculous. Couldn’t be a building in the middle of the road.
Maybe this wasn’t the road.
Or maybe it wasn’t the same road.
Had there been a fork in the road? Had he taken the wrong turn? Walked into a farmer’s yard?
He slid his hand across the surface and found its boundaries.
The wagon tailboard.
It wasn’t moving.
He heard, or felt, something; he bent down and dimly saw the huddled lump beneath the dubious shelter of the wagon bed: four men; ferociously flapping blankets and ponchos. He caught the dim glimmer of a pair of yellow eyes. O’Donnell or Finnegan? Whichever—there was the threat of death in those bleak eyes.
They saw him at the same moment he saw them. A hand reached for his ankle—pulled him down. Tumbling, he nearly lost his grip on the rifle. There were hands against him in earnest—pawing at his face, scrambling for the weapon. He could smell their rank breath. It was Finnegan’s burly arm that slammed the side of his head and encircled his neck.
It was all a terrifying confusion then.
They were pulling him to them—tugging him under the wagon—it was hard to sort out, in his mind, what was transpiring; Finnegan had a headlock on him and O’Donnell was slithering around, trying for purchase, and he saw Dutch Reuter just beyond them—Dutch was wide-eyed, watching with his mouth agape, not moving, not taking any action, not making any choice or decision but simply watching to see how it was going to come out …
Finnegan roared, louder than the storm. There was a red haze; there was a drumming thunder in his ears where Finnegan’s heavy arm was ready to crush his skull …
“By thunder you haven’t whipped me yet!”
He stood up—stood up on his hind legs with such an immense effort that he not only dragged the Irishmen with him but also lifted the back of the wagon on his bent shoulders.
It squeezed Finnegan’s arm against the wagonbed, hard enough to bring a grunt of pain from the man; and then the ranchman swung the rifle, hard, and had the satisfaction of hearing the barrel smack noisily against flesh and bone. There was an outcry—O’Donnell—and then the ranchman was stumbling back, crouched over, weaving for balance, sucking air, trying to find his bearings.
Finnegan hurled himself forward, scrambling, trying to reach him. The ranchman fired a sudden shot into the ground. The bullet sprayed frozen mud in Finnegan’s face; the abrupt explosive noise seemed to stun them all to motionlessness.
In that broken interval of time the ranchman slapped the rifle’s forestock into his palm, yanked the hammer back and laid his aim hard and steady against the Irishman’s face not two feet away.
“Hold!”