The goddamn wind was rough as a cob. It shoved him around like a cork on a fishline. When the lights spun into his vision again he set off, stumbling toward them, muttering like a man in his cups. He saw Duke again, the Old Man and his mother, the side-hill farm that was back in the Ozarks and the bull-tongue plow he had bucked through the stumps.
He was back in the smoke of battle once more, down flat on his face with an arm doubled under the dead weight of his horse and the fires of hell tearing through him like splinters. He heard the hoofs pounding round him, the clashing of sabers; and the next thing he knew he was in a Yank prison. Then the war was over and he was hunting his folks. Someone else had the farm, they'd never heard of the Benders. Elsie Potts, whom he'd rolled in the hay, said his people had took off West in a wagon.
So Rafe had come West. Missouri, Kansas, the Indian nations. He had lost them in Texas. Five years he'd put in trying to pick up the trail, riding for ranchers, buying hides, driving stage. Finally, working out of Brady, he'd hitched on with a freighter. Near El Paso he'd took up last winter with some pretty hardcases holed up in the Van Horns, making a living of sorts stopping coaches. One of them fellers had come from Colorado.
Was some Benders, he had said, in the horse raising business somewheres west of Shakespeare, over in Arizona Territory. He didn't know much about them except their iron was on some pretty fast steppers. Had been mounted on one himself, he claimed, till a Wells Fargo messenger with a sawed-off Greener had blasted this gelding plumb out from under him. Best damn bronc a man ever straddled.
Along about there someplace Rafe's fever broke and he fell into a sound sleep.
Next time he got his eyes open to know about it, the first things he glimpsed were the peeled yeso-coated poles of a sod roof. That took some studying. Presently his glance, dropping down a whitewashed wall, stopped at a window through which sunlight was pouring in a golden flood. Through scrinched up lids he stared incredulously at a set of lace curtains, wondering what fool was so out of his mind as to hang such geegaws against dirt walls.
The skreak of a chair, the long bend of a shadow, drew his eyes to the side. There was a halo of hair not two foot away from him. Then her features took shape, appearing to float over him—which was when Rafe knew that by some flip he had got off the track and bumbled into heaven.
He got up on one elbow the better to see. He was pretty near carried away, sure enough. Lips red as cherries. China doll eyes and dimples—Lord! Handsome, he thought, as an ace-full on kings, so sweet bee trees was gall beside her. Never knowing he'd been tucked into a bed he sat straight up and found her hand against him. Her eyes got big. Rafe suddenly discovered he was naked as a rock.
*****
When he finally came out from under the covers, still flushed of face and plenty mortified besides, the girl was gone. In her place sat a man who looked bigger than a load of hay with the poles up. He sure had tallow. Three sets of chins, and most of the rest of him looked to Rafe like stomach. You'd of had to throw a diamond hitch to keep him in a saddle.
It was hard to know what to make of so much bulk, and while Rafe was trying the three chins twisted round, the great head tipping back in an attitude of listening while the eyes, nearly buried in the arroyos and billows of a network of wrinkles behind that great reddish lump of a nose, sneaked a stealthy look in the direction of a door that was not quite closed.
Apparently reassured, the head came forward with a kind of grunt, a hand shot out, dipping from sight beneath the bed to be presently resurrected wrapped about an unmarked bottle of what appeared to be rye whisky. The other hand wrestled the cork from its neck. But just as he straightened, making ready to lift it, a light tapping of heels just beyond the door turned him stiff as a poker.
His eyes took in Rafe and became flat as fish scales. The three chins quivered, the vast bulk jiggled, appearing to heave as with inner convulsions, and somewhere in the process the bottle disappeared.
The door was pushed open. The girl again. Slim as a willow shoot and, even in the made-over dress she had on, a vision so lovely it made Rafe blink. "Oh—" she cried, stopping, "you've waked up! How do you feel?"
With his tongue clapped against the roof of his mouth Rafe couldn't do more than gulp and goggle. Never had he got his sights on anyone able to upset him the way she was. He had the same nerve-shattering blinding impulse to get up and run that stampedes cattle—the flap of a blanket would have set him off. And yet, incredibly, he liked looking at her. The put-up hair was like burnished kettle copper and her eyes in this light looked the shade of blue larkspur all sparkling and misty with morning dew.
She came over and fluffed up his pillow. "Are you hungry?" she asked, considering him, smiling.
The bulk in the chair heaved and puffed like a porpoise, clearing its throat like a rattle of stones coming down a tin chute. "Goddlemighty, girl—been three days, ain't it? Go fix the boy something before he expires!"
Picking up her skirts, prettily flushing, the girl turned and fled.
A clanking of stove lids came almost at once, a banging of pots interspersed other sounds. The bottle reappeared and the red-nosed old walrus with the milkweed hair took a couple hearty swigs, smacking his lips as he drove home the cork before resettling it under Rafe's covers. He raised a finger in front of his mouth, rheumy eyes twinkling amiably. "Mum's the word, eh, laddie?"
Then the old duffer sighed. "All right, boy. Get it off your chest afore you burst."
"Three days I've been here! Where am I?" Rafe growled.
"You ain't looking at St. Pete, that's for sure. This here's the town of Dry Bottom. About three steps from hell."
This didn't mean a heap to Rafe, but the way those eyes in that tub of lard kept flattening and swelling was enough to set a man's teeth on edge. The whole deal was unsettling, three days gone straight out of your life, waking up with no clothes in someone else's bed, and then this feller. Rafe would about as soon have been watched by a cobra.
"That—girl?" he gruffed, swallowing, nervous.
"Matter of opinion. My keeper, some would tell you, and they wouldn't be far wrong." The vast bulk heaved as with internal convulsions. If Rafe hadn't known better he might of figured the old fool was growed to that chair; he sure didn't look like he could get around much with his short stumpy arms and great barrels for legs. He was the craziest sight Rafe had ever run into, and yet—those damned eyes, the way they swelled up and flattened, always picking and prying, seemed to dig right into a man's quivering marrow.
Rafe snorted to think he could be such a ninny. "Well," he said, defiant, "who is she?"
"Name's Bunny. You may be hard put to believe this, but she happens to be my daughter." He cleared his throat with an avalanche of sound so sharp and sudden Rafe's good hand shot out to clamp hold of the bed. "I'm Wilbur Pike," the old walrus said, seeming to own to it grudgingly, afterwards growling, "Who're you?"
"Yell 'Rafe' and I'll come if I'm in shoutin' distance."
"That all the handle you got?" Pike said.