“One hell of a mess,” Jonas said. “One hell of a mess is what we’ve got. Dammit, Hawley.”
“I didn’t think it’d hurt. They said it’d hold. They was driving it, I mean they was willing to drive it…”
“Yeah. They were stupid, Hawley, does ‘stupid’ make sense to you?”
Danny let go a breath. Luke said,
“Froth’s got a burn. If we’re going out there, I want to grease it down good—it’s going to hurt like hell.”
“Yeah,” Jonas said. “Do that.”
“So what happened?” Carlo whispered, at Danny’s shoulder. “What did Hawley do?”
“I think the truckers bribed him, something about bad brakes.”
But that wasn’t the only question in his own mind. Bad brakes on a bad road. Truckers not wanting to stop, where they probably couldn’t turn around.
Why?
Luke had found the salve. Jonas was putting his pack together. So was Hawley.
“Are we going?” Randy asked.
Danny said, “Not staying here. Pack up. Now.”
Chapter XXI
THE RISING SUN CAST THE ROAD IN SHADOW, A BLANKET OF SNOW earlier trafficked by the ordinary dawn scurriers-about. Since they’d left Tarmin gate in the dark and in all the haste they could manage with two of their party afoot, the horses had been on edge, putting out hostile impulses, Shadow earliest and most assertive to warn a spook out of his path.
But they were clear of the attraction Tarmin posed to vermin. Cloud lazed along, thinking <cattle, > and not unhappy to have a separate place at the rear, the boys walking along on either side as Danny rode.
Everything was business, up front. Jonas wasn’t pleased with Hawley, that was clear any time they came close; but Danny stayed out of it; and not wanting to push anybody including Hawley, with thoughts that Hawley could take for accusations, Danny thought <blue sky,> sometimes, and sometimes <evergreens and sunlight > and sometimes told for the Goss boys what creatures had made the various tracks, imagined them, little mental ghosts, that occupied the road-as-it-had-been in the boys’ imaging.
So they could know what made them. So they’d learn what they watched for, and what was dangerous and what wasn’t. Senior riders and a horse with a good nose had taught him. And he didn’t know but what at some moment the seniors were going to take off at the speed they could use if they had to.
Hawley rode point. It hadn’t been his habit earlier. Luke and Jonas rode to the center and back a little, but one in the track of the other, all in light snow that taxed the horses very little.
<Still water, > Danny thought, on the edge of notions he didn’t want to think. He thought <ham sandwiches, > of which they had a great number—but he didn’t want to fuss with getting food out of his pack, and he didn’t want his hands encumbered. He preferred to wait for the sun and the greater surety they wouldn’t have a sudden alarm.
So he began to talk idly to the boys about growing up in Shamesey town, about <his father and the shop,> about <working on the machines—>
<Mama and the furniture. Mama sanding and painting.>
But the boys were distracted, out of breath, thinking about what would happen if Jonas and the rest did decide to increase the pace as he began to feel they were doing.
“It’s all right,” Danny said. “They don’t go long at a run. Horses won’t take it. Sun’s up, horses are wanting to move—they’ll settle down.”
“What if we meet something?” Randy asked.
“Hey, I’m not leaving you. I’m not moving with them, all right?”
So they slogged along at the best pace they could with their breath frosting in the morning light, Randy walking beside Cloud’s shoulder, putting a hand on Cloud when the going got uneven. And the gap widened, as they followed the trail the three ahead broke through the snow.
Cloud wouldn’t carry the kid. He’d remotely suggested it and Cloud was indignant. Cloud wouldn’t carry Randy—Cloud wouldn’t carry baggage.
But Cloud didn’t mind being touched. He didn’t mind <Randy walking > by him. He liked the boy’s hands. Was easily seduced by brushing and combing.
Easier if Cloud would agree to <carry the kid,> Danny thought. Carlo had both guns—Randy was wearing out carrying what he’d brought, and they’d redistributed and divided the supplies, so that the kid had the lighter stuff.
Carlo was struggling. It was probably the farthest they’d walked in their lives; Carlo was strong, he’d grown up hauling iron about in the shop, Danny had gotten that from him and, warned what kind of walk they were facing, Carlo had picked a sturdier pair of boots out of the store supplies. So had Randy—but they were new boots, however designed for walking and padded with double socks, and Danny didn’t want to think what was happening to unaccustomed feet.
“If I,” Randy gasped, at one point, at knee level with him, and knocking into him on the tracked and thick-lying snow, “if I someday wanted a horse—do you suppose—one would want me?”
“Might,” Danny said, figuring that brutal long walking had something to do with the thought. But he gave it an honest answer. “You can’t say for sure. Even rider kids can wait for years. But, yeah, one might.”
Randy wanted <horse,> at that thought—like letting something escape into the light; he wanted <horse> so much Cloud snorted and moved away.
“You’ll spook him,” Danny said, imaging <Danny on Cloud,> and assuring the silly fool under him that he wasn’t going to let Randy bother him.
“Why’s he scared?” Randy was upset. “I didn’t do anything.”
“They’re like that. You want him. He doesn’t like that.”
“That’s stupid,” Randy said.
“No, it isn’t,” Carlo said, out of breath. “He’s got his own ideas. You do what the man says, brat. You be polite.”
“To the horse?”
“Damned right,” Danny said.
Randy thought about it. He thought about <Cloud in the store,> and <Cloud leading them away from the jail.> And the ambient grew better and easier while he did it. So Randy found what worked with horses, and it wasn’t what Randy’d thought it would be.
Randy did a lot of thinking after that. The air grew cluttered with it.
But up ahead Jonas’ group had finally gone to walking, and they were catching up slowly. “We better close it up,” Danny said, because he wasn’t entirely easy with the gap they’d let develop. The boys were gasping with the effort they were already making; they looked at him as if he’d asked them to fly. But he got down and took Carlo’s pack and Randy’s, and that made a difference, the three of them slogging along in the track the horses had already broken through the knee-high snow.
Then to their vast relief Jonas pulled a full stop and waited—the only grace they’d gotten from Jonas since they’d started out.
And by the time they did catch up, Jonas and the rest had broken out food for them and for the horses—having breakfast standing, because there wasn’t a warm place to sit except on horseback. Besides snow for water, they had a bottle of vodka to pass around, the only thing that wasn’t frozen: the sandwiches were, and took effort.
But the borderers had known better than they had and kept one sandwich inside their coats—flattened, but not frozen; and they learned.
“You stay tighter,” Jonas said to him, when he borrowed the bottle. “You’re cat-bait back there.”
“I’m trying,” he said. “I know we’re pushing hard, but those kids—”
<“Come here,”> Jonas said, led him up past the horses and pointed at their feet.
Horse track. He looked off down the clear-cut, and far as he could see, there was an unmistakable disturbance, a track clearly made since the snow had stopped last night, on ground not yet churned up by their own horses. They’d been riding down that trail and he, lagging back, hadn’t even seen it.