In the mere, drab light, Neville's face filled with blood.
"I guess that was pretty stupid."
"You won't get any argument from me," Prine said.
Prine began to walk around the saloon. He wondered how long it had been since this place had heard and seen human revelry. The rats might dance on some spectral midnight. But it had been a long time since saloon gals had prodded old sourdoughs to drink some more of the watered-down liquor, and high-kicking dancers had exposed their frill-covered bottoms to the delight of the all-male audience.
Prine heard it first. He thought it was just one more variation on the eerie tones the winds made. But after it sounded two or three times, he recognized the gasping noise, like that of a man who couldn't catch his breath. A drowning man, perhaps.
Neville had climbed the stairs and was inspecting the second floor. Prine stayed on the ground floor, trying to find the source of the strange sound. He finally located it behind the bar, the one place he hadn't thought to look.
The old man lay on his back. From the dark circle on his filthy gray shirt, Prine assumed the man had been shot in the chest. He'd been hit in such a way that he couldn't breathe well. When he tried to speak or call out in simple syllables, the words would stop somewhere in his throat and he would clutch his throat with both hands, as if his throat had been cut.
Prine grabbed the only source of light, the ancient lantern on top of the bar, and held it down to the man. The wound, as he'd guessed, was in the chest, though further away from the heart than he'd suspected. There was a wooden box on top of the back bar. Inside, Prine found two canteens. They were both full. He untied his bandanna and soaked it with water.
He spent the next ten minutes exhausting the full extent of his medical knowledge—pulse points, eye dilation, breathing, consciousness. None was very good. The old man muttered words from time, to time but nothing Prine could understand.
Neville showed up and watched as Prine cleaned up the old man's wound so he could get a better look at it.
"They figured he was dead," Neville said. "They weren't far wrong."
"He going to make it?"
"Take a miracle."
"Didn't find anything upstairs. But this must've been a nice little place at one time."
Maybe because they were talking, maybe because the old man knew how close he was to dying and he wanted to talk to somebody—whatever, he sat up a little and fully opened his eyes.
"You ain't them, is you?" he said. His teeth were blackened stubs. His mouth was circle of scabs. He had to blink his eyes to focus. "No, I can see you now. You ain't them."
"They shot you?"
Phlegm clogged his chest and throat.
"They didn't see nobody in here except ole Midnight, so they just figured they had the place to themselves. They wanted to sleep before nightfall." He started coughing up blood. Prine held his frail upper body until the coughing stopped. "When they found me—I always sleep in the back room—they figured I might tell the law on them. Stupid bastards. Closest town is Claybank, and an old man like me ain't never goin' to Claybank and live to tell about it. The one named Tolan, he's the bastard that shot me." Then: "Midnight! Midnight!"
Prine wondered if the old man was hallucinating. There was no evidence of anybody else in the place. Maybe the old man was recalling a childhood friend.
But the old man grew more and more agitated, cried louder and louder for this "Midnight!"
And damned if Midnight didn't put in an appearance. A raven of vast proportion and eerie gaze, it didn't simply fly through the air, it smashed its way, the flutter of its wing violent as a terrible storm. It landed on the bar above the old man. Perched there, looked down at him.
"I just wanted to see him again before I passed." Then: "You been a good friend, Midnight."
The sleek, shiny, somehow supernatural bird made a sound in its own throat. A deep rumbling kind of music that was sustained for several seconds. A music dark as its feathers.
The old man said, "They said they was gonna try and make a train tomorrow morning. Junction Gap. You get 'em for me, will ya? Now Midnight's gonna be all alone."
They buried him out back.
Midnight seemed to understand what was going on.
In the moonlight, he sat sentrylike, upon the fresh earth that Prine and Neville had turned over. The raven raised its regal head once to look at the moon. The dark music sounded again in chest and throat. But this time it expelled the sound, letting it echo off the ragged rock hills and work its trembling, oddly frightening way through the night. Other animals responded in the far-flung darkness and made their own sounds. Even the horses Lattimore had loaned them joined in.
Prine said some prayers for the old man, the prayers of his childhood. He didn't say them often, so many of the words were wrong. He wasn't even sure there was a God, at least not a God as Sunday school teachers espoused anyway. But he did believe in some kind of universal spirit that was the cement of not only this planet but the entire cosmos. He was appealing to that spirit now to take the old man to a good and true place.
Ten minutes after burying the old man, they were on their way again. Now they knew where Tolan and Rooney were headed. They planned to meet the two at the Junction Gap train depot.
Chapter Eighteen
Karl Tolan had never forgotten how his three-year-old sister Daisy died. He still had nightmares about it. He was seven at the time.
He'd been playing behind the crude slab cabin his father had built when he heard a cry unlike any he'd ever heard Daisy make before.
She was off playing on the edge of their property. She liked to pick "pretty flowers," as she often tried to say. What she picked was dandelions.
Karl's mother was inside making bread, his father off trapping.
The cry.
His body wanted to do two things at once—freeze in place and run. He was afraid to find out what had happened to his sister.
He forced himself to go to her.
Her tiny hands were raised almost in prayer to the sky, blood running from them as blood ran in gouts from her mouth.
He knelt next to her, the cry scaring him as nothing ever had, screaming "What's wrong, Daisy? What's wrong, Daisy!" until his mother pushed him out of the way and put her fingers in Daisy's mouth. Daisy cried louder and louder; not even her mother's fingers could halt the plea.
His mother pulled pieces of glass from Daisy's mouth. Karl had a hard time recognizing what they were at first, they were so bloody. But then he recognized where they had come from. He'd broken a bottle yesterday while he was playing games by himself. He swore to pick up the glass when he was finished playing. Otherwise his father would take a strap to him.
But he'd forgotten somehow. And now Daisy, who had apparently mistaken the broken glass for pieces of candy, had started stuffing the glass into her mouth, not only cutting herself but swallowing some of the tinier pieces.
Daisy lived less than ten hours. The way his folks glared at him, he didn't have to ask if they blamed him. Of course they did.
They buried her on a hill where the winds were like cool magic in the spring months and where the surrounding trees took fire in the autumn.
Less than a day after they buried her, some coyotes dug her up and ate most of her. His father killed them, but by then it was too late.
His mother never recovered. Two years later, she smashed a bottle one night when his father was on one of his trapping trips. Karl was so sound a sleeper, he didn't hear the breaking bottle or the rest of it. She hadn't screamed, made a fuss. Which had been very much like her.
She hadn't wanted to take any chances. She slashed both her throat and her wrists. By morning, when he woke up and found her on the far side of the cabin in her bed, her skin was blue-gray in color. He had never seen her eyes so sad. Not scared. Just plain old sad. He'd done it, he knew. When he'd helped kill his little sister, he'd helped kill his mother, too.