Henry stood there with Dog, who was sitting on his foot with the nonchalance of a man waiting for a bus. “You have been out stealing horses?”
“Bringing them back from the dead.” I slowed Wahoo Sue to a walk. “Have you seen the boy?” He looked behind him at a diminutive figure on a small horse in the circular end of the culvert. “Benjamin?”
He approached, but his horse was limping. The boy raised his hat and looked at me. He was crying, and the tears made rivers in the red dust on his face. I nudged the big black and pulled up opposite him as he reached out with both arms. I swept him up and planted him facing me on my lap. “Are you all right, Mister Bandito Negro de los Badlands?” He nodded but didn’t say anything and buried his face in my shirt, the battered cowboy hat falling backward to hang from his neck by the stampede strings. I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him in close as Henry reached up and patted his back. “It’s all right, Benjamin, everything’s going to be okay.”
He shivered and sobbed some more, but his face turned sideways and looked up at me. “The dead man, he chased me.”
“Yep, I know.” I took a breath and smiled. “When’s the last time you saw him?”
He blurted the words out in a bunch. “I saw his truck and tried to outrun him, but Concho hurt himself, so I brought him under here.”
“Smart thinking.” I looked down at Henry. “Have you seen the truck since then?”
He nodded. “He drove over the bridge-twice.”
“Which direction, the last time?”
He pointed east toward the road to the Barsad place. I figured about a half-mile in the other direction from town. It would be the safest thing to leave the boy here with Henry rather than risk Barsad catching us on the road, especially with Benjamin’s horse being lame and mine sure to tire.
Benjamin was staring at the antique rifle in my hands. “Is that Hershel’s gun?”
In the distance I could hear a train whistle as I nudged the boy’s head back with my chest and looked down at him. “I borrowed it.”
The little bandit knuckled his fingers into his eyes and wiped them with a sleeve.
I glanced at the narrow path on the other side of the culvert that clung to the banks of the Powder and could hear the BNSF approaching. I plucked Benjamin up and lowered him into Henry’s waiting hands. “Does this trail go all the way into town?”
The Cheyenne Nation shook his head. “No, it joins the road at the railroad crossing.”
“I was afraid of that. How far does it go?”
“A quarter-mile.”
A half-mile to a phone but, even with a train between us, my odds were getting better. I just had to keep from getting trapped between Barsad and the train.
Henry watched as I thought, and as usual, he was reading me verbatim. “We will stay here.”
Benjamin’s legs straddled the big Indian’s side as Henry continued to hold him, but the boy’s voice carried concern. “Stay here?”
He looked unsure as we listened to the train pass the crossroads and begin rocking through town. “Henry Standing Bear is Cheyenne. I’m sure you two have a lot to talk about.”
He looked seriously at Henry and finally nodded. “Okay.”
I gave him one last squeeze on the shoulder. “You’ve done really well, and we’re all really proud of you.” He continued studying me with the dark eyes, and just for a moment, I studied the likeness between the boy and the man who held him. “You’ve impressed me so much, you know what I’m going to do?” He didn’t say anything until I pulled the piece of metal from my shirt pocket that had been tucked away with the horse treats.
He looked at it, dull and heavy in the just morning light. “Is that a badge?”
I nodded, the sound of the train matching the pulse of my blood. “Raise your right hand.” He did as I requested. “Now repeat after me: I, Benjamin Balcarcel, promise to stay in this culvert with the Bear until the sheriff comes back and gets me.” He repeated it. “So help me God.” He repeated that part, too. I pinned the gold-plated star onto his shirt. “But if you leave the culvert, you go back to being a regular citizen and I’m going to be really upset.” He looked uncertain. “You don’t have to repeat that part.”
“Okay.”
“You’re deputized; just stay here.”
“Okay.”
Henry smiled and lowered Benjamin to the ground and watched as he put his hat back on, walked over and took Dog by the collar, and returned to his horse. Dog wagged, and the bandito saluted and looked down at my badge as the Bear thumped his chest with a fist and then pointed his index finger down-Cheyenne sign-talk for hope/heart.
I made the same gesture and walked Wahoo Sue past them and onto the narrow, dirt path into the diffused light of the morning where I could see the cars of the coal-laden BNSF flashing by. I glanced back over my shoulder and into the culvert and could see that the boy hadn’t moved from Henry’s side. I turned in the saddle, the mare tripped off into a quick trot, and in no time we were moving briskly.
The path followed the river pretty closely, and the reflection of the sunrise broke in the shallow and lazy water. We gradually climbed to the surface of the road above and the railroad tracks. Gradual was good because it would give me a chance to look back toward Wild Horse Road and the direction from which Wade Barsad would most likely be coming in his quest to find Benjamin.
Wahoo Sue wasn’t completely happy with the proximity of the hopper cars pounding by on the elevated tracks, the clanging bells, or the hooded, flashing red lights, and was even unhappier as we grew closer. The trail, thankfully, drew up a good forty feet from the tracks themselves, and I was just as happy to wait a sensible distance away on a slightly skittish horse anyway.
I turned and looked back east, but the road was empty. With the noise of the train and the claxon bells, there wasn’t much chance of my hearing him, even in the diesel, but I would be able to see Barsad from a long way off. If he did appear from that direction, I’d pretty much made up my mind to shoot right in order to lead him away from the boy, follow the tracks in the opposite direction of the train until I got to the end, then jump across and find a cross-country route into town. That’s what I was planning to do; what Wahoo Sue was planning might be something entirely different, but she’d been awfully well-behaved up to now.
I glanced past the protective barriers that sat lowered across the road, and then at the cars, trying to gauge how many remained, but with the curve in the tracks I simply couldn’t see. Some of the damn things were four miles long, but a substantial number of the coal hoppers had already passed, so I figured at most I was only a minute or two away from crossing.
I looked back over my shoulder again, but with the rising sun, it was getting hard to see through the diffused light from the east. I threw a hand over my brow but, as near as I could tell, the road remained empty.
I pivoted in the saddle again, and Wahoo Sue took it as a command and turned with me. I took advantage of the situation to give Wild Horse Road my undivided attention. The mare took a few steps, and then planted, to give the road as much study as I had.
Nothing.
I looked at her and leaned down to stroke the side of her neck. “So-o-o girl, good girl.” I glanced back, could see that the last hopper car was approaching, and wheeled the dark horse around. She misinterpreted again and thought I wanted to advance into the tail end of the passing train, so she took a few crow-hops sideways and slightly reared.
“So-o-o girl, easy girl. Don’t worry; we’re not going until the train passes.” I patted her neck with the knotted, black mane blowing over my fingers, and she quieted long enough for the final coal car to rock past, with the small electronic device that had taken the place of a caboose attached to the last coupler.
And there, idling on the other side of the track, was the red Dodge and the late, great Wade Barsad.