The faded hat lay in the trail. Jack urged his paint forward, spurring the horse over fallen logs and tangled branches, but the horse would not pass by that hat. Jack rammed in his spurs, and the paint backed up from the signal, responding more to panic as Jack called out but heard nothing in response.
He scrambled from the saddle, falling to his knees on the slippery hillside, catching hold of a shaky pine. Listening for Refugio’s voice, for any sound. Nothing. So he stuck out his feet and skidded them downslope, following the deep gouges of the roan’s fall. He looked up once and saw the yellow mare’s underbelly as she too leaped from the trail.
Jack could barely protect himself from the branches that slashed him, the rocks that pounded his legs and backside. He dug in his boot heels, planted his spurs, and rode the slick hill. His fall was broken by the half-buried rump of the roan. Jack fell forward, grabbed a tree, yanked himself upright.
A call drew him to a clump of tangled aspen, young trees that had given way to a stronger force. A boot was caught between two slender trunks. Gently Jack knelt and freed the boot, laying Refugio’s leg carefully on the mossy ground. He heard the accompanying groan. He made himself crawl closer. He had smelled the smell before in a gutted horse, a wounded bear, a deer taken with a bad shot.
“Señor?” The voice was weak.
Jack braced one trembling hand on an aspen and lightly touched the undamaged side of the man’s face. “Mi amigo.” He choked out the words. “I didn’t know you wanted to fly.”
“It seems, amigo, that in truth I cannot fly at all.”
Jack did not flinch or betray his horror, for it was Refugio and not a broken animal. He had never seen an eye torn from its socket before. The ruined face made an effort at a one-sided grin.
“It is good I was not handsome before, señor. Not like you. For now, indeed, I would be very angry.” Refugio tried to lift one arm, but it was broken at the wrist and again above the elbow. Even so, the weak effort caused a spasm through the body.
Jack sank back on his heels and closed his eyes. When Refugio coughed, he opened them. A dark stain widened around Refugio’s shoulders, more blood soaked into the ground by his hips.
“Mi amigo, you have a task ahead that is not often asked of one friend by another. But it is necessary. I will die. Nothing and no one can help. But you…you can let me know I have had one good friend in this life which we all must leave.” He looked with that awful, single, bloody eye at Jack’s hand, which by instinct rested on the butt of the pistol.
This was asking too much, but it would be done.
“Gracias, señor. Muy hombre…ah, la Santisima.”
The one eye stayed focused on Jack as he pulled the trigger. Standing slowly, pistol gripped in his hand, Jack looked down at the corpse, trying not to see the remains of what had been a good man.
It was the plaintive whinny of a horse that broke the spell that had formed around him. The sound carried all the pain and fear, all the destruction that lay at his feet. Wherever he looked, there was blood. He could smell nothing but fouled manure and gasses, voided bowels, and emptied bladders. Not even the trail of broken aspen and shattered pine, their hearts exposed to the hot air, could hide the incredible stink.
The whinny reached him again. He twisted his neck, tried to stare uphill into the bright sun. He could not bury Refugio for he had no tools for grave digging, no hope of finding enough rocks in this grassy place to cover him. And his shot might have caught the attention of curious men—ranchers and cowhands—who were now riding to investigate.
Jack knelt again in the ruined earth and, with his knife, shaved two sticks from a dying aspen, twined them in a cross, using rawhide strings cut from Refugio’s own saddle. There he jammed the cross into the bed of moss and leaves at Refugio’s head. A poor marker for one life. Then he pulled his way out, returning on the trail left by their falling bodies.
When he climbed over the lip of the trail, he was surprised to find the paint gelding waiting. Jack used the near stirrup to haul himself to his feet and found, as he looked over the paint’s back, that the yellow mare was huddled behind the bigger horse. There was no sign of the boy.
Jack called out but only birds sang to him. A small animal scurried through the underbrush behind him. He backtracked the mare and found the boy near the base of a sturdy pine. Jack knew nothing would ever wake the child. The head was tilted, the bones in the neck snapped clean. Jack wiped his suddenly wet mouth, glimpsed his hands soiled with Refugio’s blood. There was no blood around the boy.
He shuddered once and grabbed the boy’s boots, dragged him slowly downhill, talking all the time to the horses. The animals were eager to hear his voice. The mare took several steps toward him, reached out her muzzle, and brushed against his back as he labored with his burden. He lifted the body and let it slide onto the mare’s back. The boy was barely fourteen, never had grown much height and never had weighed more than a three-week old calf.
Then he went to the paint. He’d bury that old saddle with the boy, he’d bury all the kid’s meager gear with him, but he’d have to do the burying without Johnny Thackery’s hat. He knew right where he’d take the kid. Wildflower Cañon, where the boy’d talked about it being a pretty enough place for a dead man to lie.
I regret Johnny’s death for it was an accident of a kind seen too often here. Man is at nature’s mercy in this land. I can say that he did not suffer at the moment of death.
Here he considered the harshness of the word “death” but could find none kinder. The more civilized folks used words to deny death’s importance. “Passing” was one, a word Jack hated. It destroyed the death itself. Dying was no passing to anything, it was the end, right here and now, at the time that the last breath fled through clenched teeth.
It was even more difficult to be polite when he recalled Refugio’s single eye watching him at the very second of his own death. There would never be a word to describe the act and its consequence. Making such a death civilized by talking around it was something Jack could not accept.
He finished the letter and took up a bottle of tequila. It was another full day and night before he could stand straight and take the letter to the Gutierrezville post office.
The same smiling man took the folded paper and told Jack the fee for its mailing. They exchanged coin and Jack was finished with his contract.
“Señor, we are sorry to hear of Refugio and wish to thank you for his final care.”
Jack’s boot stuttered on the puncheon floor. A small, squat, dark-haired man with heavy whiskers shadowed Jack’s elbow. “His wife…she is my cousin. We are in your debt, señor.”
Jack could not speak.
The killing was known. The thought made him sick. He pushed past the sad-eyed man and hit sunshine, walked to the pens where the paint was stabled. Jack Holden was a thief, not a murderer.
Katherine Donald
Chapter Nineteen
Her fingers trailed over the floral material, a gift from Mr. Meiklejon, sent from England by his fiancée. Her employer would be marrying soon and the question of her continued residence in a bachelor’s house would be resolved.
Katherine let her thoughts run away while she worked on the final seams of her dress with its fine, smooth finish and tender pattern, and she laughed at herself for her mental indulgences.