If it didn’t work there was always that owl he’d heard in the night. The owl would hunt in its own bailiwick and when Boag heard it make its kill he would scare the owl off its meal and steal his supper. There was also the river but Boag didn’t like fish much.
The banks were crowded with arrowweed and rushes and the occasional stunted scrub willow. It was a long day’s work breaking branches but by sundown he had a pile big enough to suit him. Then he crawled back to the grave and exhumed John B. Wilstach.
The smell was bad. Boag stripped the clothes and belt off his friend and left John B. in the grave with nothing but his boots on, and covered him up again.
He tore the clothes in strips and used most of the strips to tie the bundles of branches into something that approximated a raft. Then on one knee he lugged himself back up to the game trail to find out what his deadfall had snared.
He didn’t expect much of anything and he was ready to go around following that owl half the night, but he ran into a little luck. The deadfall had killed a small porcupine.
You used a lot of care with porcupine. He rolled it over onto its back after he got the rock off it, and jabbed a broken twig into its throat and laid it out along the bank with its head downhill. He worked the twig in and out until he had severed all the main arteries.
While the blood drained he spent twenty minutes honing the steel edge of Wilstach’s U.S.A. belt buckle against the flat side of a rock until he had a blade on it. He slit the porc’s belly from chin to tail and peeled the flesh back, removed the innards and used the buckle-knife to separate the meat from the pincushion hide. He only got three or four quill pricks in his hands.
There hadn’t been any sign of pursuit along the riverbanks but it would be stupid to build a fire and invite investigation; he wasn’t more than ten or twelve miles south of Hardyville. He ate the meat raw.
The current carried him along at a good clip and only occasionally he used the oar he’d built like a broom by lashing a bunch of stiff rushes to the end of a broken willow limb. When the sun started to get hot he soaked Wilstach’s bandanna in the river and tied it down over his head. Every little while he took it off and wetted it down again. No point getting sunstroke. He remembered the white officers of the Tenth and their tired jokes about the Buffalo soldiers’ suntans.
He had worked it out in his head. It was about 375 river miles to Yuma and the current held a steady twelve or fifteen-knot speed down the Colorado. Taking an average that meant he would be about thirty hours on the river. He’d lost some blood and there was still the vestige of shock; he couldn’t expect to spend fifteen hours a day steering the raft so he gave himself three days.
He was already thirty-six hours behind them when he started, and the steamboat would pick up another day on him—maybe two days—but still they’d only be three or four days ahead of him out of Yuma and they had the weight of that ton-and-a-half of gold to slow them down. They’d have to use pack mules or wagons.
He didn’t have a plan worked out. That would come.
In the middle of the day he let the raft drift onto the sandbank in a bend by the western shore and he rested a while and ate the last of the porcupine meat that he was going to eat; there was some left but it would go rancid by nightfall and he kept it with him only to use as bait for fishing. He made hooks out of the metal eyelets of the buttons from Wilstach’s shirt-tunic and he said, “John B., you’re helping me catch up to that son of a bitch all the time.” Slender strips of Wilstach’s clothes made his fishing line and he tied Wilstach’s brass buttons just above the hooks to attract the eyes of the fish. He imbedded the hooks in porcupine meat and let the lines trail the raft and by sundown he had six little fish aboard.
He had come far enough to risk a fire; he built one Indian-style and rubbed willow sticks over arrowweed tinder to start it going. He disliked fish anyway but raw fish was too much to contemplate; he cooked them in their skins and cut them open afterward and ate them from the inside out, spitting out the bones, hungry enough not to mind the taste.
The leg was mending all right. He still hadn’t put his weight on it and he didn’t intend to until he had to. Things were coming along, he thought. He’d need a gun and a horse but he still had the two gold eagles in his boots and that was enough to buy a gun and some cartridges, and with that he could commandeer the rest.
“I know it, John B., it’s a damn fool thing to be doing. But I got nothing else to do right now and I never expected to make old bones anyway.”
The next morning the current took him into an eddy of rapids that smashed up his raft and almost drowned him and busted his leg wounds open all over again.
The sun had both feet on his shoulders. Above the rock banks the desert winked and glittered with pyrites; heat haze wavered above the ground. When his head cleared he looked ahead across the long curve of rocks and pebbles. No reed bottoms here, it was all rock and then withered sand country above that. Nothing to build another raft with. The muddy flow of the river rushed through the sands.
A single wagon stood sagging on the near bank just below the bend.
Boag tied up his leg and started forward on one knee and both blistered hands, moving with the careless deliberation of half-drowned exhaustion.
The effort sapped him less than halfway along and he had to lie down in the sun for a time; and that was when he heard something stir.
He rolled over on his side and dug for the sharpened belt buckle in his pocket. His eyes swept the rocks in a steady arc.
A flutter of brown movement drew his attention to the left. A ragged small figure emerged from the boulder and stared at him with large grave eyes: a scrawny little girl in a filthy sack of clothes.
She spoke to Boag in Spanish, in a piping high voice: “Quién es usted?”
The little girl came toward him without fear. Boag said in Spanish, “How many of you over there?”
“There is just me. And then there are the Mexicans.”
“How many?”
“Who are you?” she said again.
“Corazon,” he said, “I do not have time to fool with you. How many are the Mexicans?”
“The old man and the woman, that is all.” Her eyes were bottomless and held distrust but not fear. Her skin was the color of old copper; she had a narrow triangle of a face and black hair tangled with burrs. Anywhere from nine to thirteen years, she had. Boag said, “You’re Indian.”
“I am Yaqui.”
“All right.”
“You are a ladrón” she told him.
He started to drag himself toward the wagon. The little girl buzzed around him like a horsefly. Finally Boag got to his feet slowly. It was the first time he’d stood up in several days and the blood fell from his head; he tightened his belly muscles and waited for the dizziness to pass. Finally he hobbled toward the wagon, putting very little weight on the bad leg. “You look like a stinking Gypsy to me.”
“I am Yaqui,” she said angrily.
She kept worrying close to his heels while he stumbled along the rock bank toward the wagon. “Don’t dog me,” he said.
“Why should I obey a ladrón negro? Have you killed many men?”
Boag hobbled to the wagon. The old man and the fat woman sat in its narrow band of shade and the old man had a Spanish percussion rifle aimed at Boag.