Paradise Sky

“There was three cows rustled from Old Man Turner over on the other side of the bluff there. He had them put up, but someone came in the night and took them. My guess is these fellas was the ones that had them, cause there was three cows in that corral, and on the far side there was horses.”

“You can tell how many cows from a pile of shit?”

“Hoofprints and such. Every hoof looks different, you make the effort to study them. My figuring is they stole them to sell, or maybe for food. They drove them off when they rode away.”

“Can you follow them?”

“Trail isn’t too warm, but I can follow it if it doesn’t start raining, and maybe even then. Long as they got those cows with them they can’t move too fast. Then again, they got quite a few days on us. I can’t guarantee your man—what’s his name?”

“Ruggert.”

“I can’t guarantee he’s with them, but Pinocchio Joe is. I know his horse’s print. It’s not the horseshoe, it’s the way the horse wears it.”

“You can wear it different ways?”

“You ain’t much of a tracker, are you?

“Why I got you.”

“A horse has his own way of walking with a shoe—how it steps, way it puts its print down. Trust me. It’s him. And I figure one of the other prints to be Doolittle. They never get far apart, and the print is light. Doolittle rides light. He don’t weigh enough to hold down a newspaper in a light wind. And there’s another. That might be your Ruggert fellow.”

I nodded, glanced at the sky. It was starting to darken. “Looks like rain will be soon.”

“Yep. Let’s get on the trail. See how much ground we can cover before it comes down.”

We wound up into the mountains and the sky got dark and the rain started to come down hard. We pulled on our slickers, and that helped, but pretty soon it was damn near dead dark, and the sound of the rain on my hat was making me loco. There was an old cabin high up in the mountains Choctaw knew of, and he said it wasn’t much off the trail and we should go there to ride out the storm. We rode there, being cautious to note if our outlaws might have had the same idea a few days back and was still there, but they wasn’t.

We brought our horses into the cabin, which wasn’t really much more than a shack. It was dark in there, but we had some waxed paper twists and we lit one. There was an old kerosene lamp, but there wasn’t any kerosene in it. We stuck a few lit twists here and there and tried to figure where we could put our bedrolls. First thing we did was block the door from being pushed back by wedging a slicked piece of wood underneath it. It would take some determination from outside to move it, and by then we should be on the job in case defending ourselves was necessary.

There was a fireplace, and the flue drew smoke well enough, and there was a bit of wood, so we made a fire. That gave us more light. Choctaw got out his cooking goods, warmed us up some beans. It was a lot of beans, actually. I ate a plateful, and Choctaw ate three plates full. He wasn’t kidding about always being hungry.

“What do you think they got in mind?” I asked Choctaw.

“Not getting caught. Bunch like that, they done played out their cards, but they don’t know it. They ain’t got nothing left now but to keep doing what they’re doing, and then in time they’ll step in a pile somehow, and they’ll get caught.”

“Think we’ll be the ones to catch them?”

“Hell, yeah.”

“What makes you so certain?”

Choctaw smiled at me, wiped his bean-juice-coated mouth with the back of his sleeve. “You got me. Course, once we catch up with them they could kill us both.”

The rain came down like bullets, and the cabin was shabby and leaked. We hobbled the horses, but the rain and the lightning made them restless, and between the rain and them stirring and me worrying about our prey coming upon us by accident, I had a sleepless night. Here is what I had wanted for so long, and now that I was getting close I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I wasn’t sure I’d live through it, and if I did I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about myself. My mother said I was destined for greatness. I doubted when she said that she thought I’d be up in the wet mountains with plans to kill a man, even if he deserved it. I remembered what Ruggert had said about her, and that made me a little sick. I didn’t like what was ru

When morning light slipped through the wet cracks of the cabin, I was already up and tending to the fire. There was hardly enough wood to make a blaze now, but it was enough to warm more beans. I had my plateful and Choctaw had his three, this time the beans coming from my possibles. At this rate we’d have to eat the horses by noon and each other by noon the next day.

The day was fresh, and the rain was drying fast as the sun was growing hot. By ten the freshness would go out of the air and it would turn sticky, like someone had poured hot honey over the woods and mountains. It was that time of year when the weather could change from one thing to another as quickly as a child can change its mind.

Choctaw, to my surprise, could still find sign of where our bunch had traveled. He said it was because they had those cows with them when they passed through. The cows had torn the earth up a lot. I looked. I couldn’t tell the difference from what the rain had done and what the cows and horses had done a few days back. As I said, I’m not a great tracker, though I can follow fresh sign all right, but Choctaw could follow a ghost in moccasins.

By late afternoon we come upon a white man walking. He didn’t walk like someone used to it. He was a heavy, bowlegged outfit of a man without a hat, and he was holding a hand to the side of his head. When he seen us he threw up a hand. “Hold on there, men. I been robbed.”

We got down off our horses and helped the man to sit on a fallen tree by the side of the trail.

“Who robbed you?”

“Three men,” he said. “One of them I knowed, so that’s why I think I’m alive. They gave him me to kill, and he took me off in the woods and said I’d wake up with a headache, and before I could ask him what he meant I woke up with a headache. I see two of each of you, by the way, but I doubt you is two sets of twins. And you got all them horses.”

“You’re going to need some bed rest,” I said.

“I ain’t far from my house if I can take the right trail.”

“There’s only one,” Choctaw said.

“Not the way I’m seeing,” he said.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“People call me Bump. Now that I got this lick on my head, that fits right nice. You got a chaw?”

Neither me nor Choctaw had a chaw.

“Smoke?”

Choctaw rolled Bump a cigarette, licked it closed, put it in Bump’s mouth, and lit a match to it.

Bump took a few puffs.

“Bump, who was it you knew?” Choctaw asked.

“Doolittle, that little shit. He used to work for me. He’s all right, I reckon, but he has a tendency to stray here and there, and now I’m mad at him, hitting me in the head like that.”

“He was supposed to shoot you,” I said.

“Yeah, well, that’s true, but I tell you, my head stays like this I won’t even be able to sort my socks. There’ll be too many.”

“What did they steal from you and when?” I asked him.

“I been walking all day…Well, I laid out some on the ground in some trees for a while. Yesterday near evening was when Doolittle hit me. They already had some cows with them when they come up on me, three, I think, and then they took my cows. Eight of them. And my horse. I was driving the cows on some green range. I don’t own it. No one does that I know of. I run them there now and then to give them a kind of spring tonic. Hell, they’re not prime cows or nothing. Just some old sagalongs. Some I was go