Death Valley Drifter, page 2
Thinking of water reminded him of his own intense thirst. He stepped onto a patch of brown grass to protect the burning soles of his feet. Sweat trickled here and there, mostly old perspiration relocated by his rising.
The man saw nothing but sand and spotty scrub ahead. He did not detect the faint but discernible smell or feel of open water anywhere nearby. That, too, he suspected, was as much an animal sense as a remembered one. He turned his head slowly, looking around. He was on a desert, a dusty plain that was flat in all directions but one. That exception was to his right—the north or thereabout, according to the position of the rising sun. There were hills about a quarter mile in that direction, with bent-over grass and little more. There were cacti, too, but they would be of no help. He recalled that the pulpy interior provided unpleasant water and the unpleasant aftereffect of diarrhea.
That was not instinct. That was something he remembered. He could even taste the damp, sour mush in his mouth.
Blood globbed into his ear, running hot and thick from his scalp. He raised an arm, unsteady with weakness, and scooped the moisture out with a dust-covered finger. He absently wiped it on his underwear.
No horse. No shoes or boots.
How the hell did I get here?
He struggled to recall, grew frustrated by running into a wall of nothing. He snorted the last of the sand from his nostrils. He flexed his bloated fingers.
Getting angry was not going to help him. Getting his bearings might. He squinted up into a featureless blue sky without even a passing cloud to offer respite. From the position of the sun, he made it not just morning but early morning. He could not have been lying here very long. With all the nocturnal predators that came out at sundown, he did not think he would have survived the night with a bleeding wound. Besides, if he had been lying there all night injured, he probably would have bled more. Possibly to death.
Whoever had done this, whomever he was talking with or cursing at, had not meant to kill him but might have been content to let death come. Otherwise, they would have finished him. A gun—too noisy? Were there others around? Just a second blow might have done it, might have left him here to bake to death.
The blood had not gone hard close by the wound—that was another clue to it being recent. He guessed that it was the heat of the sun that had roused him. Perhaps by design of the attacker? A good thing it had, too. Staying unconscious in the heat was a certain way to perspire to death or suffer— What did they call it?
Sunstroke.
Even with all those legs, the tarantula and the scorpion could not outrun the scalding lash of the sun.
So it was not intended to be a fatal wound. Then why was he here? And at night in the dark.
The man decided to look more closely at the ground for tracks. If he’d had a horse, there would be something.
He looked around on the ground . . . and swore. There was a very slight breeze, hot so that it had seemed like the sun, but it wasn’t. It was enough to have blown sand over any footprints or hoofprints that might have been left behind.
There was no time to search around. Detective work was a luxury he could not afford. If he did not find water, he would die. Whoever had hit him had not left any behind. That argued against charity—
Or else there is water somewhere around.
The man exhaled and took a moment, his eyes scrunched against the unyielding sun, searching his mule-stubborn memory for any missing pieces. Like where he was headed. Should he go forward . . . or back, into the desert? Perhaps there was a campsite.
He closed his mouth, set in his determination to recall something, anything. His inclination was to head toward the hills in the south but he had to be sure. If he picked wrong—
Shutting his dry mouth, inhaling, exhaling, he noticed a distinctive smell in his nose—
A campfire.
He turned around haltingly, his first steps, and faced in the direction opposite from the way he had been lying. There was nothing. Not the remnants of a fire, nor a stick or a rock covered with blood. He had not fallen.
A gun butt, then, he decided.
Hit from behind, from the location of the wound. Lying toward the north, which meant they had been coming from the south.
“The hills,” he said, his lips parting to permit the raw rasp of a voice. That was the way he had to go.
The soles of his feet were hot but not unbearably so. That was another indication that the hour was probably closer to sunrise than noon. The sands were not yet furnace hot. Not yet. It also meant he had to have been wearing footwear. He looked down. His leggings were worn out well above the ankles, the result of hard leather pressing on trousers pressing on underwear. Caused by boots. He checked the rest of his underwear. The fabric along the insides of his legs was slightly discolored—the pressure of trousers that had been straddling a horse.
Why would someone take his boots and the rest of his clothes and his horse? Again, he did not understand. Why not just kill me?
The soles of his feet were not soft, but what about his hands? If he were a laborer . . . or maybe he had been jailed, hammering a rock pile—
No. The skin was not extraordinary, and his fingernails were clean. He must have been wearing gloves. He raised his hands to his nose. They did not smell of horse. They smelled of leather or deerskin—he could not be certain.
What did he do in his life day after day?
He could not walk and think at the same time, and he knew which of those was more important. He took a few awkward, shuffling steps, going wide around the scorpion. Occasionally there were rocks under the sand, some sharp, and he jumped whenever he stepped on one.
Despite himself, he thought as he walked. He wondered if he might have been riding—galloping, perhaps from pursuers—and had been sacrificed by whomever he was with. An offering. Maybe those galoots were still back there, to the south, in pursuit. Maybe they had waited till sunrise.
If only he had a clue.
Maybe that was why his clothes had been taken, anything that might help him to remember might identify him to someone else. Perhaps his clothes had been a uniform?
The war. He vaguely remembered a war some time ago.
But whoever had hit him could not have known he would suffer memory loss. Was he, perhaps, supposed to pretend that was what had happened? Was there a plan that he had forgotten with all else? Everything was a jumble.
“God,” he said in exasperation.
Did he believe in God? He seemed to feel he had. He remembered praying before a cross . . . Jesus. Thinking of Jesus, he thought of the beard—
He touched his face as he walked. It was clean-shaven and recently. He had to have looked in a mirror or a pan of water—something in order to do that. But try as he might, he could not see his reflection.
What about my age?
He had no idea. None. He was a grown man; he had lived a life—he had to remember something. He tried to look around that chasm in his memory. Along the sides were images of a nondescript town somewhere, some when. He might not even have been there. He could be remembering pictures in a book, in frames, on postcards. There were no faces, friends, a wife, or parents—
Walking made his head feel better, but it also rendered the wound active. Blood trickled back into his ear. That had to be addressed before he bled to death, so he stopped, carefully knelt, and ripped off the bottoms of his underwear leggings. He folded one length of cloth into a bandage and used the other to tie it in place, like a bandanna.
His fingers seemed to know how to do that. He had done that before. He must not have lived near a doctor. Not permanently anyway.
Finishing, and touching the outside of the fabric to make sure it covered the wound entirely, the man trudged toward the hills, which, as the minutes passed, did not seem to be getting any closer. Heat was beginning to rise uncomfortably from the sands, not only broiling his sweaty soles but distorting his view of the terrain beyond him. At least, he thought it was that. The blow on the head could have been affecting his vision, causing some of that wavering. Or maybe there was something else affecting his eyes, which were not just dry but stinging. They might not be reporting the world accurately.
The past was gone, and the real world was misleading. What a state of things.
It will come back, he assured himself as he lifted one foot after another. You’re still just dazed from whatever happened.
But he could not stop trying to make his brain work, starting with the known or the obvious. Place? United States. West . . . yes, somewhere. He seemed to know that was where the deserts were. Year? It was eighteen something. Month? Out here, it was tough to say. Even winter deserts might be hot. At the moment it seemed as if he had always been hot.
He walked, his legs not hurting but increasingly leaden, his back burning with nothing to shield it, save oily sweat. At least his head throbbed less than it had before. Maybe the sun was doing it some good, like a plant bending toward the light. The thought of shade and, he hoped, water kept him mushing one foot after another despite the heat on and between his toes. As much as his head hurt and as raw as his throat and mouth were, he was not tired. Maybe his memory lied. He could have been hurt when he was asleep, his bedding stolen with his clothes. Everything packed and carted away on the horse he had been riding.
As he walked, he continually directed his attention to the distant, more verdant landscape—searching, smelling, listening for any sign of human endeavor. A warm, soft breeze occasionally picked up dust devils, spinning them in chest-high whirlwinds. There were buzzing insects, and occasionally he had to wave them from his covered wound. Twice he heard rattlers—far enough away to walk wide around them. He remembered, from somewhere in the past, that was the reason he wore boots so high. Snakes could rise up.
The sun had moved a considerable distance and was nearly overhead before he reached the hills—two hours of walking, he guessed. Two hours of perspiring what little moisture was left in him, wrung from him as if he was a cloth in a wringer, his sweat burning off and his skin shrinking around him. Despite the ominous shadow of a turkey vulture that fell upon him, he found his strength waning. Flies swarmed and lit on his bloody ear, only now he was too weak to swat them. Besides, they would only return. If he did not find water soon, the bird and its little black minions would have their lunch.
The bushes he occasionally saw around him must have had access to an underwater stream. It was sad, he thought, that people were not equipped with roots.
The man had almost nothing left to give this pursuit. His knees bent one after the other under his weight. He dropped and fell onto his hands. His palms dislodged a family of pocket mice under a half-buried rock. They surfaced briefly before digging back underground. Whether they were anxious to be out of the sun, away from him, or to avoid a circling hawk, he did not know. What he did know, what somehow penetrated his hazy thoughts, actually gave him hope. In the brief glimpse he had had, he noticed that the mice had not looked emaciated. That meant there was food . . . and whether it was plant, insect, or animal, that also meant there was water.
He turned his face forward. Had the first man on earth felt like this—what was his name?—thrown into a new world with needs but no solutions? And then, suddenly, hope?
He saw fresh ripples ahead, low to the ground and slightly to the east. They were not just rising but moving from side to side. It was not a mirage. It was the air. It was something physical close to the ground.
Half running, half stumbling toward it, the man saw that it was water stirred by the light wind. A moment later he came upon a pond about ten feet across and half as wide. It was surrounded by high, swaying reeds and was composed of groundwater that rolled and was lifted in gentle waves from the northern edge.
The man’s approach scared a pair of dark rabbits that moved deeper into the reeds that grew on the eastern and northern side; they were nurtured by the morning light and shaded in the afternoon by a high hill beyond. The reeds on the western and southern side were browned and stunted.
He thrashed through that waist-high foliage and fell on all fours on the other side of them. Like an animal, he pushed his face to the water, recoiling at the surprising heat on his cheeks and sunburned nose, on his cracked lips and swollen tongue. Shaking off the burning sensation, he bent back down and touched his mouth to the surface. He sucked the water up, quickly getting used to the heat. Almost at once, life began returning to his body. His vigorous movements were enough to send the buzzard away in search of less hopeful prey.
As his body recovered some of its vigor, his mind, too, became more alert.
Maybe now things will come back to me, he thought. It was more like a prayer than a real hope.
When the man was finished, he cupped water below his eyes, tilted his head back, and rinsed them. He removed the bandage, scrubbed it clean in the pond, then wrung the rest out on the wound. He did not want to dab the gash and risk reopening it. He just wanted it clean enough so insects would stop pestering him.
As he squeezed out the water, he noticed the big eyes of the rabbits locked on him across the way.
“You’re safe,” he assured them. “I’m hungry, damned hungry, but I’ve got nothing to trap you with or start a fire.”
As if encouraged by the man’s gentle tone and undoubted thirst, the rabbits cautiously came forward. Its ears turned back, the larger and darker of the two animals was about to drink when a wooden shaft pierced his hide behind the neck, thrusting him forward and causing him to drop to one side, kicking. The other fled, concerned only with self-preservation. A brief rustle of the reeds and there was no longer any sign of the surviving rabbit.
The man remained frozen for a moment, his refreshed eyes turned ahead; then he slowly lowered himself to his belly. He did not want any part of him visible near the top of the grasses. He looked across the velvety waters as the reeds on the other side began to part from back to front. The shot rabbit was dead, a breeze rustling its fur, thick, dark blood running from the wound. The man noticed that the arrow seemed especially crude. The fletching did not seem to be eagle or turkey. It looked like duck. Somehow, he knew that. And the shaft was a hide-tied bundle of reeds, like those that grew around the pond.
Again, the man did not know how he knew that, but he did.
A figure strode into the reeds at the side of the pond. It was not what the man had been expecting, not an Indian or a settler but a boy. The new arrival was about ten years old and dressed in overalls that looked like they were made from a potato sack. He was shirtless and wore moccasins, though he was white beneath a deep sunburn. His blond hair was short but scruffy—knife cut, it seemed.
The boy’s eyes were lively, and he was smiling down at his kill. He slipped the large bow over his shoulder, beside a quiver, as he picked up the rabbit by the arrow. He turned it round and round at arm’s length, watching its lifeless head and limbs flop.
“I think I will call you . . . Stew!” the boy chuckled.
Watching him, crouched where he was, the man had a sudden recollection that made his heart rush. He was hiding in brush, a sharpened stick in his hand. Not sharp like that arrow but sharp enough to use in the hard earth. He could feel himself pushing through the dirt with it—
Then, quick as it came, the image left. The beating in his chest slowed. He no longer felt afraid.
And not of this boy.
As soon as the youngster had disarmed himself, the man began to rise very slowly. He emerged from hiding arms first, his hands lifted high above his head.
The rabbit was jerked to a stop, and the boy’s pale blue eyes speared past it at the newcomer. With the sun on them, they looked like little diamonds in his bronzed face.
“Please don’t shoot me,” the man said softly. “I’d make pretty poor stew.”
“I don’t shoot people, only supper,” the boy assured him.
“Very sensible,” the man replied.
There had been the briefest hesitation in the boy’s young voice, but he had pushed through it. This was a tough frontier kid, the man thought.
The boy lowered his kill and looked behind him as though contemplating an escape. Instead, he turned back and took a moment to consider the stranger. “Were you swimming, mister?”
It took a moment before the man understood what the newcomer was asking. “No. I was robbed of my clothes—of everything, in fact.” He bowed his head slightly to show the boy the wound. It hurt when he bent forward like that. “I was knocked out.”
The youngster looked for a moment, then shrugged. “Seen worse. Saw a man who was scalped. You?”
The man shrugged the same as the boy had. “Possibly. If I did, I don’t remember.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Maybe my ma can fix that.”
“Your ma. Is she nearby?”
“Near enough. You better come along. My name’s Douglas. Douglas Smith.”
“Hello, Douglas Smith. I wish I could tell you my name, but honestly I don’t know it.”
The boy seemed doubtful. “Someone took that, too, along with your trousers?”
“I reckon they did, in a manner of speaking.” The man started to walk around the pond. “Your ma—she lets you wander out here in the desert alone?”
“Nah,” the boy said. He jerked his head back. “She’s behind that rock. With a rifle.”
CHAPTER TWO
JANE SMITH WOULD never leave the shack, even to hang the laundry, without her .50 caliber Springfield loaded and by her side. She kept at least a half dozen extra cartridges in her apron or, as now, in the pocket of her dress. And she was a practiced shot. Even as a girl, growing up in Austin, Texas, she had preferred rifles to revolvers. She liked having that power against her shoulder rather than in her hand. It was balanced and made a good club if it came to that.
