Wilding In The West 7

A cloud mercifully passed in front of the moon, thrusting them all into darkness. The only sound the drip of the water that had fled their bodies as it gravitated back into the pool.

Chad felt Michelle’s thumb rub against the tip of his prick. “Every day is a big day with Mr. Connors…” she yawned.

It was contagious; Allie yawned too.

Chad did not. While the girls were sleeping on him, he was sleeping on the rock floor, and it was simply too blunt for him to get comfortable on. Nor could he get comfortable with the prospect the ladies had put to him. A bank robber again. Loving on Allie while her daughter carried on an affair with him. It was all tempting as hell, the kind of thing he’d have agreed to from age ten onward. But Chad could not shake the feeling that he should’ve matured some in the years of his manhood. He should have more to show in sense than he did as a boy. And he could not help but conclude, with any thinking done on the matter, that it was a bad idea.

The arrangement with Michelle and Allie was doomed to fail. Going on the owlhoot trail again would double the enmity of the authorities who had forgave him. They might well triple his bounty out of sheer spite. He would have none of the resources of a veteran outlaw, but all of the drawbacks of a wicked reputation and an adversary that knew him for his foibles.

Hours passed, or minutes that felt like hours. Mother and daughter slept soundly in their satisfaction, while Chad’s physical contentment could not overcome his ill feeling. Even the touch of the girls could not soothe him. When would it be that this run of luck—and it was luck, a burgeoning boy’s wet dream that this had happened in the first place—came crashing down? He was bluffing a high-stakes game with two pair and Chad had to admit to himself that the time had come to fold. He’d won as much as he was likely to.

Besides, two sets of snores was a lot for any man to take.

Up above, a shooting star scratched across the night sky like a match being struck. It seemed as good a sign as any. Chad reached up, dug his fingers into the rock above him, and lifted himself up enough that it wouldn’t hurt when he pushed out with his feet, shifting his body north. Allie and Michelle’s encircling hands traipsed over him as he moved, but their soft, supple touched offered no friction and soon he’d pulled far enough away to roll over onto his belly and push himself to his feet without disturbing them.

The two laid on the floor beneath him, lush paeans to satiation unto exhaustion, and Chad could not help but be tempted to lower himself down and rejoin the pair for another round. But his mind was made up and he wouldn’t waste time debating with himself all over again. Padding across the floor with painstaking slowness, he came to the pool of water, discernible only by glints of its shifting waves in the blackness. Chad reached out a toe and finally found the feeling of wetness. He crouched down to feed himself into the water without jostling it enough to make noise. Once he’d slipped under the surface, it was easy to backtrack to the larger body of water, the underwater tunnel nowhere near as long as it’d seemed when he’d been following the much smaller helping of moonlight in the grotto.

Finally, he emerged out in the open, the water bracingly cold but also refreshing him and washing him clean. Chad went to his clothes—it seemed vaguely wrong that they should still be there after the seismic upheaval of his tryst with the two odd women—and dressed, then sought out Ol’ Buck.

Like many old-timers, the man had trouble sleeping. Chad found him on the far side of the loghouse, smoking a quirly and rocking in a softly creaking chair. The sound seemed as natural as the moonlight on a night like this.

“Sweaty dream?” Buck asked him, noting Chad’s wet body under dry clothes.

“Just wanted to get an early start to the day. That Conestoga got in yet?”

“Nosirree. We may have lost us a carriage.”

Chad nodded. “Then don’t you think someone should ride along its route and see if they need some help?”

“You offering?”

“You got a horse I could borrow?”

“How many horses do you think I’d get by making it a policy to lend them out to strangers?”

Chad crossed his arms. “You think the Conestoga had an accident?”

“Not likely. Even if three of the horses were killed, someone would take the one left and ride down here to ask for help.”

“Then you think someone waylaid them.”

Ol’ Buck shrugged. “Stands to reason.”

“You want to go out there and cross paths with whoever did?”

Ol’ Buck abruptly looked constipated. “I, err, I got to watch over the waystation. Make sure all of the passengers are protected.”

“Then how about I go to check in on the Conestoga while you stay here while it’s safe?”

Equally abruptly, Buck looked as if he’d taken a cure-all. “You wouldn’t happen to need a horse by any chance?”

“I would indeed. Thank you for offering.”

“Thank you for looking after the salesman and the womenfolk. I have a feeling they won’t wake up in the best of moods.”

***

Chad put some hard miles on the nag, eager to rid himself of the night's mood—that timeless, senseless feeling that had hoofbeats sounding quiet as stitching needles. But he had at least enough sense not to burn out a horse with no cause. And he needed to slow, at a trot, to watch the stage road and look for signs that the Conestoga had veered from its appointed rounds. There was no telling what had become of it, unless he told it.

Hours into the ride, Chad could no trace of the stage that wasn’t weeks old. The terrain was rugged—God’s own unmade bed, plants scabbing over the clayish soil, mountains and foothills folding up the landscape so that if Chad wasn’t sloping up a rise, he was coming down a defile.  The moon cowered behind the peaks of distant mountains, as if ready to dart back down below the horizon.

The air was cool—it had given up on being cold—and Chad could just about smell the new day, the smell of the world burning under the Southern sun. The night was dead and it was being buried and the dawn had been called. If the night was danger and death, which Chad halfway believed, then this was when it got its last licks in. He’d done time as a cowhand, lying low or seeking to travel from place to place without raising suspicion. In those days, he’d known this to be when bedded cattle could become a stampede—the readiness of cows to wake and be moved easily able to overflow.

Chad felt his own wakefulness at its peak, nerves taut as piano wire, and he told himself the solution to this mystery was presenting itself to him, his eyes widening to take it in. He heard a coyote’s cry and imagined somewhat that it was feeling the same way as him. Something alive in them, ferociously alive—the life of a horse at a gallop or a wolf with its teeth in a bared neck.

A gorge opened up on his right, like God had scooped up a handful of Texas, and left behind a hollow like a bullet dug from bloodless flesh. On his left, the ground graded upward, clawing at the sky in a carnival show of plateaus and mesas and other odd malfunctions of rock. There was a good thirty feet of steady ground besides the stage road itself, though Chad imagined the Conestoga going up the incline for some reason, turning over, falling into the abyss. A drunken driver? Maybe. But the conductor too? The shotgun messenger? None of them would allow a mauled driver to have his way, not when they could spell him for a time and trade back before the stage stop. Still, Chad kept an eye over the edge of the gorge… satisfying himself quickly that there was no wreckage before reining the nag well clear of the precipice. A mule he would trust with a fall like that, but a horse, never.

Ahead of him, a curve of the earth that had forgotten to fall jutted out over the gorge like an accusing finger. At the same time, the path as the crow flew was overrun by an almighty tangle of saltcedar, the blossoms trying to be pink in the stark colorlessness of the moon. Chad dutifully dragged his horse to the side: rounding the saltcedar, tracing the overhang, and taking the occasion for another look down into the gorge. There was no more wreckage now than there had been a minute ago. But as he rounded the turn around the saltcedar and went into open ground again, Chad saw a flame ahead. Itself small, no bigger than a struck lucifer at this distance, but the glow climbed up the column of smoke, providing something for it to reflect off on in otherwise nothingness. And Chad knew that oily black smoke came from treated wood burning, not any campfire.

Drawing his carbine, he set off at a charge. No whip, no matter how drunk, could get his stage caught on fire. There were malefactors in this mix, and if they’d harmed those traveling in the stage, they’d be equally delighted to do him in. Making this one of those occasions where the only guilt Chad would have over bullets flying was if any ended up in him.