“Think you can walk?”Caleb asked.
“I know I can.My knees might be a little wobbly at first, but that cougar didn’t get his claws into me down there at all…thanks to you.”
“Strong enough to walk over to the creek to wash some of this off?”
“The good Lord sent you to save the hide of his lowly servant today.He’ll see to it that I have enough strength.”
Caleb looked at the other men.“I’m going to walk Preacher over yonder.Why don’t you take his mule back with you and start packing up?”
Zeke glanced at his partner and said, “You take the mule back.I got me a mind to go down there and skin that devil.I’ll meet you at the camp.”He smiled at Caleb and shook his head in admiration.“Nobody gonna believe how big that cat was you killed.Not unless I bring that pelt back with me.”
Whatever Zeke was going to do with the cat was his business.Caleb had no interest in it.
Regardless of his belief and determination, the minister was in tough shape.Caleb draped Preacher’s bloody arm over his shoulder and helped him walk.The distance they had to go was farther than the man had strength for, but they took their time.Caleb could have easily thrown the wiry little man over his shoulder, but he’d just been mauled within an inch of his life by a ruthless hunter.Caleb didn’t want to add insult to the man’s injuries.
Though he wouldn’t admit it, the effects of the fight with the cougar continued to linger in him as well.Caleb felt like lightning had struck the ground inches from his feet.It was as if something inside of him had shaken loose and was quivering like the plucked wire on a banjo.The waves crackled through his body.
He’d killed cougars before, but this one was the first he’d physically attacked, wrestled to the ground, looked in the face, and killed in a hand-to-hand fight.Well, hand-to-claw.
He’d killed men before, armed only with a knife or his fists.Once, while waiting out a blizzard at a nameless hotel in a nameless smudge of a town in Wyoming, he’d gone across a covered alley into a building that housed the baths.Three men were waiting for him when he came back out into the alley.
He’d been unarmed.They carried knives and staves that they immediately put to use.Two men had gone down quickly.One with a damaged knee he’d be feeling with every step he took for the rest of his miserable life.The other with eyes that stared into starry blackness following the collision between his head and the alley wall.The third man had come at him with a gleaming blade and a rage in his eyes that told Caleb one of them would not survive this fight.
His attacker had been correct, but Caleb felt plucked banjo wire and the lightning bolts racing through his body for an hour afterward.
That was the part most stories left out.Not the fight.Not the winning.Theafter.The way a man’s blood kept racing long after the danger passed, as if his body had not yet accepted he was still alive.
The rising sun was filtering through the green canopy above them as they made their way to the creek.His brain told him that they were in no danger, but his nerves were still humming.And every shadow and movement drew his eye.
He forced himself to breathe deeply, and by the time they reached the creek, he was himself again.Or that’s what he told himself.
He realized he was bleeding from a long gash on his upper arm, and the nick on his cheek that he received yesterday was oozing blood again.Other than that, he’d only be feeling a few bruises.He’d been lucky.
Caleb led Preacher to a rock beside a small pool.As he passed the cougar prints he’d seen this morning, it reminded him how close they’d come to being breakfast for the big cat.
He helped the minister sit, and the old man groaned in pain.
Caleb carefully removed the vest and tattered shirt and inspected the damage done to the wrinkled body.The cougar’s claws had ripped through the clothing, and some of the gashes went deep into the flesh.Preacher had the use of all his limbs, thankfully, but Caleb knew some of those wounds could fester and cause him serious trouble if they weren’t looked after.
“We have to clean you up and get you to Elkhorn, Preacher.Hopefully, someone there can stitch you up.”
Caleb tore off pieces of the man’s ruined shirt and washed off what blood he could.Two deep lacerations ran in parallel lines from his collarbone to the middle of his chest.An inch closer to center and that cougar would have ripped through the jugular.It was a miracle that the minister had survived the attack.
“Do you have another shirt in your saddlebags?”Caleb asked.
“I do.”
As Caleb washed the blood off his own clothes, he felt Preacher’s eyes on him.
“I owe you my life, Mr.Marlowe,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.
“Nothing to it.You and that mule of yours would have finished him without no help from me.”
“I’ll let that little lie pass.But I reckon I owe you some answers in return.”
Caleb understood Preacher’s hesitation about pointing him toward the hideout of the Wells Fargo road agents, and he had no hard feelings about last night.As Preacher had reminded him, these people out here, even them outlaws, were his flock.
The wide open lands beyond the Devil’s Claw were like so much of the frontier.Life out here lay beyond the reach of sheriffs and courts and their laws.And these folk had only so many choices in how they chose to live their lives.If they chose the outlaw life, the only tie that could hold a gang together was the bond of loyalty and trust.And that went for miner, outlaw, hermit, preacher, and whoever lived on this land.Their business was their own.
