CHAPTER 2
THE WEIGHT OF THE LOAD
The midday sun over Indian Territory had no mercy in it whatsoever; it was an anvil of white-hot iron beating down on condemned ground.
The cutting cold of Kansas had been left behind for good, swallowed by a smothering dryness that rose off the earth in warped waves.
With every stride of the black stallion a fine red dust, heavy with iron and dry mineral, lifted from the hooves and hung in the still air, clinging to sweated skin and invading Nero’s throat as though he were swallowing heated sand.
The horizon seemed to bleed under that dull glare, where a pale blue sky, nearly white with heat, looked ready to crush the desert of stones beneath it.
Lashed with blind, tight knots to the side hooks of the travelling saddle, the coarse burlap sack no longer dripped the bright red of the small hours.
The thick, iron-smelling liquid had dried completely under the tyranny of the sun, turning the rough cloth into a dark crust, rigid and hardened, giving off a heavy odour.
The real problem, however, was no longer the trail on the ground but the shadows coming down out of the sky.
Since the first lines of dawn, three enormous vultures had been gliding in lazy circles — lazy but measured to the inch — high up in the firmament.
The carrion birds followed Nero’s solitary march like winged sentinels of death, knowing that the rot inside that burlap bundle carried on the wind for miles across the arid plain.
Under the brim of his hat, Nero did not bother to look up.
He knew the habits of scavengers. McCready’s gang had been duly dispatched to hell, but time — this heat that hurried the decay of flesh — was proving a far quicker enemy than the crows.
The boundary of the Texas territory would still cost him long, agonizing days of blind riding through nothing at all.
Halfway to that invisible border line, where the monotonous plain finally broke into a maze of deep limestone canyons, the hunter decided to stop.
The place was a narrow cleft between tall grey walls, where a thin trickle of muddy, brackish water insisted on seeping from a crack in the rock before the dry ground swallowed it.
It was enough to give the animal a brief rest.
While the black stallion buried its muzzle in the warm water, drawing the liquid up in heavy snorts, Nero worked without hurry.
He loosened the leather cinches to relieve the pressure on the horse’s chest and walked three paces to sit on a rock shaped and polished by centuries of cutting wind.
With a slow, ritual motion he drew the cavalry sabre from his back.
The dark, heavy steel of the blade gleamed faintly in the shade of the canyon.
Near the brass pommel, an inscription almost entirely rubbed away still held out against time: an official insignia of the military cavalry that Nero himself had scraped off with a knife point years earlier, disowning his past.
That long and pitiless blade had already torn linen uniforms and opened human flesh in the trenches of wars history had forgotten; now, in the hands of a hired executioner, it served a far more direct and practical purpose.
Taking a piece of old felt stained with oil from the inside pocket of the duster, he began wiping away the powder soot and the last of the dried blood still lodged in the central groove of the metal.
His blue eyes, narrowed against the violent glare bouncing off the limestone, inspected the edge with a craftsman’s attention.
It was perfect. Sharp enough to sever a man’s hope in a single stroke.
The grave-deep silence of the canyon, however, was broken by a dry crack.
The sound of hooves striking firm rock began to echo off the stone walls.
It was not the heavy gait of a single animal.
It was two horses. And they were coming up from the south.
Nero did not start, did not alter the rhythm of his breathing, and gave no sign at all of surprise.
He returned the cavalry sabre to its black leather sheath with a metallic click that was almost inaudible.
He stayed seated on the same rock, allowing only his large gloved hands to rest in a casual, easy way on his thighs — exactly where the dark wooden grips of the two Colt Patersons pointed forward, ready to be drawn.
Two men came around the wall of stone that formed the bend of the canyon.
They wore short vests of rawhide badly stained with grease, wide-brimmed hats warped by old sweat, and carried flintlock carbines lashed crosswise to their saddles with leather straps.
Their skin was savagely burned by the frontier sun, their faces coated in grey dust, and they had the narrowed, suspicious eyes of men who make a living hunting — or being hunted — in that vast no-man’s-land.
They drew rein and stopped their horses exactly ten paces from where Nero sat.
The one on the left, a man with ruined teeth yellowed by rotting tobacco and small eyes like a hyena’s, looked long and hard at Nero’s black stallion.
Then his gaze dropped to the rough burlap sack tied to the saddle, where a dense cloud of blowflies buzzed in a frantic rhythm.
“Hot day to be hauling meat, stranger,” said the man with the rotten teeth.
He tipped his head to one side and spat a thick dark stream of chewed tobacco into the red dust. Nero did not answer.
He stayed absolutely still, the low brim of the hat covering half of his hard features, keeping those glacial blue eyes fixed on the outlines of the two strangers.
The second rider, visibly younger and carrying an ugly burn scar that pulled at the skin on the left side of his neck, wrinkled his nose sharply.
The pungent iron smell of decay coming off the hunter’s saddle had finally reached him.
He traded a quick look, full of malice, with his older partner. Somewhere in the pair’s minds floated the memory of a wanted bill — or perhaps only the primitive instinct that the burden on that saddle held something the law would pay very well to receive.
“We’re looking for three fellows who rode up the Kansas roads a few days back,” the first man went on, keeping his voice mild, while his right hand began to drift down with calculated slowness toward the stock of the flintlock carbine strapped to his saddle.
“One of them answers to McCready. You wouldn’t know anything about them, would you, friend? ”
Nero rose slowly from the rock. The movement let the long skirts of his canvas coat fall open to either side, revealing in full the lethal engineering of the two Patersons in their low holsters and the sinister curve of the sabre laid across his back.
At that change of posture both men adjusted their reins on instinct; the horses, scenting the predator that came off Nero, lifted their heads, uneasy at the brutal tension that had suddenly filled the canyon air.
“They’re not going back to Texas,” Nero said.
The voice came out of his throat as a low baritone, flat and calm and cold as ice cracking in the dead of winter.
“And how would you be so sure of that, friend?” the younger one asked, his right thumb already easing back the hammer of his saddle carbine.
Nero shifted his eyes the smallest fraction toward the burlap sack still ringed with flies.
“Because the part of them that mattered is riding with me.”
Silence came down on the canyon walls again with the weight of a headstone. The two men froze in their saddles, their minds working out the exact meaning of that sentence, while the fingers of both locked over their triggers. Death had sat down between them.
“What did you want with the three of them?” Nero’s question cut through the dry air without a flicker of tone.
The man with the ruined teeth hesitated for a full second. He swallowed, feeling his throat scrape, before he could shape an answer. The sheer weight of that blue stare under the shadow of the hat had him recalculating his odds of surviving a duel right there.
“They owed a mighty large sum to our boss down south, in a town called Bitter Creek,” the fellow explained, easing the pressure of his fingers on the carbine a little, though his eyes stayed nailed to the burlap sack.
“McCready and the others crossed the Texas line driving cattle that wasn’t theirs and carrying money that wasn’t theirs either.
Old Vance is not the kind of man who cares to be crossed. ”
Vance. The name went off in Nero’s mind like the mechanical click of a hammer.
Jonathan Vance was a former army officer, a leftover of stained uniforms who now commanded the largest spread of cattle and mercenaries in that stretch of the frontier.
A tyrant who owned not merely thousands of acres of dry land but every brick and every soul in the town of Bitter Creek, held through systematic bribery, gratuitous violence, and stagnant fear.
Nobody bought, sold, or dared to breathe in that territory without his say-so.
Nero glanced sidelong at the small rough fire he had lit among the rocks minutes earlier. Over the coals a dented iron cup held a thick coffee that was beginning to boil, throwing up dark bubbles. He showed not the slightest reaction or fear at the size of the Texan rancher’s power.
“Coffee’s hot,” Nero said, tipping his chin faintly toward the packed dirt near the fire. “I’ve got some jerky left and a few salt biscuits in the saddlebag. Sit down. We’ll share the meal before you gentlemen get on with your road.”