Chapter 16
The smoke came in low along the floor first, a gray snake of it crawling back into the chamber, and Josh knew the trouble he was in before he could no longer breathe.
He’d been shot before, twice in a long life, and burned once, and he knew the slow, cold drain of a body losing its blood the same as he knew coming weather, in the skin before the head.
The furrow in his side had stopped its first hard pumping and settled to a slow weep, and that was the worse sign, not the better.
A wound that quit bleeding fast had run low on what to bleed.
He sat propped on the cold stone with the Sharps across his knees and his own life’s heat leaking out of him into the dark, and he did the arithmetic an old man does and didn’t much like it.
He wasn’t afraid of dying. He’d made his peace with it years ago and found it still held.
What he hadn’t reckoned was the boy out there in the dark, Eldon’s boy, alive and contrary and refusing to quit.
Josh had spent fourteen years figuring the debt ran one direction only. Nobody had warned him about the other.
Then the smoke found him, and the arithmetic stopped mattering.
It rolled up over the lip of rock and into his open mouth and down his raw throat, and the cough that tore out of him brought a tearing pain up his wounded side that whitened out the world.
He bent over the gun and hacked and couldn’t stop, each cough pulling the smoke in deeper, and his eyes streamed and his chest heaved for clean air that wasn’t there anymore.
The chamber that had been black went grayer, the stink of burning pitch pine and green brush filling it from the floor up.
Somewhere through the roaring in his ears, he heard the fire crackle louder at the mouth, fed and growing, and felt the cold draft that had been their friend turn traitor and pull the poison down on top of them.
A shape came through the murk, low and quick along the floor where the air still held. The boy. Of course, it was the boy. He’d known it would be before he could make out the face.
Nate was a black form against the red glow, now boiling at the cave mouth, down on hands and knees under the smoke where the air was least foul. He had his shirt off and torn, and a hank of it dripping in his fist. He’d wet it in the trickle of snowmelt at the back.
He pressed the cold, wet rag over Josh’s nose and mouth, and Josh sucked air through it, filtered and damp and blessed, and the world swam partway back.
“Got to move you,” the boy said, close to his ear, his voice raw and cracking from the smoke. “Through the crack. Same as Lucy. Can’t stay. It’ll fill to the floor, and we’re done.”
“Leave me.” Josh got the words out through the rag and meant them, every one.
“I’m bleeding out, boy, I feel it. Dead weight in a tight hole.
You crawl out of here light and you crawl out fast, you hear?
And you live to bring that marshal.” His hand found Nate’s wrist and gripped it with what he had left.
“I couldn’t save your daddy. Fourteen years I’ve carried that. Don’t make it two. Go.”
For an answer, the boy fired three blind shots out toward the mouth, the muzzle flashes huge and blinding in the murk, the reports slamming around the stone.
A voice from beyond the fire cursed, and the gathering shapes drew back from the slot.
It was a fool’s waste of three rounds they could ill spare, and Josh opened his mouth to say so but shut it again.
The boy hadn’t fired to hit anything. He’d fired to buy the seconds it took to get a grip on a dying man and to say, plainer than words, that the argument about leaving was over.
Josh knew the answer. He’d given it himself once or twice, to better men than Cooley. Then Nate jammed the hot pistol into his belt and got both hands under Josh’s arms.
“You taught me a thing about debts,” Nate said, hauling, dragging him backward over the stone toward the cold seam at the rear.
“You said a man thrown who doesn’t remount stays thrown.
Well, you’re not staying thrown in a hole in the ground for my father’s sake or anybody’s.
He’d have not left you. I’ll not leave you.
Push with your heels if you’ve got heels.
Don’t argue with me, old man, I haven’t the wind for it. ”
Josh pushed with his heels.
It took them an age.
It was a cruel, narrow thing, slanting up through the living rock, and a hale man went through it sideways with a grunt.
A big-shouldered old one, bleeding from the ribs, went through it an inch at a stolen inch.
Nate was above him, hauling at his collar and his belt, Josh shoving with boots that kept losing the rock, and the smoke chased them up the slot, thinner here where the draft pulled it but still clawing at their lungs.
Stone scraped the wound raw, and Josh bit down on a holler so as not to waste the breath. The dark pressed close and closer, rock against his chest and rock against his spine, and for one critical moment, he stuck fast, the panic of it nearly taking him, buried alive in the mountain's gut.
Josh’s mind went loose and wandering as the blood ran low, and he wasn’t always sure where he was.
One moment, the cold rock at his cheek was the seam in the mountain, and the next it was the cold of his own porch rail under his hand fourteen years ago, and the boy’s voice hauling at him was Eldon’s voice calling across a pasture, young and laughing, before any of it had gone wrong.
He came back to himself each time to find the boy’s hands still on him, still pulling, still refusing to quit, and that was the thing that kept him shoving at the rock with his failing legs.
Not his own will to live. He’d have lain down in the crack and been glad of the rest. It was that the boy wouldn’t lay him down, and a man couldn’t in decency die while another man worked that hard to keep him breathing.
“You’re through the worst,” Nate gasped from above. “One more. One more heave. With me. Now.”
They heaved together, and the rock let him go all at once, and Josh slithered up and out into the air.
Clean air. Cold canyon air, dark and sweet, the smoke a foul memory in his chest. He dragged it in, whole shuddering lungfuls, coughing up the black taste of the fire.
Above him, a last band of light still held along the high western rim, gold going to ash.
The bottom of the world had already gone to night.
He had never in his life been so glad to see the plain blue dark.
There was the first star out, low between the walls, the cold of the snowmelt soaking through his coat, the smell of crushed sage where they’d dragged through it.
Every plain, small thing of the living world came to him, sharp and dear, as a man feels them only when he has just about quit them.
Below and behind them, through the rock, the fire at the cave mouth came up into full roar.
He heard it find the brush curtain and the dry timber and climb, the red light of it leaping now on the canyon wall opposite.
Where the low black slot had been, there was only flame.
Sealed. Had they been a minute slower, they both would be in there yet, learning how a badger dies.
Nate dragged him up the slope another dozen feet into the cover of a fallen slab and propped him to sit against it. The boy’s own chest was heaving, his bare torso streaked black with soot and his hands shaking now that the worst was past.
He tore the rest of his ruined shirt into strips and packed the wound in Josh’s side and bound it round him tightly, knotting it hard, the way Josh himself had once shown him on a slow afternoon that felt a hundred years gone.
“That’ll hold the blood a while,” he said.
“It’s not so deep as I feared. You’re too mean to die of it. ”
“Mean keeps a man upright when sense has quit.” Josh’s voice came thinly, but it came.
He patted weakly at the boy’s soot-black forearm and felt under his fingers the same lean, hard strength that had hauled a man and a horse back from a ledge two days gone and wouldn’t let an old fool die in a hole tonight.
“You done good, Nate. You hear me. I want it said while I’ve the breath, in case the breath runs out.
” He swallowed against the rawness. “Fourteen years I reckoned the only thing left I could do for your daddy was tend his fences and wait. I was wrong. I could raise his boy to be the man he was. And I have. Your daddy—” The cough took him again, smaller now.
“Your daddy’d not believe the man you become. Nor how fast.”
But the boy wasn’t listening anymore. Josh, half swimming, his head propped heavily on the cold slab, watched through slitted streaming eyes as Nate came up into a crouch and turned slowly on his heel, scanning, the soot-dark face lifting to read the dark walls and the high rim above them.
Reading the ground the way Josh had drilled into him on a hundred mornings. Where’s your high cover? Where’s their next move? Where do they come from when they can’t come at you straight?
The boy went still. Josh followed the line of that stillness up, up the black rampart of the far canyon wall to the rim where the last of the day still bled along the stone, and there, high above them, in that thin band of failing light, a long thing caught the glow and threw it back.
A rifle barrel. Up on the rim. Where Cooley’s men had climbed around above while the fire did its work to take the high ground and the long shot and look down on two soot-blind men with no cave left to hide in and no wall at their backs and nowhere under God’s sky left to run.