Duster (9781310020889) (21 page)

It may have been that those girls thought I
was chasing after them, but when I jumped for the bank it was in
their direction and they left off giggling and flat went to do some
running. They ran upstream for a ways and then got brave enough to
stop for a second and giggle some more before they disappeared
behind some trees.

When they was gone, I started breathing
again. I hadn't realized it at the time, but I had sort of forgot
to breathe for a little while there. Then I got mad at them girls
for making light of me like they had. That passed quick, too, and
all I felt was embarrassed.

I blushed all over again and duck-walked
most of the way back to the willow overhang, this time keeping a
careful eye out for stray folks along the banks.

I surely felt better when
I got back to where my stuff was. I dumped my last catch of
crawdads—I'd kept hold of them all
the
while—in with the others and crawled into some warm, dry clothing
just as quick as I could. For some reason, I'd begun to feel cold,
and that fire-dried shirt and britches felt awful good to
me.

When the rest of the crew pulled in later on
that day, they were plenty happy with the mess of fresh crawdads,
and we had quite a feed on them. In their own wisecracking way,
they were all real appreciative of the change in diet.

I accepted the thanks just as quiet as I
could and never said much about what I'd gone through to get them
things. In fact, I never said word one about it.

"HEY, YOU CRAZY or something? lemme
alone..." I'd been sound asleep until somebody came over and
started shaking me around. I sat up and rubbed a hand over my eyes.
"Lemme be."

"Naw, now, Duster boy. Git youself up. We
needs some mo' wood for the fahr."

"More wood my left foot. You got more'n you
need now if you don't burn it all up for light to gamble by. Now
lemme alone and lemme go back to sleep."

"Huh-uh," Bill insisted. "Get yoursel' up
now an' fetch us some more. Crazy Longo's sick an' we gotta make
him some poultices, boy. Now, get up. I ain't funnin' with you. He
needs help bad."

"Well, shoot. Whyn't you say so?"

Bill went on back to where the fire was
going, and I hunted around on the ground for my shoes and stuff.
Most times when I woke up on the ground, I felt stiff and a little
cold for a while, but this time I never noticed.

When I got over by the
fire I could see Crazy Longo stretched out close up to the blaze.
He was laying there under a whole pile of blankets and bedrolls,
but underneath all that I
could see he was
twisting and twitching some from the pain. His face seemed to of
been pulled back tight over his skull and he was sweating so that
his hair was all wet, and the water running over his head showed up
bright and streaky in the firelight. He didn't look good, for a
fact.

Everybody in the whole outfit was gathered
in close except for B.J. Hollis and Tommy Lucas. They were out with
the cows, which meant it was about the middle of the night or a
little less since Jesus and Eben Dyer had been supposed to take the
morning watch. There wasn't nobody laughing nor even talking
much.

I went and got my soogan and laid it over
top of him and then went off into the woods around us to collect
some more firewood. It was plenty dark, but I had a pretty fair
recollection of the lay of things after all the wandering around
I'd done that afternoon. There was a little blowdown just above the
willow stand so I made my way up there, going slow so as to not
fall down on my face if I tripped over something in the dark. I
found the downed wood easy enough and loaded myself up with all I
could carry and then dragged another long piece behind. I made a
power of noise on the way back, but I got it done even if my arms
was a bit aching and sore by then.

When I got back, Digger Bill was stirring up
some nasty looking stuff in a couple of pots, and there was a big
can of coffee already set to one side on a rock where it would stay
hot without boiling any more.

Mister Sam Silas and Ike was kneeled down
beside Crazy Longo. Ike was swabbing at his face with a wet rag,
and Mister Sam Silas was just looking on. He looked awful worried,
too. The way Crazy Longo was thrashing and pouring sweat it was
easy to see there was something more than just a run-of-the-mill
bellyache wrong with him.

"Hurry up with those poultices," Mister Sam
Silas called out.

"They be ready in a minit. Cain't hurry them
or they ain't no good."

I was standing up close so
I could help feed the fire, and
I could
see that whatever Bill had in the pot he was stirring was getting
mighty hot. I couldn't tell for sure since you can't see very well
into a pot on top of the only light around, but from the steam
coming off it seemed there was something boiling in
there.

Bill looked up at me and said, "Fetch me my
dish dryin' rags, Duster."

I knew what he meant all right. He had a
sack that he carried full of real, machine-spun cloth towels. He
never let anyone use them but himself and he washed them out and
dried them most every day. I scrambled around in his stuff until I
found the right bag and carried it to him.

Bill never looked up or nodded or anything
when I handed him the sack. He snatched it open and pulled out a
big handful, near all he had of the clean, neat folded pieces of
cloth.

He took and shook them out longways and then
put them together to make a long pad sort of rig about four layers
thick and maybe two by four foot in size. Without saying a word, he
held that out for somebody to grab hold of. I took one end and
Jesus took the other and we stretched the pad out flat and held it
off the ground.

Bill got his pot off the fire and with a
big, wood spoon he ladled heavy gobs of stuff down the center of
the cloth pad. What the stuff looked to be was beef tallow
thickened with something, flour maybe, and cooked along with some
sort of weeds that I took to be wild herbs of some kind. I couldn't
tell what the herbs had looked like to start with.

Anyway, he built up a good, hot plaster of
the stuff and then had us fold the pad over from each side so the
stuff was in the middle of the cloth and couldn't drip out to burn
the skin. Even just holding on to one end, I could feel how hot it
was, and I was glad it wasn't me they were going to put it on.

Bill carried the plaster over to Crazy Longo
and waited while Ike and Mister Sam Silas stripped the pile of
covers off him. They had a time getting his shirt up and his
drawers loosened but finally they managed, and Bill wrapped that
hot plaster around him at just about waist level and tied it in
place good and firm with a couple of his packing strings.

You'd of thought that hot plaster would of
done something to Crazy Longo, given him some relief or else made
him holler out from it being so hot, but he never made a sign one
way or the other, just kept laying there twisting and sweating and
not making a sound except for the whistle of air from awful heavy
breathing. They got him covered back up like he'd been before, and
from looking at him you couldn't tell they'd done a thing.

Ike went back to swabbing Crazy Longo's
face. Mister Sam Silas and Bill just shook their heads some, got
themselves some coffee, and sat down to wait like the rest of
us.

We all sat around, not saying much, for what
seemed like a couple hours, though it couldn't of been near that
long since I only had to throw a couple chunks on the fire and that
only once. Crazy Longo didn't look a bit better, and everybody was
starting to get really worried. Once I saw Jesus crossing himself,
which is something he doesn't do all the time like some
Mexicans.

For lack of anything better to do, I went
out and fetched some more wood and then sat and drank coffee,
listening while most everybody tried to figure what Crazy Longo's
problem was and how it might be helped. It was something to listen
to, them fellows trying to hit on a remedy that might work.

Lickety-Split Emmons thought juniper berry
tea might do the trick, while Jesus favored the idea of burning
some dried oak leaves and animal hair and then drifting the smoke
over top of the sick man. Eben Dyer never said what he thought, but
I seen him twisting some willow withes into some sort of a sign or
talisman.

Me, I didn't know what to think, though
seeing Crazy Longo lying there so quiet brought me to mind of the
time a year or so before when Little Bo was so bad sick and Ma'd
had to sell our wagon for his doctoring. The doctor hadn't had to
do a whole lot then to get him well, but I guess you paid for his
knowing how to do more than for what he did. And he said Little Bo
would of stayed an awful sick young'un if his belly hadn't been
eased of the pain so his muscles could loosen and let some gas
out.

The more I thought on it, the more it seemed
the same. After a spell, I slipped back away from the fire and went
to catch up my night horse.

I got mounted and eased along upstream,
slow-like since I didn't know the country too well. The clouds had
come back and hid what moon there was, so it was awful dark. My
night horse was good about picking his way when I couldn't see a
thing, though, and we got along all right at a walk.

We passed the stand of willows and then the
pecans, and I commenced to pay attention to what was around me.
Those little girls couldn't of come from too far off, I figured,
and where was folks it was just possible there might be some
medicine or something that could be used to make Crazy Longo's pain
ease up.

Past the pecan trees things, thinned out to
a few blackjack oaks, and after a quarter mile or so I was about to
decide the whole world had gone and turned into a blackjack
thicket. It mightn't have been so bad in daytime, when you could
see those whippy branches rear back to slap at you, but by night it
was purely impossible to see when one of them was coming. Get
through flinching from one slashing you in the neck and there'd be
another one cutting for your eyes. I was plenty uncomfortable, and
for a while I was spending most of my time twisting around in the
saddle trying to keep from being hit any worse than I had to
be.

While I was occupied with all those
branches, I hadn't paid much mind to where my horse was going, but
after a time the branches was coming fewer and the horse seemed to
be moving a bit quicker though we were still in the thicket.

There wasn't light enough
to see anything ahead for certain sure, but the horse seemed to be
following a footpath even if I couldn't see it myself. I strained
my eyes hard trying to see something ahead, but while I thought the
black night might of been just a little grayer and a little less
dense straight ahead, still it was such a little difference it
could of been only my imagination or a trick of the night. It's
awful easy to imagine seeing things that you really don't when it
is night and you are in strange
country
and need real hard to see whatever it is you're looking for. And I
did need awful hard to find a path or something that would lead me
to where those little girls had come from.

My horse was on its own now. I'd given it
its head and it was walking straight away from the creek bank. I
didn't dare try to guide it anywhere since it seemed to have found
a direction to go in, and I hadn't any idea where we ought to
look.

When we did come up on the place, it was all
of a sudden. One second we were wading through blackjack oaks, and
the next, there was nothing but empty ground ahead, blacker than
the black of the sky although both thickened out so dark in the
distance that there wasn't any horizon at all out there. The flat
ground might have gone on for a couple hundred chain or a couple
hundred miles. I couldn't tell either way.

Up close, there was a difference to be seen
between the solid black of ground and tree and the slightly lighter
sky, and just to the left of where we came out I could see a
flat-topped black mass against gray-black sky. Being a regular
shape like that it pretty much had to be a building, for there are
few straight lines in nature and almost none that lay out flat.

My horse had stopped where he was and
wouldn't go forward anymore so I swung off him and found there was
a low, pole fence there. It seemed solid enough so I tied him to it
and felt my way along to the left toward the building. The fence
was low, and it didn't go very far so I figured it was probably
around a house garden.

I groped on past the
garden, tripped over a little woodpile, and made enough noise to
set some hens to cackling. I realized then that there should have
been an old hound or two
barking long
since. You can find a dog at most every ranch I'd ever heard
of.

Without a dog's yap it seemed these folks
was making out with their hens, for pretty soon I could hear some
thumping and movement up ahead as if somebody was getting up to see
what the noise was all about. That turned out to be so, for very
soon I could see a thin light near the ground up ahead. Someone had
lit a lamp inside.

"Hallo the house," I called out quick. I
didn't want some sleepy rancher coming out with a rifle. "Hallo.
Can you help me? "

The bit of light near the ground leapt up as
a blanket or hide was pulled away from the doorway and it became a
rectangle of yellow light that flowed out past the bulk of a short,
beefy man. I couldn't make out the man's features because the light
was at his back, but he didn't have a gun in his hands so I figured
he was friendly enough. Even with the light behind him I could see
that he was wearing coveralls and was barefoot, probably hadn't had
time to get into his boots yet. Making allowance for the sag of the
coveralls he was still mighty broad through the chest and belly,
and he gave the impression of being in his middle years from the
way he carried his weight.