been upset enough for one night.”
“Uncle Roland, I—”
“Do as I say, Opal. Tell her I’ll come up after the clothes myself.”
Opal bit her lip. She glanced at Gordon, then turned and started upstairs. She was halfway up when Gordon heard the sound of horses approaching. A moment later Chaney came in.
“I brought the horse you rode from town,” he told Bayard. “You’d left the saddle on. No time to lose, Roland. A lot of riders coming up the creek road.”
Charlotte appeared on the landing with the coat and pants. Opal hurried up to take them from her. Bayard studied Gordon, his swarthy cheeks puffed out thoughtfully. Then he slung the saddlebags over Gordon’s shoulder. Chaney unstrapped his gunbelt and held the whole harness out to Gordon. The big single-action Colt in the holster had stag grips and its metalwork was tarnished.
“No,” Gordon said. “I mean, no, I don’t want to—”
“Take it,” Chaney urged. “You won’t stand a chance without one. You’ll have to use it to eat on before you’re through.”
He thrust it into Gordon’s hand and turned away toward the door before Gordon could protest. Numbly, recoiling from the sinister weight of the gun hanging against his hands, he buckled the belt on. Opal had hurried downstairs with the clothes and she crossed the room and gave them to Gordon. Her hand remained on his arm. She moistened her lips, and there was something in her eyes.
“Gordon—”
She trailed off. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t feel like he was standing up in front of a school-marm any longer. He wanted to tell her that, but he thought it would just sound jugheaded. If he could only stay around a while, maybe he could explain it to her. He realized this was probably the last time he would ever see her.
Bayard put a hand on his shoulder. “Gordon, let me know where you are. If you need any more help, money or anything—well, let me know.”
“Thanks,” Gordon said. “I wish pa knew what good friends you really are.”
“Gordon,” Chaney called from the door. “Hurry up.”
He went outside and saw Chaney holding a horse. Bayard kept the best animals in Table Rock. It was a Morgan, with a coat like satin. Gordon dropped the saddlebags behind the cantle and stepped aboard. The poplar grove still shielded him but he could already feel the ground trembling beneath the approaching riders.
He touched heels to the Morgan and it broke into a nervous canter. The last Gordon saw of Opal she was standing in the open door with the backlight turning her hair to a yellow nimbus.
Chapter Three
THE NUMBNESS BEGAN to creep through Gordon again, as he crossed the basin toward the foothills. He was beaten, exhausted; he seemed incapable of any more strong feeling. The grief and the shame had joined his misery.
He avoided the pass, crossing the ridge far west of town. The smell of sulphur came to him as he topped the cap-rock. He looked for pursuit in the basin below but could see no sign of it. Either the riders had not guessed he was at the Bayards, or the Bayards had put them off the track. Gordon remembered what his father had said about Blackhorn . . . in the Wind Rivers somewhere, near South Pass City. It seemed a futile destination, hunting for a man he had never seen. But it was all he had left.
The South Pass Mail Road led north out of Table Rock. It took him into the mountains soon, spicy forests of fir, black with lichen on the northern slopes. He dozed in the saddle, he didn’t know how often, or how long. He rode till dawn filtered its eery undersea light through the timber and then the sun came up and touched the bright red spikes and orange blossoms on the giant firs and seemed to light their tops afire. Gordon pulled off the road and found a spring in a high park. He watered his horse and ate the cold biscuits and meat Opal had put in the saddlebags. His eyes burned and watered. There was such a powerful ache in his joints he thought he was getting the miseries. The Mail Road was far below him, a yellow thread appearing fitfully in the massed green of the timber.
Gordon saw movement, a rider, ant-size, appearing from the trees, swallowed again in their shadow, moving north along the road. Gordon began to shiver. He led the Morgan into the trees quickly and tightened the latigo. He couldn’t stop shaking. He got into the saddle again. He cursed himself. He couldn’t honestly say he was afraid. Why was he shaking?
He figured that if the man was following him, and looking for tracks, he would see where Gordon had pulled off the road. Gordon climbed to timberline and over a windswept ridge and found a creek on the other side where he could hide his sign for a space.
As he rode, the gun pressed its weight against his leg. He’d already had the impulse to throw it away, a dozen times over. But he knew Bayard was right. He was going to need it to stay alive. He despised his fear of guns. He didn’t know why he feared them. Sometimes he thought it was the sound, actually hurting his ears. Sometimes he thought the pain was only in his mind. His whole life had been haunted by it. When it first appeared his father had tried to punish him out of it. Whenever Gordon shied at gunsound Bob Conners took the horsewhip to him. When that failed he had chained Gordon to a log and shot up a whole box of shells five feet from the boy. It had left Gordon in hysterics. He knew his father was only doing it for his own good. They lived in a land where a man needed a gun to survive. When they had come into the country the Indians were still on the war-path, and the hunt was a daily thing. There had probably never been a day in Bob Conners’ life that a gun had not been on him or near at hand. It was unthinkable to him that his son should be so afraid of guns.
Gordon remembered the doctors they had gone to. The one in Laramie had said the boy was of a nervous disposition. That might account for some of it. The one in Cheyenne had tested his reflexes . . . a little hammer tapping his knee and the leg popping up. Unusually quick reflexes, the doctor said. Almost too quick. Some physical source. Definitely some physical source. He prescribed laudanum, to quiet the boy’s nerves. A horse doctor at Julesburg had suggested putting cotton in his ears, to muffle the sound, and then shooting a gun off. It hadn’t helped. . . .
In the afternoon Gordon cut back over the ridge, found the Mail Road below him again, and watched it from cover till he was sure it was empty. Keeping to high timber, he followed the road on north. It ran through the long trough of South Pass and entered a sagebrush wasteland. Near evening, in this desolation, Gordon found the town.
Gaping adits and rotting flumes and other signs of old diggings were everywhere. Gordon had heard that ten years ago there were four thousand people in South Pass City, but they had abandoned it when the veins pinched out. He entered the ghost town, winding his way through the grass-grown placer ditches and crumbling sluice boxes to one of the rotting cabins. When he pushed on the door it fell in before him, striking the floor with a muffled crash that lifted ancient dust against his face.
He was afraid firelight would give him away. All he had to tether his horse with was the reins. He hitched it outside the cabin and spent a miserable night, hungry, shivering, dreaming.
He dreamed he was locked in a little room again, so small he couldn’t turn around, like a coffin would be, only his father was in it with him, and he couldn’t cipher out how the room could be so small and his father so big, towering, a giant, casting his monstrous shadow across Gordon no matter where Gordon turned. His father was shooting off the gun. It crashed and boomed like a mountain falling down, like the world splitting open, and Gordon kept screaming and beating on the walls and all the time the noise kept getting louder,
