Free The Searchers by Alan LeMay

just as crazy as a bedbug fell in the rum.”
    “Sure sounds so. What in all hell you think happened?”
    “God knows. Maybe nothing at all. Might be he just plainly cracked. He was wandering around without rhyme or principle
     when we come on him today.”
    “I know.”
    “This puts it up to you and me,” Brad said. “You see that, don’t you? We may be closer the end than you think.”
    “What you want to do?”
    “My horse is standing up best. Tomorrow I’ll start before light, and scout on out far as I can reach. You come on as you
     can.”
    “My horse got a rest today,” Mart began.
    “Keep saving him. You’ll have to take forward when mine gives down.”
    “All right.” Mart judged that tomorrow was going to be a hard day to live far behind on a failing pony. Like Brad, he had
     a feeling they were a whole lot closer to the Comanches than they had any real reason to believe.
    They turned in again. Though they couldn’t know it, until they heard about it a long time after, that was the night Ed Newby
     came out of his delirium, raised himself for a long look at his smashed leg, then put a bullet in his brain.

Chapter Ten
    By daylight Brad Mathison was an hour gone. Mart hadn’t known how Amos would take it, but there was no fuss at all. They rode
     on in silence, crossing chains of low hills, with dry valleys between; they were beginning to find a little timber, willow
     and cottonwood mostly along the dusty stream beds. They were badly in need of water again; they would have to dig for it
     soon. All day long the big tracks of Brad Mathison’s horse led on, on top of the many-horse trample left by the Comanche
     herd; but he was stirring no dust, and they could only guess how far he must be ahead.
    Toward sundown Amos must have begun to worry about him, for he sent Mart on a long swing to the north, where a line of sand
     hills offered high ground, to see what he could see. He failed to make out any sign of Brad; but, while he was in the hills
     alone, the third weird thing that could unstring him set itself in front of him again. He had a right to be nerve-raw at
     this point, perhaps; the vast emptiness of the plains had taken on a haunted, evilly enchanted feel since the massacre. And
     of course they were on strange ground now, where all things seemed faintly odd and wrong, because unfamiliar….
    He had dismounted near the top of a broken swell, led his horse around it to get a distant view without showing himself
     against the sky. He walked around a ragged shoulder—and suddenly froze at sight of what stood on the crest beyond. Itwas nothing but a juniper stump; not for an instant did he mistake it for anything else. But it was in the form of similar
     stumps he had seen two or three times before in his life, and always with the same unexplainable effect. The twisted remains
     of the juniper, blackened and sand-scoured, had vaguely the shape of a man, or the withered corpse of a man; one arm seemed
     upraised in a writhing gesture of agony, or perhaps of warning. But nothing about it explained the awful sinking of the heart,
     the terrible sense of inevitable doom, that overpowered him each of the times he encountered this shape.
    An Indian would have turned back, giving up what ever he was about; for he would have known the thing for a medicine tree
     with a powerful spirit in it, either telling him of a doom or placing a doom upon him. And Mart himself more or less believed
     that the thing was some kind of a sign. An evil prophecy is always fulfilled, if you put no time limit upon it; fulfilled quite
     readily, too, if you are a child counting little misfortunes as disasters. So Mart had the impression that this mysteriously
     upsetting kind of an encounter had always been followed by some dreadful, unforeseeable thing.
    He regarded himself as entirely mature now, and was convinced that to be filled with cowardice by the sight of a dead tree
     was a silly and unworthy thing. He supposed he