Free Showdown With Fear by Stephen Wade Page B

desert, scampering for a hole somewhere, before the predator came.
    ‘Please, pa... you gotta find us... you gotta!’ Pete mumbled every snatch of prayer he could recall, mostly his mother’s favourite, ‘Lord who sees everything, look on my travail.’
    It must have been just as the sun appeared on the horizon that she collapsed. There were bands of red and gold glinting on the earth, giving an unreal glow to the edges of everything. The first light of the day was just stroking everything into colour and life, but Sara fell. Pete crouched by her. The great golden disc was like a hot ball rolling into play. He knew that they could not last long. In half an hour there would be such heat that neither of them could move much, they were so exhausted.
    He carried her to the shade of the largest rock he could find and squatted out of the light. He chewed some food now, and wiped Sara’s brow again. She was very nearly unconscious, trying to talk but the words were slurred. He could just make out the words, ‘leave me’.
    ‘No way, my sweet... no way. The posse’s coming, you wait and see!’
    *
    In that early sunlight, there was someone else who was almost done in with exhaustion. A young man who had lain with shock, knocked unconscious when Stobart’s boys had attacked the posse, was riding slowly to the top of a slope overlooking Red Ridge. It was Tom Boak, Harry’s son. He had been the luckiest man on earth, he reflected, as he came across a horse after the massacre of the posse. He had woken up the morning after, in the brushwood, and realised that he had been left for dead. It was the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to him. His friends’ bodies were lying all around him that day. He had walked from one to the other, stunned and shocked, feeling pulses and looking into eyes, praying that he was not the only one left alive. But he had been, and he had to leave them all and start walking towards town as fast as he could. The only problem was, he was dizzy. Something had cracked his head and he was only half in the world for some time. He had lived on water from the cacti and roots, seeds and anything that moved in the night, but never feeling well enough to travel far. Then the horse was there in front of him, like in a dream. He had recognised it, it was the old timer’s mare. It was old too, about fourteen, but it was a sign from Providence that time. He had mounted and plodded steadily homewards, stopping time and time again to rest.
    Now here he was, and his effort of will had brought him home. He saw the wooden houses of the main street, the stables, the adobe houses at the far end. And when he saw the scaffolding around the chapel, then he knew it wasn’t a dream.
    By the time the town rose and thought about breakfast, Tom Boak was leading the mare in, slow as a bow-legged pack mule, down the main street. It was the cleaner at the Golden Halls who saw him first, squinting to focus on the stranger. He dropped the broom and sprinted across to wake up Harry Boak. In no time at all, Tom was a celebrity, and there was a crowd shoving to get into his make-shift sickroom behind his father’s store.
    The young man had spent all his energy and could not speak. He slept for hours. The doctor had given him sedatives and ordered a poultice and efficacious waters to be dribbled on his lips. Salve was applied to his burns. Harry thanked God, and his friends shook his hands. He, along with almost every other citizen of Red Ridge, wanted to fire questions at young Tom, but they would have to wait.
    The question hovering on all their lips was, ‘Are you the only survivor?’ and the crowd gathered silently outside Harry’s store, orderly but full of concern. Men, women and children fussed and whispered and prayed, and every few minutes someone would ask, ‘Has he come round yet?’
    Helen had been back to look after her father for a day, and was riding back into town when she saw the commotion and soon learned