Free The Searchers by Alan LeMay

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. It was 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 ought to go and uproot that desolate twist of wood, or whittle it down, and so master the thing forever. But even to move toward it was somehow impossible to him, to a degree that such a move was not even thinkable. He returned to Amos feeling shaken and sickish, unstrung as much by doubt of his own soundness as by the sense of evil prophecy itself.
    The sun was setting when they saw Brad again. He came pouring off a long hill at four miles, raising a reckless dust. “I saw her!” he yelled, and hauled up sliding. “I saw Lucy!”
    “How far?”
    “They’re camped by a running crick—they got fires going—look, you can see the smoke!” A thin haze lay flat in the quiet air above the next line of hills.
    “Ought to be the Warrior River,” Amos said. “Water in it, huh?”
    “Didn’t you hear what I said?” Brad shouted. “I tell you I saw Lucy—I saw her walking through the camp—”
    Amos’ tone was bleak. “How far off was you?”
    “Not over seventy rod. I bellied up a ridge this side the river, and they was right below me!”
    “Did you see Debbie?” Mart got in.
    “No, but—they got a bunch of baggage;