First Blood and Other Stories by Jack Schaefer

Author:Jack Schaefer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

We only had three horses and there were four of us. The other horse, the one with the double calks, was lying dead up the slope among the rocks. That meant somebody would have to walk and the somebody couldn’t be Slater, not with a wounded leg, a bullet hole in the thigh about four inches above the knee. Tom bandaged it best he could while Slater was still unconscious. When he was able to sit up and take notice we put him on one of the three horses and ran a piece of rope between his feet under the horse’s belly just in case and to help hold him on and put a lead rope on the bridle. We put the saddlebags over the withers in front of him, those with the gold in them, all the rest of it, about eighty pounds of it. We found them, Race and I, while Tom was doing the bandaging. They were stashed between two good-sized stones and smaller stones had been laid around to cover the opening. Slater must have had his trouble moving those stones in the dark without making a sound we could hear. And the dark fooled him. He missed one end of a strap that was sticking out and showed in the moonlight. In a sense, though, that was lucky for him. If we’d had trouble finding it we would’ve had to work him over to make him talk. And the way he was acting he wouldn’t have talked easy. He wasn’t doing any talking at all. He sat slumped in the saddle, leaning a little to favor the bad leg, and kept his mouth shut.

He wasn’t much sitting there in the moonlight. About medium size with some flesh around the waist and thin shoulders. He had sharp, kind of pointed features and his face was hatchet-shaped, the kind of a face that ought to be easy to remember. But if it hadn’t been for the voice coming down the slope awhile before and the gold and the way everything fitted, I wouldn’t have recognized him. All I could really remember about how he looked was the sallowness of his face and the mustache. That’s how it is when there’s a person doesn’t impress you much and no matter how many times you see him about sort of casual passing all you remember is one or two things that catch your eye. With that mustache gone and his clothes different and his skin darkened I could have been right close to him and not known him. As Tom said, he was a smart one. That mustache had been one of his smartest tricks.

“We’ll take spells walking,” Tom said and pulled three blades of grass. “Short one starts.” I got the short one and we began the return trip, Tom leading with the extra saddle from the dead horse on the withers in front of him and Race following with Slater in tow and me hiking in the rear.

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