Crazy Weather by Charles L. McNichols

Author:Charles L. McNichols
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 1994-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

THE MORMONHATER

THE MORMONHATER lay as still as still, flat on his back, one knee up and his head close to the trunk of the tree. The old hound raised his head and looked speculatively at South Boy with deep, sad, bloodshot eyes, but the Mormonhater didn’t move. His weather-beaten, sun-wrinkled face was entirely placid, but its normal mahogany color had faded to the sickly hue of new iron rust.

He was dressed in his seldom-worn summer best—a soft white shirt, spotlessly clean, a pair of white duck pants, clean but wrinkled. One leg was rolled up to the knee that was upright. On the lean bare foreleg there was a white bandage stained with dark blood.

Through South Boy’s mind ran the lament the Foreman often sang:

As I was walking the streets of La-redo

As I was walking in La-redo one day

I saw a pore cowboy laid out in white linen

Laid out in white linen, as cold as the clay.

The old hound raised his nose to the sky and bayed dismally, and South Boy buried his head in his hands and sobbed.

Then a voice said, “Shut up, you no-good, stone-deef bastard!” It was the dead man’s voice. South Boy uncovered his face, jumped back, and would have run, but he saw the old hound’s tail was thumping the ground as he gazed adoringly into the Mormonhater’s still face.

“He ain’t dead?” South Boy whispered.

“No, but I will be if I don’t get kea-weed to make up the blood I lost,” said the Mormonhater. “Cook me meat and kea. If I pass out again, pry my mouth open and make me drink the broth.”

South Boy stood shifting his weight from one foot to the other for a few seconds, his mouth full of questions that could hardly wait.

“Kea,” croaked the Mormonhater, and South Boy ran to the house for a kettle and meat.

He pulled up to a dead stop on the threshold and peered inside, accustoming his eyes to the semidarkness.

Where was White Whiskers? Maybe he lay dead in there.

As his eyes dilated he saw a blotch of blood in the middle of the adobe floor. The floor had been furrowed and scarred by struggling bodies. Against one wall was a broken chair. Near the door was the long-barreled, single-shot, twenty-two-caliber target pistol that the Mormonhater used to kill trapped animals and small game, likewise broken.

In the farther right-hand corner of the room was a bed. The blanket and the one pillow on it were neither bloodstained nor much disturbed; so the Piute hadn’t attacked him in bed, even though the deaf hound had failed to give warning.

The place reeked with chloroform. Near the foot of the bed stood a quart bottle, all covered with bloody finger marks, as was the torn half of an old white shirt from which the Mormonhater had made his bandages. Near by was the gunny sack that held his spare clothes, its contents partly spilled out on the floor.

South Boy stood some thirty seconds, seeing all these things,

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