The Quantro Story by Chris Scott Wilson

Author:Chris Scott Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boson Books
Published: 2011-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Pete Wiltshire’s shirt clung uncomfortably to his back. He wiped a hand across his face which only smeared the clinging coat of white dust kicked up by the mules in Wild-Horse’s string. Between his legs, the shaggy coat of the paint pony steamed. Each step the pony took jarred him in the saddle. Goddamn desert. He squinted ahead to where Wild-Horse’s string of heavily-laden mules walked into the distance. The line was a little longer now, for the Apache had roped the dead cowboy’s black mare to the end of the string.

Pete turned in his saddle and looked back at his own mules. The sturdy little animals were jerking their heads and snorting under the weight of their loads. Right at the back, the big buckskin stallion with the fine saddle plodded along, head hanging, listless in the blistering heat.

Pete fanned his face ineffectively with his battered hat, but soon returned it to his head, for the strength of the sun was too great to bear through his thinning hair.

They must be close now.

He squinted into the sky, and sure enough, there it was.

The buzzard hung in the endless sky like a marker over the man that must be on the desert floor below. They would soon reach him. Only a few hundred yards.

As he watched, the buzzard banked in a steep turn and began to lose altitude. Rapidly, it glided in towards the earth.

Pete opened his mouth to shout, but Wild-Horse had already let the lead rope of the mule train fall, and was kicking his pony into a loping canter.

***

Quantro’s eyes were barely slits as he faced the ordeal of the noon sun. It blazed down on to his face with the concentration of an air-fanned kiln. It mattered little which way he turned his head, the heat still found access to each pore of his raw skin. Yesterday he had been able to sweat, even though it had dried as soon as it emerged on to the surface of his skin, but today there was not even that. Even the burning sands reflected the heat back up on to his body.

Now he was beginning to understand what Zeb Cole had gone through, lashed upside-down on the crude wooden cross. He had seen it happen to Cole and now it was happening to him. The sun had twisted his brain into a tortured, hysterical thing, his cracked lips only uttering coarse cackles instead of the full-throated manic laughter he heard echoing through the caverns of his mind. His right hand still persevered in his grip on the Colt, but he was so weak he wondered if he would be able to summon the strength to pull the trigger if the need arose.

His whole body was one huge nerve-searing pain. The ache from the gunshot wound seemed to have crawled outwards from his busted shoulder until it encompassed his whole torso, joining up with the dull throbbing from his badly-healed leg.

Now he could only move his head a little.

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