Heaven Is a Long Way Off Read Online Free Page B

ribs.
    â€œYou’ll be fine.”
    â€œWhere’s Paladin?”
    â€œDon’t know.”
    â€œWhere’s Ellie?”
    â€œDead. Let’s get up to the others.”
    â€œDead!”
    Hannibal pulled Sam to his feet. “The ass cut Ellie’s throat. I cut his.”
    They stumbled upstream, splashing in the shallows, feet sinking into the sand bars. Pictures invaded Sam’s mind, images of the handsome stallion lying on the sand, neck pumping out blood. Then he thought of Paladin and wondered how her hindquarter was. His blood prickled.
    Around a couple of bends stood Captain Smith and eight other men. Diah was looking across the river with his field glass. The trappers looked at each other with the bright knowledge of mortality in their eyes.
    Diah lowered his field glass. Sam could hardly hear his words. “They’re all dead.” Sam looked across the river. Hundreds of Mojaves milled around. From this distance he could make out no one in particular. He pictured Red Shirt’s face, Francisco’s face, Spark’s. What in hell …
    â€œWhy?” said Diah.
    No one answered. These Indians were friendly last autumn. Why?
    They looked at each other, mute and afraid.
    Now the captain’s voice of command came back. “Let’s get out of here.”

Two
    T HOUGH THEY’D LOST half their equipment, without horses they couldn’t carry even what was left. They stared bitterly at the gear. The captain put their food in his own possible sack, fifteen pounds of dried meat—that was all they had to eat. Then he filled his sack with trade goods for Indians, beads, ribbon, cloth, and tobacco. He grabbed several traps. His possible sack got heavy.
    He told the other men that they had to walk a dozen sleeps in blazing heat. Considering that, they should take whatever they wanted. “This was company property. Now it’s your property.”
    Sam looked at Diah’s sack and considered. Eleven men, fifteen pounds of meat, twelve sleeps (if they were lucky), that didn’t add up. And there was no game out there.
    Five men still had their rifles. Sam grabbed the single tomahawk and held it high. He knew how to throw one. My anger will make it a vicious weapon.
    He barely paid attention to what the others picked up. Knives seemed to go first, then traps, then bridles, in hopes of getting horseflesh. Last, they picked up more items for the Indians. These men had learned a hard practicality about that.
    When each man had the load he wanted to carry across the Mojave Desert, Jedediah said, “Scatter the rest across the sand. Tempt them.”
    They did. The thought of savages boiling over this equipment fevered the brain of every man. There was no point in asking how soon they would be here.
    â€œDrink your fill,” said Jedediah. “We have only one kettle to carry water with.”
    The men flopped onto the sand and sucked up all the river they could. Coy did the same. Sam refused to think of what it meant, starting across the Mojave with no water casks and only one kettle.
    They started walking west.
    â€œThey know where we’re headed,” said Jedediah. “We have to get to that first spring.”
    The men chewed on that. They looked around at the barren country. Desert scrub, desert scrub, desert scrub, and no place to hide.
    Fragments of ugly reality spun through their heads. The screams of their dead friends. The flash of knife, the silhouette of arm-cocked spear. The mud made by blood in the dust. The thump of human bodies on the sand.
    They tramped. They waded through grief. They looked slyly toward their own deaths, which lay ahead.
    Only Coy kept his head perked up.
    After a few minutes Hannibal said, “You know why older women are better in bed than young ones?”
    Sam was stupefied.
    Hannibal went on, “Ben Franklin wrote this. I’m going to quote it.”
    â€œHannibal!” complained Sam.
    â€œGo