The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories
turned his head away with a ghost of some of his old petulance.
“I’m hungry, Shelly. Tell Mam Gusta.…”
Weatherby squatted down on the other side of Boyd’s limp body and put his hand to the boy’s forehead.
“Fever.”
“Yes.” Drew knew that much.
“There’s a farmhouse two miles that way.” Weatherby nodded to the south. “Maybe nobody there, but it will be cover—”
“You can find it?” Drew demanded.
The Cherokee scout answered quickly. “Yes. You tell the lieutenant, and we’ll go there.”
Kirby’s hand rested on Drew’s shoulder for a moment. “I’ll track down Traggart. You and Weatherby here get the kid into that cover as quick as you can. This ain’t no weather for an hombre with a cough to be out sackin’ in the bush.”
Kirby was back again before they had rigged a blanket stretcher between two horses.
“The lieutenant says to stay with th’ kid till mornin’. He’ll send the doc along as soon as he can find him. Trouble is, we may have to ride on tomorrow.…”
But Drew put that worry out of his mind. No use thinking about tomorrow; the present moment was the most important. With Weatherby as their guide, they started off at a walk, heading into the night across ice-rimmed fields while the rising wind brought frost to bite in the air they pulled into their lungs.
There was no light showing in the black bulk of the house to which Weatherby steered them. It was small, hardly better than a cabin, but the door swung open as Kirby knocked on it; and they could smell the cold, stale odor of a deserted and none-too-clean dwelling. But it was shelter, and exploring in the dark, Kirby announced that there was firewood piled beside the hearth.
By the light of the blaze Weatherby brought alive they found an old bedstead backed against the wall, a tangle of filthy quilts cascading from it. One look at them assured Drew that Boyd would be far better left in his blankets on the floor itself.
The Cherokee scout prowled the room, looking into the rickety wall cupboards, venturing through another door into a second smaller room, really a lean-to, and then going up the ladder into a loft.
“They left in a hurry, whoever lived here,” he reported. “They left this—” He held out a dried, shrunken piece of shriveled salt beef.
“We can boil it,” Kirby suggested. “Make a kinda broth; it might help the kid. Any sign of a pot—?”
There was a pot, encrusted with corn-meal remains. Weatherby took it outside and returned, having scrubbed its interior as clean as possible, and filling it with a cup or so of water. “There’s a well out there.”
Boyd was asleep, or at least Drew hoped it was sleep. The boy’s face was flushed, his breathing fast and uneven. But he hadn’t coughed for some time, and Drew began to hope. If he could have a quiet day or two here, he might be all right. Or else the surgeon could send him along on one of the wagons for the sick and wounded—the wagons already on the move south. If the doctor would certify that Boyd was ill.…
Weatherby was busily shredding the wood-hard beef into the pot of water. His busy fingers stopped; his dark eyes were now on the outer door. Drew stiffened. Kirby’s fingers closed about the butt of a Colt.
“What—” Drew asked in the faintest of whispers.
The Cherokee dropped the remainder of the uncut beef into the pot. Knife in hand, he moved with a panther’s fluid grace to the begrimed window half-covered with a dusty rag.
CHAPTER 12
Guerrillas
Boyd stirred. “Shelly?” His call sounded loud in the now silent room. Drew set his hand across the boy’s mouth, dividing his attention between Boyd and Weatherby. They had no way of putting out the fire, whose light might be providing a beacon through the dark. The Indian moved back a little from the window.
“Riders…coming down the lane.” His whisper was a thread.
Now Drew could hear, too, the ring of hoofs on the iron-hard surface of the ground. A horse nickered—one of those which had brought Boyd’s stretcher, or perhaps one of the newcomers.
Kirby whipped about the door and was now lost in the shadows of the next room. Weatherby looked to Drew, then to the loft ladder against the far wall. In answer to that unspoken question, Drew nodded.
As the Cherokee swung up into the hiding place, Drew eased one of his Colts out of the holster, pushing it under the folds of the blankets around Boyd. Then he swung the pot, with its burden of
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