Once we were on the real trail, the other men asked me a bunch of questions. Mostly about my cross-country trek on Ballycor. When I mentioned his name, they said that they had heard of the stallion‒ there were still get of his being bred and producing well known runners, jumpers and dressage horses.
I answered best as I could but after a few hours of up and down on the horse, leaning under low-hanging branches, jumping gullies and my butt pounding on a hard leather seat, I was exhausted and sore. Hungry and sick of moving. I prayed that we would be stopping soon just so I could stop moving. My horse, named Tanner chose that moment to stumble but caught himself.
I wasn’t so lucky. It was enough to throw me out of the saddle and I landed awkwardly on the downhill side of the trail. On my side and I rolled down the slope. I heard their cries of alarm as I fell. Bounced off several tree trunks and ended up on my back, lying half on a rock that was part of a ledge and on dirt. The sky whirled over my head, a sliver of blue and gray that I could barely see through the canopy of pine boughs.
The back of my jacket had caught on a metal spike sticking up out of a large crack in the ledge. Rusted, I was still able to recognize it as an iron spoke from a wagon wheel. Wondered vaguely what it was doing there. My coat ripped as I started falling just as a hand wrapped in a leather glove grabbed for me.
I looked up to see a blurry face and was hauled backward so fast that I felt as if I were flying. Hands removed my coat, slid down the coveralls until I could feel their bare hands on my skin before I was wrapped in a blanket and carried up the slope.
When I was back on flat ground, somebody lay me on a horse blanket and went over every inch of my body. I closed my eyes. Drifting but they wouldn’t let me sleep. No, they pinched me, dug their nails into my chest and other annoying things to me until outrage made me spit. I yelled. To them it was only a moan.
I tried to sit up and curse. Somebody I didn’t know pushed me down. “Slow down, kid. You hit hard, especially your head, ribs and back took a good wallop. Anything hurt worse than normal?”
“Who are you?” I asked. He looked worried.
“Never mind that. What’s the last thing you remember?” His hand wiped at my head and came away with a white pad stained with bright red blood. I felt pressure on the back of my scalp, his hand. I felt sick. I swallowed, instead of heaving. Looked around at their worried faces. At the horses. Wondered where I was and how I got there. A steep trail up towards wild mountains tinged in blue and white. Big mountains, not like the gently worn ones we had ridden in the east.
“Matt? Jake?”
Their faces were right there. Along with Pepper. He held a soft-sided first aid box. “We were at Dunkin Donuts?” I said. “Jake forgot his wig. No, we drove back to the cabin. A big horse trailer showed up.” I looked around. “I guess we went somewhere with…someone?”
Before they could respond, I threw up. Violently. Quick as a thought, the man on his knees rolled me on my side so that I couldn’t choke on my vomit.
“We need to find a campsite and get him to a hospital,” he said. “He has a concussion.”
“No,” I protested. Gagging on the taste in my mouth, I continued trying to speak. “They’ll find me if I go in the system.”
“You could have a subdural bleed,” he said angrily. “I can’t treat that kind of injury out here. You might need brain surgery.”
I shuddered. “I’d rather die out here than go back into custody. I’m getting up, riding with broken bones if I have to and it won’t be the first time, either.”
Struggling, I forced my bruised body onto my feet, swaying but upright. I took a step and then another. My legs hurt but nothing was sprained or broken, ankles, knees and hips okay, too. Same for my arms, elbows, wrists and shoulders.
My back sent a sharp pain down one leg, but I knew that was only a pinched nerve. Annoying but I could live with it until we got back to safety. It was when I turned my neck that I nearly screamed and passed out.
I woke in Matt’s arms, held on the front of his saddle with my head tucked under his chin. My forehead was wrapped with gauze under the Elmer Fudd hat. Too bad, I thought I had lost it. I couldn’t move my neck at all.
“Matt?” I asked sleepily. “What’s going on? Where are we?” We were back in the trees, on fairly level ground. It smelled nice. Piney, clean air with the hint of sage and fresh snow.
“Cris.” I couldn’t figure out why his tone sounded so…sad. Frightened. I tried to look at his face, but my neck was stiff. There were rolled-up towels around it.
“I don’t feel so good,” I whispered.
“I know, baby. We’re headed to a small town named Ouray. We can get help there.”
“Ouray. That’s where the old-timers still mine gold and silver. Suspicious people. They shoot first then ask questions.”
“Pepper knows someone,” he replied.
“I think I’m gonna‒”
He stopped the horse and let me dry-heave over its side. All I got out was foamy yellow stuff that burned my mouth and nose. I gagged more. My ribs hurt. Really bad.
The man who had caught me before I’d fallen off the ledge made me look at his face as he gently turned me in Matt’s grip. He flashed a small penlight in them. It really hurt on the odd side and made my eyes water. All I wanted to do was sleep.
“You have to stay awake, Cris,” he urged, kneeing his horse closer. “Pepper, he has to be air-lifted out of here. His left pupil is blown and the right slow to respond. It’s more than a serious concussion, I’m positive he has a subdural bleed with brain trauma.”
“Are you a medic?” I asked curiously. He looked like an extra from Cowboys and Aliens.
“I’m a doctor,” he snapped. “Emergency surgery and I say you need it.”
“I have the SAT phone but I’m not sure if we can get a signal until we’re in Ouray. Too much tree cover and the mountains block the signal,” Pepper said. “We’re only a few miles from Ouray, maybe an hour?”
“I guess we have no choice, then,” the doctor sighed.
I tried to turn my head back but any attempt at movement made jabs of pain race down my back and explode in my head. My neck was stiff, it didn’t want to move at all. Matt readjusted me and told me to just relax. Any more relaxed and I’d fall off the horse.
I complained in a whiny voice and even I couldn’t make sense of what I was saying. I tried to explain myself but the more I tried, the worse I got until Matt was urging all of them to hurry.
The horses trotted. The bouncing made everything hurt worse. My stomach came up through my mouth in pieces big enough to choke a horse.
“Bally, please,” I begged. “Stop trotting. It’s making me so sick. Crispin? Make him stop.”
It got so bad that I fainted. Passed out like a girl. I think because the next thing that I knew, I was lying on a table in what looked like an old west saloon. For a moment, I wondered if I had gone back as Crispin, back to the 1830s. I was pretty sure that I’d never seen any of the old, bearded faces of the people leaning over me. With sun wrinkled features, gray whiskers that must have taken a lifetime to grow. Big dudes in faded jeans and overalls. They looked like miners. Some of them reminded me of the men in Johannsen’s crew. One of them was the spitting image of the half-breed, Flat Iron.
I shrank away from him involuntarily as the doc checked my pulse against his wrist watch. With that, I was jolted forward into the memory of my present time. Knew that he wasn’t the same soul as that killer.
“He’s been unconscious for 45 minutes this time. No seizures and his pulse is rapid and uneven. Blood pressure was sky-high, but it’s dropping fast, now. He might have internal injuries along with the subdural bleed,” he murmured. “Did you get an emergency call through?”
Pepper’s voice came from above and behind me. “I was able to get the SAR chopper. Your friends are there and they’re heading this way.”
“Can they land around here?” Matt’s asked. I couldn’t see him, just heard his voice. I lay there, not quite awake but not really asleep, either. It was like I was drifting, in a thin fog that separated me from everyone else. Like a curtain.
“He said that they spotted several carloads of hunters headed up towards the cabin. Hunters who brought weapons that were military grade, not your typical hunting rifles. And they had drones. He saw an older man, short but built like a fireplug. With gray hair. He thought they might be cops, they gave off that vibe. Or military men.”
“Mercenaries? With Neige?” Jake asked.
“Didn’t see him, just the old man and one other guy that was really thin, pale and unhealthy looking. Like he’d been really sick. He was being pushed around in a wheelchair by the older man.”
“Could it have been Neige?” Matt asked.
“He didn’t think so. Said he looked older, really pale yellow. Neige is over 6’4”. This guy looked about six foot, stooped and thin. Had a face that drooped on one side, like a stroke victim. And gray-haired. Nothing like the way he remembered Neige, he said,” Pepper said. “How is he doing?”
I heard a tinny piano playing in the background and wondered if Sheriff Harris had stopped in for a drink. I knew my dad wouldn’t have, especially if I was with him. I frowned. What was I doing in a saloon?
“Isn’t there a clinic or hospital in this town?” the doctor questioned with a tone of skepticism.
“Mostly, we handle everything ourselves,” a strange voice said. It came out of the beard. “An occasional sprain, burns, stitches. Broken leg or arm. Them things we can handle. A couple of us were medics in the war.”
I gaped. Surely not the Vietnam war. That would make these people in their 70s and 80s. They must mean the Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts.
“How many people live up here?” Jake asked in disbelief.
“Ten, twelve. Counting you folks,”
“What do you do for food? Fuel? How do you live like this?”
“Hunting. Fishing. We need anything else, one of us rides down to Rico, catches a ride into Dolores or Cortez. Don’t need much to survive up here with all this bounty around us.”
“You make much mining for gold?” Jake was curious. He asked the one question that he shouldn’t have asked. The sudden silence confirmed it.
Pepper interrupted with an apology which Jake offered, too. He said that we were Easterners and didn’t know any better, didn’t understand the western concept of etiquette. When the older man’s shoulders relaxed, I didn’t worry about him attacking Jake. Actually, I felt too odd to worry about anything.
I bolted upright and yelled. “The wagon rod! It marks the spot where Gay Cooley hid his gold!”
Everyone but the bearded man looked at me as if I were crazy. The doc and Matt tried to force me back down, I pushed their arms away from me and slid off the table. Tottering over to the wooden bar that was made of one long single plank of golden chestnut, I leaned on it to see myself in the mirror finish. It had names carved deep into its surface. And dates going back to the 1800s.
“Rye,” I said to the startled bartender who was nursing a beer. He had long curly sideburns and longer gray hair tied back with rubber bands.
He poured me a shot and I slugged it with shaking hands to the utter disbelief of all in the saloon. It burned going down, yet it stayed in my stomach. A warm nugget of fire spread from there to all my limbs and lastly, my head. I was sweating as I turned around to face the crowd.
“Matt, if you make me get in that helicopter, I’ll die,” I stated.
“You’ll die if you stay here,” the doc retorted. He had a great bedside manner and I told him so. He snorted.
“What is your name?” I asked irritably. “I can’t keep calling you ‘doc’.”
“I’m Andy Cussler. Pepper’s cousin. Asus is my older brother and Bobby is our cousin,” he answered. “You met my father, Jonathon, Pepper’s uncle and Debbie is his wife.” He spoke with forced patience as if he had told me all that before.
“Where are we?”
“Ouray. Colorado. We’re waiting for the helicopter.”
“What helicopter?” I asked. “Why? Where are we? God, my head hurts.”
They became shapeless. Dark. The sun disappeared, and the lights went off. I saw the floorboards from a weird angle. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was because I was falling towards them face first. Hands caught me before I hit the floor. The movement was too much for my tender belly and I puked all over someone’s hands before the black became too thick for me to shift.