Rhizomania, Part 11

Then he heard Redboy’s high, frightened whinny.  

Doran’s feet were in his boots and he was on the other side of the one-room dwelling in a moment, leaving behind him and a spilled tin cup lying in a dark puddle of cold coffee, plus an upset chair, in his wake.  

Outside in the cool night air, Doran heard behind him, through
 the open doorway, the sounds of a sleepy, confused Shorty, stumbling in the dark and swearing continuously.  From inside the dark cabin came a louder, metallic sound. After a moment, Doran identified it as the spilled tin cup on its side, rattling across the pine floorboards and hit the wall. Shorty said loudly, to the dark, empty room, “What are you about, Doran?”

But Doran, even if he'd felt like explaining a spilled coffee cup on the floor, did not have time for rhetorical questions. He'd already begun to run toward the barn, where Redboy’s distress sounds had intensified, both vocal distress calls and the heavy thumps of hoofs hitting the stall walls and the dirt floor. 

Doran could also hear other noises from the barn. These were quieter but more alarming: as he ran, he definitely heard, over the scuffing thuds of his mulehide boots hitting the sandy Nebraska soil,  the murmur of men arguing quietly. He decided against entering the barn immediately, at least not unarmed. The wood-splitting maul, with its solid handle and heavy wedge head, would make a decent weapon. 

Doran moved to the woodshed, and stepped inside to let his eyes adjust. He'd moved from bright moonlight into the shed without windows, and with a door in the shadow of the barn. He stood in the shed's open doorway, and slowly his eyes searched the dark shapes. He could not locate the splitting maul. Had he left it out at the stump? Had it fallen over along the shed wall behind some sloppily stacked firewood? Or had one of the strangers he could hear in the barn taken the maul to use on him, on Shorty, or both?

  In desperation, he moved forward as quietly as he could, then grasped the longest, thickest stick of firewood he could spy among the jumbled shadows. Dammit! He pulled his hand back, dropping the chunk of rough wood as he felt the sharp pierce of a long splinter entering the thick calloused pad of muscle under his thumb.  Had anyone heard the piece of stove wood fall? Had Doran cursed or yelled as the splinter jammed itself painfully into his palm? He couldn't remember. 

His focus returned to the horses in the barn. The register of Redboy’s whinny moved from the steady, repetitive cry of anxiety to an unnerving scream of pain. In an instant, Doran felt in the dark for, then grabbed the fallen chunk of wood, and turned to run from the wood shed to the barn. His legs pumped with all their power, carrying him to the dark entrance, with the horse stalls to his right.

The wide slatted doors, usually bolted firmly in place, were now both flung open against the barn’s faded siding. No wonder Doran had heard all that was going on inside. He'd been a fool not to get Shorty's rifle from the house before he came running out. 

Shorty hadn't made the same mistake. Behind him, Doran heard running footsteps and heavy breathing combined with alternating metallic rattles and thumps. These noises meant that Shorty, armed with his old but well-oiled Winchester, was just a few strides behind.

Suddenly, in front of Doran, movement. Like large birds flushed from a thicket, a cluster of three or four indistinguishable figures rushed from the barn's shadowy open doorway.  One of the silhouretted forms struck Doran with an elbow, knocking a “hunh” from him, before uttering a protesting sound of his own as a blow came from Doran’s thick wedge of stove wood, swung at knee level.  

The man, bearded and wearing a cap with a broad bill pulled down to his heavy eyebrows, stopped long enough to examine his leg where the wood had caught him. Abruptly, he turned and his heavy fist delivered a crashing blow to Doran’s head. This was aimed at the temple but its power decreased as the knuckles raked along the side of Doran’s hairline. The skin must have split somewhere, as Doran felt a drip down the side of his neck, coming from a blood spot on his scalp, behind his left ear.

Doran expected to feel his head get heavy, then the sensation of the ground smashing into his spine, but instead he felt Shorty’s square hand support him between the shoulder blades. After a moment, he regained his balance, then shook his head to clear it before began to pursue the bearded man and his companions. All of them were just steps ahead, because they were moving on unfamiliar ground, while Doran knew every ridge and root in the farmyard.   

As he ran, Doran swung forward blindly with the pine slab twice, each intended strike missing the back of the bearded man’s head by a good foot, maybe eighteen inches. It was hard to run, keep a good grip on the stove wood, and swing it. He sure wished he had the splitting maul, with its long slender handle and weighted head.

Behind him, Doran could hear Shorty raising and cranking the lever of the Winchester, and he prayed that if Shorty fired, the small man would carefully aim at the first three runners, rather than spray Doran with ejected cartridges or worse.  

Fear of being accidentally shot by his friend and mentor spurred Doran into a faster pursuit of the intruders.  Sweat soaked the back of his nightshirt, so that its wrinkled clamminess clung to, and rode up, his back.  He was glad he’d at least had the damn sense to jam his feet into his mulehide boots. He even had enough room in his mind, despite the current chaos, to appreciate that Shorty had fashioned the footwear with the hide’s rough side on the outside.  Even the smooth leather and the well-made seams chafed the skin around his ankle bones, for he hadn’t had time for socks.  

At the end of this chase, whatever happened, and even if his feet were more or less nothing but pale-red skinned blisters, Doran wouldn't dare mention socks to Shorty. The older man disdained “stockin’s” as a foppish weakness, and he’d teased Doran many times about the extravangence of a dandy’s ways.  Though he already felt a raw place starting along the inner edge of his left foot, Doran ignored the pain and increased his pace, pounding downhill through a gritty area with soil too poor for even deep-rooted prairie grass to take hold.

Extending his right arm, which held the chunk of wood, as far forward as it would reach, Doran swept the long piece of stove wood down and then in, bashing the outside of the bearded man’s thigh. The man fell heavily, in a rough somersault over his left shoulder, cursing as he rolled under the legs of the man in front of him, and cursing again much more loudly when received the weight of the other man’s body on his own rib cage.  He yelled at the impact, which included a ghastly series of cracking sounds.  

“Damn, damn, my side!  Get off me!  Get off and help me, Charlie!  My ribs are all broke!” groaned the fallen man.

Charlie did get up, but he did not tarry a moment, disappearing into the gloom, where the first three fleeing men had also just vanished.

Doran stood over the fallen man, still holding the stick of split pine ready, until he saw that the bearded man was unable to get up, let alone fight or flee.

Shorty, out of breath, his Winchester in his right hand, hurried up, then saw that Doran was in no danger.  He looked out toward the murky horizon, where the line between the grassy plain and the cloudless sky was slowly becoming clearer as the sun hovered just below its dawn position. 

“They doubled up on us,” said Shorty.  “Four or five of  'em this time, 'stead of just the two.”

Shorty set the Winchester down on the ground, within his own reach but not of the fallen man's, then  knelt next to the still-screaming intruder.  Shorty brought his own body across and over and placed his right hand gently over the man’s injured chest.  Shorty’s face bore such a look of force-gathering concentration that the injured man stopped yelling, He held still, submitted quietly to the doom he obviously perceived as imminent. He did not close his eyes, but he exhaled and stilled himself, ready for the choking grip of Shorty’s muscular hands around his neck, or maybe for bare-knuckled punches which would leave his face bloody and swollen, or possibly for the shockingly smooth slide of a tempered steel blade into his fast-beating heart.  

But when he saw what Shorty actually intended, he began to squirm and protest, trying to push Shorty’s tough, wiry frame away. “No, don’t,” he said. “I’m all tore up, don’t. I can’t get my breath, it stabs me so.”

Ignoring the protests, Shorty smoothed his palms over the man’s chest, stopping to touch various points with a knotty index finger.  Then Shorty rubbed his hands over the sides of the supine man’s torso, before he used two fingers to explore the row of buttons which held the man’s cotton duck shirt closed.  Last, Shorty ran a thumb over each of the man’s collarbones in turn.  

“Let me alone,” said the man, weakly, as a trickle of tears leaked from the outer corner of each eye and washed dirt down into the beard stubble which covered his hollow-cheeked face. “I didn’t hurt nobody.  Now it ain’t right you’re hurting me, and me not doing anything “

“Hush up, you baby,” said Shorty.  “Ain’t you ashamed to be blubbering like a little girl that didn’t make it to the outhouse?”  He leaned back, paused to collect himself, then suddenly came forward and pressed down hard on the lower right side of the man’s rib cage.  Four loud clicks, so close together that they were hardly separate at all, broke the silence the night air and then were absorbed up in the background murmur of crickets, rattling twigs, and the soft sandy scrapes of small furry creatures burrowing under the roots of protective shrubs.

The bearded man opened his mouth, but no yell came out.  Instead, a squeaking intake of breath was followed by a relieved exhalation.  “I can breathe,” he said, wonderingly.

Click this link to go to Chapter 12