Abandon

SEVENTY-THREE

I

t was a twenty-one burro pack train, the first six animals loaded down with burlap sacks holding three quarters of a ton of Packer’s gold, the next fifteen bearing stiff riders, all fastened to their mounts with one long mecate—Ezekiel Curtice, skin a plum shade of scarlet, burned from the cold and high-altitude sun, frozen straight through, an eviscerated Bart Packer, his four servants, Russell Ilg, Molly Madsen, the albumen print of her husband shoved down the front of her corset, Billy McCabe, a faceless Oatha Wallace, the still-warm mule skinner; and the four other men the preacher had murdered in the day hole on Christmas night.

It was dusk, the snow falling in big, patient flakes.

The preacher sipped from the tincture of arnica and prayed for the fifth time in the last hour that God might ease the awful pain in his head.

From his vantage, he could see the soft glow of his cabin across the canyon, where Harriet slept.

He slapped the rear haunches of the last burro. The animal brayed, and the pack train shuffled on into the mine.

Stephen dropped the shadowgees on the floor of the tunnel and pulled the key out of his pocket.

As he worked it into the padlock, the hair on his neck stood erect. It’s been three days, he thought. They must be dead by now. He dropped the crossbar on the rock, lifted the lever, the bolt retracting, pushed the iron door open with the toe of his arctic.

When the noise of the rusty hinges died away, he listened.

Silence.

He knelt and lighted the rest of the shadowgees, carried them inside three at a time, setting the lamps on the rock around the door. Then he walked back up the tunnel to the end of the pack train and quirted them on.

The donkeys hesitated, reluctant to enter the mine. He slapped their bony rumps with the reata’s braided rawhide. “Get on, now!”

They inched forward, carrying their cargo, the tunnel resonant with the clack of hooves on rock.

He drove the burros through the iron door and followed them into the mine. They bunched up near the entrance, huddled together and braying nervously.

Stephen went to work cutting loose the burlap sacks and hauling the gold bricks into a nearby alcove. Then he severed the horse hair rope that attached the dead to the burros and shooed the pack train out of the mine and back up the day hole. It is finished.

“There!” he shouted into the cavern. “All yours! For all time!”

He reached down to lift a shadowgee.

Fingers touched his arctic.

He shrieked, tripped, and fell as he moved for the door.

What crawled toward him in the firelight seemed neither man or woman, and barely human. Lipless and toothless, a dried-out shell of a person, it whispered words undecipherable, its inflated tongue lolling out of its mouth like a piece of jerky.

Stephen raised the lamp, and in that trembling firelight, he saw the throng of Abandon in the cavern, most dead, a dozen or so dragging themselves in his direction, beggars searching for crumbs of light. The one who’d touched his boot reached out for him, bulging, lidless eyes desperate for an end to their living death. Stephen wept as he backed into the tunnel and pulled the door shut.

He stood there for a moment, listening to a weak fist pound the iron on the other side.

Please, God, end their suffering. How does that glorify—

It stopped him mid-prayer—framed in that oval of charcoal light at the far end of the tunnel, a silhouette too tall to be a child.