Clouds kept the moon hid and there warn’t no stars out to guide by. We was moving in the dark through grasslands that rolled off tedious and lonely in all directions, not knowing where we was going, just only away from that wagon train. In the middle of the night, my thoughts begun to float about, and when the old pony slowed to a mosey, I fell to sleep on his back. And soon as I did, there she was again, down on her knees and knuckles, sirring me in her sugary whisper, beguiling me all over again. It was a kind of nightmare and jolted me awake, but every time I closed my eyes, she come back like them devil women who drive all the widow’s saints so crazy. Can you help me, sir? I thought it was the widow who was the crazy one, but now I knowed better. One time when I come to, I seen that Jackson had stopped and was sleeping standing up, and we stood like that for a while, dozing off together with half-open eyes, until I thought I heard horse hoofs behind me, and I startled up and we pushed on again.
At dawn, the thick clouds slowly lighted up a-front of us, then more paleness spreading round, signifying we’d been a-wandering east all night, so I bent Jackson northards towards the old beat-down emigrants’ trail. There was a few stray open-range cows scattered about, sejesting we was nigh water, cows needing barrels of it every day not to keel over and donate their bones to the landscape. There was also one human person out there, a scruffy fellow with a black beard, but he was dead, laying with his hands crossed over his belly and a sign pinned to his shirt that said HOSS THEIF. One of the unluckiest things a body can do is hive a dead man’s boots, specially those of thieves and murderers, but they was near my size and they was just crying out for needful feet like mine. I did not want to get shot as a BOOT THEIF, so I pulled them off him fast as I could and we hurried away, aiming for some rock formations I’d spied up ahead, rairing up on a low hill all by theirselves in the early morning light like giant thumbs and fingers.
Bad luck can chase a body for years before it shows itself, but it can also strike a body down on the spot. This was most like what happened. There was a little stream below them stone pillars. I drank my fill and picketed Jackson near it, then pulled on the boots and walked around a while to get customed to them. That horse thief’s feet was bigger’n mine; I’d have to stuff some rags in the toes. I clumb up the little rise to the tall stones to see what I could see, and there in the valley on t’other side was an Indian camp. I most dropped in my tracks. They was all painted and feathered up and they was howling and stomping around like they was on the warpath, or maybe they was just praying in their savagely way. I went running back to the pony, hoping nobody seen me, but I warn’t watching where I was going and I trod straight on a rattlesnake nest. There was a bzzzt! at my heel and a sudden burning pain behind my knee and down I went, trying not to holler out.
I knowed I was in desperate trouble. My leg was paralyzing up fast and the loose boot on it warn’t loose no more. I was so scared I most couldn’t think. I reckoned it was all up for me. And then, if things warn’t worse enough, one a them wild painted-up Indian warriors come at me and ripped my pants away with a knife and stabbed me in the leg. I thought he was going to scalp me, and I worried what that might feel like, but he leaned right in with his teeth where he cut me. I recollected what Tom said about them all being either cannibals or slaveholders, and I seen that this one was a cannibal who liked his meat direct off of the bone. I tried to fight him off, but I didn’t have no strength left. And then I didn’t have no thoughts left nuther.
The first thing I seen when my eyes was opened was a grim old rip wearing a horned buffalo skull on his head, shaking some rattles and mumbling over me. It was steamy hot, minding me of the widow’s stories about where bad boys go when they die. Firelight was flickering on the domed hides above and somewheres there was a thumping sound, or maybe it was my own heart pounding, if I still had one. Then I seen that stringy-haired cannibal setting there, beating softly on a drum of stretched hide, his legs wrapped round it. I couldn’t feel nothing in the leg that got snakebit, so I allowed he must a et it. I was dead or dying and I only done it to myself, I couldn’t blame nobody else. I shouldn’t never have smouched nothing off of a dead horse thief, least of all his boots. When I done that, I stepped right into his bad luck. I knowed better, but knowing better don’t always help. Maybe it don’t never.