Into the black maw of the cañons and draws. Snow piling in till a man felt smothered. Black as a hat. Cold. Give a dollar fer a drink. Hell, give five dollars. Ten. There was money a-plenty in that sack. Whisky money.
Topping out on a long ridge. Into a dawn that was the color of dirty slate. A wind that bit plumb into a man’s innards. Didn’t dast drop into a ranch or even a sheep camp fer grub. There'd be no fool sign fer a posse to pick up. Nobody but Pete knew of that little log cabin tucked away in a pocket of the Bad Lands. Pines and brush and rocks. Grub cached. Shoot a black-tail buck or a yearlin’. What’s two days without grub? Make a man eat good when he got it. Whisky and meat. Good whisky and fat meat. Half way home now. Safe as dog in a hole.
Keep to the coulees, just under the rim of the ridges. No use skylinin’ a man’s self. All day. Horse gittin’ laig weary. Stumbled into a badger hole. No harm done. Wind that shriveled a man’s heart. Wind that cut the hide on a man’s face. Feet like ice cakes. Like the blood was dried up. God, but that whisky’d send it chargin’ through a man’s veins, though. Fill a jug and go acrost to Pete Peralta’s. A man needed talk when he’d bin alone so long. Pete’d drag out the fiddle. “Red River Jig.” “Hell among the Yearlin’s.” “Blue Bottles.”
He pulled into his hidden cañon that afternoon. A frost seared, fur clad figure, red eyed from the wind and loss of sleep. A lone figure in a vast white world. Cold, hungry, craving whisky as a man on a parched desert craves water. With a fortune tied in a gunnysack. Two fresh notches on the bone handle of a short barreled Colt .45. A laugh rattling in his throat.
Hay in the barn. Pete had put up that hay. The spring above the cabin was warm. It never froze. Had an iron taste to it.
Sam Graybull watered and fed his gaunt horse. While no law of God or man had weight with the killer, he never violated that creed of the range that commands its men to care for a horse that has carried a man. After that he may look to his own comfort.
Sam Graybull found the whisky keg buried under the hay. He found a tin cup, and with a corner of his fur coat he wiped some of the dust from inside it. Then he squatted there by the keg and drank a cup of whisky as if the stuff were water. He sat there for better than half an hour. Drinking until the ache thawed from his bones and the hunger pains left his empty stomach. Now and then he laughed. The horse would give a start and look around, ears erect. Sam Graybull’s laugh was unlike the laughter of any other man because there was no humor in it. More like a death rattle.
He was steady enough on his feet when he got up and went to the cabin. As steady as a man can be when he has been frozen into the saddle for a night and a day, and when he is bundled in fur coat and chaps and four buckle overshoes.
“Fill a jug and go visit Pete Peralta. To hell with cookin’. Pete’s missus’ll sling up some grub.” His cracked, frost blackened lips split in a grin as he saw smoke coming from the Peralta cabin, across the river among the skeleton cottonwoods.