Find Us in the Shivering - Chapter 22

The world tricked Josh's eyes as he lifted his head.  There was no sign of the woman who had been there moments ago.  Was it moments ago?  Or longer?  

His surroundings turned and stretched like the time he had taken something at a party the previous year.  Sounds were not right either in his ears.  They became loud and faded at strange intervals.  Was he still just outside the snipe cavern?  Where was Walter?  Where was the arrowhead trail?  He groaned as nausea overcame him for a moment.

The whinny of a horse drew him up and his head twisted around to see where the animal stood.  The spinning and stretching of the desert caused him to miss the animal the first time, but there it was.  The horse's eyes glowed back, breath of steam from its nostrils.  A dozen or so yards away the majestic beast walked with a cloaked rider on its back. 

The man was older with white hair and a cowboy hat much like Anson's.  He looked around but never saw Josh; he looked up, shielding his eyes in the sun.

"Mr. Dalton!"

Another rider approached on a galloping horse--brown and tall.  "Sir," the man said, voice rising and falling in volume, "we're too far from the border."

Dalton, the white-haired man and the town's founder, shook his head.  "Masterton, your lack of guts is becoming more and more an annoyance.  I told you I've been this far out before."

Masterton, a younger and heavier set man, spit to the side.  His hand rested on the butt of a rifle sheathed on the side of his saddle.  "My matter of guts, sir, have gotten me this far myself in all honesty.  Trust in the almighty makes up for what I don't have."

"Ha!"  Dalton turned in his saddle, finger pointing at Masterton.  "That kind of trust will get you lyin' in a dry river bed with critters picking at your wounds while you beg for water.  That kind of trust leaves you shattered and hopeless."

"That's brazen," Masterton snipped.  

"Truth is brazen all too often," Dalton said matter-of-fact.  

"And what truth are you seeking out here so far from the boundary?"  Masterton's attention was drawn to something in the sky but when Josh followed the man's eye line, he saw nothing.

"There's a truth in this valley, Marcus, that I have yet to define...  There's something in this odd place of the world that has evaded human presence."  Dalton pulled out a compass and raised it to his eye.  "You feel it just as I do.  Every man, woman, and child back in the town can feel it and we have no name to give it.  It sends a shiver down our spines when we sense it's liveliness.  Perhaps it's what the preacher has come to call it: a power.  I, however, mean to discover more.  If it has a heart and mind, I will be the one to discover its source."

Masterton visibly shook.  "Sir, if such a thing exists then let us avoid it at all costs.  There've been stories all throughout this unsettled side of the world--stories that we use to scare children with but each of us knows there's a truth to the threat.  Those who seek it out will only find violence and worse."

"An astute warning, Marcus," Dalton said, "but I will not avoid or flee from it.  A calling beckons me to discover truth wherever I go and this calling draws me there."  Dalton pointed to the northwest towards low hilltops; Josh pinpointed the location in his mind.  

"Sir," Masterton grumbled threw disappointment, "I wish to head back."

Dalton urged his horse forward and called behind him, "Fear and flee, Marcus.  Settle in your weakness.  Strength and will are all that is needed where I go."

Josh dropped his head as Dalton disappeared in the distance and his eyes closed to darkness.