Part One

Cain

Cain came riding down through a cloud. He was still very high above the timberline in the Big Stonies. He rode a tall black gelding named Lonesome. Behind him sauntered Animal, his gray pack mule, tied to Lonesome's tail.

Cain let his horse pick the way down the steep slope. Sometimes Lonesome's iron shoes rang on scoured rock. The cloud gave way to clear air very slowly. From the horse's back Cain could occasionally make out varicolored ground: rock blotched over with moss, then bare rock, then carpets of mushy grass.

A single ponderosa pine suddenly appeared out of the mist. It came out of the cloud as if walking toward them. Its orange trunk was just barely visible, while its upper reaches were lost in drifting silver.

For late August the air was cold. Cain drew down his hat, making his stub ears splay out some. He tightened his bandanna snug around his neck. He shivered. He rolled his shoulders. His slicker rustled comfortingly. He walloped his arms around his chest, walloped until finger tips tingled inside his gloves.

Cain was a knobby-muscled fellow. His movements, though quick, were blunt. His face was rough-cut, as if slapped into form with the side of an ax. He had a black walrus mustache, and it gave his face a weathered walnut hue. He wore a black hat, with the wide brim shaped up on both sides against the crown, making points in front and in back. The two dents up front in the crown, into which his thumb and forefinger fit when he handled it, matched the two deep hollows in his cheeks exactly.

Except for a small red heart carved in the leather just below the pull strap, his boots were black too. So too were his .45 Colt and its holster and the cartridge belt, and his pants, shirt, and vest. His Cheyenne-style saddle, bridle, and reins were black. But blackest of all was the kingly horse Lonesome. Lonesome had a coat of somber powder-black and a curling mane and tail that glowed purple in the sun. Setting off all the striking blacks of Cain's rigging was the white sock above Lonesome's left rear hoof and the silver ornaments on the bridle and saddle and the hand-forged inlaid silver spurs.

Cain rode very light, for all his blunt body. He rode with much of his weight in the stirrups, knees taking up the spring, making it easy on the horse. To sit in the saddle like a bag of sand all day long was to kill the mount. He rarely used the reins; drove mostly with his knees. It hurt him to see men rein in their horses with vicious jerks. A horse frothing blood at the bit was enough to set him against the rider.

Behind him, on Animal the pack mule, under a tarp and balanced exactly, rode his bedroll and camp supplies and the remains of a whitetail bighorn sheep. Late the evening before, Cain had finally got his shot and dropped a young buck. He'd butchered in the dusk, shining up his skinning knife with a few quick strokes down his leather chaps, and disemboweling the sheep with easy strokes, the guts welling out like baby snakes, moist and sliding. He'd trimmed out the better meat, all of it smelling deliciously gamy, and wrapped it up in the dust-brown hide. The noble head, with its curling horns resembling hand-carved bench knobs, he'd also saved for mounting later on.

The trail lifted up, to the left, and then crossed over a low neck of rock. The rock was speckled over with various kinds of mosses: brown, green, red, black, orange. The cloud thickened. Old pocked snow lay melting on the left; tiny blue bell-like flowers grew on the right.

Cain smiled to himself. The grimace lifted the ends of his mustache. It creased wrinkles back through a five-day growth of beard. Here comes bachelor Cain Hammett, he thought, a snowball in his left hand and a posy of true flowers in his right.

They crossed a great open space. The ocher soil was matted over with blooming short grasses, with white and purple and gold flowers. Patches of miniature ferns rode above the grass like diaphanous green veils. Perfumes of the most delicate kind, yet each quite distinct, and weighted with the fresh scent of cloud dew, touched the inside of the nostril no matter which way a man turned his head. It was all a park, almost too good for grazing.

Again the trail sloped down. The cloud thinned out. As Cain came around the shoulder of a huge rock, the cloud suddenly vanished, evanescing up and away, making a solid bank above him and shrouding the blue peaks to the west.

Then for the first time he could see, far down to the east, vast throws of eternal rock away, the great Crimson Wall. Forty miles long, it stretched across his path like the Great Wall of China. It ranged from north to south and was as red as geranium-petal rust.

Beyond Crimson Wall the further valley spread out before him like a huge relief map. It was midforenoon, and the full sun struck it with a flood of brilliant light. He could trace the Bitterness River and all its branches as they trickled east through huge breaks in the blood-red Wall, down, down, the Red Fork where Dencil Jager had his horse ranch, the Shaken Grass where he had his own little spread, and then the Bitterness itself where Dale and Rory Hammett had their sheep ranch, all coming together in the violet color of a violent land called the Bad. The Bitterness flowed east, swinging and aggrading through gray alkali wastes, until at last, fifty miles away, it turned sharply north for the Yellowstone. Cain knew it all well, had seen it many times, and yet each time he saw it as a wonder again. This was the country all right. The big open.

Lonesome nickered low. Cain gave the horse its head, and Lonesome immediately headed for a small patch of succulent green growing out of sappy ground. Both Lonesome and Animal were hungry and they snapped at grass to all sides as if they couldn't get enough of it. It was the first good feeding they'd had since leaving the meadow beside the Shaken Grass. The horse moved under Cain, the high shoulders rocking the saddle, making the leather cinches creak. The mule's movements as it grazed stirred up the lifeless head of the bighorn. The horse and mule tromped around in the tender patch. Presently the air was sweet with the smell of crushed greens.

Cain relaxed in his saddle. He let his back hump some and the flesh over his belly fold up. He rolled himself a cigarette. He took a match out of his hatband and lit up. The forenoon sun became warm. After a bit he began to heat pleasantly inside his slicker. The sun also dried Lonesome's damp coat. It left gray streaks in the powder-black hair. Some of the streaks resembled the markings of coastlines on a map.

Once more Cain's eyes could not resist tracing out the great curving escarpment of Crimson Wall far below, scarves of rock sheering down from north to south, from where it curved in a bright red crescent out of the footslopes near Antelope to where it vanished in blue shadow near Hidden Country. Green flanks of land stretched to where Red Fork ran south; deep green hills rolled to where the Shaken Grass ran north. And where the grass ran thin, bare folds of soil lay skinned and fleshy red.

He found himself breathing heavy in the thin air. His nose stung from it. His eyes, seeing so sharply, so widely, and so alive to blood racing within, teared vaguely at the corners. Every now and then his lungs sucked deep of the searing air.

"So dummed high up here, when a fly lights for the night it has to settle on the ground."

Right in...