Riveder Le Stelle, Part V

Luke Altman

This is part of a serial story. Click to read the first, second, third, or fourth parts.

V.

“I should have made camp last night,” he mused aloud.

“They’d have caught you easier then,” Tara responded. “Your gash might have been not only one gash.”

“The fire would have kept those jackals away. It always did in that infernal city we left behind.”

Tara looked at him. “You don’t remember, do you?”

“No, I do not,” Lane said. “Remind me. I’m not the most memory-able chap in the South anymore.”

“The city’s fire never did keep them away; they liked it. They used to sleep on every street corner. They howled at most people that passed them by without giving them so much as a stare. You remember. Those horrid things hated being ignored.” She shuddered a bit, almost as if one had stared her in the face. Lane and Tara were alone, though. No eyes peered out at them in the dusk, except those of the mountain. “I used to be so frightened when I was a little girl. I was terrified of them.”

“Why?” he asked. “Jim Bowie and my Winchester made short work of them.”

“I know,” she replied, “but no one would have dared to face them like that in the city. They’d have torn the man to pieces.”

Tara continued, “When I was a little girl, I used to be terrified that they’d nip at my heels each time I walked past. I was scared that they wouldn’t let me pass on the street I walked down – that I’d have to take another street. The thought that they might like what they found at my heels frightened me, too.”

Lane winced again, inaudibly. Though the gash was healing under the bandages, it would hurt for a few days. Luckily Tara had wrapped her three white napkins around some medicine tablets, and applied them to his shoulder. The danger of infection didn’t exist, unless the jackals had been rabid. But not even those that lived in the city were rabid, and there they fed on much more disease-ridden trash and refuse. At least the wound did not bleed any more. The location of the gash, though, on his left shoulder, did make it hard to move that arm at times.

“I’d have killed any one of those things if they’d have taken a nibble out of you,” he growled.

“I know.” She smiled. They walked on in silence again.

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