they were dangerous as hell. He remembered a cave about a mile or so back and turned, heading for it on the run. Halfway there, it started to rain. There was nothing subtle about it. It was an immediate downpour.
Staggered by a sudden lack of visibility, he stopped to take stock of his location. The best he could figure he had another fifteen minutes before he got to the cave, but the raindrops were peppering his shoulders and hat like bullets. He pulled his hat low upon his forehead, leaned into the wind, and started to walk. Other than the fact that he was getting cold and wet, he thought nothing of it. He’d lived his entire adult life at the mercy of the elements. It wasn’t the first time he’d been rained on. It wouldn’t be the last.
But in his haste to reach shelter, he took a wrong turn. On the mountains, in a storm, with visibility less than ten yards, it was understandable. It came close to being fatal.
One minute Henry was on solid ground and running and the next thing he knew the ground had disappeared from beneath his feet. In the space of time it took to take a breath, he’d fallen off the mountain.
He knew when he hit the first tree that the fall would be bad. Instinctively, he tightened his grip on his gun. Later it would occur to him that he should have let it go and grabbed at a tree, but now it was too late. Everything had been set in motion. Down, down, down, he fell, bouncing from bush, to tree, to rock, every jolt racking his body with pain.
And then as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. The cessation of motion was almost as startling as the fall had been. He lay for a moment, shivering from shock and assessing his injuries. Rain hammered upon his head. He groaned and tried to move then passed out from the pain.
Much later, it was the sound of rushing water that brought him to his senses. This time when he opened his eyes, the thought crossed his mind that, if he could have reached his rifle, he might have given some thought to shooting himself now to get it over with.
The best that he could tell, he’d gone feet first into a dead fall, and was now wedged between it and some rocks, sort of like forcing a square peg into a round hole. One arm was folded up beneath him while the other was over his head and caught in the gap between two large rocks.
The weight of his body and the momentum of the fall had driven him deep into the morass. One leg pained him terribly, the other he couldn’t feel or move at all. His rifle was underneath him and the water in the nearby creek was only a couple of yards from where he was trapped. And it was rising. By his reckoning, he had an hour, maybe two before he drowned.
Henry hadn’t planned on dying today, but unless a miracle occurred, it was going to happen. He kept telling himself that he’d lived a full life and that if he had to die someplace, then Plenty Valley was the place it should be. He’d been happier here than anywhere he could remember. But he also hadn’t lived to be sixty-three years old by being a quitter. He began to struggle, yet no matter how hard he tried, could not pull himself free. It crossed his mind then how sad old Parson would be when he found his body.
A shaft of lightning cracked nearby, followed by the scent of sulfur and something burning. The fire soon went out, but in spite of the rain, the scent stayed with Henry. He wondered if he would be sniffing sulfur and brimstone where he was going.
An hour passed, maybe more, but it was hard for him to tell. All he knew was that his right ear was full of rainwater and it was getting on his nerves. And though the horror of the rising creek became more and more apparent, the continual downpour had offered Henry an opportunity that hadn’t been there before. The dead fall beneath him was shifting and getting looser by the minute—so loose that he’d been able to reach down to the point that he could feel the sight on his gun. With a little more effort, he moved his hand along the barrel until