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Carson's massacre at the old pueblo.
Ryan stood up, waist-high out of the top of the wag, and braced himself
against the pitching and jolting.
He tried to make out what the ground was like on either side of the ruined
highway, deciding that it could be passable.
The Trader called down to Beulah, trying to find out how much farther before
they were due to turn off toward the mountains.
"Close. Any sign of Questa?"
Both the Trader and Ryan peered ahead. The Trader had a battered pair of Zeiss
glasses, and he called down for Hun to stop while he checked the vicinity.
The engine ticked over quietly. Ryan spotted a lone coyote, head and tail
down, scurrying along a shallow ridge a half mile to the west. Apart from
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that, there was no sign of life anywhere. Not even a buzzard circling
optimistically overhead.
"See anything?"
The Trader shook his head and lowered the binoculars. "Nothing. If there was a
town there once, it sure ain't there now. Can't see no sign of any road going
east, neither."
"Want me to go on?" Hun asked. "Left or right?"
"Right's clearer," Ryan said.
"Must've been like this in the old frontier days of the Conestoga wagons,"
J.B. said a couple of hours later.
"Ox-drawn, weren't they?" Ryan asked, coughing as he swallowed dust.
The trail was so rough that most of the two crews had gotten out of the wags
after the Trader had given them permission. They preferred to walk rather than
ride in the sickly, sweltering metal boxes that the war wags had become. Speed
had dropped to a little less than a steady walking pace.
"Mostly oxen. Some mules. Not many horses. Funny. Most old vids show horses
pulling their canvas-
topped wags."
J.B. had tugged his fedora down low over his eyes and knotted a scarf around
his mouth and nose to make breathing easier.
"You told me once that a lot of the cowmen were black, didn't you? Never see
that on the old vids, neither."
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Deathlands - Time Nomads
The wags were now going due east, with the lowering sun at their backs. The
Trader was sitting out on top of War Wag One, his head bare, smoke curling
from his cigar. He looked completely relaxed.
"Look at the old bastard," Lex said, panting and sweating along with J.B. and
Ryan. "Like the baron of the whole fucking world."
"If he wanted to be, I guess he could," July said quietly, joining them. "I
never met anyone like the
Trader."
"You never will," Ryan said.
It took them two whole days to cover the miles into the foothills of the
mountains. Beulah was delighted to find that the rough map that Ferryman had
given her was accurate. It had showed the breakup of the highway as well as
the point where the forest began to encroach toward the road. If there'd been
trees in close a few miles farther back, the journey would have come to a
sudden halt. As it was, the war wags were able to move back onto the ribbon of
highway. The seismic devastation lower down on the plain wasn't repeated in
the hills, and they picked up toward ten miles an hour.
It was early in the morning of their third day that the first Indian was
spotted. He was a lone man, ragged-
trousered, bare-chested and clutching what J.B. swore was a nineteenth-century
Springfield carbine. He stood for a few moments in the clear sight of the
waking camp, on a steep slope above a rushing stream of clean water. By the
time that the nearest guard had shouted a warning and begun to draw a bead on
the intruder, the Indian had vanished again.
"Best go to yellow," was Trader's comment.
The finest scout on either war wag was a rear gunner in One, named Garcia. He
had once kept a camp-fire crew entertained for an hour while he tried to
explain the mix of grandparents that had resulted in his dark skin, blond hair
and eyes so dark that they almost disappeared in their sockets. Ryan couldn't
remember that complex web of relationships, but he did recall that there was a
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