The Last Handful of Clover - Book 2: Gifts Both Light and Dark

2.05 The Cabin

August 25, 1857

When his ghostly body reassembled back at the mouth of Emigration Canyon, Billy was overwhelmed with a physical agony far worse than any he had ever experienced; either in his life, or since his death. And long after the physical pain had faded, his mental anguish lingered, and he felt himself wallowing in a sea of despair that relentlessly tried to claim him and drag him under. His sanity was precarious, but he didn't care. In those hours after his return, he felt that madness was perhaps the only escape he could ever achieve from his unrelenting despair and loneliness.

He hoped he would go mad. But he didn't.

Hours later, looking out at the city below him and the shimmering Oquirrh Mountains far to the west, he came to an inevitable conclusion.

I need to find my parents.

Frances was dead. All the Sowersbys were dead, and he knew no one else in the Utah territory. There was nothing to hold him here. His parents would have reached California weeks ago, and hopefully by now his father had established his ranch and was building the life that he had promised to him and his mother. He knew it could take him months or years to find them. But that didn't matter. He literally had all the time in the world.

Having a goal and a reason to go on helped Billy to battle back the despair that was assaulting his mind. And when his strength was back, he stood.

Without looking back, he trudged to the West.

The walking was slow, and Billy still had the impatience of the living, and of the young. Eventually he broke into a trot, and was surprised to find that, even at a moderate pace, he did not feel winded from the effort. Pushing his limits he broke into a run, and in no time he was zooming through the streets of Salt Lake City faster than any stagecoach, faster perhaps than even a man on a swift horse! The sensation was unlike anything he had ever imagined, and he was soon passing the covered wagons that were heading west out of the city, exhilaration coursing through him and feeling truly alive again for the first time since his death.

He ran through the night, passing an occasional campfire in the plains and mountains that extended around the Great Salt Lake. And the morning found him descending the last range of hills between Salt Lake City and what would eventually become the state of Nevada. In front of him lay the endless expanses of the Bonneville Salt Flats—the remnants of an ancient inland sea, now gashed and rutted with the passing of thousands of wagons and horses. He knew from stories his father told that it was more than sixty miles across the Flats, at which point he'd climb into the first low mountain ranges of the Great Basin, each parallel range separated by miles of featureless sagebrush.

Feeling stronger than ever, he raced across those sixty miles, dreaming of the land of California, as his father had described it to him on so many nights in Missouri.

As night fell, he saw the outlines of the far mountains, rolling gently away from the white salt upon which he ran. He saw the wagon tracks converging as the salt became more firm under their wheels, all leading toward a point in the far foothills. He was nearing the end of the Salt Flats at the very moment the sun fell below the far horizon in the West.

Just as he was about to cross the last stretch of white sand, it hit him again.

He knew instantly what it was. This was the same feeling of being torn apart, of shattering, that he had felt as he leapt toward the vomiting figure of the Dutchman, far to the south. But this time, the agony hit him far harder and faster than it had in the south. This time, the wrenching sensation was instant agony, as if he had just run through a net of fish hooks that had torn all the flesh from his bones. The feeling was so sudden and so excruciating that he didn't even have time to slow, let alone stop. His bodily momentum carried him past the same barrier he had encountered in the south, and all he could do was scream out a curse he had only heard his father utter once, when he'd nearly lost a thumb to the blade of a plow.