Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  Lord B. was squeezing Tasmin’s arm quite tightly— he was very red in the face.

  “Now Papa, Vicky was probably just upset,” Buffum began, but before she could complete her plea, Tasmin dipped her head and gave her father’s clutching hand a quick, hard bite; His Lordship gave a cry and immediately released his daughter’s arm. Blood at once welled up where Tasmin had bitten him.

  Lord Berrybender was too shocked to speak, rather as he had been when Venetia Kennet first delivered her threat—his own daughter had drawn his blood.

  “Being the weaker sex, we women have to use such weapons as we possess, when selfish men attempt to interfere with us,” Tasmin informed him coldly. “A woman’s teeth are not to be taken lightly, as you’ve now discovered.”

  “But . . . but . . . ,” Lord Berrybender stammered.

  “No buts, Father—just leave Vicky alone,” Tasmin told him. ‘And don’t be grabbing me when I have urgent business to conduct.”

  Then she left, leaving a startled Buffum to bandage her father’s bleeding bite.

  4

  Wounds were given every day . . .

  WHEN Tasmin caught up with Pomp she saw to her dismay that there were tears in his eyes. He was fumbling with the rails that enclosed the small pasture where the captive animals grazed: three young elk, several deer, two antelope, four buffalo, and a clumsy young moose calf.

  “Will you wait, please! You’re not supposed to do that,” Tasmin said, with some impatience; she was afraid the wound in his chest might open if he put himself to any strain. But when she saw the tears she regretted her tone.

  “Mr. Stewart’s dead,” Pomp reminded her. “There’s no use keeping these animals penned up any longer— they won’t be going off to Scotland.”

  Of course, Pomp was right. Drummond Stewart’s frightened horse had carried him right into the invading Utes, where he was immediately killed. The animals he had collected might as well be let go, but dismantling fences was not something Pomp needed to be doing when he was so weak he could barely walk.

  Pomp meekly stepped back and let Tasmin take over—it took only a few minutes for her to scatter the light railing that had been keeping the animals in. Two fawns came over and nuzzled Pomp expectantly— sometimes he fed them tidbits, but he had nothing with him today. His own weakness surprised him—he had scarcely walked fifty yards, and yet, on the return, had Tasmin not half carried him, he would have had to sit down and rest.

  Wounds were given every day in the West, and yet Pomp himself had never before suffered so much as a scratch; the fevers, pneumonias, and other ailments that carried off so many, including his mother, had so far spared him. He knew, of course, that the Ute’s arrow had just missed his heart, and that he was lucky to be alive, and yet he was shocked at how completely he seemed to have lost his strength. His legs wobbled—they never had before. His breathing was shallow—he felt unable to get enough air. He doubted whether he could draw a bow or lift a gun—and yet, only two weeks earlier, he had won two wrestling matches, beating Kit Carson easily and even outlasting the wiry Jim Bridger.

  Pomp could tell, from Tasmin’s silence, that she was rather vexed with him; but she stuck with her task and got him back to the pallet. He tried to smile at her, but even his facial muscles seemed tired.

  “I’m going to insist that you mind me, and mind me strictly, for the next few days,” Tasmin said briskly. She had been not only vexed but scared: Pomp’s face was ashen—he looked again as though he might die. Fortunately, once he was on the pallet, his color soon improved. Tasmin ceased to be quite so afraid.

  “I’m sorry,” Pomp said. “I’ve never been sick before. I guess I don’t know how it’s done.”

  “Obey your nurse, that’s how it’s done,” Tasmin said, though his apology caused her to feel less angry. She herself had always enjoyed splendid health; she had never been sick either; but she had borne a child, at the end of a long labor, and she too had been surprised at how exceedingly weak the effort left her—she could at first barely hold her own babe, and it was several days before she could walk confidently across a room.

  “In a week I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she told him. “Just don’t rush things.”

  Pomp’s tears had spilled over—there were tear tracks on his face which Tasmin longed to wipe away; and yet, for a moment, she didn’t. Pomp might take it wrong— indeed, it might be wrong, inasmuch as she was a married woman. One touch, in her experience, was apt to lead to another. She felt somewhat perturbed—why had this question even entered her thoughts?

  Pomp seemed sobered from his close brush with death.

  “If it hadn’t been for you and my mother—and of course, Father Geoff—I’d be as dead as Mr. Stewart,” he said.

  “Your mother?” Tasmin asked in surprise.

  Pomp looked abashed—he rarely spoke of his mother, and in fact had few memories to expose. And yet he felt Tasmin might understand.

  “My mother comes to me sometimes in dreams,” he confessed. “She gives me advice.”

  Tasmin waited—it seemed he might consider that what he was revealing was too private.

  “In the fever I felt like I was flying,” Pomp said. “But then my mother would come and I’d come down.”

  “What did your mother advise, in this instance, if I may ask?” Tasmin asked.

  “She called you ‘the woman who whispers,’” Pomp said. Weary he had slumped against Tasmin’s shoulder.

  “I was whispering to you, trying to keep you alive,” Tasmin told him. “I whispered and your mother advised, and it worked, you see: you’re alive, though you certainly caused us both a good deal of worry.”

  “I was only seven when my mother died,” Pomp said. “I didn’t know her very long.”

  Then he gave Tasmin a sweet, dependent look.

  “Where’s Jimmy?” he asked, as if just remembering that Tasmin had a husband.

  Tasmin shrugged.

  “Gone on a scout, and he took Kit with him, which is annoying,” she told him. “Kit Carson is a very obliging fellow—I can always put him to good use.”

  “It’s because he’s in love with you that he’s obliging,” Pomp remarked. “Nobody else can get him to do a thing.”

  Then he looked at her again.

  “I hope I can know you for a long time,” he told her quietly.

  “I hope so too,” Tasmin said. She looked for their water basin but it was not to be seen, so Tasmin quickly licked a finger and wiped the dusty tear tracks off Pomp’s cheeks.

  “Hold still, mind your nurse, it’s just a little spit,” Tasmin told him. It was a small thing, quickly done, but very pleasing to her, the briefest intimacy, which Pomp accepted, though his mind was elsewhere.

  “I’m more apt to cry for animals than for people,” he said.

  Yes, they’re trusting, like you, Tasmin thought. The spittle had done no real good; Pomp’s cheeks were still a dusty smear, so she jumped up, hurried to the tent, and returned with the washbasin, so she could wash her young man properly—for already, in her mind, she thought of Pomp Charbonneau as hers—though exactly in what sense he was hers, she could not yet say.

  5

  Besides the mule, there was Jim.

  “YOU’VE got longer legs than me—you’d be fine on this tall mule,” Kit suggested.

  “I’m fine enough on Joe Walker’s mare,” Jim informed him. It struck him as curious that he and Kit got along perfectly well when they were part of a big encampment but could not manage to advance even five miles without quarreling when they were alone. They had hardly left the Valley of the Chickens before Kit had started insisting that they trade mounts, a suggestion that Jim ignored. Joe Walker himself had warned Kit about the tall, ornery mule, but Kit had chosen him anyway. Jim himself was quite comfortably mounted on the same little mare that had carried him so smoothly, in the winter past, from the Knife River to the Green, a feat so singular that now all the mountain men coveted the little bay mare.

&nbs
p; Jim did not expect to do anything particularly challenging on this scout with Kit; he mainly wanted to have a look at some of the Platte River country before attempting to lead the Berrybender party to Santa Fe. What he didn’t need was for Kit Carson—the scout with the keenest eyesight of any mountain man and thus a valuable asset if one were traveling in the lands of the Sioux—to start complaining about his mount before they had even been a week on the trail.

  “I’ll give you a dollar if you’ll trade,” Kit said. He had chosen the mule mainly because it was tall—it pleased him to tower over Jim Snow when they rode; Jim, of course, towered over him when they were afoot. The big mule’s trot was so rough that it had already caused Kit to bite his tongue. They had a vast amount of country to explore; Kit didn’t relish the thought of exploring it on a mule whose trot was a threat to his tongue.

  Besides the mule, there was Jim. In camp with the other boys, Jim—though prone to moods—was fairly easygoing. He didn’t feel that he had to work every minute—he might laze around with his beautiful wife and his chubby little boy; or he might listen to Hugh Glass tell lies. Jim didn’t yarn much himself, but he liked to listen to yarns. But the minute the two of them started to go somewhere, even if it was just a moose hunt in the Assiniboine country, Jim Snow became a demon, relentless and unyielding in his aims. He seemed determined to travel far faster than the accepted norm—fifty miles a day was nothing to Jim, though it represented intolerably rapid travel for a man handicapped by a stiff-gaited mule.

  “A dollar’s as high as I’ll go for a switch,” Kit said, annoyed that Jim had ignored what he felt was a reasonable, even a generous offer.

  “No thanks, I’m comfortable,” Jim replied. “You’ll just have to put up with that mule until something better comes along.”

  “How could anything better come along, when we’re out here in the middle of nowhere?” Kit asked, vexed but trying not to let it show.

  Jim shrugged. “The Sioux and the Pawnee have plenty of horses,” he remarked. “If we run into some friendly Indians, maybe you could trade.”

  “No, if we run into any Indians they won’t be friendly—they’ll kill us and take our horses,” Kit replied. On a scout his outlook was invariably pessimistic, besides which he was still bitterly jealous of the fact that Tasmin had married Jim—in Kit’s view the only possible explanation for that union was that Jim was tall. He was unlikely to shrink, either.

  “I wouldn’t have picked this mule if we hadn’t left in such a hurry,” Kit pointed out. “You didn’t even tell your own wife good-bye, which is rude behavior, in my book.”

  “She was trying to save Pomp—I hope she saved him,” Jim replied. “If I’d told her I was leaving she’d just argue—she always argues when I decide to go someplace. If Tasmin had to take time off to fuss, she might have lost Pomp, and that wouldn’t be good.

  “When it’s time to go, it’s better just to go,” he added.

  Kit’s patience, already sorely tried, was further exacerbated by this reply. If he were married to Tasmin he would certainly take the trouble to say good-bye when he left.

  “What would it take to get you to switch mounts, you fool!” Kit asked, in hot exasperation.

  “Stop pestering me—I ain’t switching,” Jim said. He glanced at Kit and saw that he was swollen up like a Tom turkey. If they had been on the ground a fistfight would have been hard to avoid, but fortunately, they were mounted. Jim put his heels into the little mare, who had an easy lope, and went on ahead.

  Kit’s mule, unlike the mare, lacked an easy lope—in fact, had no true lope at all; he seemed to possess only three gaits, rather than the usual four, though it was true that he could sometimes be coaxed into a gait that was just short of a dead run—a “high lope” was what Joe Walker called it. It was difficult to get the mule, whose name was Brantly into this high lope, and even more difficult, once he was in it, to keep him from accelerating into a dead run—so the high lope had almost no practical value. The hard trot was Brandy’s preferred gait, the very mode of travel that had already caused Kit to bite his tongue.

  Now there went Jim, loping off on his little mare, as comfortable as if he were rocking in a hammock. Kit reminded himself again that he was a fool ever to travel with Jim Snow, since when he did, he invariably got the worst of it. Annoyed, he deliberately held Brantly to a slow, stately walk, which meant that Jim Snow was soon little more than a dot on the prairie, so far ahead that he could be of no use at all if an emergency arose.

  Then Jim ceased to be visible, even as a distant dot—Kit was alone on the great gray plain, just the kind of circumstance in which his pessimism was apt to get the better of him. First he might just feel generally low; then he would begin to imagine various ways in which death might come, in which regard Indians usually came to mind first and grizzly bears second. Indians were so good at hiding that they could be hard to spot even on a bare plain: up they’d jump, with their lances and hatchets, and be on him before he could even spur his mule. Grizzly bears too were wily stalkers, able to creep within a few feet of their unsuspecting prey. Kit didn’t suppose that his renowned ability to see farther than anyone else would be much help to him in a crisis, since crises usually happened close to hand. Though it pained Kit to admit it, Jim Snow had superior instincts when it came to sensing trouble, and he was very quick to act. After all, it had been Jim who killed the Indian who had wounded Pomp—killed him so cleanly that the man had not had time to yell for reinforcements.

  So now what had Jim done? He had ridden off and left Kit aboard a mule nobody liked, with a gun that was unreliable. Kit was about to put Brantly in a high lope, in an effort to catch up, when—as if to prove his point—the old Indian appeared. One moment the plain was empty, and the next minute there the man was, standing over what appeared to be a dead horse. A swell of the prairie had concealed him. Kit grabbed his rifle but then realized the Indian was only old Greasy Lake, a harmless prophet who was apt to show up anywhere there was a gathering of any size, in hopes of delivering a prophecy or two in exchange for presents. Faintly, over the prairie breeze, Kit could hear the old man chanting. He spread his arms to the heavens and shuffled around the horse, which turned out to be not quite dead after all. Now and then Kit saw the horse raise his head, though it made no move to get up. The horse, if it was Greasy Lake’s same old nag, was as famous in prairie circles as its master. Mountain men who had first seen the animal twenty-five years earlier and had not supposed it could last a week were astonished to discover that the spavined old nag still hadn’t died. Efforts to figure out how old the horse might be revealed only that it had very good teeth for an animal that had been alive so long.

  Kit thought he might as well investigate—it was better than riding on alone, thinking gloomy thoughts. At first Greasy Lake, who, as usual, was in a kind of trance, paid no attention to Kit at all. He was rattling some kind of rattle as he chanted and shuffled. Kit politely drew rein; he didn’t want to interrupt a religious ceremony. Perhaps Greasy Lake was singing his trusty mount a death song—giving him a proper send-off. To Kit’s astonishment the old horse twitched an ear, lifted its head, and slowly got to its feet. Greasy Lake at once stopped chanting. He tucked his rattle into a little pouch he carried and got ready to mount his horse.

  “I wouldn’t do that, Greasy,” Kit advised. “That horse will die for sure if you put any weight on him.”

  “He’s a strong horse,” Greasy Lake assured him. “I just have to sing to him in the mornings, to get him up. He’s a horse who likes to sleep late.”

  “That horse is older than me,” Kit replied.

  The horse did shiver a bit when Greasy Lake climbed on top of him, but no longer seemed to be about to die.

  “That horse beats all,” Kit remarked. “If I thought he had a year left in him I’d trade for him and let you have this expensive mule.”

  Greasy Lake ignored that remark—he was not such a fool as to trade for a stiff-gaited mule. It annoyed Kit that he
had chosen a mule that not even this old prophet would take. No one had ever been able to pin down quite what tribe Greasy Lake belonged to—his age, like his horse’s, was also hard to calculate. He claimed to be the cousin of various powerful chiefs, but no one could be sure of the truth of anything he said. Because it was his habit to wander constantly over the West, he was known to everyone, from the Columbia River to the Rio Grande. No tribe claimed him, yet no tribe turned him away.

  “Where are you bound for now?” Kit asked—at least the old fellow was usually good for a little conversation.

  “I am on my way to see the Partezon—he is my cousin,” Greasy Lake replied. “He doesn’t like me but I don’t think he’ll kill me.”

  The Partezon, war chief of the Brulé Sioux, was the most feared Indian in the West. It was the Partezon who had destroyed the steamboat the Berrybenders had been traveling on, once it got stuck in the ice above the Knife River. Fortunately Jim Snow had led most of the party overland to Pierre Boisdeffre’s trading post on the Yellowstone, but Captain George Aitken, several passengers, and a number of engages had been cruelly butchered up.

  “I’ve heard that old Partezon’s mean,” Kit said.

  “He is not friendly,” Greasy Lake admitted. “But now I am on my way to look for some white people who can fly. All the tribes are looking for them. I am going to see the Partezon to see if he knows about these flying men. They fly in a little basket attached to some kind of cloud.”

  Kit wanted to laugh—white people couldn’t fly. Probably the old prophet had gone a little daft.

  “I’ve never seen a white person who could fly,” he remarked. “Where are these fellows supposed to be?”

  “They are flying over the Platte,” Greasy Lake said. “If we watch we might see them.”

  “How close are we to the Partezon’s camp?” Kit asked—even mention of the old warrior’s name caused the prairies to take on an aspect of menace— and now Jim Snow was nowhere to be seen.