Last One Standing

by Derek Rutherford

  ‘That one?’ Grey Fox asked.

  ‘Didn’t feel it,’ One Leg said. He might have even been telling the truth.

  ‘Can I put one in,’ Grey Fox said, stepping away from the window and moving closer to the table where her husband lay. ‘I bet I could make him squeal.’

  ‘I’m sure you could,’ Jia said, slipping another needle into One Leg’s back, this one lower down where his skinny waist looked like he’d been badly burned long ago. ‘It’s easy to make them hurt. The hard thing is to then take away pain.’ Then she said to Grey Fox, ‘You’re in my light.’

  Grey Fox’s smile vanished and her face turned hard and expressionless once more.

  ‘How does it work?’ I asked. I had a tin cup of whiskey in my hand. One Leg had brought a bottle from the barman at the Silver Spur with some of his winnings. I sipped the whiskey and enjoyed the warm feeling as the drink slid down my throat.

  Jia looked up. She was holding a needle in her hand. It picked up a ray of sunlight and sparkled. It reminded me of the way the sunlight reflected off the blades on the roosters’ legs. ‘It’s like moving rocks from a path,’ Jia said. ‘It clears the way and lets everything flow easy.’

  She lifted a corner of the cloth that covered One Leg’s behind, and eased the needle into his buttock. I swear he smiled.

  ‘Whiskey does the same thing for me,’ I said.

  Jia looked at me and said, ‘No, it doesn’t. You just think it does.’

  Then she took another few needles from the velvet case and started working down the other side of One Leg’s back.

  I finished my whiskey about the same time as Jia slipped the last few needles into One Leg’s thigh. Grey Fox, seemingly bored with the fact that her husband wasn’t squealing in pain, was over by the stove chopping potatoes, onions, and chicken. Halfway through the procedure One Leg had actually started snoring.

  ‘Looks like a porcupine,’ I said quietly. ‘Hibernating.’

  One Leg Hawk woke up a few minutes later and then Jia took the needles out as slowly and as carefully as she had inserted them.

  ‘How do you feel?’ I asked him after he had climbed off the table and dressed. The food Grey Fox was cooking smelled good and Jia had asked her to boil a pan of water in which to clean the needles.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I feel like I’ve slept all night.’

  ‘It was just five minutes,’ Grey Fox said. ‘You were snoring.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Jia said, ‘you will notice the difference.’

  ‘Will I be able to dance?’ One Leg said.

  Over by the stove Grey Fox laughed.

  ‘Maybe,’ Jia said.

  ‘It’s a long time since I’ve done a war dance.’

  ‘Do you need to do one?’ I said.

  ‘You’re going after Schmidt?’ One Leg asked me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I need to do a war dance.’

  Jia and I slept on blankets on the floor of the main room. One Leg and Grey Fox slept in a small second room that had been added to the back of their cabin. For breakfast, Grey Fox made us coffee and tea and biscuits and whilst we ate One Leg told us that, last he heard, Moose Schmidt was in a town called Mustang.

  ‘Actually, it’s not a town,’ he said. ‘It’s not even a village. ‘It’s just a string of buildings along a creek. Not much there at all. But Schmidt has friends and they look out for him.’

  He told us where Mustang was and then he looked at the gun that Jia was strapping on, and said, ‘Can you use that?’

  ‘I prefer to fight with my hands. But I’ve practised with the gun. It’s a double-action,’ she said proudly, glancing at me.

  ‘You prefer hands?’ One Leg smiled. Long ago he’d preferred to fight hand to hand, too. It was the warrior way.

  ‘Yes. That’s what I’m good at.’

  One Leg’s smile straightened and he said, ‘If you get close enough to Moose Schmidt to fight with your hands, then you’re too close.’

  I recalled my mother’s words all that time ago: You don’t talk and you don’t ask questions, and you don’t get to wondering on anything. You just shoot him like he did your father. Then you come home.

  One Leg said, ‘When you get to the heights north of Green Springs look back. You’ll see smoke rising from the yard here.’ He looked me straight in the eye. ‘I wasn’t joking about the war dance.’

  Chapter 9

  We rode and we talked, letting the horses pick their own way through the tall grass and along the blue-coloured rock trails that crossed this edge of the prairie. When the early summer sun reached its height and the day was too hot for both us and the animals we found shade in an oak forest that lined a narrow river. We rested and watered ourselves and the horses. Jia told me more of her life in China, of the Taiping revolution of which I knew nothing. She wasn’t sure what was happening in her homeland now, but a few years before it sounded like vast armies had been marching across the country, battling each other, killing thousands – maybe millions of people. Women, she said, had been burned to death in great numbers, and it was one reason she had learned to fight so well. But no matter how well you could fight there were still some things you couldn’t beat. That led her on to tell me of her family’s travels across Europe to London and a place called Limehouse. It was an unforgiving place, dark and dreary, wet and cold, and the Londoners were not at all friendly. But it was much safer than China.

  Jia’s life was full and rich, even though it was filled with hardship and tragedy, and when she asked me about my life I had little to say in comparison. I talked about my father and how things had been with him. I talked of my days and nights in the hills hunting and practising shooting. Jia told me I was too serious. About the practising, I asked, because she’d said she’d done the same with her fighting. No, about life, she said. She told me I should smile and laugh more. I thought about this and realized I had stopped smiling and laughing when Moose Schmidt had killed my father and I realized that I would never be happy unless I killed Schmidt. She said she knew how I felt; but I was handsome when I smiled; and anyway didn’t it make me feel better? I allowed that it did.

  As the afternoon wore on and cooled a little we again rode towards Mustang, which was still more than a day away. In the distance there were buzzards circling over something.

  ‘How are we going to kill him?’ Jia asked, looking at the birds.

  I thought of One Leg saying that Schmidt had friends in Mustang. I was starting to feel a knot in my belly. It was small but it grew with every mile that we rode.

  ‘I’d like him to know why we’re killing him,’ I said. ‘But it might not be possible. It will more’n likely have to be quick.’

  Maybe that belly-knot was creating a tremor in my voice, for she said, ‘I will do it.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘No, it’s not an offer. He killed my father and my mother and my cousin. I will do it.’

  ‘He killed my father, too. I need to kill him.’

  ‘As do I.’

  ‘Then we should do it together,’ I said. ‘We should find out where he lives, maybe watch until he’s alone, and then go and do it. Together.’

  ‘And if he’s never alone?’

  ‘Let’s see when we get there. He will have to be alone sometime.’

  She thought about it for a moment and said, ‘In the outhouse.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He will be alone in the outhouse.’

  I looked across at her and she wasn’t smiling. She was serious. She was still watching the distant buzzards.

  ‘The outhouse?’ I said. ‘We will kill him in the outhouse?’

  She looked at me and held my gaze. ‘It’s a better plan than you’ve got.’

  The sun was far over in the western quarter. The sky was clear and the distant hills seemed to have flattened in the heat-haze. A shimmering horizon stretched away on either side of us. The prairie here had turned into short-grass scrubland. There were few tree
s and plants. No animals other than the birds of prey. It felt like we had been, and would be, riding across this vastness for ever. Trying to formulate a plan in such a place was hard. I needed to see something in front of me, the buildings, the people, the way the trails and tracks led in and out of the settlement. I needed to see Moose Schmidt’s outhouse.

  ‘The outhouse is one plan,’ I said, and forced myself to smile. I wondered if it made me look handsome.

  She smiled back.

  ‘It’s a good plan.’

  We camped in a copse of trees, not far from a creek. The monotonous land had started to undulate a little just before dusk. The trees grew taller. I shot a rabbit with my rifle. We made a fire and cooked the meat and this time we had rice rather than potatoes and Jia used some of her spices and it tasted a whole lot better than my cooking. We fed and watered the horses and we washed in the creek, giving each other privacy, and we both drank tea and we talked some more, laughing as we recalled One Leg grinning secretly as he lay naked on the table the evening before. I took some time cleaning and loading her gun for her. Then we slept beneath the stars. In the middle of the night it grew cold and Jia carried her blanket across to where I was sleeping. She lay down against me and covered us both with her blanket. I listened to her breathing and she wrapped an arm around me. I think she did it in her sleep.

  Late the next day we arrived at Mustang.

  The town was deceptive in the dusk.

  We looked down upon it from a ridge, hidden by pines, but close. At first glance it appeared Mustang was just a handful of buildings straddling a rough track that one would be hard-pushed to get a horse and cart along. There was a burned out lodge at the nearest edge, a few cabins, and then a larger two-storey building with a veranda running round the outside of the first floor. Then came several false-fronted structures and a few more log cabins. But the more we looked, the more we saw. There were other houses and sheds back from the main road, and a couple higher up on the slopes. In the distance, on the hill side, was a cluster of bigger buildings. Maybe a mine, or a mill, I thought. On closer inspection I saw the roof appeared to have collapsed. It was in a state of disrepair. In fact, Mustang as a whole looked to be in a state of disrepair.

  It was surely too warm for the residents to have many fires lit, but smoke curled upwards from the chimney in one of the huts midway between us and the town centre, if the place could be described as such. More smoke came from the chimney of one of the false-fronted buildings. As the night darkened, lights became apparent through the windows of that false-fronted building, and when the breeze blew towards us I could hear voices and laughter and, I fancied, a piano. The saloon, I guessed. A dog meandered along the street, sniffing at this and that, and a woman and a man came out of the saloon, hand in hand, and walked a few yards down to the two-storey building. I picked out horses tied to a rail a few buildings further into town. There were wagons parked along the side of the street.

  There were several piles of rough lumber on a track that ran off the main road, and if I followed that track upwards it disappeared into the treeline on the far side of the valley. More lights appeared. I saw a few more people walking towards the saloon. I saw a man come out the back of the bar and go into the outhouse in the yard. I saw two Indians come out of the building just beyond the saloon and climb onto the two horses. They said something to each other, one of them leaned over and appeared to spit on the ground, and then they rode out of town, in the direction away from Jia and I.

  It looked like a town that was struggling to survive but was just holding on.

  ‘Do you know what Moose Schmidt looks like?’ Jia whispered.

  ‘I have a Wanted poster with a drawing of him. It’s a few years old but I know his face. You told me he has a limp. I know from One Leg that he is a big man, tall and heavy and muscular.’

  ‘My mother described him to me in her letters,’ Jia said. ‘Yes, he is big and has a limp. He walks with a stick, she said, and leans his weight to the right. He moves slowly. He had a beard – maybe still does – and dark hair with grey in it that was bushy and curly. Blue eyes. Bright blue eyes.’

  ‘Would you like to see the poster?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  I went back into the trees where we had left the horses. The poster was folded up carefully in the bottom of a saddlebag. I took the picture back to Jia and in the light of the rising moon we looked down upon the face of the man we had come to kill.

  ‘My mother wrote that he wears a gun on his left hip, despite being right-handed.’

  ‘His right hand is holding his stick,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Then: ‘Do you think he’s down there?’

  I looked again at the darkening town. The air was cooler now and the piano music was much clearer.

  ‘One Leg said this is where he is.’

  She looked at me and in the moonlight her skin was as smooth and as perfect as a gold satin dress that my father had once bought my mother. Her eyes were as deep and dark as a well.

  ‘And we’re going to kill him together?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, feeling that knot getting ever bigger in my stomach.

  Our plan was to watch, and if it took a whole day, so be it. If it took two days, so be it. We had both waited years already. If Moose Schmidt was here we would see him, and watch him, and when we knew where he lived we would do what we needed to do.

  At one point Jia took delight in pointing out to me that almost every cabin in Mustang had an out-house. We laughed quietly in the dark trees and looked at each other’s silhouettes and she reached out and touched my arm and I tried to understand if there was something more than revenge happening here.

  But before I could think on it any further, we saw Moose Schmidt limping through Mustang towards us.

  It had to be Moose. A big man with a stick, leaning heavily to the right. He had the beard and he was here in Mustang.

  What were the odds that it was someone else?

  He shuffled along Main Street in our direction, the moonlight illuminating him, paused outside a cabin that, apart from the one that was burned out, was the closest one to us, and he looked up at the clear night sky. He turned around very slowly as if examining the stars. At one point he was looking directly at us, but I knew we were invisible in the trees. Then he turned and went into the cabin.

  My heart was racing. My hands felt cold and damp. I breathed through my mouth, taking the air deep into my chest, trying to calm myself.

  It was Moose Schmidt for sure.

  We were so close to the man that had killed our kin.

  ‘He looks old,’ Jia whispered.

  ‘And he’s alone,’ I said. ‘Unless someone else had been in that cabin ever since we got here.’

  ‘There’s been no smoke.’

  ‘It’s not too cold,’ I said.

  ‘People still cook in the evening,’ Jia said. ‘And anyway it does get cold at night.’

  ‘So, he could be alone.’

  ‘And he looks old,’ she said again. I thought of the roosters fighting and of Reuben giving out odds. Did the fact that Moose looked old make our own odds better?

  ‘Let’s sit tight,’ I said. ‘Let the town go to sleep.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Then we’ll go down there and do it.’

  We waited two, maybe three, hours. We’d been prepared to wait for days so a few hours was easy. The moon moved gently along the line of the Mustang valley. The night did grow cold, but we were sweating with anticipation of what lay ahead.

  I’d like to say I considered – and questioned – how easy it had been to find him. But it didn’t cross my mind.

  When there had been no movement – except for animals – in Mustang for what seemed like an hour, I whispered to Jia, ‘Let’s do it.’

  We slipped out of the cover of the trees and very slowly, very carefully, and very silently we eased ourselves down the slope and into Mustang.

  We paused, hidden behind the
burnt-out skeleton of the cabin next door to the one that we had seen Moose go into. We waited some more. There was no movement. Mustang was sleeping soundly.

  So we crept forwards to Moose Schmidt’s cabin.

  Moose Schmidt was snoring.

  I glanced at Jia. She was in the dark shadows outside Schmidt’s cabin. I couldn’t see her expression, just the gleam of moonlight on her cheek bones. I pressed lightly on Schmidt’s door. It was latched. I reached out and lifted the latch. It squeaked, but it was the quietest of squeaks. Schmidt carried on snoring.

  I pushed against the door again. It was a heavy door. I noticed that there were old brackets midway up that would have once held a hefty piece of timber to bar the door. It looked as if the door had been taken from somewhere else and reused on this house. Maybe from the mill upon the hill that had looked abandoned?

  I pressed harder and the heavy door eased opened an inch.

  There was the slightest rub of wood on wood, but nothing loud.

  Another inch.

  My right hand rested on my gun. Jia already had hers drawn.

  I pushed the door further open, it swung easily now on oiled hinges and I had to hold back its weight so it didn’t swing all the way through its arc and crash into the inside wall. The room smelled musty as if it hadn’t been aired in a long time. I felt the interior warmth against my face.

  I forced myself to breathe slowly, but my heart was beating so wildly I felt sure it would wake Schmidt.

  I could see inside the house now. It was dark, but moonlight shone through a window and illuminated a large kitchen-come-living room. Where the thick window frames blocked the light, a crucifix-shaped shadow was cast across the room. There was an unlit stove, a table, chairs, a kitchen bench. There were two dishes on the table, a bottle of whiskey, half empty. Nothing more. It was sparsely furnished and I figured Schmidt must live alone. There was a single door set in the far wall.

  I took my first step into the house.