This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  “Back at camp, the Two Footed Shit found Red Arrow’s youngest wife alone, and though she fought, he took her there in the dirt.

  “Red Arrow came back then, caught the Two Footed Shit raping his wife. When Red Arrow cried out, the taipo stuck a knife in his friend’s belly. The Two Footed Shit looked around. Couldn’t find Metsa, Mountain Lamb, Red Arrow’s first wife. She’d seen. Ran and hid.

  “The stinking taipo couldn’t let Red Arrow’s young wife live. She would tell. And he didn’t know that Mountain Lamb had seen him kill her husband. So he cut the young wife’s throat and carried both of the bodies to the river the taipo call Platte. He just let them float away.

  “Mountain Lamb was headed home, alone, on foot, horrified. That’s when the Crow found her. Took her to their village.

  “The Two Footed Shit knew she must have seen, so he started back to the Wind River, thinking he would find her on the way and kill her. But he didn’t. He came back to our band and my sister’s lodge. But he was always out hunting alone, searching to see if Mountain Lamb was coming. And for more than a year, she did not.”

  Antelope Fire almost trembled, his hands knotted. “When she did come, late the next summer, the Two Footed Shit had decided that she was dead. Mountain Lamb was no one’s fool. She came to my lodge at night, told me what had happened. She had had time to think during her stay with the Crow. She knew that if she just showed up, it would be a fight in the camp, that other people might be hurt. So we waited. Then one night after a father dance, when several naatea had gathered, she appeared at the fire as a surprise.

  “The Two Footed Shit could do nothing but call her a liar, and when he came at her, I was there with a knife.” He pointed to his cheek. “He gave me this before others intervened. We tied him up, but before morning, he had vanished, taking four of the horses. We were never able to catch him.”

  Butler turned to his father. “Is this true?”

  “I couldn’t understand that singsongy clucking he was making.”

  “About Red Arrow, and his wives … did you kill them?”

  “That’s all a bald-faced lie. All of it.” Paw’s face had stiffened into his arrogant and appalled expression. “If I could, I’d face him down over a pistol!”

  Dear God, he’d seen it so many times. Butler sagged, his heart like lead in his chest. With an aching sorrow that leached the starch from his bones, he turned to Antelope Fire. “I am so sorry. I never knew. None of us did.”

  “What?” Paw cried, struggling to rise. “You taking his side?”

  Butler stalked up to his father, who balanced on his crutch. “You raped a man’s wife! Gutted him! Hid the bodies, and denied it!”

  “You had to be there! I don’t know what happened! I’d been through most of a jug!” He gestured feebly with his mutilated hand, eyes half rabid with worry. “They was just Indians, boy!”

  “Just Indians? Like my wife? My friends? My naatea? Just Papists? Just Mexicans? Just a whore? Is there nothing in your life that you can be proud of? Is it all ruination and lies?” He pointed at his father’s lodge. “Get out of my sight, Paw.”

  Paw blinked as if confused. Glanced sidelong to where the others were watching, Mountain Flicker whispering a translation in Dukurika.

  “You don’t know shit, boy.” Then Paw turned. Awkwardly he propped himself. Reached down for his parfleche, and clinging to it and his crutch, stumped awkwardly to his lodge.

  Butler glanced around, seeing his men. In a ring at the edge of camp, they watched him through stunned eyes. Then he lowered his head, tears of shame and sorrow mixing as they trickled down his cheeks.

  He sank to his knees, bereft. He didn’t hear Hard Hand or Antelope Fire leave. Didn’t know how long he knelt there, but Mountain Flicker placed a hand on his shoulder, saying “I hurt with you.”

  “What should I do with him? He can’t stay here. Not among the newe. It will be all over camp that my father is a rapist and murderer, and we’re keeping him here.”

  “Puhagan will be back tonight. We can ask him.”

  Butler pursed his lips. “When I was little, I worshiped my father. Thought he was the most powerful and grand man alive. He made me read, encouraged me to be a scholar. And it was all built on lies.”

  “We cannot help who our parents are. They have different souls, nadainape.”

  “Is there anything else he can do to disgrace me?”

  The bang of a pistol shot made him jump.

  Scrambling to Paw’s lodge, he pulled back the cover. The smoking revolver lay on the hides. Paw sagged against the poles, eyes oddly bulged and bloodshot, crimson leaking from his mouth, nose, and ears.

  115

  June 2, 1868

  Butler looked back at the packhorse that followed along on its lead. The travois poles extended in an X above the horse’s withers. The blanket-wrapped body was riding perfectly where it had been lashed to the travois frame.

  Beneath the blanket, Paw’s head had been tightly wrapped; his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears covered with rawhide bindings. At Flicker’s instructions, that had been done to keep his breath soul and dream soul trapped inside his corpse along with the mugwa, or body soul. The precautions were necessary. Not just because Paw had been a violent suicide, but that he’d been a rapist, murderer, and liar.

  It wasn’t that suicide was prohibited among the Dukurika, just that there were acceptable methods: most generally walking away into a snowstorm; refusing food in the middle of a famine; leaping into raging rivers; or flinging oneself from a high point.

  Blowing one’s brains out with a gun in the midst of a social gathering wasn’t among them.

  It had been Butler’s decision to drag the corpse not only out of Owl Creek Valley but clear out of Shoshoni territory before he finally disposed of the body.

  Had he not done so, a half-terrified Mountain Flicker had promised that every lodge in the valley would have been packed and gone by morning. And not only that, but the local bands wouldn’t have returned to the vicinity, fearing Paw’s malignant and evil spirits.

  Why inflict such intense and long-term misery upon the people?

  Glancing back again, Butler called, “Even in death you’re a perpetual goddamned pestilence, aren’t you?”

  He looked up at the tan sandstone ridges to the south. The flat stone beds were dotted with juniper and pines. And beyond them lay the Owl Creek divide, its timbered skyline rounded and rumpled.

  He’d take the trail south across Mud Creek, past Rattlesnake Springs, through the Red Canyon and over the pass to the Wind River Basin. From there he’d top the Sweetwater Rim, hit the Oregon Trail, and follow the telegraph to Muddy Gap. Then he would cross to the Laramie Basin, and somewhere in that vastness, be far enough away from Shoshoni country that Paw’s malignant ghost, if it ever escaped, could harass the occasional passing Arapaho or Sioux. Because he sure wouldn’t worry any white man.

  “Got to bury you, Paw. All tied up like you are, we want your ghost deep underground where it can’t get out and bother decent people.”

  “Y’all expect him to answer?” Corporal Pettigrew asked as he marched at the head of the men. They followed in the wake of the travois, tramping along on either side of the two drag marks.

  “Absolutely not, Corporal.” Butler smiled to himself. “With most of a company of dead men already at my beck and call, what do I need another one for?”

  “Don’t make fun of us, suh,” Jimmy Peterson called back.

  “Just feeling sorry for myself, Private. Thinking that Water Ghost Woman played me for a fool. Told me I could heal, and gave me the one man on earth I should have let die.”

  Butler shook his head, swaying in time to the horse’s pace. “If I hadn’t interfered, but let Paw die back in Red Canyon, we’d still be with Mountain Flicker, laughing and eating fine. The Dukurika wouldn’t be staring nervously over their shoulders. Hard Hand wouldn’t be thinking his daughter married a monster’s son, and Puhagan wouldn’t be wondering what h
e’s going to have to do to cleanse me of soul pollution before I can return.”

  “Soul pollution, suh?” Frank Thompson asked.

  “Reckon that means the cap’n’s gonna have to do another puha journey to the Underworld, with all them sweats and fasting,” Phil Vail told them.

  Kershaw spoke up for the first time. “Not only that, Cap’n, but this time of year? Yor paw’s gonna be turning a mite ripe. Reckon he’s already drawing flies, comprendre?”

  “We could drop him anywhere,” Pettigrew groused. “How are the Dukurika gonna know any different?”

  “We will not.” Butler shot a hard glance at the recalcitrant corporal. “Paw might have been a liar, but I’m not. I gave my word. We will see this through in the honorable tradition of Company A, Second Arkansas.”

  “Be just as like to run into a passel of angry Sioux out here all alone.”

  Butler thinned his eyes. “And what chance does a party of Sioux have against a company of the Second Arkansas Infantry? As upset as I am right now? We could take half the Sioux nation.”

  “What about Philip, Cap’n?” Kershaw asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Reckon he ought ter know ’bout his father, le père, oui?”

  Butler winced. Philip had hated Paw, but he was still the man’s son. And there were only the two of them left.

  You can write him a letter from one of the stage stations on the Overland Trail.

  But after lecturing the men on honor, was that really the thing to do?

  116

  June 6, 1868

  The thrill of the hunt pulsed with each beat of Billy’s heart. End-of-the-Tracks was all that Parmelee had promised. And sure, it was small-time compared to the stakes he was used to. But that old joy of watching the approach of prey—in this case a half-staggering man appearing from the tent door—of seeing Win Parmelee reach up and touch the brim of his hat to signal the go-ahead, and then following behind the unknowing victim just plain made Billy’s bones quiver.

  Adding to the thrill was the sense of danger, of knowing that a mistake would mean discovery, flight through the darkness, and the chance of being caught.

  Billy, moving silently on his feet, stepped behind the latest target. The man was big, heavy through the shoulders. Most track builders were, from pick-and-shovel men, to graders, to the ones who carried the ties or unloaded the rails. Let alone the ones who swung the jackhammers all day pounding in spikes.

  Win Parmelee’s weighted-leather sap wasn’t the tool for this kind of hunting. Instead, Billy carried a pick handle. More wallop and less room for error.

  The man he now crept after was whistling softly, wobbling as he made his way to the line of outhouses. Billy set himself, swung.

  Some sense warned the mark at the last instant; he ducked. The thick end of the pick handle glanced off the side of the man’s head. Definitely not enough of a blow to flatten him, but enough to topple him. As he hit the ground, he let loose with a loud bellow, followed by, “Son of a bloody bitch!”

  Billy made a quick calculation of his chances, figured it was time to blow, and with all his might, slung the pick handle at the galoot. He didn’t look back as he made fast tracks for where he’d left Locomotive.

  Shouts rose behind him, with calls of “Thief!” and “Some dirty beat’s just tried to bushwhack me!” “Where’d he go?” “That way! Christ, my head hurts!”

  Billy rounded a corner just as a man with a lantern emerged from a shebang shanty. Billy plowed straight into the chucklehead. Face-to-face as they collided. He had an image of a green-eyed man with a mashed nose, thick beard, and breath like rotted onions.

  Then Billy was on his feet, half blinded by the lantern. Blinking at the afterimages, he damn near made a wrong turn. Caught himself at the last instant, and plunged between the two wagons that hid his horse. He paused only long enough to tighten Locomotive’s cinch, then he was in the saddle, letting the big black horse find his own way in the dark.

  “By God.” Billy chuckled to himself. “That was some doings!”

  Hard to admit, but he hadn’t had that much fun for a coon’s age. Reaching down, he felt the thick stash of cash he’d wadded into his shirt for safekeeping. Good enough for a road stake, and Parmelee wouldn’t be asking any stupid damn questions about Billy Hancock’s money.

  “All right, Win, you old fog, that ought to just about do us, don’t you think?”

  Riding with Win was almost like old times, but different. Billy had always been able to trust Danny. Win was different, unnerving in ways. The man took pains to hide it, but couldn’t quite corral his belief that he was Billy’s better. Behind it all, Parmelee was driven, possessed of a plumb cruel streak. He just plain hated this whore he called the Goddess, and he downright loathed George Nichols.

  But most irksome of all, Billy knew he was being played. That behind Win’s smiles and assurances of friendship, the son of a bitch was figuring to set Billy up for George’s murder. That somehow he’d be left holding the bag.

  “Yep,” Billy told the night. “But we’ll see who’s playing who, Win.”

  117

  June 15, 1868

  Doc stopped beside one of the freshly planted trees that lined Grant Street. Denver had its own committee dedicated to the planting of trees; they’d popped up along all the major streets. He stared up at the two-story brick behemoth of a house.

  The design, with two round towers, one on either side, had reportedly come from New York. The big corner lot on Grant Street and Colfax Avenue originally had been purchased by a young man whose father owned a prosperous foundry in Cleveland. The young man—expecting to open a Denver branch of the family business—had begun construction on the great house, only to relocate to Cheyenne upon notice that the railroad would be routed to the north.

  Sarah had been able to pick it up for a song, and even now workmen were still finishing the interior. What Sarah would do with the fifteen-room monstrosity—let alone how she’d maintain it—was anyone’s guess.

  Some of the windows were still boarded over, awaiting the arrival of beveled-glass panes that would eventually overlook the street. The yard was dirt, though to Doc’s eye, it had plenty of promise for a fine garden.

  Doc shifted his grip on his medical bag and nodded to Pat O’Reilly’s driver where he waited out front on the phaeton’s seat. So, Pat was here. Doc always felt uncomfortable in the man’s presence, knowing that he’d been one of Aggie’s regulars. And how did one act casually with a man known to have paid handsomely to bed one’s sister on multiple occasions?

  Ah, the tangled webs we spin!

  Skipping up the stairs, Doc knocked at the pine-plank door, having heard that an engraved-oak specimen was somewhere between St. Louis and Cheyenne.

  Sarah opened the door, smiling as she ushered him in. In the foyer he divested himself of his hat and coat, glancing around. The stairs in the back still lacked a handrail. Sawdust seemed to be everywhere.

  “Philip, welcome. It’s good to see you.” Sarah stepped close and kissed him on the cheek. “Come. Pat’s already here.”

  She led Doc through what would be the parlor and to a dining room off the kitchen. A south-facing bay window provided plenty of light. The back wall would be a built-in hutch, to be filled with plates, cups, and porcelain. The drawers were for flatware, napkins, and the like. Everything remained unfinished—including the utilitarian table and mismatched chairs where Pat waited.

  The Irishman stood, taking Doc’s hand, and crying, “Ah, Doctor, a good day t’ ye. And I hope yer doing roight foine.”

  “Pat, good to see you.”

  “Can I get you a drink, Philip?” Sarah asked, offering a bottle. “Sherry. Just the thing for an early afternoon.”

  “A small glass,” he told her, setting the bag on the table.

  Pat gave it an askance inspection. “Expecting trouble, are ye, Doc?”

  “Showing off.” He unbuckled the strap. “I’d forgotten I’d ordered
them, it’s taken so long.” He lifted his prize.

  “That doesn’t look so frightening,” O’Reilly decided as he took the small glass rod. “What is it?”

  “The new Allbut-patent medical thermometer. Just six inches! I’d used thermometers at medical school. Big things, over a foot long. But look how small and compact. Imagine, a thermometer that small!”

  Sarah set his glass of sherry before him. “But Philip, whatever is it good for?”

  “Accurately diagnosing and measuring a patient’s fever, dear sister. And look at this.” He lifted out his true delight.

  “Now, that scares the bejeezus outta me.” Pat made a face.

  “It’s called the binaural stethoscope.”

  Sarah pulled up a chair, staring at the thing. “What on earth would you ever use it for?”

  “Auscultation,” Doc told her. “Isn’t that apparent? It’s such an improvement over the old monaural tubes.” At her blank look he said, “I can listen for irregularities in heartbeat, hear the lungs as they breathe. It will make the detection and treatment of pneumonia so much faster.”

  Pat nodded. “Now that, Doc, is worth something. I lost nigh on thirty men to pneumonia last winter alone.”

  For long minutes, they listened to each other’s hearts, Sarah and Pat absolutely enchanted. All three of them were within a degree of 98 degrees Fahrenheit.

  “And you think it will change medicine?” Pat marveled. “It’s not jist amusement?”

  “It will,” Doc promised.

  Sarah tossed back her sherry and refilled her glass. “The reason I asked you here, Philip, is to discuss a different kind of payoff. How are we doing, Pat?”

  He gave her a saucy wink. “Closing the deal, lassie.”

  “What deal is this?” Doc asked.

  Sarah’s smile was triumphant. “You remember the company we set up after I sold the Angel’s Lair? I need your signature on some Hancock and Hancock documents. We’re selling our interests in a mining venture. Just speculation.”