The Searchers

by Alan Lemay

  She became perfectly still for a moment. When she moved again, one hand stirred the skillet, while the other brought a torn-open letter out of the breast of her robe, and held it out to him. He recognized the letter that had been left with Aaron Mathison for Amos. His eyes were on her face, questioning, as he took it.

  “We hoped you’d want to stay on,” she said. All the liveliness was gone from her voice. “But I guess I knew. Seems to be only one thing in the world you care about any more. So I stole it for you.”

  He spread out the single sheet of ruled tablet paper the torn envelope contained. It carried a brief scrawl in soft pencil, well smeared.

  Laurie said, “Do you believe in second sight? No, of course you don’t. There’s something I dread about this, Martie.”

  The message was from a trader Mart knew about, over on the Salt Fork of the Brazos. He called himself Jerem (for Jeremiah) Futterman—an improbable name at best, and not his own. He wasn’t supposed to trade with Indians there any more, but he did, covering up by claiming that his real place of business was far to the west in the Arroyo Blanco, outside of Texas. The note said:

  I bougt a small size dress off a Injun. If this here is a peece of yr chiles dress bring reward, I know where they gone.

  Pinned to the bottom of the sheet with a horse -shoe nail was a two-inch square of calico. The dirt that grayed it was worn evenly into the cloth, as if it had been unwashed for a long time. The little flowers on it didn’t stand out much now, but they were there. Laurie was leaning over his shoulder as he held the sample to the light. A strand of her hair was tickling his neck, and her breath was on his cheek, but he didn’t even know.

  “Is it hers?”

  He nodded.

  “Poor little dirty dress …”

  He couldn’t look at her. “I’ve got to get hold of a horse. I just got to get me a horse.”

  “Is that all that’s stopping you?”

  “It isn’t stopping me. I’ll catch up to him. I got to.”

  “You’ve got horses, Martie.”

  “I—what?”

  “You’ve got Brad’s horses. Pa said so. He means it, Martie. Amos told us what happened at the Warrior. A lot of things you left out.”

  Mart couldn’t speak for a minute, and when he could he didn’t know what to say. The skillet started to smoke, and Laurie went to set it to the back of the range.

  “Most of Brad’s ponies are turned out. But the Fort Worth stud is up. He’s coming twelve, but he’ll outgame anything there is. And the good light gelding—the fast one, with the blaze.”

  “Why, that’s Sweet-face,” he said. He remembered Laurie naming that colt herself, when she was thirteen years old. “Laurie, that’s your own good horse.”

  “Let’s not get choosey, Bub. Those two are the ones Amos wanted to trade for and take. But Pa held them back for you.”

  “I’ll turn Sweet-face loose to come home,” he promised, “this side Fiddler’s Crick. I ought to cross soon after daylight.”

  “Soon after—By starting when?”

  “Now,” he told her.

  He was already in the saddle when she ran out through the snow, and lifted her face to be kissed. She ran back into the house abruptly, and the door closed behind her. He jabbed the Fort Worth stud, hard, with one spur. Very promptly he was bucked back to his senses, and all but thrown. The stallion conveyed a hard, unyielding shock like no horse Mart had ever ridden, as if he were made all of rocks and iron bands. Ten seconds of squealing contention cleared Mart’s head, though he thought his teeth might be loosened a little; and he was on his way.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When Laurie had closed the door, she stood with her forehead against it a little while, listening to the violent hammer of hoofs sometimes muffled by the snow, sometimes ringing upon the frozen ground, as the Fort Worth stud tried to put Mart down. When the stud had straightened out, she heard Mart circle back to pick up Sweet-face’s lead and that of the waspish black mule he had packed. Then he was gone, but she still stood against the door, listening to the receding hoofs. They made a crunch in the snow, rather than a beat, but she was able to hear it for a long time. Finally even that sound stopped, and she could hear only the ticking of the clock and the winter’s-night pop of a timber twisting in the frost.

  She blew out the lamp, crossed the cold dog-trot, and crept softly to her bed. She shivered for a few moments in the chill of the flour-sack-muslin sheets, but she slept between two deep featherbeds, and they warmed quite soon. For several years they had kept a big gaggle of geese, especially for making featherbeds. They had to let the geese range free, and the coyotes had got the last of them now; but the beds would last a lifetime almost.

  As soon as she was warm again, Laurie began to cry. This was not like her. The Mathison men had no patience with blubbering women, and gave them no sympathy at all, so Mathison females learned early to do without nervous outlets of this kind. But once she had given way to tears at all, she cried harder and harder. Perhaps she had stored up every kind of cry there is for a long time. She had her own little room, now, with a single rifle-slit window, too narrow for harm to come through; but the matched-fencing partition was too flimsy to be much of a barrier to sound. She pressed her face deep into the feathers, and did her best to let no sound escape. It wasn’t good enough. By rights, everybody should have been deep asleep long ago, but her mother heard her anyway, and came in to sit on the side of her bed.

  Laurie managed to snuffle, “Get under the covers, Ma. You’ll catch you a chill.”

  Mrs. Mathison got partly into the bed, but remained sitting up. Her work-stiffened fingers were awkward as she tentatively stroked her daughter’s hair. “Now, Laurie.... Now, Laurie....”

  Laurie buried her face deeper in the featherbed. “I’m going to be an old maid!” she announced rebelliously, her words half smothered.

  “Why, Laurie!”

  “There just aren’t any boys—men—in this part of the world. I think this everlasting wind blows ’em away. Scours the whole country plumb clean.”

  “Come roundup there’s generally enough underfoot, seems to me. At least since the peace. Place swarms with ’em. Worse’n ants in a tub of leftover dishes.”

  “Oh!” Laurie whimpered in bitter exasperation. “Those hoot-owlers!” Her mind wasn’t running very straight. She meant owl-hooters, of course—a term applied to hunted men, who liked to travel by night. It was true that the hands who wandered out here to pick up seasonal saddle work were very often wanted. If a Ranger so much as stopped by a chuck wagon, so many hands would disappear that the cattlemen had angrily requested the Rangers to stay away from roundups altogether. But they weren’t professional badmen—not bandits or killers; just youngsters, mostly, who had got into some trouble they couldn’t bring themselves to face out. Many of the cattlemen preferred this kind, for they drifted on of their own accord, saving you the uncomfortable job of firing good loyal riders who really wanted to stick and work. And they were no hazard to home girls. They didn’t even come into the house to eat, once enough of them had gathered to justify hiring a wagon cook. Most of them had joked with Laurie, and made a fuss over her, so long as she was little; but they had stopped this about the time she turned fifteen. Nowadays they steered clear, perhaps figuring they were already in trouble enough. Typically they passed her, eyes down, with a mumbled, “Howdy, Mam,” and a sheepish tug at a ducked hat brim. Soon they were off with the wagon, and were paid off and on their way the day they got back.

  Actually, Laurie had almost always picked out some one of them to idolize, and imagine she was in love with, from a good safe distance. After he rode on, all unsuspecting, she would sometimes remember him, and spin daydreams about him, for months and months. But she was in no mood to remember all that now.

  Mrs. Mathison sighed. She could not, in honesty, say much for the temporary hands as eligible prospects. “There’s plenty others. Like—like Zack Harper. Such a nice, clean boy—”
<
br />   “That nump!”

  “And there’s Charlie MacCorry—”

  “Him.” A contemptuous rejection.

  Her mother didn’t press it. Charlie MacCorry hung around a great deal more than Mrs. Mathison wished he would, and she didn’t want him encouraged. Charlie was full of high spirits and confidence, and might be considered flashily handsome, at least from a little distance off. Up close his good looks seemed somehow exaggerated, almost as in a caricature. What Mrs. Mathison saw in him, or thought she saw, was nothing but stupidity made noisy by conceit. Mentioning him at all had been a scrape at the bottom of the barrel.

  She recognized the upset Laurie was going through as an inevitable thing, that every girl had to go through, somewhere between adolescence and marriage. Mrs. Mathison was of limited imagination, but her observation was sound, and her memory clear, so she could remember having gone through this phase herself. A great restlessness went with it, like the disquiet of a young wild goose at the flight season; as if something said to her, “Now, now or never again! Now, or life will pass you by....” No one who knew Mrs. Mathison now could have guessed that at sixteen she had run away with a tin-horn gambler, having met him, in secret, only twice in her life. She could remember the resulting embarrassments with painful clarity, but not the emotions that had made her do it. She thought of the episode with shame, as an unex-plainable insanity, from which she was saved only when her father overtook them and snatched her back.

  She had probably felt about the same way when she ran off a second time—this time more successfully, with Aaron Mathison. Her father, a conservative storekeeper and a pillar of the Baptist Church, had regarded the Quakers in the Mathison background as benighted and misled, more to be pitied than anything else. But the young shaggy-headed Aaron he considered a dangerously irresponsible wild man, deserving not a whit more confidence than the staved-off gambler—who at least had the sense to run from danger, not at it. He never spoke to his daughter again. Mrs. Mathison forever after regarded this second escapade as a sound and necessary move, regarding which her parents were peculiarly blind and wrong-headed. Aaron Mathison in truth was a man like a great rooted tree, to which she was as tightly affixed as a lichen; no way of life without him was conceivable to her.

  She said now with compassion, “Dear heart, dear little girl—Martin will come back. He’s bound to come back.” She didn’t know whether they would ever see Martin Pauley again or not, but she feared the outrageous things—the runaways, the cheap marriages—which she herself had proved young girls to be capable of at this stage. She wanted to give Laurie some comforting hope, to help her bridge over the dangerous time.

  “I don’t care what he does,” Laurie said miserably. “It isn’t that at all.”

  “I never dreamed,” her mother said, thoughtfully, ignoring the manifest untruth. “Why, you two always acted like—more like two tomboys than anything. How long has …When did you start thinking of Mart in this way?”

  Laurie didn’t know that herself. Actually, so far as she was conscious of it, it had been about an hour. Mart had been practically her best friend, outside the family, throughout her childhood. But their friendship had indeed been much the same as that of two boys. Latterly, she recalled with revulsion, she had idiotically thought Charlie MacCorry more fun, and much more interesting. But she had looked forward with a warm, innocent pleasure to having Mart live with them right in the same house. Now that he was suddenly gone—irrecoverably, she felt now—he left an unexpectedly ruinous gap in her world that nothing left to her seemed able to fill. She couldn’t explain all that to her mother. Wouldn’t know how to begin.

  When she didn’t answer, her mother patted her shoulder. “It will all seem different in a little while,” she said in the futile cliché of parents. “These things have a way of passing off. I know you don’t feel that way now; but they do. Time, the great healer...” she finished vaguely. She kissed the back of Laurie’s head, and went away.

  Chapter Fifteen

  After days of thinking up blistering things to say, Mart judged he was ready for Amos. He figured Amos would come at him before they were through. Amos was a respected rough-and-tumble scrapper away from home. “I run out of words,” Mart had heard him explain many a tangle. “Wasn’t nothing left to do but hit him.” Let him try.

  But when he caught up, far up the Salt Fork, it was all wasted, for Amos wouldn’t quarrel with him. “I done my best to free your mind,” Amos said. “Mathison was fixing to step you right into Brad’s boots. Come to think of it, that’s a pair you got on. And Laurie—she wanted you.”

  “Question never come up,” Mart said shortly.

  Amos shrugged. “Couldn’t say much more than I done.”

  “No, you sure couldn’t. Not without landing flat on your butt!” Mart had always thought of Amos as a huge man, perhaps because he had been about knee high to Amos when he knew him first. But now, as Amos for a moment looked him steadily in the eye, Mart noticed for the first time that their eyes were on the same level. Mrs. Mathison had been right about Mart having taken a final spurt of growth.

  “I guess I must have left Jerem’s letter lying around.”

  “Yeah. You left it lying around.” Mart had meant to ball up the letter and throw it in Amos face, but found he couldn’t now. He just handed it over.

  “This here’s another thing I tried to leave you out of,” Amos said. “Martha put herself out for fifteen years bringing you up. I’ll feel low in my mind if I get you done away with now.”

  “Ain’t studying on getting done away with.” “ ‘Bring the reward,’ he says here. From what I know of Jerem, he ain’t the man to trust getting paid when he’s earned it. More liable to try to make sure.”

  “Now, he ought to know you ain’t carrying the thousand around with you!”

  “Ain’t I?”

  So he was. Amos did have the money with him. Now there’s a damn fool thing, Mart considered. Aloud he said, “If he’s got robbery in mind, I suppose he won’t tell the truth anyway.”

  “I think he will. So he’ll have a claim later in case we slip through his claws.”

  “You talk like we’re fixing to steal bait from a snap trap!”

  Amos shrugged. “I’ll admit one thing. In a case like this, two guns got about ten times the chance of one.”

  Mart was flattered. He couldn’t work himself up to picking a fight with Amos after that. Things dropped back to what they had been before they went home at all. The snow melted off, and they traveled in mud. Then the weather went cold again, and the wet earth froze to iron. More snow was threatening as they came to Jerem Futterman’s stockade, where Lost Mule Creek ran into the Salt Fork. The creek had not always been called the Lost Mule. Once it had been known as Murder River. They didn’t know why, nor how the name got changed, but maybe it was a good thing to remember now.

  Jerem Futterman was lightly built, but well knit, and moved with a look of handiness. Had he been a cow-horse you might have bought him, if you liked them mean, and later shot him, if you didn’t like them treacherous. He faced them across a plank-and-barrel counter in the murk of his low-beamed log trading room, seeming to feel easier with a barrier between himself and strangers. Once he had had another name. Some thought he called himself Futterman because few were likely to suspect a man of fitting such a handle to himself, if it wasn’t his right one.

  “Knew you’d be along,” he said.

  “Have a drink.” “Have one yourself.” Amos refused the jug, but rang a four-bit piece on the planks.

  Futterman hesitated, but ended by taking a swig and pocketing the half dollar. This was watched by four squaws hunkered down against the wall and a flat-faced breed who snoozed in a corner. Mart had spotted four or five other people around the place on their way in, mostly knock-about packers and bull-team men, who made up a sort of transient garrison.

  The jug lowered, and they went into the conventional exchange of insults that passed for good humor out h
ere. “Wasn’t sure I’d know you standing up,” Futterman said. “Last I saw, you were flat on your back on the floor of a saloon at Painted Post.”

  “You don’t change much. See you ain’t washed or had that shirt off,” Amos said; and decided that was enough politeness. “Let’s see the dress!”

  A moment of total stillness filled the room before Futterman spoke. “You got the money?”

  “I ain’t paying the money for the dress. I pay when the child is found—alive, you hear me?”

  The trader had a trick of dropping his lids and holding motionless with cocked head, as if listening. The silence drew out to the cracking point; then Futterman left the room without explanation. Mart and Amos exchanged a glance. What might happen next was anybody’s guess; the place had an evil, trappy feel. But Futterman came back in a few moments, carrying a rolled-up bit of cloth.

  It was Debbie’s dress, all right. Amos went over it, inch by inch, and Mart knew he was looking for blood stains. It was singular how often people west of the Cross Timbers found themselves searching for things they dreaded to find. The dress was made with tiny stitches that Amos must be remembering as the work of Martha’s fingers. But now the pocket was half torn away, and the square hole where the sample had been knifed out of the front seemed an Indian kind of mutilation, as if the little dress were dead.

  “Talk,” Amos said.

  “A man’s got a right to expect some kind of payment.”

  “You’re wasting time!”

  “I paid twenty dollars for this here. You lead a man to put out, and put out, but when it comes to—”

  Amos threw down a gold piece, and Mart saw Futterman regret that he hadn’t asked more.

  “I had a lot of other expense, you realize, before—”

  “Bull shit,” Amos said. “Where’d you get this?”

  One more long moment passed while Jerem Futterman gave that odd appearance of listening. This man is careful, Mart thought; he schemes, and he holds back the aces—but he’s got worms in his craw where the sand should be.