The Searchers
Page 26
That night she couldn’t sleep; and when she had lain awake a long time she knew that somehow she was going to have to see the medicine buckle’s back. Scar had been in council most of the night, but he slept at last. Mart had to imagine for himself, from her halting phrases, most of what had happened then. The slanting green eyes in the dark-tanned face were not cat’s eyes as she told him, nor Indian’s eyes, but the eyes of a small girl.
She had crawled out from between the squaws, where she always slept. With two twigs she picked a live coal out of the embers of the fire. Carrying this, she crept to the deep pile of buffalo robes that was Scar’s bed. The chief lay sprawled on his back. His chest was bare, and the medicine buckle gleamed upon it in the light of the single ember. Horribly afraid, she got trembling fingers upon the bit of gold, and turned it over.
How had she been able to do that? It was a question he came back to more than once without entirely understanding her answer. She said that Mart himself had made her do it; he had forced her by his medicine. That was the part he didn’t get. Long ago, in another world, he had been her dearest brother; he must have known that once. The truth was somewhere in that, if he could have got hold of it. Perhaps he should have known by this time that what the Indians call medicine is three-fourths the compelling ghosts of early associations, long forgotten....
She had to lean close over the Comanche, so close that his breath was upon her face, before she could see the writing on the back of the medicine buckle. And then—she couldn’t read it. Once, for a while, she had tried to teach Comanche children the white man’s writing; but that was long ago, and now she herself had forgotten. But Amos had told her what the words were; so that presently the words seemed to fit the scratches on the gold: “Ethan to Judith …” Actually, the Rangers were able to tell Mart later, Amos had lied. The inscription said, “Made in England.”
Then, as she drew back, she saw Scar’s terrible eyes, wide open and upon her face, only inches away. For an instant she was unable to move. Then the coal dropped upon Scar’s naked chest, and he sprang up with a snarl, grabbing for her.
After that she ran; in the direction Mart and Amos had gone, at first, as the squaws had said—but this was chance. She didn’t know where she was going. Then, when they almost caught her, she had doubled back, like any hunted creature. Not in any chosen direction, but blindly, running away from everything, seeking space and emptiness. No thought of the limbo “between the winds” had occurred to her.
“But you caught me. I don’t know how. I was better off with them. There, where I was. If only I never looked—behind the buckle—”
Sometime, and perhaps better soon than late, he would have to tell her what had happened to Scar’s village after she left it. But not now.
“Now I have no place,” Debbie said. “No place to go, ever. I want to die now.”
“I’m taking you back. Can’t you understand that?”
“Back? Back where?”
“Home, Debbie—to our own people!”
“I have no people. They are dead. I have no place—”
“There’s the ranch. It belongs to you now. Don’t you want to—”
“It is empty. Nobody is there.”
“I’ll be there, Debbie.”
She lifted her head to stare at him—wildly, he thought. He was frightened by what he took to be a light of madness in her eyes, before she lowered them. He said, “You used to like the ranch. Don’t you remember it?”
She was perfectly still.
He said desperately, “Have you forgotten? Don’t you remember anything about when you were a little girl, at all?”
Tears squeezed from her shut eyes, and she began to shiver again, hard, in the racking shake they called the ague. He had no doubt she was taking one of the dangerous fevers; perhaps pneumonia, or if the chill was from weakness alone, he feared that the most. The open prairie had ways to bite down hard and sure on any warm-blooded thing when its strength failed. Panic touched him as he realized he could lose her yet.
He knew only one more way to bring warmth to her, and that was to give her his own. He lay close beside her, and wrapped the blankets around them both, covering their heads, so that even his breath would warm her. Held tight against him she seemed terribly thin, as if worked to the very bone; he wondered despairingly if there was enough of her left ever to be warmed again. But the chill moderated as his body heat reached her; her breathing steadied, and finally became regular.
He thought she was asleep, until she spoke, a whisper against his chest. “I remember,” she said in a strangely mixed tongue of Indian-English: “I remember it all. But you the most. I remember how hard I loved you.” She held onto him with what strength she had left; but she seemed all right, he thought, as she went to sleep.
Other Leisure books by Alan LeMay:
WEST OF NOWHERE
THE BELLS OF SAN JUAN
SPANISH CROSSING
THE SMOKY YEARS
WINTER RANGE
Copyright
A LEISURE BOOK®
February 2009
Published by special arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency.
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Copyright © 1954 by Alan LeMay
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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Epigraph
The Searchers and John Wayne
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Other Leisure books by Alan LeMay
Copyright
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