Appaloosa vcaeh-1

by Robert B. Parker

  “Might be smart to parcel it out small,” Cole said.

  “Might be.”

  “We don’t know what they got,” Cole said.

  “Or how far they’d have to go to get it.”

  “Water’s not a problem for them, either.”

  “Nope,” I said. “They just go down the river out of range and get it.”

  Behind us, a small voice said, “Virgil.”

  “Yes, Allie,” Virgil said.

  “Can I come up and sit with you and Everett?”

  “Yep.”

  She came up crouching, in her ridiculous clothes, looking very small, and sat cross-legged on the ground between us.

  “You ever fire a pistol,” Cole said.

  “No.”

  “Best you learned. Everett, you got that little hideout dingus you usually carry?”

  “I do,” I said, and took an over/under derringer out of the side pocket of my pants.

  I broke it open, took out the two .45 cartridges, and closed the weapon.

  “It’s unloaded now,” I said. “But pretend it isn’t.”

  I handed it to her. She handled it as if it were some vile reptile.

  “Just a piece of equipment, Allie,” I said. “Like a cherry pitter. Won’t do anything ’less you operate it.”

  “It’s not very heavy,” she said.

  “It’ll be a little heavier with the bullets in it.”

  I had her dry fire it a few times, then I took it and reloaded it and gave it back to her.

  “I… what am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Keep it with you,” I said.

  “Indians win this,” Cole said, “cock that thing, put it in your mouth, pull the trigger.”

  “Kill myself?”

  “ ’Less you want to be the bottom squaw in some buck’s string,” Cole said.

  “Oh, God,” she said.

  Neither Cole or I said anything. I don’t imagine Cole could think of anything to say, either. Awkwardly, Allie put the derringer in the pocket of her too-big pants. The three of us sat, looking out over the short stretch of empty prairie.

  Finally Allie said, “I’m sorry, Virgil.”

  Cole didn’t speak.

  “I don’t know what to say, Virgil. I… how are we going to make this right?”

  Cole stayed silent, looking toward where the Kiowas were.

  “I was so alone,” Allie said, “and Bragg was… Ring protected me, and he told his brother to protect me. And they both did.”

  Cole didn’t turn his head.

  “So you fuck Mackie, too?” he said.

  “I… no… It was Ring. Ring was in charge. What was I supposed to do?” Allie said.

  Cole didn’t say anything else. I didn’t want any part of this and had nothing to say.

  “I was alone… I want to fix this between us, between you and Ring.”

  Cole turned his head slowly and looked at her in the faint light.

  “I’ll think about that another time,” Cole said. “Right now, I’m thinking about Indians.”

  38

  At first light, we spotted the tracker. He swung out in a big arc from behind the hill, staying out of rifle range, and headed upstream. Another rider came out on the other side, described the same wide arc out of range, and headed downstream.

  “He ain’t a tracker,” Cole said. “They come from down there they know we didn’t.”

  “He’ll cross downstream, come up for a look on the other side of the river,” I said.

  “And we just sit here?” Bragg said.

  “Not if you got a better plan,” Cole said.

  “Maybe we send somebody out after them two bucks,” Bragg said. “Got ’em isolated from the rest, kill ’em off, improve our odds.”

  “Ain’t a bad idea,” Ring said. “Course them other Kiowas up there will see us send somebody, so they’ll send somebody, too. So our man is outnumbered two to one.”

  “Maybe our man can kill them both. We got some gun hands here.”

  “Maybe,” Ring said. “Which one you want to follow? Upstream or down?”

  Bragg was silent. Then he shook his head.

  “Might make a fire this morning,” I said. “It won’t stand out so much in the day.”

  “Indians can’t get close enough to shoot,” Cole said, “in the daylight.”

  We made our fire, and we all had coffee and fried salt pork. Coffee made me feel better. In about an hour, we saw one of the Indians on the other side of the river, squatting beside a big rock, looking at our campsite. About midmorning we saw the upstream Indian come back, swinging wide away from our guns and disappearing behind the hill. When we looked again, the one across the river was gone. After that, nothing. We sat with our weapons, watching the hill. Nobody appeared. No sound drifted down across the grassland. Nothing happened. We drank some more coffee and ate some jerky and hardtack. We dipped the hardtack in the coffee to soften it. We took turns sleeping. For supper, Allie made fry biscuits. We ate them with salt pork and coffee and hardtack. We dipped our hardtack. We took turns sleeping.

  On the second day of this, Bragg said to us, “How do we know they’re still there?”

  “We don’t,” Cole said.

  “How we going to find out?” Bragg said.

  No one said anything for a time, then I said, “I’m going to ride up and see.”

  All of them looked at me. I thought Cole was going to say something. But he didn’t. Instead, he nodded. I got up and went to the brush-and-branches pen we’d made and saddled my horse. I put the Winchester in its saddle sleeve, checked my Colt and holstered it, picked up the shotgun, and got on my horse.

  “Don’t go no further than you have to,” Cole said. “I can cover you about halfway there. All we need to know is that they didn’t keep the hill between us and skedaddle.”

  I nodded. Cole picked up his rifle and settled in on his stomach with his Winchester. Ring did the same thing.

  “We’ll do what we can,” Ring said.

  “Minute you see an Indian,” Cole said, “you turn and run for the woods.”

  I nodded again. Then I turned my horse’s head and clucked and nudged him with my knee and we rode out of the woods and onto the short-grass open land. The sun was high and steady. I could smell the river and the grass. The horse was frisky from standing around in the woods. He capered a couple of times as we moved into the sun. I held him to a walk. There was no reason to hurry. Nothing was moving but me. The only sound was the horse walking. I had the shotgun resting across my saddle in front of me. It was cocked. As we walked toward the hill, the horse kicked up some grasshoppers and they jumped frantically in front of us. The horse tossed his head and blew a couple of times. I knew he wanted to run. I smiled a little to myself. Hell, so did I. We were almost out of range of the woods. At this distance, even for Cole, hitting what you were aiming at would be mostly luck. I kept riding slowly toward the hill. Nothing moved. Some more grasshoppers jumped around in front of us as we walked. The grass smell was strong. I didn’t smell the river anymore. I could feel the hard sun on my back. We were almost to the foot of the hill. Out of rifle range. I was on my own. I stopped the horse for a moment and looked up the easy slope. Nothing moved. Then it did.

  A young Indian was sitting his horse on the top of the hill. He was bare-chested, wearing leggings and moccasins. There were eagle feathers in his long hair. Not much of a war bonnet. He was not yet a significant chief, but he’d earned some feathers. His horse was a big buckskin with a light mane. It wasn’t an Indian pony. He’d probably stolen it from the Army. There were white and colored beads in a tight collar around his neck, and in several looped necklaces on his chest. In the center, there was a kidney-shaped silver medallion. The lower half of his face was painted vermillion, with black paint on his cheeks and around his eyes. His eyelids were vermillion. He looked straight down at me. I looked up at him. There was contact, like looking at a wolf or a cougar and seeing not just the animal but it
s actual living self looking out at you. I should have turned the horse and headed back. But I didn’t. I couldn’t turn on him and run. I sat my horse with the shotgun across my saddle and waited.

  In a moment, the other Indians came up behind him on the top of the hill and stopped and sat silently in a row maybe a horse’s length behind him. My horse swished his tail at a fly. I waited. The young Indian began to ride slowly down the hill toward me. He sat his horse bareback. There was no bridle, merely a length of rope tied to the buckskin’s jaw. I sat. The Indian came slowly. He was looking at me, and I at him. In his right hand he carried a Winchester. There were bullets in a looped belt around his waist. He carried a knife on the same belt. His eyes were dark brown and full of energy. I could see that the Winchester was cocked. He could see that the shotgun was cocked. My shotgun, resting on my saddle horn, was pointing to my left. He moved his horse to my right. I turned the shotgun. He seemed almost to smile. He shifted the Winchester to his left hand, holding it with the butt on his thigh and the barrel pointing up. I nodded and did the same with the shotgun. Again, he might have smiled. We were almost side by side now, headed in opposite directions. Then we were side by side, our horses standing head to tail. The Indian reached out carefully and put his right hand on my right shoulder. We sat for a fraction, as if all of time had come to a point on that contact.

  Then he took his hand away and whirled his horse and whooped something in Kiowa and set the horse at a hard gallop up the hill. As he came toward them, the other Indians yelled and whooped and waved their weapons. When the young Indian reached the top of the hill, he spun his horse, making him rear and paw the air with his front feet as he did so. Then he set the horse back down on solid ground and looked down at me once more. A second Indian rode out beside him and planted a lance in the ground. It was the one with Allie’s undergarment tied to it. Several of the Indians shouted in Kiowa, and then there was laughter. The young Indian with the vermillion jaw turned his horse and disappeared over the crest of the hill, and the other Indians followed him. I could hear their hooves going down the other side.

  I nudged my horse forward and we went up the hill, my shotgun still pointing up, the butt still resting on my thigh. At the top of the hill, I looked down at a flat prairie that stretched to the horizon. Below me, the Kiowas were riding away at a comfortable pace.

  39

  Beauville wasn’t much. It wasn’t even Appaloosa. But it was a railhead, where cattle driven up from Texas could load onto trains that would bring them to Omaha or Chicago. And being a railhead, it was livelier than it had any right to be otherwise.

  We dragged into Beauville two days after my coup had been counted by the buck with the vermillion chin; we were tired, out of coffee, and short of most everything else. The horses were tired. The mule was tired. And we were tired. Allie, straggle-haired and badly dressed, dusty and sweat-streaked like the rest of us, looked especially tired. There was a hotel on the one street, and a bank, and a restaurant in a tent, and six saloons. At the far end of the street, there were a few small, unpainted houses. The train station, surrounded by cattle pens, was the grandest building in town. There was even a little steeple on it, with a big clock. According to the clock, it was 2:41. Behind the station was the city marshal’s office and jail. “This time tomorrow,” Ring said.

  “This time,” Cole said.

  “We’ll ride on down to the station,” Ring said. “You, too, Bragg. If the money’s there, our deal is up. If the money’s not there, we gonna be asking you where it is.”

  “It’ll be there,” Bragg said. He nodded at us. “What about them?”

  “Our deal covers them,” Ring said. He looked at Cole.

  “That gonna be a problem?” Ring said.

  “Might be,” Cole said.

  Ring nodded.

  “How about the woman?” he said. “She a problem?”

  “Might be,” Cole said.

  “Well,” Ring said. “Won’t be a problem till tomorrow afternoon.”

  He nudged his horse forward. His brother followed. Bragg trailed along, and Russell behind him. Allie sat uncertainly on her horse, near me.

  “Let’s head down to the hotel, Allie,” I said. “Get you a room.”

  “How about you two?” she said.

  “I’ll bunk in with Everett,” Cole said.

  It was between cattle drives, and the hotel was nearly empty. We washed and slept and sent our clothes to the Chinaman. It was after dark when Cole and I went down to the saloon and Allie joined us. The hotelkeeper’s wife had found her some clothes, probably from one of the whores who worked in the hotel, and Allie looked pretty good again.

  It wasn’t much of a saloon, two long planks set on whiskey barrels. The whiskey sat in bottles on a table behind. We had a drink, including Allie, who drank hers in very small sips.

  “Will the Sheltons stick to the truce?” I said.

  “Ring’s word is good,” Cole said.

  “And so is ours,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  We were quiet. The hotelkeeper’s wife came to the table.

  “You folks hungry, we got some stew and some fresh bread,” she said. “I baked it today.”

  “How ’bout the stew?” Cole said.

  “Been simmerin’ ’bout six years,” the woman said. “Just keep dishing it out and addin’ in stuff.”

  We ordered some.

  “What are we going to do?” Allie said.

  “We’ll wait until tomorrow afternoon,” Cole said. “Then we’ll take Bragg back.”

  “I meant us, Virgil,” she said.

  I started to get up.

  “I’ll have a drink at the bar,” I said.

  Cole put his hand on my arm.

  “Sit,” he said.

  “Does Everett have to be here, Virgil?” Allie said.

  “Yep.”

  I wasn’t comfortable with it. But staying might not be a bad idea. If Allie started talking about us at her half-constructed house that rainy day, I would want to be around to see that the story got told adequately.

  “Ring forced me to do that with him,” Allie said.

  “Nope,” Cole said.

  “He did, Virgil, I swear he did.”

  Cole shook his head.

  “I seen what I seen,” he said.

  “I was afraid,” Allie said. “I was doing what I had to do to stay alive.”

  “He wouldn’ta killed you,” Cole said. “He’d just trail you along with him till he didn’t need you no more.”

  “Maybe you know that,” Allie said. “But I didn’t know it, Virgil. And the other men. I was a woman alone with four terrible men.”

  Cole drank some whiskey and stared into the glass and didn’t say anything for a while.

  Then he said to me, “Tomorrow this time we’ll have settled things with the Sheltons. If Ring kills me, you think she’ll go off with him, Everett?”

  “I think Allie needs to be with a man,” I said.

  “You bastard,” Allie said. “Don’t listen to him, Virgil. The sonova bitch tried to put his hands on me one day when I was showing him our house.”

  Cole looked at me.

  “No, Virgil,” I said. “I didn’t.”

  Cole looked at me for a moment longer. I looked back. Then he looked back into his whiskey glass.

  “No, Allie,” he said. “Everett didn’t do that.”

  “He’s lying, Virgil. You believe him and not me?”

  Cole studied the surface of his drink. He nodded his head slowly.

  “That is correct,” he said.

  “You men. You always stick together, don’t you. What chance has a woman got, alone?”

  Cole finished his drink and poured himself another. The hotelkeeper’s wife brought us food. We all ate some and were quiet while we did. It was better than fried salt pork and hardtack.

  “Well, if it’ll help you feel easy,” Cole said after a time, “nobody’s killed me yet, and I don’t think Ring ca
n do it, either.”

  “Why do you have to face him?”

  “He’s got my prisoner.”

  “Can’t you get the local marshal or whoever to help you?”

  “Maybe,” Cole said. “Either way, he’s got my lawful prisoner.”

  “And you just have to get him back,” Allie said.

  “He’s my lawful prisoner,” Cole said.

  “And that’s all there is to it?”

  “I’m a lawman,” Cole said.

  “And that’s all you are?” Allie said.

  “Mostly,” Cole said.

  40

  After we ate, Cole and I went out and sat in a couple of chairs in front of the hotel. It was dark now, and the street traffic was mostly rail hands and cowboys heading for the saloons, and now and then a whore hurrying to work. Allie had gone back up to her room without speaking to us again. The night insects were making noise. I could hear the sound of a bad piano somewhere up the street.

  “What happened at the house?” Cole said to me.

  “I didn’t make no advance at Allie,” I said.

  “I believe it. I tole you that already. But I’d like to know what transacted.”

  I told him. He nodded slowly as he listened. If he felt anything, he didn’t show it. He sat with his chair tilted back, looking up through the clear night at the stars. After a while, he shook his head as if answering a question no one had asked.

  “I never met no woman like her,” he said.

  I was quiet.

  “Mostly, I been with whores, and some squaws.”

  Cole took out a cigar and lit it, turning it in the match flame, and got it going good and even.

  “She talks good and dresses nice, and she’s good-looking,” Cole said.

  He took in some cigar smoke and blew it out and watched it thin out and disappear in the night air.

  “She can play the piano, and she cooks nice, and she’s very clean.”

  Cole’s voice was quiet in the near darkness. He was listing assets, I thought, deciding whether to buy.

  “But,” Cole said, “it appears she’ll fuck anything ain’t gelded.”