by Gene Curry
“I don’t have to believe anything,” I said, sick of his small-town sins.
“You mean you aren’t going to turn me in? You’re the law in this train. I’m a murderer.”
“Look,” I said. “Even if I didn’t believe your story, I wouldn’t turn you in. It so happens I do believe it. Where were you hoping to go when you joined the train?” Belknap said, “The train was our only hope of getting away. They were watching all the railroads and ports. Out on the Plains we’d be lost for months. First California, then Australia, that’s where we hoped to go. If we were lucky, we’d get new names and a new life.”
“I won’t try to stop you if you still want to go on by yourself. You do what you like, Belknap. You’re still Dr. Ames to me. I didn’t hear what you just said. Your woman is dead, but I got a lot of live ones to think about. I ask you again. Do you think the plague has spread to the other wagons?”
Belknap forced his mind to return to the here and now. “There’s a good chance that it hasn’t,” he said.
“Can we rejoin the train after you ...?” It was hard to say it.
“After we burn her body,” Belknap said. “That’s what has to be done. If we bury her, animal prowlers may dig her up and spread the plague far and wide. The answer is, yes, we can rejoin the train after we burn our clothes and disinfect ourselves. If the plague isn’t there now, we won’t bring it with us, if we take the right precautions.” I nodded. After he climbed back in the wagon, I fired three shots, the signal for the train ahead to send someone back within hailing distance. I expected to see Culligan or Steiner, but it was Maggie O’Hara who rode back from the train.
She reined in her horse a fair distance from me. “She dead yet?” she hollered.
“She’s dead,” I yelled back. “Ames is taking care of the body. We have to burn our clothes and wash down with disinfectant. After that we can rejoin the train. Anybody else sick yet?”
Maggie’s horse stood atop a high, grassy mound. “Not so far,” she called. “You want me to get fresh clothes for you and the doctor, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“I’d just as soon leave you bare-assed on the prairie. But we need the doctor, so I’ll be along directly. You didn’t expect me, did you, Saddler?”
“That’s right.”
“You thought I’d be scared to come this close?”
“That’s right.”
That got her going, not a hard thing to do. “Fuck you, Saddler! I can do anything a man can do, and do it better.” Without waiting for an answer, she turned the horse and rode back toward the wagons, now halted miles away on the prairie. Belknap called to me from the wagon. I came close, and he handed me two buckets and two bottles of carbolic acid to be mixed with the water.
“Take them away some distance,” he said. While I was doing it, he splashed coal oil all over the wagon, soaking the body and the bedding. I came back.
“That’s close enough,” Belknap said. The strange look was back on his face. “Take off your clothes and pitch them in here. After that you make the solution good and strong, as strong as you can bear it on the skin. Burn the wagon before you start to wash down.”
I stared back at him. “Why don’t I just do as you do?”
He gave me that odd smile again. “I think not, Mr. Saddler.” Before I could stop him, he drew the revolver from his belt, put the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullet blew off the top of his skull, spattering his blood and brains. After he was dead, I wasn’t sure that I would have stopped him if it had been possible. Robert Belknap was finished as a man. Keeping him alive would have meant nothing more than carrying extra weight.
There was nothing to do but get on with it after I took the revolver from his dead hand and the extra cartridge from his pocket. He had fallen beside the body of his woman. In life they had been a strange pair, in death they looked like everybody else.
I peeled off my clothes and pitched them into the wagon. I threw my hat in too. I could find another hat. That left only my boots and gun belt to be washed, along with my body. The wagon was well-soaked in coal oil; all that remained was to strike a match. It went up like a bomb, with a loud, whomping sound that split the covers. I turned fast but the fierce heat reached out at me.
The wagon was still burning as I washed myself in one bucket of carbolic solution. It stung like hell, so I knew it was good and strong, as he had ordered. Then, using the bucket intended for him, I washed myself down a second time. It might be all a waste of time, because there was no way I could be sure I wasn’t bringing the plague, or that it wasn’t already there.
By the time I finished, the wagon—and the bodies—were reduced to a pile of glowing ash. I fired the last three bullets in my pistol and reloaded. Sometime later I heard the drumbeat of horse hoofs coming back and there was Maggie, riding hell for leather. I started out to meet her. If she was afraid of me as a possible plague carrier, she didn’t show it. I guess she’d rather die than show fear to any man. She rode up without a moment’s hesitation, leading my horse.
She looked down at me, dressed now in nothing but boots. I hadn’t buckled on the gunbelt. That would have made me look even more foolish, if that was possible.
“Where’s the doc?” she said, instead of giving me my pants. “There was a single shot a while ago.”
“Ames killed himself,” I said. “He didn’t want to live after his woman had gone.”
For once, that didn’t bring a sneering comment from her. She slung the fresh clothes down at me. “You look kind of limp today, Saddler. Better get dressed before the ladies see you as you really are—limp! You sure you’re not going to infect everybody in the train?”
I pulled my pants on. “The doc didn’t seem to think so. It may be there now; it doesn’t have to come from me.” I finished dressing and buckled on my gun. “Let’s go.”
There was some puzzlement in the quick look she gave me. “You’re all washed and clean, Saddler. You could just ride out and leave us. Why don’t you?”
I mounted up. “You’d like that?”
“If you’d asked me that question a week ago, I’d have said yes.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I can’t stand the sight of you, but you got us this far. Maybe you’ll get us the rest of the way.”
“That’s all there is to it, huh?”
Maggie had a mean, gutter mouth, nothing at all like Rita’s good-natured obscenities. She told me what I could do to myself. A few things I hadn’t heard before—and that’s saying something, since I’m a man of considerable experience in such matters.
“That’s what I think of you,” Maggie finished. She set off at a fair clip, but it was no trouble to catch up with her before she had gone any distance. All at once she seemed to realize that there was no great hurry. If we were carrying the plague, it would stay with us, no matter how fast or slow we traveled.
Chapter Fifteen
The plague warning flags still fluttered above the wagons. They would stay aloft until we were sure we didn’t have the disease in our midst. Belknap had said that an outbreak would come within a week, if it came. After a week we could be reasonably sure that we were out of danger. But Belknap hadn’t been absolute about anything. Not that much was known about the plague except that it struck fast and its victims died a horrible death. Why certain rodents on the Plains carried the plague was as big a mystery as the plague itself. No one knew why it hadn’t wiped out the entire country, but right at that moment I wasn’t concerned with the state of the country, just us.
I rode to the lead wagon and told Claggett about the death of Ames and the girl. He just grunted. His response wasn’t unnatural or unusually hard, given the circumstances. “Two more gone,” was all he said at first. Then he said, “What can we do if the plague breaks out in the other wagons?”
“Not much,” I said. “If it breaks out in a wagon, then we leave the wagon and the people in it. I don’t know what good that wil
l do. If we have the plague, it’s likely to kill all of us.”
“Most likely it is. Then it’s just wait and see. No more precautions we can take?”
“Nothing that will be of any use.”
“You ever been through an outbreak?”
“Not even close to one.”
“Me neither. It’s not that common, far as I know. How long do we wait?”
I had been figuring the hours. Jenny Sills—it was hard to get used to that name—had died in less than a day after we cut the wagon loose from the train. By now we were some hours into the second day. But I was just fooling around with numbers. It couldn’t be cut that fine. “I’d say we better give it a full week,” I said.
Claggett grunted again. “It’s going to be a long week.” And so it was.
In a way, it was like waiting to be hanged, with just the smallest hope of getting a commutation at the last moment. Naturally we didn’t tell the women about the time limit, because it would have tensed them up even more than they were. Some were holding up pretty good; others were close to the breaking point after the strain of the endless journey.
More than a few of our original number had died, and California seemed no closer, though we were, in fact, well into Utah and fast approaching the Nevada border. The plague might or might not come, but there was no doubt in my mind about Kiowa Sam’s raiders. I was still betting that they would attack somewhere in Nevada. As the days passed there was less and less reason to change my mind.
The seventh day passed without the slightest sign of plague. It was morning, and I rode up to Claggett’s wagon. He stared at me without saying anything. Jake Steiner knew about the time limit. So did Rita, Maggie, Iversen and Culligan. I don’t know how many others knew, or what fearful, whispered exchanges had gone on among the women. Of those who knew for sure, none dared to say that seven days had gone by. To put into words our secret hopes seemed to be risking bad luck.
It took Claggett to say it. The old preacher didn’t believe in luck, good or bad, just an angry God. “Looks like we’re out of danger,” he said. “You think we can take down the plague flags? It will make everybody feel better, whatever lies ahead.”
Just as he spoke, I got the feeling that we were being watched. The feeling came suddenly, almost like a pain or a bunching of the nerves. The feeling was so powerful that I looked up in spite of myself. But there was nothing stirring out there in the dun-colored wasteland, not even a buzzard wheeling in the sky. It was a hot, bright morning without a breeze or a breath of cloud.
“We leave the flags as they are,” I said quickly. Claggett had already reached out and was grasping the tall sapling from which his own flag flew. He withdrew his hand and his face grew dark with anger. “Then what the doctor said was a lie? The seven days don’t mean anything?”
“No lie,” I said. “The danger is over, but we’ll let the raiders see the flags. I think they’ve been looking at them already.”
“You know that for sure?”
“For sure? No, a strong feeling is all.”
Instead of scanning the hills, Claggett’s eyes remained fixed on his team of mules, as if I hadn’t said a thing about danger. “If they’ve been watching us, then they know it’s been more than a week since the Ames girl got sick.”
“They’re not likely to know about the time limit. I didn’t know about it and you didn’t know about it.”
“An old Plains hand like Sam might know about it. If he’s been crossing all these years, he’s bound to have run into plague. If he has, then he’ll know you’re running a bluff.”
I couldn’t give him much of an argument about that. “Maybe Sam knows, but is his word good enough to make men attack plague wagons? Even to get the women, will they figure it’s worth the risk? You know anything that scares men more than plague?”
Claggett had his doubts, and properly so. “You’re trying to read men’s minds, Saddler. All right, you have a point. Maybe some of them will run out on him, not wanting to risk their lives, even for a cargo of women. How many is just guesswork, though, and you know it. Now that we’re guessing, my guess is they’ll just follow along like they been doing.”
This time Claggett and I were on the same side, and it surprised me. “You’re not just taking my word they’re out there then?”
“No need to,” Claggett said. “I got that being-watched feeling myself. I was hunted too long ever to lose it. You’re like me in that way, having a nose for danger. If it hadn’t been for the threat of plague, we’d have smelled Sam long before now. A big problem is this. Every day that we travel' and somebody doesn’t die is going to weaken our position.”
That was just as true as the other things Claggett had said. Still, I figured the threat of plague gave us some sort of edge. Before the plague killed the girl, we were fair game for Sam’s raiders. Now we had some kind of chance, however thin. “Maybe I am reading men’s minds,” I said, “but it would take a lot to make me attack a plague-carrying train. I sure as hell wouldn’t do it for money. Every raider that turns tail is one we don’t have to kill.”
“Or be killed by,” Claggett said. “We’ve got nothing to lose, but the women have to be told. You see the way their nerves are.”
“Let me do it in my own way,” I said. “If you do it, you’ll make an announcement. The women look hangdog now and have to stay that way for Sam’s benefit. The first sign of good spirits will bring Sam down on us.” Claggett grunted but didn’t argue.
After that, I rode back and forth among the wagons, as I had been doing for a week. Jake Steiner was waiting for orders to take down his flag.
“Looks like we don’t have it,” he said happily.
I told him to wipe the smile off his face. “Do it quick. They could be glassing us. Look like we’re a rolling mass of pestilence. Do it, Jake. I’ll explain later.”
~ I rode back through the train, talking quietly to the women, explaining how they were to behave. Some caught on right away, but others were stupefied by fear and fatigue. That was just fine. Kiowa Sam could be using field glasses or a telescope. Either way, he’d be able to look at us up close. I did my best to keep the relief from showing in their faces, but right then I couldn’t be sure how successful I was. They had to be told. It was the only way I could get back some of the fighting spirit we m were going to need. I laid it on thick about Kiowa Sam, and that took care of any good cheer there might have been.
We crossed into Nevada late that afternoon, with the fading sun throwing an orange glow on the first real desert country we had seen. To get to the desert we had to traverse a range of bare, brown hills with nothing remarkable about them except the fact that they probably hid Sam and his killers. The women who had never seen the desert before greeted it with startled cries. Even without the threat of raiders, it would have been a grim sight. From the looks of it, it wasn’t such a bad stretch, but to anyone who hasn’t experienced it before, the desert looks like the entrance to hell. And, for all we knew, that’s where we might have been heading.
I kept watching for the flash of field glasses. Nothing showed, but I kept looking, for the light of the dying sun seemed to be all around us, and even the most experienced scout can make a mistake at that time of day.
Now that they knew Kiowa Sam was stalking us, the women didn’t have to do any play-acting in their efforts to look glum. Only Maggie still displayed the hard edge of her spirit. I was counting on the mean-eyed woman-lover when the shooting started. In a fight she’d be as good as any man, and maybe better.
Some of the women would be no good in a fight; I wasn’t faulting them for that. I was going to have to depend on about twenty women, maybe less. Claggett, Steiner and Culligan would fight like tigers, knowing what , they could expect if we were overrun. I had no great confidence in Iversen; I guessed he would fight hard enough. I still wondered why he had chosen to cross the Plains by wagon train. Back in Missouri his reasons ' hadn’t mattered; now they did.
The arms had be
en parceled out to the twenty women who knew how to use them. Against a determined band of raiders we wouldn’t stand much of a chance, but I was still hoping that the plague warnings would have an effect. I could just about see Sam and his men arguing the point in the cover of the hills. Claggett was right. Most likely Sam would know about the seven-day limit; as an. old-timer on the Plains, he’d be bound to. Some of the men would believe him, but then there would be the ones who didn’t want to believe and the ones who weren’t sure. As I had told Claggett, the thought of catching the plague was enough to make the hardest hard case shiver and kick dirt in hesitation. Hell! I was scared shitless myself, come to think of it. I had seen the Sills girl die of the plague, and it was as bad a death as ever I’d seen. Nothing could save you from it once it struck. No serum was worth a damn—you just died. A millionaire in a private hospital died as horribly as a pauper in a charity ward.
The sun went down as we formed the wagons into an oval, which could be taken as a routine precaution in rough country rather than as a sign of panic. If we formed too tight a defense, Sam would be sure to think we were on to him. I didn’t want to do that, not now anyhow. At the moment his men were still fresh and lusting for young female flesh. What I wanted them to do was wear themselves out deliberating the ins and outs of the situation. Even in a gang of outlaws, there are men more cautious, more sensible than others. In Sam’s bunch there would be crafty men and fools, cowards and diehards. I was hoping there would be a lot of wary men and ordinary cowards.