The Mammoth Book of Westerns

by Jon E. Lewis

  When he reached the settlement, the spare form of the storekeeper moved out in the rutted trail to meet him.

  “Nellie and Jack didn’t get them a new day for their weddin’?” he asked in a low voice, but his gaze was sharp and piercing.

  “Not when I passed there this mornin’.” Out of the corner of one eye the boy glimpsed Chatherine Minor in a new maroon cashmere dress moving quietly to the side of her father. His hand tightened on his bridle rein. “I’ll ride down and see what’s keepin’ them,” he said briefly.

  John Minor opened his leathery lips as if to say something, and closed them again, but the girl had stiffened.

  “Don’t go, Laban!” she cried after him.

  He made as if he hadn’t heard, sitting very straight in the saddle and not looking back, riding away at a steady lope on the familiar trail for the Hedd house and his father’s dugout. He would have gone now if a norther had been blowing, white and blinding, across the prairie, but he had never seen the Staked Plains more gentle and mild. The wind had gone down and the late afternoon sunlight slanting across the motionless grass was soft and golden as the candle burning in the little shrine on the wall of Mrs Gonzales’s house in Carnuel when her man, Florencio, was somewhere out in this desolate land.

  Like a long shadow felled across his path, he reached the edge of the cañon and saw below him that his morning’s trail of bright sunshine now lay in twilight and gloom. He pulled up his pony and listened. The rocky depths with their untamed fertile bottoms tangled with shanghai grass and willows, and even the river itself, were utterly silent. For a little he sat there looking back at Carnuel, that had somehow become a distant and golden speck on the sunlit prairie. Then he urged his pony down the trail that the indefatigable pick of Sebastian Hedd had cut wide enough for his buckboard in the sloping cañon wall.

  It wasn’t so bad, once he was down and accustomed to the heavy shadows, with Calico splashing cheerfully through the shallow river and the echo of iron shoes thrown back from the rocky walls. A little farther on, the cañon would be homelike, with Sebastian Hedd’s fields green in this wild place with winter wheat, and beyond them the peeled logs of the Hedd cabin, with the buckboard drawn up to the door and Jack Shelby’s horse tied under the cotton-wood. Even Calico freshened and stepped briskly round the bend in the cañon wall.

  It was there, as he expected – the house and the fields Sebastian Hedd had wrested from the wilds, and the old slatted buckboard standing in front of the house. And yet there was something wrong with the familiar scene, something that caused him slowly to stiffen and his pony to halt and snort in the gloomy trail. Jack Shelby’s horse was curiously missing and the pole of the buckboard had been propped up on a boulder, and over it had been bent some peculiar and unfamiliar object, pale and glistening in the shadows, and utterly still.

  With a fine, inexplicable sweat breaking out of his pores, the boy watched it, little by little edging his pony nearer and leaning over the saddle horn that he could better see. Then, as if struck by a rattlesnake, he stopped. He had made out a feathered shaft like a long, thin, uplifted finger warning him grimly not to come on. And now for the first time he knew the naked and mutilated object on the buckboard tongue for what it was.

  A hundred times, night and day, sun and shadow, Laban had travelled this trail, but never had the walls of the cañon pushed in and choked him as they did today. He could feel the dark, open door of the wronged little house watching him. And far above him, the layers of cap rock still brilliant in the sun, were the bright walls of the holy city that he could never hope to reach again.

  For endless minutes he sat there on Calico, his knees wedged against the pony’s shoulders, rigid, waiting, twitching, listening. All he could hear was an unseen horned lark winging its way back to the cap rock from the river, uttering its nameless cry, that never betrayed the direction from which it came or whether it was bird or spirit. And all he could see were the contents of a bride’s leather trunk, starched muslin underwear and petticoats, feather-stitched and trimmed with ruffles, and nightgowns, high in the throat and tatted on the wrists, one of them given by his own mother, and all carefully folded away for the bridal journey, now torn and scattered like bits of white rubbish along the trail.

  And now, examining again the loaded chamber of his old Sharps with the octagon barrel, he forced his rearing and plunging pony by the tragic little house, his eyes mechanically counting the three pitiable things lying motionless on buckboard tongue and ground.

  Everywhere as he rode on rigidly through the cañon dusk, through the clumps of tangled willows that took on the shapes of bows and rifle barrels, and through the tall rank grass that twisted like snaky braids and eagle feathers, he could see his father more clearly than he had ever seen him in the life – splashing his face in the wash-tin before supper, wetting his hair, combing his long, tawny, imperturbable moustache, sitting without expression as he smoked in his chair after supper. And he could see his mother, her black hair combed tightly back from her forehead, tilting the huge coffee-pot, carving a slice from the loaf, or riding sideways on her man’s saddle, her right knee hooked over the horn, and behind her his young brother holding on with both hands to the cantle and scratching his itching cheek against the rough homespun back of her basque.

  Every fresh turn in the murky trail, boulders lying on the ground twisted the hand on his woolly rawhide reins, and up on the home side of the cap rock in the last searching rays of the sun, distant white specks in the grass flattened his cheeks until he knew them to be forgotten piles of bleaching buffalo bones. And when at last he reached the rise from where he had lifted a hand to Cass that morning, he could see below him in the grassy cañada the silent bank that was his father’s dugout, and the door standing idly open on its wooden hinges.

  Minute by minute he put off the grim duty, and when slowly he pushed his way into the doorway, he found the place as if a shell had struck it – the ticks ripped open, the floor littered with staves of his mother’s sour-dough keg, and broken pieces of the beautifully polished red-cherry bed that had come all the way from Kentucky in the wagons, and flour and savage filth over everything. The buffalo robe where Cass used to lie of an evening on the floor before the earthen fireplace was gone without a trace, and so were Cass and his father and mother, the hoofprints of the unshod Ben and Fanny lost among the endless trample of unshod ponies.

  Long after darkness had fallen, the boy half ran beside his grunting pony climbing out of the deep silent cañon. Up here on the cap rock he could breathe again. The stars seemed only half as far away. And far across the blackness of the plains he could see that reassuring small spark of yellow light, steady, alive, and more beautiful than all the stars in the sky.

  He told himself that his father, who knew the country better than an almanac, might have left his mother in the soft radiance of that light at this moment. And when he rode up in front of the lighted post, the first thing he did was to peer from the saddle toward the dusty panes. But all he could see was the candlelight shining on brand new cinches and cartridge belts and skillets strung along the rafters, and on the full skirts of three women, none of whom was his small mother with her black hair combed tightly back from her forehead.

  “That you, Labe?” the voice of the storekeeper came from the dimness.

  The boy moved his pony back deeper into the shadows.

  “Could you come out here, Mr Minor?” he said in a low tone. “The women, I reckon, better stay where they’re at.”

  At the peculiar quality of his voice, four men, two with rifles, moved with silent stiffness from where they had been standing unseen on the dark side of the gallery – the storekeeper and the saloon-keeper, the gaunt circuit rider, and Seth Falk, a buffalo hunter from Indian territory, thick, bearded, in a buckskin shirt and an old pied brown and white calfskin vest.

  “What’s the matter, boy?” the circuit rider demanded.

  Laban only looked at him, his eyes burning like coals in
the darkness.

  “I reckon,” after a moment he told them, “there won’t be a weddin’ in the settlement now.”

  Silence followed except for the short, rapid puffs of Dan Seery’s pipe and the circuit rider’s hard breathing. Only Seth Falk changed no more than an Indian.

  Laban could see him standing there in the dim light, leaning on his rifle, taciturn, inscrutable, his heavy forehead bent characteristically forward. His unreadable black eyes watched the boy from under the edge of his twisted hat-brim.

  “They get Jack and the girl both?” he questioned without emotion.

  “They got them all,” the boy said thickly.

  “How about your folks?” John Minor wanted to know.

  Laban told him. And when he spoke again, it was very low, so the girl, who, he knew, was standing at the open door of the post, couldn’t hear him.

  “I got Nellie here on Calico now. She’s wrapped up in my sugan.” He made every effort to keep his voice from breaking. “You better tell the women not to open it. They did her up mighty bad.”

  The circuit rider, who was standing nearest the dim shadow of the pony, stiffened as if touched by a grisly hand, and Dan Seery’s eyes rolled white. But Seth Falk and John Minor did not move.

  For a time the four men stood staring at him and out into the night and at each other and through the open door of the post to the untold women, while a stark awareness grew on the boy that not a wolf or coyote howled on the cap rock this evening.

  “We better get Jack and Bass tonight – if we want to bury them,” he said bleakly.

  “I’ll ride down with the boy,” Seth Falk spat, and moved off toward the rock corral with his rifle, for all his size as light on his feet as a mountain cat in the darkness.

  The Comanche moon hung low in the west as the two horses came slowly and heavily back across the plain from the cañon. In the shadow of the post John Minor and the circuit rider stood waist deep in a wide, sandy trench. There were no boards to waste on a coffin. The three women came slowly out of the post, and the circuit rider put on his long, dark coat to read the burial service. A tall, gaunt, unforgettable figure in rusty black, towering there in front of a pile of shaggy buffalo hides, his voice rang out into the night as if to reach and sear the red infidels where he pictured them lying on the ground like wolves and harlots with their sinful and bloody scalps.

  Laban had bared his long, sandy hair at a burial before, but never one that constricted him like this – the late hour, the small handful of people, the rising and falling of a real preacher’s voice making the hair on the back of his neck to stir, and all the time the grated tin lantern with its tiny pane of glass and scattered airholes throwing grotesque shadows on the men with rifles, on the full skirts of the women, still dressed for the wedding, and on the house of Jack Shelby, empty and silent yonder in the darkness.

  Even here, when she stood only a few feet from him, the boy did not glance at the tight-lipped face of Chatherine Minor. A blur of maroon dress was all he saw or cared to see. White women didn’t belong out here. Their place was back in a gentler land where farmers never heard of turning a furrow with a rifle lashed to the plough handles and where, on a Sunday morning, his mother used to say, she could still remember the peaceful sound of church bells drifting across the blue-grass. And tonight, if they had stayed there, no girl with luxuriant dark-red hair would be lying out here to be buried without it in an old mended sugan for a coffin, and his mother might be surely alive and rocking on a board floor in a Kentucky town with a lighted lamp-post on the corner.

  “The Lord giveth,” the circuit rider declared, “and the Lord taketh away. And no man knoweth the hour at which the Son of Man cometh.”

  As if in pagan challenge to the Christian words, a sign appeared slowly out in the darkness, then another. And presently, as they stood there watching, with the lips of Mrs Gonzales moving in Spanish and her hand convulsively crossing the black shawl folded on her breast, three fires far out on the plain burned red holes into the night, a scarlet triangle around the little settlement, fading and flaring in some savage code.

  “ ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea’,” the circuit rider said, with abomination in his voice, “ ‘and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns’.”

  Sternly, when the rude service was done, John Minor ordered the women into the post, and for a time there was only the whisper of falling sand.

  “What are they sayin’, Falky?” Dan Seery asked.

  “I ain’t sartain I savvy,” the buffalo hunter muttered. But Laban observed that he gave John Minor a meaning look and then stood with his head thrown forward grimly, watching the fires wax and wane.

  For long minutes while they burned to smouldering red sparks on the prairie, John Minor mechanically mounded the wide grave with his shovel, his face bleak and marked, as if what he thought lay too deep in his mind to fetch up without Herculean effort.

  “There’s something I want to say to you men,” he said at last unsparingly.

  The boy had been watching his face. He wasn’t sure what the storekeeper was about to say, but whatever it was, he was with him. Only the buffalo hunter seemed to know. He swung around slowly. All evening he had said little, and he said nothing now, but his eyes were like burning black fragments as they threw a deep, unutterable look around the little circle, not as if searching their faces, but from some powerful, unspoken feeling.

  “I’ve no notion,” John Minor went on harshly, “of letting our women go through what Nellie Hedd went through before those devils scalped her.”

  Laban felt a sharp, prophetic stab of coldness, as if slivers of blood had congealed in his veins. But John Minor had picked up an old buffalo horn and was bent over his shovel, scraping off the blade with all the deliberation of a man expected to use it for a long time to come.

  “What’s this you’re talking about, man?” the circuit rider demanded sharply.

  “The women.” John Minor didn’t look up at him. “Three of us got to keep extra guns loaded. We’ll hold out as long as we can. Then, if it has to be, it’s an act of mercy.”

  He said no more, but Laban felt strangely weak in the knees. Dan Seery’s eyes were white and glistening in his beard, and for a moment even the rugged face of the circuit rider lost some of its colour. Only Seth Falk stood there stony and unchanged. And presently he brought out a deck of worn Mexican cards that fetched the quick censure into the circuit rider’s cheeks.

  “I’ve throwed out the queen of clubs,” he told John Minor.

  “I reckon that’s good as any other way,” the storekeeper said. “Who must we say for the queen of spades? Mrs Gonzales. And Sadie Harrison for the queen of diamonds. And the queen of hearts” – for a moment his face was like leather strained over a drum – “will have to be the other one.” He turned and started to pull down a hide that had worked loose from the pile.

  “You all savvy?” Seth Falk’s gaze swept the men.

  With its grotesque legs and clotted ruff, the hide lay on the ground like some dark mis-shapen omen, scarred and bloodstained, its swarthy wool matted with ticks and sandburs, bearing the tin lantern and the pack of cards face downward beside it.

  “You draw fust, Dan,” the buffalo hunter said briefly.

  The saloon-keeper made no movement – just stood there looking down at the deck as if paralysed. John Minor knelt and lifted a card. When Laban saw them glance expectantly at him, he stiffened his back and drew the second. It was the four of spades. The buffalo hunter followed. Relentlessly, now, the drawing went on. With strong disapproval on his face, the circuit rider moved away, and came back again in his long black coat to watch like a gigantic dark moth drawn to the flame.

  It seemed to the rigid boy that, except for the slight hiss of the slipping cards, the Staked Plains had never been so hushed. The horned moon had set. The fresh grave slept peacefully. Not a sound came from the post. Their little circle of light lay on the ground like a go
lden coin in all this illimitable darkness which somewhere held his father and mother and little Cass.

  He was dimly aware of turning up a card with a broken corner which suddenly froze in his hands. It was a woman riding a horse, as the queen does in the Mexican deck, her coloured raiment stained and blemished, her face almost obliterated, and above the horse’s head the small, curious-shaped Mexican heart. And as soon as he laid it down on the swarthy hide, it turned into the slender body of Chatherine Minor lying silent on the dark adobe floor of the post in the full skirts of the maroon cashmere dress she had made for Nellie Hedd’s wedding.

  He remembered afterwards John Minor’s granite face, and Seth Falk tossing down the queen of yellow diamonds with no more expression than a card in a poker hand, and the latter’s little black buffalo eyes watching him as if his face bore some unbecoming colour.

  “Come in and John’ll give you a drink,” he said gruffly.

  Laban stood there, rude and unhearing. When the others had gone with the lantern into the post, he kept walking with his rifle between the dark piles of hides.

  The strong reek of the skins gave him something that he needed, like a powerful medicine brewed from the Staked Plains themselves. It reached where no whisky could. Kiowas or Comanches were nothing. After what he had seen in the cañon this afternoon, he could mow the painted devils down all day and stay icy cold with hate and clear of regret. But a white person, a woman, and only a girl! For more than an hour he kept walking up and down between the dark piles, and all the while, in the tightened sinews of his arms and legs and in the growing flatness of his cheeks, he seemed to be curing, hardening, drying, almost like one of the buffalo hides itself.

  It was very quiet in the post when he came in. Over in a corner, so deep in shadows it seemed impossible to distinguish the faces of the cards, Seth Falk was playing a stolid game of solitaire on a boot-box, a pair of rifles lying beside him on the floor. Sitting under a candle, his Bible open on his knees, was the circuit rider, his rugged face alight as if the sun were shining into some rocky cañon. Dan Seery had just poured himself a stiff drink in a tumbler from a jug beneath the counter. And John Minor, with two guns leaning against the wall, sat writing slowly and methodically at his littered table.