Jahzini would stand no chance at all on foot. And perhaps only a little better on horseback…
She stopped close to a blaze-faced pinto. He extended his head and nose against her sleeve. He belonged to her grandfather and was something of a pet; often she fed him bits of carrot and rubbed his muzzle. His chest was powerful, his legs long and rangy. He should add a good edge to Jahzini's chances.
She bent, untied the leather rope and straightened up and around. Her glance ran across the trees.
For just an instant she saw the man. A quick dark form moving at a crouch from one tree to the next as he worked in closer. Then he was invisible again.
Rainbow Girl spoke to the horse. She tugged gently at the rope to start him moving. She walked slowly back toward the hogans. Her heartbeats filled her ears like a thunder of death drums.
The man would wonder about the horse. She was in clear view should he decide to shoot. She ached with the temptation to look backward, but resisted it. What was he doing now? Raising his rifle to take aim? Or hesitating, undecided? All the stories of white atrocities that branded her memory swarmed through her brain. The Belinkana! They were men capable of killing women… children… anybody at all.
She did not feel safe even when several lodges were between her and the man. And then she hurried. Jahzini emerged from Adakhai's hogan as she reached it. He took the long halter from her hand and knotted it swiftly around the pinto's jaw.
"I saw a man," she said. "He is in the trees. Waiting. Maybe there are more."
A long-muscled twist of his body vaulted Jahzini onto the pinto's back. He looked down at her, then bent over a little. And touched her face.
"Ah-sheh heh," he said.
He wheeled the pinto, heels drumming its flanks. The animal streaked away between the lodges in a southeasterly run. Rainbow Girl took a few steps after him, then stopped, hands clenched at her sides.
A man shouted. Tsi Tsosi. He was coming from the other end of the village at a run. But Jahzini was already cut off from him. When Yellow Hair pulled to a raging stop, he wasn't six yards from her. His hands were fisted around a big buffalo rifle, and now his glance moved to her. His face was livid.
Dimly Rainbow Girl was aware of her grandfather hobbling toward him. But she looked only at Tsi Tsosi: unafraid now, eyes locking his in a black fury. Nayenezvani! Let the god of the four lightnings strike him down!
Shots. Jahzini had run into someone. And quite suddenly he was racing into view again, turned back by the enemy's fire. Hanging like a burr on the pinto's off side, his leg cocked over its back, using the animal as a shield.
Jahzini. She tried to scream but only a whisper clawed up from her throat.
He was coming almost on a beeline toward Tsi Tsosi. With his face half-turned against the pinto's neck, he didn't immediately see the white man. And then he did. He yelled into the pinto's ear, at the same time using his knee savagely. Veering the animal hard to his right. Cutting away almost at a right angle between the hogans.
Ulring swung the rifle to his shoulder, the blued barrel moving, following intently as Jahzini crossed behind the lodges. Waiting the moment he would clear of them. Sighting in for the instant he would make a plain target.
Rainbow Girl was moving before the thought had completely formed. She reached Tsi Tsosi, she hit out blindly at his arm and rifle. Felt her hand strike metal and the savage jar of it clear to her shoulder as the big gun went off.
Her ears filled with a roaring cascade of sound.
Ulring swore as he brushed her aside. His hand rammed into his pocket; a brass-cased shell winked in his fingers. He slammed open the breech of his rifle, frantically reloading.
Already Jahzini was past the last hogans, the pinto running all out and Jahzini flattened to his withers. He crashed the animal into a stand of aspen. And he was gone, out of sight, safe and running.
Slowly Ulring lowered the rifle. He turned just as slowly. She saw his right hand drop from the weapon, lift, and then swing back and forward. Beyond the blur of his hand she saw his face, the teeth drawn back wolflike. The meaty palm came against her face like a club.
It was a blow, not a slap. The force of it knocked her sprawling. She rolled on her face in the dust, a salty blinding in her eyes.
She pushed up on her hands, blinking her eyes clear. Tsi Tsosi was running for his horse and she thought too late, too late. The words sang in her mind.
Old Adakhai stood looking at her. She rose to her feet and a trembling ran through her. His eyes were like flame. She passed her palm over the warm blood running from her broken lip and met those terrible eyes defiantly.
Then his head turned and it was Tsi Tsosi, mounted now and flailing his horse to a run, that his glance followed. The jaggedness in his look had not been for her.
"Once," he said softly, "and it was not so long ago, if a man did that to you, I would have killed him."
Bethany stood by the big corral back of the livery barn and watched the white colt. He was champing restlessly; he put up his head in the dimming twilight and snorted and pushed back and forth among the other horses.
"You beauty," she said. "Have you been exercised every day? Has he, Claude?"
"Every day, ma'am, sure enough." Claude Warhoon leaned his crossed arms on a corral pole, a straw bobbing in his lips. "The boys from your school, mostly three-four at a time, been coming to walk him. When they ain't, I seen to it."
"Thank you, Claude."
She watched the colt awhile longer, her nerves twitching with sympathy. How much he wanted to be free, running the wild range he had known. And how well, in her present frame of mind, she understood that feeling. Lately she'd been oppressed by a sense of everything closing in on her: the halters of her various responsibilities, the pressures of her false mourning. How good it would be to shed it all and run free as the wind!
Yet she knew from where the urge stemmed. From the surge of almost guilty relief after her first intense depression following her husband's death. And ironically, Dennis, who had really known her so little, would have understood this once—perhaps sympathized. Dennis had always given way to all impulses and enthusiasms that seized his fancy. Any gamble (and gambling in general) had gratified his nature; so had she, for a while.
Bethany herself was dissatisfied with quiet ruts, drawn by worldly excitements. A tendency which had first drawn her to Dennis. But she'd come to a bitter comprehension of the gulf between his surface feelings and her own need—guided by the stern lines of a bluestocking conscience—to plunge herself into the demands and challenges of community work.
Too, she had always hated failure. She could tolerate it in others, never in herself. Her failed marriage had oppressed her. And she was too honest not to admit that part of her present wish to get away from everything welled from a brooding sense of having failed with young Will-Joe Cantrell.
She had placed such hopes in him. He had learned to read and spell better than most frontier-raised whites. He could write a fair hand and cipher in his head well enough to circumvent the trickiest horse dealer. He knew about Bunker Hill and Gettysburg and (thanks to her) could handle a knife and fork with any gentlefolk. ("When," he had asked her ironically, "do you think I will be invited to eat with white gentry?")
Yet he had disappointed her. His apparent ambition had impressed her. She had hoped he would return to his people and use his learning to better their lives. But horse-catching had proved the crest of his aspirations. Now he had stolen, he had killed… in the best style of the alien culture with which she'd imbued him. And Bethany felt obscurely to blame.
The day had been unseasonably warm. Even now, with twilight fading, the heat pushed down the stillness with the weight of a huge dead hand. The in-pressing dusk was like hot gray wool. Bethany took off her wide-brimmed straw hat and fanned herself.
"My, it's been a scorcher, hasn't it? When do you think the sheriff will be back, Claude?"
"No telling that, ma'am. He ain't showed up in town for th
ree days. Cap Merrill come in for supplies today and he says Frank is been up at his and Baylor's camp a couple times."
"Well, I'd heard that they had almost caught Will-Joe there… but surely Frank doesn't believe that the boy will try to return to his people now?"
"Ain't really no way of saying, is there, ma'am? Frank ain't taking no chances, Cap says. Says he ast him and Baylor to stay on watch up there awhile yet. Course now the Injuns know they are watching, but Frank figures it might make 'em think twicet about helping the kid again."
"I see." Bethany touched her temples with her handkerchief. "I understand there was a girl who helped Will-Joe to escape."
"Yes'm, some kin to old John Thunder."
"Rainbow Girl, that would be."
"Anyways Frank had the kid dead in his sights and she spoilt his aim. Frank was madder'n a switched cat. Later he give old John vow that when he is got more time, he will run his whole damn bunch outen the country."
"Well, he was angry, of course. I'm sure that when he calms down…"
"No'm," Claude said flatly. "He don't back water on no promise like that, Frank don't. Anyways he purely hates Injuns. That first day we was out after the kid, he give the boys plain-out orders. Shoot to kill, he says. Even if he makes like he is giving up, don't take no chances."
Shock poured through Bethany like a cold wind. She stared at him. "Oh, really now, Claude, you're exaggerating…"
"I am not, by God, I was right there. He said it twicet to make sure we all got it. I heard him, ma'am."
"Are you sure you didn't misunderstand him?"
"Ma'am, when Frank Ulring says somewhat, they ain't hardly no way a body can take him amiss." Claude snapped his galluses with his thumbs. "You'd a been there and seen how he was pushing us all, you'd blame well believe it. Frank is bound and determined he will get that kid. He don't care how, neither, long as it's dead."
"I see… well, you have work in the stable, haven't you? I sha'n't keep you from it any longer."
"Been a pleasure, Miss Bethany."
"Good night, Claude."
"Night, ma'am."
Bethany headed homeward. She walked slowly, her chin bent, her steps scuffing up little puffs of dust. She felt faintly sick, still numb with a residue of shock. Shock—yet not genuine surprise. Why was that? Because she had always known, or sensed beyond those bits of mere hearsay it was so easy to discount, that Frank Ulring could be hard-steel ruthless?
Not that she'd ever deceived herself that such gentleness as he'd shown her was really typical of the man. Nor had he ever taken particular pains to conceal the roughshod side of his nature. She supposed that she'd always been inclined to dismiss it as one more facet of his touchy pride. God knew he was touchy. Early in their relationship, she had made the mistake of expressing amazement at his wide knowledge of the classics, he had taken a harsh offense that had given her a glimpse beneath his ordinary pleasantry. And the glimpse had frightened her.
That Frank could be ruthless she didn't doubt. But the man of savagely cold-blooded purpose that Claude had described? You cannot judge in haste, she told herself. The truth is never that simple. There's so much more than appears on any surface. Frank had promised her that he would do his best to take Will-Joe Cantrell alive. That was what really hurt, she argued. It was less likely that he had consciously broken his word than that he had simply ignored it for reasons of his own. That was like Frank; he was that kind of a man. Arrogant, overbearing, full of monolithic prejudices that had often stung her sensibilities. She had learned to accept them, and it was just a step to admitting other imperfections in his character. Why should it be surprising that such a man's faults towered as tall as his virtues? If you accepted the best of a man in friendship, weren't you obliged to accept all of him?
Bethany stopped in her tracks, appalled by how easily her mind had slipped into this maze of rationalization. And with a salt-bitter abruptness, she admitted to herself why. She didn't want to believe the worst of Frank Ulring, and there it was. Unable to brush aside the cold boulders of fact, she had rationalized them into mere pebbles. For she couldn't deny, did not even want to deny, his overpowering effect on her. She was a warm and needing woman. And for three years, while the frustrations of her empty marriage had piled up, he had always been there, too vital and dominating and masculine to ignore, gradually infiltrating the vacuum of her needs.
It was even worse, now that Dennis was gone. She was free, and frontier custom which held that long mourning and long widowhood were undesirable still hung on strong in this remote mountain country. She might remarry next week, and few would think the worst of her.
She walked on, her hat dangling by its ribbons from her fingers, and her back was straight. Brace up, Bethany Louisa McAllister. Are you such a lightheaded goose as to leap into the bed of some man because he smiles so handsomely? Brace up! But she felt confused and alone and bitter as she turned up the gravel path to her house.
She unlatched the door and let herself into the sala, leaving the door open. A checkering of lamplight from the house across the road penetrated faintly into the room. It lit her way as she crossed to the table, struck a match and lighted the lamp.
"You had better close the door, Miss Bethany."
A tremor of cool shock ran through her. She half-turned toward the voice, then stood very still.
Will-Joe was sitting on his heels in front of the cold fireplace. His young face was drawn, tired, hollow-cheeked; he would seem gaunted, she supposed, if he weren't ordinarily leaned down to sheer bone and rawhide. His clothes were stained and tattered, and his eyes gleamed with a wild alertness that she saw was not menacing but only a tautly developed habit. His wrists lay on his knees, the hands hanging loose and empty.
"Or," he said, "you can yell. I think it would bring a lot of people in a hurry."
Bethany went to the door and closed it, then drew the blinds on both windows. He stood up and he seemed bigger than she remembered. He smelled of horse and sweat and smoke.
"How did you get in, Will-Joe?"
"The door at the back was not locked. I have only been a few minutes here. I waited for dark."
"That was wise. But it was foolish of you to come."
He studied her face. "You are not afraid?"
"Certainly not."
"Didn't the sheriff tell you I killed Mr. McAllister?"
"Of course, but I believed I knew you well enough to assume it could hardly be deliberate… murder." She pointed at his bulky and shapeless right sleeve. "Is your arm hurt?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"I will look at it. Sit down. In a chair, please. I'm sure you haven't forgotten how."
After a moment he moved to the table and pulled out two chairs. He looked at her steadily and a smile brushed her lips. She murmured, "Or your manners, praise be," and let him seat her before he stiffly took the chair beside her.
"Lay your arm on the table… why did you come here?"
His eyes had not left her face. "I did not think you would yell," he said simply.
"No, I am not going to yell, but I'm going to ask some questions." She had rolled up his sleeve; the soiled and crusted wrapping underneath made her lips tighten. She began to undo it. "And I expect truthful answers."
"Yes, teacher." His soft voice was quite dry.
"Why did you come here, knowing the danger?"
"I wanted you to hear the truth. I don't care what any others think."
"That's all very well. But the truth… that you did not take Dennis's life intentionally? I already believed that."
"No, that is a lie." She looked up from his arm and he shook his head. "I did not kill Mr. McAllister. I have killed nobody."
He talked then. And Bethany listened with an indescribable horror threading her nerve-ends.
She knew she was hearing the truth. Knew it even as a reaction of shocked denial sprang to her lips and died there. Will-Joe was simply telling what had happened. He could not look at her that way and lie. Frank Ulr
ing had killed Dennis. Not by accident, by cold design.
And she knew what even Will-Joe did not. She knew why.
She looked down at the bandage where her fingers now rested motionless. The strip of calico was dried to the flesh of his arm, but there was no bloodstain.
"I will have to soak this off," she said.
Mechanically she went to the kitchen and lighted a lamp and touched a match to the pyre of kindling in the iron range. She set a pan of water on to boil and stood looking at it, thinking that she was in a nightmare that was real.
Real, and all too clear. Frank had broken his promise to her because he couldn't afford to do otherwise. Will-Joe was a deadly witness. One whose story could ruin Frank even if his word were disbelieved in a court of law. She did not even have to ask herself whether Frank were capable of setting up an elaborate plan to murder her husband. She knew Frank, knew beyond any doubt that he could do exactly what he deemed necessary to get whatever he wanted. She looked at the flimsy straws of her former rationalizations of his character: they broke and crumbled, they were nothing.
She carried a basin of hot water back to the table and dipped a cloth and began to soak away Will-Joe's caked bandage. It loosened at once and she peeled it off, taking the poultice with it. She was surprised to see that the deep grooved wound was hardly inflamed or swollen at all, and that healing had begun.
"Did you make this poultice?"
"No. Rainbow Girl, two days ago."
"What's in it, do you know?"
He shrugged. "Prickly pear… different herbs. She is a medicine woman, she knows the secrets. I don't think she would tell you."
"That's a pity. Well…" She ran the hot cloth over his arm again and examined the clean line of healing. "I think now it will heal faster with no bandage. Will-Joe—"
"Ma'am?"
"Do you know why the sheriff did what he did?"
He looked at her a long moment, caught by her intensity, and she saw his understanding. "I think maybe so."
"Say it then."
"It is because of you."
Eye of the Wolf Page 11