by Jonis Agee
He nursed her until the thaw finally arrived in the middle of a late March night and they woke to a warm wind and snowmelt creeping into the tipi. She stood, shook out her waist-length hair, tied it with a strip of buckskin, and began to roll their bed before it got soaked. He realized then that she had been waiting for this moment to leave, and he hastily signed for her to stay as his wife. He assumed that no white woman could survive the hills with him. She was plain, with broad flat features and expressionless eyes so dark he always seemed to be looking at his own reflection when she stared at him. There was a small thick scar on her chin that she often covered with one hand when she knew he watched. She had not said a word in the weeks she’d been with him although he had tried English, then a smattering of Ute, Sioux, Omaha, and Ponca. He didn’t know any other languages. Still she soundlessly joined with him in the deep cold nights of that winter. It kept them alive, and she showed him other ways of boiling bark and grass, of spearing fish that waited sleepily at the bottom of the small pool under the young cottonwoods, of smoking the deer meat in strips, sucking the marrow from the bones and grinding them for soup. The cow somehow found enough forage to stay alive, fatten even, he realized that morning of the March thaw. Her sides bulged and her coat had a glossy sheen. The Indian looked at the cow and burst out laughing, the first he’d heard from her. When he raised his brows and shook his head, she tugged the ragged sleeve of his coat and gestured to the cow’s stomach, then her own, using her hands to draw a round pregnant shape. He looked at the woman’s stomach pushing hard against the deer hide dress, then the cow’s heavy stomach hanging just above the newly revealed earth.
“I am Mary Morning,” she said in carefully enunciated English, and her black eyes softened for the first time as she glanced shyly at the cow’s stomach again. When her face relaxed, it became almost pretty, and Drum felt a brief quickening in his heart. But he wasn’t a boy anymore. He had already lived a hard life on his way to the Nebraska Sand Hills, and she wasn’t the first woman to claim something from him.
He thought now of how different it might have been had he not been raised by that mean old man, had he not shot Bennett Shear and fired the homestead, killing those youngsters, there, he’d said it, had he not done any number of wrong things before they were done to him afterward. For two years before he came to Nebraska he made his way around Colorado and what became New Mexico, prospecting, fighting, barely scraping by, and he’d done some things out there that still haunted him. One in particular, the mine he stumbled upon in the Spanish Peaks, on the way to Fort Morgan. It showed some color, and he couldn’t figure out why it was abandoned until the afternoon the owner showed up with two pack mules and a scattergun aimed at his belly while he slept in the man’s bed in the lean-to at the front of the mine opening. He was sure he’d die that time, and given how hungry and tired he was from trying to scratch a living out of rock, he wasn’t sure he cared.
Drum drained the coffee from his cup and struggled up to pour another. Not a soul stirring. Lazy so-and-so’s. He stood on the porch, surveying his son’s ranch. He had to hand it to J.B., the buildings were placed right where he would’ve done it—so no matter the weather a man could tend cattle and livestock in the home pastures and corrals. The hay yard wouldn’t be snowed in, and water was always close by. Drum had to admit that when he built his own spread, he wasn’t so circumspect, and extra work was needed in the winter to keep the stock watered. If he had it to do over—He bit off the idea with a quick grimace and a shake of his head.
The gold weighed more than he expected coming down that Colorado mountain and crossing Wyoming and up into the Sand Hills, but he was still a young man then, strong as an ox, and the mules were from Missouri and wouldn’t quit. He had stayed almost a year with Wilke, and they’d dug out enough gold to keep them from despair. Wilke said he’d split it down the middle when the time came, but Drum saw how that left them each with merely a small mound. “I know there’s a big vein in there,” Wilke always claimed when the boy grew despondent. Tomorrow, he promised. When the vein finally showed itself, it was too late, really. Drum had planned on leaving for weeks. It was his pick that pulled down the soft stone shelf, revealing a wide vein that Wilke attacked, heedless of the rock trembling above him. It didn’t all come down that morning, and they were able to pull out a sizable amount of gold before they quit for the day. The vein widened, which seemed impossible to the two men who labored carefully now, scooping up the gold gravel and crumbles along with the nuggets.
Wilke was beside himself, slapping Drum on the back, swearing they would be millionaires now, as soon as they could haul their find down to the assayer’s office. That night as they lay on beds set on either side of the fireplace, Wilke insisted they plan for their fortunes. As far as Drum could tell, there still wasn’t enough for the ranch he intended to build, to show his dead grandfather who suspected he was too weak to hold the land. Drum could never admit to himself that night was the beginning of it. Even now he couldn’t be sure that he was the one who caused the cave-in, with Wilke trapped on the other side. They worked for three more weeks. The vein was wide and some of the purest ore either man ever saw. Their fortunes were substantial with no end in sight. Then the entire roof gave way. Drum escaped with a couple of broken fingers and cuts and bruises, but he was in the front and plunged outside as soon as he heard the first crack. Wilke went deeper that morning to follow the seam along the roof into the mountain, picking here and there to reveal the gold. At first there was silence as the dust rose into the still morning air and then the birds in the jack pines around them started yammering again.
He called Wilke’s name and pulled rocks out of the way, but heard nothing so he gave up, resting on his heels as he surveyed their little camp and imagined the trip down the mountain for help. Except there was nowhere to go. By the time he made it to La Veta or Fort Garland, Wilke would be dead if he wasn’t already. Drum thought of Wilke’s last words, “Good Lord, the whole roof is gold, Drum, it’s a gold dome!”
He heard the first sounds as he was rolling up his bed and figured it for imagination, the wind or the birds whose voices could sound human in the peculiar angles and depths of the mountains. As he packed the camp utensils onto the mules, he heard the voice more clearly. Wilke calling his name. He stopped, and stared at the wall of rock plugging the mine. Wilke was hurt, he could tell from the weakness of his voice. There was too much rock. The pieces too big, even if they were riddled with gold. He had enough now. He began to load the gold equally on the mules, and when it appeared to be too much, he unloaded them again, put a few cooking utensils into his pack, and discarded the picks, shovels, and tools. Then Wilke’s voice grew louder, more demanding.
“My legs are busted, Drum, you got to get me outta here.” When that didn’t raise a response, the voice whined, “I’ll give you my share, boy, I swear, you can have it all. I can dig more. Just help me . . . You have to see this gold, Drum, it’s more than we ever imagined. We’ll be kings. Just help me . . . Drum? You there, boy?”
Drum started back up the slope to the opening, then stopped. A man with two busted legs would have to be nursed for months, right into winter. They’d be stuck here, low on food, regardless of the piles of gold. They might not make it. Probably wouldn’t. So there’d be two dead instead of one. Maybe Wilke could dig himself out, though Drum doubted it, maybe he could get himself down the mountain, though Drum knew that was impossible. There was nothing for it. He surveyed the lean-to and in a last impulse grabbed Wilke’s pack and shouldered it, feeling the wooden Hopi kachina doll the other man had set such store in digging into his back. He picked up the mules’ lead ropes and started down the mountain.
At La Veta, just over the mountain pass, he tied the mules in an arroyo outside town and took a small cache of money Wilke had hidden among his clothes. He bought a decent horse, a rifle, a pistol, and the supplies he would need for the trail. His story was that his horse ran off in a thunderstorm coming through the p
ass and he was on foot. The man at the livery nodded. He’d seen it happen. He sold Drum a bay horse with three white socks that had wandered into his corral wearing a saddle and bridle late one night. No brand to speak of after Drum blotted it with a hot cinch ring. He cropped the mane and tail and fed the animal corn and water to bloat it. As soon as the brand scab fell off, he used a root dye to darken the white sock on the front leg. He’d wait awhile to sell the saddle and bridle.
Making his way across Colorado, along the high plains and down into the Sand Hills, Drum had time to consider the problem of the gold, especially those nights coming into winter when the wind blew Wilke’s voice. Even now, sitting on the front porch of his son’s house, he could hear his name when the morning breeze caught the edge of the roof. Sometimes it made him so mad he had to hit something. Most of the time he pushed it aside, willed the sound to stay buried with the rest of it.
He sipped his coffee. It was cold. He got used to cold coffee and cold jerky that first winter in the hills. By the time he decided to settle in the Sand Hills, it was too late to build. He deposited a small amount of gold in the Cattleman’s Bank in Babylon under the pretense that he had made his stake in the California strike. He buried the rest, planned to use it only when desperate, to avoid drawing attention. Plenty out there would take advantage of a lone man holding a fortune in gold. The mules were stolen almost immediately, leaving him with the horse that ran off the first big snowstorm, true to its nature. Drum hunkered down then, figuring to winter on the Niobrara, where he was told the season was usually mild with thaws following storms. It was not that kind of winter.
He looked at his hands, the two fingers he couldn’t quite close, and the dark nails that never regained normal color after frostbite. Come spring, with the cow pregnant and Mary Morning gone, he found his land and began to build a small house, spare and plain. He figured he would build a bigger one later, using some of the gold. He tried not to touch it, kept it in reserve to back up any play he made to acquire more land, cattle, and horses, but as it was he went twice a year to the hidey-hole, always toward dawn. He was lucky the rattlers that frequented the mounds of stone chose not to bother him. He figured it was part of a grim blessing on the gold, on his fortune and life. Except for women and the boy. No blessing there. Mary Morning had stayed until spring, helped him with the chores and cooked his meals. They shared a bed in the silence that grew from winter on, no whispered endearments, no declarations. She must have known how he felt, he reasoned. He wasn’t a man to give things away to just any passerby. Later he would realize that he loved this strange Indian woman more than anyone in his life. He would have shared his fortune with her, he told himself, although he wondered if that was true. He certainly would have cared for her and the child. He would have done that at least. No reason for her to slip away on the buckskin mare. How she even mounted with the belly in front of her, he never knew. Maybe she walked away leading the horse. That image always made him sad, and he shook it off. He could have bought her material to make a dress, combs for her hair, shoes or beads or whatever she desired. A mirror, a better mirror than the small cracked one he used to shave his face. He thought less about the child she carried. He couldn’t say why that was, either.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
As he watched now, the rooster came out, inspected the sunrise, and commenced crowing. When nothing happened, he clucked to himself and minced back into the henhouse. That new dog of Dulcinea’s came down the stair, pressed its face against the screen door, and whined to get out. Drum hooked his cane on the door handle and pulled it wide enough for the dog to slip through. An ungodly mutt, it gave him a courtesy nod, then ambled down the stairs and out into the yard to relieve itself on the lilac bushes.
The white woman he married was a whole different story. Drum shook his head and grinned ruefully. What the hell was he thinking? On a horse-buying trip to Missouri, he stayed with a family that raised fox trotters and before he knew it he had foundation stock and the man’s only daughter to herd home. Turned out she wasn’t much interested in Sand Hills ranching and as soon as she dropped the baby boy she took off to Omaha and beyond. He told J.B. she died so he wouldn’t have to answer for it later. She did die, he learned from her father, on a ship that sank in the Atlantic, on its way to Europe. She married a duke of some sort and was going to live the life she’d always wanted. As far as Drum knew, they were never divorced, but it hadn’t mattered. Silly woman. If she’d waited long enough, he would have used the gold to buy her pleasure. At least he told himself that when he was in a generous mood.
Which brought him to his current problem. He reached inside his shirt and pulled out the envelope that had been sitting on the dresser upstairs. J.B.’s new will and a copy of Drum’s. Who was he going to tell about the gold? Who was he going to leave it to? He never trusted his lawyer enough to put the fact of its existence in his will. He certainly didn’t want Dulcinea to have it. Cullen wasn’t ready, it would spoil him. Hayward wasn’t old enough. He’d be damned if he was going to ruin those boys with too much money. He had spent the last month in bed ruminating on the problem and still hadn’t come up with an answer. It was time to ride out and check on it.
And it was time to put his plans into action, before the county judge held his hearing. Right now he could do just about anything to bring the two ranches together and J.B.’s widow couldn’t do a thing to stop him. He smiled grimly, slapped the envelope softly in his palm. Maybe the gold could buy the judge or even pay off the woman so she’d leave the Bennett men in peace once and for all. Today he’d get word to Stubs to come over to help him ride out for the gold. Have to blindfold the old fool, or get him so drunk he couldn’t find his way there or back. Doubted he could ride yet with this damn foot, though, need to take a wagon, pretend to go to town or some—
“You’re up.” Dulcinea’s voice startled him. Damn woman to sneak around like a thief in the night.
“Coffee’s on the stove,” he said gruffly, flinging the cold remains from his cup off the porch. The dog came up the steps and wagged its long tail at him briefly, saw the disapproval in the man’s eyes, sighed, and flopped down beside him, bones hitting the wood floor with a cracking thump.
“I’m not your friend,” Drum said and felt like those were some of the truest words he’d ever uttered.
When she returned with the cup in her hands he wished he could’ve asked for another. He leaned back and raised his bad leg to rest on the porch railing covered in curls and scales of old white paint. His son hadn’t done much work these past few years. Drum had to admit the cattle and horses were in good shape, but the rest of the place had taken on that run-down shabbiness of a man about to give up. Who would’ve guessed J.B. would take on after a woman like that? Fortunately, Drum had been there to do the right thing.
“Do you have any idea who killed him?”
Drum looked at her for a long moment. “Don’t you think I’d be the first to put a rope on his neck if I knew?” He thought about the Indians lurking around town, the sense he was always being followed on his way to the gold, the rough lot he employed—any one of them would slice his throat for a dollar—the lawyer fella he encountered twice riding their land with a shovel and a pair of binoculars, this Graver who showed up at just the right time, and finally, Cullen. Would he shoot his own father? Drum couldn’t be certain—maybe he’d bred too much meanness into that boy.
“I thought you were supposed to protect him . . . that was our bargain.”
“I did the best I could.” He felt a quick stab of guilt in the middle of his back. He couldn’t very well tell her that he’d made up a bunch of lies to get her to leave.
“You lied.” She grimaced and sipped her coffee. The silence between them grew more uneasy as the corralled horses began to mill and argue like their morning hay was late. A flock of sparrows wheeled up and out of the cottonwoods, then splattered down again and began furiously pecking at the ground beneath.
“Is the sheriff
from Valentine doing anything?” she asked.
Drum snorted. “Man’s about as useful as a three-legged horse. Told me it wasn’t his concern if we hills ranchers want to kill each other off.”
She shook her head. “Babylon sheriff believes it was the boys. I’m thinking of hiring Pinkertons.”
He glanced at her. “That’s a goddamned bad idea.”
She stared straight ahead now, her shoulders rigid, voice flat. “You have something to worry about?”
Drum ignored her. Damn wastefulness. Sometimes it seemed that was all life had to offer. A man worked hard, too hard even, only to see what he’d built sheer away and dissolve like salt in water. Did he want to find his son’s killer? Had it made a bit of difference when he avenged his grandfather’s death? Maybe Wilke had survived after all, waited all these years to track him down and finish off his family. The thought, crazy as it was, made him uneasy. He thought of his gold and some Pinkerton following him around. He shook his head.
“Won’t nobody talk to a stranger out here. You know that.” He hadn’t meant to antagonize her, but could tell from the flush that rose up her neck to her cheeks that she took it personal again, like she always did.
But when she spoke her voice stayed even. “You might be right. I just don’t want to let it go, act like it was an accident. We’re living with a murderer. Who knows what his plans are?”