by Celia Hayes
“Go to sleep, Sam.” Peter gave a huge yawn. There was something more he ought to say, he thought, but he was swooping and falling into soft feather-beds of slumber, as if an ocean wave were rolling him over and pushing him down. The last conscious thought he had was of gratitude for having a place where he could go, a place where someone understood that he was hurting in so many ways, a place where someone listened with kind comprehension and made him hot milk afterwards.
Chapter Four– Doctor’s Orders
It was a wintry day after the turn of the year. Clouds were as thick and regular as rolls of grey wool, but a shaft of sunshine had slipped through a rift and bathed the hills below in a rich golden torrent, turning the river behind them to quicksilver and gilding the limestone crags above. He and Dolph in the lead wagon, and Fredi and Jacob in the second, rested the horses. It had been a long haul up from the river crossing at Kerrville on the upper Guadalupe, having delivered a heavy load of mixed goods to Mr. Schreiner in Kerrville, who had intentions of opening a general mercantile in the near future. At Schreiner’s they had accepted a new shipment of heavy cypress timbers and some barrels of burnt lime to be hauled back to Friedrichsburg.
Dolph slapped the reins on the team’s back. “Soooo, move on boys.” The two teams leaned obediently into their harness collars. It was beyond Peter’s ability to manage two teams one-handed. He rode on guard, cradling a cut-down double barreled Parker shotgun across his lap and a heavy Walker Colt in a holster at his side—in helpless unspoken envy of those having the use of two good hands. Dolph drove and Pepper the dog would ride on the load of timbers or trot underneath the axle, whichever he pleased. All of them, save for the dog, had worked at loading and unloading. Peter groaned faintly at the ache in his shoulders, and the tenderness in the stump of his arm, for he had tried to use his abbreviated limb as much as possible. He had added a fine collection of bruises to the ragged hem-stitched scars there. On the whole, though, he did feel more able to cope. Perhaps Ma’am Becker was right about hard work and hot poultices. He had only gone to her three or four times more, on those few occasions when the pain had been especially fierce, asking for the hot milk and laudanum.
“You know, Cuz . . .this is just what the doctor ordered,” Peter observed.
“What doctor?”
“The Yankee doctor—he told me that I should work at something outdoors in the clean country air—but at nothing too strenuous.”
Dolph grinned fleetingly. “All the clean country air you can breathe, Cuz.”
The road below them was a pair of wagon-tracks worn into the grass and undergrowth. The path fell across the distant hills and through the steep tree-filled valley in between, as regular as something cut by machine. Peter’s gaze was drawn abruptly, as a fish is drawn by a hook in its mouth, to a flock of birds bursting up from a distant thicket. The birds wheeled a short distance and settled into a tree, then roused themselves once more, as if the tree was not the least to their liking. Behind them, Pepper suddenly growled softly; the dog was staring in the same direction, on a particular place in the valley below.
“Someone down along the road,” Peter said, knowing that Dolph’s attention was also suddenly riveted to the birds, the branches they had abandoned and the twiggy thickets beneath. The golden afternoon, the empty land around them and the bare-branched trees reaching up from either side of the trail seemed suddenly full of menace. Pepper growled again, a deep menacing rumble in his chest, and Dolph bade him hush. No, the dog clearly heard, and sensed something more. Something he did not like.
“Keep looking,” Dolph advised softly. “Whoa, boys . . . whoa.” He pulled at the reins; the wagon halted. “I think there’s men among the trees—there.”
Behind them, the second wagon halted and Fredi called, “Wie gehts?”
Dolph half turned on the seat, and called back, “I think there’s someone lying in wait, down below.” He added some more in German, advice and instructions, it sounded like. In response Friedrich cursed, good-naturedly, in the same language. Dolph made a sign for quiet. But he did not urge the horses on for some time. He sat quietly, with the reins slack in his hands and his eyes keenly quartering the distant thicket and trees where the birds were most uneasy. Pepper came down off the load and nudged Dolph’s shoulder with his nose, whining deep in his throat, as if something worried him.
The horses stamped in a restless manner, seeming impatient, and finally Peter ventured, “That’s where I would set an ambush, were I planning to lay for a fellow. Who do you think is down there and what might be their business?”
“Indians,” Dolph answered in a somewhat absent voice, as if every one of his senses was focused on the road below. “Comanche, mebbe. There were unshod horses crossing this way, a little farther back by the river. Doesn’t mean much—it’s not as if there is a law telling every white man to ride a shod horse. And ol’ Pep here certainly sees something shifty in that thicket down below. But that’s something to take notice of.” He sniffed at the breeze, now and again restlessly stirring the trees. He licked his finger and then rubbed the end of his nose. “Didn’t you smell that? Almost like wood smoke, and then like sweat and rendered tallow? Just a faint whiff, now and again when the wind blows towards us from down there. There’s men waiting in that thicket down below and they’ve been there a while.”
Peter shook his head, in admiration for his cousin’s wood-sense. “I’ll take your word for it, Cuz. I don’t smell anything but horses. How many, or can’t you tell by your nose?”
Dolph smiled in faint amusement. “I’m good, but not that good. Half a dozen, maybe more. On either side of the road. Enough they think they might have a chance of taking us . . . but now they know that we know they’re there and waiting. They will know that we will be expecting an ambush . . . since we have taken so long, in sitting here, and looking at where they must be.”
“So, Cuz, what do you do, when you’re about to be ambushed?” Peter felt oddly quite calm, and yet preternaturally aware of every new leaf, of every branch of the thicket and the stony bank that Dolph had been studying so intently.
“Colonel Ford always said to ride into it, once you knew where they were,” Dolph answered. “Charge in and ride them over—turn onto their flank and push their ambush back upon them.”
“’Fraid you’d have an idea like that,” Peter sighed. “Just give me a moment, Cuz. I’d like to even up the odds a little.” He stood up, and laid the Parker shotgun atop the load of timbers. “Didn’t your Colonel Ford ever say anything about the high ground?” Clumsily and one-handed, he scrambled over the seat back and boosted himself to perch on top of the load with the Parker at hand. “I never heard of a Comanche yet, who can shoot from below through a thick timber beam! If they choose to take the first shot, be assured I’ll have the second!”
“Good notion,” Dolph grinned at him, looking back over his shoulder, as Peter settled himself for an uncomfortable but hopefully brief journey, sprawled out flat on top of the timbers. “I reckon you did learn something back east with ol’ Hood and his brigade, after all—besides how to forage for good food and flirt with pretty girls. Hold on tight, here we go.”
Peter flattened himself on top of the timbers, bracing himself as the heavy beams still shifted against each other like living things, with every jolt of the wheels. He could actually not see very much but those tree-tops level with the tops of the timbers and the cloudy sky arching overhead. He did see that Jacob had also climbed onto the back of Fredi’s wagon, taking advantage of the same cover as he had. As their two wagons followed the road down through the shallow defile, Fredi drove with the reins gathered into one hand and a revolver cocked in his other. Oh, yes, this was another man who had seen the elephant.
Peter pressed his body still flatter onto the shifting timbers, every nerve tightened like a fiddle bow, tensed to the snapping point as he listened for . . . what would be the first sound as the Indians ambushed them? A war whoop, or the wicked whisk-and-snick so
und of an arrow hitting home? Dolph urged the horses to a brisk trot—they could endure that pace for some few minutes, drawing that heavy bulk of timbers. If anything were going to happen, Peter told himself, it would happen now. He gripped the Parker—damn, but it was a fine weapon, so much better than that old Harper’s Ferry musket he had carried back then, no wonder the Yankees won—remembering all the other times where he stood elbow to elbow with the fellows, waiting for a shout from their commander, or that first shot cracking overhead with a noise like a thunderclap. Compared to advancing across an open wheat field, this wasn’t much at all. Flattened against the timbers, Peter breathed in very slowly and counted to ten, then twenty. If it came to it, he could reload the Parker in the blink of an eye. His cousin had patiently worked out how he could do so one-handed and drilled him mercilessly: he would hold two fresh cartridges between his fingers, jutting out past his knuckles, brace the barrel of the Parker in his armpit, thumb open the catch and break it open with his hand, pry out the empty shells, make a fist and slam in the new shells, and snap it shut. Ten seconds, or less, and in a pinch, or if the Parker got too hot, there was always the Colt. Frankly, if it were a Comanche ambush waiting down there, Peter would prefer the Parker, for the authoritative spatter that shotguns like that would make, close in. He counted to thirty, then forty. Still nothing happened. Fifty, sixty. Presently the team slackened pace to a walk. Peter sat up, bracing himself with one hand.
“So . . .I guess they decided we looked too tough a nut, Cuz?”
“Expect so,” Dolph replied. Peter scrambled down from the load, and resumed his former seat. Dolph added thoughtfully, “We’ll send word to Captain Inman’s Rangers as soon as we get to town that there’s a raiding party out there, looking for sport and easy horses.”
“You saw something?” Peter asked, and his cousin nodded, his fair hair blowing off his face. Dolph’s shapeless grey hat lay next to him on the wagon bench. He put it on his head again and slowed the horses to a walk.
“Comanche, lying in wait. I saw a scrap of red, a blanket like what they favor, just where I thought they’d lay up—back among the rocks and trees. But I think there was someone sensible among them telling them to hold back. So they let us by. I saw a couple of young ones, ducking quick-like behind cover as we went past; just boys, looking to make name and fame among their people. That’s how they need do it, Papa told me.”
“What else did Uncle Carl tell you, then?” Peter settled onto the wagon-bench, torn between genuine interest and the relief of terror recently past. “’Bout the Comanche and the other wild Indians?”
“Oh, he was wood-crafty,” Uncle Carl’s son returned evenly, meditating like a man asked a question of mild and academic interest. “The best that Colonel Ford ever knew. So he told me, often enough. Papa took me riding all across his land from the time I was tall enough to sit on a horse. And he talked to me and showed me things, said that I should pay attention around me always. Showed me how to track, what to look out for, what to listen for. Papa was . . .” Dolph paused again, re-settling his hat over the fair and white-blond head. Had he removed it as a taunt to the Comanche, Peter wondered, or some kind of signal? Come and take it if you can. “Papa knew his own lands as Mama knew her own garden or her own store-place, now. He said that one should know the wilderness out in the Llano country, just the same. I should know it so well and pay such attention so that I would recognize a handful of broken twigs and a footprint in the dust as quick as Auntie Liesel sees a pillow out of place in the parlor.”
“Uncle Carl, he knew the Comanche pretty well too, didn’t he?” Peter allowed at last.
Dolph nodded. “He went with Mister Meusebach’s treaty mission and met with some of their folk. I could not say he was ever friends with any, but he respected them. And they spoke of peace with the Germans back then—and meant it, too. Some of the Comanche still remember. We lost more folk to the Hanging Band during the war than we ever did to the Indians before it.” Peter looked sideways at his cousin. In three months of close association, that was the nearest thing to a bitter word that he had heard Dolph utter.
He was reminded again of his own angry and thoughtless words to his uncle, and said by way of apology, “I reckon feelings ran pretty high, Cuz, because of the war and all. It’s something that most men regret, now.”
Dolph slapped the reins over the team’s backs and answered curtly, “As they should, but men like Waldrip never will. The war was just an excuse for him to carry on a feud. I don’t rightly know if he’ll ever have the nerve to come back to the Hills. I kind of hope he will.”
“Why is that, Cuz?”
Dolph looked straight ahead. When he answered, the certainty in his voice seemed all the more chilling for its very matter-of-fact flatness, as if he described the weather. “It’ll save me the trouble of tracking him down and killing him. He ran to Mexico, after Captain Banta was arrested and tried, hadn’t the guts to face up to what he done and the folk he wronged.”
“Here, I thought the war was over,” Peter said when he recovered his own voice. “Carrying on a fight like that is a dangerous business.”
“Cuz, when it comes to killing Waldrip, I’d have to get in at the end of a long line.” Dolph shrugged as if it was a matter of no moment. “And the war had nothing to do with it, save for giving him a free hand.”
“I’d sooner see the law deal with that kind,” Peter said.
“Oh, the law!” Dolph barked out a short and derisive laugh. “The same law that they used to rob my mother of everything my father had worked for and throw us out of our house like so many beggars! That law, you mean? The same law that put Captain Banta safe in a jailhouse, instead of strung up to a handy tree or dead in the dirt like the Itz brothers? They used the law for their own purposes, broke it when it was too much trouble to obey, and then whined for the shelter within the law when men sought to deal with them in the same like as they had dealt with others. Look for the protection of the law out here, Cuz, you’ll wait a damned long time—if you aren’t dead first.” He looked straight out at the wagon track unrolling before them, the backs of the four horses pulling in harness, and added, “It’s not your fight. But if I ever do meet up with J.P. Waldrip, I’d like to think you’d cover my back. He’s a twisty bastard, mean as a snake.”
“You don’t have to ask, Cuz,” Peter answered, but with a feeling of foreboding. He hoped that this Waldrip would stay in Mexico for a long, long time. He didn’t like to think of his quiet, soft-spoken cousin caught up in a blood feud, even if he was as wood-crafty as an Indian. “Just for my information, though; how will I know this Waldrip, if he ever turns up?”
“Odd eyes—one grey and one blue,” Dolph answered. “He wore a tall black beaver hat, almost like what the regular soldiers used to wear, and he has a liking for tormenting the weak.” He paused for such a long moment that Peter thought he was finished, until his cousin added, “I saw him hold a pistol to Hannah’s head until Papa agreed to go quietly with them.”
And for that, Peter had nothing to say. But he silently resolved that if it came to that, it would be his honor to guard Cousin Dolph’s back. They were all the blood he had left in the world and Ma’am Becker near about the closest thing to a mother. Of course he would take their part, especially against a low-life like Waldrip.
On their return to Friedrichsburg late that afternoon, all four of them walked back to Vati’s house for supper, their footsteps light with anticipation. They had first delivered the timbers and barrels of lime to where a new building was going up along Main Street, then had unhitched the teams, brushed down the horses, and taken care of all the necessaries. They were cold, hungry, and well-tired.
Golden lantern light slipped between the curtains and the cracks in the window shutters of the big house on the corner of San Antonio and Market Street, looking as warm as a mother’s loving embrace. Beyond the expanse of Market Square and the coffee-pot octagonal dome of the Verein-Church, the sun set in a blaze of
purple and scarlet clouds edged with fire. Pepper romped at Dolph’s heels, looking as pleased as if he had two tails to chase. The four of them talked of the non-encounter with the Indians and of other matters to do with horses, trade, and freight wagons. Peter sensed, though, that his cousin’s mind was elsewhere.
As they crossed the street, Peter thought again of Waldrip and the Hanging Band. Most folk hereabouts seemed ready to put the war behind them, for which he could hardly blame them at all. But he had heard whispers enough about Waldrip, and the men from Kansas who had abetted him in the worst outrages during the last year of the war. The widow Feller had been pointed out to him; her husband torn from her arms as Waldrip and the men from Quantrill’s band went looting and hanging from house to house along Grape Creek. Surely a man of such notoriety would not dare set foot in Gillespie County, Peter told himself, not with every man’s hand turned against him.
They went around to the back of Vati’s house, and let themselves in through the garden door. Ah, the welcome of a warm house, with supper waiting and the lamplight gleaming on the brass and china ornaments hung on the walls. Peter thought, with a pang, of his mother’s house—it had once been as welcoming as this.
“You’re late!” Miss Anna welcomed them from the kitchen door.
“Alas my lady, a thousand apologies.” Peter swept up her hand and kissed it with an extravagant gesture, then made a smacking sound with his lips, as if he was trying to figure out the taste of something in his mouth. “Oh, my, you were chopping onions, just now. And celery . . . a distinct air of celery!” Anna pulled her hand away and Peter made a tragic face. “My favorite vegetable—may I not have another taste?”
“No!” Anna snapped. “Your taste in perfumery is most lamentable, Mr. Vining!”