by Win Blevins
The fellow started rolling a cigarette with one hand alone, a cow-boy’s trick. Took his time with it, too. “Might look out along the road toward the fort,” the fellow said. He took a deep draw. “She’s out riding with Sheriff Masterson.” He blew the smoke toward Smith. His expression was unreadable.
Out riding? In her splint? With Masterson? As Smith recalled, Masterson had some name as a fellow ready to mix it up, and as a ladies’ man.
Smith said, like the cow-boys, “Obliged,” giving away no more than the fellow did. He reined his horse in that direction.
Smith saw the buggy in the distance, crawling like a spider back toward town. He stopped and focused the field glasses he’d stolen from the sergeant he killed. And couldn’t believe what he saw.
A surrey with a driver, and a horse tied behind. And a woman next to the driver, her head resting on his shoulder.
If the driver was Masterson, and the passenger was Elaine …
He flushed. He had an impulse to gallop off, to get out of Elaine’s life, to go back to …
Humiliated. He felt humiliated, bitterly.
He was just a goddamned red nigger. Red nigger cuckold.
He had to know. And by God he would let her feel the whip of his anger. He gouged his horse with his spurs.
Elaine swam one stroke toward consciousness. Then she felt Sheriff Masterson’s hand shaking her arm gently, and she rose to the surface.
She opened her eyes. The surrey had stopped. A mounted man leading an extra horse stood in front of them, a tall mam. He …
Adam!
Elaine jerked her head up off the sheriff’s shoulder.
Adam spoke slowly and clearly in the soft and melodic Cheyenne language. He must be speaking so distinctly because he wanted her to remember the words forever. His face was dark, mottled. His words were, “A moose has wet on my lodge.” Meaning, something has happened that’s beneath my contempt. “I send you back to your relatives.”
She couldn’t respond for a moment. Then she screamed, “Wa-a-i-it!”
At that moment Adam put the spurs to his horse and was gone in a clatter of hooves.
My God, she said to herself, disbelieving.
She watched the rider get smaller, galloping toward the fort, galloping out of her life.
“What did he say?” asked Bat Masterson.
She looked at the sheriff soberly. “My husband says he divorces me,” she murmured.
The sheriff got down from the buggy and looked down at the road, maybe at Adam’s tracks. Then he looked after the two horses, already getting smaller in the distance.
“We can’t catch him in this surrey, can we?” Elaine said hopelessly.
“No,” said Bat Masterson, drawling it out. He got back into the surrey. “We can catch him with a posse, though. And we will. Remember, he’s a wanted man.” The sheriff lashed at the horses, and they broke into a run.
Divorced. My good God, divorced.
BOOK THREE
Chapter 1
On the second day she roused herself enough to go to the sheriff’s office.
She’d spent the days in a crazy state of mind. That first afternoon she’d lain about, apathetic. She threw herself about her room, actually pounding on the walls and falling on the floor. She wept, hopelessly, self-indulgently, extravagantly. She screamed. She bellowed and moaned.
At some point early on she passed beyond being nervous about what the other lodgers must think. Probably they thought she’d gone mad. They’d send men for her and lock her up. Maybe they’d put her in the cell next to Adam, and at least she could see him and be near him until they hanged him.
She fingered her shoulder-length hair. So now, bitch, you really have something to grieve about.
The next day, in what seemed a fever of rage or despair or … something, she crutched all the way to the telegraph office. There she wrote a telegram to her mother and sister in Massachusetts:
ADAM HAS ORDERED ME BACK TO MY RELATIVES STOP THAT MEANS HE HAS DIVORCED ME STOP I ASK IN SHAME IF YOU CAN SEND ME TRAIN FARE TO COME HOME STOP YOUR DAUGHTER ELAINE
Then she started to edit it down, to get the point into as few words as possible to save money. Suddenly, for no reason, she wadded the form up, slammed it into the wastebasket, glared at the operator nastily, and stomped out. She felt ridiculous trying to stomp without two feet to stomp with.
The day after that she managed to hie herself to the sheriff’s office. The man behind the desk looked like he couldn’t be roused to care about anything on earth. He didn’t get up. She wondered if he could talk around the huge chaw in his mouth.
“Are you a deputy, sir?”
“Unnershuriff.”
“May I speak to the sheriff?”
“He ain’t here.”
“Will he be in today?”
The undersheriff shrugged. “No telling. Out with a posse.” So the fellow didn’t intend to let on that he knew who Elaine was.
“Would you send word to Mrs. Maclean at Mrs. Yancey’s boardinghouse when he gets back? Whenever he gets back, day or night?”
The undersheriff made a shrug that meant, “I guess,” or, “Why not?”
“It’s important,” Elaine said.
The man nodded vaguely.
“Thank you, Unnershuriff,” Elaine said with a maliciously formal smile.
She crutched away with all the dignity she could muster and did not glance back. She thought in thunder to herself: I will get good on that peg leg, I will get graceful with it, I will wear skirts to the ground so people won’t be able to tell, I will be slender and beautiful. Meanwhile she thought how hideous she must look, at the moment, to the undersheriff.
And I will show them that I can teach and be useful.
For despite her tempests, her rampages, her demonstrations, she supposed she had accepted Adam’s decision. Yes, it was unfair. Yes, Adam had made a mistake. Yes, she was misunderstood. But that was just his excuse to get what he wanted anyway. What he wanted, for whatever reason, was an end to the marriage. He’d wanted that all long. She didn’t know why, but she accepted.
She would have done anything for him. But she wouldn’t beg. She never would have done that. Now that she was crippled it was unthinkable.
Not that she believed the excuses he must be giving himself. That everything was against it—the times, the cultures, the barrier of race, the tides of history—everything. It wasn’t their fault, he would say. The circumstances made it impossible.
Meanwhile only one circumstance made their marriage out of the question: Elaine could never again be a whole woman. She couldn’t go to him crippled. And a cripple couldn’t make a wife to an Indian.
So there it was. But the son of a bitch didn’t even know it.
Around midday on the second day Smith cut the old main trail of the Cheyennes moving north and followed it. Now the tracks of his stolen cavalry horses would be mixed with lots of other tracks. Since his were shod, and fresh, the posse could still track him. But he had an idea.
It was an idea that would keep him from shooting at county sheriffs any more, or the deputized agents of sheriffs. Yesterday he’d had to slow them up by letting them know he was watching his back trail. As a result they had to leave one horse for the vultures.
He kicked his horses up to a gallop. They were tired, but they’d run for a while yet. A well-trained horse would run as long as its rider asked, until it died. These horses just needed to put a little distance between Smith and his trackers. It wouldn’t do to be seen working his wiles.
He hurried right along for twenty minutes, then stopped with some rock underfoot. He’d have to work fast. He tied the reins of the two horses together. Then he got his big knife from his belt, lifted the front right hoof of the saddled horse, worked the tip in beneath the shoe, then pushed the knife down to the hilt. A little twisting and the shoe came right off-—it wasn’t as hard as he’d feared.
Seven patient repetitions. Being deliberate brought his pulse
up nicely, but it saved time, and it was something he needed. He had to concentrate to keep his emotions calmed. He couldn’t afford to think about the life he was riding away from, or he wouldn’t end up getting away from it—he’d end up in the hoosegow.
There, he was finished. He put the shoes in his saddlebags, mounted, and got up to a gallop again. He needed a little distance, and then the horses could rest the whole afternoon and night. His shod tracks disappeared, and his horses became two of several hundred Indian ponies.
After two or three miles, he saw what he needed, one set of unshod tracks forking away from the main trail to the northwest. Over that way was a long hilltop. He could set himself there and watch. Mixing fresh tracks with old ones was a risk. A first-rate tracker might guess what he’d done. But Smith thought none of these white men would be as good as a Cheyenne tracker. If they were, Smith would just have to shoot him some deputies. And why not a sheriff, a goddamned sheriff who would steal your wife and make sure of her by hanging you?
He picketed his horses beyond the ridge line, hoofed back up to where he could see the main trail, and got prone with a good shooting angle. Ten minutes later Bat Masterson’s posse came to where Smith had left the main trail and rode on north without even a close look.
Bye-bye, Sheriff Masterson. You ass.
Anguish raged through Smith. After slipping away from the sheriff’s posse, Smith walked the horses away from the trail, his head down, his steps despairing. Now his memories swirled around Elaine, his mind aflame with jealousy.
He did manage to take the routine precautions—waited until past the early sunset and doubled back into some rocks to make a fireless bivouac in the dark. There he sank into a kind of stupor, a miasma of memories of Elaine, fragments of conversations, odd bits of music they’d heard together, tastes of meals they’d shared, often quite ordinary meals, all of it made piquant by intermittent touches, and made absurd by great globs of sticky desire that entangled him, mocked him, and infuriated him.
In the middle of the night it began to rain, a thin, chill drizzle that suited his misery perfectly.
When he woke wet in the morning, he honestly wasn’t sure he’d slept, whether all those throes had been fantasy or dream. He let the horses rest on some fair grass for half a day while he fretted and tried to watch his back trail, and then set out toward Ogallala. He was shaking like leaves in the wind of his own rage.
He found them stuck where the crude road crossed a wash running an inch or so of water, a teenage boy and his father, heaving at their wagon to get it out. They were headed out from town and probably could have gotten through that wash easily except for the rain and whatever their load was. Smith sat his horse and watched them from the top of a little rise for a moment, making sure they were alone, and what they seemed to be, and wondering why they were so inattentive in rough country.
The man had his hair shaved back from his forehead in the manner of devotees of the Chautauqua circuit, of all things. Well, Smith supposed intellectuals came to Nebraska, too. Even awkward-looking intellectuals like this one. The boy seemed sullen. Smith wondered whether he blamed his father for letting them get stuck in a cold drizzle.
Smith rode down close and saw that the faded lettering on the wagon said “DANA DIDEROT, MARBLE MONUMENTS.” Three big gravestones lay in the back of the wagon. Smith wondered what rich family could have been unlucky enough to have three deaths at once. He noted that Diderot didn’t have sense enough to unload the wagon so it would come out.
“Trembul-ling titties, we’ve got company,” said the gangling man. He affected an exaggerated drollness, as though he’d seen Smith coming, which he hadn’t. The kid jumped like he’d been bit. Diderot grinned madly at him, pretending they shared some secret joke. He signed a greeting of friendship to Smith.
Chuckling inside, his face somber, Smith signed friendship back.
“Tottering testicles, a friendly savage,” said Diderot with clownish merriment. “I wonder if he’s a helpful savage.” The man abandoned the expressive sign language of the plains for kids’ gestures: You. Us. Wagon.
Smith put on his best silent, stoic, noble face. If you’re going to be a stereotype, you may as well be a thundering one. He swung out of the saddle, led his horses to the front of the wagon, and picketed them.
He was trying to sort out the queerest impulse he had. He didn’t want to speak English with these people. He didn’t want to be Dr. Adam Smith Maclean. He wanted to give them what they saw, a dirty, stinking, ignorant savage.
He said in mellifluous Cheyenne, “I see you have troubles. I will help you,” and he repeated that promise with his hands.
“Jesus hallelujah,” Diderot went on, pronouncing Jesus in the Spanish was, “Hay-soos.” “I wish I knew what tribe he belongs to,” said Diderot. His son had nothing to say. The kid just stood there looking pissed off, like an engine building up steam. “His skull looks like the Cro-Magnon type. I’m sure there are tribal patterns. The intellectual capacity may be limited.” He played the scientist amused at a specimen.
Smith considered for a long moment. No, he wouldn’t speak English. It was the oddest feeling. He walked to the wagon, climbed in via a wheel, noting that the wheels were dug in deep. He lifted one of the gravestones and dumped it into the wash. One by one, wordless, conscious of the eyes on him, he dumped the others. The carved stones each weighed as much as a sizable man, and sank deep into the sand. Lifting them took a huge effort—for someone of ordinary size it would have been impossible. Smith made a point of seeming to do it easily.
He watched the rivulet of water run around the big stones and deliberately did not look at Diderot.
“Tottering testicles,” said Diderot, with an idiot smile at his son.
Smith jumped out of the wagon, taking Diderot’s length of hemp with him. He tied the hemp to the axle and to his saddle horn. Then he motioned to Diderot to lead the team, and lisped, “Plis, plis,” as though he were unsure of the English word. He went forward to lead his own horse. The horses strained, and the wagon came out with a gritty suck!
“Parlez-vous français?” he asked Diderot as he pulled the picket on his second horse. When Diderot shook his head, Smith said in French, “May it always burn when you piss.”
Diderot held out his arms in a gesture of helplessness. Smith switched his saddle from the tired mount to the rested one and pulled the cinch tight.
He said to Diderot in the Crow language, which he had spoken from childhood, “May your family put you out to starve.” The man smiled stupidly at his son and muttered, “Moronic maunderings.”
Smith swung into his saddle. “May your grandchildren all be idiots,” he said in Lakota, with a big grin and a friendly wave of the hand.
He touched his spurs to his horse’s flanks and was off. Before long, he was sure, the intellectual would recall that the gravestones were in the wash, and start considering how to hoist them back into the wagon, and not like the answer.
It was a damn nuisance. Every time she stepped, the peg banged, or clopped like a hoof on a boardwalk. Just what a lady wants, to sound like a horse when she walks. And the thing didn’t seem to give her decent balance. When she put her weight straight on it, she was balanced. But when she put part of her weight on her good leg, the peg seemed to want to scrape around and act like the deck of a pitching boat. And when she stepped forward on it, it seemed to throw her forward onto her good leg too quickly, making her feel as though she was lurching.
Oh, hell, she was lurching. That was what she would have to overcome. She certainly wasn’t going to be seen around town constantly saving herself with her left leg, like the strap on a swaying train. She was going to be seen walking gracefully, making people admire her carriage, and even fooling those who didn’t know. And to hell with Adam.
She sat and took the damn thing off. It was a simple device, a hardwood peg screwed into a flat, round top, then a piece of rawhide that laced tight onto her leg, with a pad of buffalo hair to act a
s cushion for the stump. Dr. Richtarsch had feared she didn’t have enough leg left below the knee for the rawhide to lace onto, requiring a peg leg that reached up to her thigh, but this one seemed to work.
Lord, her stump felt raw. Maybe she was hurrying the process. But she couldn’t stand being on crutches a day longer than she had to. She would leave Dodge City looking good. Though she was through with the West—through with it! through with it!—she wouldn’t leave until she could look like a lady, not a cripple.
All right, one more circuit of the walls of her room and she would quit. The pain was, well, all that Dr. Richtarsch had predicted it would be. She kept her mind off it by talking to herself about Sheriff Masterson.
Really, she thought some brazenness in the flirtation might solve the problem. Bat Masterson had come back from the chase disgruntled. Adam had given him the slip somehow, and that displeased him. “Pissed him off,” as he kept saying earthily. Until Adam showed up and threw her over, Bat seemed not to take the wanted notices to heart. Now he acted like the lover who was thwarted.
She’d gotten a little news from the sheriff. The Cheyennes had been captured and taken to Fort Robinson—they’d probably be returned to Indian territory immediately. God, she felt for them. She supposed Adam would go with them. Or they would all fight, Adam included, and all would end up dead.
She came to a wall and turned. She hated that infernal clumping noise she made.
Bat should have been thinking of it the other way: it must seem to people that if there was a rivalry, he’d bested his rival. Not that Bat Masterson did think of it that way. He wasn’t that interested in her, except as a curiosity. Possibly a one-legged sexual curiosity, morbid thought.
But instead of reveling in his victory, he kept talking about how Adam had kidnapped the Batz girl and murdered her father right here in Ford County, and he wasn’t paid to let people commit mayhem and walk away. He sent telegrams to other sheriffs, and went on and on about putting together another posse, and seemed to be slowed in the chase only by the unnershurriff’s reminders that the voters of Ford County wouldn’t favor spending a lot of money to chase one single, scruffy Indian. Beally, Bat was being immature about it.