by Stan Krumm
In that awkward position we did a peculiar sideways sort of dance to the deeper shadows of the place around the corner of the outbuilding, where I had laid out my equipment. Sufficient moonlight filtered through the clouds to make our faces visible to each other at a distance of a foot or two, and as I slowly removed my hand from her mouth I held her eyes with mine and tried to communicate with the same sign language I might use with Rosh. I touched her lips, made a talking sign with my hand, then drew one finger like a knife across her throat.
The fear I could see in her eyes, even in that inky gloom, was repulsive to me but necessary under the circumstances. At my signal, she quite readily accepted one rag into her mouth and allowed me to run another one around her head to hold the first. Likewise she turned passively around and stood stolidly at attention while I tied her ankles together with a section of rope. Once again I had her turn to face me and was in the process of tying her hands when the kitchen door swung open and slammed noisily shut again.
I swung flat against the wall of the shed, pistol in my right hand, with my left arm wrapped ignobly around my prisoner.
We were as silent there as intense fear can make two people—stiff as pokers, breathing lightly. Into our line of sight walked a small boy of eight or nine years, swaggering and whispering to himself. If he hadn’t been so intent on his own fantasies, he might easily have spotted us, for the darkness was incomplete and the little fellow was so close to us that when he unbuttoned the front of his trousers, he peed on the ground not four feet from us. Having done his duty, though, he refastened his pants, climbed onto an imaginary horse, and ran back into the night around the corner of the main building.
I relaxed slowly, feeling the girl do the same, and wondered briefly what I would have done if the child had seen us and raised an alarm. There was no time, though, for idle thoughts. I quickly tied my captive’s wrists, signalled an order for silence, and hoisted her onto my shoulder, with her legs against my chest and her arms dangling down my back.
A human being is always an awkward bundle to carry, but May Sang was so compact and light that I thought I might be able to trot all the way back to the horses. When I broke into a run, though, my shoulder bounced into her belly, and she groaned in pain. I slowed again to a fast walk, but still made good time. Circling the buildings until I was across the road and behind the blacksmith’s shop, I headed towards the little graveyard, trying to walk smoothly and not punish her too badly with my shoulder. As we passed the last of the buildings, she grabbed at my coat with her tightly wrapped hands, presumably to control the bouncing movement.
Then she cocked the hammer of the revolver from my right-hand holster. I jerked to a stop just as she fired, which evidently ruined her aim. The bullet kicked up the dirt between my heels but did no damage. In one motion I threw her backwards over my shoulder and sprang ahead, tripping over my own feet and landing on my face.
I scrambled to my knees, my other pistol in hand. May Sang writhed on the ground and emitted a sort of squealing groan through the folds of her gag. My thought was that she had somehow shot herself, but she had only had the wind knocked out of her, and in a second or two she had rolled into a sitting position with the revolver gripped between her nicely bound hands. While I stared stupidly at her, kneeling eight feet away, she cocked and fired again, but she was no marksman. I ran quickly to my right, and before she could shoot again I was behind her. With her hands and feet trussed up, she couldn’t turn around, but she tried gamely to point the gun at me backwards, over her shoulder. One more flash and bang erupted through the night air before I could disarm her. Behind me I heard voices shouting, and I looked back to the roadhouse to see James Cox standing in the roadway holding a lantern and squinting in my direction. One man stood beside him and another ran towards the veranda to get another storm lantern.
I tried to pick up May Sang, but she was through with being cooperative. She kicked and squirmed like a wounded snake, and all I got for my efforts was an amalgam of rope and fists that nearly broke my nose.
As I have said, I despise the very thought of assaulting a woman, but that night had to be declared an extraordinary instance, and I knew of only one way to quickly sedate an uncooperative companion. Even once I had recognized the necessity of striking the lady—as I heard the men of Ashcroft advancing like hounds on a fox—I wavered momentarily, not knowing quite how hard to hit her. In Chicago once, I had knocked out an Irishman with a single blow, my only notable pugilistic success. I figured that a woman would require a little less force than an Irishman, and accordingly popped May Sang with about two-thirds of my weight. She went as limp as an uncooked Christmas goose, and I scooped her up once more over my shoulder.
For the next few minutes I concentrated on silence rather than speed, as I could hear Cox and associates rummaging around the barn looking for the root of all the noise.
It was tricky walking across the uneven ground without a light, but I had set up markers earlier on, and I hadn’t left myself too far to go. A quarter mile from the buildings, I followed a small path that led up a gully, where the shadows were deeper and footing was even harder to find, until I made it to the crest of the ridge. As we got to the animals, I was puffing and wheezing until I thought my heart might burst, and May Sang had come to her senses enough to whimper quietly.
All in all, my kidnapping expedition had succeeded, albeit clumsily. Everyone had heard our departure, but it would be a while before they sorted out the confusion enough to guess what might have happened, and they wouldn’t likely pursue us in the dark. Even in the morning, my trail on foot over the hard-packed clay would be nearly invisible, and with any luck they would decide to start their search to the south.
I stopped long enough to catch my breath, but there was no point in trying to take a real rest. I needed at least twelve hours of sleep, and anything less would only serve to stiffen up my joints.
The poor little Chinese woman was as polite as a bag of flour as I set her into the saddle of the old grey horse, who was probably as tired and confused as his master. I watched her closely for the first few steps as I led the procession out, but she was now fully conscious and evidently had no illusions about leaping to freedom, even though I had had to remove the bindings from her legs.
Before sunset, when I had brought the animals to this section of the plateau’s edge, I had sighted my route towards a distant wedge-shaped indentation in the horizon, and to my great relief I now found that I could still see it quite clearly against the night sky.
I needed to put some distance between myself and Ashcroft before morning. “If the animals can do it,” I thought, “then so can I.” We started off.
The physical exertion soon ceased to bother me, especially after we were down from the little clutch of hills and onto the level desert plain. My eyes adjusted to the dimness well enough to make out the contours of most of the holes and boulders, and I trudged evenly along, with the mule’s long line tied to the back of my belt and the horse’s reins tied to my wrist. The Chinese woman might have been another bundle of gold and blankets. She didn’t make a sound, apart from a single sigh when I removed her gags, and hardly shifted her position.
Physically, I was competent enough, but once the excitement of the kidnapping episode had passed, I sank into a most distasteful and morose mental state, which I was unable to shake. I wondered what I would do if Rosh were dead when we arrived—overcome by a rush of the fever’s poison or ripped apart by wild animals. How could I use signs and symbols to persuade May Sang that the man had been my friend and not my victim?
These were cruel thoughts, and it did me no good to dwell on them, but my weariness made them hard to dispel, even to the stage that I would find myself deep in my foul postulations, staring at my boot tops until I suddenly realized that we had strayed far off our course, and I had once more to sight a line between the hills behind us and the wedge cut out of the hills in front.
We were some three hours along in our noctu
rnal journey, not having stopped to rest for a minute, when I looked up from one of my periods of trance and realized that I could not spot the wedge at all. I seemed to be in some hollow of foothills, and my single guiding landmark was nowhere to be seen.
My confusion nearly led to panic before I realized that the indentation in the horizon was directly above us. We had simply arrived so close to it that its appearance was not immediately recognizable. We would turn to our right here and follow the base of the slopes until we met with the creek.
With a deep breath and a smile of relief, I started the animals forward and immediately heard a great thumping noise behind me. Turning around, I perceived that May Sang must have been about three-quarters of the way descended from the saddle when I pulled the horse forward, more or less out from beneath her. She sat there on the ground rubbing her legs with her hands, which were still bound, and moaned rather pitiably.
I tethered the animals to sagebrush, got the big canteen and my cup from the mule’s baggage, and walked back to kneel beside May Sang.
Before I tried to communicate with her I gave her a cup of water, which she accepted and drained in one gulp. She seemed nervous when I crouched close to her, but I needed to be close enough for her to make out my gestures, and she watched me willingly enough, still with a confused expression on her face.
With my hands, I pointed at her and the horse and made a tumbling motion to symbolize her fall, then held my head and scowled in concern. I wanted to express to her that I was sorry she fell down. Next I tapped myself on the chest, smiled broadly, and held out both hands to her, palms up.
“Friend,” I said, and repeated, “friend.”
She narrowed her eyes and tightened her lips to a sneer as she stared at my hands before her.
“If you ever touch me with your filthy hands,” she said in a low but clear voice, “I will tear your eyes out. Also I will rip your heart out and leave it sitting before you, and I shall be gone before you wake up.”
She spoke with an unusual way of clipping each word short, but her tone and her accent might have been the Queen of England’s, although her vocabulary proved less than regal.
I was shocked, and for a second just stared open-mouthed.
“You speak English,” I said finally.
“Don’t you?” she replied.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded.
“You did not ask me, you swine. You gave me not one chance, you unclean dog,” she spat back. “I never said I did not speak English.”
“I could have explained myself a long time ago—saved us both a lot of trouble, you know. Why did you think I was using all that sign language nonsense?”
“You stuck a filthy rag in my mouth, you disgusting, cowardly blackguard. You gave me no chance. I thought you were some deaf-mute idiot.”
“Nonsense,” I protested. “You heard me talking back at the roadhouse.”
“Well then, I should have thought you were just a fool. Give me some more water.”
I gave her another cupful and waited for her to drink it. “Please try to calm yourself. I can explain my actions back there,” I began, but I was immediately forestalled.
“I can explain your actions very well, thank you. I am not a child. I do not need such matters of life explained. You are a heartless, mindless dog. You are a coward running around in the dark. You are a hopeless, continual liar, consumed by your pride and boastfulness. Like a cowardly dog you grab me and tie me and stick rags in my mouth to take me away and ravish me in some solitary place. When I defend myself, you box me on the chin, and when I wake up with my head throbbing and pounding like poison, I find myself on the back of a horse, off into the perilous darkness. You think you can explain. Shut up! In dear heaven’s name, shut up! I know that you are an animal without conscience, and you probably do this sort of thing each and every day to poor girls who are far from their homes, but if you touch me with your filthy hands, I will tear your belly open for the birds to eat.”
After this lengthy tirade she burst into tears, and sobbed and wailed into the lap of her dress for several minutes. I was not altogether convinced of the genuineness of this display, but if its purpose was to hold me at bay, it succeeded. I couldn’t hope to make myself heard, and if I had felt any impulse to try to comfort her in any other way, it would have been stilled by her eloquent description of what would result should I attempt to touch her. Finally her volume subsided, and I tried to interrupt.
“Please, miss. Please—I have something I must ask you. I can tell you . . .”
“Monster! You are a stupid beast with stupid questions! It is you who should be told a great deal. What could you possibly tell me? You are a creature sent from hell. You are sent to torment poor girls, but for what reason these things happen to innocent souls is the question of the ages. If you want to explain something, then explain that. But no, you should just shut up, you vicious dog.”
It was amazing to me that someone could for several hours be so quiet that I was unaware of her ability to speak my language, and immediately thereafter could launch into such an endless vituperative onslaught that it was impossible for me to interject two sentences. Any gaps in her haranguing were filled with overdramatized sobs and loud moaning. She insulted me with every caustic noun and derogatory adjective she knew, then used some others whose meaning she clearly did not understand. When she ran out of English slurs, she lapsed into Chinese, but her basic meaning could not be misunderstood.
I was too tired to fight the verbal battle any longer. Stepping behind her, I swept up the little woman with one arm and dumped her unceremoniously onto the horse. We walked along the line of low hills, May Sang still muttering low derogations.
When at last she quieted, no sound disturbed the stillness of night except the endless shuffling of eight hooves and two feet. I had decided to let the objectionable young lady stew in her own juice until her countryman could set her straight. My sense of the passing of time disappeared completely, supplanted by the ache in the small of my back.
Only once did the woman distract me from my somnambulant self-pity with a question.
“What is your name, sir?” she asked politely.
“Beddoes. Zachary Beddoes.”
It was mildly pleasing to me to be allowed simple honesty in such an elementary matter as my name. Soon enough this young woman would hear my entire story.
ONCE WE REACHED THE CREEK and began to follow its banks, not much of my attention was required to keep our course, and I focused more on the dimensions of my own exhaustion than on the details of the countryside around us. Thus it was not altogether surprising that our little company wandered several hundred yards past our objective. Even when I raised my bowed head and found that I recognized the little quarry-like basin we were crossing, it took a long minute for me to figure out that we must turn around.
Going back downstream, I also realized that the outlines of objects around me were becoming more visible. Day was dawning.
I had missed the island on our first pass because I irrationally expected to see a fire burning there, and of course we found no such thing. I waded the animals across the little channel and left them drinking from the shallows for a moment, while I helped May Sang from the saddle, removed the bindings from her hands, and walked over towards the little campsite.
“Come on this way,” I told her. “Someone over here that I think you know.”
She hesitated for a moment, then stepped tentatively forward.
“Are you there, partner?” I spoke quietly into the shadows at the base of the big cottonwood trees. “Are you all right, Rosh?”
I stumbled over the cold remnants of the campfire. My heart chilled with dread for a moment before a slight movement caught my eye. Then I was able to discern the outlines of his bed and saw the pale circle of my companion’s face as he turned towards us.
The girl stood immediately behind me. One last wave of uncertainty assailed me as I prayed that I had done the right
thing and was not about to bear the brunt of a horrible misunderstanding.
“I brought someone to see you, Rosh. I brought May Sang.”
“May Sang?” Rosh’s response came as a shout.
She started upright as if she had been stabbed with a needle.
“Who is there? Who is it?” she demanded.
A short burst of two-directional Chinese ensued, and the girl threw herself at the figure beneath the blankets. A momentary whirlpool of questions and answers was replaced by embraces, endearments, and a torrent of tears. I left them and plodded back to bed down the animals.
Our long-suffering animals had behaved heroically. Never again would I permit anyone to use the mule as a symbol for a lack of cooperation. They had blandly traversed every step that I had, but with heavy loads on their backs, and had never balked once. If I had been a better man, I would have put aside my fatigue long enough to curry and towel them both.
As it was I let the saddle and baggage fall to the ground on the far side of the creek and stumbled back to the island.
It was light enough now to see the smile on Rosh’s face and the trails of tears down May Sang’s cheeks as she sat beside him on the ground, stroking the hair off his forehead. As I returned, I saw her shifting her posture a bit, straightening and half turning to me.
“You called this man your partner, I believe?”
“Yes I did,” I said. “I tried to explain that to you earlier.”
She turned to the invalid lying before her and spoke briefly. In response he grinned and nodded positively.
Before either one of us had the chance to move a muscle, May Sang pulled her left arm back in a roundhouse windup and gave Rosh an openhanded belt to the side of the head. He howled like a coyote. By the time I had shaken my astonishment enough to come to his defence, she had gripped one of his sideburns in each fist and was shaking his head like someone trying to shake the last drips from a slop bucket. As I sprang towards them, she paused long enough to jab her elbow solidly into my solar plexus. It was a lucky shot, but it knocked the wind out of me.