by Stan Krumm
When the stars had faded from my vision, she was once again stroking the skin on the man’s bruised cheek and cooing at him like a fretful dove. I presumed he was in no more need of help, so I sat where I was, listening with a mixture of relief and disgust to the gentle tones of their singsong exchange.
As I stood up to depart and give them their privacy, May Sang spoke to me once more.
“I have heard about you, Zachary Beddoes. I have heard you are a wild and murderous animal with no conscience or respect for God or man. How you made my poor love to be your helper, I don’t know. Even if I forgive him, it is because I should not have let him go so far off away from his home, and I might still rip you to pieces. You know you should have kept your evil to yourself and left my poor, poor love out of this.”
I was much too tired to argue. I swept the rocks and sticks away from a patch of moss near one end of the little islet, pulled my coat over me, and fell asleep.
I didn’t sleep for long. I felt like the corpse of someone long drowned, being hauled slowly to the surface of a deep tropical pool, and it required almost a supernatural effort to make my eyes focus on the face before me.
“Wake up. Wake up now, Mr. Beddoes. You are always so difficult, and here I am trying to be nice to you. I know you are awake. Please open your eyes.”
May Sang crouched directly in front of me, at the centre of my blurred vision, with her elbows resting on her knees and a short stick in her hand, tapping on my shoulder. When she judged that my eyes were stuck open, she gave me a thin smile. At least, from the context of her words, I would assume that such was meant to be her expression.
“It seems I have misunderstood you, Mr. Beddoes. I have judged you badly perhaps, and I should apologize.”
The greatest token of her remorse and esteem would have been to allow me to return to my slumber, but my lips would not move quickly enough to interrupt her with this suggestion.
“I spoke a little harshly in the night, I think, but you must realize that I was very confused. You should remember, Mr. Beddoes, that it is extremely discourteous to spirit away young ladies in the dark, and what was a poor girl such as me to think? And if you absolutely must kidnap a girl, you should at least be gentle, you know. Here I am with bruises all over, and a cut on the knee. Yes, and all night I was thinking that in the twinkle of an eye I might be killed.”
She managed to make the apology seem more like a lecture than any statement of remorse.
“Still,” she said, turning her head to a profile, “I was hasty in my thinking perhaps, although what can I hope to know, except what has been told to me about such things and about you in particular? Now, of course, Leung has told me the full story, and I appreciate the predicament more fully.”
The peculiarities of her speech and her train of thought made it difficult for a half-awake man to follow her.
“Who’s Leung?” I asked.
“What a question!” she chirped. “Leung is Leung!”
“You mean Rosh?”
“Ah, here is this Rosh business again. What is ‘Rosh’ supposed to mean?”
“That’s his name, girl. His name is Rosh. He told me so when we met.”
“Oh no. Oh no. He thought your name was Rosh, and it was very hard for me to convince him that no, it was Beddoes.”
I was confused and frustrated, and I couldn’t begin to figure what I was doing awake.
“I’ve been calling the man Rosh for three hundred miles, for heaven’s sake,” I insisted, but her reply was equally confident.
“Leung says you have called yourself Rosh ever since he discovered you.”
I was tempted to demand to know what was meant by him discovering me, but I was too impatient to pursue it.
“I have called him Rosh for too long now,” I shouted, “and I will continue to call him Rosh. I am Beddoes and he is Rosh, and I am going back to sleep now.”
That, of course, was not about to happen. No sooner had my eyes closed than the tapping resumed on my shoulder. My first impulse was to lunge forward and bite the stick in half, but instead I merely glared at my tormentor without lifting my head.
“You are once again being most impolite,” she informed me. “Here I am, being most humble and apologetic, and you shout back at me. I am forgetting the demands of my station and trying to be friendly with you. Whatever Leung may say about your good attributes, I am suspicious still that you may be a villain. I am not such a precious, naive young girl as you think, and I heard about you before you ever came to Ashcroft Station. Still I am trying to be friendly, and you insist on shouting.”
She was waiting for a response to her last outburst, so I apologized for shouting.
“Now I really must get some sleep,” I mumbled.
“Oh no!” she exclaimed, and jumped to her feet as if she had just discovered that she was sitting on a rattlesnake. “Get up! Look around! Feel the sky!”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I wasn’t about to leap to my feet for the sole purpose of indulging my senses.
“Poor Leung is very sick. He’s been shot, you know, shot and beaten very badly. Then, I’m ashamed to say, he was left all alone by you to shiver and gnash his teeth in the dark while you went off travelling. You should have come and got me much sooner. Now we have to look after the poor soul. It might rain any time. It might snow. You can feel it. Get up now, and we’ll all go where we can get under cover. Come along.”
I concluded that I had made a grave mistake in travelling fifteen miles or more across naked wasteland to bring this black-haired demoness to our camp. I have never been a man to ignore or escape my problems, but in this case, every fibre of my being demanded that I pull my coat over my head and retreat once more into unconsciousness. May Sang, unfortunately, was not the sort of problem who would allow herself to be avoided. She disappeared for only a moment, then returned once again to chide and chatter like an angry squirrel and tap her little stick on my coat. Finally it seemed easier to submit than to resist, and I climbed unsteadily to my feet and followed her.
When my head cleared, enough of my sensibility returned for me to object to the plan at hand.
“Listen, young lady, we are not on some city street corner here. The nearest place of shelter is the place we just travelled from, and Rosh is in no shape to make that kind of trip. Besides, I don’t know how much of our situation he explained to you, but it would be a bad idea for either of us to be seen in public. I at least have some things that I couldn’t explain to a magistrate.”
She dismissed my protests with a shrug.
“I know all about your troubles. Don’t you worry, Mr. Beddoes, I know all sorts of things of which you are ignorant. Come along. Three miles up this very creek is the Farrell homestead, and we can move Leung into their old cabin. No one will suspect a thing. Mr. and Mrs. Farrell built their new house over the hill by the road because the cabin was dark and ugly and small, but we will be quite happy there. It will be dry, and we can make it warm. Look here, I’ve already loaded the mule and saddled the horse. You must help Leung up now.”
May Sang may have been a woman of great ability and much knowledge, but she didn’t know how to load a mule. I undid everything and retied the baggage, which prompted her to sulk a bit. Then I helped Rosh onto the horse. He seemed to be much improved since I had last nursed him, partly, I suppose, because the return of May Sang had lifted his spirits. I resolved to find out later whether she was wife, sweetheart, or sister, but at that moment I was intent only on the job at hand. Eventually I would be allowed to sleep. I wasn’t particularly curious about the abandoned cabin, as long as it was functional, but she volunteered the background information with a tone of pedantic pride.
“I know every place and every person around here,” she explained. “They all buy their supplies from Mr. Cox, you see, and I am what he calls his ‘right-hand girl.’ When there is important mail for these faraway farms, it is me he sends, because he knows I ride horses very well and have
no fear of calamities. Mr. Cox has also commented that when I work I never seem to get tired, which I am afraid could not be said about you, Mr. Beddoes. Don’t you think we should hurry along before some stranger on the road catches sight of us? Laziness is all right for crooks who have already escaped from the clutches of the law, Mr. Beddoes, but we certainly must not be seen.”
Without a pause, she shifted languages and showered Rosh with what sounded like a mixture of encouragement and admonition. The poor fellow saw my dour expression as I tightened the belly straps of his saddle and gave me a helpless half-smile. He pointed at May Sang apologetically and made signs to me, but his explanation would not translate into our form of communication, and he ended by shaking his head and patting me once on the shoulder.
The aching in my legs behind and below my knees bothered me at first but disappeared once we had started walking, and the dreamy, monotonous plodding reflex took control. The day was once again cloudy and cool, and the world looked wide and flat to me. The rocky creek bed we travelled seemed expanded from its actual width of fifteen or twenty feet to being an immense, badly cobblestoned highway. On the other hand, I felt that if I could manage the energy to straighten up, I might scratch the fluff of the low clouds with my extended arm.
Rosh was silent, as always. The one time I glanced at him, he seemed to be as comfortable as could be hoped. May Sang, on the other hand, was rarely silent. She spoke to either of us whenever she could think of something to say, and to herself much of the time when she could not. She annoyed me in any number of ways. When she was not speaking, she hummed the same tuneless oriental melodies that I had recently heard from my partner’s lips. Worst of all, she affected the most unladylike habit of whistling. When she walked, she kept a position to the fore, which was natural enough since she was the one who knew our exact destination, but even her manner of walking disturbed my tranquility. She never moved in a straight line. Like a water beetle, she dodged and wound her way around the slightest obstacle in the path. I suppose her small stature and her long skirts may have had something to do with this, and I grumbled to myself that no man should be forced to walk any distance with a woman.
In this sunken attitude of mind and heart, I kept no track of the hour, but it must have been some time around midday when we arrived at Farrell’s cabin.
May Sang informed me that the cabin was abandoned because Mrs. Farrell had finally refused to sleep with her husband until he had built her a new house, and she offered me her personal opinion that the man should not have wanted to sleep with the old turtle at all, but he had built her a new home anyway, just over the ridge and a half mile towards town across the meadows.
I had to agree with Mrs. Farrell. The cabin looked grim within and without, with much more deterioration than one year of vacancy should have caused. It had been built of cottonwood logs, poorly sorted as to size, with only one window and a plank door with cracks in it big enough to slide a slice of bread through. The weight of the sod on the roof had started to collapse one corner of the building, but it was dry and stopped the wind, and there was still a hope that I would be allowed to sleep once we were settled there, so I accepted it readily as my temporary castle.
The animals were unloaded once more and left to graze at the edge of the pine forest that encircled the clearing. I gathered sticks and started a small fire on the dirt floor close to the window while May Sang made as comfortable a bed as she could from boughs and moss.
Some of the smoke from the fire escaped through the window opening and some drifted up through the old chimney hole. I was satisfied that if we kept it low, it would not be enough to draw attention to us from any distance, but I had yet to consider the opinion of the woman of our party.
May Sang wished to pile on enough brushwood to heat the breezy little room to kitchen temperature, and I refused her this luxury.
“Please be reasonable, Mr. Beddoes,” she declaimed, “and think for once of others. Poor Leung has been grievously injured by villains, and he must be kept warm.”
“Keep him close to the fire and under his blankets. He’ll be just fine,” I suggested.
“Oh no, no! He was not born in this cold land, you see. Persons from China and such countries need to be very good and warm when they become sick. Not freezing. He has a fever already, you see, and these things worsen if disregarded by thoughtless people.”
“He’ll have more trouble than fever if we get all the neighbours poking in to see who’s made camp in this cabin. Your poor Leung could very easily end up at the end of a hangman’s rope if he gets caught with me.”
I had her at a loss for words for a few minutes and she just glared at me. While she primped and adjusted Rosh’s bed and wiped his forehead with a wet cloth, I made my own nest on a corner of the floor and let my throbbing muscles uncoil. She mumbled, to herself but for my benefit, that her poor, poor love should never have allowed himself to be seduced into aiding in my vicious schemes. I ignored her and had almost dozed off when I realized that bit by bit the size of our campfire was subtly increasing until it approached bonfire proportions. Finally I roused myself enough to carry the stock of dry wood from its place near at hand, and stacked it in the farthest corner of the room.
“You say you know this country, do you?” I asked her with a sneer. “Well, you should know better than to heat up an empty building in winter, then. Right about now there’s rattlesnakes hibernating down in the cracks between the logs at the bottom of old walls. If you get this place good and warm, you’ll have them all awake and crawling in here to get comfortable.”
I flopped back down in my corner and once again she was silent. I don’t know if she really believed me, but after that the fire stayed at a respectable size. It was the only time I had reason to think I might have won an argument with May Sang.
She must have allowed me several hours of sleep, although it seemed to amount to only a protracted blink, for when she shook my shoulder, I awoke to the long shadows of late afternoon.
“That will have to be enough slumbering now, Mr. Beddoes. While you sleep away, I have solved our problem, which is food, which we have none of, and poor Leung tells me you have fed him all the way only dry deer flesh and fried wheat paste, but now I have gone off and very sneaky I have become a thief at the Farrells’ root cellar. Yes, you have made a thief of even me, Mr. Beddoes! Now come and eat.”
She had found some carrots and a potato or two, which she had boiled in our tin pot. Unsalted boiled roots never tasted better. Even Rosh managed to eat a bit, then fell asleep beside her on the outskirts of the campfire’s pale circle of light.
Finally I broke the peaceful silence.
“You loaded up the mule this morning, May Sang. You must have taken notice of the gold.”
She nodded once and continued to stare at the orange embers at the base of the flames.
“Come on now, woman, didn’t that do anything for you? Didn’t it make you just a little bit excited? There’s more gold there than most people will see in a whole life, let alone hold it and have it to own.”
“It is not mine.”
“It’s partly Rosh’s. Leung’s, that is.”
She shook her head.
“He has told me that he felt compelled to relinquish his part.”
I laughed. “There’s still a good part of it that belongs to him.”
“Well,” she said, and shrugged. “That will be good for us. Good enough, I am sure.”
When I had wanted peace and quiet, she had prattled on without a pause; now that I was inclined to talk, she was suddenly uncommunicative. She wouldn’t volunteer a thing that I did not ask directly.
“It’s too bad he and I can’t talk things over properly.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“Your English is certainly good enough.”
“Thank you. I have spent considerable amounts of time and read a multitude of books.”
“But Rosh?”
“Stubborn. Leung is very stubbor
n.”
“He’s smart enough. Even without trying, he should have made better progress with it than he has by now.”
She hesitated a second, then spoke without looking at me. “He is of the opinion that it is dangerous to become too involved in the life of this uncivilized place. If one speaks like a wild person, one might become too much like a wild person. That is his idea.”
“He thinks the white man might be a bad influence, does he? There’s a laugh!”
She returned my sneer. “And what is it that you have taught my poor Leung? Wild living and lawlessness!”
She did have an arguable point at that. I didn’t want to antagonize her any more than I already had, so I took it philosophically and changed the subject.
“So then, you’re his sweetheart?”
“He is my husband.” She said it with a touch of defiance.
“Husband?” I pursued. “What was he doing up in the goldfields then, and you down here?”
“That is no place for a Chinese lady,” she informed me. “I am too proper and too sensitive. He wished me to be sheltered from the wickedness of wild mining men.”
“Not much better down here, is it?”
“At least we are farmers here, not highwaymen, shooting each other for gold.”
“Well, I can see why you’d be angry at him for leaving you behind.”
I hadn’t meant to offend her, but she seemed suddenly rather angry. When she spoke, it was in a low, controlled tone.
“And what do you know about such matters, Mr. Beddoes? Are you out here in the wild country protecting some wife that I cannot see? Will you teach us about honour and duty before you run off with your gold?”
I began to regret that I had initiated this conversation. Her assessment held the sting of truth.
“I meant no offence. You’re quite right. I don’t know the slightest thing about women. Never had a sweetheart, not even a girl who knew me from any other beard and trousers passing by on the street. I know a bit about gold and guns, and all about how to get myself into a proper pickle without even trying—that’s what I know.”