"Yes, and what would it do to you?" she said.
"When I get you you'll wish you'd give it to me," Luke said, flushing red with anger. He got on his horse and rode off.
Zwey came back well before sundown with a wild turkey he had managed to shoot. But Luke wasn't back. Elmira decided she might as well tell Zwey. She couldn't tolerate any more of Luke. Zwey was mildly puzzled that Luke wasn't there.
"I chased him off with the gun," Elmira said.
Zwey looked surprised. His mouth opened and the look spread up his big face.
"With the gun?" he asked. "Why?"
"He tried to interfere with me," Elmira said. "He tries it nearly ever day, once you go off."
Zwey pondered that information for a time. They had made a mess of cooking the turkey, but at least it was something to eat. Zwey gnawed on a big drumstick while he pondered.
"Was it he tried to marry you?" he asked.
"You can call it that, if you like," she said. "He tries to do me. I want him to let be."
Zwey said nothing more until he had finished his drumstick. He cracked the bone with his teeth, sucked at the marrow a minute and then threw the bone into the darkness.
"I guess I better kill him if he's going to act that way," he said.
"You could take him with you when you hunt, like you used to," she said. "He couldn't pester me if he's with you."
She had hardly spoken when a shot rang out. It passed between the two of them and hit the turkey, knocking it off its stick into the ashes. They both scrambled for the cover of the wagon and waited. An hour later they were still waiting. There were no more shots, and Luke didn't appear.
"I wonder why he shot the turkey," Zwey said. "It was done dead."
"He didn't shoot the turkey, he missed you," Elmira suggested.
"Well, it tore up the turkey," he said, when they came out of cover and picked up the cold bird.
That night he slept under the wagon with a cocked pistol but there was no attack. They ate cold turkey for breakfast. Two days later Luke showed up, acting as if he'd never been away.
Elmira was apprehensive, fearing a fight then and there, but Zwey seemed to have forgotten the whole business. About the time Luke rode up they spotted two or three buffalo and immediately rode off to shoot them, leaving Elmira to drive the wagon. They came back after dark with three fresh hides, and seemed in good spirits. Luke scarcely looked at her. He and Zwey sat up late, cooking slices of buffalo liver. They were both as bloody as if they'd been skinned. Elmira hated the smell of blood and kept away from them as best she could.
The next morning, before good light, she woke up gagging at the blood smell and looked up to see Luke sitting astraddle of her. He was rubbing his bloody hands over her bosom. Her stomach heaved from the smell.
Luke was fumbling with her blanket, trying to get her uncovered. When he raised up to loosen his clothes Elmira rolled on her stomach, thinking that might stop him. It did annoy him. He bent over her and she felt his hot breath at her ear.
"You're no better than a bitch dog, we'll have it that way," he said. She squeezed her legs together as tightly as she could. Luke pinched her but she kept squeezing. Then he tried to wedge a knee between her legs but he wasn't strong enough. The next thing she knew Zwey was dragging Luke over the side of the wagon. Zwey was smiling, as if he were playing with a child. He lifted Luke and began to smash his head into the wagon wheel. He did it two or three times, smashing Luke into the iron rim, and then he dropped him as if he were deadwood. Zwey didn't really seem angry. He stood by the wagon, looking at Elmira. Luke had pulled her clothes half off.
"I wish he wouldn't act that way," Zwey said. "I won't have nobody to hunt with if I kill him."
He looked down at Luke, who was still breathing, though his head and face were a pulp.
"He just keeps wanting to marry you," Zwey said. "Looks like he'd quit it."
Luke did quit, at that point. He lay in the wagon for four days, trying to get his breath through his broken nose. One of his ears had been nearly scraped off on the wheel; his lips were smashed and several of his teeth broken. His face swelled to such a point that they couldn't tell at first if his jaw was broken, but it turned out it wasn't. The first day, he could barely mumble, but he did persuade Elmira to try and sew his ear back on. Zwey was for cutting it off, since it just hung by a bit of skin, but Elmira took pity on Luke and sewed on the ear. She made a bad job of it, mainly because Luke yelped and jerked every time she touched him with the needle. When she finished, the ear wasn't quite in its right place; it set a little lower than the other and she had pulled the threads a little too tight, so that it didn't have quite the right shape. But at least it was on his head.
Zwey laughed about the fight as if he and Luke had just been two boys playing, although Luke's nose was bent sideways. Then Luke developed a fever and got chills. He rolled around in the wagon moaning and sweating. They had no medicine and could do nothing for him. He looked bad, his face swollen and black. It was strange, Elmira thought, that he would bring such punishment on himself just because he wanted to interfere with her.
There was no more danger of that. When Luke's fever broke, he was so weak he could barely turn over. Zwey went off and hunted, as he had been doing, and Elmira drove the wagon. Twice she got the wagon stuck in a creek and had to wait until Zwey found her and pulled it out. He seemed as strong as either of the mules.
They had not seen one soul since leaving the Fort. Once she thought she saw an Indian watching her from a little ridge, but it turned out to be an antelope.
It was two weeks before Luke could get out of the wagon. All that time Elmira brought him his food and coaxed him to eat it. All the passion seemed to have been beaten out of him. But he did say once, watching Zwey, "I'll kill him someday."
"You shouldn't have missed that shot you had," Elmira said, thinking to tease him.
"What shot?" he asked.
She told him about the shot that hit the turkey, and Luke shook his head.
"I never shot no turkey," he said. "I was thinking to ride off and leave you but I changed my mind."
"Who shot it then?" she asked. Luke had no answer.
She reported this to Zwey but he had forgotten the incident — he wasn't very interested.
After that, though, she grew afraid of the nights — whoever had shot the turkey might still be out there. She huddled in the wagon, scared, and spent her days wishing they would come to Ogallala.
67
ALL THROUGH THE TERRITORY, Newt kept expecting to see Indians — the prospect was all the cowboys talked about. Dish claimed there were all manner of Indians in the Territory, and that some of them were far from whipped. The claim upset Pea Eye, who liked to believe that his Indian-fighting days were over.
"They ain't supposed to fight us no more," he said. "Gus claims the government paid 'em to stop."
"Yes, but whoever heard of an Indian doing what he was supposed to do?" Lippy said. "Maybe some of them consider that they wasn't paid enough."
"What would you know?" Jasper inquired. "When did you ever see an Indian?"
"I seen plenty," Lippy informed him. "What do you think made this hole in my stomach? An Apache Indian made that hole."
"Apache?" Dish said. "Where did you find an Apache?"
"West of Santa Fe," Lippy said. "I traded in them parts, you know. That's where I learned to play the piano."
"I wouldn't be surprised if you forget how before we come to a place that's got one," Pea Eye said. He found himself more and more depressed by the prospect of endless plains. Normally, in his traveling days, he had ridden through one kind of country for a while and then come to another kind of country. It had even been true on the trail drive: first there had been brush, then the limestone hills, then some different brush, and then the plains. But after that there had just been more and more plains, and no end in sight that he could see. Once or twice he asked Deets how soon they could expect to come to the end of them, fo
r Deets was the acknowledged expert on distances, but this time Deets had to admit he was stumped. He didn't know how long the plains went on. "Over a thousand, I guess," he said.
"A thousand miles?" Pea said. "We'll all get old and grow beards before we get that far."
Jasper pointed out to him that at an average of fifteen miles a day it would only take them about two months to get a thousand miles. Thinking of it in terms of months proved more comforting than thinking of it in terms of miles, so Pea tried that for a while.
"When will it be a month up?" he asked Po Campo one night. Po was another much-relied-on source of information.
"Don't worry about months," Po Campo said. "Months won't bother you. I'm more worried about it being dry."
"Lord, it ain't been dry yet," Pea said. "It's rained aplenty."
"I know," Po said. "But we may come to a place where it will forget to rain."
He had long since won the affection of Gus's pigs. The shoat followed him around everywhere. It had grown tall and skinny. It annoyed Augustus that the pigs had shown so little fidelity; when he came to the camp and noticed the shoat sleeping right beside Po Campo's workplace, he was apt to make tart remarks. The fact that many of the men had come to regard Po Campo as an oracle also annoyed Augustus.
"Po, you're too short to see far, but I hear you can tell fortunes," he said one morning when he had ridden over for breakfast.
"I can tell some fortunes," Po allowed. "I don't know if I can tell yours."
"I don't want nobody to tell mine," Jasper said. "I might find out that I'm going to drown in the Republican River."
"I'd like to know mine," Augustus said. "I've had mine told a few times by old black women in New Orleans, and they always say the same thing."
"Probably they tell you that you'll never be rich and you'll never be poor," Po said, whipping at his scrambled eggs.
"That's right," Augustus said. "It's a boring fortune. Besides, I can look in my pocket and tell that much myself. I ain't rich and I ain't poor, exactly."
"What more would you like to know about your fortune?" Po Campo inquired politely.
"How many more times I'm likely to marry," Augustus said. "That's the only interesting question, ain't it? Which river I drown in don't matter to me. That's Jasper's interest. I'd just like to know my matrimonial prospects."
"Spit," Po said. "Spit in the wagon here."
Augustus walked over to the wagon and spat on the boards. The day before, Po Campo had caught six prairie-chicken hatchlings, for some reason, and they were running around in the wagon bed, chirping. Po came over and looked for a moment at Augustus's expectoration.
"No more wives for you," he said immediately, and turned back to his eggs.
"That's disappointing," Augustus said. "I've only had two wives so far, and neither of them lived long. I figured I was due one more."
"You don't really want another wife," Po said. "You are like me, a free man. The sky is your wife."
"Well, I've got a dry one then," Augustus said, looking up at the cloudless sky.
The shoat stood on its hind legs and put its front hooves on the side of the wagon. It was trying to see the hatchlings.
"I'd have turned you into bacon long since if I'd have known you were going to be so fickle," Augustus said.
"Can you tell stuff about a feller from looking at his spit?" Pea Eye asked. He had heard of fortune-tellers, but thought they usually did it with cards.
"Yes," Po Campo said, but he didn't explain.
Just as they were about to cross into Kansas, some Indians showed up. There were only five of them, and they came so quietly that nobody noticed them at first. Newt was on the drags. When the dust let up for a moment he looked over and saw the Captain talking to a small group of riders. At first he supposed them to be cowboys from another herd. He didn't think about them being Indians until the Captain came trotting over with them. "Take him," the Captain said, pointing to a steer with a split hoof who was hobbling along in the rear.
By the time it registered that they were really Indians, they had already cut off the steer and were driving it away, as the Captain sat and watched. Newt was almost afraid to look at them, but when he did he was surprised at how thin and poor they looked. The old man who was their leader was just skin and bones. He rode near enough for Newt to see that one of his eyes was milky white. The other Indians were young. Their ponies were as thin as they were. They had no saddles, just saddle blankets, and only one had a gun, an old carbine. The Indians boxed the steer out of the herd as skillfully as any cowboys and soon had him headed across the empty plain. The old man raised his hand to the Captain as they left, and the Captain returned the gesture.
That night there was much talk about the event.
"Why, they didn't look scary," Jimmy Rainey said. "I reckon we could have whipped them easy enough."
Po Campo chuckled. "They weren't here to fight," he said. "They're just hungry. When they're fighting they look different."
"That's right," Lippy said. "It don't take but a second for one to shoot a hole in your stomach. It happened to me."
Call had formed the habit of riding over with Augustus every night as he took Lorena her supper. Augustus usually camped about a mile from the herd, so it gave them a few minutes to talk. Augustus had not seen the Indians, but he had heard about the gift of the beef.
"I guess you're getting mellow in your old age," he said. "Now you're feeding Indians."
"They were just Wichitas," Call said, "and they were hungry. That steer couldn't have kept up anyway. Besides, I knew the old man," he added. "Remember old Bacon Rind? — or that's what we called him, anyway."
"Yes, he was never a fighter," Augustus said. "I'm surprised he's still alive."
"He fed us buffalo once," Call said. "It was only fair he should have a beef."
They were fifty yards from the tent, so Call drew rein. He couldn't see the girl, but he took care not to come too close. Augustus said she was spooked.
"Look how blue it is toward the sunset," Augustus said. "I've heard about what they call the Blue Mounds. I guess those must be them."
The prairie was rolling, and there were humplike rises to the north as far as they could see. Though the sky was still bright yellow with afterglow, the mounds ahead did have a bluish electric look, almost as if blue lightning had condensed over their tops.
In the dawn the Blue Mounds shimmered to the north. Augustus usually came out of the tent early so he could see the sunrise. Lorena had stopped having so many nightmares and she slept heavily, so heavily that it was hard to get her awake in the mornings. Augustus never rushed her. She had regained her appetite and put on flesh, and it seemed to him her sleeping late was healthy. The grass was wet with dew, so he sat on his saddle blanket watching Dish Boggett point the cattle into the blue distances. Dish always swung the point as close to the tent as he dared, hoping for a glimpse of Lorena, but it was a hope seldom rewarded.
When Lorena awoke and came out of the tent the herd was almost out of sight, though Lippy and the wagon were not far away. Po Campo and the two pigs were walking along looking at things, a hundred yards ahead of the wagon.
Augustus made room for Lorena on the blanket and she sat down without a word, watching the strange little man walk along with the pigs. As the sun rose, the blueness to the north diminished, and it could be seen that the mounds were just low brown hills.
"It must be that wavy grass that gives it the blue look — or else it's the air," Augustus said.
Lorena didn't say anything. She felt so sleepy that she could hardly sit up, and after a moment she leaned against Gus and shut her eyes. He put his arms around her. His arms were warm and the sun on her face was warm. Sleep had pulled at her so much lately that it seemed she was never fully awake, but it didn't matter so long as Gus was there to talk to her and sleep close beside her. If he was there she could let go and slide into sleep. He didn't mind. Often she would rest in his arms, while he held forth, talki
ng almost to himself, for she only half heard. Only when she thought of coming to a town did she feel worried. She stayed in her sleeps as long as she could, so as not to have to worry about the towns.
Augustus stroked her hair as she lay against him. He was thinking how strange life was, that he and Lorena were sitting on a saddle blanket on the south edge of Kansas, watching Call's cattle herd disappear to the north.
One little shot during a card game in Arkansas had started things happening — things he couldn't see the end of. The shot had ended up killing more than a dentist. Sean O'Brien, Bill Spettle, and the three people who were traveling with July Johnson had lost their lives so far, and Montana nowhere in sight.
"He ought to have taken his hanging," Augustus said out loud.
Actually, Jake couldn't fairly be blamed for any of the deaths, though he could be blamed for Lorena's troubles, which were worth a hanging by Augustus's reckoning.
"Who ought?" Lorena asked. Her eyes were open but she still rested her head against Augustus's chest.
"Jake," he said. "Look at all the bad that happened since he showed up."
"He wanted to take me to town," Lorena said. "I wouldn't go. I didn't want no towns.
"I still don't want no towns," she said a little later, beginning to tremble at the thought of all the men that would be in them.
Augustus held her close and didn't try to discuss it with her. Soon she stopped trembling. Two big hawks were skimming the surface of the prairie, not far away.
"Look at them birds," Augustus said. "I'd give a passel if I could fly like that."
Lorena had an uneasy thought in her mind. Gus was holding her in his arms, as he had every day and night since he had rescued her. Yet he had not approached her, had never mentioned it. She understood it was kindness — he was letting her get well. She didn't want him to approach her, never would want any man to again. And yet it troubled her. She knew what men wanted with her. It wasn't just a bedfellow. If Gus had stopped wanting her, what did that mean? Would he take her to a town someday and say goodbye?
"My goodness, Lorie, you smell fresh as dew," he said, sniffing her hair. "It's a miracle you can keep fresh out in these raw parts."
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