A Century of Great Western Stories

by A Century of Great Western Stories (retail) (epub)

  “What gave you the idea you’ve got any say around here after what you did? I’m the one to say what’s to be done. You don’t be careful, maybe I won’t take you back.”

  “Maybe I don’t want you to!”

  “So damn finicky all of a sudden! After being with the Indian and maybe a lot more!”

  Sergeant Houck stepped through the doorway. The man’s back was to him, and he spun him around and his right hand smacked against the side of the man’s face and sent him staggering against the wall.

  “Forgetting your manners won’t help,” said Sergeant Houck. He looked around, and the woman had disappeared into the inner room. The man leaned against the wall, rubbing his cheek, and she came out, the boy in her arms, and ran toward the outer door.

  “Cora!” the man shouted. “Cora!”

  She stopped, a brief hesitation in flight. “I don’t belong to you,” she said and was gone through the doorway. The man pushed out from the wall and started after and the great bulk of Sergeant Houck blocked the way.

  “You heard her,” said Sergeant Houck. “She doesn’t belong to anybody now. Nobody but that boy.”

  The man stared at him and some of the fury went out of his eyes and he stumbled to his chair at the table and reached for the bottle. Sergeant Houck watched him a moment, then turned and quietly went outside. He walked toward the corral and as he passed the second shed, she came out of the darker shadows and her voice, low and intense, whispered at him.

  “I’ve got to go. I can’t stay here.”

  Sergeant Houck nodded and went on to the corral. He harnessed the horses quickly and with a minimum of sound. He finished buckling the traces and stood straight and looked toward the cabin. He walked to the doorway and stepped inside. The man was leaning forward in his chair, his elbows on the table, staring at the empty bottle.

  “It’s finished,” said Sergeant Houck. “She’s leaving now.”

  The man shook his head and pushed at the bottle with one forefinger. “She can’t do that.” He looked up at Sergeant Houck and sudden rage began to show in his eyes. “She can’t do that! She’s my wife!”

  “Not anymore,” said Sergeant Houck. “Best forget she ever came back.” He started toward the door and heard the sharp sound of the chair scraping on the floor behind him. The man’s voice rose, shrilling up almost into a shriek.

  “Stop!” The man rushed to the wall rack and grabbed the rifle there and held it low and aimed it at Sergeant Houck. “Stop!” He was breathing deeply and he fought for control of his voice. “You’re not going to take her away!”

  Sergeant Houck turned slowly. He stood still, a motionless granite shape in the lamplight.

  “Threatening an army man,” said Sergeant Houck. “And with an empty gun.”

  The man wavered and his eyes flicked down at the rifle. In the second of indecision Sergeant Houck plunged toward him and one huge hand grasped the gun barrel and pushed it aside and the shot thudded harmlessly into the cabin wall. He wrenched the gun from the man’s grasp and his other hand took the man by the shirtfront and pushed him down into the chair.

  “No more of that,” said Sergeant Houck. “Best sit quiet.” He looked around the room and found the box of cartridges on a shelf and he took this with the rifle and went to the door. “Look around in the morning and you’ll find these.” He went outside and tossed the gun up on the roof of one of the sheds and dropped the little box by the pile of straw and kicked some straw over it. He went to the wagon and stood by it and the woman came out of the darkness, carrying the boy.

  THE WAGON WHEELS rolled silently. The small creakings of the wagon body and the thudding rhythm of the horses’ hooves were distinct, isolated sounds in the night. The creek was on their right and they followed the road back the way they had come. The woman moved on the seat, shifting the boy’s weight from one arm to the other, until Sergeant Houck took him by the overalls and lifted him and reached behind to lay him on the burlap bags. “A good boy,” he said, “has the Indian way of taking things without yapping. A good way.”

  The thin new tracks in the dust unwound endlessly under the wheels and the waning moon climbed through the scattered bushes and trees along the creek.

  “I have relatives in Missouri,” said the woman. “I could go there.”

  Sergeant Houck fumbled in his side pocket and found a straw and put this in his mouth and chewed slowly on it. “Is that what you want?”

  “No.”

  They came to the main-road crossing and swung left and the dust thickened under the horses’ hooves. The lean dark shape of a coyote slipped from the brush on one side and bounded along the road and disappeared on the other side.

  “I’m forty-seven,” said Sergeant Houck. “Nearly thirty of that in the army. Makes a man rough.”

  The woman looked straight ahead and a small smile showed in the corners of her mouth.

  “Four months,” said Sergeant Houck, “and this last hitch’s done. I’m thinking of homesteading on out in the Territory.” He chewed on the straw and took it between a thumb and forefinger and flipped it away. “You could get a room at the settlement.”

  “I could,” said the woman. The horses slowed to a walk, breathing deeply, and he let them hold the steady, plodding pace. Far off a coyote howled and others caught the signal and the sounds echoed back and forth in the distance and died away into the night silence.

  “Four months,” said Sergeant Houck. “That’s not so long.”

  “No,” said the woman. “Not too long.”

  A breeze stirred across the brush and she put out a hand and touched his shoulder. Her fingers moved down along his upper arm and curved over the big muscles there and the warmth of them sank through the cloth of his worn service jacket. She dropped her hand in her lap again and looked ahead along the ribbon of the road. He clucked to the horses and urged them again into a trot and the small creakings of the wagon body and the dulled rhythm of the hooves were gentle sounds in the night.

  The late moon climbed and its pale light shone slantwise down on the moving wagon, on the sleeping boy and the woman looking straight ahead, and on the great solid figure of Sergeant Houck.

  Americans love success stories, and few success stories match that of John Jakes. Following a long career in advertising, during which he wrote innumerable novels and short stories, he found his literary fortunes waning. Then, in the 1970s, he was commissioned to write the American Bicentennial series and very quickly became one of the world’s bestselling authors. He has written virtually every kind of fiction, and excels at all of them, but the Western seems to bring out his best work and most passionate feelings. He is particularly good with characters common to the American frontier, and the protagonists in the story chosen for his book, “Manitow and Ironhand” are no exception.

  Manitow and Ironhand

  A TALE OF THE STONY MOUNTAINS

  John Jakes

  Dedicated to the memory of Karl May.

  THE FREE TRAPPER, a strapping shaggy white man of indeterminate age, waded into his secret stream about a quarter mile above the wide beaver dam. His darting glance revealed no dangers; nor did he truly expect any, this far into the wilderness.

  His buckskin shirt was wet, and soiled by many hasty meals. His buckskin leggings were stagged at the knees, where he’d sewn on pieces of fine English blanket, which wouldn’t shrink. Leggings and his wool-lined moccasins were last year’s tipi of a Crow chief of his acquaintance.

  Shadows of quaking aspens and bending willows were growing longer. It was nearing the twilight hour, the ideal time for setting out traps. He would set this one, his fifth of the afternoon, then one more before returning to his campsite, there to rest until he rose before daybreak to clear the traps. He shifted his campsite nightly; a professional precaution of those who worked alone. Also, he now had eighty plews to protect—a valuable mixed bale of beaver, marten, and otter, weighing nearly a hundred pounds. So far the spring trapping season had been bountiful.
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  The late afternoon air was light and warm, but the water was still icy from the melted snows. The soft-burbling stream froze his bones and set his hands to aching, the good right one and the mangled left one he concealed with a filthy mitten except when he was at his trade, as now. He went by the name “Old Ironhand,” though he really wasn’t old, except in spirit. The snowy white streaks in his long hair were premature. There was a bitter cynicism in his eyes, the oldest part of him.

  Once his name had been Ewing. Ewing Something. It was a name he no longer used, and struggled to remember. Ever since he’d split with the Four Flags outfit, and Mr. Alexander Jaggers—ever since they’d crippled his left hand, causing him to compensate with exercises that strengthened the other one, welding five digits into a weapon—to the free trappers and those who still gave allegiance to the large outfits, he was Old Ironhand.

  He waded along, carrying the seven-pound trap and chain in his left hand, the pin pole in his right. He moved carefully, the small sounds of his passage undetectable because of the water’s purl. This was a fine stream; he’d been working it for a year. It yielded fat mature beaver, fifty to sixty pounds each, with choice tails he charred, skinned, then boiled as a mealtime delicacy. Hip deep in his secret stream, he felt good as he approached a natural beaver slide worn into the bank at the water’s edge. The shadowed air was sweet. The trees were a-bud, the mountain peaks pristine as a new wedding dress, the sky a pale pink, like a scene from a book about fairyland. He saw a mockingbird singing alertly on a bush. It was 1833, in the Stony Mountains, far from the civilized perfidy of other white men.

  He laid the pin pole on the bank. He crouched in the water and lowered the trap to the bottom, drawing out the chain with its ring at the end. By now he was bent like a bow, half his beard immersed. The water smelled icy and clean.

  He pushed the pin pole through the ring on the chain. Then he grasped the pole with both hands and began to twist it into the marly bottom. He leaned and pushed and twisted with his great right hand bloodless-white around the pole. If the trapped beaver didn’t gnaw his paw off and escape—if he died as he should, by drowning—the pole would site his carcass.

  In order to leave as little man-scent as possible, Ironhand worked obliquely backward toward the bank, to a willowy branch he’d already selected for its pronounced droop. He unstoppered his horn of medicine, which he compounded from secret ingredients added to the musky secretions of beaver glands, and with this he coated the end of the drooping branch. The strongly scented end of the branch hung near the pin pole.

  Hands on his hips, he inspected his work. Though by now his teeth were chattering—the spring warmth was leaching from the plum-colored shadows—he was satisfied. Felt better than he had in a long spell. One more trap to place, then he’d have his supper, and a pipe.

  He was turning to move on to the next location when the rifle shot rang out. The bullet hit him high in the back. Toppling, he thought not of the awful hot pain but instead of his failure to hear the rifleman stealing up for the cowardly ambush. Careless damn fool! Should’ve kept your eyes skinned! He was reasonably sure of his attacker’s identity, but that wasn’t much damn satisfaction as the muddy bank hurled up to strike him.

  And that was all there was.

  SOMEONE HAD DRAGGED him to level ground.

  Someone had rolled him on his back.

  Someone had built a fire whose comforting heat played along the left side of his seamed face, and the back of his ruined hand. The fire was vivid, shooting off sparks as brilliant as the mountain stars. A curtain of smoke blew away on a puff of breeze.

  He elbowed himself to a raised position, clenching his teeth against the pain. The Samaritan was squatting on the other side of the fire. A young Indian, with a well-sculpted nose, firm mouth, light brown skin that shimmered bronze in the firelight. His glowing dark eyes were not unfriendly, only carefully, unemotionally observant.

  Bluish-black hair hung like a veil down his back, to his waist. His costume consisted of moccasins ornamented with porcupine quills and bright trade beads, fringed leggings, a hunting coat of elk leather. Around his neck hung a small medicine bag that nestled inside his coat against his bare chest. Outside the coat, ornamentation was a three-strand necklace of bear claws. A double-barrel rifle rested within his reach.

  “I put medicine on you. The ball is still there. It must come out. Do you understand?”

  “Delaware,” Ironhand grunted, not as a question. He understood perfectly.

  “Yes.” The Indian nodded. “I am Manitow.”

  “My pardner, the one they killed at the rendezvous two year ago, he was Delaware. Named after the great old chief Tammany. Fine man.” So were most of the members of the tribe who roved the Stony Mountains. The Delaware had been driven from Eastern hunting grounds eighty to ninety years ago; had migrated over the Mississippi and successfully taken up farming on the plains. A few, more restless and independent, had pushed farther on to the mountains. Enemies of the Delaware, including ignorant whites, sneered at them as Petticoat Indians. That was not only stupid but dangerous. Ironhand knew the Delaware to be keen shots, excellent horsemen, superb trackers and readers of sign. They were honest, quick to learn, resourceful in the wilderness. You could depend on them unless for some reason they hated you.

  The Delaware could find the remotest beaver streams as handily as a magnet snapped bits of iron to itself. Thus they were prized pardners of the free trappers, or prized employees of the outfits such as Four Flags.

  The white man licked his dry lips, then said, “I’m called Old Ironhand.”

  “I have heard of you. Who shot you?”

  “I think it was the Frenchman, Petit Josep. Petit Josep Clair de Lune. Little Joe Moonlight.”

  “Works for Jaggers.”

  “I worked for Jaggers …”

  “I know that. Don’t talk anymore. The ball must come out.” In a calm, almost stately way, Manitow rose from his crouch. His hair shimmered, black as the seepage of one of the oil springs that produced the tar trappers like Ironhand rubbed on their arthritic joints.

  Without being told, Ironhand rolled over to his belly. It hurt hellishly. In the firelight a long rustfree knife sparkled in Manitow’s hand; an authentic Green River—Ironhand glimpsed the GR, George Rex, stamped into the blade in England. It was a knife as good as Ironhand’s own, which he’d left with his possibles bag, his bale of plews, and his carbine, in what he’d presumed was a safe clearing upstream.

  Manitow laid the knife on the ground. From a pocket in his coat he took the all-purpose awl most Delaware carried. He placed this beside the knife. One or the other, or maybe both, would mine for lead in Ironhand’s back. The trapper stared at the implements with bleary eyes and made a heavy swallowing sound.

  Manitow knelt beside him. With a gentle touch he lifted Ironhand’s bloody shirt high enough to expose the wound glistening with smelly salve. With the fingers of his left hand Manitow spread the dark brown edges of the wound. A swift, sharp inhale from Ironhand was the only sound.

  “Be sure you get it out,” he said. “I don’t want to go down with the sun. That bastard Jaggers has to pay. Little Joe Moonlight will pay. Go ahead, dig.”

  “I don’t have whiskey,” Manitow said.

  “I don’t need any whiskey,” Ironhand said. “Dig.”

  A NIGHT BIRD trilled in the darkness. Old Ironhand listened drowsily. He was coming awake; hadn’t died under Manitow’s ministrations, which had hurt infernally. He had, however, fainted at the moment the Indian worked the rifle ball out of the wound with bloody fingers, ending the ordeal.

  Ironhand’s eyes fluttered open. Against a morning sky the color of lemons, Manitow crouched by the fire as he had the night before; a small dented pot, blue enamelware, sat in the embers.

  A white mist floated on the high peaks. The air nipped; Manitow had found a colorful trade blanket as a coverlet for the trapper. Ironhand heard a nickering; tried to rise up.

  “Y
our horses are safe, with mine,” Manitow said. “Your gun and plews also.” Small comfort, now that Ironhand realized the outfit was still after him.

  Manitow stretched out his hand, offering a strip of charqui, the smoked buffalo meat that was a staple of frontiersmen. The trapper caught the meat between his teeth. He lay back, gazing at the sky, and chewed.

  The enamel pot lid clinked when Manitow lifted it. “Coffee is boiling. Ready soon.”

  Ironhand grunted and kept chewing. A hawk sailed in heaven, then plunged and vanished in the mists. The cold ground smelled of damp and made him think of death, not springtime. On his back under his shirt, where the Indian had prospected for lead, a thick pad of some kind told him Manitow had improvised a dressing.

  “You have been a trapper for many years,” the Indian said in a reflective way.

  Old Ironhand pushed the jerky into his cheek, like a cud, while he answered. “Twenty years next summer.”

  “All that time. And a man stalks you and you don’t see any sign?”

  “I wasn’t looking for none.”

  “You didn’t hear him?”

  His anger was sudden, overriding his pain. “I was in the stream. It makes noise. I was thinking about my traps. I thought the outfit was done with me. Christ, they did me enough damage—why not?”

  Manitow’s grunt seemed to scorn that naive conclusion. The damn Indian made Ironhand uneasy with his quiet, unruffled manner. His air of wisdom annoyed and puzzled the trapper, because of Manitow’s relative youth.

  “Done with you?” Manitow repeated. “Not when the fur trade is sickly and you steal profits from the company by working for yourself and selling to others.”

  “You sure”—a gasp of pain punctuated the sentence—“seem to know a devil of a lot about me. How come?”

  Ironhand’s head was rolled to the side now; his old reddened eyes stared. Almost shyly, Manitow dropped his own gaze to the smoldering fire, from which he pulled the dented pot. He poured steaming coffee into Ironhand’s own drinking cup.