And finally I started to feel myself give up. No more strength; maybe not even any more determination. Too much pain and weakness. Overwhelming …
And then I heard, as if I were unconscious and dreaming again, a terrified but very angry voice saying, “Leave my daddy alone! Leave my daddy alone!” She was awake now, and had found my .45, which she held up with surprising confidence.
And then there were two huge booming shots in the gloom, and the sudden cry of a wolf seriously wounded, and then the cry of a young child as she collapsed again to the floor.
The wolf, shocked, bleeding badly already from the bullets in his chest and stomach—the wolf began to crawl out the front door, crying so sadly even I felt a moment of sorrow for it.
I slowly got to my feet and crawled over to Annie.
I took her to me and held her, and at first I couldn’t tell if the crying was hers or mine.
“I’m sorry I brought all this on, Annie,” I said. “Your mother was right. I shouldn’t have tried to get Reeves.”
But she was unconscious in my arms, and my words were wasted.
And then I heard the wet snort of a horse near the front doorway.
I lay Annie down carefully, grabbed my .45, and ran to the doorway.
In the moonlit grass before the door, Reeves knelt next to the wounded wolf, stroking the animal as it crouched, growling, at the sight of me.
To Reeves’s left his horse stood waiting for him. And then—
Reeves brought his right hand up—
I barely had time to duck inside before the bullet tore away an inch of wood from the door frame.
Two more shots, quickly. And then silence.
Before I could crawl back to the door frame, I heard Reeves swing up on his horse—saddle leather creaking—and start to ride away.
By the time I reached the door frame and steadied my hand enough to squeeze off some shots, Reeves was fast becoming a silhouette on the hill—fast-retreating horse and rider with the gray lobo running alongside.
I fired twice but only to sate my rage. From the distance, I had no hope of hitting him.
I FORCED MYSELF to ladle up some water for Annie. The mere smell of it still nauseated me.
I got her on the floor in the kitchen, dragged out a blanket, and propped her head up on a pillow I’d taken from the back of the rocking chair.
Every few moments I felt her wrist for a pulse. I had to keep reassuring myself that she was still alive.
I raised her head and gave her water. Her eyes fluttered open but remained so only briefly.
I was just starting to examine her wounds when I heard, on the distant hill, the sound of a rider coming fast.
Reeves. Come back for the fight that was inevitable.
I kissed Annie on the forehead and then grabbed my gun and moved to the doorway, keeping to the shadows so he couldn’t see me.
As I leaned against the wall, waiting for him, I heard Annie moan. She needed a doctor, and quickly. After I finished Reeves …
The rider stopped short a few hundred feet from the cabin. Eased off his saddle. Ground-tied his beast. Grabbed his carbine from the scabbard. Crouched and started moving toward the cabin. All this in black silhouette against the silver moonlight.
Pain and my sickness were taking their toll on my eyesight again.
Not until the rider was very close to the door, just now getting his carbine ready, did I realize it was not Reeves at all, but Hollister, who must have doubled back and let the rest of the posse continue on. Good lawman that he was, he’d known that I couldn’t leave without seeing Gillian and Annie one more time.
Now I knew how I’d get Annie taken care of.
I pressed back against the wall and let Hollister come through the door. Soft jingle of spur, faint creak of holster leather, hard quick rasp of tobacco lungs, scent of cold wind on his dark uniform.
He got four steps in and saw Annie where I’d rested her on the floor and then said, “My God!”
And set his carbine down on the kitchen table.
And rushed to little Annie. And knelt beside her. And lifted her head gently and tenderly upward so that he could see her face better. He no longer cared about his own safety—he knew I could be hiding anywhere in the cabin, but he didn’t care. His overwhelming concern was Annie.
It’s a funny thing about a man, how he can be crooked the way Hollister was with his prisoners when he was drunk, but be absolutely straight otherwise. Despite the animal he sometimes became in that little locked room of his in the police station, he held in his heart love and pity and duty, and I was watching all three at work now.
He rested Annie’s head again and then started to stand up.
I stepped from the shadows, put my .45 on him.
“I want you to take her to the doc. Reeves brought his wolf out here. The wolf has rabies.” I paused, wondering if I could actually say it out loud. “And so do I.”
“Rabies!” he said. “You sure about that?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. That’s why I’ve been so sick the last few days. One day I went out to Reeves’s and the wolf bit me. There’s a shot the doc can give her. You need to get her there now and fast.”
“But what about you? Won’t you need the shot?”
“It’s too late for me. All I’m worried about is Annie here.”
We stood in the shifting darkness of the big front room, wind like ghosts whistling through the front door, fire guttering in the far grate.
“That posse’ll find some way to kill you, Chase, if they ever catch up with you.”
“I know.”
“Why don’t you come in with me?”
“I want to finish my business with Reeves.”
“You keep mentioning Reeves. What the hell’s he got to do with this?”
So I gave him a quick history.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
“I just want you to get Annie to the doc.”
“All right.” Then he looked around. “Where’s your wife?”
“Bedroom. You don’t want to see her.”
“The wolf?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry, Chase.”
“Help me with Annie.”
We bundled her in blankets and carried her out in the moonlight to Hollister’s horse. He got up first and got himself ready, and then I handed her up. He cradled her across his saddle.
“She’s a sweet little girl, Chase.”
“She sure is.”
“I’ll get her to the doc right away.”
“Wait here.”
I went to the pines where I’d been hiding and got the money and brought it back and then tied the cord to Hollister’s saddle horn.
“There’s the bank money,” I said.
“You’re pretty hard to figure out, Chase.”
“Look who’s talking.”
He smiled. “I guess you’re right.”
I reached up and touched Annie’s leg and stood there for a long moment with tears in my throat and a silent prayer on my lips.
And then Hollister was riding off, a dark shape against the moon-silver top of the hill, and then just receding hoofbeats in the night.
Part 32
I took Gillian’s horse.
In an hour I slid off the animal and started working my way to the poplars on the west side of Reeves’s mansion. There would be an armed guard in those poplars.
The fever was getting worse. Every few minutes my vision would black out again and I’d feel a spasm of ice travel down my back and into my buttocks and legs. Then the dehydration would fix my tongue to the roof of my mouth.
The frost gave the land a fuzzy look, as if a silver moss had suddenly grown over everything. The stuff was cold on the palms of my hands, and when the fever got especially bad, I’d stop and put a cooling hand to my cheek.
From the size of him, I knew the man on duty had to be Hanratty. Reeves probably knew I was coming, so he put his best man on the job. Hanratty had l
ikely been sleeping down in the bunkhouse when Reeves had roused him. Hanratty was day guard, not night guard.
He didn’t hear me till I was close, too close, and just as he turned, I brought the butt of the carbine down against the side of his head.
He managed to swear and to glare at me, but then he sank in sections to the ground. I had nothing against Hanratty, but I wanted to make sure he didn’t wake up and follow me into the house. I kicked him in the side of the head. He’d be out a long time but eventually he’d wake up. He was luckier than Gillian had been.
The first thing I wanted a look at was the wolf’s cage.
I crept around the edge of the sweet-smelling jack pines for a good look. The cage was empty, its door flung wide.
The wolf was inside with Reeves.
I slipped through the shadows to the Victorian estate house. In the moonlight the cupolas and captain’s walk had an exotic aspect, troubling the plain line of prairie and the jagged barren stretch of mountains beyond, too fancy by half for such a landscape.
I was two steps from the front porch when I saw the man step from the shadows around the doorway.
The tip of his .45 glinted in the moonlight.
I put two bullets into him with my pistol before he could fire even once.
The noise was raucous in the vast prairie silence. The smell of gun smoke filled my nostrils.
Inside, in addition to the wolf, Reeves would have one, maybe two more men. And because of the gunfire, they now knew I was here.
I went around back, dropping to my knees halfway when blackness rushed up and knocked me down. The chills kept getting worse. I threw up, scared halfway through that I was going to choke on my own vomit. Panic …
When I was on my feet again, I reached the wide porch that ran the entire length of the rear.
The guard posted there wasn’t very good. He was smoking a cigarette and the fire end made an easy target.
I put two shots into his face.
He made a grunting sound and fell facedown onto the porch.
I crouched, moving over to the porch door, got it open and then half crawled up the three steps.
Ahead of me lay the darkened kitchen door. Beyond that waited Reeves …
On my way across the porch, I nudged a chair. The scraping noise could be heard clearly in the silence. The men inside would be able to chart every step of my progress.
I eased the kitchen door open. The scent of beef and spices filled the air.
Three more steps up and I stood in the kitchen. It was long and wide, with a fancy new ice box that stood out even in the gloom.
I got four steps across the linoleum floor when the gunny appeared in the archway leading to the dining room and shot me dead-on in the shoulder.
Pain joined my sickness and spun me around entirely. But as I was spinning, I knew enough to put a shot of my own into him. I got him in the stomach.
I beat him with my fists until I knew he was dead. I’d actually done him a favor. Dying gut-shot was an experience nobody should have to go through.
Only as I started walking again did I realize how badly I was bleeding from my shoulder. I almost had to smile. There was so little left of me. The sickness had taken most of me; the gunshot claimed what remained.
I had just enough life left to finish what I needed to finish… .
When I got to the bottom of the staircase, my footsteps hollow on the parquet floor, I heard the wolf.
He was crying, and his cry was very much like my own. But that wasn’t surprising. We were both dying of the same disease.
I started up the sweeping staircase, grasping my weapon tight in my hand. With the shoulder in such sudden pain, I had to hold my gun very tight.
I reached the landing and stopped, staring up into the gloom above me. No lights shone; not even moonlight lent highlights to the darkness. Reeves had drawn all the heavy curtains.
I started up the remaining six steps …
One, two, three steps, each one an agony for a man in my condition, my legs feeling as if they were weighted down by massive invisible boulders …
The gunshot flared against the shadows, there was even a certain beauty to it.
I threw myself on the stairs. The bullet ripped into the wainscoating behind me.
Four, five, six rifle shots cracked and roared and echoed down the sweeping stairway.
All I could do was lie there and listen to them, and listen to the wolf crying all the time.
I tried to remember how much I hated the beast for what he’d done to my brother and to my wife and daughter. And yet no matter how much I hated him, I hated Reeves even more, for what he’d trained the wolf to become.
I started crawling on my belly up the stairs. I didn’t have much strength left. I needed to spend it while there was still time.
When I reached the top step, still lying flat, I raised my head an inch and stared deep into the gloom.
Reeves was crouched beneath a large gilt-framed painting of himself. A very aristocratic pose, that one.
Next to him crouched the wolf, eyes yellow in the darkness, the cry still in its throat, forlorn as the cry of a wolf lost in a blizzard some prairie midnight.
Reeves saw me peeking up over the stairs and squeezed off several more shots. Apparently he had two or three rifles with him. He wouldn’t need to reload for a while.
A silence, then, as I lay on the stairs, my body trembling from the chill, my throat constricted for want of water.
And then a whisper, a word of Indian I did not understand, the same word used that night when the wolf attacked me in my brother’s room.
And then I heard the wolf, his paws scratching the floor as he began to pad over to the top of the stairs; a deep, chesty sound coming from him.
I raised my eyes and looked up directly into his as he lowered his blood-spattered head and prepared to lunge at me. He was still bleeding from the bullets Annie had put in him.
I slowly raised myself to my feet, sighting the .45 on his chest.
And he dove at me, all slashing teeth and furious noise.
He knocked me backward down the steps. My gun had fallen from my hands. I could defend my throat only by keeping my arms folded over my face.
Meanwhile we tumbled over and over down the stairs.
When we reached the landing, he renewed his attack, ripping flesh from my forearms so he could weaken me further and reach my throat. His teeth cut so deep that soon he was gnawing on raw bone… .
I was in the kind of delirium—fever, pain, fear, rage—a kind of dream state in which I functioned automatically.
Perhaps this was hell … a battle with the beast lasting for all eternity.
And then I remembered the knife I’d taken from our cottage. The bone-handled bowie …
Reaching it would mean that I would have to take one of my arms from my face … but there was little choice.
I started rolling across the landing, trying to confuse the wolf, trying to keep him from my throat. He kept crying and biting and hurling himself at me—
And as I rolled, I found the bone handle of the knife and yanked the blade free, and as I rolled over once again and saw the beast ready to spring—
I held the blade of the bowie knife up so that when he lunged—
He came in with his head down, teeth bared, spittle and blood flying from his mouth—came in so that he impaled himself on the blade.
It went straight and deep into his chest, and for a moment in his fury he did not allow himself to feel the wound—
He just kept trying to get at my throat, to rend and rip it open so that I would look like poor Gillian there on the bed.
But then the pain of the knife I kept pushing deeper and deeper into his chest finally registered—
And he stood on top of me, hot splashing blood beginning to flow from his wound, and he began to cry so loud and so sad in the gloom that I had no choice but to pity him. He cried his wolf song of cold icy waters and long lonely hunts; of
seeing brothers and sisters die in bitter winter; of finding a moonlit pond in a midnight forest and sleeping peacefully there; of finding a mate strong enough to follow him into the mountains and bear the offspring who would make them both so proud—sadness and grief and joy and pride, all that and much more in wolf song as the beast stood upon me and I in my pain and sickness and weakness and curious final strength watched as Reeves descended the stairs, wanting to finish me off since his trained wolf could no longer do the job himself.
But when he was halfway down the stairs, Reeves in his fancy ruffled shirt and expensive dark suit, his rifle aimed directly at my heart—when he was about to kill me, the wolf turned abruptly and sprang on him and proceeded to tear and rend in a frenzy so loud and vicious I wanted to cover my eyes.
All I could hear was Reeves screaming and screaming and screaming there in the moonlight of the stair landing… .
And when the wolf was finished, he came back and lay next to me, and took up his crying once more.
IN SOME WAY we are brothers, this wolf and I, lying here dying as the cold dark winds of November whip through this now-useless mansion… .
His cry is even louder now, and I wish I could comfort him, but there is no comfort for either of …
… not for a few minutes yes …
… not until the darkness.
IT IS A sunny afternoon and Gillian and Annie are coming toward me on the bicycle, and Annie on the handlebars, golden hair glowing.
And then it is dark and I am looking down at my dead brother in the bed that night and I am wanting to cry.
And then there is a barn dance and Gillian looks so beautiful in the autumn night and—
And then my mother is there, plain prairie woman, plain prairie wisdom evident in her kind gaze, and she puts out her hand so I will not be afraid in these last moments.
Dreams, phantasms, memory … all memory dying with me now …
Gillian—
Annie—
And finally the darkness
the wolf and I
and the darkness
Dwight V. Swain was another pulp writer who eventually made the transition to paperback Westerns. He was also a teacher and a fine student of writing, turning his observations into three first-rate books.
A Century of Great Western Stories Page 50