Beyond Fort North

by Peter Dawson

  “Dan, it’s not that,” she breathed as he started toward her. “It’s...you see, I told the major I couldn’t bear to be there, told him I was going down to the dressmaker’s when really I’d planned all along on meeting you. Sergeant McCune thought you’d be needing clothes. And a gun.” Her head with its small black hat perched on her high-piled ebony hair tilted toward the trees. “I have them here. McCune thought it best not to tell you.”

  Gentry’s soberness eased somewhat as he came up to her. “I could use a new outfit.”

  She reached out impulsively then and took his hand, leading him on around the thicket until they were within sight of a horse and buggy standing back among the trees. And she asked uncertainly: “Was it...awful back there?”

  “Nothing I won’t get over.”

  His strictly neutral tone made her look around at him, an oddly beseeching quality in her glance. Then quite unexpectedly she stopped and turned to grip his arms tightly in her slender hands. “You mustn’t let it change you, Dan. Never be any other than you’ve always been.”

  Some barrier she had raised against her emotions gave way then. She drew closer to him and, bowing her head to his chest, began sobbing brokenly, softly. He was bewildered and embarrassed, and as her body trembled against him, he put a hand to the back of her head, saying gruffly: “It’s done with, Missus Fitzhugh. Let’s forget it.”

  “Forget it?” Her head rocked back, pale cheeks glistening with tears. “How can it be forgotten? There’s been some horrible mistake! I...it hurts me terribly to see this happening to you.”

  “The Army doesn’t make mistakes, Missus Fitzhugh.”

  “Missus Fitzhugh?” she echoed wonderingly. “Are we still such strangers that you can’t yet call me by my given name?”

  He was uneasily trying to give her an answer when she spoke again, letting him know she had expected none. “You’re wrong in what you say. The Army does make mistakes, many of them. This is one. It will never be the same for you. Never!”

  “Why not?” He lifted his broad, heavy shoulders in a careless shrug, even grinning faintly in a way that held a quality of real amusement. “By tonight I’ll be gone, Mary. By next week I’ll have found something else. Twenty-seven is young enough to make a new start. And....”

  “And you can’t just shed this life as you would a coat.” Anger and rebellion were giving her cheeks more color now.

  “If a coat wears out, you can shed it.” He was having no more of this pointless argument and glanced toward the buggy. “That’s the outfit McCune sent? In the rig?”

  “Yes. In back.”

  Her tone held a lifeless quality that let him know she had expected a far different reaction from him. Yet he stubbornly left her and walked over to the buggy. He pulled a bundle of clothes, a heavy shell belt and gun, and a wide, curl-brimmed hat from the box behind the seat. Looking back at her then with a nod of thanks, he went on around the rig.

  He had shrugged off the blue blouse and was pulling the belt from his yellow-striped trousers when she called: “Dan, there are some things you should know before you leave!”

  “What things?”

  “First, that Phil was a coward.”

  Her unexpected words jolted him so hard that his hands hung motionless, holding the clean but worn waist overalls he had taken from the bundle. He asked himself — Can she know? — and over his wonderment managed to say: “Any son of Robert Fitzhugh a coward? You’re wrong, dead wrong. You’ve heard how they found him, the...?”

  “I know all that,” her voice interrupted. “Apaches lying all about him, the arrow in his back. But I tell you he was a coward.”

  She hesitated, giving him the chance to speak. When he didn’t, she went on: “Something happened to him when he got his orders, long before we left Leavenworth. He raged when he heard they were sending him out here. Even the unofficial reason of his father’s health made no impression whatsoever on him. He was deathly afraid at the prospect of campaigning against the Apaches. And he was white with fear that night he left with you, his first and only action. He’d been drinking for days, Dan, drinking a lot. Perhaps you knew it, perhaps not. And he was coarse, beastly when he drank. I.... So what came out at your courts-martial about how they found him made no sense.”

  “But, damn it, it was there for everyone to see.”

  Gentry buckled on his gun belt, then buttoned the gray flannel shirt that looked and felt as strange as the tight-fitting denims. And now he snatched up the brown wool coat and wide hat McCune had sent him and, holding his uniform wadded in the other hand, came from behind the buggy.

  Mary Fitzhugh’s look was startled as she took in the change in him. It was a long moment before she managed to say: “Yes, it was there for everyone to see. But I shall never believe that Phil died any other way than as a complete coward.”

  “Isn’t there a saying...‘Speak no ill of the dead’...Mary?” he drawled quietly, leaning over to tie the sagging holster unnaturally low along his thigh.

  “I’ve spoken it, Dan,” she stated deliberately. “I have no regrets.”

  A real anger all at once brightened the darkness of his eyes. “If the major should ever hear of this, should even suspect....”

  She waited a moment after his words had trailed off helplessly. Then: “The major never will hear of it. Not from me.”

  “It would kill him. Kill him just as surely as though George Spires were to give him strychnine instead of medicine. He must never have the slightest inkling of what you thought of Phil. If you should ever....”

  “But I’ve told you I never will!” She spoke heatedly. Yet there was a tenderness in her tone as she added: “You love him, don’t you, Dan?”

  Gentry eyed her then in such an outraged way that she could scarcely believe her eyes. It was as though she had touched upon something he considered inviolate, something so purely personal to him that it seemed she had betrayed a trust in even mentioning it.

  “I do,” he said deliberately. “If I had a father, one I could even remember, I would want him to be like Robert Fitzhugh.”

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I was only trying to tell you that I understand, that you can trust me.”

  “Mary, I served under him during the war. I was fifteen then and I worshiped him. Maybe you know that he later made it possible for me to go to the Academy. But neither of those things count. Nor does it count that he’s taught me everything I know about real soldiering.” His tone had lost its cutting edge, and now he added very soberly: “It’s that he...that they don’t come any finer. I would do anything to save him a moment’s pain.”

  She gave him an odd, measuring glance. “Do you think what’s happened to you has saved him pain?” She caught the instant hardening of his expression and quickly put in: “That was an unkind thing to say. Please forgive me.” Her eyes pleaded with him and shortly, when she saw his anger fading, she asked: “Would you like to hear the rest, Dan? I had only commenced.”

  “Is there more?” he asked guardedly.

  “Yes. I must tell you about myself. Before you ask why, I’ll say that it’s simply because I very much want you to know. You above all others.”

  The implication to those words made him uncomfortable, and she saw that and went on. “For over a year now, long before we came here, I’ve simply existed. Not lived, existed! Had I had a family, anyone to turn to, I would have left Phil. He and I had become complete strangers to each other.”

  “Do husbands and wives ever agree on everything?”

  “On the basic things, yes. We didn’t have even those in common. It would be despicable of me to add anything to that. But we weren’t even friends.”

  Gentry shook his head in a perplexed way. “No one would have guessed it.”

  “No. We had made a pact to spare the major’s feelings. There was at least enough decency in Phil for that.
Or perhaps it was fear. I’ve never known.”

  “The Old Man doesn’t have it in him to make anyone afraid of him, Mary.”

  “Then I’m wrong. But at any rate I’ve kept a bargain, played out a part. You’re the only one who knows the truth or even suspects how I loathe this dress.” She lifted her arms outward and glanced down at her slender, gently rounded body in its sheath of severe black. “This mourning! What a mockery it is!”

  Her gesture, so plainly inviting his attention, brought home to him in that moment her undeniably strong physical attractions, and for the first time he was realizing fully that she was an extremely desirable woman no longer claimed by another man. Yet he was again uneasy over the direction her words were taking, and, without pausing to weigh the oddness of his feeling, he said: “I wish there were something I could say to convince you how wrong you are about Phil.”

  “There is nothing you could say that would convince me of that.” She let her hands fall to her sides again. “But underneath, beneath this accursed black, I’m free, Dan. I can begin to live again.”

  Over a moment’s strained silence he said awkwardly: “Maybe I know how you feel. I’m trying to look at things that....”

  His words broke off as he caught the rhythmic hoof falls of a horse sounding from close by, along the road. And, thankful for the interruption, he looked on out through the trees and then stepped past Mary Fitzhugh and over behind the oak thicket.

  From there he watched a big, rangy bay gelding walk slowly into sight from beyond the far edge of the dense oak brush. Even before the tangle of brush let him make out the massive shape in the saddle, he recognized the animal and knew the rider to be Caleb Ash. And at once he was feeling a surge of the cold fury that had lately come whenever he set eyes on the man or even thought of him.

  His impulse then was to step from behind the thicket and into the road, to bring on a showdown he had often prayed he might someday have with Ash. Yet he halfway hesitated, thinking of Mary Fitzhugh being here. And abruptly that hesitation jelled before a baffled helplessness as he told himself: You haven’t a shred of proof!

  The next moment, his impulse bridled, he was feeling a strong puzzlement at the expression he read on Ash’s craggy face. Instead of the satisfied smile or the look of gloating he had expected, he saw the man scowling glumly, staring worriedly down at the road ahead. And as Gentry wondered at this Ash rode on past.

  The rage in Gentry was dying now and with his last glimpse of the scout, before the bay walked out of sight around the road’s lower bend, he admitted grudgingly that the man made an imposing and impressive bulk regardless of the outlandish clothes.

  Ash was barely out of sight when Gentry caught a rustle of sound behind him and turned to find Mary Fitzhugh standing almost within arm reach. And as his glance met hers she asked: “He was there?”

  When he only nodded, she put another question: “He wasn’t your friend, was he?”

  “No.”

  She seemed uninterested in his reply, in fact gave no sign that she had heard it as she stared beyond him soberly, almost sadly. He sensed that she was making a last attempt at calling back that earlier mood even before she murmured: “If I could only be going away with you, Dan. I would give anything for that.”

  He put a serious look upon her. “And leave the major, sick as he is?”

  She colored at the accusation in his tone and, her pride visibly stiffening, she coolly said: “You take me too literally. Of course I’m staying with him. But I can still envy you, can’t I?”

  He was thankful for the turn their words were taking and said wryly: “No one else does, Mary.”

  She ignored his meaning and abruptly, holding out her hand, she said: “I suppose this is our good bye.”

  He took her hand, answering its firm pressure. And she told him: “One more thing, Dan. You must write me. I want to know where you are, how you are.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I had intended writing. I’d like to hear how it goes with the major.”

  Only when he saw her wince did he realize how unfairly he had spoken. And he hastened to add: “I’ll also be wanting to know about you, Mary.”

  The smile she gave him was empty of all amusement. “I had hoped you would.”

  Just then he was wanting more than anything else to wipe out this awkwardness between them. Yet, unable to think of anything he might say that would accomplish that, he looked down at the uniform he still held in his hand. He lazily tossed it into the oak brush, turning from her as he drawled: “Thank McCune for the outfit. And I wish you luck, you and the major.” He hesitated, looked around. “Good bye, Mary.”

  He was walking away from her when she said softly: “Good bye...Dan.”

  He sensed the catch in her voice and didn’t look around. Only when he had reached the road’s lower bend and knew he must be out of her sight did he draw in a deep breath and let it out in a long, slow sigh of relief.

  The placers along Elk Creek had in little more than a year changed the look of the cañon immediately below Fort North. Where once there had been nothing but Mike Clears’s log trading post and, above it, the sprawling sheds and corrals of Caleb Ash’s horse ranch, there now stretched between the two a disorderly array of tents, pole and tar-paper shacks, and a few substantial cabins. Newcomers were calling the settlement Elk Bend.

  The placers, most of them below town, scarred the cañon’s far side beyond the willow-edged creek well up each finger draw, snaking back into the higher hills. Isolated by upward of a hundred miles of hostile land between here and the nearest civilized country around Sante Fe, the diggings had attracted only the hardiest prospectors, men who worked with rifles leaning against their sluiceways and rocker boxes, men who could shoot. There would be a real boom here one day, but only after the more incorrigible Apaches gave up their habit of periodically breaking off the reservation.

  Mike Clears had come here in his twenty-fourth year, five years ago, bringing two wagonloads of trade goods under the protection of an Army survey party and its escort, trying to locate a new post along the newly established reservation’s eastern boundary. Both Clears and the surveyors found the cañon to their liking. The soldiers because the timbered bench above edged by its rim dropping a sheer three hundred feet into the cañon exactly suited their purpose; Clears because the prospect of trade with both hostiles and whites was too good a chance to pass up.

  Mike Clears’s first winter in the cañon put considerable maturity on him. By a vast amount of effort he and his two drivers dismantled the wagons and moved them, his goods, and teams into a deep cave in the rim face below the bench. They had logged up the cave mouth by the time the Army pulled out. Throughout the long cold months they never left the cave singly. And for several weeks the following spring when a band of Jicarillas camped below along the cañon, they didn’t stir from their crude fort and lived on a diet of horse meat.

  In late spring when the cavalry and a civilian work party returned, Clears and his men moved into the cañon with them, and Clears started the erection of a sizable cabin. It was less than a month later that Caleb Ash arrived with a herd of horses, unannounced and unbidden. The amiable giant, seeming in some ways more Indian than white, had gambled shrewdly on the Army’s need for draft animals. The gamble immediately paid off when Ash was given the logging contract on the new construction.

  By the following year, when the permanent garrison arrived, Ash had built a large layout and had on hand a string of big, sleek one-color geldings ideal for remounts. Except for the animals the cavalry brought with them, there hadn’t been a gelding in the new stables since then that hadn’t come from Ash’s corrals.

  That first summer Mike Clears stumbled into the wisest move he had ever made in a business way. He hired an Indian-raised white, an older man, off the reservation. After Ben Qualls had been with him several weeks the Apaches began trading despite the presence of
the soldiers. Later it was Qualls who talked him into building permanently down here rather than going above to locate near the post gates, Qualls insisting that the hostiles would put more trust in a trader if he showed his independence of the Army. They had.

  Accident, nothing but, changed Mike Clears from trader to saloon man. This had happened only last summer. A close-mouthed crewman of Ash’s who had spent his spare time gouging the slopes behind the layout one day turned up missing, leaving Ash short a driver on one of his new freight hitches. Later, when the stampede began, Ash learned what had happened to his man. He had ridden across to Taos, gone on a three-day bout with the bottle, and talked a tall story. As a consequence of his producing a pokeful of yellow dust to convince his doubters, a considerable rabble and a sprinkling of real prospectors poured in shortly afterward.

  The newcomers bought anything and everything Mike Clears had to sell, particularly his whiskey. So when he freighted in more supplies he concentrated on wet goods rather than dry. Now he was calling his establishment the Lucky Find and no longer stocked anything but whiskey, tobacco, and cards.

  Again it was by pure accident that Clears found himself now running what the local folk were calling a hotel. When the boom first started, men began offering a dollar a night for the comfort of getting in out of the weather and sleeping in Clears’s sod-roofed barn across the road from his main building. Presently, seeing the possibilities, Clears moved his livestock and stored goods up to the cave he had called home that first winter. Then he pulled off the barn’s rotten earth roof, covered it over with canvas stretched across a new ridge log, tore out the stalls, and built fourteen double bunks of aspen poles and rope. Over the barn’s door this spring he had painted a big sign: Sleep Here. Inside, along a crude counter in the entryway, hung another sign that bore a longer legend:

  Sleep Eight Hours for a Dollar!

  Good Beds.

  Shifts change Noon, Eight Night, Four Morning

  Pay As You Turn In

  QUIET!!