Frenchie said there was meat stew and when Hart questioned him further about the meat he shrugged his heavy shoulders and looked evasive. Other than that there were potatoes hot in the oven, pie filled with some canned fruit that had lost its way between St Louis and San Francisco and the best coffee in this part of the state.
Hart bought a couple of beers to break the dust from their throats, two shots of whiskey to warm their bellies and ordered two platefuls of stew and potatoes, pie to follow and sure, he’d try the coffee if it was that damned good.
Aram had piled their belongings close by the center of the dining table and was sitting up to it, the fringes of his buckskin jacket silver with frost. Hart gave the other customers the once-over as he carried the drinks from the bar, but failed to see a face that he recognized.
‘Food comin’.’
‘Tha’s good.’
Hart snorted. ‘Wouldn’t bet on it!’
Aram nodded and wiped a layer of grease off the glass before sampling the whisky. It burnt into the back of his throat like a knife and made the corners of his eyes water instantly.
‘Makes his own, huh?’
Aram glanced at the Yakima woman near the stove. ‘Gets his squaw to piss in a pot an’ keeps it buried underground while it collects a little flavor!’
Hart looked at the fat-armed woman stirring the contents of a blackened pot and laughed. ‘Wait till you get a taste of this stew.’
‘I have to?’
‘Lessn’ you want to ride through the night an’ get your balls froze off.’
Aram shook his head. ‘Might find use for ’em yet.’
‘We’ll be out of here come sun-up. Ain’t many miles to go.’
Aram sipped suspiciously at the beer. ‘I’ll be glad when it’s over.’
~*~
The stew tasted better than they’d figured. Whatever meat it was there were so few sinewy pieces of it floating on the thick surface that their origin scarcely mattered. But it was rich in something and both men ate with relish, heads bent over their plates and spoons working greedily.
They were so intent upon what they were doing that neither of them noticed the slim figure detaching himself from a small group seated over by the side wall. His face was smeared with a mixture of grease and dirt and through it the beginnings of a stubbly beard were pushing hopefully. His clothes were ragged and patched and as grease-lined as his face. At a quick glance he might have been an old man - but for the straightness of his body and the keenness of his eye. He slipped between the two men with whom he had been drinking and talking in a desultory fashion. Angling himself away from the wall, he slid a hand inside the folds of his heavy coat; the pistol that emerged was the only clean, shining thing about him.
Spoon to his mouth, Hart sensed the danger before he saw it. His body automatically rocked sideways, clearing the way for his right hand to make its clawing move towards the Colt at his hip.
The spoon clattered down into the plate and stew splashed across the table.
Hart yelled a warning and flailed a left hand towards Aram’s head, trying to snatch him clear.
The fingers of his other hand hit the pearl handle of the Colt and began to pull it clear of the smooth leather.
Jacob fired once and Aram was kicked hard against the table, driving it forward into Hart’s midriff. The thick edge struck against the back of his wrist and jammed the hand fast.
Jacob was one pace further to the left and heading for the door. He had his arm extended and he was paying Hart no heed, intent upon doing the job he’d come to do, dispatching his long-lost uncle to his six foot and more of earth.
Hart’s voice broke through the startled clamor of the room and he tried to push Aram off the bench and down to the floor. Even as he touched the trapper’s shoulder he felt the body leap beneath his fingers as Jacob’s second slug tore into him.
He kicked the bench away behind himself and leapt to his feet. The youngster had all but gained the door.
Hart’s hand was free and the Colt came up fast and smooth.
‘Hold it!’
Jacob kept on going.
‘Now!’
The boy’s hand grabbed at the handle of the door.
Hart squeezed evenly on the trigger and a .45 slug exploded through the back of Batt’s left thigh, an inch or two above the knee. It broke away a section of bone and burst through the side of the leg, ricocheting off the inside of two walls.
Frenchie’s wife was standing with her hands pressed against her heavy breasts, mouth and eyes wide open, staring.
Frenchie had yanked his sawn-off out from below the beer cask on the bar and was wondering where to aim it best. One or two of the other men had drawn weapons and most of them had taken whatever cover the interior afforded.
Aram Batt was stretched across the long table, his face resting half in the plate of stew. His eyes appeared to be closed and his mouth was twitching open and closed like a fish claiming air.
Hart went round the table fast.
Jacob had somehow got himself propped against the wall alongside the door. One knee and the side of one boot were pressed against the floor and his face and one hand were against the logging of the wall.
Hart couldn’t see where the other hand was.
He went up behind him and swung his boot, hooking away the boy’s legs from under him.
He struck the ground with a crash and rolled over, face up.
The Yakima woman screamed like an arrow piercing soft flesh.
Jacob’s other hand still clung to the gun.
Hart waited till it was angled up towards him and kicked at the bone immediately at the outside of the wrist.
The fingers flew open and the pistol looped useless away.
Jacob’s eyes flickered and closed as his head turned away.
Aram’s head fell from plate to table and the plate smashed on the ground.
Instinctively, Hart half turned. Jacob had the knife from his belt in his hand and leapt for Hart’s back. The point of the blade cut through the sleeve of his coat as Hart’s body ducked and his up thrust elbow, following through, drove into Jacob’s jaw and sent him staggering back towards the wall.
Hart saw for a second the madness in the boy’s eyes and leveled the Colt. The lower half of Jacob’s face disappeared in a sprawling welter of blood and fragmented bone that sprayed out over the space between them, splattering Hart’s hand and gun, his outstretched arm and his face.
When Jacob Batt slid down the wall and stretched across the floor, most of the back of his head seemed to have disappeared too.
Chapter Fifteen
Frenchie’s wife spent a lot of time fussing over Aram with half-chanted words and herbs and yellow mud that she packed tight over his wounds. It didn’t look any too good to Hart, but Frenchie assured him that his woman was a good doctor and Aram himself, between frequent bouts of unconsciousness, seemed to approve of what was being done. He’d seen trappers treated in similar ways by their squaws enough times to know their cures were as likely to succeed as the efforts of any half-trained white doctor who was doing the job on the side as a way of getting some extra money into his barber shop.
The boy’s two bullets had avoided anything vital. The first had made one hell of a mess of Aram’s upper left arm and the other had mangled its way through the ribs on his right side without busting more than one or two of them.
Other men might’ve suffered more, specially accounting for their age, but Aram’s hide was as tough as the weathered skins he traded in and his constitution was akin to that of an ox.
They spent four days at Frenchie’s, Aram mending all the while and Hart trying hard not to let the inaction sink him down into a bout of morbid depression. He hated doing nothing, putting up in one place – especially when that place was as one-eyed as Frenchie’s trading post. Ever since he’d ridden off from home as a kid he’d kept moving, never allowed himself too much time to think. He’d tried once to change – thought serious
about it any road - and that had only made him travel more when it was over. A good horse under him and the land wide and deep further than the eye could see. Tall red grasses, and the startled yellow of sunflowers and other than that nothing but the expanse of sky.
Course, he knew things were changing all around him. Fences and boundaries and the man who invented barbed wire being treated like the nation’s hero instead of what he really was. You hem men in and you coop them up and tell them how many acres they can farm and they get greedy; they get like the land, smaller and more petty and they know they ain’t free.
Sitting there under the low roof and amidst the stink of the tallow lamps, Hart felt himself close to sick. If he’d stayed with Kathy, he wondered, if she’d stayed with him - was this what it would have been like? Would they have found themselves clemmed together the way these folk had? Or the way Jedediah Batt and his family had worked themselves dead or half-crazy trying to fight a living off bad land? Would their kids have been like that - like Jacob and Rebecca - if they’d married and settled on some patch of prairie?
He sat there brooding, drinking too much whiskey and trying his damndest to convince himself that it would have been so. That he was better off as it was. On his own. No ties. No kin.
And Kathy?
Was she better off?
Hart stood abruptly, knocking the rickety chair back against the wall. He kicked out at someone’s mongrel dog that got in his way as he stalked to the bar, seizing the neck of an open bottle and tipping the contents down his throat. When his eyes were watering and his breath was all but stopped, he pulled the bottle away and stared around the room, as if daring anyone there to say anything, to challenge him.
When no one did, he aimed another kick at the dog, which backed off and growled deep in the rear of his throat. He saddled his mare and rode her hard for the best part of an hour, so that when they returned both man and horse were lathered with sweat despite the cold.
Aram was on his feet inside the building, walking gingerly, but walking.
‘Stop your frettin’, hoss,’ he greeted Hart, ‘’nother day an’ we can ride.’
‘Who’s frettin’?’ snapped Hart and helped himself to some food from the iron pot on the stove.
Aram shrugged his right shoulder, winced, tried not to laugh on account of that would hurt him too.
By evening Hart had calmed down some, the whiskey laying thick on his tongue and on his brain. He sat with Aram and played a few games of checkers, his mind half concentrating.
‘Want to talk ’bout it?’
‘What?’
‘Whatever’s eatin’ into you.’
Hart gave a short shake of the head and made his next move.
Aram sucked on his pipe some and decided that with his opponent playing the way he was a little side-bet wouldn’t run amiss.
‘Times in the winter,’ Aram began, almost as if he was musing aloud, ‘get to feel so damned cooped up it’s all I could do not to bust down the walls. Would have ’cept I knew I’d freeze to death inside half an hour. That calmed me some. That an’ some rotgut whiskey – take it like you do for an achin’ tooth.’
‘Tooth you can pull out,’ interrupted Hart.
Aram nodded, acknowledging it to be true.
‘Some folk,’ he went on, ‘they ain’t fashioned to live like others, with others. Settlin’ down.’ He poked the end of his pipe towards Hart for emphasis. ‘Take me an’ Jedediah. No reason for it, far as I could see. But we was different right from the start. Ran different ways since we was kids. Always wanted different things. From the age he was movin’ out into the land, Jedediah, he always hankered after a place of his own, kids and crops an’ hogs. Tried to get me to come in with him, reckon he wanted that more than most. Him an’ me buildin’ together, family.’
Aram spat neatly into the palm of his hand and rubbed it along his pants leg.
‘Never wanted to build, not me. Him, he never wanted nothin’ else. Couldn’t see nothin’ else. Wouldn’t. That’s why he was the way he was with the gold. If he’d let his family know that was there, they’d’ve known they could get off the land. Leave and strike out elsewhere. Jedediah, he didn’t want that. Needed ’em all with him, workin’ the land, strivin’ an’ toilin’. That money, it’d’ve changed all that. For the better. Jedediah, he didn’t want for things to be better. Not that way.’
Hart thought for a while and then said: ‘Reckon that explains the boy here, Jacob?’
‘Helps to. Maybe he was more like me - or you - his pa’s way of life weren’t his but he didn’t see no other way out. Even when he got himself that job in the livery, he was still tied to his fam’ly. Findin’ out the gold was there and what’d been keepin’ him strivin’ shoulder to shoulder all through his young years weren’t needed, that could’ve spun his mind so’s he turned real wild.’
Aram tamped down the tobacco in his pipe.
‘But who’s to say for sure? Jacob could’ve been born with that streak in him, born wild. Mean. Who’s to say?’
Hart remembered the wild, crazy look in the youngster’s eyes when he had been doing his damndest to shoot his uncle dead; he remembered, too, the dark intense stare of the girl, Rebecca - if Jacob was touched with insanity, then what of …
‘Your move,’ said Aram, breaking across his thoughts.
Hart glanced down quickly, moved too fast, lost again.
‘I ever thank you for what you did that day?’ asked Aram, leaning back in his chair.
Hart shook his head. ‘Had too many other things on your mind. Like stayin’ alive.’
‘Well, I’ll thank you now.’
‘Okay. You want to play another game?’
‘You want to lose again?’
Hart shrugged: ‘Why not?’
‘Money on it?’
Hart laughed. ‘I ain’t that much of a fool.’
‘Glad to hear it, hoss. Plumb glad to hear it. Put your mind to it, you might stand a chance of comin’ close to winnin’.
The old trapper toyed with his pipe, sipped at his glass of beer and tried not to notice the pain that was shooting from his shoulder. Hart hooked one boot over the other and concentrated on the game, secure in the fact that come morning they’d be in the saddle and back on the road to Fallon. For a moment and no more, his mind snagged on the thought of the two gunmen from Monterey, nursing their wounds and their wounded reputations, maybe back there somewhere searching him out. But Aram nudged him and he jolted the thought clear and settled down to checkers, determined to take at least one game before the night was over.
~*~
The day was bitter and the sky seemed to have taken over the land. Hart’s Indian blanket was thrown over him and his scarf held his hat over his ears. Gloves retained a semblance of feeling in his hands. The ground over which they rode was brittle as iron; the vibrations jerked through their saddles and jolted their spines as they rode.
Neither man spoke a deal, shouted comments as abrupt as possible all that passed between them until they climbed down and passed coffee strongly laced with whiskey from hand to hand.
When they reached Fallon the main street was bare of people, nothing stirred save a couple of shingles hanging over the sidewalk and rattling in the wind. Kerosene lamps burned dully in the back of a store or two, even though it was still an hour into the day. But for what the whole place could have been dead, deserted. In the time that Hart had gone it was as if an epidemic had swept through the town, clearing everything with it.
‘Some welcome!’ Aram reined in his mount and shifted one leg painfully in the saddle. He pushed back his skin cap and shook his head as he looked up and down the length of the street.
‘Sure makes you feel at home, don’t it?’
Hart touched the mare with his spurs and guided her along to the front of Zack Moses’ store. He dropped to the ground, looped his reins over the rail and waited for Aram to do the same.
Zack beckoned them in from behind the plate glass o
f his door, the ravages of Jacob Batt’s escape having been repaired.
The stove was well stoked and a couple of men, neither of whom Hart recognized, glanced round from their game of cards, nodded a hasty greeting and returned to their play.
‘You must be Aram?’
‘S’right.’ The trapper held out his hand and Zack gripped it with a degree of warmth that was surprising.
‘You come then?’
Aram looked about him. ‘Seems that way.’
‘Figured you would.’
‘How come?’
‘Money’s money.
Aram hawked up phlegm and, failing to find anywhere to deposit it, swallowed it back down. ‘An’ shit’s shit!’
Zack wrinkled his nose as if he could suddenly smell it and turned towards Hart. ‘The boy—’
‘We know.’
Zack glanced from one to the other. ‘Bust out from them fools in the jail an’ shot up the town like he was Quantrell or Bloody Bill Anderson.’
‘Yeah, we heard.’
Zack nodded and pointed a finger at the trapper. ‘Wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t come lookin’ for you now he’s on the run. He—’
‘He did,’ Hart said flatly.
‘Did? He come after you? But you only this minute got back into town.’
‘Didn’t wait that long,’ said Aram. ‘Figure to meet his old uncle back up the trail.’
Zack’s mouth opened but he didn’t say anything, just looked and waited.
‘Know Frenchman?’ Hart asked.
‘Sure.’
‘Kid was there. Could’ve been chance, could’ve figured for certain that was the way we’d come. Either way, don’t matter. Snuck behind Aram here and put a couple of bullets into him.’
‘You okay?’ asked Zack, concerned.
‘Here, ain’t I?’
‘Looks like.’ He looked back at Hart. ‘What happened to ... to Jacob?’
‘Didn’t give me a lot of choice. Tried to stop him with a slug in the leg but he weren’t goin’ to give up.’
‘Killed him, huh?’
Hart nodded.
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