by John Jakes
Sick at heart, Charles flung off his black hat. He pushed the gypsy robe over his head and laid it across his saddle. He dismounted, handed Satan’s rein to Gray Owl and drew his Bowie from his belt, and waited.
64
SCAR DROVE HIS LANCE down through the slit at the end of his sash, pinning it. The lance vibrated as he let go. Charles understood what the sash said. To the death.
The Dog Society man began to mutter and chant. He untied a thong at his waist to free a wood-handled axe. He raised axe and carbine over his head in some ritual supplication Charles didn’t understand. Then he ran the edge of the iron head along the carbine’s barrel, back and forth, a whetstone rasp. Sparks spurted.
I’ve had enough, Charles thought. Texas, Virginia, Sharpsburg, the Washita. Augusta, Constance, Bent’s razor—is it endless?
With a grunt, Scar threw the carbine away. The gun tumbled barrel over stock and landed unseen in the dark. Chanting louder, he kicked out of his moccasins. He sidled around to the right, presenting his shoulder and forearm. He showed the axe, then began to swing it clockwise in a small taunting circle. Suddenly he struck out straight toward Charles, the blade horizontal.
The ground was soggy, the grass still brown and scant after the winter freezes. Charles’s foot slipped as he raised the Bowie in both hands and blocked the axe blow, edge against edge. Scar’s force drove his arm on. The axe head slid off the knife and whistled past Charles’s ear. Charles stabbed at the lunging body, a hard target in the starry dark. He missed.
Scar’s sash limited his movement, Charles’s only advantage. He knew that if he just walked away, out of Scar’s reach, the four riders would come down for him. So he had to finish it here, God help him.
Once more Scar came sidling in, rotating the axe in the clockwise circle. He swung. Charles ducked. He swung again. Charles ducked again, but he felt the iron pluck at his hair. He stabbed upward. Pricked the inside of Scar’s left sleeve. The Dog Soldier leaped away nimbly, turning like a dancer to unwind the sash twisted around him.
Charles crouched, both hands high in the traditional stance of the knife fighter. The Bowie twinkled in the starlight. Already the two men had churned their little patch of ground to choppy mud. It sucked at Charles’s boots as he sidestepped, awaiting the next feint or slash.
Scar chanted and tossed his axe to his left hand. Charles shifted to counter the move. Turning toward Scar’s left hand opened the left side of his body to attack. Without warning, Scar tossed the axe back, laughing deep in his belly as he chopped with his right hand.
Charles’s right-to-left parry slashed the inside of Scar’s forearm. Scar reacted by jerking the axe upward. Charles reached for it with his left hand and Scar kicked with his right foot. The hard blow struck Charles’s groin. He reeled, lost his balance in the mud, fell.
Scar screeched like a boy who’d won a game. He jumped on Charles with both knees, then rolled him from his side to his back. He seized Charles’s knife hand and pushed it over his head into the mud. The axe swung high, a black wedge against a familiar milky veil of stars.
The axe came down. Charles wrenched his head the other way; felt the blade scrape his hair before it buried in the mud. He twisted his knife hand and pricked Scar’s knuckles. Scar yelled, more surprised than hurt.
Charles tried to jerk his knife hand free. Scar held fast. Charles smelled the rancid grease Scar had used to dress his body before he applied his paint. Scar swung the muddy axe down again, and again Charles twisted away. The wrenching movement freed his knife hand. He spiked the Bowie through the upper part of Scar’s left arm.
The Dog Society man dropped the axe. The blunt top of the blade bounced off Charles’s temple. Scar was breathing harshly, in pain. Charles clamped the Cheyenne’s chin in his left hand, his right hand with the knife well inside Scar’s bleeding left arm. He felt the chin clamped in his left hand turn to flaccid weight. The wound was draining Scar quickly. Charles had only to reach up and cut his throat.
“Stab him,” Gray Owl said from the dark.
Charles’s knife hand began to shake. Scar hung over him like a meal sack someone was filling; it became heavier and heavier.
Reach up.
He couldn’t do it. He pushed with his left hand and rolled from underneath as Scar tumbled away. He’d whipped him. That was enough.
He felt a hand snatch at his right thigh before he comprehended what it was. Gray Owl ran forward as Scar sat up, cocking the Army Colt he’d plucked from Charles’s holster. Despite the mud coating the piece, the mechanism worked. Gray Owl stepped in front of Charles to shield him, and the two Cheyennes exchanged shots. The tracker took the one meant for Charles.
Scar’s head flung backward in the mud with a sloppy splash. He was hit, though Charles couldn’t tell where. Up on the rise, the ponies of the four riders neighed and tossed their heads. Gray Owl sank to his knees and discharged three more rounds at them. In Cheyenne, he shouted that Scar was killed. The Indians hastily formed a file and trotted out of sight.
Gray Owl exhaled, a weary sound. Charles scraped mud out of his eyes and crawled toward the tracker as he relaxed and slipped down onto his back. In the village someone raised an alarm.
Charles lifted Gray Owl in his arms. The tracker’s shirt was slippery with mud and blood. The starlight whitened his face, which showed a remarkable repose.
“I found the way for us, my good friend. Now I go on.”
“Gray Owl, Gray Owl,” Charles said in a broken voice.
“I go on as my vision foretold. I go—”
“Gray Owl.”
“There.” With a tremor in his hand, Gray Owl reached for the veil of stars. The Hanging Road. His hand fell back to the bosom of his shirt and Charles heard the rattle and felt the shudder as he died.
He held Gray Owl’s body while he studied that of Scar, motionless with the Army Colt in his hand. He knew there was something he should do but exhaustion and confusion kept it from him a few moments. Then he remembered. He envisioned a platform high in a tree, nearer to heaven. It was his duty to build that for Gray Owl, a good man. He had believed his gods wanted him to lead others, even if that led him to exile, and the white man’s path, and death. To the end he was faithful to the vision. Charles wished he had something as strong to believe in.
But he did. He remembered Gus. He remembered Willa.
Gently he laid the body on the muddy grass. He slipped twice gaining his feet. He heard clamorous voices behind him. Red Bear and his people. They would help him build Gray Owl’s resting place. He turned around to wait for them.
Dying but not dead, Scar raised himself a few inches and shot Charles in the back.
___________
GEO HAZARD
CARE OF HAZARDS
LEHIGH STATION
PENNSYLVANIA
THE CRIMINAL BENT APPREHENDED AND EXECUTED IN THE INDIAN TERRITORY ON THE 27TH INST.
I HAVE THE EARRING.
CHARLES MAIN
FT LEAVENWORTH KANS
BY TELEGRAPH
___________
MADELINE’S JOURNAL
May, 1869. The press has a new hare to chase. Charleston papers are full of revelations from Washington about the Dixie Stores. Cannot believe the name associated with the scandal.
“Unfortunate,” said the Boss. “Very unfortunate, Stanley. I thought you’d make an excellent congressman from your district when Muldoon retires at the end of the next term. You’re well known, you can afford to campaign, your positions are highly principled.”
Stanley knew what that last meant. He was obedient to orders from the state machine, which was under his guest’s absolute control.
The two of them were seated near the bust of Socrates at the Concourse, Stanley’s favorite club. Stanley’s face had a pale and saggy look these days. He was standing fast in the face of daily exposés, principally in the Star. Although Stanley was forty-seven and his guest, Simon Cameron, seventy, Stanley felt that the Boss was the more v
igorous. He’d stayed slim. His hair showed no sign of thinning and his gray eyes revealed none of the dullness of imminent senility that Stanley noted in some men Cameron’s age. The Boss had returned to the Senate in ’67, and had never been so powerful. Political intrigue agreed with him.
Reflective, Cameron sipped his Kentucky whiskey. A warm spring twilight gilded the windows near them. “As to circumstances now,” he resumed, “I must be candid with you. Usury may not be illegal but it is certainly unpopular. And Northerners have grown tired of flogging the South. The Dixie affair has actually generated a surge of sympathy for the victims of carpetbag profiteers.” He raised a hand to placate his host. “That’s a newspaper term, my boy, not mine. But it is regrettable that the moment Dills was confronted with that Klansman’s confession, he caved in.”
Stanley snapped his fingers to summon one of the servile waiters. He called for another round so blithely, Cameron was puzzled. Stanley was under enormous pressure because of the stories linking him to ownership of Mercantile Enterprises, which owned the forty-three Dixie Stores throughout South Carolina. Almost daily Stanley made a public denial of his guilt; he explained nothing, merely professed his innocence with the determination of old Stonewall resisting the enemy at First Bull Run. Given Stanley’s past behavior, Cameron expected him to be not only visibly tired, which he was, but also completely unnerved, which he was not. Remarkable.
Stanley said, “I presume Dills cooperated in hopes of keeping what’s left of his practice. In the past year or so his circumstances have been greatly reduced. No one’s sure about the reason. He had to resign from this club, for example. He couldn’t afford it any longer.”
“Like our friend Dills, I presume you’d like to keep something, too? Such as your good name?” The lean old Scotsman’s face showed a familiar severity. “You have no political future without it.”
“I have nothing to do with the Dixie Stores, Simon. Nothing.” There; another sign of Stanley’s surprising new assertiveness. Until recently he’d been timid about using the Boss’s first name. “I have stated and restated that to the press, and I’ll continue to say it, because it’s true.”
Cameron puffed his lips out and moved his tongue behind them as if trying to dislodge an irritating seed. “Well, yes, but to be candid, my boy, in the Republican hierarchy, they don’t believe you.”
Stanley sighed. The elderly black man in a fusty formal suit offered his silver tray. Stanley took his glass, which contained twice as much whiskey as the one given Cameron. “Then perhaps I had better be somewhat more forthcoming. I do aspire to that House seat. Of course, to clear myself completely would be hard. Emotionally.”
Cameron, who could read most men easily, was thrown. “What are you talking about?”
A swift glance showed Stanley there were no members close enough to hear. A magnificent tall clock behind the periodical table chimed, six sweet, deep notes.
“I’m talking about the Dixie Stores. When they were established, I admit that family funds were used. I had no knowledge of it at the time, however. I was too busy overseeing General Howard’s programs at the Bureau.” His eyes, so like a mournful hound’s, actually sparkled now. “Mr. Dills can verify that all of the stock of Mercantile Enterprises is registered in the name of my wife, Isabel.”
The senator from Lancaster nearly spilled his drink.
“Are you saying she operated the stores?”
“Yes, and she started them on her own initiative, after a visit to South Carolina. Of course I discovered it eventually, but I have never had any knowledge of the details.”
The older man guffawed. Stanley took offense but quelled his resentment. Cameron shook a long finger. “Are you telling me that you absolutely deny any association with the Dixie scandal?”
“I am. I do.”
“You expect the party and the public to believe that?”
“If I keep saying it,” Stanley returned calmly, “I expect they will, yes. I knew nothing. Isabel is an intelligent and driven woman. The shares belong to her. I did not know.”
Simon Cameron tried to align this bland, imperturbable Stanley with the timid naïve man he had advised to look into some sort of profitable Army contract early in the war. Stanley had grown enormously rich selling shoddy shoes. He had also changed while Cameron’s attention was elsewhere. The Boss couldn’t find the old Stanley in the new one.
Relaxed in the leather chair, he gave a grudging laugh. “My boy, that congressional seat may not be out of reach after all. You are very convincing.”
“Thank you, Simon. I had a master teacher.”
Cameron presumed Stanley was referring to him. He took note of the clock. “Will you join me for supper?”
Stanley handed Cameron another surprise when he said, “Thank you, but I can’t. I have invited my son here to dine.”
Laban Hazard, Esquire, just twenty-three and only two years out of Yale, had already established a Washington practice. It was not prestigious, but it was profitable. The majority of Laban’s clients were murderers, perpetrators of stock frauds, and husbands charged with adultery. Laban was a slight, fussy young man whose earlier handsomeness was fast being eroded by too little sunshine and too much Spanish sherry.
In the club dining room, over excellent lamb cutlets, Stanley explained his predicament, and his decision to speak in more detail to prove his innocence. Laban listened with an unreadable expression. Under the gaslight his carefully combed hair resembled the pelt of an otter just out of a creek.
At the end of Stanley’s long monologue, his son smiled. “You prepared well, Father. I don’t think you’ll even need counsel if the shares are registered as you say. I’ll be pleased to represent you in any unforeseen circumstances, however.”
“Thank you, Laban.” A syruplike sentimentality flowed through Stanley. “Your wretched twin brother is unredeemable, but you gladden my heart. I am happy I took the initiative in reuniting us.”
“I too,” Laban said. He belched. “Sorry.” The S sound was prolonged; Laban had already drunk one sherry too many.
“Will you contact the Star for me? I’d like a private meeting with their best reporter, as soon as possible.” Stanley’s voice was pitched low. There was no mistaking what he wanted his son to do.
“I’ll take care of it first thing tomorrow.” Laban twirled his wineglass. Then, avoiding his father’s eye, he said, “You know I have always had difficulty feeling affection for my mother.”
It was uttered in a monotone; Laban was in his lawyerly mode. He made the personal confession sound ordinary.
“I know that, my boy,” Stanley murmured. He felt triumphant; he would survive, and ascend to new heights. “But we mustn’t harbor ill feelings. She will need compassion when the storm breaks.”
Three days later, Saturday, Stanley was in the stable behind the I Street mansion. In shirt sleeves and already fortified by two morning whiskeys, he was admiring his matched bay carriage horses. They were the joy of his life; they symbolized the benefits of wealth.
“Stanley.”
Her harpy voice brought him around to face the wide doorway. A pale sun was trying to break through the night mist from the Potomac. The stable had a friendly smell—earth, straw, manure. Stanley saw a copy of the Star in Isabel’s hand.
“Please leave us alone, Peter,” he said. The young black groom knuckled his eyebrow and left.
Isabel was ashen. She shook the newspaper at her husband. “You fat vile bastard. When did you do this?”
“Transfer the shares? Some time ago.”
“You won’t get away with it.”
“Why, I think I already have. I had a congratulatory note from Ben Wade yesterday. He commended my honesty and courage in the face of a draconian choice. He lauded my future as a Republican. I understand the White House considers me exonerated.”
Isabel detected the spite in his treacly tone. She started to revile him, then thought better of it. She felt the weight of her nearly fifty ye
ars, and she was suddenly afraid of this pudgy man in disarrayed linen whom she’d held in contempt for so long. She crossed over to him.
“What are we going to do, Stanley?”
He stepped away from her imploring hand. “I am going to institute divorce proceedings. Laban has agreed to handle matters. I can’t condone the policies of your Carolina stores.”
“My—?”
“I have my future to think of,” he went on. Isabel’s face showed a sick disbelief. “However, I’ve instructed Laban to arrange for transfer of five hundred thousand dollars to your personal account. Consider it a sort of parting gift, even though you served me ill as a wife.”
“How dare you say that? How dare you?”
Suddenly Stanley was quaking. “Because it’s true. You constantly humiliated me, belittled me in front of my sons while they were growing up. You deprived me of the one woman who ever cared about me.”
“That music hall slut? You simpleton. She wanted your purse, not your privates.”
“Isabel. That’s revolting.” Deep within, some little gnome of spite laughed aloud. Isabel prided herself on refinement. He’d finally broken her.
He continued. “That remark is further proof of my assertions. Even so, I’ll still give you the money to tide you through the scandal. All I ask in return is that you stay away from me. Forever.”
The blooded bays nuzzled one another from their adjacent stalls. Shafts of brightening sun speared down from the hayloft. Outside, hidden by the mist, Peter whistled a minstrel song. Isabel’s astonishment turned to rage.
“I taught you too well. I taught you too much.”
“That’s true. Growing up, I never thought very highly of myself or my abilities. Neither did Mother. Neither did George. You convinced me I could become successful if I wasn’t overly scrupulous about how I did it.” Christ, how he hated her. He was openly nasty for the first time. “In your old age you can take pride in that accomplishment.”