“You think they’d do that?” Bragg said.
Ring glanced at Cole.
“What’s that thing you always used to say, Virgil? Read it in some book?”
“Clausewitz,” Cole said. “Clausewitz says you gotta plan for what your enemy can do, not what you think he’ll do.”
“Fuck Clausewitz,” Bragg said.
But he didn’t start a fire.
“Everett and I will go up front now.”
“Be sure and let Mackie know it’s you,” Ring said. “You know how quick he is.”
Bent nearly double, Cole and I went through the cottonwoods toward the fallen tree behind which Mackie and Russell were watching.
When we were maybe a hundred feet away, Cole said, “Virgil Cole, Mackie.”
“Come on,” Mackie said.
We dropped to our knees and crept to the watch spot.
“You boys can head back now, get some sleep,” Cole said.
They left us without a word. Both of them moved very quietly in the woods. Ahead of us, the land was treeless. The Sheltons’ fire had died away entirely. The moon was already declining but still bright enough to fill the land between the woods and the low hill with pallid emptiness. Nothing moved. There was no sound except the water behind us. The sky was vast and dark. There were stars, but they seemed pitiless.
“They’ll come in the morning,” Cole said.
“Not right at us,” I said.
“No. I figure they’ll send some riders around out of rifle range and cross the river and come back up behind us. They’ll wait for the trackers to go upstream and find our trail. See who we are, how many we are.”
“Woods aren’t that thick,” I said. “In the day, they’ll get a fair idea even ’fore the trackers come back.”
“We can try to keep down,” Cole said. “Not move around.”
“When the trackers come back, they’ll know anyway,” I said.
“Still ain’t good battlefield for ’em,” Cole said. “They got to cross that open land between us and the hill.”
“Or swim the river.”
“Either way, they got to come at us with no cover and six of us shooting.”
“They know that,” I said.
“Expect they do.”
“If they do, then we’re back to seeing how long they’ll sit there,” I said. “We got all the water we need, and we got some food.”
“Might be smart to parcel it out small,” Cole said.
“Might be.”
“We don’t know what they got,” Cole said.
“Or how far they’d have to go to get it.”
“Water’s not a problem for them, either.”
“Nope,” I said. “They just go down the river out of range and get it.”
Behind us, a small voice said, “Virgil.”
“Yes, Allie,” Virgil said.
“Can I come up and sit with you and Everett?”
“Yep.”
She came up crouching, in her ridiculous clothes, looking very small, and sat cross-legged on the ground between us.
“You ever fire a pistol,” Cole said.
“No.”
“Best you learned. Everett, you got that little hideout dingus you usually carry?”
“I do,” I said, and took an over/under derringer out of the side pocket of my pants.
I broke it open, took out the two .45 cartridges, and closed the weapon.
“It’s unloaded now,” I said. “But pretend it isn’t.”
I handed it to her. She handled it as if it were some vile reptile.
“Just a piece of equipment, Allie,” I said. “Like a cherry pitter. Won’t do anything ’less you operate it.”
“It’s not very heavy,” she said.
“It’ll be a little heavier with the bullets in it.”
I had her dry fire it a few times, then I took it and reloaded it and gave it back to her.
“I . . . what am I supposed to do with it?”
“Keep it with you,” I said.
“Indians win this,” Cole said, “cock that thing, put it in your mouth, pull the trigger.”
“Kill myself?”
“ ’Less you want to be the bottom squaw in some buck’s string,” Cole said.
“Oh, God,” she said.
Neither Cole or I said anything. I don’t imagine Cole could think of anything to say, either. Awkwardly, Allie put the derringer in the pocket of her too-big pants. The three of us sat, looking out over the short stretch of empty prairie.
Finally Allie said, “I’m sorry, Virgil.”
Cole didn’t speak.
“I don’t know what to say, Virgil. I . . . how are we going to make this right?”
Cole stayed silent, looking toward where the Kiowas were.
“I was so alone,” Allie said, “and Bragg was . . . Ring protected me, and he told his brother to protect me. And they both did.”
Cole didn’t turn his head.
“So you fuck Mackie, too?” he said.
“I . . . no . . . It was Ring. Ring was in charge. What was I supposed to do?” Allie said.
Cole didn’t say anything else. I didn’t want any part of this and had nothing to say.
“I was alone . . . I want to fix this between us, between you and Ring.”
Cole turned his head slowly and looked at her in the faint light.
“I’ll think about that another time,” Cole said. “Right now, I’m thinking about Indians.”
38
At first light, we spotted the tracker. He swung out in a big arc from behind the hill, staying out of rifle range, and headed upstream. Another rider came out on the other side, described the same wide arc out of range, and headed downstream.
“He ain’t a tracker,” Cole said. “They come from down there they know we didn’t.”
“He’ll cross downstream, come up for a look on the other side of the river,” I said.
“And we just sit here?” Bragg said.
“Not if you got a better plan,” Cole said.
“Maybe we send somebody out after them two bucks,” Bragg said. “Got ’em isolated from the rest, kill ’em off, improve our odds.”
“Ain’t a bad idea,” Ring said. “Course them other Kiowas up there will see us send somebody, so they’ll send somebody, too. So our man is outnumbered two to one.”
“Maybe our man can kill them both. We got some gun hands here.”
“Maybe,” Ring said. “Which one you want to follow? Upstream or down?”
Bragg was silent. Then he shook his head.
“Might make a fire this morning,” I said. “It won’t stand out so much in the day.”
“Indians can’t get close enough to shoot,” Cole said, “in the daylight.”
We made our fire, and we all had coffee and fried salt pork. Coffee made me feel better. In about an hour, we saw one of the Indians on the other side of the river, squatting beside a big rock, looking at our campsite. About midmorning we saw the upstream Indian come back, swinging wide away from our guns and disappearing behind the hill. When we looked again, the one across the river was gone. After that, nothing. We sat with our weapons, watching the hill. Nobody appeared. No sound drifted down across the grassland. Nothing happened. We drank some more coffee and ate some jerky and hardtack. We dipped the hardtack in the coffee to soften it. We took turns sleeping. For supper, Allie made fry biscuits. We ate them with salt pork and coffee and hardtack. We dipped our hardtack. We took turns sleeping.
On the second day of this, Bragg said to us, “How do we know they’re still there?”
“We don’t,” Cole said.
“How we going to find out?” Bragg said.
No one said anything for a time, then I said, “I’m going to ride up and see.”
All of them looked at me. I thought Cole was going to say something. But he didn’t. Instead, he nodded. I got up and went to the brush-and-branches pen we’d made and saddled my horse. I put the Winchester in
its saddle sleeve, checked my Colt and holstered it, picked up the shotgun, and got on my horse.
“Don’t go no further than you have to,” Cole said. “I can cover you about halfway there. All we need to know is that they didn’t keep the hill between us and skedaddle.”
I nodded. Cole picked up his rifle and settled in on his stomach with his Winchester. Ring did the same thing.
“We’ll do what we can,” Ring said.
“Minute you see an Indian,” Cole said, “you turn and run for the woods.”
I nodded again. Then I turned my horse’s head and clucked and nudged him with my knee and we rode out of the woods and onto the short-grass open land. The sun was high and steady. I could smell the river and the grass. The horse was frisky from standing around in the woods. He capered a couple of times as we moved into the sun. I held him to a walk. There was no reason to hurry. Nothing was moving but me. The only sound was the horse walking. I had the shotgun resting across my saddle in front of me. It was cocked. As we walked toward the hill, the horse kicked up some grasshoppers and they jumped frantically in front of us. The horse tossed his head and blew a couple of times. I knew he wanted to run. I smiled a little to myself. Hell, so did I. We were almost out of range of the woods. At this distance, even for Cole, hitting what you were aiming at would be mostly luck. I kept riding slowly toward the hill. Nothing moved. Some more grasshoppers jumped around in front of us as we walked. The grass smell was strong. I didn’t smell the river anymore. I could feel the hard sun on my back. We were almost to the foot of the hill. Out of rifle range. I was on my own. I stopped the horse for a moment and looked up the easy slope. Nothing moved. Then it did.
A young Indian was sitting his horse on the top of the hill. He was bare-chested, wearing leggings and moccasins. There were eagle feathers in his long hair. Not much of a war bonnet. He was not yet a significant chief, but he’d earned some feathers. His horse was a big buckskin with a light mane. It wasn’t an Indian pony. He’d probably stolen it from the Army. There were white and colored beads in a tight collar around his neck, and in several looped necklaces on his chest. In the center, there was a kidney-shaped silver medallion. The lower half of his face was painted vermillion, with black paint on his cheeks and around his eyes. His eyelids were vermillion. He looked straight down at me. I looked up at him. There was contact, like looking at a wolf or a cougar and seeing not just the animal but its actual living self looking out at you. I should have turned the horse and headed back. But I didn’t. I couldn’t turn on him and run. I sat my horse with the shotgun across my saddle and waited.
In a moment, the other Indians came up behind him on the top of the hill and stopped and sat silently in a row maybe a horse’s length behind him. My horse swished his tail at a fly. I waited. The young Indian began to ride slowly down the hill toward me. He sat his horse bareback. There was no bridle, merely a length of rope tied to the buckskin’s jaw. I sat. The Indian came slowly. He was looking at me, and I at him. In his right hand he carried a Winchester. There were bullets in a looped belt around his waist. He carried a knife on the same belt. His eyes were dark brown and full of energy. I could see that the Winchester was cocked. He could see that the shotgun was cocked. My shotgun, resting on my saddle horn, was pointing to my left. He moved his horse to my right. I turned the shotgun. He seemed almost to smile. He shifted the Winchester to his left hand, holding it with the butt on his thigh and the barrel pointing up. I nodded and did the same with the shotgun. Again, he might have smiled. We were almost side by side now, headed in opposite directions. Then we were side by side, our horses standing head to tail. The Indian reached out carefully and put his right hand on my right shoulder. We sat for a fraction, as if all of time had come to a point on that contact.
Then he took his hand away and whirled his horse and whooped something in Kiowa and set the horse at a hard gallop up the hill. As he came toward them, the other Indians yelled and whooped and waved their weapons. When the young Indian reached the top of the hill, he spun his horse, making him rear and paw the air with his front feet as he did so. Then he set the horse back down on solid ground and looked down at me once more. A second Indian rode out beside him and planted a lance in the ground. It was the one with Allie’s undergarment tied to it. Several of the Indians shouted in Kiowa, and then there was laughter. The young Indian with the vermillion jaw turned his horse and disappeared over the crest of the hill, and the other Indians followed him. I could hear their hooves going down the other side.
I nudged my horse forward and we went up the hill, my shotgun still pointing up, the butt still resting on my thigh. At the top of the hill, I looked down at a flat prairie that stretched to the horizon. Below me, the Kiowas were riding away at a comfortable pace.
39
Beauville wasn’t much. It wasn’t even Appaloosa. But it was a railhead, where cattle driven up from Texas could load onto trains that would bring them to Omaha or Chicago. And being a railhead, it was livelier than it had any right to be otherwise.
We dragged into Beauville two days after my coup had been counted by the buck with the vermillion chin; we were tired, out of coffee, and short of most everything else. The horses were tired. The mule was tired. And we were tired. Allie, straggle-haired and badly dressed, dusty and sweat-streaked like the rest of us, looked especially tired. There was a hotel on the one street, and a bank, and a restaurant in a tent, and six saloons. At the far end of the street, there were a few small, unpainted houses. The train station, surrounded by cattle pens, was the grandest building in town. There was even a little steeple on it, with a big clock. According to the clock, it was 2:41. Behind the station was the city marshal’s office and jail. “This time tomorrow,” Ring said.
“This time,” Cole said.
“We’ll ride on down to the station,” Ring said. “You, too, Bragg. If the money’s there, our deal is up. If the money’s not there, we gonna be asking you where it is.”
“It’ll be there,” Bragg said. He nodded at us. “What about them?”
“Our deal covers them,” Ring said. He looked at Cole.
“That gonna be a problem?” Ring said.
“Might be,” Cole said.
Ring nodded.
“How about the woman?” he said. “She a problem?”
“Might be,” Cole said.
“Well,” Ring said. “Won’t be a problem till tomorrow afternoon.”
He nudged his horse forward. His brother followed. Bragg trailed along, and Russell behind him. Allie sat uncertainly on her horse, near me.
“Let’s head down to the hotel, Allie,” I said. “Get you a room.”
“How about you two?” she said.
“I’ll bunk in with Everett,” Cole said.
It was between cattle drives, and the hotel was nearly empty. We washed and slept and sent our clothes to the Chinaman. It was after dark when Cole and I went down to the saloon and Allie joined us. The hotelkeeper’s wife had found her some clothes, probably from one of the whores who worked in the hotel, and Allie looked pretty good again.
It wasn’t much of a saloon, two long planks set on whiskey barrels. The whiskey sat in bottles on a table behind. We had a drink, including Allie, who drank hers in very small sips.
“Will the Sheltons stick to the truce?” I said.
“Ring’s word is good,” Cole said.
“And so is ours,” I said.
“Yes.”
We were quiet. The hotelkeeper’s wife came to the table.
“You folks hungry, we got some stew and some fresh bread,” she said. “I baked it today.”
“How ’bout the stew?” Cole said.
“Been simmerin’ ’bout six years,” the woman said. “Just keep dishing it out and addin’ in stuff.”
We ordered some.
“What are we going to do?” Allie said.
“We’ll wait until tomorrow afternoon,” Cole said. “Then we’ll take Bragg back.”
“I me
ant us, Virgil,” she said.
I started to get up.
“I’ll have a drink at the bar,” I said.
Cole put his hand on my arm.
“Sit,” he said.
“Does Everett have to be here, Virgil?” Allie said.
“Yep.”
I wasn’t comfortable with it. But staying might not be a bad idea. If Allie started talking about us at her half-constructed house that rainy day, I would want to be around to see that the story got told adequately.
“Ring forced me to do that with him,” Allie said.
“Nope,” Cole said.
“He did, Virgil, I swear he did.”
Cole shook his head.
“I seen what I seen,” he said.
“I was afraid,” Allie said. “I was doing what I had to do to stay alive.”
“He wouldn’ta killed you,” Cole said. “He’d just trail you along with him till he didn’t need you no more.”
“Maybe you know that,” Allie said. “But I didn’t know it, Virgil. And the other men. I was a woman alone with four terrible men.”
Cole drank some whiskey and stared into the glass and didn’t say anything for a while.
Then he said to me, “Tomorrow this time we’ll have settled things with the Sheltons. If Ring kills me, you think she’ll go off with him, Everett?”
“I think Allie needs to be with a man,” I said.
“You bastard,” Allie said. “Don’t listen to him, Virgil. The sonova bitch tried to put his hands on me one day when I was showing him our house.”
Cole looked at me.
“No, Virgil,” I said. “I didn’t.”
Cole looked at me for a moment longer. I looked back. Then he looked back into his whiskey glass.
“No, Allie,” he said. “Everett didn’t do that.”
“He’s lying, Virgil. You believe him and not me?”
Cole studied the surface of his drink. He nodded his head slowly.
“That is correct,” he said.
“You men. You always stick together, don’t you. What chance has a woman got, alone?”
Cole finished his drink and poured himself another. The hotelkeeper’s wife brought us food. We all ate some and were quiet while we did. It was better than fried salt pork and hardtack.
Appaloosa / Resolution / Brimstone / Blue-Eyed Devil Page 12