by Mark Henry
Trap cleared his throat and the boy clutched at the saddle horn, jerking awake.
“Jeez-o’-Pete!” he said, rubbing his eyes. “How long you been sittin’ there starin’ at me? It ain’t polite.”
Trap grinned. “Wouldn’t know,” he said. “I only just woke up myself.”
The boy chuckled and settled the hat back on his head. He urged his roan up next to Skunk and reached a big hand across the pommel of his saddle. “In that case, I’m Clay Madsen hailin’ from Bastrop, Texas. Glad to meet you.”
Trap shook the offered hand. “Trap O’Shannon.”
Madsen threw a quick glance over his shoulder before he turned his attention back to Trap. “You don’t look Irish.”
“O’Shannon is Scots-Irish.”
“You don’t look Scots either,” Madsen said, looking behind him again.
Trap saw no reason to start explaining his heritage to everyone he met on the trail. He didn’t have time to sit and jabber the morning away, so he picked up the reins to take his leave.
“Well,” he said. “It looks like you’re waiting for somebody. Guess I’ll just push on.”
The other boy shrugged and cocked back his hat with a knuckle. “I ain’t waitin’ for no one,” he said, casting another glance over a muscular shoulder. He brought the blue roan up beside Trap so they faced the same direction. “Mind if I ride along with you for a little spell? I could use a speck of friendly conversation.”
“I reckon I’m friendly enough,” Trap said. “But I’m not much of a talker.”
“Perfect.” Madsen gave him a wide grin. “You’re just the sort of feller I like to converse with.”
Trap picked up the pace and Clay Madsen matched it with ease. With the sun higher in the sky, the day grew warm and sticky. Moisture hung heavy in the hot air, and felt thick enough to drown anyone who took in a full breath.
The talkative Texan had the relaxed yet supremely confident air of a man three times his age. He spoke the miles away as the two picked their way through hardwood forests and loped through knee-high grass along lush floodplains. Even the blue roan, who must surely have heard them all before, cocked an inquisitive ear back to listen to Madsen’s stories.
The Texan recounted that he’d left his father’s ranch in south central Texas three months earlier to strike out for adventure and fortune on his own. In gritty detail, he described how he’d wiled away the last few weeks with a pretty young whore in St. Joe, who’d befriended him without charging a cent for her time.
Trap never considered himself a prude, but all Clay’s talk of drinking, gambling, and half-naked women needled at his conscience. His father would have had him reciting Scripture until his tongue fell off.
The most bothersome fact was that he found Madsen’s stories interesting. The way the boy told them made Trap feel as if he was being trusted with a family confidence.
“Her name was Vera,” Clay said as their horses lugged up the crest of a red clay embankment. The going was steep, but he spoke on without any concern. He was a superb horseman and rode as an extension of the handsome blue roan. “Course, that was her given name. I called her Popper.”
Trap shook his head. He didn’t really think he should hear why anyone would give a nickname like Popper to a whore.
Clay gave him no notice and pushed ahead, twirling the end of his reins absentmindedly as he spoke. “Called her that on account of the way she was always a-poppin’ her knuckles and what not.”
Trap relaxed a notch. That wasn’t so bad.
“Sometimes she’d have me give her a big squeeze around the middle, like a bear hug. Her spine would pop like a row of dominoes clinkin’ over.” Madsen leaned over in the saddle across the gap between the two riders. He raised dark eyebrows under the brim of his hat and spoke in a hushed tone. “Once in a while, she even had me tug on her little ol’ toes and give each of them a pop.” He grinned at Trap. “You ever hear of such a thing?” He sighed, looking away. “She had danged fine toes too, like peas in a pod. . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Why didn’t you stay with her?” Trap heard himself ask. His mouth felt dry and he found himself pondering on Maggie’s toes. He could still picture the tiny impressions they made from the first time he’d tracked her to the root cellar. As a student of tracking, if there was one thing Trap noticed, it was feet. Now that he thought of it, Maggie Sundown had some danged pretty toes herself.
Madsen interrupted his thoughts.
“A no-account son-of-a-bitch gambler named Haywood.”
“What?” Trap snapped out of his reverie over the details of Maggie’s body.
“You asked why I didn’t stay with Popper. It was that sorry pimp gambler of hers named Haywood. He reckoned I owed him money even if she decided not to charge a handsome young feller like myself. I may be long on charm when it comes to the womenfolk.” Clay winked. “But I don’t have two shinplasters to rub together. I coulda taken the bucktoothed bastard in a fair fight, but I knew he’d force my hand. Be a hell of a poor start if I had to go and kill somebody before I was gone from the home place three months.”
“That’s good thinking,” Trap agreed, but his mind was elsewhere.
They topped a hill overlooking a valley choked with tall grass. A swift creek wound its way through groves of pecans and other hardwoods. They were still a good thirty miles away from the school.
A glint of steel and movement a scant half mile to the north caught his eye. It was late afternoon and the sun was behind them, casting long shadows to the fore. Trap figured he and Madsen were all but invisible to the four approaching riders with the sun in their eyes.
Something about the lead rider—something he couldn’t put his finger on—made Trap pause.
“I need to get closer,” he muttered under his breath. Thoughts of Maggie’s toes still lingered, giving the boy a warm knot, low in his belly.
“It ain’t Haywood,” Madsen said. “Not unless he’s lost, comin’ from that direction.” He took a brass spyglass out of his saddlebag and held it up to his eye. “I don’t recognize any of them. But them dogs sure look mean. We best give them a wide berth.” He passed the telescope to Trap.
O’Shannon caught his breath when he moved the metal tubes into focus. The only reason Tobias Drum would ride this far south with a group of hard cases like the Van Zandts and their vicious dogs was to hunt someone who’d left without permission. The only person he knew with enough guts to run away from the school was Maggie Sundown.
* * *
The two boys backed down the hill and watched Drum and his men move methodically through the groves of nut trees. One of the striped dogs kept his nose to the ground and tracked, the other, the bigger one, sniffed the air. Even from a distance, Trap could see the animal was a mean one, capable of tearing an unarmed man to shreds.
It took an hour for Drum and his group to move far enough away that Trap considered it safe to approach the trail below.
Trap dismounted and looped Skunk’s reins around a low limb of scrub oak. Clay remained in the saddle, keeping watch.
“This Indian girl you’re looking for,” Madsen said. “If she knew you were comin’ back for her, why’d she take to the woods like this?”
Trap knelt and touched the ground, studying the tracks left by the Drum and the others. A fifth set of tracks caught his attention. Most of the hoofprints had been walked over by the others, but a few were still visible.
“Drum must have forced her hand after I left.” Trap didn’t think he’d ever be able to talk about Maggie with the same easy detail Clay used to speak about women. He tapped the loose soil with his fingers. “I’m betting this is her horse. It’s dragging its toes like it’s getting tired. She’d likely ran it a good ways before she got here. The way it’s movin’, I’d say it’s picked up a stone in the forefoot.”
Trap stood and led Skunk toward the shallow stream. “She would have dismounted and gotten the stone out.”
“This Maggie girl must
know her horses,” Madsen said. He threw back his hat and slid a hand over his thick, chocolate hair. “I believe I’d like to meet her someday.”
Trap looked up and shielded his eyes from the low sun with the flat of his hand. “Sounds like you got women a-plenty from all the stories you tell. I only got the one. I’d be much obliged if you didn’t try to steal her.”
Madsen gave him a good-natured grin. “I may not have to try. She’s likely to fall into my arms all on her own.”
Trap stood and studied the tracks at his feet beside a leaning cottonwood. Two moccasin prints straddled a damp spot in the earth where Maggie had made water. He didn’t tell Clay; it seemed too private a thing to talk about out loud.
The thought of Drum and the others chasing her gnawed hard at Trap’s gut, but another, more sobering thought filled him with a feeling he’d never quite experienced. It was the same feeling he’d had as he contemplated Maggie’s toes earlier, only multiplied until he felt his insides might burst.
She was not only running away from the school. Maggie Sundown was running to him.
CHAPTER 17
Maggie used a rock to kill a fat grouse just before sunset. Fearful of being seen if she started a fire, she hung the bird on her saddle string and rode on. She wanted to keep riding throughout the night, but her horse stumbled more often now and groaned for a rest at every step. He was a lanky beast not cut out for this type of labor, and Maggie knew he would lose flesh rapidly if she didn’t give him plenty of time to graze.
The trees began to thin out not long after sunset. Here and there a lamp flickered in the window of some farmhouse, but Maggie was careful to steer clear of those. She turned more south to keep to thicker country, and was relieved when the forests began to come back. Guided by the stars and little more than the feeling inside her, she worked her way southwest until midnight. A crescent moon cast black pools of shadow among the trees and bushes.
The weary gelding jerked to a twitchy stop as something crashed through the bushes in the thicket to the right ahead of them and splashed in the water on the other side. Maggie leaned forward in the saddle and patted the horse’s neck. A warm wind blew across her face.
The darkness and unseen noises might have frightened a lesser girl, but Maggie had been chased by the Army, shot at, clubbed on the head with a pistol, and assaulted by Reverend Drum. Worse, she’d had to watch while her once-proud people were conquered. Few things in the night were as frightening as that.
* * *
Maggie dismounted under the protection of a large cottonwood, loosened the girth, and let the saddle slide to the ground. Her bones ached from the constant pounding of riding over rough terrain. The brown gelding nosed her hand and gave a rattling groan. She blew softly into its nose and hummed a soothing tune her mother used to sing when she worked around horses.
Maggie used her knife to cut a strip off the saddle blanket about three inches wide. She knotted one end, and after cutting a slit like a button hole in the middle and the opposite end, wove the cloth back and forth through itself to make a set of figure-eight hobbles. The horse was sweat-stained and exhausted enough, it would likely stay near her little camp while it grazed, but she had to be sure.
Once the animal was watered, she turned it out, hobbled, and sank down at the base of a tree against the soft fleece pad on her saddle. She still didn’t want to risk a fire, but the weather was cool and the grouse would keep a while longer.
A breeze blew across her neck, and she reached up to smooth her hair. She’d forgotten Reverend Drum had ordered it cut. She hated the greasy man as much as she’d ever hated anyone. Her heart told her she’d have the chance to kill him someday. Not for cutting her hair or even what he did in his office—no, when next they met, Drum would surely give her a reason much more vile.
Leaning her head back against the rough bark on the tree, she gazed up at the myriad of stars that speckled white on the night sky, like the blanket on an Appaloosa horse.
She wondered if Trap O’Shannon would be surprised to see her—if she made it to Arizona. She wondered if he might be thinking of her at all since he left.
Drum would follow her, there was no doubt about that. She’d made good time, but he was close; she could feel it. The Thoroughbred needed rest; that was something she couldn’t get around. Without the big gelding she’d move so slowly, she was sure to be caught. But the horse also left an easy trail to follow. She had to do something to discourage her pursuers—to slow them down.
Her breathing came deep and steady as drowsiness tugged at her body. Asleep only a few seconds, she was startled awake by a familiar whistling grunt in the bushes beside her. When she figured out what it was she smiled, a plan already forming in her mind.
CHAPTER 18
“I’m not too keen on them dogs hearing us,” Clay whispered. Drops of dew covered the grass in front of their faces. A black and yellow spider the size of a twenty-dollar gold piece scuttled up and down the damp stems to repair a glistening web only inches from the Texan’s nose. He paid it no mind, concentrating instead on the brindle dogs below. “I got bit by a dog once when I was a boy and I gotta tell you, I’d rather be in a gunfight without a gun than go through that again.”
“Wind’s wrong,” Trap grunted beside him. “We’ve stayed well away so they won’t even cross our trail.”
The two boys watched from a thick stand of tall grass and berry brush on a chalk bluff above the river bottom. The sun had been up less than an hour when they saw Drum pick his way though a thin layer of fog that hugged the waterline. The Van Zandts followed, rifles at the ready, as if they were hunting escaped convicts instead of a fourteen-year-old Indian girl. The brindle dogs ranged in front of the group, padding up to this tree or that, pausing to sniff out every possible trail.
The small one took the lead, while the meaner one hung back a little.
“Looks like the monster’s waitin’ for his little buddy to flush out something for him to rip to pieces,” Clay whispered.
Trap nodded slowly. The morning felt so quiet, he didn’t dare speak.
Without warning the smaller dog, who sniffed at the base of a large cottonwood, let out a mournful howl and ran yelping back to Harry Van Zandt. The bigger dog broke into a ferocious snarling fit. It faced another tree, not ten feet away from the first along the water’s edge.
Trap’s heart jumped in his chest. He shot a glance at Clay. “I’m afraid she might be in those bushes. Wish we had a rifle.”
“We don’t need no rifle to shoot that little piece,” Clay scoffed. “I could part their hair with this peashooter at this distance if they try and do the girl any harm.”
The big dog suddenly tore up to the tree and pawed at the ground around it. Seconds later, it flipped over backward with a yowling cry, more wildcat than hunting dog. Regaining its feet, the yelping animal retreated to a dismayed master, tail between its legs.
Clay took up the telescope and studied the scene in more detail. He chuckled and passed it to Trap.
“She’s a smart one, this girl of yours,” Madsen whispered. “She must have got herself a porcupine last night and set some snares with the quills. Both dogs got a snootful. That little one looks to have three or four up around the eyes. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s blinded. The kid holding it looks mad as a hornet.”
* * *
Unable to move without being seen, Trap and Clay lay still in the grass and watched the scene below them. The Van Zandt boys were furious at the injuries to their pets. Their vehement curses and oaths carried on the stiff breeze, but it was impossible to make out more than a few words.
It took an hour to get all the quills out of both dogs. The monster bit Roth in the hand during the process, and they had to use a belt to muzzle the snarling thing. It took more time to doctor the wound.
In the end, the two brothers left with their injured little dog, while Mr. Van Zandt and Drum followed the monster up the trail that ran along the water.
Ten minut
es later, Trap and Clay moved down to take a look at the sign. Five minutes of study and Trap began to chuckle. He swung back on his horse, shaking his head.
“They’re following the wrong trail,” he said. “You’re right, she is a smart girl.”
Madsen stood dumbfounded, holding the roan’s lead in his hand. “How do you know it’s the wrong trail?”
Trap smiled. “You ever have a dog mix it up with a porcupine?”
Madsen nodded.
“Could you ever break him of it?”
“I guess not,” the Texan admitted. “Seems like they get more quills each time they tangle with one. It’s like they hold a grudge or something.”
“Exactly. They get all caught up in a blind rage and can’t think of anything but revenge,” Trap said. “Drum’s relying too much on the dog.” He nodded back to the northeast. “There are rocks turned over in the water heading upriver. I reckon Maggie will go that way a spell before she turns back south.”
“If she headed back upriver, who’s the evil reverend followin’?”
“He’s following the dog.” Trap waited for Clay to make the connection.
A smile slowly spread across Clay’s face. “And the dog’s followin’ the porcupine where Maggie got the quills. . . .”
CHAPTER 19
1910
Montana
“You were some woman then and you’re some woman now, Maggie darlin’,” Clay said, bouncing his fist on top of the table. “I still don’t see why you didn’t take up with me all those years ago. . . .”
“Mr. O’Shannon, I’m amazed you didn’t shoot this scoundrel two days after you met,” Hanna said.
“He never had the need to.” Clay shrugged. “I can’t figure it out, but she picked him over big, strappin’ me.”
Hanna leaned forward on the table. “Clay was telling me you all rode from St. Louis to Arizona, dodging Comanche troubles, whiskey peddlers, and outlaws all the way. I suppose there were still buffalo back then.”
Trap nodded. “Some. Hide hunters had already made a good mark against them, but we ran across several sizable herds.” It was funny, but looking back, he’d been so focused on finding Maggie, he’d likely let half the country slip by him without really taking the time to notice it.