She laughed and leaned down to give the brim of his hat a playful tug. "What will you put up this time, Mr. Rafferty—your own six-shooter? You keep making wagers you're sure to lose, and come winter you'll be finding yourself left with little of not much."
"My, my, but if you aren't frisky and sassy as a clover-fed colt this mornin', Boston." His smile deepened, turned lazy and knowing. "You have anything in particular you're aiming to do with all that friskiness and sassiness? Otherwise, there's a place near here I'd like to show you."
And there were other times... other times when he was the one who forgot to be careful.
They rode in silence except for the squeak of saddle leather, the steady rush and pull of their horses' breath. They rode through a forest of cottonwoods and pines and huge larches that filtered the sun. They emerged onto a high grassy plain where the yellow sage bloomed and a hot wind blew.
She felt his eyes on her and she turned her head, met his gaze, though she knew it would not be wise. The look he gave her was like summer thunderclouds—dark, shifting, uncertain.
She looked away. At times he seemed to her a terrible man, wild and ruthless, crude and full of sin. But then he would do something so fiercely brave, so earthily decent, that the very splendor of him would make her ache inside. She longed to know how his heart and mind worked. She wanted to crawl inside his skin and see the world through his eyes. He haunted her, like the elusive memory of a dream that leaves you empty and restless when you awaken. And yearning for sleep so that you can dream it again.
It took her a moment to realize that he had pulled up, was swinging down from the saddle. He reached up and clasped her waist as she dismounted. And the feel of this hands resting on her hips, the brush of his leg against her skirt, the nearness of his face, his mouth... Though the sun beat down bright and hot on the parched prairie grass, she shivered.
An enormous larch stood isolated in the middle of the sea of grass. It had been decorated like a Christmas tree with beads and bear claws, strips of red calico, queer-shaped stones, and pieces of bone.
"This used to be a hunting ground, this plain," he said. "And that's a sacred tree. The Indians would leave gifts here to the Great Spirit, so that he would make the game plentiful and their arrows fly true."
Clementine felt the pull of the tree's majesty as she walked up to it. She stood beneath the canopy and looked up, and it was like the vaulted ceiling of her father's church—open and limitless and silent. She felt something here, a power ancient and beckoning, holy.
But some of the holiness had been defiled. A man by the name of Emory had been here in 1869 with a knife and tar bucket.
She knelt and tried to cover up the ugly black scars on the trunk with her gloved hand. "I must bring my photographic equipment up here some time," she said. "But I'll shoot it from another angle, where this can't be seen."
"Why? This tree don't belong to the Indians anymore. It's the white man's now, like the land it grows on. If you didn't show that, you'd be making a lie."
She looked up at him, startled that he would understand such a thing. She wanted to think of him only as a man of rough ignorance and lawless sinning.
The intensity on his face frightened her. Her gaze shifted down to his hand, which gripped one of the larch's low-flung branches. To those long, urgent fingers that were capable of such explosive violence. That had touched so many women.
He took her arm, to help her to her feet, and then his hand moved down her side and wound up pressing into the small of her back. She drew in a deep breath, heady with the smell of sage and sun-ripe grass.
She saw that the plain they stood on was actually the shoulder of a high bluff. About two hundred feet below them was a narrow canyon filled with knee-high grass that rippled in the wind. The canyon wound past cliffs the color of driftwood and hogback ridges of red rocks and stunted pines.
Her eyes picked out a skull first.
Like a cow's skull, only not exactly. And then she saw more bones, thousands of them, heaped in jagged weathered piles among the sere grass.
"A buffalo is pretty much a stupid critter," came Rafferty's voice from beside her. "And he don't see too good, either. Once spooked, he'll stop for nothing. When the Indians hunted here they used to stampede whole herds of them over this cliff."
"What a terrible thing." The thought saddened her. The poor dumb blind animals being driven so callously to their death.
"No more terrible than standing at the end of a railcar and shooting them down with carbine rifles like wooden ducks at a fair."
She turned her head to look up at him. "Did you do that?"
He thumbed his hat back a little. "Yeah. And it shames me to think of it, when I see how they're mostly all gone now."
There was a vulnerability in his eyes that she had never seen before. As if the tough shell he lived inside had cracked a little to reveal the meat of the man he was, behind the chaps and the Stetson and the six-shooter.
A loud snorelike grunt echoed up from the bottom of the canyon. She whipped around, clutching one-handed at her hat to peer over the cliff edge. Directly below them an enormous buffalo stood alone.
"Oh, look, Rafferty!" she exclaimed, grabbing his arm, her excitement making her forget herself. All these months out west and this was her first close look at a buffalo.
She had never seen anything at once so ugly and so majestic, with his huge head and dainty legs, his humped back and coffee-colored fur like an old matted rug. His long beard trailed in the grass. His quarter-moon horns were as thick as tree limbs. "How magnificent he is!"
"He's what you genteel Boston types would call a gentleman buffalo. These old woods buffalo, they winter up in the mountains near here. They're bigger and darker than the ones you see farther east, out on the prairie."
"Oh, I do so wish I had brought my photographic equipment." She turned her head in time to catch his disapproving frown. Because he had brought her here, she thought he understood. But he didn't after all, and her disappointment in him was sharp and keen. "You're like Gus," she said. "You think I'd do better to spend my time at the washing and the scrubbing and the cooking."
"Hell, you could waste all day crocheting them little divan tidies for all I care. I was only thinking that buffalo should be allowed to keep his dignity, instead of bein' immortalized on some piece of pasteboard for folk to gawk at. Folk who don't understand how he used to be. He ain't so magnificent anymore, Boston. He's sick and he's old. You can practically see his ribs poking through his hide. Buffalo are social critters, yet here he is roaming the canyon alone. He's the last of his herd and chances are he won't live to see next summer."
A sadness filled her, a sadness that seeped deep into the soul. It was as if she were in mourning for a friend she never knew. "My photograph would help you to remember him," she said.
"Maybe I don't want to remember him as he is now. Maybe it would hurt too much."
The sadness swelled, filling her, pressing on her chest until she couldn't breathe. She looked beyond, beyond the canyon, where flat pancake clouds skimmed along the tops of the saw-toothed mountains that reared, black and frightening, against the sky. This place, it was so big and empty. Too big and empty for the heart to bear, and too wild to love.
Standing here with Zach Rafferty beneath the big Montana sky, she felt alone and fragile. As achingly lonesome as the last buffalo.
She spoke without thought, from her heart, "All this land and sky... how like a man it is in the way that it demands a woman's surrender."
"You'll tame it, Boston. And us, too, I reckon." His lips quirked into a half smile that creased his cheek and seemed to catch her beneath the ribs. "If I don't manage to chouse you outta here first."
She shook her head. She didn't want to tame this land, but she didn't want to leave it, either. And she wouldn't surrender to it—that most of all. She turned away from him, couldn't look at him anymore, but her gaze found no relief in the wilderness that only stirred the restless, yaw
ning achings.
"Do you believe in God, Mr. Rafferty?"
He was quiet for so long that she thought he wouldn't answer her. His gaze was focused on the immense ridges of timber and grass. But unlike her, she knew, he had no fear of them, but rather loved them fiercely.
"Looking at this," he finally said, "you can't help but feel there's something. You take it all in with your eyes and your breath and the pores of your skin, all the beauty and the wildness of it, and you can't help feeling at one with the mountains and the plains and the sky, a part of it somehow."
A flush touched his cheeks, and into his eyes there came a look of searching, of wanting. "Whoever created all this, whether you call him God or the Great Spirit, I do believe he must've had a reason."
"What?" She leaned into him, desperate to know. "What was his reason?"
She thought a smile might have touched his lips. "Love."
The word hung in the air between them.
She drew in a slow breath, trying to ease the pressure in her chest. But when he spoke again his words sent her heart slamming back up into her throat: "Do you know what it is to have a heartfire for someone?"
She wanted to clamp her hands over her ears and shriek at him that he was wrong, wrong. That this wasn't happening and that she hated him, because he was wrong. It was wrong, sinful, wicked, and it wasn't happening. She would not allow it to happen.
"Clementine—"
"No. I don't want to know," she said, backing away from him. His eyes were fierce and wild, and they called to the terrible wildness within her. She wrapped her arms around herself. She was shuddering hard from the inside out. "I don't want to speak of this. I won't speak of this."
His lips made a funny little twist that was barely a smile. "You know, for all your tender feet, Boston, you sure do have a tough head. I guess you figure you can't be held to account for the things you don't say. So you make me say them instead..."
Her whole body seemed to be straining, but whether it was reaching away from him or toward him she no longer knew. She was terrified he would do something, touch her in some way, and she would be lost.
"A heartfire, Clementine my darlin', is when you want someone, when you need her so damn bad, not only in your bed but in your life, that you're willin' to burn—"
"I am having your brother's child!"
She shouted the words so loud that they seemed to split open the air, and the echo of them drummed on the cliffs and in the canyon and against the wide and empty sky. She watched the blood slowly drain from his face, and his eyes go dark and hollow. She had chosen the one thing she knew would stop him. The thing she knew would hurt him the most.
He stared at her across the shaken-up air between them. There was a pressure pain in her chest, from not breathing and from wanting and from fearing the things she wanted. When the gunshot split the air, she thought for a moment that her heart had cracked.
Several more shots followed, spitting like a string of firecrackers. Rafferty's head snapped up; then he whirled and took off running for his horse. Hampered by her long skirts, Clementine lurched and stumbled after him.
"Stay here!" he shouted. He was already mounted and pulling his horse's head around. He slapped the broad gray rump with his hat, and Moses launched into a gallop, disappearing into the timber within seconds.
Somehow Clementine got herself up on Gayfeather and rode after him. The echoes of the gunshots had long ago faded into the buttes and hills. She clung to her mount's neck as branches whipped past her face. The pinto, wild now and out of control, plunged after Rafferty's horse.
When he pulled up to a more cautious walk, the pinto nearly plowed his nose into Moses's rump. He stumbled and then shied, and Clementine wrestled with the reins trying to calm him. Rafferty didn't look at her. He'd gone utterly still, but the air suddenly seemed to vibrate around him.
Through the trees Clementine could see shafts of sunlight that marked a clearing. A man shouted. Another answered with a short, sharp bark of laughter.
Rafferty took his rifle out of the saddle scabbard beneath his leg and laid it across his lap at half cock, his finger on the trigger. He nudged his horse toward the edge of the clearing, and she followed.
They crossed into bright sunlight that dazzled her eyes, blinding her for a instant. "Oh, dear sweet forgiving Christ," Rafferty said on a sharp expulsion of breath.
A man dangled from the thick limb of a cottonwood tree. His eyes bulged in a blood-engorged face that was the mottled purple of crushed grapes. His tongue lolled out a mouth that gaped open as if in a silent scream. Hot vomit rose in Clementine's throat and she almost choked. A dozen or so mounted men were gathered beneath the hanging man, wearing almost comic looks of shock at this unexpected arrival of guests to their necktie sociable. Clementine's horrified eyes searched their faces: Snake-Eye, Horace Graham, Weatherby the sheepherder, Pogey and Nash, and others, strangers she didn't know.
And Gus.
Smoke drifted over the clearing from a fire that bristled with branding irons. The place reeked of blood and spilled entrails. Scattered everywhere were the hides and carcasses of slaughtered cattle.
Two human bodies lay sprawled and bloody on the ground, guns clutched in their lifeless hands. Two others had been captured alive. One now hung from the end of a rope, swinging and swaying, the braided rawhide creaking in the sudden silence. The other was the Indian boy, Joe Proud Bear. He sat rigid on his horse, his hands tied behind his back, and Gus McQueen sat mounted beside him, a heavily knotted noose in his hand.
"No!" Clementine cried. She wrestled awkwardly with the gun at her waist, jerking it from the holster. "Let him go!"
CHAPTER 13
Rafferty's hand shot out, grabbing her wrist. "You gonna shoot your own husband?"
"Make them stop." His hand squeezed, just hard enough to force her to drop the gun. She held his gaze, challenging him, and there was nothing in his eyes, nothing. "You can make them stop. He has a wife and child. No one should have to die just for stealing a cow."
His eyes still held hers. He spoke, in a silky tone she'd never heard before, yet it carried to the posse beneath the cottonwood tree. "Let the boy go."
Although it seemed like an eternity since they'd burst into the clearing, in truth only seconds had passed. Gus and the others were frozen in a silent tableau, except for Joe Proud Bear, who must have figured a bullet in the back was a better way to die than slowly choking to death at the end of the rope. He leaned forward, kicked his moccasined heels into his horse's flanks, and bolted for the cover of the timber.
"He's gettin' away!" Horace Graham yelled and wheeled his horse, his hand falling to the revolver at his waist.
The ground in front of the cattleman erupted into a spurt of dust. The smack of the rifle shot hadn't quit bouncing through the air before Rafferty was levering another cartridge into the Winchester's chamber. Smoke from the barrel wafted across Clementine's face.
"I won't shoot y'all to kill," he said in that same cold, soft voice. "But that ain't sayin' accidents can't happen."
Joe Proud Bear had disappeared into the woods. Even the sound of his horse flailing through the brush had fallen into the well of stillness in the clearing.
Gus spurred his mount into movement. Not after the Indian boy but at his brother and his wife.
"What are you crazy, Zach?" he shouted. "We caught the bastards red-handed."
"The buffalo are gone. There's nothing left for them to hunt."
Gus's face was red and bunched up tight as a fist. He pulled up his horse to stare at his brother, his eyes wide and incredulous. "What in the blazes are you talking about?"
Rafferty shook his head. "Take your wife home. She shouldn't have to see this. I'll help your friends bury these bodies."
Slowly Gus turned his head, his gaze spearing her. And now his eyes flattened with fury.
Clementine jerked the pinto around and heeled it into a canter and rode away, away from Gus and the hanging man and the s
mell of gun smoke and blood.
She heard hooves pounding after her. Her whole body began to tremble. She pulled on the reins and slid from the saddle before the pinto had come to a stop. The sun blazed down, yet her hands and feet were numb with cold, and her chest was so heavy, her throat so tight, she felt as if she were choking. As if she were the one hanging at the end of a rope.
Gus rode up to her. He lifted his leg over the pommel and dismounted. "You gonna be sick?"
She shook her head.
He took off his hat, ran his hand through his hair, then jammed the hat back on his head. "Then what's the matter?"
"I..." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. It tasted coppery, like blood. She had borne his weight, taken his body into hers, and he had hanged a man for stealing a cow, killed him in cold blood... hot blood. Laughing Gus McQueen of the sun-bright face and sky-blue eyes. The cowboy of her dreams. "I feel as if I don't even know you."
He blew out a sharp, angry breath. He started to turn away from her, then spun back around. He loomed over her the way her father used to, trying to make the very air shiver with his man's big size and his man's great strength.
"You just won't quit in your defiance of me, will you?" he shouted into her face, and his mustache quivered with the expulsion of each hot, angry word. "I tell you Iron Nose and his rustling are no woman's business, yet you come busting in where you don't belong and shame me in front of the entire territory." He emitted a bitter, ragged laugh. "'My husband,' you say. 'I love you.' Yet you look me right in the face and set about doing just what you want to do."
"You don't own me, Gus," she said through stiff lips.
"The hell I don't. You're my wife, girl, and—"
"And I am not a girl. I am a woman grown. I have a mind and thoughts and feelings that are mine"—she thumped her chest with her fist—"mine, and they're nothing to do with you. You cannot tell me how to live my life—"
He hit her. He did it with the palm of his hand across her cheek, but he was a big man and his frustration and anger put violence into his swing. She went sprawling against the pinto. The horse neighed and shied, and Clementine landed flat on her back, the air gusting from her lungs.
Heart of the West Page 28