Petra

by Arch Gallen

  Chapter 6

  His dining room lit by no more than a small shaded oil lamp turned low sitting on the floor in a corner and embers in the fireplace could provide, Pike stood gently tapping the table as he eyed a small back pack sitting before him. Already inside were field glasses, several coils of rope cut short with ends tied for their purpose and one left long, three candles an inch high, a hand axe and moccasins along with various other odds and ends possibly useful to his plan stowed carefully next to his coffee pot containing small sacks of coffee and jerky. The season was late for berries or nuts to be gathered but he expected less than three days to be gone and had survived often on less.

  Thick fingers tracing letters on the cloth reading ‘U.S. Army’ brought him to wonder what came of the young Corporal who’d given him the pack after they fought side by side against a renegade band of Kiowa attacking settlements in southern Montana. A sharp man that soldier, Adam remembered, who understood Indian fighting better than any ranking officer he served under and knew it. They became close prompt as men in battle frequently do talking late through night watch. Pike learned much of his companion's raising in New Jersey, how he came to join the Army for lack of other good choices and sought land to call his own in a West he thought represented freedom to be himself.

  After the hostiles withdrew, they’d gone their own ways, the Corporal giving Adam this pack to use because Pike’s own had been ruined while accepting a keen steel knife and scabbard removed from a murderer Adam tracked nine days across Montana prairies before killing him trying to make the arrest. Looking up but without seeing the stone chimney in front of him, Pike recalled sadly the Corporal served under disgraced Colonel Joseph Reynolds and hoped he survived the brutal Powder River battle fought a few years after their meeting.

  Adam sighed. Doing so little right, Army campaigns against natives led directly to needless death on both sides, innocent women and children killed as often or more than soldiers and warriors. All that was needful, in his thinking, was for Government to honor treaties negotiated and signed to avoid many of the atrocities but had watched, also, how white settlers overwhelmed the West with or without Army support. Too few Indians scattered across thousands of square miles could never have held out against relentless waves of men determined to make new lives, build communities and take advantage of land deemed theirs to conquer.

  Hearing sounds of a horse trotting through spatters of rain on glass, he stooped low then slipped beneath the window, easing aside curtains made and hung by Adele just weeks before. Against rapidly darkening skies, he recognized the outline of Step nearing so strode over and opened the door wanting no annoying feelings over entering without knocking. Gesturing him in, Adam shut the door against a stiff breeze whipping weather about the house.

  Passing his younger brother soundlessly, Step strolled to the kitchen, taking down a mug from short dowels holding them then filling it from the coffee pot on the stove, topping off Adam’s cup after.

  Surveying the dimly lit room, Step asked carefully, “Where’s the family?”

  Taking a swallow, Adam tossed his head slightly to his left. “Staying at Katherine’s for a night.” he answered, voice low.

  “How’d that go over?” his brother inquired, easing into a chair at the table.

  Pike shrugged a bit. “Not well. Especially with it touching the children and her believing all this ended years ago.”

  Step’s brow furrowed. He knew from Kate the long running disagreement between Adam and his wife over the killing and violence so common when they first met and strains on their marriage his work as Marshal created. Then, at least, she understood his wanting to bring order and safety to the country and, mostly, was able to overlook gunplay that involved. Since his retiring, tho’ she’d come to believe that was past and handled poorly demands on Adam to act, rarely as they occurred now.

  Having no more words useful to the discussion, Step glanced at items on the table, passing over a beaten hat whose purpose was obvious to him then halting on a bow and quiver of arrows laying next to the pack. “Most would say bringing a bow to a gun fight is less than sensible.” he observed, pointing his cup at the massive fireplace occupying half the living room wall. “Would think you’d be taking the one that’s been mounted since the first day you moved in here.”

  Adam shook his head, sliding into a chair. “That’s a Sioux bow,” he advised in a matter of fact way, “good for use in open prairie or plains but too long and cumbersome in mountain forests among rocks and underbrush. This one” he added, taking up the smaller weapon, caressing it fondly while seeing again the fine workmanship that went into its making, “is Blackfoot. Shorter, made to use in tight confines and nearly as powerful on close shots.”

  Setting the bow down, he considered again his plan, wanting at first to carry the other bow in a sense of balance to life, taken as it was from the first Indian Adam ever killed fending off a raid on Bob Patterson’s outfit back in Nebraska. Somehow, using it against Petra, the last man Pike hoped he’d ever be forced to kill, seemed fitting but in the end, practical need overruled emotion as it always did for him.

  Too, he believed the Blackfoot bow had good medicine. Over years of living alongside Indians, most times peacefully, Adam respected their thinking, adopting several notions of theirs while speaking rarely of it. This bow, like the pack, was a gift, given by Blackfoot chieftain Soaring Hawk whose son Pike stumbled across badly wounded and nursed back to health before returning to their village. Spending two nights among them, Adam won great esteem by defeating a troublesome young brave who’d begun challenging Soaring Hawk for control of the band unexpectedly earning the bow and quiver by doing so.

  The greater prize came several weeks later when Pike, sitting in a saloon miles away, overheard a surly ranch hand bragging up ambushing a redskin. Approaching the man, Marshal badge tucked in his vest safe from notice, Pike garnered enough detail to assure Soaring Hawk’s son was the target proudly boasted of then, knowing no judge would convict any white for shooting an Indian, laid in wait until the man staggered out drunk. With a quick rap from his gun butt, Pike knocked the man unconscious before tying him over a saddle and escorting him to Soaring Hawk’s village where appreciative Blackfoot elders initiated Pike into their band as a blood brother before he departed leaving them to deal with one would ambush another for no cause but skin color.

  Passing on discussion of bows, his last use of one long before leaving home, Step drank coffee watching his brother lean forward on the table from the corner of his eye. He was no longer the bright, hard working youngster who left home with a whimsical, easily stirred good humor when Mitchell and Step arrived in Morale at the end of the Outlaw Wars. Much of what Adam endured those hard eighteen months Step learned from his wife who’d seen it, becoming Adam’s big sister, confidante and, at times, the last vestige of conscience guiding him.

  Adam never stopped working smart or hard. For certain the kin believed he did so too much, a topic Step and Katherine talked over regularly but discussed with Adam only once, the summer after their arrival. Then, the youngest brother seemed uninterested in opinions of others, unusual for him to their thinking, showing intense difficulty helping them understand how the world appeared to him then. It was only a short time after, Adam engaged in marshaling duties and often absent, the kin decided to leave him to work through what was needful rather than push notions sure to be poorly received. “To him who much is given, much is expected.” Adam had reminded them once, a sentiment no Pike could dispute.

  While understanding between his ears, Step was slow taking to heart what transformed Adam until Kate demanded one hot summer day her husband ride with her to the cemetery, walking them past scores of graves there by Adam’s hand. Telling him as they walked, sat then cried together over beatings taken and given, of a dozen or more times Pike had been hunted by men with no intent but to kill him, Kate opened Step finally to feeling some of what it must have been like and sensing his brothers despera
te aloneness through dark nights and grim days when death, dispensed or received, was his only choice.

  As Marshal, Adam relaxed some to his siblings great relief, proper authority granted legitimizing his activities so reducing almost unbearable weights that come when one man kills another. Having law on his side, backing from kin, friends and growing communities eased his transition back to decent living more than any words could. Later, grateful more than was ever said to end his work as a lawman, Adam became the person he was raised to be, a hard-working, smart businessman, loving father, husband and good brother. Over the last half decade, Step realized, he’d forgotten by choice or carelessness the fiery cauldron still smoldering inside Adam but saw it now like never before.

  “Guessing you have a plan.” he said quietly, refilling cups emptied in a half hour of silent sitting.

  Adam bobbed imperceptibly. “Hoping to do this without killing.” he answered somberly.

  “Told Petra that?”

  Smirking, Adam shook his head a bit, replying, “Not needful him knowing.” then leaned back, a hard look on his face. “Time’s come for killing to stop, brother. Was a time no other way existed but it’s changed now. We have courts and law here. It doesn’t always have to come down to kill or be killed and it’s on me to find a better way.”

  Step stared at Adam, agreeing completely but surprised, unsure when his brother arrived at this point. Raising a brow, all the gesture required to begin Adam explaining his plan, he listened to more detail than caring to hear with less patience than required to hear it. After all was said, he toasted with his cup, reminding, “You’re not seventeen anymore, Adam. You have friends, many in fact. Not needful doing this alone.”

  “It is.” Adam disagreed. “First because an army of friends would only shoo him off to show up again when not expected and second because it’s mine to do. He’s what he is, at least in part, from a choice I made years back and it’s on me to end it without risk to others. Besides” he grimaced, “if I was still seventeen, I’d have called him out in the hotel and killed him then so be through already. I’m not wishful of doing such anymore.” as Step’s expression suggested that notion was suitable to him.

  Rising, the youngest Pike took his cup to the basin and rinsed it, pausing to set the coffee pot away from stove heat before standing thoughtfully, hands on hips.

  “Your thought?” Adam asked.

  “First thought is he’s a man hunter, skilled at ambush.”

  Pike scoffed. “Used to shooting ones not expecting it. Never a day he chased one chasing him back.” he replied dismissively.

  Rising, extending his hand to shake, Step smirked. “Second thought is shoot the son of a bitch first time you get a clear shot and come home.”

  Adam laughed, tossing his arm around his brother as they walked to the door, bidding him good night then dousing the lamp and going to bed.