by Hazel Rumney
It was only Thursday, two days before he and Ruby usually rode down to Elkhorn Springs, but he decided to go anyway. Maybe a few shots of old man Bradshaw’s firewater would wash away this sour mood that seemed to infest him.
Ruby had shown up half-dead at his cabin door just ahead of a hard winter blizzard last December. She told him that Bear Quincy, the man she’d been holed up with at a neighboring claim, had been killed by a band of renegade Sioux. She had barely escaped herself and was too scared to go back to Bear’s cabin. A group of miners went over a few days later and found Bear’s frozen corpse just outside his cabin door, a single arrow still deeply embedded in his chest just below the breastbone They made a half-ass try at stirring up the trail of his murderers, impossible, of course, in the fresh deep snow, and while they were there, they went ahead and searched his cabin in case he had hidden his stash somewhere inside. They found nothing, and a broader search of the claim would have to wait until the spring thaw. Ruby herself made one trip back to pack her meager belongings into a worn carpetbag so she could take up housekeeping with Jeb.
With his body half-buried in snow, frozen to the ground and stiff as an oak trunk, none of the visitors could do much for Ol’ Bear in the way of burying, so they just left him there, a feast for the first winter-starved beasts that happened along.
It wasn’t until weeks later that Ruby quite unexpectedly told Jeb the real story of Bear Quincy’s sorry demise. Jeb had been down to Bradshaw’s, came back surly drunk, and slapped Ruby across the face for not having coffee made and a hot meal waiting. He woke the next morning to find a hatchet on the pillow beside his head, and over breakfast Ruby spelled it out for him.
Bear Quincy had been one of those men who thought women had been put on earth for a man to whale on whenever he took a notion, but Ruby said she never had seen anything in the Bible that said a woman had to abide such treatment. Finally, after fair warning that Bear ignored, she had slid her sheath knife up under his rib cage one day as he stormed at her with a stick of kindling. Afterward, she was worried that the locals might hold it against her if they found Bear’s body stabbed to death and thought maybe she did it just to get her hands on his stash. So she took one of the arrows from a Sioux quiver hanging on the cabin wall, one of Bear’s souvenirs from an Injun fight, and stuck it down deep into the knife wound. Then it was easy enough to wrap a story of an Indian attack around that.
There was no missing the message, and by the time she was finished, Jeb understood that there was only one tolerable way to ensure himself a good night’s sleep as long as he shared his cabin with Ruby.
A cold drizzle was falling as Jeb rode his mule down the mountainside to Bradshaw’s Post. It served to further darken his mood, and he was more than ready for that first shot of firewater by the time he reached his destination. Norman Bradshaw, proprietor of the supply post at Elkhorn Springs, measured out an ounce of gold flakes from Jeb’s poke while his wife, a mostly silent Crow woman with long, graying braids that hung halfway down her back, tipped a jug and poured whiskey into a clay cup. Bradshaw wrote Jeb’s name on a piece of paper he kept on the bar and marked an X under it.
“Are we in for it, Jeb?” Bradshaw asked.
“Naw, I don’t think so. The clouds are too thin, and there’s still blue sky up north of here.” Jeb tipped the cup up and took a drink, wincing at the bite of it. The only resemblance this stuff had to real whiskey was that it burned going down and scrambled a man’s mind just as well.
“What brings you down again in the middle of the week?”
“Thought I’d raise a glass to Ruby,” Jeb said, actually raising the cup. “She passed on yesterday. A rattler bit her while I was down here picking up that load of lumber.”
“Now ain’t that a shame?” Bradshaw said. He looked over toward his wife. “You hear that, Meadow? Ruby’s dead.” The woman gave him a silent nod and her face became more dour, if that was possible. Some of Bradshaw’s customers had never heard the sound of her voice.
“Damn careless fool of a woman,” Jeb complained. He shoved his cup over for a refill, and Bradshaw put another X under his name. “I just got used to tolerating her out at the claim, and now she’s laid out under a pile of rocks. She’d wandered up the mountainside, prob’ly picking flowers or some other such female nonsense. Everybody knows the rattlers are out all over the place this time of year. She should’ve been more careful.”
“I liked that woman from the start when Bear Quincy brought her up the Bozeman. She was too good for him, but you and her seemed to get on fine.”
“She wasn’t much trouble. A hard worker and didn’t talk a man’s ear off all day long. I got used to her,” Jeb said again. He could feel the whiskey doing its work on him. He choked back the second cup, let Bradshaw fill it again, and moved off to sit at a table against one wall. Most of the place was filled with the goods Bradshaw stocked to sell to the miners, but there were a few tables and chairs on one side that served for a saloon.
Maybe if I just get drunk enough, Jeb thought. But drunk enough for what? He’d been fine before that lanky, homely woman showed up. He’d taken care of himself, obliged to nobody, and was used to the solitary life out there in the mountains. After all his hard work, the claim was starting to yield a decent amount of gold, and he was beginning to see the promise of a good life ahead if he was able to work his claim for just another year, or maybe two. Nobody was sure the Sioux would let them stay out here on their tribal lands that long, but there was no good thing in life that didn’t involve some risks.
But now he couldn’t seem to steer his mind away from that dead woman out there under the rocks, and back to the reason he had come here in the first place. “Doggone it,” he muttered under his breath, before realizing that he wasn’t sure in what direction the complaint was aimed. The whiskey wasn’t helping, but he didn’t protest when Meadow came over and refilled his cup.
Ruby wasn’t as jabbery as some women Jeb had known, but she did reveal bits and pieces of a hard life back in Weston, Missouri, first as the rebellious daughter of a country Methodist preacher, and later as the common-law wife of a riverboat man who met his end during an Indian attack somewhere in the northern reaches of the Missouri River. Leaving her young daughter behind with her widowed mother, Ruby had lit out west seven years before, thinking she might marry again, or make some other kind of new start on the frontier, and then bring her child out to live with her. But, instead, she had run into nothing but hard times and bad luck, with no shortage of men glad to use and abuse a woman trying to make it on her own.
Coming up the Bozeman Trail with Bear Quincy, out into gold country, but also into wild Indian Territory, had been pretty much her last desperate roll of the dice. If they found gold, as Bear was so sure they would, and he shared some with her, as he promised, she might have enough to get on back home and make a new start in Missouri. By then she had given up on the idea of settling somewhere in the West. Life was too cruel and dangerous on the frontier, and she’d had enough of it.
But, instead, from any side you looked at the thing, now it was snake eyes for Ruby.
“Sorry to hear ’bout your woman.”
Jeb looked up and saw a man approaching, whiskey jug in hand, backlit by the sunlight coming in the open front door. His face was in shadow, but Jeb knew who it was. Silas McGhee was the last man hereabouts that Jeb would have picked for company today, but probably the one most likely to be encountered in Bradshaw’s this time of day, or any other time for that matter. It seemed like every time McGhee panned out more than an ounce or two at his claim, he started down the mountain to drink it up.
“It’s a hard way to go,” McGhee said. “An’ a terrible waste of a woman with plenty of use left in her.”
Jeb gave him a hard look, but that didn’t stop the man from sitting down across the table. “So, was you there when it happened?” McGhee asked. “Did you try to save her?”
“Nope. I was hauling lumber to shore up the sluice, an
d she was dead when I got back,” Jeb said. “But it wouldn’t have made no difference even if I was there. The bite was high and deep, a big ol’ rattler maybe eight feet long.”
“Naw, they don’t grow that long.”
“All right, maybe six feet then. Doesn’t matter. I was always warning her to be careful. Keep looking down when you’re walking, and never reach under nothing without checking it first. It was most likely her own durned fault, but that don’t make a difference to anybody now. I was always telling her to carry something around, like a shovel or a stick, because those rattlers are mean as the devil when they come out in the spring.”
“Water under the bridge,” McGhee said, as close to being philosophical as he was ever likely to get. “Did you find her stash?”
“Nope, I haven’t looked yet. Pretty sure it’s not in the cabin. When she went out for wood at night, I think that’s when she tucked it away someplace.”
“So you shared with her, then? Bear told me once that he never did.”
“A third. And we split the expenses. I thought that was fair. She worked as hard as I did, but it was my claim. Wasn’t much to share anyway, though.” It was normal and expected for a man to play down his take.
“Maybe she carried it on her.”
“Naw, I’d of known.” Jeb was uncomfortable talking about his or Ruby’s gold stashes to a man like McGhee. There was the hard way to get your hands on gold, which was to dig it out of the hillsides and pan it from the streams, and then there was the easy way, by just taking somebody else’s. So he felt compelled to add, “We never did trust each other about that. And I can tell you this much. She could have searched that mountainside from now ’til doomsday and never found where I had my take tucked away. Her or anybody else.”
McGhee positioned his jug in the crook of his arm, raised it up, and took a long drink. Jeb signaled the Indian woman for another, and Bradshaw announced, almost conversationally from the counter, “Two left on account, Jeb.”
“You and Ruby could have made some good money other ways if you ever took a notion,” McGhee said with a drunken grin. Jeb gave him a hard look that didn’t seem to take. The whiskey owned McGhee now, and there was no telling what was likely to come out of his sorry mouth. “In a place like this, with plenty of colors coming down from the hills, she could of got top dollar.”
Jeb put the whiskey away with one angry gulp and leaned forward so there was no mistaking that he was getting heated up. “You best quit talking about Ruby that way,” he warned. “She wasn’t that kind.”
“Hell, ain’t every woman?” McGhee laughed, trying to invoke some kind of masculine camaraderie that he thought every man shared. “Why, I bet when she was up there in that cabin with Ol’ Bear Quincy, why he’d . . .”
Jeb didn’t even bother to stand up before launching his fist across the table toward the middle of Silas McGhee’s face. It landed hard and solid across McGhee’s mouth and nose and McGhee went down backward in the chair, his head ricocheting off the edge of the table behind him. He lay on the floor for a moment, snorting and drooling and shaking his head, trying to gather his wits. When he finally did start to clumsily stand up, it was clear that his brain wasn’t working too well just yet because one hand was fumbling to draw his sheath knife, and the other went to work pulling his handgun out of its holster.
Jeb picked up the jug from the table and threw it at McGhee, finishing up the damage to the man’s face that his first punch started. McGhee toppled back again, clipping his head on the table behind him again, and ended up limp and still on the floor like a sack of potatoes.
Jeb stood up, glancing down at his scratched knuckles and wiping the blood on his pants. He looked over at Bradshaw and said, “You seen it, didn’t you, Norman?”
“I seen and heard it all,” Bradshaw said. “He was begging for what he got.” That was how justice worked out here in the badlands.
During the ride back to the cabin, Jeb began to reflect on the fight. After a couple more drinks, he had left without checking to see if Silas McGhee, still crumpled on the floor, was alive or not. It would be easier if he was dead, Jeb thought. Then Bradshaw and his wife could simply bury him out back of the Trading Post with a few other unfortunate pilgrims and take whatever he had on him as payment for their trouble.
But if Silas McGhee recovered and got back to himself again, then Jeb knew there would be some sort of reckoning to pay. Until this was settled, he’d be working with his Army Colt strapped on and his rifle in reach, his eyes keeping on the tree line in daylight and the shadows at night.
But Jeb felt right about what he done to McGhee, dead or not. There was no call for him to say the things he said about Ruby. She wasn’t that kind of woman, Bear Quincy or not. She never had told him much about the goings on over there, but Jeb did know that sometimes a person did what they had to, and not what they wanted. Jeb himself had never forced anything on her, not the extra chores and woman’s work, or his own manly needs.
But he still recalled those frigid winter nights when the brutal winds and snow blew in from the northwest, howling like ghostly wolves, making the log walls of the cabin tremble and creak. Sometimes on such nights, he woke up to find her standing by his bed, wrapped in her blankets and nearly frozen from the cold. And she would say the words that at the time were as welcome as a mother’s hug. “Move over.”
There were a lot of ways that people found to survive in this hard, dangerous old world, and who could say which ones were more important than the others?
The snarls and growls and yips of the wolves outside woke Jeb at first light. Without even dressing, he carried his shotgun outside and loosed a few shots up in the direction of Ruby’s grave, too far away to do much damage, but scaring them away with the noise. Then he raised the muzzle up and let go a couple more times at the circling buzzards high above. The wind shifted, and he caught a whiff of Ruby’s decaying flesh.
He dressed, then started up the hill toward Ruby’s grave, still carrying the shotgun in case he had to discourage the wolves again. This wasn’t going to do, he thought, as he looked down at yesterday’s handiwork. First of all, he had picked a spot too close to the cabin, and he’d be smelling Ruby’s sad remains for days or weeks if he didn’t do something about it. Some critter had already started digging in the dirt along the edge of the pile of rocks, and a few of the smaller stones he had piled on top were clawed away. There was food under there, and eventually the wild animals from all around, large to tiny, would show up and connive to get their share.
This just wouldn’t do at all. Ruby needed to rest in peace, with what dignity he could provide, and Jeb began to realize that he wouldn’t have a clear mind until he gave that to her.
With pick and shovel, determination, and back-breaking labor, he managed to get a four-foot-deep grave dug beside where Ruby lay. He didn’t want to have to move her far because he imagined that after two days dead, whatever remained inside that canvas was not something he’d want to pick up off the ground and carry around the hillside or get an unintentional look at if the canvas fell away. Later, he’d rather bring to mind the way she looked that last morning across the breakfast table, sipping her coffee and smiling slightly at him as they laid out their day’s work. In the sunlight spilling through the open cabin door, she had looked rested and ready, pleased with the little leather bag of gold he had given her earlier as her share of the week’s take, maybe even pleased to be here where she’d ended up, and satisfied to be with him for the time being.
When he thought about her that way, he realized that she wasn’t so much trouble to have around. There were a lot worse things to see in the morning than a woman’s smile.
As he plodded down to the cabin for his midday meal, Jeb realized that he had been so intent on getting his project started that he hadn’t had breakfast. After eating, a wave of exhaustion overtook him. He stretched out on his bunk and was asleep in seconds.
In the dream he had, Ruby was there in the cabin
again, rolling out biscuit dough, looking over at him as he came in the door. “You can stomp that mud off your boots before you come in, mister. And you might as well bring in an armload of wood and a bucket of water while you’re at it. No reason I should have to do it all the time myself. You haven’t lost any arms or legs since I showed up and started doing the chores, have you, Mister Jeb Parkerson?” But it wasn’t like nagging. Her eyes twinkled, and she talked to him like he was a youngster that had to be reminded of every little thing. In the dream, Jeb didn’t mind it at all.
He spent the afternoon building a coffin for Ruby from the lumber he’d brought up from Elkhorn Springs to use on the sluices. He never had built one before and did his best to make it neat and tight. He put her tick and blankets inside and laid her pillow at one end. Soon Jeb had Ruby settled inside the coffin, down in the grave, with the lid nailed on tight. He thought he would feel better when he got things to that point, with only the grave to fill in tomorrow, and a cross marker to make later.
But standing there beside the grave, knowing she was down there in that box, dead and gone for good, he had an empty feeling inside, and there was an unfamiliar knot in his throat that he never would have expected.
Guilt swept over him, though he knew that there was nothing more he could have done to keep her safe, no way to save her life even if he’d been right there when the snake struck, and no better burying than the one he was giving her now. Maybe he could have treated her better when she was still alive, he conceded. But he hadn’t wanted her there in the first place, and a few times, had wished that that she’d just go on off and leave him be. He already had a plan that didn’t include her. Once he’d dug whatever fortune he could out of these stony hills, he’d go down out of the mountains and put together a brand-new life for himself. There would be women enough to choose from then, prettier than Ruby, younger and more agreeable, and glad to do their best to make him a happy man. All that was still out there waiting for him, but he had a notion now that sometimes, right in the middle of all those good times, he’d still think about poor old Ruby, buried alone up here in the middle of nowhere.