Boone's Lick (2 page)

“Honey, when you catch your breath maybe you ought to run on down to Boone's Lick and bring Sheriff Stone back with you,” Uncle Seth said. “It's the sheriff's job to deal with horse theft, and mule theft too.”

“I don't need to bring the sheriff, because he's already there,” Neva said. “It was the sheriff's horse Ma shot.”

“Uh-oh. Where was Sheriff Stone at the time?” Uncle Seth asked.

“Sitting on his horse,” Neva said, in a tone that suggested she considered it a pretty stupid question. “It fell over when Ma shot it and nearly mashed his leg.”

Uncle Seth absorbed this information calmly. If he was surprised, he didn't show it.

“Oh, I see, honey,” he said. “It's Baldy Stone that's stealing our mules. I guess that's just the kind of law you have to expect in Missouri. Let's go wade into them, Shay.”

I
was
surprised that Ma had shot the sheriff's horse, but my opinion wasn't asked.

“Do you still want me to go to Boone's Lick?” Neva asked, as Uncle Seth and I started for the house.

“Why, no, honey—no reason to run your legs off,” Uncle Seth said. “The law's already at the freight yard—who would you get if you were to go to Boone's Lick?”

“Wild Bill Hickok,” Neva said—it was clear she had already thought the matter out.

“He's usually in the saloon,” she added. I saw right then, from the look on her face, that she intended to go see Wild Bill, whatever Uncle Seth advised. Neva might be young, but she had Ma's determination, and there were not many people, young or old, male or female, with more determination than Ma.

“I'm impressed by your steady thinking, honey,” Uncle Seth said. “Bill could be a big help, if he was in the mood to be, but this cloudy weather might have put him off.”

“You're the only one that minds clouds,” Neva said. She had got her wind back and looked ready for a tussle.

“If there weren't no clouds it would never rain, and if it didn't rain nothing would grow, and if
nothing grew, then the animals would all starve, and then
we'd
starve,” Neva said, giving Uncle Seth one of her cool looks.

Uncle Seth didn't say anything. He saw that Neva had backed him into a pretty tight corner, where cloudy weather was concerned. G.T. was already halfway to the house, too.

“A
pistolero
like Bill Hickok is likely to have his moods, whatever the weather,” he said. “I try not to interfere with Bill and he tries not to interfere with me. I think we better just go home and see why Baldy Stone thinks he has the right to requisition our mules.”

Neva immediately started trotting down the riverbank toward Boone's Lick. I wasn't surprised, and neither was Uncle Seth.

“There's no shortage of hardheaded women in the Cecil family,” he said, mildly. “If you hit one of them in the head with a rock it would break the rock.”

Our cabin wasn't far from the river. Pa and Uncle Seth had been raised on the Mississippi River, in the Ioway country; both of them lived by rivers until their hauling business forced them out onto the plains from time to time. Despite his gimpy knee Uncle Seth was only a step behind me when we came around the chicken yard. There was no sign of Ma, and no sign of our mules, either, but there was plenty of sign of Sheriff Baldy Stone, a short man who had grown very round in the course of his life.

Sheriff Baldy was trying to unsaddle his dead horse, a large roan animal who had fallen about twenty steps from our cabin door. It was a big horse. The sheriff had the girth unbuckled but
when he tried to pull the cinch out from under the horse it wouldn't budge.

G.T., who had beat us home by a good margin, was standing nearby, but he didn't offer to help. After tugging at the cinch several times without having any effect, Sheriff Baldy abruptly gave up and sat down on the corpse of his horse to take a breather. He was almost as out of breath as Neva had been when she showed up down by the river.

After resting for a minute, the sheriff looked up at Uncle Seth and gave a little wave—or it may have been a salute. The sheriff had only been a corporal in the war, whereas Uncle Seth had been a captain.

“Well, Seth, she shot my horse and here I sit,” Sheriff Baldy said. “Do you realize I courted Mary Margaret once, when things were different?”

“I've heard that rumor—I expect she still has a sweet spot for you, Baldy,” Uncle Seth said.

“A sweet spot? I don't think so,” the sheriff said.

“It would explain why she shot the horse and not you,” Uncle Seth pointed out.

The remark struck G.T. as funny. He began to cackle, which drew a frown from the sheriff. Just then Ma came out the door, with the baby in her arms. The baby, a girl named Marcy, was cooing and blowing little spit bubbles. Ma handed her right over to Uncle Seth, at which point Marcy began to coo even louder. Pa was so busy upriver that he hadn't even been home to see the baby yet—for all little Marcy knew, Uncle Seth was her pa, if she even knew what a pa was, at that age.

“Now, Mary Margaret,” Uncle Seth said, “you oughtn't to have handed me this child. There
might be gunplay to come, depending on how mad Baldy is and what he's done with our mules.”

“No gunplay, no gunplay,” Sheriff Baldy said. “Getting my horse shot out from under me is violence enough for one afternoon. You can hold ten babies if you want to, Seth.”

Ma walked around the dead horse, looking down at it thoughtfully. She didn't say a word, either kind or unkind, to Sheriff Baldy. When she got round to the rump of the horse she leaned over and tested it with her fingers, to see if it might have a little fat on it, rather than just being all muscular and stringy.

“Why, it
is
a horse. That's a surprise,” Ma said lightly.

“Of course it's a horse, thoroughly dead!” the sheriff said. “You shot it out from under me before I could even open my mouth to ask for the loan of your mules. What did you think it was, if not a horse?”

“An elk,” Ma said, with a kind of faraway look in her eye. “I thought it was a big fat elk, walking right up to my door.”

She paused. She had lost flesh in the years of the war—everybody had.

“I thought, no more mush, we're going to be eating elk,” she said. “Granpa can stop complaining and I can be making a little richer milk for this baby—she's not as chubby as my other babies have been.”

Sheriff Baldy sat there on the dead horse with his mouth open—a bug could have flown right into his mouth, if one had been nearby.

“You mean you didn't shoot it because we were borrowing the mules?” he asked. “I was going to explain why we needed the mules, but you didn't give me time. You stepped out the door and the next thing I knew this horse was dead.”

Ma made no reply—she just tested the rump in another place with her fingers. Baby Marcy was still bubbling and cooing.

“Well, I swear, Mary Margaret,” Sheriff Baldy said. “This was a big roan horse. How could you get it in your head that it was an elk?”

Ma still had the faraway look in her eye. It worried me when she got that look, though I couldn't really have said what it was I was worried about. I think it must have worried the sheriff too.

“I guess I was just too hungry to see straight, Eddie,” she said, calling Sheriff Baldy by his first name. At least I guess it was his first name. I had never heard anyone use it before.

“I'm hungry and my family's hungry,” Ma went on. “Horse meat's not as tasty as elk, but it will do. Whatever I owe you we can put toward the rent of the mules.”

She started for the house, but the look on the sheriff's face must have made her feel a little sorry for him, because she turned at the cabin door and looked back at him for a moment.

“We've got a little buttermilk to spare, Eddie, if you'd like some,” she said, as she opened the door.

“I'll take the buttermilk,” Sheriff Baldy said.

He got off the dead horse and we all followed Ma through the door.

G
RANPA
Crackenthorpe got up from his pallet when we all trooped in. I think he was hoping for a dipper of buttermilk, but he didn't get one. There was only one dipperful left in the crock—while the sheriff was enjoying it Granpa began to get annoyed.

“I'm the oldest—that was my buttermilk,” Granpa said. “I was planning to have it later, with my mush.”

“Hubert don't like me—I've arrested him too often,” Sheriff Baldy remarked, wiping a little line of buttermilk off his upper lip.

Granpa, who didn't have much of a bladder left, had formed the awkward habit of pissing in public, if he happened to be in public when the need arose. Sometimes he made it into the saloon and peed in
the spittoons, but sometimes he didn't make it that far, and those were the times when Sheriff Baldy had felt it best to arrest him.

“Hubert, we've got enough troubles in Boone's Lick without having to tolerate public pissing,” the sheriff said. “If you've got a minute, Seth, I'll explain why I took the mules.”

“Fine, but if it's not too much to ask, we need to borrow one of them back for a few minutes,” Uncle Seth said. “Otherwise we'll have to butcher that roan horse practically in Mary Margaret's front room, which is sure to bring flies. If we could borrow a mule back for half an hour we could drag the carcass over to the butchering tree.”

“That's fair—the boys just took them down to the livery stable,” the sheriff said. “If one of these young fellows can go fetch one, then when you're done with your dragging I can ride the mule back to town.”

“G.T., go,” Ma said, and G.T. went. Ma already had the whetstone out and was getting ready to sharpen a couple of butcher knives.

“I'm the oldest but nobody's listening to me,” Granpa Crackenthorpe said—a true statement. No one paid him the slightest mind.

“It's that gang over at Stumptown—the Millers,” Sheriff Baldy said. “The war's been over nearly fourteen months but you couldn't tell it if you happen to wander over to Stumptown. The Millers are robbing every traveler they can catch, and killing quite a few of them.”

“I don't doubt it—Jake Miller's as mean as a
pig, but what's it got to do with our mules?” Uncle Seth inquired.

“I'm going over there and clean out the Millers,” the sheriff said. “You know how poorly all the horseflesh is around here. The farmers all quit, because of the war. Mary Margaret just killed the only good horse in Boone's Lick.”

“I thought it was an elk,” Ma said firmly, as if that subject had been disposed of forever.

The sheriff just sighed.

“If the Millers see somebody passing through on a decent horse they kill the rider and take the horse,” the sheriff said.

Right there I saw the sheriff's point—he was right about the poor horseflesh around Boone's Lick. But Pa and Uncle Seth were in the hauling business—they couldn't afford sickly mules. Uncle Seth went up to Ioway himself and brought back fodder for our mules. There hadn't been much fighting in Ioway; the farmers there were happy to sell what they had to Uncle Seth, the result being that our mules were the best-conditioned animals anywhere around Boone's Lick. No wonder the sheriff wanted to borrow them, if he had a hard job to do.

Ma was whetting her knives, which made such a racket that the rest of us went outside.

“I guess I can't blame you for wanting your posse to have decent mounts,” Uncle Seth said to Sheriff Baldy. “That's correct thinking, as far as it goes, but it don't go far enough.”

Sheriff Baldy just looked at him. It might be that the shock of having his horse shot out from
under him by a woman he had once courted had just hit him. His mouth hung open again, inviting flies and bugs.

“Of course, I have no objection to you borrowing our mules for a patriotic expedition, provided the expedition is well planned,” Uncle Seth said. “How many posse men have you signed up so far?”

“One, so far,” the sheriff admitted.

“Uh-oh, there's the incorrect part of your thinking,” Uncle Seth said. “There's a passel of Millers, and Jake ain't the only one that's mean. If you go wandering over there with an inadequate force our mules will be at risk. Jake Miller can spot a valuable mule as quick as the next man.”

“I know that,” Sheriff Baldy said. He looked a little discouraged.

“I expect you were counting on our fine mules to attract a posse,” Uncle Seth said. “It might work, too. At least, it might if you're offering cash payment too.”

“I can offer five dollars a man, and fifty dollars to Wild Bill Hickok, if he'll come,” the sheriff said.

Something about that remark irked Uncle Seth, because the red vein popped out again on his nose. I don't think the sheriff noticed.

“You mean if I was to join your posse you'd offer me forty-five dollars less than you're offering Bill Hickok to do the same job, even though the two of us were commanded by General Phil Sheridan and
I
was the sharpshooter and Bill just a common spy?” Uncle Seth inquired.

It didn't take the sheriff but a second to figure out what he had done wrong.

“Why, Seth, I never supposed you'd want to join a posse,” he said.

“For fifty dollars I'll join it and enlist Shay and G.T. too,” Uncle Seth said. “The boys will work for nothing, of course.”

That remark startled me so that if I had been sitting on a fence I expect I would have fallen off. Ma wouldn't hear of our fighting in the war, though plenty of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds
did
fight in it; and now Uncle Seth, with no discussion, was offering to trot us off to Stumptown to take on the notorious Miller gang, an outfit filled with celebrated killers: Cut-Nose Jones, Little Billy Perkins, and the four violent Millers themselves.

The sheriff didn't immediately respond to Uncle Seth's offer, but he didn't immediately reject it, either.