Friends (8 page)

We each had a cup and then I stood. "I'll be going now," I said. "Thank you for my dinner and for what you've told me about the man I'm chasing. I've never seen him, but now, thanks to you, I have a pretty good idea of what he looks like."

"You knew about his limp just from following him?" she ask, doubt in her dark eyes.

"I'll stop back in the morning, if you like," I told her.

"I would feel better if you would stay here tonight, Mr. Goodwin. You can sleep in Mother's and Daddy's bed there, and I could sleep up in the loft, where I used to." She read the look on my face. "It would be all right. Who is to know but us, eh?"

I didn't see how she could say that right out that way.
I'd rather
spend a night in a regular bed any time,
I told myself, but even as I thought that I knowed it wasn't just comfort on my mind.

Anyway, I unsaddled my horse and brought my trap inside and barred the door. She'd cleared the table and put things away by the time I went back in. The fire was burned low.

"I'm up here, Mr. Goodwin," she said after I'd looked around and not seen her. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight," I told her. I pulled her rocker up close to the embers of the fire, lit my pipe, and helped myself to the last of the coffee. It wouldn't keep me awake tonight. Nothing would, tired as I was.

I'd just got into bed when I heard her stirring in the loft. "Are you awake, Mr. Goodwin?"

"Just about."

"Can I come down with you? I'm awfully cold up here."

Well, I didn't say nothing and a minute later I heard her climb down the ladder. Then she slipped under the quilts beside me. After a while she put her hand on my shoulder, and I could feel her loose breasts against my back.

"You wear your clothes to bed?" she asked.

"Just my longjohns," I said.

She laughed then, that warm throaty laugh. "That is a strange way to sleep." She slid one of her long legs over against mine and I could tell she wasn't wearing nothing at all.

I determined I would just wait and see what happened next. I don't know how long I laid and waited there in that big old featherbed, but after a while her breathing got slow and regular. I rolled over and put my hand on her hair. My, it was smooth and soft! But she was asleep. Fast asleep. I rolled back over and called myself a fool. My baby-fetcher was as hard and as long as a rake handle, and I don't think I slept at all that night.

I woke with a start, not knowing where I was for the longest minute, 'til it come to me. A fire burned in the fireplace and you could smell coffee brewing. The front door stood wide open and my bedfellow was gone.

I dressed quick and from the doorway I seen her working at my horse. It was warm and sunny, later than I wisht I had slept. She had made a pile of her things in the dooryard, and from that I knowed what she was up to.

I walked out and leaned over the top rail, just watching her for a minute, a beautiful sight of a spring morning. But then she saw me, though she didn't say nothing at first. You could tell she knowed what she was doing-with the curry comb. "Did you sleep well, Mr. Goodwin?"

"Not as good as I would have on the ground out by the stream there," I told her.

She had a good laugh on me then. "I think perhaps you are not used to having a woman in your bed."

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Making ready your horse, can't you see?" She went back to combing for a minute and then begun to whistle a tune. Well, she could whistle a whole lot better than me, but that didn't take much. "You
do
plan to leave today, no? And if the horse must carry two riders, he should at least be as comfortable as we can make him, don't you think?"

I tried to come up with some gentle way to tell her, but the only way I could think of was to say it straight out. "Miss Mandy, I can't take you along, much as I'd like to oblige you."

She stopped brushing and turned them big dark eyes on me in the most mournful way. Two tears commenced to roll down her cheeks.

"Now, I wish you'd stop that," I said, feeling lower than a lizard's belly. 'Td take you along if I could, I truly would. It's just that I'm following a killer and I have got to-" I seen her shoulders start to shake, but she was doing all she could to keep from crying. "Riding double would slow me way down, Mandy, and I might lose him. Hell, be probably gained a couple hours on me already this morning."

She come over to the rail and stood on the other side, just looking at me. Tears dripped off the sides of her chin and I felt awful.

"Besides, you might get killed. He's going to lay in ambush somewheres and watch his backtrail. That rifle of his-"

"I can't remain here, Mr. Goodwin," she said, lifting her arms out wide and then letting them drop to her sides. Two new rivers poured down her cheeks. "I will take my risks with you, for I will surely die if I stay by myself any longer."

Well, I didn't see bow that could be, since she'd already come through the winter out here, but then maybe that entered into it. I'd heard of women dying of loneliness by themselves out on the prairie, nothing wrong with them. Just shrunk up and died from being all alone, so I beard tell. Still, she didn't appear in no danger of being shriveled to death, fresh as she looked standing there with the wind blowing the black rings of her hair across that pretty face.

"You can leave me wherever you find some people, and I will ask them to take me further. Please, Mr. Goodwin, do not leave me here!" She reached over that top rail and squeezed me so tight my hat fell off.

That was the fix I was in, and I argued it both ways with myself standing there awkward as the devil, bent partly over the rail and with her arms still around me. After a while I nodded my head.

She laughed through her tears then, and I could feel her jumping up and down like a youngster will do.

I took her shoulders and moved her off so I could see her good. "Now, if we're going down the trail a piece together, you must do just as I tell you, no two ways about it."

She kissed me. I didn't even see it coming. Oh, nothing big, you understand, but it
was
on the lips. She had such a funny look on her face then it puzzled me. "Of course, Mr. Goodwin. I will do just as you require."

In a minute I seen what she thought I meant. Well, she had got me all wrong there. "It's not like that, Miss Mandy," I said. "I didn't mean-"

But she just smiled like she knowed some secret and went to sorting her things.

It was a fight getting her to pare down that pile of goods she wanted to take along–some of her mamma's silver, her brother's cradle, and a big old Spanish guitar. Instead, I let her take just a quilt, some heavy clothes, a frying pan, and her Remington. Which I stuffed in the saddle boot along with Clete's Henry. Sure, we could of left her rifle, but I preferred she have it if we had to gun for that old boy. Truth is, she could probly shoot better than me.

After we ate, I got a piece of paper from her and tacked Clete a message on the door telling him the day and the time we'd left and which direction. When she come back from the little cemetery on the hill by the stream, she stood by the low corral and looked at the house. Though she didn't cry none, I knowed she was saying goodbye to her home.

Of course she talked me into letting her take the guitar, which she strapped across her back before she climbed up behind me. We had fixed my canvas and her quilt into a kind of seat for her. It softened the bumps some, but it wasn't much good for staying on. So she clung to me with her arms and tighter still with her knees and thighs.

My buckskin took the extra weight well. Better than I took her legs around me so. I lost his tracks twice before midmorning and it was clear I wasn't gaining on him, like I done yesterday. By noon the horse needed rest if we was to go on much further and so did Mandy. She would probly have been all right in a saddle, but riding the rump of a walking horse is a different thing entirely.

Beside a river I guessed was the Cheyenne, she slid off and unpacked some food she'd brought. Then she unrolled her quilt and we had us a picnic on the bank.

She chewed a bite of jerked antelope and laid out biscuits and jam. "How far will we follow this man, do you suppose, Willie?" she ask.

"Well,
you'll
be following him 'til we get someplace I can leave you," I told her. "And don't forget that's part of our deal. I'll trail him 'til I find him, or lose his tracks, which is what will happen if it rains. Don't rain up here much, but springtime is still the wettest."

"Did he hurt you, too?"

"No," I said. "Killed some people I cared about, though. And he shot my friend, the sheriff of Two Scalp. You'll meet him. He should be along in about a day." I drank some water, though I wisht it was whiskey.

"But this man,
le meurtrier,
if he did not try to kill you, why do you search for him?"

It was plain she didn't understand the responsibilities of the peace-keeping trade nor the way of things between men. And if she didn't know that, I figgered she was mighty poorly equipped to understand how your friend's trouble is yours too, and how his fights are your fights. How, at the same time, you could fight with your pardner over
how
to fight his fights. And I could also see no way to explain to her how being the sheriff or the deputy of some damn little town was just something you did because you couldn't see nothing better to do, or how else to sit out a Northern winter. But, still, if someone raised hell in your town, or killed someone, why, he must pay for it, and you are the one hired on to make sure that he does. You must see that the laws are obeyed and the rules of people living together are followed to the letter.

I decided against even
trying
to explain all that to her. "He'll be laying for us up here somewheres, and he'll be shootin' to kill, you as well as me, since you're along."

She lost the smile her teasing me had put on her pretty face, and it begun to cloud over. "How do you know that?" she ask.

"Because he's done this before and so have I," I told her. "Been chased like him, I mean. And I've chased others as well. Comes a time when you got to be sure no one's after you. It wears on you, running does, bears down on you like a heavy stone, crushing the wind out of you so's you can't hardly draw a full breath. He'll stay put soon, wait for whoever's following to come along behind him. He almost done it yesterday, before he reached your place, but then he changed his mind for some reason. I seen the tracks where he waited an hour or more, and he'll do it again. Only next time he'll wait 'til he's sure."

When the scrawny man saw the eroded pile of clay in the distance rising above the rolling plain, he knew he had found what he had been looking for all day. He was careful to take his horses in close to the base and then some distance around the rilled and fluted butte before he circled and came back from the other side. He hobbled the horses in a bare gully which had cut itself into the clay, where the heat stuck his shirt fast to his narrow, sweaty back, and he scrabbled up the side with his gear.

Down from the top he found a notch. It was not as level as he would have liked, but it was level enough. He could stay there all night if he had to, and tomorrow too if need be. He could see miles through his glass; miles and miles back across the dusty green flatland toward the distant river, a ribbon of blue and luster. He spread his oiled canvas on the ground and sucked a mouthful of cold coffee from his bottle, then checked the primer on his Sharps and lay down. Someone was still after him. He knew it. He didn't know who it was or how he knew it, but he did. Sure as the South had lost the war. Sure as he knew that he had finally killed the murderer who had gunned down his brother.

We took a little longer with our picnic lunch beside the river there than I was happy about, but I could tell from the fresh look of his tracks after we started again that we weren't slipping no further behind. He stayed on the southern bank of the river, moving upstream at a good, regular pace, and easy as anything to follow in both sand and gravel. He was still riding the girl's horse and leading his own, but he wouldn't be much longer, lame as it was getting.

My, it was a pretty day, getting warm unto summer almost, no Janger of rain and losing the trail.

Mandy, she was happy as sunshine. Pointing out wildflowers and getting me to name them, after she knowed I could. Singing songs most all afternoon, she was. French words to most of them, so I had no idea what they was about. Someone'd taught her to sing like a songbird and you could tell she liked doing it. One, she got me to learn and sing with her while we rode, but I made her teach me in English. Something about some young pullet waiting for her rooster in the moonlight, I don't know what else. Young girl takes twenty years off a man's age, maybe more.

Midafternoon rolls around, she pesters me to stop for a while where a little stream tumbling in from the left formed a good-size pool in the river, a low bluff on the other side. I'd already noticed that his tracks cut away from the bank here and headed more south, along the stream, and I wanted to fill our canteens anyway before heading in that direction.

Soon as she slid off, she laid down her hat, slipped that guitar strap over her head, and her shirt followed it. And she had nothing on underneath, like women usually wear.

"What do you think you're doin'?" I ask.

"I am going to get clean, go swimming," she said. "Come swim with me." She was already unbuttoning her pants so I turned around.

"Doesn't seem like a proper thing to do," I said.

She just laughed and soon I heard her walking into the water. Well, that was too much for me. I turned around and she was standing up to her knees, bent over and splashing water on her anns and breasts and looking at me so level and bold.

I wish I had the words to tell what a sight she was standing there. I saw a white tailed deer standing in a stream once, and I thought of that then, of how right it was for a young thing like her to be enjoyin' the water. Strange, I didn't think before of how her whole body would be the color of her face and hands, but I didn't. Not that I didn't picture her that way, though, I confess. Like coffee with cream that'd turned to wet silk she looked standing there in the slow-moving river. She had got her hair wet by then too, and the drops run off the rings in a shower that the sun caught and sparkled.