Haxan (24 page)

“Marwood, I was only doing what I was told.” The wind blew his white-blond hair, revealing white scalp around his ears. His drooping left eyelid began to flicker with nervous tension.

“So am I, Rand.”

“I don’t want to pull on you,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

He watched me for a long time. His face subtly changed. He was cornered. The only way he would live was if he shot his way out. He already had his gun free while my heavier Colt Dragoon remained holstered. The odds were on his side.

“Have it your way,” he said.

He was good. His expression never changed and his eyes remained steady. He flung Magra aside and started to draw a bead on me. My first shot hit him in the head and took away most of his lower jaw. He stumbled back, arms windmilling as my second shot centre-cut his lungs.

I walked up on him. His tongue was moving in what was left of his lower mouth. He was most dead, but the flickering nerves that remained in his brain were trying to make him talk before they, too, died.

I raised my pistol. My third shot echoed across the flat desert.

I turned. Magra stood alone, trembling. Her dirty hands were pressed against her face. I walked to her and said soft, “It’s over.”

She took her begrimed fingers from her face. “They said someone in town paid them to kill Papa and kidnap me.”

“I know.”

“They never said a name.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I already knew who hired them.

“They . . . I—” She swallowed hard. Watched me. Softened.

“I’m glad you came, John,” she said at last.

The wind blew her loose hair across her face.

“Can you walk? I’m camped beyond that next rise.”

“Don’t you want their money? Connie, that man, he kept it in a leather satchel under the wagon seat.”

I gave her a sidelong glance. “Why would I want their gold? Unless you want it.”

She flashed a sick, angry look. “I don’t want anything from them, ever again.”

I took her hand. “Then let’s go home.”

W
e rode in slow. I thought Magra needed time and I was right.

That same morning we reached the spring I had found earlier. I used a shovel found on the buckboard and dug down into the earth until I had a wide basin of clear water.

I cleaned my shoulder wound. The muscle was red and bruised where the bullet cut me. It was inflamed but didn’t appear infected. The old wounds on my side had opened up and bled through, but they weren’t too bad. I cleaned those, too.

I was achy and sore, but I was alive. So was Magra. Right now, that’s all that mattered.

Magra washed her broad face and long hands at the water hole. She glanced my way briefly and, without a word or a blush, started to undress so she could wash her entire body. She started this process by scrubbing herself clean with sand and rinsing it off her glowing skin with handfuls of water.

I rummaged in the saddlebags and brought out a doeskin skirt, faded red blouse, and calf-skin boots.

“Got these from your poke in the storeroom before I left Haxan,” I explained. “Thought you might want a change of clothes when I caught up with you.”

“Thank you. Leave them there, will you?”

I gave her the privacy she deserved. Some time later, after she let the sun air-dry her, she called, “I am ready.”

She had dressed in the plain white doeskin skirt and blouse. The boots came halfway up her calves, hugging her legs. Her face was scrubbed bright and her black hair, washed, was combed straight and hung down her back in long ropes. She pinned her hair behind her ears with a piñon stick.

Standing there, water dripping from her fingers and the sun in her red-brown face, she looked like the wildest thing the desert had ever let loose on a man.

She didn’t say anything as I helped her onto my horse. She rode behind me, her chin resting on my shoulder.

I tried to make small talk. I pointed out things she had taught me about the desert. She didn’t respond. She was lost in her own thoughts. I let her be.

A high wind started up from the south, kicking dust in our faces. By the time night came on it died down and I was able to build a decent fire. There had been no game on the trail so we shared
charqui
and hardtack.

“I knew you were coming after me,” Magra said. She tapped the hardtack against a rock to make sure there were no weevils in it. The firelight danced on her cheekbones and in her eyes. A breeze ruffled her blouse and hair. She turned her face to mine. Parts of her were in shadow like the open desert around us.

“Papa came to me last night and said you were nearby, hiding in the dark. He said you were waiting for morning to come.”

I grunted. “Must have been good to have that kind of comfort.”

“
Ai
, it was.” She hugged her knees. “I think it’s the last time he’s going to visit me, John.” Her tone was plaintive. “I got the impression he felt, well, because you were here he didn’t need to watch over me anymore.”

“I hope that’s right, Magra.”

A desert owl called across the night flat. Another answered, farther away.

“That first owl caught a mouse,” she said.

She gave me her first real smile and tugged a black and white Mexican blanket over her shoulders. The night closed down around us. The stars were like handfuls of sugar flung against the black sky.

She didn’t move for the longest time. Just watched the dancing fire while I smoked my pipe. “John, I want to ask you something,” she said at length.

“You can ask anything you want, Magra. You never need my permission.”

“Where are you from?”

I didn’t wait to answer. “It’s a place you’ll never have to visit.”

“That sea of time and dust you spoke of before?”

I nodded. I put my pipe away. Now it was my turn to stare at the fire. “Mostly.”

“Is it old, this place?”

I nodded. “Very.”

“How old?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I made an expansive gesture. “As old as man’s time in the world. Yesterday. An hour ago. There’s no telling.”

She wasn’t put off by that. She knew I wasn’t being evasive. I was only describing it with the words I had.

“But it’s real,” she pressed on, “this place you speak of?”

I remembered some of the people I used to know. Things they had said in languages long forgotten. Things they had told me about why we had come to the world.

“It’s real, Magra.”

“And you are from there.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Like I said before. We are called to stand against that which must be faced.”

Her curiosity deepened. “You’ve been other places? These other places?”

“Some of them. Not all.” I felt myself groping, trying to find a way to explain. “I guess in a way you could call it night-walking. We are made to night-walk between worlds that can’t exist until something is put right. Then all these worlds are put together in a line, like glass beads on a string, and that’s the history of man.” I shrugged. “That’s the best I can explain it. I’m sorry.”

“
Ai
, but why you, John?”

I had one arm across my knee. The night air was fine and the fire felt good on my face and arms. My horse whickered behind us and pawed the ground.

“Because they don’t choose anyone, Magra,” I said with careful deliberation. “You have to have something inside you. Something so big it could maybe devour worlds if you let it loose.” I shrugged again. “I don’t let it. Leastways, not often.”

“You have this thing inside you?” She wasn’t afraid. She wanted to know.

“I do.” Coiled and wintry. Asleep at the moment. But it had awakened in White Sands and again at Trinity.

She thought about this for a long time. “How do you carry something like that inside you and stay human, John?”

“That’s easy.” I looked at her, watched the flecks of dancing fire reflected in her liquid dark eyes. “Because it’s more afraid of me than I am of it.”

“I think I saw something of that power,” she admitted. “When you shot Silas Foote after he was down. Again when you shot Rand. Rand only had seconds to live. You didn’t do that to end his suffering.”

“No, I didn’t.”

She rolled the blanket off her shoulders. Her eyes were dark. “John. Do I have any reason to ever be afraid of you?”

I smoothed her hair back. “Magra, the day you are afraid of me is the day I leave Haxan forever. That’s all.”

“I guess you will never have to leave.”

I pulled her into my arms and she leaned into me at the same time.

Her hands went around my neck as I kissed her. She pulled me down, trying to cover her body with mine.

Night fell around us.

Her body lay warm under the rumpled Mexican blanket. I could feel the warmth of the dying fire on my exposed legs.

She rolled over and propped herself on her elbows. “He called you here, didn’t he? Papa.”

The glowing embers of the fire brightened and dimmed with the shifting wind.

“I never know that, Magra. Sometimes I think I can call myself and that’s why I go where I’m needed.”

Her fingertips explored my face. She touched the scars on my chest, shoulders, and elbows. “You really were living with the Mandans,” she said.

“Yes.”

“But you’re here now. Maybe not only for me, but a lot of other reasons you don’t understand.”

I tucked the wool blanket around her shoulders. “Time to go to sleep. Let yourself heal.”

She pressed her face into the open palm of my hand. “I’m doing that, John. You’re helping me do that right now.”

W
hen we arrived in Haxan I dropped Magra off at the hotel. Hew and Alma Jean came outside in the sunshine to meet her.

“It must have been quite an ordeal,” Alma Jean said, bustling forward and clucking like a mother hen. “Thank God you are back safely among us, Magra Snowberry.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Clay.”

“Marshal,” Hew said, “Mayor Polgar wanted to see you. Doc Toland got the lab results back the very day you left.”

“All right.” I paused in the open doorway to the hotel. The sun at my back cast a long shadow across the lobby. “Magra?”

“I’m okay, John.”

“I’ll be back for you as soon as I can.”

She cast a shy smile my way. “I know.”

“We’ll keep an eye on her for you, Marshal,” Hew promised.

“Indeed we will,” Alma Jean echoed. She put a protective arm around Magra’s shoulders and steered her away. “Hot food, bath, and a long rest will set you right, young lady.”

I strode down Avenida de Haxan toward the freight office. Polgar was inside the station with Doc Toland. Word had spread like quicksilver as soon as I returned with Magra. Doc probably figured I would want him around.

He was right. He was going to be needed.

“How’s the girl?” Polgar asked.

“It’s going to be a long time before she’s ever right again,” I told him. “They hurt her bad.” I turned to Doc Toland. “Mayhap you should examine her and make sure she’s all right. But, don’t leave just yet.”

“All right, John,” he said, catching my meaning.

“We saw you ride in alone, John,” Polgar prompted. He had a cigar going and was debating whether or not he had smoked it down far enough to toss it aside. “We saw you ride in without Rand.”

“That’s right, Frank, I guess you did.”

“Those men still out there?” he asked.

“They’re not going anywhere.” I pointed through the window at a circular nailed to a post, flapping in the breeze. “We can take down those dodgers. I heard you got news for me, Doc.”

“Indeed I do. Those men you found in the ditch at Shiner Larsen’s place died in a very bad way. Poisoned until their kidneys shut down and failed. Their stomachs were full of—”

“Oil of cloves.” That was what I had smelled on their bodies that night. They must have been held down and forced to swallow, but some had spilled on their clothes and soaked through.

“That’s right, Marshal.” I had impressed Toland with my deduction. “How did you know?”

“I smelled it a second time at the post office when a package carrying bottles of the stuff was smashed on the floor. That’s when I knew for sure,” I admitted.

“It’s a nasty way to die,” Toland remarked.

Polgar caught my attention. “John, there’s only one man in town who uses that stuff in any definable quantity. Rex and I have been keeping an eye on him ’til you got back. We figured you would want to be the one to take him.”

“I’ll pick him up, Mayor.”

“You need help? Jake is down at the office.”

I opened the cylinder and checked the loads and percussion caps in my gun. Snapped it closed. “I’ll take care of this alone. It’s my job.”

I walked through the empty street. The morning sun was hot and there was dust in my throat. A few Mexican women and their children lounged around the water well in the plaza, talking and fanning themselves from the heat.

I walked but a few buildings down in the direction of his office.

I hadn’t been back in town long, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to meet him running out the door when I went through it.

I slammed the door behind me to announce my presence. The little wooden plate with the name “
J
osiah
H
artleby:
D
entist
” rattled in alarm against the glass pane.

I had caught him in the middle of packing. He had a threadbare carpet bag stuffed full of odds and ends, along with shirts that needed laundering and a pair of striped suspenders.

“Sir, I am closed for the day. You’ll have to come back another time.”

He saw me and his face sheeted white.

I felt cold and distant. “You have to answer for Shiner Larsen, tooth-puller.”

He had sense enough not to try and talk his way out of it.

He drew himself up to his full measure, what there was of it. “And why not?” he snapped back. “Why shouldn’t I have that crazy old Swede killed? Being a dentist is a hard enough trade. People don’t like dentists much and his slander wasn’t helping me eat. Besides, I was willing to marry that half-breed daughter of his, but he wouldn’t have it. Said I was no good, that she didn’t need the likes of me because one day he would call a man out of the dust of time to protect her. He was always talking crazy like that.”

He moved across the room until a table stood between him and me.

“You have to understand, Marshal. Larsen wouldn’t even broach the subject of my marrying Magra to her. He was crazy. So I made arrangements to have him pushed out of the way. Told the man I hired to teach her a lesson, too, since I couldn’t have her to myself.” He lifted his chin. He had cut himself shaving that morning and there was a stick of white plaster there.

“The way I see it,” he said, “I did this town a righteous favour. Cleansed it of evil. If you know anything about the history of Haxan you know that much, Marshal.”

“Law says you have to pay, Hartleby. You’ll get a trial and then you’ll be hanged.”

“I was losing money and respect.”

“You had more than enough money to hire three cold-blooded killers. Think about that. And I’m not sure you had much self-respect to begin with, seeing how you wanted Magra treated. No, Hartleby, I think you’re a man who let his hate get the better of him. It happens.”

His mouth worked a bit. He spit with indignation. “I don’t like your high-minded tone, Marshal. Or your insinuations regarding my character.”

“I don’t care. As for your character, you’re probably the sneak who tried to back-shoot me from the alley.” I could tell by his reaction I had hit the mark.

“Come on, Hartleby. I’m taking you in. You’re under arrest for murder.”

His hand stole for the carpet bag.

I swept my grey duster aside, revealing the bone handle of my Colt Dragoon. “Don’t try it, Hartleby.”

“I won’t hang from a rope, Marshal.” He was facing the street. If he fired he might hit someone standing outside. Phaedra Finch all over again. I had to get him first.

“Don’t pull on me, Hartleby,” I warned. “You’ll never live to see your own hanging if you do.”

He wasn’t hearing me. He was listening to the hate that bellowed in his heart. His hand flashed and our guns roared in the cramped room at the same instant. He slumped against the wall and left a smear of red.

Acrid gun smoke drifted between the high rafters. I kicked the smoking Walker from his hand and went outside.

Mayor Polgar and Doc Toland were there to meet me, blinking in the sun.

“Haxan’s going to need a new dentist,” I told them.