Shalako (1962) (5 page)

He was gone.

Irina Carnarvon felt a curious sense of loss ... a ridiculous thought, for the man was not her sort, anyway. Yet the feeling remained, and she asked herself, What was her sort?

What sort of man did she want? What sort of life? It was an odd question, for she had believed that was settled in her mind. She had thought to marry Frederick, and it was unreasonable that a ride of a few miles with a strange, unshaved, unwashed man of the desert could change that.

Nor had it been changed. Only there was a subtle sort of difference in her feelings now. What had moved her to let him ride Mohammet? She had never allowed Frederick to ride the horse, and actually, aside from one groom on their estate in Wales, nobody had ridden him but her father and herself.

What was her sort? What kind of man did she want? And what sort of man was this man called Shalako? Certainly, she did not want him. She did not know him, and then he was only a wanderer, a hunter, big, uncouth ... but was that fair?

What made her say he was uncouth? Actually, there was a strangely gentle quality in the man ... it was in nothing he had said, rather his handling of his horse, and aside from his brusque way of speaking, his manner toward her.

Yet it was he who caused her to think of herself and of Frederick. Not for a long time had she thought as she was thinking now.

This man had come up from the desert, and now he had returned to it.

Who was he? What was he?

Above all, who was she?

She had scarcely known her mother, living much in a world of men. Her father had never been content with the hunting of Wales or of Scotland. He had hunted wild boar in France as a boy, and then had gone to Africa. She herself had been to Africa and to India with him.

Her father held an ancient title, possessed ancient wealth, but he had been a hunter.

Never so much at home as when he was far from home and in the deep woods, the far veldt, the desert, the mountains.

The table had been set up on a stretch of hard-packed adobe clay, swept clean of dust. Now it was spread with white linen, set with silver and glass. It seemed strangely incongruous in the midst of this desert, yet it had never seemed so before.

Charles and Edna Dagget were already seated at the table, with Julia Paige and Laura Davis opposite them. They looked up as she approached.

"I never knew anyone like her, Julia," Laura said, with a teasing smile. "She rides out into an empty desert and comes back with a man."

"And what a man! Where is he, Irina? Don't tell me you let him get away?"

"Yes, he's gone."

She looked around with wonderment. All this, these pleasant people at the table, the others that would soon join them, this was her world ... but what was it doing here? Suddenly, with a kind of embarrassment, she realized how foolish all this must have seemed to Shalako.

Like a group of children they had come running into this country to play, this country where everything was the utmost in reality. For there was something positive about the desert... it was stark, strong, definite. There were few shadings here, and many points of no return. The margin between life and death was infinitely narrow.

Pete Wells ... in the morning she had talked with him, a quiet, rather colorless man, yet a man, filled with life, enjoying his small pleasures. And a few hours later he was dead, shot down by men he had not even seen.

Count Henri came up to the table and joined them. He was a tall, well set-up man with a shading of silver at the temples. He had been a soldier in the French Army, serving somewhere in the Far East, and he had written a book on China, a scholarly work which she had not read.

"I am sorry he went away," he said, "I liked the look of the man, and if there is trouble, he would have been a good man to have around."

Von Hallstatt overheard the comment. "There won't be trouble, Henri. I was just talking with Hockett and he assures me the Apaches are all south of the border or on reservations."

"Mightn't it be a good idea to pull out in the morning, Fred?" Henri watched the food being placed on the table. "I don't like the look of things."

Von Hallstatt glanced at him. "Don't tell me you've got the wind up? Hockett says that the Apaches rarely move in groups larger than twenty or thirty, and no party that small would be likely to attack us. We're too many for them."

He paused. "No, Henri, I came down here to get a desert big horn, and I shall. And if we have a bit of a skirmish, so much the better."

Henri glanced across the table at von Hallstatt, a cool, measuring glance. "It is not as if we were all men," he said. "I doubt if we have the right to subject the ladies to such risk."

"There is no risk." Von Hallstatt glanced up at him. "Forget it, Henri. This man frightened Irina with some talk of Indians. I have no idea what he hoped to gain.

Or perhaps I do. At least he rode away on our finest horse."

"I believed him," Irina said quietly, "and I still believe him."

Von Hallstatt smiled at her. "I am afraid he impressed you too much. Did you not tell me you had read the novels of Fenimore Cooper? I am afraid you see your man from the desert as another Leather stocking."

Irina smiled. "And he may be. I think we could use one now."

The conversation took a turn away from the moment, but Irina was silent, scarcely hearing the talk that went around and across the table. She was thinking again of the man who had ridden into the night on her favorite horse ... Would she see him again?

Von Hallstatt talked easily. He was a good conversationalist, if somewhat opinionated, and not quite so easy with words as Count Henri. An inordinately proud man, he was undoubtedly brilliant. Long ago, when she first met him in London, she had been told that had he not gone into the military he might have become a brilliant mathematician.

She looked up, feeling eyes upon her. Across the table and back at the edge of the firelight was the man called Bosky Fulton. He looked at her without smiling, but there was a boldness in his eyes that irritated her. She looked away, taking up a comment of Henri's but her thoughts remained with Fulton.

He made her uneasy ... there was something unclean about the man that had little to do with his physical dirtiness, something that warned and repelled her. For that matter, aside from Buffalo and that other young man, the one who drove the wagon-Harding, his name was-she found little to like in any of the men Frederick hired.

When they were outfitting none of the men recommended to them had cared to join up.

These men were fiercely independent and they resented Frederick's manner. He was accustomed to Germanic subservience to authority, and persisted in regarding the men he hired as servants or peasants, and no one could call these men either. Work for you they might, but they remained themselves, proud, independent, and prepared to fight to preserve their independence.

The result had been that the men he could get were the worst, the scum, the hangers-on.

Even Pete Wells had objected to the hiring of Rio Hockett... But when Fulton appeared Wells simply turned away and would say nothing. Like the others, Wells had been afraid of Fulton.

She looked down at her plate, appetite suddenly gone. For the first time in days she thought of her father, and wished he was here. He had been a calm, sure man who always seemed to know what to do, and who had an unerring judgment of men.

She looked up. "Frederick, why don't we go back?" He took his wineglass in his fingers and turned it slowly, watching the reflection of the firelight in the wine.

"We came for a hunt. You knew when we came how long we would be gone, and we had planned this hunt in detail. I do not wish to leave."

"We might do better in the mountains near Silver City," Henri suggested. "There is a plenty of timber there." "You, too, Henri? Don't tell me you are afraid? I thought the French were a bold, dashing lot? Reckless, and all that?"

Henri's eyes chilled, but he smiled. "Dashing? Yes. But cautious also, and lovers of comfort. I believe a move to the north would offer more of both."

"And I do not."

Julia Paige lifted her large, dark eyes and looked down the table at Frederick. Irina felt a little tightening inside, knowing what Julia was going to say. Julia had made no secret of her interest in Frederick.

"After coming all this way it would be foolish to go back empty-handed. I think we should stay. At least we should stay long enough to see if Irina's desert man will come back again."

"I am perfectly prepared to stay," Charles Dagget said. "We have only just come, and there seems no reason to be frightened. If there are Indians, I have no doubt the Army can cope with them."

"Yes," Irina said as she arose. "I believe they could cope with them ... if they knew where they were, and where we were." She smiled sweetly. "You will remember, Charles, that the Army has no idea we are here."

She walked away, going toward the stable. She had never been inside the building, but this was the one Shalako had suggested they could defend.

Harding was seated near the door, but when she approached he got quickly to his feet.

"Howdy, ma'am. Something I can do for you?"

"Would you show me the stable, Mr. Harding? Mr. Carlin was saying it would make a fort."

"Sure would! I been looking it over, ma'am, and whoever built this knew a thing or two. Old, mighty old, but strong. And the portholes are placed just right to cover everything."

Within the barn Harding held up a lantern. It was a long room, and there had been stalls for eight horses, a storeroom for harness, and a big area where hay had been kept. There was a steep stair that led to the loft.

"There's a bigger room upstairs," Harding explained.

"They must have lived there for a time." He led the way up the steps and showed her the room up there.

The floors were solid, the planks well fitted. There were loopholes here also, and, from a large window, Irina could look out over the entire camp, lighted as it was by campfires.

The wagons had been drawn into the gaps between the buildings, but there was no evidence of alertness among the men, to say nothing of those who lingered about the table.

The sky was scattered with stars, the black serrated ridge of the mountains rimmed the sky, and there was a velvety coolness in the night.

"Mr. Harding, have you lived long in the West?" "Yes, ma'am. Since I was eleven.

Before that my home was Ohio. Raised on a farm, ma'am, and done a sight of hunting back there.

"We came West and my family was wiped out by Kio was while I was from home, visitin'.

I've been freighting and buffalo hunting since then. Done a mite of rough carpentering here and there."

"What do you think? Are we in danger of attack?" "Yes, ma'am. Where there's Apaches there's danger. Or most any Indians, for that matter. War is a way of life to them.

They count wealth in horses, and a man who can steal horses better than somebody else is a big man, a mighty big man."

"Mr. Harding, that man ... Shalako ... he suggested we think of defending this place if it becomes so bad we cannot defend the circle. He thought we should have food and ammunition here, prepared ahead of time."

"That's good thinking."

"He also suggested that we keep someone we can trust inside here, or close by. I want you to be that man, Mr. Harding."

"Yes, ma'am. Begging your pardon, ma'am, as long as we're on the subject. This is a mighty poor lot of men you have here. I wouldn't place much dependence on them, and that Fulton, ma'am, he's a bad lot, a bad lot."

She turned away from the window and walked to the steps. At the head of the steps she paused again. "Mr. Harding? What do you know about Shalako?"

Roy Harding was a lean, raw-boned young man, not tall, but muscular and fit. He paused near her. "I never saw him before, but I'd heard tell of him, ma'am. Buffalo, he knew him a long time back. Shalako grew up out here, ma'am. Someplace in California, I think, and then lived in Texas awhile. When he was eighteen or so he pulled out and it was six or eight years before he showed up around again, and then it was up in Montana.

"Nobody knows much about him except that he's said to be one of the best shots on the frontier. He can track better than most Indians, and can ride anything that wears hair.

"Buffalo Harris says he's hell-on-wheels in any kind of a fight." Harding paused.

"I sure wish he'd stayed with Von Hallstatt glanced around as Irina returned to the table, but offered no comment.

A servant was filling their glasses again. "You must try this, Henri. It is one of our finest German wines."

"A good wine, a very good wine."

"Ah? I was not aware that the French ever conceded there was any good wine but French wine."

"On the contrary, Baron, if it has quality, no matter what it is, we French have it. We have learned how to be content with the best of everything."

"There is a story behind this Bernkasteler Doktor.

It is said there was a certain bishop who had fallen ill of some confusing illness, and no matter what the doctors did for him, he continued to lose strength.