Sudden Country (18 page)

"I swear you put more store by that savage than your own belly. Don't forget the wood. Or who's watching you," she added, squinting.

I mumbled something to the effect that I would forget neither and gathered up the material, and with it the knife. My head was pounding in counterpoint to my heart as I approached the door flap.

"Hey, boy," said Mad Alice.

I faltered. Run, or make my stand? The time for last resorts had arrived. I turned, bracing myself to leap. If her arm was faster . . .

She had picked up the rough soap and water bag and was holding it out. I hesitated, relief washing up and over me like a warm tide, and stepped forward to take them.

Knowing that she was watching from the doorway, I took my time during the trek past the graveyard. I was very conscious of the knife wrapped in the net cloth. By the time I was inside the stable, I was wrapped in a sheath of cold sweat like a clammy shroud. The smell of it caused the old horse to back away from me.

Panther was alert. Quickly I set about removing his old dressing and flushing the wound. I was glad to see the red patch had not spread. He sensed my excitement. There was a question in his eyes. Grinning like the schoolboy I was, I produced the knife. It had a Sheffield blade and a hide handle that had replaced the broken or worn-out original. In a trice I had sawed through his bonds and he sat rubbing his wrists.

"She is watching the door," I said. "We must wait our chance."

"I've been waiting longer than you. It is now or never."

"Mad Alice–"

"She can fire that musket only once before reloading. Give me the knife."

He took it away while I was considering the request. "You are too weak," I said. "She will cut you down long before you get–"

"I am too close to death to start attacking old ladies now." He shifted positions, grunting a little, and commenced sawing with the edge of the blade at the leather thongs that held together the poles from which the wall was made. "Get ready to catch these before they can fall outward," he said. "We haven't time for a saddle and bridle. Can you ride bareback?"

"I can try."

"That means you cannot. But if you can boost me aboard we can both try. Here comes the first."

I grasped the pole just as the last thong encircling it fell away and drew it inside, leaning it against the front wall by the door. He was already working at the next. "Hurry," said I. "She is sure to wonder what's keeping me."

"If I work any faster I will start losing fingers."

The effort was tiring him already. Without a word I took the knife from his hand–he offered little resistance–and cut through the remaining thongs while he rested. I caught the poles myself and leaned them next to the first. We now had an opening on the blind side of the dugout.

Panther said, "That's enough. Help me up."

"One more pole."

"Leave it. We'll manage. Get moving!"

The Indian was heavier than he looked, but I helped him to his feet and after two tries, over the back of the horse, which snorted and shambled but found no escape inside the small enclosure. I got on behind, not without difficulties of my own. The animal was all bone and sagging flesh; straddling it was like sitting on loose floating logs. However, it supported our combined weight without great effort.

"Ready?" said Panther. Before I could reply, he dug in his heels and we shot through the opening.

It was a tight fit. The rough poles on either side tore my trousers and took skin off my legs. I reeled, surprised by the pain and our jolting start; reflex alone kept me in my seat as I swept both arms about Panther's waist, forcing a grunt from him because of his wound. Outside, the fresh air of freedom struck with flatiron force.

Out of the corner of one eye I glimpsed a familiar flower-hatted figure poised halfway between dugout and stable. Something split the air past my head with a loud crack. She had brought her musket with her.

I paid no attention to our course, trusting to the Indian and disregarding his pain as I hugged him for life and liberty. Either the old workhorse was faster than it appeared or I was drunk with motion, but it seemed that we were flying. The hammering of hoofs outdid the pounding in my head. Wind buffeted my ears.

We were free-----or as free as befell a half-dead Sioux and a battered white youth without arms or provisions in the treacherous Black Hills of South Dakota.

THE WAY TO DEATH

N
ight fell quickly in that hill country, and we had gone a very little distance before darkness forced us to halt. The activity had deeply taxed Panther's weakened constitution. I helped him down, made a bed in the lee of a wash from pine needles and plucked grass, plucked more with which to rub down the winded and disgruntled old workhorse, and used my belt to tether it to a juniper. Then I huddled close to the Indian. It was a cold night and very long.

Panther was worse at dawn. When I helped him to his feet he was barely conscious, and although he had not bled through his bandages, his forehead was hot, indicating that the fever was in his blood. Helping him aboard our bleary-eyed mount, I knew that he would not survive another night without medical help.

For what it was worth, I now knew how to get back to where I had left Mr. Knox and the rest. Whatever his shortcomings as a Union Army paymaster, Orrin Peckler was an able cartographer and had faithfully recorded the landmarks that surrounded us on his makeshift map. With the sun's position as my guide I turned the horse's head to the southwest, and with my arms around the sagging Indian and grasping the mane, and using my knees and heels, started us along the path of least resistance. For sanity's sake I did not allow myself to think about what we might–or might not–find at the end of our journey.

The day was blistering. I had had the foresight to bring along the water bag, but even so we stopped often in the shade of the pines to cool our bodies and let the horse blow. Panther was now alert, now nearly comatose. He was actually easier to manage in the latter state, for when his senses were about him he would argue that we were headed in the wrong direction for salvation, that I must give up my friends as lost and set a course for Standing Rock. I knew not where Standing Rock was or how long I could depend upon him to guide me, and so I ignored his protests. Fortunately, he hadn't the strength to override me.

Or perhaps unfortunately; but again I am outdistancing myself.

The sky was broad and blue and polished painfully bright. High above the hills an eagle (I preferred not to think it was a vulture) slid between clouds upon spread wings, flapping them now and again only to climb higher before diving hundreds of feet into the next updraft–mocking, it seemed to me, our ants' progress along the uneven ground. Other, lesser birds whistled and squawked in the trees and squirrels repelled down the trunks and scudded across the forest floor with the noise of crashing elk. The plenitude of the game, unarmed as I was, served only to remind me of the gnawing in my stomach. I began to think nostalgically about Mother's sickbed soup.

Mother. What was she doing now back in Panhandle? If it was Monday, she would be washing the linen and airing out the mattresses; Tuesday, scouring the floors with the harsh soap that bleached the boards and made her knuckles swell and crack; Wednesday, shopping in town for the corned beef whose fat melted like butter on the tongue and milk by the pail, still foaming from the cow's heat, and if there was a boarder, canned peaches or apricots, served chilled from the icebox and so sweet they hurt the teeth; Thursday or Friday, the windows; Saturday, sewing, her fingers working as fast as any bobbin as she replaced buttons, repaired rents, pieced together my shirts and the dresses she fashioned from bright prints to look her, prettiest for the male roomers she admired; Sunday, coming back from church to fill the house with the warm sunny smell of baking bread. I smelled it now, and I saw her face, and unashamedly I wept, the boy who would be a man, stranded in strange country with a dying Indian and an ancient horse and a numbness inside that passed for hope.

I felt loneliest when our way took us through forest so deep that nothing grew and consequently no animals lived, where the dense trunks did for night and silence spread around us like a brackish pool. My skin, so recently slick with sweat, grew cold and clammy and I shivered uncontrollably. The horse sensed my unease and shied from the sound of its own hoofbeats. I took what heat I could from Panther, who by then was burning up with fever and muttering deliriously in his semiconscious state. Of what he spoke I was for the most part ignorant, for it was mainly in a language that I assumed was Sioux. Once only did he raise his voice clearly in English, and I wished that he had not, because the words left me colder than the forest shadows.

"The white man's road," he said, "is the way to death." After that he lapsed back into his native tongue.

The sun was growing rusty when we passed out of a narrow cleft between hills whose steep faces rose like cliffs on either side and into a clearing I recognized with my insides before my mind caught up. The horse recognized it too, and the memory was not good, because it threw up its head and whistled through its nostrils and tried to rear. Its old muscles were not equal to its heart, however, and before it could pitch us off I slid to the ground and brought Panther tumbling down with me, breaking his fall as best I could with my own body. He sank down with a grunt. I made sure, first, that he was still breathing, then that he was in a relatively comfortable position in the tall grass, and turned to try and soothe the big drayhorse. Clearly my priorities were in faulty order. It had wheeled and was retreating the way we had come at a gallop several times faster than I had managed to get it into thus far. It would not stop running until it was safely back in its own stable.

The animal's panic had not been entirely the result of memory. When with an air of resignation I turned back to see to the Indian, I saw, not thirty yards away, what at first appeared to be a pile of discarded clothing lying, as Panther was lying, in the grass. I knew long before I got to it that it contained the remains of a man.

D
ignity in death is a civilized invention. There is no place for it in the wilderness. What Lives Again's braves had started in their superstitious determination to handicap a despised enemy on his way to the Happy Hunting Ground, the wolves, coyotes, and carrion birds had finished. But for his clothes I would not have recognized Aintchell, the former prison guard mortally wounded in his attempt to overpower Mike McPhee just before the Indian attack. My stomach crawled, but it did not turn over. Scant weeks before–even days–it might have; but the boy who had wept for his mother that same day could spare no bile for the dead in a place where all his energy was required to keep from joining them. Still, I whispered a prayer for Aintchell's soul. He had been true whatever his motives, and it seemed unlikely that Deacon Hecate had had time to do as much for him.

A wider search disclosed another heap of bones and sinew whose soiled and tattered garments I identified as those of Mike McPhee. Someone, either an Indian or one of my own retreating party, had relieved the corpse of its weapons, even going so far as to pluck Aintchell's knife from between its ribs. The skull grinned through gristle that had been the Irishman's face.

For his soul I wasted not a breath.

Everywhere were signs of upheaval: torn grass, trampled brush, rusty patches where men had bled. My head ached and I sought to relieve the pressure by unwinding Mad Alice's bandage, wincing when it tore away from the gouge in my right temple. I touched the spot gingerly. It was roughly two inches in length and formed a perfect groove. I have it still, also the headache whenever rain threatens.

The light was going. I left off the investigation to comfort my companion. He had ceased babbling and I thought at first, with a shameful mixture of grief and relief that I had lost him. But when I placed the back of my hand against his lips and waited, I felt his breath, faint and hot with fever. He was clinging to life as desperately as his people had fought to keep their land. I made my bed next to his and huddled close to keep him warm, for I knew something about shock–a legacy of Mother's infatuation two years earlier with a boarder who had left medical school to practice veterinary science, badly.

I did not sleep. The air was biting cold and hunger was a feral thing clawing my stomach from inside. I heard the rustling of wildlife and wondered if the scavengers that had ravaged the remains of Aintchell and McPhee would return for us. Among these considerations wound the mystery of what had become of Mr. Knox and Judge Blod and the Deacon and all the rest. It was as if a great wind had swept them from the face of the earth. Were they dead, or had the savages taken them away, wagons and all, to divide the provisions among themselves while watching the torture of their captives? After what seemed hours of this I left Panther sleeping and took a moonlight walk; as if that would induce weariness better than a full day's flight.