Authors: Alan LeMay
He was in no hurry to get back. He wanted to miss supper at the Mathisons for fear he would lash out at Amos in front of the others; so, taking his time about everything he did, he managed to fool away most of the day.
A red glow from the embers in the stove was the only light in the Mathison house as he put away the good little team, but a lamp went up in the kitchen before he went in. Laurie was waiting up, and she was put out with him.
“Who gave you the right to lag out till all hours, scaring the range stock?”
“Amos and me always night on the prairie,” he reminded her. “It’s where we live.”
“Not when I’m waiting up for you.” She was wrapped twice around in a trade-blanket robe cinched up with a leather belt. Only the little high collar of her flannel nightgown showed, and a bit of blue-veined instep between her moccasins and the hem. Actually she had no more clothes than he had ever seen her wear in her life; there was no reason for the rig to seem as intimate as it somehow did.
He mumbled, “Didn’t go to make work,” and went to throw his rag-pickings in the grandmother room.
Amos was not in his bunk; his saddle and everything he had was gone.
“Amos rode on,” Laurie said unnecessarily.
“Didn’t he leave no word for me?”
“Any word,” she corrected him. She shook down the grate and dropped fresh wood in the firebox. “He just said, tell you he had to get on.” She pushed him gently backward against a bench, so that he sat down. “I mended your stuff,” she said. “Such as could be saved.”
He thought of the saddle-worn holes in the thighs of his other drawers. “Goddle mightly,” he whispered.
“Don’t know what your purpose is,” she said, “getting so red in the face. I have brothers, haven’t I?”
“I know, but—”
“I’m a woman, Martie.” He had supposed that was the very point. “We wash and mend your dirty old stuff for you all our lives. When you’re little, we even wash you. How a man can make out to get bashful in front of a woman, I’ll never know.”
He couldn’t make any sense out of it. “You talk like a feller might just as leave run around stark nekkid.”
“Wouldn’t bother me. I wouldn’t try it in front of Pa, was I you, so long as you’re staying on.” She went to the stove to fix his supper.
“I’m not staying, Laurie. I got to catch up with Amos.”
She turned to see if he meant it. “Pa was counting on you. He’s running your cattle now, you know, along with his own—”
“Amos’ cattle.”
“He let both winter riders go, thinking you and Amos would be back. Of course, riders aren’t too hard to come by. Charlie MacCorry put in for a job.”
“MacCorry’s a good fast hand,” was all he said.
“I don’t know what you think you can do about finding Debbie that Amos can’t do.” She turned to face him solemnly, her eyes very dark in the uneven light. “He’ll find her now, Mart. Please believe me. I know.”
He waited, but she went back to the skillet without explanation. So now he took a chance and told her the truth. “That’s what scares me, Laurie.”
“If you’re thinking of the property,” she said, “the land, the cattle—”
“It isn’t that,” he told her. “No, no. It isn’t that.”
“I know Debbie’s the heir. And Amos has never had anything in his life. But if you think he’d let harm come to one hair of that child’s head on account of all that, then I know you’re a fool.”
He shook his head. “It’s his black fits,” he said; and wondered how he could make a mortal danger sound so idiotic.
“What?”
“Laurie, I swear to you, I’ve seen all the fires of hell come up in his eyes, when he so much as thinks about getting a Comanche in his rifle sights. You haven’t seen him like I’ve seen him. I’ve known him to take his knife …” He let that drop. He didn’t want to tell Laurie some of the things he had seen Amos do. “Lord knows I hate Comanches. I hate ’em like I never knew a man could hate nothin’. But you slam into a bunch of ’em, and kill some—you know what happens to any little white captives they got hold of, then? They get their brains knocked out. It’s happened over and over again.”
He felt she didn’t take any stock in what he was saying. He tried again, speaking earnestly to her back. “Amos is a man can go crazy wild. It might come on him when it was the worst thing could be. What I counted on, I hoped I’d be there to stop him, if such thing come.”
She said faintly, “You’d have to kill him.”
He let that go without answer. “Let’s have it now. Where’s he gone, where you’re so sure he’ll find her?”
She became perfectly still for a moment. When she moved again, one hand stirred the skillet, while the other brought a torn-open letter out of the breast of her robe, and held it out to him. He recognized the letter that had been left with Aaron Mathison for Amos. His eyes were on her face, questioning, as he took it.
“We hoped you’d want to stay on,” she said. All the liveliness was gone from her voice. “But I guess I knew. Seems to be only one thing in the world you care about any more. So I stole it for you.”
He spread out the single sheet of ruled tablet paper the torn envelope contained. It carried a brief scrawl in soft pencil, well smeared.
Laurie said, “Do you believe in second sight? No, of course you don’t. There’s something I dread about this, Martie.”
The message was from a trader Mart knew about, over on the Salt Fork of the Brazos. He called himself Jerem (for Jeremiah) Futterman—an improbable name at best, and not his own. He wasn’t supposed to trade with Indians there any more, but he did, covering up by claiming that his real place of business was far to the west in the Arroyo Blanco, outside of Texas. The note said:
I bougt a small size dress off a Injun. If this here is a peece of yr chiles dress bring reward, I know where they gone.
Pinned to the bottom of the sheet with a horse -shoe nail was a two-inch square of calico. The dirt that grayed it was worn evenly into the cloth, as if it had been unwashed for a long time. The little flowers on it didn’t stand out much now, but they were there. Laurie was leaning over his shoulder as he held the sample to the light. A strand of her hair was tickling his neck, and her breath was on his cheek, but he didn’t even know.
“Is it hers?”
He nodded.
“Poor little dirty dress …”
He couldn’t look at her. “I’ve got to get hold of a horse. I just got to get me a horse.”
“Is that all that’s stopping you?”
“It isn’t stopping me. I’ll catch up to him. I got to.”
“You’ve got horses, Martie.”
“I—what?”
“You’ve got Brad’s horses. Pa said so. He means it, Martie. Amos told us what happened at the Warrior. A lot of things you left out.”
Mart couldn’t speak for a minute, and when he could he didn’t know what to say. The skillet started to smoke, and Laurie went to set it to the back of the range.
“Most of Brad’s ponies are turned out. But the Fort Worth stud is up. He’s coming twelve, but he’ll outgame anything there is. And the good light gelding—the fast one, with the blaze.”
“Why, that’s Sweet-face,” he said. He remembered Laurie naming that colt herself, when she was thirteen years old. “Laurie, that’s your own good horse.”
“Let’s not get choosey, Bub. Those two are the ones Amos wanted to trade for and take. But Pa held them back for you.”
“I’ll turn Sweet-face loose to come home,” he promised, “this side Fiddler’s Crick. I ought to cross soon after daylight.”
“Soon after—By starting when?”
“Now,” he told her.
He was already in the saddle when she ran out through the snow, and lifted her face to be kissed. She ran back into the house abruptly, and the door closed behind her. He jabbed the Fort Worth stud, hard, with one spur. Very promptly he was bucked back to his senses, and all but thrown. The stallion conveyed a hard, unyielding shock like no horse Mart had ever ridden, as if he were made all of rocks and iron bands. Ten seconds of squealing contention cleared Mart’s head, though he thought his teeth might be loosened a little; and he was on his way.
When Laurie had closed the door, she stood with her forehead against it a little while, listening to the violent hammer of hoofs sometimes muffled by the snow, sometimes ringing upon the frozen ground, as the Fort Worth stud tried to put Mart down. When the stud had straightened out, she heard Mart circle back to pick up Sweet-face’s lead and that of the waspish black mule he had packed. Then he was gone, but she still stood against the door, listening to the receding hoofs. They made a crunch in the snow, rather than a beat, but she was able to hear it for a long time. Finally even that sound stopped, and she could hear only the ticking of the clock and the winter’s-night pop of a timber twisting in the frost.
She blew out the lamp, crossed the cold dog-trot, and crept softly to her bed. She shivered for a few moments in the chill of the flour-sack-muslin sheets, but she slept between two deep featherbeds, and they warmed quite soon. For several years they had kept a big gaggle of geese, especially for making featherbeds. They had to let the geese range free, and the coyotes had got the last of them now; but the beds would last a lifetime almost.
As soon as she was warm again, Laurie began to cry. This was not like her. The Mathison men had no patience with blubbering women, and gave them no sympathy at all, so Mathison females learned early to do without nervous outlets of this kind. But once she had given way to tears at all, she cried harder and harder. Perhaps she had stored up every kind of cry there is for a long time. She had her own little room, now, with a single rifle-slit window, too narrow for harm to come through; but the matched-fencing partition was too flimsy to be much of a barrier to sound. She pressed her face deep into the feathers, and did her best to let no sound escape. It wasn’t good enough. By rights, everybody should have been deep asleep long ago, but her mother heard her anyway, and came in to sit on the side of her bed.
Laurie managed to snuffle, “Get under the covers, Ma. You’ll catch you a chill.”
Mrs. Mathison got partly into the bed, but remained sitting up. Her work-stiffened fingers were awkward as she tentatively stroked her daughter’s hair. “Now, Laurie.... Now, Laurie....”
Laurie buried her face deeper in the featherbed. “I’m going to be an old maid!” she announced rebelliously, her words half smothered.
“Why, Laurie!”
“There just aren’t any boys—men—in this part of the world. I think this everlasting wind blows ’em away. Scours the whole country plumb clean.”
“Come roundup there’s generally enough underfoot, seems to me. At least since the peace. Place swarms with ’em. Worse’n ants in a tub of leftover dishes.”
“Oh!” Laurie whimpered in bitter exasperation. “Those hoot-owlers!” Her mind wasn’t running very straight. She meant owl-hooters, of course—a term applied to hunted men, who liked to travel by night. It was true that the hands who wandered out here to pick up seasonal saddle work were very often wanted. If a Ranger so much as stopped by a chuck wagon, so many hands would disappear that the cattlemen had angrily requested the Rangers to stay away from roundups altogether. But they weren’t professional badmen—not bandits or killers; just youngsters, mostly, who had got into some trouble they couldn’t bring themselves to face out. Many of the cattlemen preferred this kind, for they drifted on of their own accord, saving you the uncomfortable job of firing good loyal riders who really wanted to stick and work. And they were no hazard to home girls. They didn’t even come into the house to eat, once enough of them had gathered to justify hiring a wagon cook. Most of them had joked with Laurie, and made a fuss over her, so long as she was little; but they had stopped this about the time she turned fifteen. Nowadays they steered clear, perhaps figuring they were already in trouble enough. Typically they passed her, eyes down, with a mumbled, “Howdy, Mam,” and a sheepish tug at a ducked hat brim. Soon they were off with the wagon, and were paid off and on their way the day they got back.
Actually, Laurie had almost always picked out some one of them to idolize, and imagine she was in love with, from a good safe distance. After he rode on, all unsuspecting, she would sometimes remember him, and spin daydreams about him, for months and months. But she was in no mood to remember all that now.
Mrs. Mathison sighed. She could not, in honesty, say much for the temporary hands as eligible prospects. “There’s plenty others. Like—like Zack Harper. Such a nice, clean boy—”
“That nump!”
“And there’s Charlie MacCorry—”
“
Him
.” A contemptuous rejection.
Her mother didn’t press it. Charlie MacCorry hung around a great deal more than Mrs. Mathison wished he would, and she didn’t want him encouraged. Charlie was full of high spirits and confidence, and might be considered flashily handsome, at least from a little distance off. Up close his good looks seemed somehow exaggerated, almost as in a caricature. What Mrs. Mathison saw in him, or thought she saw, was nothing but stupidity made noisy by conceit. Mentioning him at all had been a scrape at the bottom of the barrel.
She recognized the upset Laurie was going through as an inevitable thing, that every girl had to go through, somewhere between adolescence and marriage. Mrs. Mathison was of limited imagination, but her observation was sound, and her memory clear, so she could remember having gone through this phase herself. A great restlessness went with it, like the disquiet of a young wild goose at the flight season; as if something said to her, “Now, now or never again! Now, or life will pass you by....” No one who knew Mrs. Mathison now could have guessed that at sixteen she had run away with a tin-horn gambler, having met him, in secret, only twice in her life. She could remember the resulting embarrassments with painful clarity, but not the emotions that had made her do it. She thought of the episode with shame, as an unex-plainable insanity, from which she was saved only when her father overtook them and snatched her back.
She had probably felt about the same way when she ran off a second time—this time more successfully, with Aaron Mathison. Her father, a conservative storekeeper and a pillar of the Baptist Church, had regarded the Quakers in the Mathison background as benighted and misled, more to be pitied than anything else. But the young shaggy-headed Aaron he considered a dangerously irresponsible wild man, deserving not a whit more confidence than the staved-off gambler—who at least had the sense to run from danger, not at it. He never spoke to his daughter again. Mrs. Mathison forever after regarded this second escapade as a sound and necessary move, regarding which her parents were peculiarly blind and wrong-headed. Aaron Mathison in truth was a man like a great rooted tree, to which she was as tightly affixed as a lichen; no way of life without him was conceivable to her.