Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  When the five remaining warriors broke for the open prairie, Kit and Jim swung east to attempt to intercept them. Kit’s mule was exceptionally hard mouthed—once he got his speed up, there was no stopping him. When he was nearly into the fleeing Pawnees, Kit suddenly realized he no longer had control of his mount—the very thing that had caused the death of Drum Stewart was now happening to him. He pulled back on the reins with all his might but it had no effect on the mule at all. In fact, he increased his speed to a wild runaway’s, which very quickly carried Kit straight into the midst of the fleeing Pawnees.

  Jim Snow was doing his best to catch up, but knew it was hopeless. The mare wasn’t as fast as the big mule. Jim also saw that Kit had lost control of his mount and was fast approaching a collision point. It occurred to Jim that he could shoot the mule, but Kit might be injured in the fall, in which case he would be an easy kill.

  Kit himself, as he got closer and closer to impact with the Pawnees, thought of shooting the mule himself, but that would leave him with an empty gun, so he held off.

  Rattle was the only one of the fleeing raiders to notice that a collision was coming—Red Knee, flushed with his triumph, was merely running for the fun of it, and the other boys, happy to be alive, were whooping and hollering, giving no thought to the white man on the mule. Rattle thought he might get an arrow into the foolish white man whose mule was running away with him, but to his great annoyance, his horse jumped a bush and he dropped his arrow just as he was ready to string it. Before he could ready a second, the huge mule plunged right into the midst of the surprised Pawnees. Rattle’s horse and two others were knocked down. The mule fell to its knees, tried to recover, then fell and rolled over one of the Pawnee boys just as Kit Carson jumped free. Rattle was knocked into the melee but clung to his bow and, as soon as he could scramble to his feet, readied an arrow to fire at the foolish white man whose erratic mount had knocked down and possibly damaged three Pawnee horses.

  Kit saw Rattle notch the arrow and fired at him from the hip—the arrow, when released, flew over his head. Two of the Pawnee boys whose mounts had been knocked down were staggering around with the wind knocked out of them. Red Knee and a boy named Duck Catcher because of his skill with snares were the only raiders whose horses were not affected.

  Highly annoyed that this white man had spoiled their triumphant departure, Red Knee turned back, meaning to kill the man—whose gun was empty—with his hatchet. He leapt off the horse he had taken from the dead Thistle-Pricks-Us and ran at the white man on foot, hatchet raised.

  Jim Snow, in easy range now, saw that Kit—faced off with Rattle—had no notion that he was being menaced from the rear. Jim fired—the bullet took Red Knee in the side, startling him so that he promptly sat down—but that reaction only lasted a second. In a moment Red Knee got to his feet, remounted, and joined Duck Catcher in flight.

  Pomp, Kit, and Jim all knew that the battle was won, but High Shoulders, one leg covered with blood from the wound in his hip, raced in and lanced one of the winded Pawnee boys before anyone could wave him off. Rattle, winded too, and wounded in the thigh by Kit’s bullet, was unable to find the arrow he had been about to shoot; he began to sing his death song—so did the other young Pawnee, who faced the white men armed with nothing but a knife. Jim came riding up, rifle at the ready, but he held his fire. Red Knee and Duck Catcher, having ridden off a certain distance, pulled up, uncomfortably aware that the battle was not over and that two of their comrades were facing death. They sat on their horses indecisively, trying to decide what to do. Matters that had at first looked simple were now very confused.

  For a moment, both sets of warriors were poised in tense indecision; they were ready for blood and death and yet did not feel quite compelled to push matters to a conclusion. The excitable High Shoulders was ready to kill both Pawnees, but Pomp waved him back and Kit merely stood where he was, his gun empty. The conflict could have been rejoined and finished in a few seconds; and yet, no one moved or spoke until Pomp realized that there was something familiar about Rattle.

  “But you’re the son of Skinny Woman,” he said. “My father was married to her sister once. Aren’t you called Rattle?”

  Rattle, surprised that Pomp, or Six Tongues, had remembered him—they had met for only a few minutes after a buffalo hunt—merely nodded.

  “Dern, your pa’s been married to more women than Bonney,” Kit said. “It’s hard to go anyplace without running into some of his kin.”

  Rattle left off his death song—it didn’t seem that the whites were in the mood to kill them, though it annoyed him that Red Knee, who had started the whole thing, was just sitting there watching from a safe distance.

  “We tried to steal some horses from the Cheyenne, but they were too much for us,” Rattle said—suddenly he felt very tired.

  “Yes, it’s hard to steal from those Cheyenne,” Pomp agreed. He tried to speak very carefully—such situations were tricky to get through. If any one of the combatants, on either side, felt that their courage or honor was being slighted, knives and hatchets would flash and it might be necessary to kill all the young Pawnees, something Pomp wanted to avoid if at all possible. They were just boys, raiding a little; if it became necessary to kill them all, the tribe would certainly attempt to avenge them. The company might be facing a hundred warriors this time, instead of these few youths.

  Rattle knew that the whites could easily finish them off, but it seemed their blood had cooled—it might be possible for them to leave.

  “We would like to take our dead,” he said, addressing himself to Pomp. The Ute, he knew, would have liked to fight on, but the whites did not seem in a mood to support him. Even the Sin Killer was no longer leveling his gun.

  Once Jim heard Pomp talking calmly to the young Pawnee he knew that there needed to be no more killing. It was screams and war cries that kept battles going. Once there was even a little friendly conversation, the war mood usually died; unless someone jumped in the wrong direction or accidentally fired a gun, there would be, for a time, an end to slaughter. After the terrible effort of violence a calm seemed to enfold them all. Even Lord Berrybender, who was approaching cautiously in his buggy, a gun across his lap, seemed to feel it.

  “There’s no calm like the calm of a battlefield, once the killing’s over,” he remarked, looking around him with composure. There was the great sky, and the light, waving grass—there lay the dead. The living, no longer locked in struggle, had a moment of quiet, of gratitude. After all, they were alive. Even High Shoulders had calmed down.

  One horse had a broken leg. It was a Pawnee horse, and it was agreed that the Pawnees should have the meat. When the horse was killed, High Shoulders even helped with the butchering, which was accomplished in a very short time.

  In the distance, the apprehensive women watched. Father Geoffrin and Clam de Paty were talking calmly to Ben Hope-Tipping, who still sat upright. Pomp hurried over—just as he arrived, Ben lay back in the grass and died. The Pawnees were now trotting slowly away, with their three dead and their fresh horse meat. Soon the prairie swallowed them up, as a boat is lost in the curving distance of the sea. Pomp’s father came ambling over. Clam de Paty was sobbing, bitterly remorseful because he had not managed to warn his friend in time to save him.

  “Skinny Woman’s son was not hurt badly,” Pomp informed his father. “Kit just wounded him in the fatty part of his leg.”

  Toussaint Charbonneau shook his head, in general regret.

  “Those boys are too young to be out raiding on their own,” he remarked. “Too young to have any judgment. They thought we’d be easy pickings, but we weren’t.”

  “Dern if I’ll ever ride that goddamned hard-mouth mule again,” Kit declared. “That big ugly fool nearly got me killed.”

  “You don’t need to be cussing, let’s just dig these graves,” Jim told him.

  “Jim Bridger and the Sublettes would go off just when we needed them,” Kit said. He was so happy to be alive t
hat he felt he could indulge in a few complaints.

  “I guess you’d complain if you were in heaven,” Jim told him. “Only if you don’t stop that cussing, you won’t be in heaven.”

  “You could be wrong about that,” Kit told him, angrily. “You ain’t God—you could be wrong.”

  30

  She had armed herself with an axe . . .

  “WHAT do they think just happened, a fox hunt?” Tasmin asked, with considerable pique. She had armed herself with an axe, which she still gripped tightly. Coal and Little Onion had skinning knives, Cook a great cleaver, Vicky, Buffum, and Mary sharp hatchets, Eliza a rolling pin. Unlikely Amazons though they were, they crouched behind the wagon, ready to mount a spirited defense of their lives and their virtue; yet abruptly the crisis seemed to pass. The combatants had become more or less at ease with one another. Jim and Kit were helping the Pawnees tie their dead on horses; High Shoulders helped cut up the horse.

  “It was the same with the Utes,” Tasmin reminded them. “Enemies one day and customers the next.”

  “I suppose it’s merely the frontier way, Tasmin,” Vicky remarked.

  “More likely the military way, I guess,” Tasmin replied. “If battles were fought to the last man, then there would soon be no more battles and the only masculine thing our silly males would have to do is fornicate, and I’m sure they’d soon tire of that simple pleasure.”

  “Not High Shoulders,” Bess observed, with a blush. “High Shoulders never tires of fornication.”

  “Well, then ain’t you lucky,” Tasmin told her. “Many of us are forced to endure lengthy stretches of abstinence. I suppose we had better go attend to Milly and Tim—or what’s left of them.”

  ’And Mr. Hope-Tipping and Senor Yanez,” Mary reminded her. “Fortunately my good Piet is safe.”

  During the anxious moments of battle the babies had been piled in the wagon and enjoined to keep still. Tasmin had looked at Monty so sternly that he opened his mouth in dismay. His mother’s stern looks, which came without warning or explanation, usually had the effect of freezing Monty in his place, which was just what Tasmin intended.

  Eliza, Cook’s clumsy helper, who had only been allowed a rolling pin by way of a weapon, for fear that if given anything sharp she would probably only injure herself, was sobbing hopelessly, in grief at Milly’s death. Though lately they had fallen out—Milly then a nobleman’s mistress, Eliza just an unwanted servant girl—Eliza wept because she had now lost her one friend, a girl, like herself, born into the service of the Berrybenders. Milly was dead, and where would she ever find a friend in this violent place, America?

  Tasmin, Buffum, and Mary carrying some worn blankets that might be suitable for shrouds, trudged off into the prairie toward where Milly and Tim had last been seen.

  Jim and Pomp came hurrying over, anxious to divert this burial party if they could.

  “I wouldn’t go look,” Pomp told Tasmin. “Me and Jim can tidy them up.”

  “I’m going to go look,” Tasmin informed him bluntly. “Who were those Indians, Jimmy? Why did they attack us?”

  “Pawnees—just boys,” Jim told her. “They couldn’t manage to steal any horses from the Cheyenne, so they decided to try and kill a few of us.”

  “They didn’t merely try—they succeeded,” Tasmin pointed out. ‘Are Seftor Yanez and Mr. Hope-Tipping both dead?”

  Pomp nodded.

  “They killed four of us—how many of them did we kill?”

  “Three,” Jim said.

  “Then it’s a narrow victory for the savage Pawnees,” Tasmin declared. “We women weren’t frightened out of our wits for nothing.”

  Gripping her axe, she had been so scared that she was trembling, but as soon as she saw Jim racing back to join the battle, her wild terror diminished. Her husband might not understand her, but Tasmin had absolute confidence in his ability to protect her.

  “Why do you want to be looking at those dead folks?” Jim asked. “They’re apt to be chopped up bad.”

  “That’s precisely why I want to see them,” Mary told him. “Piet thinks I’m progressing rather rapidly with my anatomical studies—I’m sure a close look at poor Tim and Milly’s remains will be most helpful.”

  “You hush,” Tasmin said. She had no real answer for her husband’s question. Why did she want to see two badly mangled corpses? Pomp and Jim gave up the effort to stop them; soon they were looking at the remains of two servants who, for all their lives, had been entirely familiar: Tim and Milly.

  “It’s exactly as it was with Fraulein Pfretzskaner,” Buffum informed them. “They cracked her skull and then seemed unable to stop chopping.”

  “The human cranium must be little harder to crack than a coconut,” Mary said, staring sadly at the remains of the girl who, for most of her life, had washed and ironed her clothes.

  Buffum suddenly burst into deep, gulping sobs— the sight of the mutilated girl brought back hard memories of her own brief but painful captivity by the Mandans. She remembered the terrible cold at night, with herself and Mademoiselle Pellenc huddling under a bit of deerskin they had snatched from the dogs. Then the men had been at her; the terrible witch woman, Draga, had beaten them with hot sticks. Now there lay Milly and Tim: the former she had often abused, the latter was a lover who, though not especially gifted, had done his best. Both were now so gashed about that they might indeed, as Mary suggested, have been cadavers there to be examined by an anatomy class.

  Tasmin put her arms around her sobbing sister. The two corpses already had a waxy look, as if figures in a wax museum had been crudely disassembled. Their remains had already become unhuman. Once there was no life in the flesh, only an absence of life, a sort of unhumanity what was there to say?

  “I don’t know why they refer to dead bodies as mortal remains—of Lord this or that, of Jack and Jill for that matter,” Tasmin told them. “We’re only mortals while we’re alive. Once we aren’t alive, what does remain—these scraps of flesh, these bloody bones— hardly seems worth fussing over.”

  “Oh, don’t be icy, Tasmin,” Buffum sobbed. “Don’t.”

  “Sorry,” Tasmin said. “I very much regret that those Pawnee boys chose to attack us, the result being that neither Tim nor Milly, nor Mr. Hope-Tipping nor good Seftor Yanez, will ever be among us again. But they’re gone—and their husks don’t interest me.

  “We’ll all leave husks someday, somewhere,” she added. “Let’s just bury them and go along.”

  “I suppose they always remove the genitals of the male,” Mary remarked.

  “Not always—in some cases there is no time for such embellishments,” Tasmin told her.

  Buffum, still sobbing, still distraught, stumbled off to find High Shoulders, but Cook—an expert with shrouds—soon arrived, accompanied by Tom Fitzpatrick, who had just missed the battle, though he claimed to have had intimations of it.

  “I seen some birds fly up, and some antelope start running,” he said. “If you’ve been in as many Indian fights as I have, things like that get you wondering.”

  Tasmin left the corpses to Cook and wandered back to the wagon where the children were. Her mind was on the anxious minutes when she had stood behind the wagon, gripping her axe. What would she have done if the battle had gone the other way—or if the Pawnees had passed up Tim and Milly and come straight for the wagon? Suppose Pomp had been killed? Suppose Jim and Kit had been out of earshot, and her father too slow to mount a defense? Could she and the women have somehow fought off these racing warriors with their flashing lances and deadly hatchets? Would old Charbonneau have been able to sway the attackers? Should she and the women have done better to fight, or to submit? After all, Buffum had survived her capture. What if the Pawnees had simply filled them all full of arrows, as they had Mr. Hope-Tipping?

  Tasmin stopped for a moment—her legs suddenly became jelly at the thought of what might have happened. She sank to her knees, feeling a throb of relief deeper than any she had ever felt befo
re: the relief of one who had been within a minute of death and yet had been left alive. The plain around her had never seemed more vast and merciless, the sky above never so filled with light and brilliance. And yet, in this place of light, the darkness of death was not more than a minute away. Her survival had not been due either to the craft of men or to the bounty of the gods: it had been absolute luck. Tim and Milly dragging their fuel sacks around, had blundered right into the path of the warriors—without the brake their deaths provided, the Pawnees would have been at the wagon in only a minute more. Even Pomp and High Shoulders, though they had been quick, might not have been quick enough. The memory of an old book of Greek fables she had had as a child came to her. In it was a picture of Zeus and Poseidon looking down on earthlings through a hole in the clouds, pointing their fingers in an arbitrary way at this mortal or that, far below.

  So it might have been that day, Tasmin felt. Seftor Yanez and Signor Claricia had been sitting next to one another. Ben Hope-Tipping had been no more than an arm’s length from Clam de Paty yet now the Frenchman and the Italian were alive, the Englishman and the Spaniard quite dead.

  She had survived, and so had her child, her sisters, father, husband, lover, and most of the company—and yet the deadly combat had been the work of only seven restless boys. Were not there thousands of Indians somewhere on the plain? What if twenty came, next time, rather than seven? Suppose a hundred came?

  In time strength returned to Tasmin’s legs; she walked on to the wagon, where her hungry child was waiting. The burials were accomplished without ceremony, Father Geoff merely mumbling a few Requiescat

  in paces. No one wanted to linger in this spot where death had caught them. Jim Bridger and the Sublette brothers, returning from a fruitless search for beaver, got back just as the company pulled away from the four mounds of earth on the long prairie.

  “Was it the Partezon?” Jim Bridger asked.