Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  “You’re right, of course,” George said. “If I live I’ll get Kit to help me and do this myself,” Tasmin assured him. “I want my boys together, that’s all.

  “You were once jealous of Jim, weren’t you?” she asked, unexpectedly.

  “Of course,” George admitted. “At first it seemed most unlikely that you’d suit one another—it seemed distinctly improbable. And yet I suppose you do so suit one another—and I can never feel that I suit anyone—so far I haven’t, at least.”

  “I can’t bear to think of Jim right now,” she told him. “Perhaps we do suit—though not steadily. But right now I’m not strong enough to bear the uncertainty of having to wonder if he’s alive. I have to put him out of my mind, or lose my mind. There may be months and months of waiting, this time.

  “Just don’t forget about my boys,” she said again. “If I should die, you and Kit have to do that for me. Promise me. Promise me.”

  “Certainly—you have my promise,” George said. “I shall probably charge Geoff with the same mission,” Tasmin told him. “The fact is you could die yourself, George Catlin.”

  “I easily could,” he admitted.

  Tasmin gave him a grateful look.

  “I fear you sell yourself rather short, where women are concerned,” she told him.

  “Oh, I suppose—certainly I’ve had no notable successes,” he said. “Why do you mention it?”

  “Because I believe I might have made do with you, in a pinch,” Tasmin said. “I fancy I might have made do.”

  52

  Draga had learned about poison in the faraway time . . .

  DRAGA DIDN’T LIKE TRADING in Mexican captives— she longed to return to the Mandan country, where she had had her best years. Of course, it had been necessary to leave when the smallpox struck down the Mandans and the Rees. No traders came from the north in those grim years—the river no longer supplied her with captives, as it had for so long. In those rich years she had been able to count on a steady stream of white captives: French Canadians, Americans from across the Mississippi, the wives of white traders whose husbands had died from one cause or another.

  Draga considered that she knew better than anyone how to handle captives, particularly women captives. She knew ways to make them submissive that didn’t involve disfiguring beatings or tortures. A few women with strong spirits had to be broken by tortures, which of course excited the spectators and sometimes got out of hand, resulting in the death of the captive. But such losses didn’t occur often. The Bad Eye, when he had been the main prophet of the Mandans, discouraged the burnings and tortures that had been common in earlier times. The Bad Eye, in Draga’s view, had been more merchant than prophet. The Mandans held the choice spot on the Missouri River—in the years when the fur market was high, furs poured in from all directions. The Bad Eye discouraged violence because he didn’t want the trappers to be frightened. He wanted the furs to keep pouring in.

  But the smallpox ended that time. Draga had reluctantly gone south, where the work was harder and the pickings less interesting. Compared to what she had known with the Mandans, the southern Indians seemed dull; and she found the mostly squat brown captives dull too. There was little variety. Most of the Mexican children soon got sold back to Mexico, to provide help in the fields.

  She had heard from many sources that the white immigrants to the east would soon begin to push the Mexicans out. Malgres and even Blue Foot claimed this, and yet none of them brought her any of these abundant whites, as captives. The one white woman she had traded lately had been brought in by an Apache—the woman was sold within a week to a Kiowa chief. She had already been used so heavily that her mind was dislodged. The Kiowa wasn’t going to get much for his money.

  Because of this lack it was irritating to have Blue Foot and Tay-ha show up and brag about the big party of whites they had followed, a party that had several young white women in it. Draga thought from their description that it must be the same family of whites that had gone up the Missouri a few years before. What they had been doing all that time was a mystery to Draga, but she was highly irritated with the men for failing to bring in even one salable captive. It was a poor show, so poor that Draga idly considered poisoning all four of those worthless men. Or three of them, at least. She saw no point in wasting poison on old Snag-gle, who was on his last legs anyway.

  Draga had learned about poison in the faraway time when she had been a girl in California—an old woman in one of the missions taught her a few simple poisons; later, at the Mandans’, she had provided herself with strong chemicals brought down by a French apothecary who sometimes visited. These she kept carefully stoppered and concealed. In her opinion there was no quicker or safer way to get rid of men who had become obnoxious than with poisons. The first man she poisoned was Guillaume, an old trader who had once been her lover— Guillaume had caught Draga in the bushes with a young warrior and had had the temerity to beat her: she poisoned him that very night. He woke up with his belly on fire and was dead before the sunrise.

  Now she thought she might poison Malgres, an envious man whom she had never trusted. Besides, Malgres was an indifferent slaver who never brought in interesting captives. Merely having him in camp filled her with a vague sense of menace. Draga considered Malgres a coward, and yet the fact was cowards sometimes made more effective killers than brave men. She never allowed Malgres to get behind her—he might kill on impulse, in hopes of finding the money and jewels she was supposed to have brought with her from the Mandans. She had hidden the money and the jewels under a black rock—but there were hundreds of black rocks in the desert and only she knew where her treasures were hidden.

  As the sun set Draga rested on her heap of buffalo hides, thinking about whom she might poison in the next few days, when a strange cry, of a sort she had never heard before—a kind of rising ululation—suddenly filled the air. It seemed to come from the big bluff, and yet there was nothing to be seen on the bluff except the last rays of the evening sun, shining on the reddish rock.

  Draga was not easily frightened and yet for a moment the hair stood up on her neck. Everyone in camp was suddenly scrambling for their guns, looking, listening to the strange, indecipherable sounds floating above them. Draga at first doubted that the sounds were human. She had heard that panthers sometimes made strange screaming sounds. Certainly there could be a panther near camp, hoping to kill one of the horses. But she had glimpsed panthers often in her life and had never heard one of them scream.

  As abruptly as they began, the strange cries ended—though the echoes of the last call seemed to curl off some cliffs to the south.

  The cry stopped, the sun slipped under the horizon, winter dusk closed in, and yet no one in the camp of slavers had moved. The men all waited with their guns. The captive children huddled together. The Mexican girls began to pray to the saints.

  Draga forgot about poisoning anyone.

  She walked over to consult with Malgres and Ramon, both of whom looked scared.

  “Was it a panther?” she asked.

  Both men shook their heads. “It was no panther—it was the Sin Killer,” Malgres said. “He’s here somewhere.”

  “Where? I don’t see him,” Draga remarked.

  Of course, she had heard stories about the ferocity of this Sin Killer, but she supposed most of them were lies. It took very little to get people started lying. She knew the Osage claimed that the Sin Killer had eaten the lightning and so could not be killed by ordinary weapons. Others said he was married to one of the English girls from the steamboat. Still others claimed his wives were Ute. The conflicting stories just convinced Draga that he was probably an ordinary frontiersman who had made a few lucky kills, after which a legend grew up about him.

  “He’s no legend,” Malgres insisted. “In a second he destroyed Obregon.”

  “But Obregon was always slow,” Draga reminded them. “He thought too much of himself.”

  “If it’s the Sin Killer I think we should
leave,” Ramon proposed. The sound reminded him of how Obregon had moaned and screamed from the pain of his splintered jaw—they had finally killed him, to rid themselves of his cries.

  “Obregon could not stand pain,” Ramon said, distractedly, fingering his own jaw. A broken face must be extremely painful. What if the Sin Killer still had his club?

  Malgres at once disagreed with Ramon about the business of departure—if the Sin Killer was close by, the last thing he intended to do was flee into the desert. The two of them would be easy prey if they tried to do that.

  “Here, we are at least a dozen guns,” Malgres argued. “Surely he wouldn’t attack a dozen well-armed men.”

  “All of us put together couldn’t kill him,” Ramon declared gloomily. “He is quick as a panther when he moves. Remember how he jumped at Obregon?”

  Malgres did remember. He considered himself a fast man, but the Sin Killer might be faster.

  “Can’t you make a bad spell?” Malgres asked Draga.

  Draga thought it might be wiser to make a bad poison and feed it to Malgres and Ramon, for being such worthless cowards. She would just make them coffee one morning, pretending to be helpful. Then she would dribble a few drops of her strongest poison in the murky coffee—after a few swallows Malgres and Ramon would be writhing around like lizards whose backs were broken. Before the coffee cooled they’d be dead.

  But how could she poison the Sin Killer, a creature whose existence she only half believed in? How did one go about poisoning a phantom?

  “Sure, you go bring him here and I’ll poison him quick,” she said. “I’ll put barbs in his belly for sure.”

  Ramon shook his head vigorously at this suggestion.

  “I don’t want to bring him here—I want him to go somewhere else,” he said, so frightened that his knees were knocking together.

  Disgusted, Draga turned and stumped back to her pile of hides. Ramon looked as if he might die of fright: how worthless could a man be?

  53

  He had been holding in his anger for days . . .

  JIM KNEW THAT HE HAD been lucky to find a perfect hiding place from which to cry out the Word. If he hadn’t seen the white ram crossing the face of the cliff he would never have found the small cave where he hid himself. His hideaway was under an insloping curve of the cliff. It could not be seen from below. He had been holding in his anger for days, ever since he found the bodies of Petey and Little Onion—finally he let it out for a few minutes, listening to his cries echoing off the distant hills.

  Mainly he cried out to relieve the anger and sorrow he felt—but he also wanted to see what effect it had on the slavers.

  All the men in the camp grabbed their weapons, but none of them fled. They heard the Word, but didn’t know what the cries meant, or what was best to do. The old slaving woman, Draga, had seemed bewildered at first, but she finally went and sat back down on her seat of hides. Jim had no worry that she might spot him—few women who had spent their lives in Indian lodges could see well in old age—years of having smoke in their eyes had dimmed their sight.

  The men Jim meant to kill first, the four who had taken Petey and Little Onion, jumped up and grabbed their weapons, but they slowly calmed down and resumed playing dice. They were not worried enough to run—there seemed to be plenty of liquor in the camp, so probably most of the slavers were drunk, or half drunk.

  Jim meant to kill all the slavers, but he had not planned his assault in much detail. Battle was too unpredictable—it was best just to do what had to be done when blood was up and the fighting fierce. One thing he did do was sharpen the sword he had borrowed from Corporal Dominguin. He had never fought with a sword, or even owned one, but he thought the weapon might be useful if he found himself in the middle of the slavers’ camp. In close quarters, during a fight, many men got flustered and fired their guns foolishly, as Signor Claricia had been prone to do. A sword sharp enough to sever a limb or split a head would be a decided advantage when the time came to strike.

  In the afternoon Jim got out his tattered copy of the Book and fumbled through it. There were two verses that he felt sure were in the Book, but he couldn’t find them. One was “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” The other—he only half remembered it—was “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

  Jim wanted badly to find those verses, but his copy of the Book had so many pages missing that in the end he had to give up. The first seemed to mean that he should let the Lord manage what vengeance need be—but he wasn’t going to heed that verse.

  It was when he remembered Petey and Little Onion that he thought of the second verse. They had been the meek, as he understood the word, but they hadn’t inherited the earth. Instead they had had painful deaths. He had been raised to believe that every word in the Book was true but he couldn’t make that belief jibe with what had just happened— much less with what was about to happen.

  Jim decided it would be best just not to think about the Book until he got back to the company and could talk about his confusion with someone who was educated. He was about to go into battle, and he didn’t plan to hold back. Confusion of the mind was not something he could entertain—not then. The Sin Killer was going to fall upon the heathen, screaming out the Word. His sword and his gun would then accomplish what needed to be done.

  54

  At once everyone fell silent.

  MALGRES SUDDENLY HAD A THOUGHT—a notion about the Sin Killer.

  Ramon, still frightened, had bought some liquor from Draga, who kept some in her brush house. He was now in a stupor, not quite asleep but too drunk to be talkative.

  Malgres gave him a shake. “What?” Ramon asked, apprehensively.

  Malgres pointed to the men who were camped with old Snaggle, the most ancient person in the camp.

  “Weren’t those men arguing about killing a girl?” he asked. “The one with the club did it—he hit the girl too hard, and she died. I think they killed a little boy too.”

  “So what? Nobody wants to drag a child around!” Ramon said.

  “The girl and the little boy came from that big party of whites—the one the Sin Killer was with when he hit Obregon,” Malgres went on.

  “I want to go to sleep—I hate talking about the Sin Killer,” Ramon told him.

  “I think that girl they killed was the Sin Killer’s wife,” Malgres concluded. “The boy must have been his son. He has come for vengeance.”

  “I thought he had a white wife,” Ramon said. “Yes, and an Indian wife too. I tell you, he’s come for his vengeance. That’s why we heard that cry.”

  “Then let him kill them—I don’t like them anyway,” Ramon remarked.

  Malgres, convinced that the Sin Killer was near, and convinced, also, that he had come to kill the four slavers, at once went over to warn the men. Maybe they would want to try and outrun him.

  But the men proved to be rude fellows—they were playing dice and resented Malgres’s interruption.

  “Can’t you see we’re gambling?” Blue Foot asked.

  “Yes, I can see that,” Malgres said. “In my opinion you ought to get on your horses and go. The Sin Killer has come for you.”

  Tay-ha had begun to develop his own uneasy suspicions on that score. What Malgres said might be true. How could such a sound come from a bare cliff? Probably there was a cave they couldn’t see. He tried to talk Blue Foot and Bent Finger into going with him to see if he could spot the cave, but they weren’t interested.

  “There must be a way up it,” Tay-ha said. “We ought to go have a look.”

  “We’ll just kill the man when we see him. What does he want?” Bent Finger said. He was losing at dice—his mood was sour.

  “I think he wants the men who killed his wife and baby,” Malgres declared.

  Blue Foot took offense at once. “How do you know so much about it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know much about it—I just had an opinion,” Malgres said—he didn’t know why he had troubled
to warn this quarrelsome bunch.

  “He knows because you bragged,” old Snaggle said to Blue Foot. “You told everybody you killed a girl and a child.”

  “I doubt they were the Sin Killer’s,” Blue Foot answered, but he was beginning to feel shaky. Why had this Malgres been so rude as to interrupt their game?

  At once everyone fell silent. Then Blue Foot rattled the dice, but didn’t roll them.

  “I think the Sin Killer’s dead,” Tay-ha mentioned. “Some Utes caught him and took his hair. I heard that from somebody.”

  He didn’t know why he had made the remark, because it was the opposite of what he believed, which was that the Sin Killer was in a cave, watching them, probably studying their weaknesses, which were many. Somewhere up there the man was watching, making his plans to kill. It was a bad thought to live with.

  “You spoiled a good game and I was winning,” Blue Foot pointed out.

  “You’re too rude—you deserve to be killed,” Malgres told him. Then, feeling that his advice had been scorned, he went away.

  55

  A white man was standing there . . .

  TAY-HA HAD BEGUN to want to own the Mexican woman, whose name was Rosa. At least once and often twice a day he led her a little way from camp and copulated with her. Rosa didn’t resist but she refused to look at him while he was about his pleasure; as soon as he finished and withdrew she stood up and walked wearily back to camp.

  Rosa belonged to Chino, a small half-breed slaver who was well known to put very high prices on his merchandise. He owned a dozen captives and kept them longer than was normal because he refused to lower his price. Tay-ha offered Chino one hundred dollars for Rosa, an offer that irritated Blue Foot. Not only was the price ridiculously high, but having to take a woman with them would seriously limit their mobility. Chino, however, refused the offer; he sometimes took his own pleasure with Rosa and was not going to let her go unless he got a high price.