by Anya Seton
He pointed a stumpy finger down the gulch, where the light of campfires silhouetted shadowy figures on horseback, and there was the sound of stamping feet and rhythmic shouting.
‘Utes?’ asked Terry, handing over a silver dollar and a fifty-cent piece.
‘Mostly,’ answered Wootton; ‘a few Navajos and Apaches too, seeing as them tribes ain’t squabbling with each other right at this moment, for a wonder. I let ’em all go through the gate free. Makes ’em friendly, and when they figger they’ve got some grievance they’ll come and tell me before they go on the warpath stravaging after scalps.’
‘We 11 stay with you tonight,’ said Terry, grinning. ‘We need supplies, anyhow. This is my sister.’ He indicated Fey by a careless wave. At this, old Sam, who had been mumbling alcoholically to himself, gave a derisive snort.
Uncle Dick peered at the mountaineer, then he turned his head and thoughtfully inspected Terry, Fey, and the wagon. Wootton was a philosopher and within certain limits a moralist. He had experienced a great deal of raw living in his fifty years and now he had reached a more contemplative stage. Isolated as he was at the top of a mountain pass, he took a keen interest in every aspect of the pageantry which flowed along his tollroad. Some of it was routine, empty freight trains returning East, and the bull-whackers who drove them as stupid as their oxen, but there were also any number of strange travelers, not counting the Indians.
The Barlow-Sanderson stages always yielded interesting passengers, and contact with these was his great pleasure. He savored situations, and his own Jove-like position, which sometimes afforded him the opportunity of resolving them. The money he took in was not important, and he tossed it all into an old whiskey keg which he kept behind the bar. While he led the way into his hotel and flung the silver received from Terry into the keg, he was examining Fey. Women were rarities on the Santa Fe Trail. Those who did come through were almost always army wives or enterprising harlots. This girl was neither, and she puzzled him.
‘Have a seat by the fire, ma’am,’ he said to her hospitably. ‘ I’ll make you up my Ladies’ Special to warm your stomach while you’re waiting for vittles.’ Fey gave him a small polite smile and sat down on a bench by the great fireplace. She was tired, and the evening air was chilly.
Terry leaned over the bar while Uncle Dick busied himself among the bottles. Old Sam had managed to lurch inside the door and then collapsed in a heap in the corner, where no one paid any attention to him. There were three other men at a table, and a couple more playing checkers on the far side of the room. They were all prospectors hurrying South to investigate a rumor of pay dirt in the Moreno Valley.
After a few minutes, a half-breed woman waddled in from the kitchen bearing a plate of thick meat sandwiches which she offered to Fey and Terry. These and Wootton’s ‘Ladies’ Special ’—which turned out to be whiskey and milk—revived Fey. She leaned back in her rustic chair by the fireplace and a hazy glow of well-being stole over her. Her eyes turned inevitably to Terry. He was lounging at the bar in the immemorial masculine attitude, one foot on the rail and a supporting elbow near the open whiskey bottle. This revealed the lithe lines of his body in the open blue shirt and buckskin trousers, and his bright crisp curls vivid against the stone wall behind. She heard his easy laugh and Wootton’s answering chuckle. Terry was recounting an incident of the trip, making a good joke out of it now, and yet, at the time, when dealing with one of the inevitable frictions or annoyances of travel, he did not respond with humor, but with a quick irritability. Fey knew this discrepancy, and many others in his nature. Knew them intellectually, and immediately discounted them. What mattered was the occasional piercing charm of his smile, the set of his brown neck on the heavily muscled shoulders, the careless grace of his movements.
She continued to watch him, and the unaccustomed whiskey relaxed her defences so that her unguarded eyes were easily read by Uncle Dick. He observed her shrewdly, then brought his gaze back to Terry, who was pouring himself another drink.
‘Whyn’t you marry that gel, Dillon?’ said Wootton, cutting across Terry’s flow of anecdote.
Terry was startled. He threw Wootton a quick look. ‘ I told you she was my sister,’ he said resentfully.
‘Rot!’ said the older man.
‘Well, she might as well be,’ snapped Terry, and he stuck his jaw out. The whiskey was beginning to take effect.
‘You don’t say,’ said Wootton. ‘So that’s the way it is.’ He examined Fey again, but this time the girl had seen him, and she turned her head and gazed at the fire. Her motion held both pride and pathos. Wootton frowned.
‘How’s she happen to be traveling with you if you ain’t sleeping together? ’ he inquired in a lower tone.
Terry’s eyes glinted. ‘ I’m damned if I know. I thought when we started out, she was crazy for me.’
Wootton’s mouth twitched. She must have been a right smart little girl to hold off.
‘I reckon she is crazy for you, boy,’ he said. ‘ But did the idee ever occur to you she might be a decent woman? Whyn’t you marry her? ’
‘Hell!’ cried Terry, angrily grabbing the bottle. ‘You keep harping on that like an old biddy. I’m not a marrying man, and certainly not a little piece of fluff I picked out of Santa Fe.’
‘She don’t look like a little piece of fluff,’ said Wootton, patiently moving the bottle out of Terry’s reach. ‘ She’s quiet and she’s got breeding. I ain’t knocked around for fifty years without knowing breeding when I see it.’
Terry scowled, and his anger rose. Nosy old duffer, yammering away, none of his business. Anger at Fey, too, surging hot above the current of puzzled resentment.
Wootton perfectly understood Terry’s reaction. He’d seen dozens like Dillon here on the frontier; uncomplicated males, always ready for a fight or a woman, always craving adventure and change—avid for easy money, but lacking the calm drive necessary to obtain it. Sometimes marriage to a good woman was the making of them, and, anyway, it was high time the West settled down into respectability like the rest of the country.
Too much lawlessness still, too much of this sort of thing, free, easy morals — giving the West a bad name.
‘I could hitch you two up good and legal right now,’ he said, in his quiet drawl. ‘I’m the law up hereabouts.’
Terry lifted his empty glass in a violent gesture, but his arm paused in midair as Wootton’s words penetrated his mind. ‘You a J.P.?’ he asked slowly.
The other man nodded, threw back his buckskin coat and pointed with some pride to a shiny badge. ‘ I’m all the law there is, boy, between Cimarron and Trinidad.’
Terry put the glass down thoughtfully. A few words mumbled here in a mountain shack by this old duffer would hardly be a marriage at all, not to count. But it would doubtless satisfy Fey. Then for the rest of their trip back East, there’d be no more nonsense about sleeping arrangements, nor would she be able to balk over her part of the medicine show act. She’d be grateful to him and a wife does as she’s told.
He swung around and looked at Fey. ‘Come here, honey,’ he called.
She turned, and her white skin, already flushed by the fire, deepened in tone, for his voice was wooing and tender. The checker-players in the corner looked up and winked at each other. Terry saw the lascivious looks they gave Fey as she moved slowly to him across the bare boards. He put his arm around her waist, savoring its firm flesh and the pressure of her breast against his side.
He leaned down and kissed the top of her head on the glossy black braids.
Uncle Dick Wootton nodded to himself and disappeared behind the red cotton curtain at the side of the bar.
Fey stood quiet, leaning against him a little, and waiting for the explanation of this new mood. Since the night at Fort Union, he had not even been civil to her. Her stillness and drooped lids betrayed nothing of the wild turmoil inside her. His physical nearness was like drowning, drowning in waves of suffocating gold. Her body ached with swift desire.
>
‘What do you say we get married, Fey?’ said Terry, grinning down at her, the grin of a small boy presenting a bird’s egg to his first sweetheart.
He waited a minute, and as she did not answer, he added in some irritation, ‘What’s the matter with you? That’s what you’ve been after right along.’
She moistened her lips, and moved. ‘Yes,’ she said. The first blankness was passing. Of course, that was what she had wanted, from almost the first moment of seeing him. ‘When we get to Trinidad there must be a padre——’
‘Can’t wait that long, my girl, now I’ve made up my mind. Old Wootton here’s a J.P. We’ll do it right now, tonight. Find a padre later some place, of course,’ he added quickly.
‘Tonight,’ she repeated. She looked at the bar beside her; its stained pine surface exuded a stench of spilled whiskey and tobacco juice. The mirror behind it, Wootton’s great pride, had one corner starred by a spent bullet from a long-forgotten fight, but its good surface faithfully reflected the huge room; the stuffed heads of Rocky Mountain sheep and an elk, the rough boulder walls, the smoky oil lamp swaying on a chain from the roof, the five frowzy malodorous prospectors grouped around the far table and the checker game, the tin spittoons on the floor edging the buffalo-hide rug, and in one comer old Sam, crumpled into a heap and snoring acridly.
Terry was not unintuitive, and he sensed some of the girl’s dismay. He knew that to her marriage must have always meant church and priest, new clothes and ceremony, as it did to most women, and since he was now passionately eager for her, he controlled his annoyance at her hesitation, and drew her away from the bar to a recess by the fireplace.
‘Look, Fey,’ he said, holding her shoulders in his big hands, ‘I’m crazy for you.’ His voice deepened and throbbed. ‘I’m proving it, aren’t I? I’ve treated you mighty fine, haven’t I, leaving you alone, respecting you? Why, we belong together. We were made for each other, sweetheart, ever since the world began.’
He had forgotten that this last speech was a direct quotation from a part he had once played. She listened only to his words and his voice, determinedly deaf to an undertone which reverberated far below the surface of her rushing joy. For now it seemed that her heart would burst in the clamor of its excitement, and she raised her arms with a kind of violence and threw them around his neck.
‘Plenty of time for that later,’ said Uncle Dick’s dryly humorous voice behind them. ‘ Get slicked up, you two. I’m fixing as much of a jamboree as we can manage up here. Got the squaw to making flapjacks out in the kitchen shed, and I’ve sent word to the Injuns’s going to be a party. They like that; takes their minds off the warpath.’
‘Got the bridal chamber ready, too?’ shouted Terry, and he showed his white teeth in a triumphant laugh while his arm tightened around Fey. The prospectors chuckled, and abandoning the checker game crowded around the bar demanding drinks on the house.
Color flowed up Fey’s neck and she turned her head away, but her body pulsed and tingled, and her right side pressed against Terry’s seemed seared by heat.
‘I’ll go change my shirt,’ said Terry. ‘We haven’t any fancy duds for the great event, but I guess the Injuns won’t mind.’
‘You look good to me just the way you are,’ he added ardently to Fey, ‘but pull out that blue gewgaw you wear; it’ll liven up your dress.’ He reached a possessive hand inside the neck of her bodice and drew out the turquoise pendant.
She made a quick, reflexive gesture, but after all, why not? In the bar mirror she could see the radiant blue of the jewel against the darker blue and yellow of her calico dress. It did look pretty, and she had no other ornament.
‘One little drink for the groom to get up his courage!’ cried Terry, winking at the delighted audience, and he drew Fey with him over to the bar.
‘To you, my love and my bride!’ he cried. He kissed her on the mouth, then raising his glass began to drink.
Her nostrils dilated and she gave him a slow, answering smile.
There was a stir in the back of the room. The door opened and shut. Fey was hardly aware that people had entered, and with them a wave of cold resinous air from the mountains. But in another moment she experienced a sharp unease. It pounded like a black wedge through the sensuous warmth. She stiffened, hating the intrusion, aware that her heart had begun to beat not with the expectant passion of a moment ago, but in the mounting rhythm of that separating wedge.
It seemed to her that this went on for a long time while she resentfully searched for the meaning. Yet it was not a long time, for as Terry placed his glass on the bar and murmured, ‘I’m going to spruce up now, honey—be right back,’ she saw the cause.
The Indians had come in, old Conmach, the Ute chief, some of his council, and one other, who stood apart, silent in the corner of the room.
‘Natanay,’ Fey whispered; she took a quick step away from Terry, and across the room she received the full impact of the Navajo shaman’s calm gaze. His eyes moved slowly down to the turquoise on her breast, they rested on Terry, who was entirely oblivious, then returned to Fey’s face with added intensity, an edge of anger.
Terry went out through the kitchen shed to find the wagon and a change of clothes; the prospectors clustered around one end of the bar, tactfully leaving the bride alone; the Ute chief and his warriors drew apart beside the fireplace and conferred in low tones; but Fey saw nothing except the tall figure by the door.
At last she walked reluctantly over to him. His unshifting gaze did not lighten. When she stood in front of him, he inclined his head. ‘ Que Dios te bendiga, muchacha,’ he said, and went on in his measured Spanish. ‘ Is it to this your vision has brought you, my child? ’ There was contempt and reproof in his tone.
Fey lifted her chin. ‘Tonight I will be married to the man I love. To what better place could my vision have brought me?’
The lines deepened around Natanay’s eyes. ‘Lust, muchacha,’ he said. ‘Not love.’
Fey’s face blazed. ‘That’s not true!’
Natanay shook his head. ‘It is true. You are not the first to mistake lust for love, but for those others—most of them—it does not matter. For you it is different. Your soul was awakening. The Great Spirit meant you for a better destiny.’
Fey’s lips set. She looked down at the floor. ‘What do you know about me or my destiny?’ she said sullenly. ‘You’re an Indian and a heathen. I’m a white girl and a good Catholic.’
Natanay made a faint sound, but when he spoke it was in a tone of pitying sadness. ‘Come outside where the air is pure. One cannot discuss truth in the stench of drunkenness and passion.’
She did not wish to obey him, but she went to the chair by the fire and, picking up her shawl, silently followed the Navajo outside. He led her across the tollroad and up a little rise of ground on the other side. Here the air was fragrant with the fresh smell of the forest, and the stars—each a shimmering silver lamp—seemed as near as the treetops on Raton Mountain.
Natanay turned his back on the cabin below them and lifted his arms toward the west. He stood for several minutes in silent invocation and Fey waited impatiently. Her awe of him kept her quiet. He was a magnificent figure silhouetted against the sky, his head thrown back as though he listened, his dark face raised to the starlight.
At last he began to speak, and between each word there was a pause as he translated from his own language into Spanish.
‘Three summers ago, while my people were banished from their own land into degradation, you had a vision of their return. It gave me—their shaman—courage and hope. Now they are beginning to go back to their own place, and the weight of sorrow is rolling from me. In payment for this vision of yours, I try to help you now.’
He lowered his arms and folded them. She saw the dark bronze of his face in the dimness and it seemed that his eyes caught the eternal light of the stars.
‘You have taken the wrong trail,’ he said. ‘Your body has deafened you to the song of the Spirit.
Go back!’
‘Never!’ she whispered. ‘Natanay, you’re old, you’re a Navajo. How could you understand? I’ve found my man, and there was nothing for me in Santa Fe. Nothing,’ she repeated vehemently. The word echoed and died away, while Natanay waited motionless.
When there was peace again, he spoke. ‘ This man down there ’ —he gestured toward Wootton’s cabin—‘is not your true mate. He is weak.’
‘He isn’t,’ she cried. ‘I love him.’
The Navajo continued imperturbably, ‘He is weak and you will make him weaker. You will be bad for him as he for you.’
‘You can’t know that,’ she said. ‘You’re wrong. You don’t understand.’
He raised his hand and the passionate denials were silenced on her lips. ‘You will not listen.’ He spoke in sadness, and added in a low, meditative voice: ‘Poor little one. A few are born for true greatness, and when these stubbornly deny the voice of the Spirit, it is their punishment that later they must look back and see the wrong turnings when they can no longer go back.’
A cold wind blew along the valley. Fey shivered and pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. From the cabin below she heard the thrumming of the banjo and Terry’s voice singing ‘ The Arkansas Traveler.’
‘I must go down,’ she said. ‘-He’s waiting.’
Natanay folded his arms again beneath the Navajo blanket. He lowered his head once in assent. ‘Adios, chiquita.’ His eyes rested on the turquoise which gleamed blue between the folds of her shawl. ‘You still wear the sky-stone,’ he said quietly. ‘ May you never lose it.’
He walked away from her, his moccasined feet noiseless on the rough ground. He vanished into the darkness of the pines.
