by Lou Cameron
“It was dark when she left Old Dan’s house,” Rockwell said. “He must have followed her there, then waited till she came out. It would be easy to grab her without being seen. People go to bed early and there are dark places on that street. My guess is he knocked her out with a blow and took her away insensible to some place where he would not be disturbed. God help us, he may have kept her there for days before he killed her.”
I shuddered. Hickman was a huge man, a savage, and I didn’t want to think of the things he did to little Abby. It wouldn’t just be rape; there would have been many beatings. Hickman had ten wives and I guessed them to be listless, defeated creatures. Abby would have fought back, thereby bringing about her death. There had been one final struggle and he had broken her neck.
“I think he took her out to deep water in a boat,” Rockwell went on. “There are boats all along the shore. Boys build them and leave them on the verge. Late at night he killed her, weighted the body, and took her out far from shore. The stones might have held her in any lake but this. You could all but float rocks in this. The buoyancy was too great and the body broke loose. Doc Whit taker says she wasn’t just raped. A big corncob was used too. Doc found traces. Stories are starting up that soldiers from the camp did it. That might be Hickman’s doing. It might not. I’ve got to find that pistol, William. Your part of this will be more dangerous than mine. You have no second thoughts?”
“None,” I said. I didn’t like the plan but it would have to do. Hickman owned several big ranches; the one he lived on was right outside the city limits. My job was to open the corral gate and run off the horses, about sixty or seventy, Rockwell said. All fine horses and worth a great deal of money. They had to be run off in daylight so that everybody on the ranch would turn out to round up the runaway animals.
“Run them off good,” Rockwell said earlier, handing me a fistful of big needles, the kind used by sail makers. “But take care you don’t get kicked to death when you start sticking these in. Damnation! I hate to do that to any animal, but no real harm will be done.”
“What if the horses are guarded?” I asked.
Rockwell shook his head. “They won’t be. There’s no horse thieving in these parts. Anyhow, nobody in his right mind would try to steal that man’s horses. Down from the corral there’s a creek that flows into the lake. That’s where you go after the horses are loose. Wear nothing but your trousers and boots. Hide the rest so you won’t be covered with mud when you go back into the city. You have the clean trousers with you?”
“In my saddlebag,” I answered patiently. We had gone over it three times. I was afraid of Hickman and my nerves were catching up on me. But Rockwell was right; it had to be timed just right.
“Do the best you can,” Rockwell said. “But don’t hang around too long. Go out with the horses. There’s enough of them to give you cover all the way to the creek. If they outdistance you, get down on your belly and crawl the rest of the way. You will be seen from the house if you run. Get into the creek and make your way back to the lake. If I find the pistol I’ll take it to Brigham. I’ll see you at the funeral.”
“You may not find it, Port.”
“I know that, William. Won’t make any difference though. I’ll kill him with or without it, with or without Brigham’s permission.”
“I want to be there, Port.”
“It would be better for you if you weren’t.”
“I don’t care what’s better for me.”
“Why do you have to be there? He’ll be just as dead.”
“I want to see him dead, that’s all. I want to see how the son of a bitch takes it.”
“All right,” Rockwell said. “Just remember this. If I get killed you’re to make your way to Connor’s army. That’s the only place in Utah you’ll be safe, with Hickman after you. I must have your word on that.”
“You have it, Port.”
“Time to get on with it,” he said.
We parted company when we reached the sluggish creek that flowed down from Hickman’s ranch. Rockwell crossed the creek and began the long sweep that would put him on a hill behind the ranch buildings. He would wait there until the horses broke loose. Then, when the entire ranch turned out, he would run to the main house and search for Abby’s big army revolver. Hickman had a large collection of weapons in the room that also served as his office. If Rockwell didn’t find the pistol there, he would be forced to abandon the search.
Driving a long peg into the sandy soil to tether my horse, I thought, Rockwell wants to be right with the Prophet. He was making one last, desperate effort to remain in good standing with his church. Evidence—he wanted evidence that would hold up in the Mormons’ one-man supreme court. But would it do any good if he obtained this, the most damning evidence? Or would the holy man turn his bland, benevolent gaze on Rockwell and tell him there must be no scandal in the Land of the Saints?
I tethered my horse and stripped to my trousers and boots. Then I slipped the .36-caliber pistol into my trousers’ pocket and, clutching my handful of outsized needles, I began my mile-long journey along the sandy banks of the creek. Finding my progress slow, I went down into the water and found that it reached only to my knees. There was mud on the bottom, but I made better time than climbing along the bank. The morning sun was red and the water in the creek looked like blood. The Hickman family would be breakfasting about now. Hickman, his ten wives, and how many children? There were hired men, Rockwell said. How many of them? And what if some of the horses took it into their walnut-sized brains to run into the creek, my escape route? Rockwell said they wouldn’t, they would run for open country. But what if they didn’t, some of them? If some of them ran into the creek they would get to it before I did, and I would be found before the horses.
I waded on for more than three-quarters of a mile before I climbed the bank of the creek and looked up toward the ranch buildings. Smoke from the main house rose straight up in the windless morning air. Beyond the main house was the low log building where the hired hands lived. Steel banged on iron in the smithy; there was no one in sight. While I watched, one of the hired men came out and emptied a pail of water. He went back inside and I moved on.
Now I could see the horses moving in the corral, about one hundred yards from where I lay in hiding. Clutching the needles, I began to crawl. The ground I had to cross was sun baked and bare, flat as a floor. I felt like a fly waiting to be swatted, and it seemed that I had come a long way from reporting the news.
The horses sensed my presence before I got close. The horse, noble steed of song and story, is an idiot hysterical and fearful. The horses shied away from me as I crawled through the bars of the corral. There was enough cover to stand up safely, and I edged my way to the gate. I opened it and rammed home the first needle. There was an ear-shattering scream and the frightened animal ran for the gate. One after another I stabbed with my needles and when five or six rumps had been pierced I threw away the rest of the needles and ran out with the last of the terrified horses.
Up at the house there was shouting. Rockwell had been right: the horses ran faster than I did. The last horse ran past me and I threw myself on the ground and I scuttled toward the creek like a giant land crab.
I flopped into the water and cursed silently when I remembered the pistol in my pocket. This was a percussion weapon and it wouldn’t fire now. The shouting became louder and men were running, their boots thudding on the baked earth. I heard the voices of women and children, and then I heard Hickman’s stentorian bellow. My feet seemed to make an awful lot of noise as I waded toward the lake. I drew the pocket pistol when I heard horse hooves coming down the side of the creek. I looked at the damned pistol. It was wet and wouldn’t fire, I was sure. Perhaps it would if the paper cartridge wasn’t too wet. I looked behind me. There were no tracks because I was in water. But I wondered if there were slide marks where I had thrown myself into the creek. Still holding the small revolver, I crawled up high under the crumbling bank as the
horseman came close. He was cursing and swearing as Saints were said not to do. It was Hickman. There was no mistaking his basso rumble, and I huddled close to the bank, with sand falling in my hair, and never did I think myself closer to death than I did at that moment.
Down from where I stood, the shallow creek gurgled on as before. I remained there, a reluctant passenger for Charon’s ferry. I heard the agitated breath of horse and rider as I cringed in my insecure hiding place, my heart a-patter, the blasted wet revolver in my hand. Damn Rockwell and his plan. I was going to get shot in a minute. Everything takes a cheap seat when you are so close to death. No longer was I am heroic avenger, a lighter of wrongs. I just didn’t want to be killed.
I dared to look up and found myself looking into the frightened, liquid eyes of the horse. The beast looked at me, I looked at it, but there was no whinnying or plunging. I was a horse s neck from being shot. Then Hickman cursed again before he turned the animal and rode back the way he had come. Only then did I slide back down into the water and stumble toward the lake.
A band of orphaned Mormon lads blared out This Blessed Land, and the music sounded suspiciously like an old Calvinist hymn of my youth. Whatever its origin, the Saintly lads managed to make it sound warlike. I would have preferred a gentle Quaker hymn for gentle Abby but then, after all, hymns are for the living and not for the dead. We are stirred by hymns as we are by martial music. All soldiers in God’s army, or the Devil’s, we all march to different drummers, and we all get to where we are going—in the end.
Abby had a fine day for her funeral; it could not have been finer. A blue sky with only a wisp of decorative clouds. It wasn’t hot as it had been; Nature had conspired to give Abby a good send-off. On my way back from the lake, my muddy boots wiped clean with my wet trousers, I stopped in McSorley’s to buy a pint of brandy. McSorley sold it to me without a word. I might have been a stranger in town.
I was walking out when he said, “I heard you found the girl.”
I whirled on him. “What’s it to you?”
His red face grew sullen and he said, “I’ve been here longer than you have, Forbes. I knew the girl. She was a nice little girl and I’m sorry she’s dead.”
I guess he was. What man wouldn’t be? No matter that this man had been ready to kill me on the day before. I was tired of everything. In my room, I changed into my best black suit and drank brandy between putting on my shirt and pulling on my boots. I didn’t know how Rockwell had fared; he might even have been dead.
As a Gentile, I could not enter the Temple where Abby’s body lay in its coffin. The Mormon orphans sang outside, their untrained voices ringing back from the granite walls of this far west Canterbury. Fisk, the undertaker, his ornate hearse, and his assistants were there. Other Gentiles were there, a fair crowd of them; I was not the only outlander come to pay my last respects to the waitress. I saw Cassie and Fitz in the crowd, but they made no attempt to approach me. Cassie saw me looking, but she didn’t nod. And then I saw Hickman approaching on a great black stallion. He looked at me and I looked back at him.
He knows, I thought. Let him know. I want him to know.
Hickman ignored me after that first veiled look. He disappeared into the gloom of the Temple, and by then it was past three o’clock and still there was no sign that the funeral was about to begin. At first, I didn’t know what it meant when armed Mormons began to push the watchers aside as roughly as they had to. Then a gilded coach worthy of a South American strongman rumbled into sight, with other mounted Mormons attending it, and I knew then, with a silent and unexpressed sneer, that the holy man had come to accompany the little waitress as far as the grave.
Something made me glance toward Cassie— spying Cassie MacKay—as the holy man stepped down from the vulgar conveyance to hold up his hands to still the cheering that had not yet begun. I thought there was something like sympathy in her face; something else as well. She hated the holy man and so did I. She had called him a “greasy vagabond,” and so he was—a villain.
The cheering began and the holy man acknowledged it, not with the usual practiced, mirthless smile of the veteran politician, but with the absent wave of the solemn yet indulgent emperor—the man who does not have to garner votes. He saw me and inclined his head in my direction, and then he went into the Temple surrounded by his guards. No riflemen went in with him, but I felt sure that the others carried revolvers under their coats.
After a while they carried out Abby’s coffin and placed it in the hearse, and the procession moved off toward the cemetery. The Prophet’s coach was next in line behind the hearse, and then came all the others. I saw Fleming, the editor, climbing into his coach; if he saw me, he didn’t acknowledge my presence. General Wells walked with a lot of Mormons I took to be Abby’s cousins. Rockwell walked by himself.
Hickman was one of the last to emerge from the gloom of the Temple. He mounted his great black stallion and looked at no one. Dressed all in black, on his huge black horse, he looked like the Angel of Death, and I wondered what strange forces had shaped a man like that. Today, so many years later, I know the answer to the question which puzzled me then. There is such a thing as pure evil. Nothing accounts for it. It has been there from the beginning—it exists, and will exist always.
I had cleaned and reloaded my pistol; I felt an almost irresistible urge to kill him. But then he moved away from me; the stragglers came between us.
Except for some baroque touches, the Mormon service for the dead is much like our own; all religions take from what has gone before. They buried her on a sunny hillside, with the loved and unloved Mormon dead on all sides of her. The Prophet delivered about ten thousand well-chosen words, and that was that.
People went down the hill from the flower strewn-grave and I was left with Rockwell. We watched Hickman riding away.
“He knows I ran off his horses,” I said.
“Sure he knows,” Rockwell said. “I found the pistol and took it to Brigham. I showed him my marks on it, explained that Abby was carrying it the night she disappeared. I didn’t have to tell him how much Hickman wanted Abby.”
“And he said no.”
“Yes, William. He said no. I tried to go over it again, but he cut me off. I asked him if he doubted my word about the gun. He said he didn’t doubt my story. It wasn’t that, he said. Hickman was not to be killed, or even accused of the murder. We were close to being at war with the Americans, and he needed Hickman, he said. The girl was dead, and killing Hickman would serve no purpose, he said. It would be bad for the church if I killed Hickman, he said.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said nothing. I started to walk out of his house and he called me back and warned me. ‘What do you want, Brigham?’ I asked him. ‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that,’ he said. But all I did was repeat the question, and that made him angrier. ‘Let William Hickman alone or you’ll be sorry for it,’ he said. ‘Sorry how?’ I asked him. ‘You’ll find out soon enough if you disobey my orders,’ he said. Then seeing I wasn’t put out by what he said, he put his arm around my shoulders and walked out front with me. ‘This is no good, Port. We’ve been together too long to let this stand in the way of our friendship,’ he said. You’re the best there is, Port, but you must leave these decisions to me. After this trouble with the Americans is over I’ll do something about Hickman. That’s my promise, old friend, but for now you’re to do nothing.’ That’s how it was left.”
“Did you believe what he said?”
Rockwell had to force out the words. “No,” he said. “I didn’t. I am a disappointed man, William.”
“One man is not the entire church,” I said in a feeble attempt at consoling him.
“That was my mistake,” he admitted. “The church and the man were one to me. But it’s not in my nature to complain. I must clean the dirt from the good name of my church. If I am to be cast out, let it be for something worth doing.”
His air of fatalism saddened me. Rockwell knew he
was close to the end of his road. Knowing it, he was prepared to face life and death with equanimity, and I wasn’t at all sure that he might not turn his gun on himself after he put finish to Hickman.
“You feel like a drink?” I asked.
“I have no need of it,” he answered. “Whiskey is good for some occasions, bad for others. It would be very bad for this one.”
“Will Brigham tell Hickman about the pistol?”
“I don’t know. There is no need to tell him. He is not a stupid man.”
“You think he’ll try to kill you, knowing what you know?”
“Absolutely,” Rockwell answered. “Brigham may have warned him away from me by now. That won’t do any good. This has been coming for a long time and now it’s here.”
We were walking back toward town when a lanky boy with crow-black hair came toward us with a sullen look on his face. He was about seventeen, with a long jaw and quick, darting eyes. His round black hat gave him the appearance of one of those boy preachers who have been too much with us in recent years. His manner of speech was abrupt, slightly incoherent.
“My father will be waiting for you at Abernathy’s mill,” he said to Rockwell. “If you have business with him . . . he’ll be there. That’s where you will find him . . . Just the two of you. Nobody else is to come.”
“Your father is William Hickman?”
“That’s right.” The youth’s long jaw stuck out even more. “My father says you’ll know what it’s about. Nobody else is to come with you. My father said for me to repeat that. He’ll be on his own. The family is not to take sides in this.”
“I heard you,” Rockwell said.
“Then you’ll come?”
“I’ll be there. Just me. Nobody else. You tell him that from me.”
The boy loped away and I said heatedly, “You can’t go alone, Port. You’ll be walking into an ambush. At least let me go with you. Why go at all? Why not pick your own time and place?”
