by Alan Lemay
He fought it grimly, and slowly got hold of himself; his eyes cleared, and the unearthly voices died, until he heard only the hammering of his heart. He saw, close to his eyes, the stems of the chaparral; and he was able to move again, stiffly, with his muscles shaking. He turned his head, getting a look at the actual world around him again. Then, through a rift in the brush that showed the creek bank, he saw the death tree.
Its base was almost on a level with his eyes, at perhaps a hundred feet; and for one brief moment it seemed to swell and tower, writhing its corpse-withered arms. His eyes stayed fixed upon it as he slowly got up and walked toward it without volition, as if it were the only thing possible to do. The thing shrunk as he approached it, no longer towering over him twice his size as it had seemed to do wherever he had seen it before. Finally he stood within arm’s length; and now it was only a piece of weather-silvered wood in a tormented shape, a foot and a half shorter than himself.
An elongated knot at the top no longer looked like a distorted head, but only a symbol representing the hideous thing he had imagined there. He lashed out and struck it, hard, with the heel of his right hand. The long-rotted roots broke beneath the surface of the soil; and a twisted old stump tottered, splashed in the creek, and went spinning away.
Mart shuddered, shaking himself back together; and he spoke aloud. “I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” he said; and rejoined Amos. If he still looked shaken up, Amos pretended not to notice as they mounted up.
Chapter Twenty-two
Martin Pauley was taken by another fit of shyness as they approached the Mathison ranch. He was a plainsman now, a good hunter, and a first-class Indian scout. But the saddle in which he lived had polished nothing about him but the seat of his leather pants.
“I tried to leave you back,” Amos reminded him. “A couple of burr-matted, sore-backed critters we be. You got a lingo on you like a Caddo whiskey runner. You know that, don’t you?”
Mart said he knew it.
“Our people never did have much shine,” Amps said. “Salt of the earth, mind you; no better anywhere. But no book learning, like is born right into them Mathisons. To us, grammar is nothing but grampaw’s wife.”
Mart remembered the times Laurie had corrected his speech, and knew he didn’t fit with civilized people. Not even as well as before, when he was merely a failure at it. But someway he was finally herded into the Mathison kitchen.
Laurie ran to him and took both his hands. “Where on earth have you been?”
“We been north,” he answered her literally. “Looking around among the Kiowas.”
“Why up there?”
“Well …” he answered lamely, “she might have been up there.”
She said wonderingly, “Martie, do you realize how long you’ve been on this search? This is the third winter you’ve been out.”
He hadn’t thought of the time in terms of years. It had piled up in little pieces—always just one more place to go that would take just a few weeks more. He made a labored calculation, and decided Laurie was twenty-one. That explained why she seemed so lighted up; probably looked the best she ever would in her life. She was at an age when most girls light up, if they’re going to; Mexicans and Indians earlier. A look at their mothers, or their older sisters, reminded you of what you knew for certain. All that bright glow would soon go out again. But you couldn’t ever make yourself believe it.
Laurie made him follow her around, dealing out facts and figures about Kiowas, while she helped her mother get dinner. He didn’t believe she cared a hoot about Kiowas, but he was glad for the chance to have a look at her.
There was this Indian called Scar, he explained to her. Seemed he actually had one on his face. They kept hearing that Scar had taken a little white girl captive. He showed her how the Indians described the scar, tracing a finger in a sweeping curve from hairline to jaw. A well-marked man. Only they couldn’t find him. They couldn’t even find any reliable person—no trader, soldier, or black hat—who had ever seen an Indian with such a scar. Then Mart had happened to think that the sign describing the scar was a whole lot like the Plains-Indian sign for sheep. The Kiowas had a warrior society called the Sheep, and he got to wondering if all those rumors were hitting around the fact that the Kiowa Sheep Society had Debbie. So they went to see….
“A pure waste of time, and nobody to blame but me. It was me thought of it.”
“It was I,” she corrected him.
“You?” he fumbled it; then caught it on the bounce. “No, I meant—the blame was on I.”
“There’s going to be a barn party,” she told him. “Mose Harper built a barn.”
“At his age?”
“The State of Texas paid for it, mainly; they’re going to put a Ranger stopover in part of it, and store their feed there next year—or the year after, when they get around to it. But the party is right away. I bet you knew!”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Bet you did. Only reason you came home.”
He thought it over, and guessed he would give her some real comical answer later; soon as he thought of one.
After supper Aaron Mathison and Amos Edwards got out the herd books and ledgers, as upon their visit before. Aaron’s head bent low, eyes close to the pages, so that Mart noticed again the old man’s failing sight, much worse than it had been the last time.
And now Mart made his next mistake, rounding out his tally for the day. He set up camp, all uninvited, on the settle flanking the stove where he had sat with Laurie before; and here, while Laurie finished picking up the supper things, he waited hopefully for her to come and sit beside him. He had a notion that all the time he had been gone would melt away, once they sat there again.
But she didn’t come and sit there. Had to get her beauty sleep, she said. Great long drive tomorrow; probably no sleep at all tomorrow night, what with the long drive home.
“Harper’s is seven miles,” Mart said. “Scarcely a real good spit.”
“Don’t be coarse.” She said good night, respectfully to Amos and briskly to Mart, and went off across the dog-trot into that unknown world in the other section of the house, which he had never entered.
Mart wandered to the other end of the room, intending to join Amos and Aaron Mathison. But “G’night” Amos said to him. And Mathison gravely stood up to shake hands.
“It comes to me,” Mart said, “I’ve been a long time away.”
“And if we stayed for the damn barn burning,” Amos said, “we’d be a long time off the road.” Amos believed he knew where he was going now. All that great jackstraw pile of Indian nonsense was straightening itself in his mind. He could add up the hundreds of lies and half truths they had ridden so far to gather, and make them come out to a certain answer at last.
“You be stubborn men,” Aaron Mathison said, “both of you.”
Mart tried to share Amos’ fire of conviction, but he could not. “Man has to live some place,” he said, and slung on his coat, for they were to sleep in the bunk house this time. The coat was a long-skirted bearskin, slit high for the saddle; it was big enough to keep his horse warm, and smelled like a hog. “The prairie’s all I know any more, I guess.” He went out through the cold dark to his bed.
Chapter Twenty-three
Mart was up long before daylight. Some internal clockwork always broke him out early nowadays. In summer the first dawn might be coming on, but in the short days he woke in the dark at exactly half-past four. He started a fire in the bunk house stove, and set coffee on. Then he went out to the breaking corral into which they had thrown the horses and mules Amos had picked for the next leg of their perpetual trip.
He grained them all, then went back to the bunk -house. He set the coffee off the fire, and studied Amos for signs of arisal. He saw none, so he went out to the corral again. They carried three mules now, on account of the trading, and a spare saddle horse, in case one should pull up lame when they were in a hurry. Mart picked himself a stocky buckskin, with zebra stri
pes on his cannons and one down his back. He snubbed down, saddled, and bucked out this horse with his bearskin coat on; all horses took outrage at this coat, and had to be broke to it fresh every day for a while, until they got used to it.
He laid aside the bearskin to top off the great heavy stock horse he supposed Amos would ride. Its pitch was straight, and easy to sit, but had such a shock to it that his nose bled a little. Finally he got the pack saddles on the mules, and left them standing hump-backed in a sull. By this time the gray bitter dawn was on the prairie, but the white vapor from the lungs of the animals was the only sign of life around the place as yet.
Amos was sitting up on the edge of his bunk in his long-handled underwear, peering at the world through bleary lids and scratching himself.
“Well,” Mart said, “we’re saddled.”
“Huh?”
“I say I uncorked the ponies, and slung the mule forks on.”
“What did you do that for?”
“Because it’s morning, I suppose—why the hell did you think? I don’t see no smoke from the kitchen. You want I should stir up a snack?”
“We’re held up,” Amos said. “We got to go to that roof-raising.”
“Thought you said we had to flog on. Jesus, will you make up your mind?”
“I just done so. By God, will you clean out your ears?”
“Oh, hell,” Mart said, and went out to unsaddle.
Chapter Twenty-four
The barn party was just a rough-and-ready gathering of frontier cattle people, such as Mart knew perfectly well. He knew exactly how these people spent every hour of their lives, and he could do everything they knew how to do better than most of them. What bothered him was to see such a raft of them in one place. They filled the big new barn when they all got there. Where had these dozens of scrubbed-looking girls come from, in all shapes and sizes? All this swarming of strangers gave Mart an uncomfortable feeling that the country had filled up solid while he was gone, leaving no room for him here.
Mart had got stuck with the job of bringing along the pack mules, for Amos wanted to get started directly from Harper’s without going back. In consequence, Mart hadn’t seen any of the Mathison family after they got dressed up until they appeared at the party. Aaron Mathison was patriarchal in high collar and black suit, across his vest the massive gold chain indispensable to men of substance; and Mrs. Mathison was a proper counterpart in a high-necked black dress that rustled when she so much as turned her eyes. They joined a row of other old-timers, a sort of windbreak of respectability along the wall, suggestive of mysteriously inherited book learning and deals with distant banks.
But it was Laurie who took him by shock, and for whom he was unprepared. She had made her own dress, of no prouder material than starched gingham, but it was full-skirted and tight at the waist, and left her shoulders bare, what time she wasn’t shawled up against the cold. He would have been better off if he could have seen this rig at the house, and had time to get used to it. He had never seen her bare shoulders before, nor given thought to how white they must naturally be; and now he had trouble keeping his eyes off them. A wicked gleam showed in her eyes as she caught him staring.
“Honestly, Mart—you act as though you came from so far back in the hills the sun must never shine!”
“Listen here,” he said, judging it was time to take her down a peg. “When I first rode with you, you was about so high, and round as a punkin. And you wore all-overs made of flour sack. I know because I seen a yearling calf stack you wrong end up in a doodle of wild hay, and you said ‘Steamboat Mills’ right across the bottom.”
She giggled. “How do you know I still don’t?” she asked him. But her eyes were searching the crowd for somebody else.
He drew off, to remuster according to plan; and when next he tried to go near her, she was surrounded. The whole place was curdled up with lashings of objectionable young jaybirds he had never seen before in his life, and Laurie had rings in the noses of them all. Some of them wore borrowed-looking store clothes, generally either too long in the sleeves or fixing to split out someplace. But more had come in their saddle outfits, like Mart, with clean handkerchiefs on their necks and their shirts washed out by way of celebration. He took them to be common saddle pounders, mostly. But he imagined a knowingness behind their eyes, as if they were all onto something he did not suspect. Maybe they knew what they were doing here—which was more than he could say for himself. Tobe and Abner knew everybody and mixed everywhere, leaving Mart on his own. Brad had been his best friend, but these younger brothers seemed of a different generation altogether; he had nothing in common with them any more.
Some of the boys kept sliding out the back way to the horse lines, and Mart knew jugs were cached out there. He had taken very few drinks in his life, but this seemed a good time for one. He started to follow a group who spoke owlishly of “seeing to the blankets on the team,” but Amos cut him off at the door.
“Huh uh. Not this time.” Amos had not had a drop, which was odd in the time and place. Mart knew he could punish a jug until its friends cried out in pain, once he started.
“What’s the matter now?”
“I got special reasons.”
“Something going to bust?”
“Don’t know yet. I’m waiting for something.”
That was all he would say. Mart went off and holed up in a corner with old Mose Harper, who asked him questions about “present day” Indians, and listened respectfully to his answers—or the first few words of them, anyway. Mose got the bit in his teeth in less than half a minute, and went into the way things used to be, in full detail. Mart let his eyes wander past Mose to follow Laurie, flushed and whirling merrily, all over the place. The country-dance figures kept people changing partners, and Laurie always had a few quick words for each new one, making him laugh, usually, before they were separated again. Mart wondered what on earth she ever found to say.
“In my day,” Mose was telling Mart, “when them Tonkawas killed an enemy, they just ate the heart and liver. Either raw or fussy prepared—didn’t make no difference. What they wanted was his medicine. Only they never ate a white man’s vitals; feared our medicine wouldn’t mix with theirs, seemingly, though they respected our weepons....”
Mart more than half expected that Laurie would come around and try to pull him into a dance, and he was determined he wasn’t going to let her to it. He was making up speeches to fend her off with, while he pretended to listen to Mose.
“Nowadays,” Mose explained, “they’ve took to eating the whole corpse, as a food. ’Tain’t a ceremony, any more, so much as a saving of meat. But they still won’t eat a white man. ’Tain’t traditional.”
Laurie never did come looking for Mart. She made a face at him once, as she happened to whirl close by, and that was all. Holding back became tiresome pretty fast, with no one to insist on anything different. He got into the dance, picking what ever girls caught his eye, regardless of whom they thought they belonged to. He was perversely half hoping for the fight you can sometimes get into that way, but none started.
He had been afraid of the dancing itself, but actually there wasn’t anything to it. These people didn’t party often enough to learn any very complicated dances. Just simple reels, and stuff like that. Sashay forward, sashay back, swing your lady, drop her slack. You swing mine, and I’ll swing yours, and back to your own, and everybody swing. At these family parties, out here on civilization’s brittle edge, they didn’t even swing their girls by the waist—a dissolute practice to be seen mainly in saloons. Man grabbed his lady by the arms, and they kind of skittered around each other, any way they could. He got hold of Laurie only about once every two hours, but there were plenty of others. The fiddles and the banjos whanged out a rhythm that shook the barn, and the time flew by, romping and stomping.
Through all this Amos stood by, withdrawn into the background and into himself. Sometimes men he had known came to shake hands with him, greeting him with
a heartiness Amos did not return. They were full of the questions to be expected of them, but the answers they got were as short as they could civilly be, and conveyed nothing. No conversation was allowed to develop. Amos remained apart, neither alone nor with anybody. Small use speculating on what he might be waiting for. Mart presently forgot him.
It was long after midnight, though nobody but the nodding old folks along the wall seemed to have noticed it, when the Rangers came in. There were three of them, and they made their arrival inconspicuous. They wore no uniforms—the Rangers had none— and their badges were in their pockets. Nobody was turned nervous, and nobody made a fuss over them, either. Rangers were a good thing, and there ought to be more of them. Sometimes you needed a company of them badly. Didn’t need any just now. So long as no robbery or bloody murder was in immediate view, Rangers ranked as people. And that was it.
That, and one thing more: Everyone knew at once that they were there. Within less than a minute, people who had never seen any of these three before knew that Rangers had come in, and which men they were. Mart Pauley heard of them from a girl he swung but once, and had them pointed out to him by the next girl to whom he was handed on. “Who? Him?” The youngest of the three Rangers was Charlie MacCorry.
“He enlisted last year sometime.”
As they finished the set, Mart was trying to make up his mind if he should go shake hands with Charlie MacCorry, or leave him be. He never had liked him much. Too much flash, too much swagger, too much to say. But now he saw something else. Amos and one of the older Rangers had walked toward each other on sight. They had drawn off, and were talking secretly and intently, apart from anyone else. What ever Amos had waited for was here. Mart went over to them.
