It has taken Dunne longer than he supposed to gather himself. He is not sure, but he thinks he may have even dozed off for a brief time. Now the night air feels colder than it did before, gives him a feverish shiver. As he closes in on Toomey’s fire, he composes his face to look friendly and agreeable. But then he recalls Priest’s horror when he saw him. He must not make that mistake again. He must not reveal himself in the light. He must coax Toomey to come to him, to come into the dark. Dunne’s arms are crossed behind him, the knives clutched in his hands; his chest angles forward like an old man walking into a strong wind. A procession of broken cloud troops across the face of the moon. Intermittently, the clearing lightens and darkens with its movement. Ahead of him, the bonfire is twisting up a whirlwind of white smoke beaded with flying embers. Toomey’s back is to him, the crackle of the fire, the pop and sizzle of resin filling his ears. Dunne stops a few yards short of where the light of the fire madly quavers on the snow. “You!” he shouts.
Toomey starts like a hare. “What the hell you doing, creeping up on me like that!”
“Come here. I want to talk to you.”
“If you want to talk to me, come here yourself. I ain’t yours to order about.”
Dunne makes out Toomey’s Henry repeater slanted over a log, five or six steps away from its owner. A pack of cloud closes on the moon, the light fails, and Toomey cranes his neck to better see the target of his belligerence.
An image flashes into his mind of a boy sitting on a chair, facing him. Take his picture, he thinks.
He lets the surgical knives fall soundlessly into the snow behind his back, draws the long-barrelled Schofield out of his coat pocket. In the dim light of the cloud-shadowed clearing, he finds it no easy job to set the bead at the end of the barrel on his target.
“What are you doing, Dunne?” says Toomey.
Just as an eddy of wind folds Toomey in smoke, obscuring him, Dunne fires. Like a corpse bursting the bounds of its shroud, Toomey comes tearing out of the smoky billows. “Figgis!” he screams. “Figgis! Priest! Priest!”
Dunne is between him and the cabin, so Toomey veers to the right, heading for cover in the bulrushes that hem the slough. Dunne follows without haste. The moon has slid out from behind the clouds. Now when he lifts his pistol and aims it, the bead on the end of the barrel glistens in the moonlight bright as a candlewick. Dunne walks ten paces and fires, walks another ten and fires again. The second bullet catches Toomey just at the edge of the bulrushes, sends him floundering into them, his passage marked by thrashing cattails. Dunne fires into the agitation until the bulrushes go still. Cautiously, he steps over the trampled stalks and finds the wounded man lying flat on his back. Dunne stands looking down at what he has accomplished.
All at once, it begins to snow; flakes briefly hover above Toomey’s face. Dunne watches them drift and settle on his brow; their cold touch seems to prompt him to stir. “You cocksucker,” Toomey spits. “You traitor. You Judas.”
Dunne wrinkles his forehead as if the accusation is incomprehensible to him. “Remember, it was you fellows threw me out. I only got one vote. What else you expect me to do?” But the stupidity stamped on Toomey’s face tells him there’s no reasoning with the man. So he thumbs back the hammer of his revolver and proceeds to conclude his argument.
Although Ada had committed the map to memory, when she picked up the first of McMullen’s trail markers in the bouncing light of the cutter’s lanterns, she felt as if she could hear Joe giving her a kind and encouraging word. The arrow directed her across the stream like a pointing finger. Without a moment’s hesitation, she urged the team into the low water, the runners of the cutter scraping on the gravel bottom, the sound of hooves splashing, and then the sleigh was bucking and jolting up the opposite bank. She paused a moment for her heart to still, watched the steam lifting off the legs of the team, and then gave them a slap with the reins, sent them into a brisk trot.
All along the way, at every moment of hesitation or indecision as to which way she must take, Ada discovers more signposts revealed in the light of the swaying lamps. On she goes, the cutter rocking and slithering along the trail, the snow thrown up by the horses’ hooves pelting the dashboard with soft thumps, as she hunts for another of dear Joe’s messages written on the snow.
Rounding a thicket, McMullen is greeted by a strange light flickering above the brow of a hill. The location roughly corresponds to where the girl had marked the cabin on her map. It puzzles him. Such a big fire don’t fit with nobody who wants to keep his whereabouts quiet, he thi. A lure for a ambush, a snare of some description? And then another possibility hits him. Has that bastard Dunne put a torch to the cabin to burn it down around the body inside?
The thought is like a kick to the gut. A hot rush of acid climbs his gullet, scorches his throat, and settles in his mouth. He leans over and spits the sourness out. His head hanging, his back bowed, he feels the soreness and stiffness from the beating he took lodged in his muscles. “Too blamed creaky for this,” he says aloud, and then the squeak of runners, the faint jingle of trace chains, the muffled thud of hooves pushes that thought out of his head. Backing his horse into the trees, he draws his revolver and waits for whatever is coming.
A sleigh sweeps round the bend, the team’s heads swinging. Joe heels his roan to block the path. The horses shy, the cutter slides to a stop. Faced with a pistol, Ada cries, “Joe! It’s me!”
McMullen peers hard into the glare of the cutter’s lamps, then lowers the barrel of his gun to the ground. “Goddamn that young fool! Why didn’t he stop you! I’ll break him to pieces!”
Ada keeps her voice reasonable and level. “How did you imagine you would transport Wesley? We will need the cutter to get him back to Helena. Don’t you see?”
“No, I don’t. Not at all.”
“The law is on their way by now. Let us sit tight.”
“Waiting ain’t a help – it’s a hindrance. Look,” he says, pointing to the glow in the sky. “You see that? It’s those that took Wesley. Hard by, where I have a chance to strike them. But what the hell am I supposed to do with you?”
There is a snap in the distance. Then more, one after another, quick cracks like the flick of a bullwhip. The sound of a pistol firing.
Joe wheels his mount, goes pounding up the slope where the fire beckons with a palsied forefinger of light. Ada spills out of the cutter, chases after him, reticule clutched in her hand.
A steady, insistent whistling causes Case to open his eyes in a place he does not recognize. He has been abandoned; the chair in which Ada should be sitting is empty. Pulling himself up, he looks for the source of that annoying, high-pitched whine, and finds it, a kettle jetting steam on the stove. Then his eyes fall on bloody footprints tracked across the floor.
He remembers a hand stroking his brow with a cool cloth. Not Ada but Michael Dunne. Collecting his breath, his wits, the little vigour he has, he swings his legs out of bed and fumbles for the floor with his feet. When he stands he sees another bed, the sheets stained scarlet.
Dunne is moving delicately, gingerly through the bulrushes, careful not to brush up against them and excite their whispering. The hushed, insinuating voices of stalks and dry leaves say the same scornful, dismissive things that have been said about him all his life. Is te day coming when the birds will sing against him? When he lies in the coffin, will the earth rub its salt in his wounds?
Stepping out of the bulrushes, he sees a horse and rider circling the fire. The screen of gauzy snow obscures the horseman’s features but he surmises it can be nobody else but McMullen. Indignation swells up in Dunne. They come at you from all sides, like a pack of dogs. Turn one over on its back with your boot and here is another one snarling and snapping at you.
McMullen’s gaze is fixed on the cabin. Dunne starts shucking empty cartridge cases from the long-barrelled Schofield, replacing them with new rounds. The revolver loaded, he draws his Wells Fargo Schofield detective special from its silk sleeve se
wn inside his coat. A piece in both hands, he marches forward.
Out of the corner of his eye, McMullen detects movement on his left, a dark blob moving through the light snow that has begun to fall, and he shifts his red roan around to face it. There’s no mistaking Dunne, a tub on legs, trundling towards him like an outraged landowner ready to run a trespasser off his property. Joe sidesteps his horse out of the light of the fire and spurs it at Dunne. The roan makes two skittish jumps before she breaks into a gallop. McMullen means to turn Dunne, put him to flight, run him down. It’s a cool man who’ll stand firm against a horse bearing down on him full speed. But Dunne is holding his ground, his arms up at shoulder height as if he means to embrace the charge. There’s nothing to do but go directly at him, knock him over, trample him, kill him on the ground.
Four flashes, four reports. Joe feels his horse plunge downward as if she has gone headlong over a cliff. The sky jerks out of sight and a smear of white rushes up and smashes into him; something breaks loose deep inside him, filling his mouth with blood. The weight of the dying horse pins him to the ground. He can see its head rising and falling, hears a bubbling snort coming from its nostrils.
“Get your feet under you, girl. Come on, come on,” Joe encourages her. If he can get her to try to rise he might be able to tug his leg loose. A broken bone is grinding in his thigh, flashing pain up his spine. Jarred out of his hand by the fall, his revolver glistens several feet out of reach. The horse makes an effort to rise, then quivers like a plucked string and goes absolutely still. Suddenly Dunne is looming over him, wearing the hazy, perplexed look of a man with too many things on his mind.
McMullen says to him, “I reckon this is better than dying behind a plough. I only wish if someone has to send me over it would be a better man than you, you black-hearted son of a bitch.”
“Every time I turn around, people coming at me, meaning to do me harm. If it ain’t that, they’re pestering me, Do this for me, Mr. Dunne, do that. Why’s everybody want something from me?” He looks to be directing his words towards the cabin. “Sick people ought to have more sense than to leave their beds,” Dunne says petulantly. “Now I got to put him back where he belongs.” He trudges away from McMullen.
Joe raises himself up on an elbow to see Wesley clinging to the doorframe of the cabin, Dunne headed towards him.
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Breathless from the long run up the hill, the sound of the four shots stammering panic in her ears, Ada halts by the fire. The first thing her eyes fall upon is a dark hump resembling earth heaped on a newly dug grave; she sees it is Joe’s horse, and rushes over, drops down by McMullen’s side. With strangled vehemence he says, “Go for the cutter, girl. Fast as your legs can carry you.”
“Joe –”
He gestures. “Dunne. He’ll be back. Get out of here.”
She lifts her eyes and sees square shoulders moving towards a stick figure teetering in a golden doorway, Wesley so feeble he can scarcely stand. Plunging her hand in her purse, she rises and starts numbly after Dunne, hears Joe calling out to her, “No, Ada! No!”
“Mr. Dunne! Mr. Dunne, wait!” she cries.
Dunne stops dead in his tracks. His head swivels back over a shoulder and peers intently at her. Ada sees Wesley waving to her, hears him calling out in a hoarse, choked voice, “Go back! Go back!” Joe is yelling to her too. Their warnings gusting about in her head, she lowers her eyes, walks on, watching the clean white snow that passes under her feet.
At first Dunne doesn’t trust the sound of Mrs. Tarr’s voice coming out of the ether, calling his name. But then he sees her head and shoulders surrounded by a multitude of bright white flecks, swarming, the swirl and billow of her skirts. The glow on a silvered plate, an image captured in an instant, is turned to flesh and blood. And it is Mrs. Tarr’s voice that has asked him to wait, not the flat, characterless voice that haunted him before, a voice without qualities; there is no doubting it is her voice, coloured with kindness and goodness.
Frantically, he scoops up snow, scouring his hands, scrubbing his face to make himself presentable for her, washing himself clean. I must offer her my best self, he thinks. My very best self.
He hears Case begging her to go back but she doesn’t heed him. And McMullen is shouting the same to her from behind the swaying curtain of snow she is parting, but Mrs. Tarr is not listening to anything but her own heart. She does not hesitate. She is coming to him.
She is very near now, her face gleaming wet with snow, gleaming with resolution. How he wishes that he could offer her his arm and parade her before everyone who thought him worthless, lead her into his father’s house, escort her into Mr. Hind’s parlour, stroll with her before Mr. McMicken’s wondering eyes, walk her through all the days of his life before he was loved.
She is extending a hand to him now; some small glinting gift closed in her little fist. He is humbled by her consideration, ashamed that he has nothing for her. But then love is not a balance, one thing piled against another; he knows that now.
As he reaches out for Mrs. Tarr’s hand he sees a flame leap between them; it sears him with joy; it toes him.
And Ada falls to her knees beside Dunne’s body, trying to pat out the fire that is wicking the threads of the hole scorched in his shirtfront by her derringer. “Look what you have made me do, Mr. Dunne,” she whispers. “Oh, look what you have made me do.”
TWENTY-NINE
FOR MONTHS HIS daughter had been besieging him with letters. “Please come home and pay me a visit. I am lonely for you and your stories.” So, shortly after the failure of the Terry Commission
to persuade the Sioux to return to the United States, Walsh requested and was granted a long leave to visit his family. The Major was as eager to see his little Cora as she was to see him. The few letters he had received from his wife were nothing like his daughter’s; they exuded nothing but chilly resentment.
As he travelled east through the United States by train, news of his journey preceded him, and Walsh found himself beset by newspapermen at every stop. They swarmed him at stations where he waited for his next connection, clambered into his car when the locomotive halted to take on coal and water. In the articles they wrote, they admiringly dubbed him “Sitting Bull’s Boss,” characterizing James Morrow Walsh as the white man who had single-handedly brought the bloodthirsty red scoundrel Sitting Bull to heel, contrasting his success with the American failures to control the chief. Reporters pressed the same question on the Major: Who or what was responsible for the recent troubles with the Plains tribes? Walsh pulled no punches with his answers; he laid bare knuckles to politicians’ faces. The blame, he said, rested with the U.S. government’s habit of breaking treaties with the Indians, and with the sticky-fingered reservation agents who stole the provisions destined for the people in their care, then sold them for their own profit. These remarks plucked many sensitive nerves in Washington, and when they twanged with outrage, the reverberations were felt all the way to Ottawa. A discomfiture to both governments, he was given a good dressing-down and told to clamp his jaws shut.
But soon, Sir John A. Macdonald was once more in power. With the Liberals sent packing, Walsh believed things were looking up. Macdonald, Old Tomorrow, had created the NWMP; surely, he would take a paternal interest in his offspring. When the Prime Minister decided to place the direction and oversight of the Police within his own portfolio, everything pointed to better days for the force, better days for Walsh. He felt his star was on the rise.
But Old Tomorrow had noted the Major’s peccadilloes, how he had spoken without reserve while on leave. He saw how, with a little coaxing, penny-a-line scribblers had tempted the Major to say intemperate, undiplomatic things. Walsh was cheeky, overconfident, impulsive, and naive, dangerous qualities for a man in his position.
But, for the present, there was no denying the Major’s value. He did have influence with Sitting Bull. In uncertain times, this was useful. And the times were uncertain. When spring
came, the Americans set ablaze the prairie wool that sustained the buffalo. By day, smoke blackened the sky. By night, raging fires danced lividly on the horizon. That summer, corralled by flame, the buffalo did not come north. The tribes above the Medicine Line converged on the last oasis ofe, the Cypress Hills, threatening a bloody collision with the Sioux. The Blackfoot, Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux all complained that their old enemies were stealing food from the mouths of their children. An outbreak of tribal warfare and the price of putting it down was not a cost a frugal government cared to contemplate.
Hunger also drove the Sioux to undertake forays into their old hunting grounds in Montana where a few small herds of buffalo were still to be found. On these expeditions young men occasionally helped themselves to ranchers’ horses and skirmished with their traditional enemies, the Crow. A group of buffalo hunters led by Sitting Bull exchanged shots with two companies of Bear Coat’s soldiers. Such incidents prompted anger on the part of the United States. Why did Canada not restrain the hostiles? If the Canadians would not or could not control Sitting Bull and his warriors, the Americans would be forced to take steps to protect themselves. So Walsh was moved to Wood Mountain, the doorstep of the Sioux. Let the braggart demonstrate he could do what the newspapermen claimed, exert a salutary influence over his bosom chum Sitting Bull. Let him stop the depredations. The transfer was a demotion in everything but name. A lonely, isolated post, a handful of men to put fingers in a dam ready to crack in a hundred places.
A Good Man Page 45
