by Gene Curry
I got to the Claggett tent as people tumbled from their wagons. Their faces seemed to know that this wasn’t the foreign woman with the nightmares. And somehow I knew it wasn’t Claggett in trouble.
People ran behind me to the tent. Whiskey-sick or not, Culligan was right behind me with a rifle. I dived into the bed of the wagon and found Claggett tearing at the thin wood partition that separated Hannah’s bed from the rest of the space. The preacher had a gun in his hand. Hannah’s bare feet showed beyond the end of the partition. They kicked convulsively, but the screaming had subsided.
Claggett, in his panic, was doing no damn good. I shoved him aside so hard that his back hit the far sideboard of the wagon. Culligan, stinking with whiskey, pointed at the twitching feet. “The girl must be having a fit,” he said. “We got to keep her from swallowing her tongue.”
I knew he was wrong when I heard the rattle for the first time. The Irishman heard it too, and his mottled face turned a blotchy white. “Dear, sweet, Jesus Christ!” he said. “It’s like being in a coffin with a rattler.”
I pointed, and without a word Culligan ripped the hinged table from the wall and shattered the thin wood in several places. Then he ran at it from the side and knocked the whole thing down. Maybe he was too full of whiskey to be scared. Maybe he was just a tough man. The rattler, full-grown and thick-bodied, struck at him from close to Hannah’s neck. The fangs struck wood and I blew the head off the snake before it could strike again. It dropped off the bed and writhed on the wreckage on the floor. Culligan stomped it to a pulp with iron-shod heels. Then he scraped the thing to the end gate of the wagon and kicked it out. Reaching into his coat pocket, he took out a pint bottle of whiskey and handed it to me. I pushed it aside, but he drank from it himself, his face still blotchy with shock and disgust.
Hannah was dying. Nothing could save her. She had been bitten in the face and neck, and the punctures in the big, throbbing neck vein were going to kill her. By now the venom had been carried to all parts of her body. Just then Dr. Ames climbed up with his little black bag. I didn’t need the professional and sorrowful shake of the head to know that Hannah would be dead within minutes.
“All I can do is give her an injection to kill the pain,” Ames said.
“Then do it and get out.”
I knelt beside the little bed where we had spent such a good night together. Culligan climbed down and shooed the others away, then lowered the drop cover. Claggett seemed to be fresh out of prayers, for which I was glad. I might have slapped his face if he had dared to pray over this sweet, young girl. All the preacher did was sit and stare at the floor of the wagon.
The morphine Ames gave Hannah took its effect quickly. She opened her eyes and looked almost happy. It didn’t matter to her that her father was there and could hear everything she said. She was past caring about the preacher and his terrible God. She knew she didn’t have more than a few minutes, and yet it didn’t seem to bother her.
“What do you think it’ll be like on the other side?” she asked, smiling. “You think there’s anything at all?”
I had no answer for that. “If there is, we’ll have a get-together,” I said. “I’ll be along one of these days. We’ll all be along pretty soon.”
I thought she was going to say something else, but she didn’t. She just smiled and died, still holding my hand. I hated to see her go. I had to loosen her hand to get my own hand away. I didn’t look at Claggett.
Outside, the others waited for news of her death. I told them to look after her. Culligan handed me his bottle in full sight of the preacher. I took it and drank deeply. The bottle was empty when I finished.
“I’ll see to the grave,” Culligan said. “She was a nice little woman.”
The Irishman had small, quick, clever eyes. “What are you going to do?”
He knew what I knew. “Look for Cyrus,” I said. Culligan turned away. “That’s your business,” he said. “It could be Cyrus. Him or the father. They have it in for you, boyo, so keep a good lookout. I been across the Plains more than a few times, and Sam has stories to go with the rest of him. Nothing you could prove to the law.”
“I won’t worry too much about the law,” I said. “Where we’re going there is no law.”
Chapter Eight
The women who were preparing Hannah’s body for burial were foreigners, German sisters in their late twenties. They looked capable.
I was certain that Cyrus had thrown the snake into her bed just after I’d left. I wondered why he hadn’t done it while I was there. My guess was that he considered it less risky after I’d gone. Besides, the rattler could have struck at me instead of Hannah, because I had been on top of her. Her body had been covered by mine.
I had no hard evidence against Cyrus, just a suspicion. Some suspicions can be trusted though, and I trusted this one. Cyrus had to be done away with; all that remained was to decide how to do it.
Some of the women were crying, though they couldn’t have known Hannah very well. Soon there would come a time when death wouldn’t move them to tears. All the women looked at me as Culligan went to dig the grave. Dr. Ames had gone back into the wagon to look at Hannah’s body with his daughter. There was hardly a time when she wasn’t with him.
But they looked at me as if they expected me to do something. That meant they knew about Hannah and me—our night together. In a small town it’s hard to keep anything a secret; a wagon train is worse.
I was sure Cyrus had tossed the fat-bodied rattler into Hannah’s bed. It must have taken him some trouble to catch one that big, because the snake that killed Hannah was about as big as they come. Those big old snakes are wary, so Cyrus must have had to use all his idiot cunning.
The horror of it all made me shudder. A full-grown rattler thrown suddenly in darkness; the squirming, rattling reptile landing in the darkness on the girl’s naked body. Perhaps happy and fully at ease for the first time in her life, she must have been drifting off to sleep when it happened. Maybe, at first, she thought it just a nightmare, the onset of a bad dream. Then came the horror. It was real, and it was happening to her. There had been no escape, walled in as she was by the wood partition built by her goddamned madman of a father. Maybe the first scream came even before the rattler struck. The vibration of the scream had drawn the snake’s attention to her face and throat. In the first dim light of dawn, she must have been able to see the evil head of the angered reptile, as it drew back to sink its fangs into her flesh. Thrown or dropped from the front of the wagon, it must have landed on or about her face and throat, for all the bite marks were in that part of her body.
But it was the fangs puncturing the jugular that had done her in. When you get it there, you’re as good as dead. Nothing helps. The blood flows too fast through the jugular; a frail girl like Hannah didn’t have a prayer.
The fact is that frailty or strength has nothing to do with it. It’s unusual to get snake-bit in the throat, but I’ve seen it happen once, and I’ll never forget it. It happened when I was just a kid and working with a big cow outfit in Texas. In most outfits, the trail boss won’t stand for dangerous horseplay. So, you’d have to call discipline lax in this outfit I worked for. One night after supper some fool thought he’d stir up a little excitement by tossing a rattler into a group of men sitting around the fire. He hooked the snake, not a big one, with a stick and tossed it in with a holler. Instead of some sensible man shooting the damn thing, the rest of them started slinging the snake back and forth. The snake kept getting madder all the time. The fools playing the game used sticks like the first man, and it went pretty good for a while. Then one young fellow tried to hook the snake with a stick that was too short. He had to stoop to get at the rattler and got fanged right through the jugular. Far from puny, he was a big brawler of a man, the kind that boasts he can rassle grizzlies, uproot trees and the like. Didn’t matter a good goddamn, not in the end.
That ended the game, then and there. He knew what the bite meant, and so did
the others. He was still on his feet, and stayed there for about a minute, but they knew they were looking at a dead man. Nobody blamed anybody. They caught him before he fell and made him as comfortable as they could. Somebody dug out a bottle and fed him as much as they could. They got about half a pint into him before his throat muscles stopped working. Then his lungs stopped sucking air and he died.
Hannah Claggett was the second human I’d seen die that way. It was no accident, no stray snake drawn into the wagon by the need for warmth. No matter what they tell you, snakes are shy creatures and stay away from people as much as they can. I had heard of snakes crawling into wagons in freezing weather, but the weather then was good, almost warm. Anyway, the pine partition that shut off Hannah’s bed was twice the height of the wagon side. That made it about eight feet high. No snake had gotten over that alone.
Kiowa Sam came up to me, making sympathetic sounds. He wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t known about Hannah and me. At the same time, there was something in his voice that made me want to kill him. I don’t even know what I’d call the sound he made. The treacherous old man told me that I shouldn’t have climbed into bed with his idiot son’s intended woman. That was part of the sound. The rest of it was a sort of wary defiance—daring me. For Sam that was a bad mistake: to take me for a reasonable man. I wasn’t feeling reasonable. Cyrus was going to die, and not even the reverend was going to have any say in my decision.
I looked at Sam, at his dirty, patched buckskins and broken teeth. The only thing about Sam that seemed to be in complete working order was the big Schofield revolver. Just as good as the Colt .45 in many ways, the Schofield had never caught on like the Old Equalizer. It didn’t have a graceful look, nor the sleekness of the Colt, but that didn’t keep it from being a fine shooting iron in the hands of a man who knew how to use it.
The job had to get done, and there was no point trading talk with Sam. “Where’s Cyrus?” I asked point-blank. “Everybody showed up but him.”
Sam gave me a sly grin. “Guess he’s taking it real hard, what happened to the Claggett girl. Had a special kind of a fondness for that one, he did. Used to talk about her to me. Cyrus knew he wasn’t like the rest of us, figured he didn’t want to stay out in the world all his life—his way of putting it. I got a bit of money socked away, and he’s all the time saying why don’t we give up this life and get a little ranch far from people? Cyrus figured the Claggett girl, shy and all, might be the right woman for him. A good, quiet, shy girl not like the rest of these—”
“Ladies!” I finished for him.
“Your word, not mine,” Sam said. “Cyrus figured the Claggett girl had a wish for him, too. She smiled at him, and always had a cheery hello when he came around.”
“Rounding up the strays.”
“The boy’s way of courting the girl; only way he knowed how. Wasn’t no harm meant by it. You warned him off. Cyrus didn’t like you doing that, but he did what you said anyway. I told him the same, ‘Don’t make no trouble.’ ”
“Everybody ran to the Claggett wagon when she started screaming. Why didn’t Cyrus come too?” I asked.
Sam had an answer for everything—he thought. “We was just going off night guard when it happened. Cyrus went a few minutes ahead of me. Must have fell right asleep. By the time he waked, it was all over for the poor girl. A damned shame, is what it is.”
Sam winked at me. “Course she’s just the first on this trip. Poor things, they ain’t all going to make it. You’ll be fine, though—young, and well set-up like you are.”
I restrained the urge to draw and kill him. “You have anything to do with Cyrus murdering that girl?” I asked him. “I think maybe you did.”
Sam showed the right amount of surprise. “That’s crazy talk, that’s what it is,” he said. “Didn’t I just tell you he had a big fondness for her, hoped maybe she’d be his woman? You been drinking that Irishman’s whiskey, Saddler? Say a thing like that!”
“Answer the question, Sam. I won’t ask it a third time.”
Sam kept his gun hand still while he carved up the air with the other. “O’ course I didn’t have nothing to do with it. Snake crept in there and stung the child. Nothing makes murder out of that. The snake’s dead, and you can’t ask the snake. Ain’t you never heard of a person being snake-bit before?”
“Just like that, only one time. This time was a murder, and you or Cyrus did it. Either he did it by himself, or you thought it up for him.”
“Why’d I want to do that for?”
“You look like a mean man. A mean man’d murder a girl with a snake. Answer the question, or do something about it.”
Sam must have been fast enough in his day. Against somebody else he might be fast enough to get by. For an instant, I thought he was going to go for his gun. It was in his mean nature to go up against a faster and younger man. But maybe he saw something in my face, in my eyes, that forced him to hold back “I had nothing to do with nothing,” he said.
“You better speak the truth.”
“Who’s to decide what I’m saying isn’t true?”
“I’ll decide it. Call Cyrus here, and we’ll have this out. Try a sneak on me, Sam, and I’ll shoot your eyes out. Get him here. Don’t go yelling—fetch him quiet.”
In a few minutes, Sam came back with Cyrus. He was red-eyed and shaking. Sometimes killers who murder on impulse are like that. They do it, and then they’re sorry for it. But when I saw his naked hate for me, I knew for sure he had killed the girl.
He stood beside his father, taller by a good ten inches. I felt no pity for the murderous fool. No law says an idiot has to be good-natured like people think. I didn’t care how he died, just as long as he did. Even so, I didn’t want a hanging.
“Well, go ahead and ask him,” Sam said.
“What’s he going to ask me?” Cyrus said.
“Did you kill the girl with the snake, is what he’s going to ask you,” Sam said.
“I didn’t kill nobody,” Cyrus said.
I couldn’t see any gun on Cyrus. It was likely that Sam wouldn’t let him carry one. He might have a knife though. I would have to watch for that.
I pointed at Cyrus. “Hold up your hands one at a time. Sam, if you don’t like that, you can try to stop me.”
“Not me,” Sam said.
At my direction, Cyrus held up his right hand, and I smelled it. The smell of the snake was still strong on the skin. I didn’t ask to look at the other hand. Snake smell isn’t something you can smell from a distance. It isn’t that strong, except at first, and then it fades. But the fading takes a while. You can’t get that smell any way except by handling a snake. A snake gives off a musk, a stink, when it finds itself in danger. I wondered if Cyrus had used a forked stick to pin the head of the big rattler before he grabbed the back of the head. That was one way to do it.
“You stink of rattlesnake,” I said. “You did it.”
“The boy’s always fooling around with snakes and wild critters,” Sam said.
Cyrus spoke suddenly. “She could have been my woman. I know she could. Why’d you have to come along and spoil it? She smiled at me. You wanted her for yourself. Not to make a good wife out of her, like I would have done. All you wanted was to use her like a cow. I seen you sneaking with her into that wagon. If I’d had a gun, I’d a shot you, and Hannah’d still be alive. All the time you was in there with her, I had my ear to the sideboard. I heard all the things you was doing to her. Things she was saying to you. After that she wasn’t no good as a wife to me. That’s right—I threw the snake in there.”
Sam said, “You goddamned fool. That wasn’t the way.”
“You know what has to be done,” I said to Sam. Cyrus stood and stared at the gun in my holster.
“You can’t do it, Saddler.” I guess Sam had some feeling after all. “He ain’t never been right. Even a judge would just lock him up.”
“No judge here,” I said. “I’m the judge.”
“Look,”
Sam said in a voice close to pleading. “What’s done is done. Nothing can bring the girl back. I’ll take Cyrus far away from here. We’ll go far back in the hills and never see a soul. Not a human, man, woman, or child.”
“You won’t be around that long,” I said. “I don’t want some other girl to die because your little boy here gets jealous. I’ll give you this much—I won’t hang him. The only question is—do you kill him or do I?”
“Kill my own son?”
“Makes no difference to me. He has to die.”
Cyrus said, “Who’s got to die?”
Sam thought for a moment, then nodded at me. “We’re just talking, boy. You walk over behind that wagon with me.”
“All right, Pa,” Cyrus said.
I waited with the .44 cocked in my hand, not at all sure that Sam wouldn’t try some last sneak trick to save the idiot. If he came back with a gun ready, I’d blow his brains out.
I waited until a single shot rang out, then I moved away from where I had been standing. Sam came out from behind the wagon with the big Schofield in his holster. People came running at the sound of the shot. Reverend Claggett came first. Culligan came too, but I noticed that he didn’t hurry. The women were excited, and some were crying again.
“What happened?” Claggett asked me.
Sam answered, looking at me, “My boy Cyrus started fooling with my belt gun and shot himself dead—an accident. You know, that poor boy never had a chance in this world.”
“A boy like that shouldn’t have the handling of guns,” Claggett said. “We’ll bury him with my girl.”
It made no difference but I couldn’t let it go. My voice, hard and cold, stopped Claggett and turned him.
“Sam will want to bury his boy by himself,” I said.
“What did you say, Saddler?”
“They weren’t kin, so it’s better that way.”
Sam nodded, his eyes hating me.
