by Gene Curry
“Not the usual kind,” Steiner said. “I made my plans, and then I deserted when we were on maneuvers close to the French border.”
“You ran away,” Claggett said, but I knew that was just for effect. The preacher didn’t want to give in too quickly.
“As fast as I could,” Steiner said. “And I’m still a crack shot.”
Claggett turned to me. “Give me your rifle,” he said. I unsheathed the Winchester .44-.40 and handed it to Steiner, who said he hadn’t handled a lever action before. I showed him how it worked by jacking out all the shells and reloading.
“I think I can manage it,” he said.
“We’ll see about that,” Claggett said to Steiner. “Set up a target at a fair distance.”
“There’s no need for that,” Steiner said. “A few tin cans thrown in the air will do. Anything will do.” Culligan came forward with a small, badly rusted bucket. “This thing is past fixing. How’s about that?”
“It will do, but throw it far,” Claggett said.
“I’ll throw,” Culligan said, holding the bucket by the handle.
“I’m ready,” Steiner said.
Culligan whirled the bucket with a powerful hand until it became a blur. Then he released it. It sailed up high and out far. Steiner didn’t try for a shot until it reached the apex of its flight and began to fall. His first shot hit it dead center, spinning it off to one side. He jacked a shell, fired, and hit it again. The bucket was close to the ground when he put a third bullet through it.
“Is that good enough for you?” he asked Claggett.
“If you’re hungry there’s food on the fire,” the preacher said, his way of saying that Steiner was hired.
Now came the harder part—Rita. I said Rita had saved my life back in town and that was all the reason I needed for letting her join the train. “She’ll pay her way and won’t make any trouble for anybody. She won’t be part of the train, just a passenger.”
“You’ll have to repay her some other way,” Claggett decided. “You have plenty of money from that poker game, and you have wages coming as guide. Use some of that to show your gratitude.”
Rita flared up, as I knew she would. “This Holy Joe talks like I’m not even here.”
I told her to shut up.
“Money isn’t what she needs,” I told Claggett. “She got to Kansas all right. That’s not to say she’ll get out again. This country is crawling with men that would delight to take her prisoner. Apart from that, she wants to go to San Francisco.”
“To do what?”
Rita cut in with, “To mind my own business. That’s why I’m going to Frisco.”
Claggett’s mental torment was crazy but real. “I’d be doing the devil’s work if I took you to California. I know you mean to continue your life of sin. Listen to me, girl, Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins.”
“You got it wrong, padre,” Rita said. “I wasn’t around at the time.”
Claggett shook his head in disbelief. “You mock the crucified Christ! But there is time to repent, even at this moment. I mean only the best for you. Kneel with me, and we will pray together.” Claggett’s voice grew shrill with fervor. “We will pray and beg the Lord’s forgiveness. Then you will set out with us on a new life filled with decency and hard work. Answer me, girl!”
I didn’t expect Rita’s answer to be as strong as “Fuck you, preacher,” but it was.
Claggett’s face turned white with anger. “That settles it; she’s not going,” he said. “Do what you like about the money. Just send her away from here.”
Push had come to shove. It was time to say it. “If she goes, then I go with her. Try to pull that shoulder gun on me, and I’ll shoot the fingers off your hand. Make up your mind.”
Claggett knew he was beaten. Hiring Steiner was a stroke of luck, but even a crack shot wouldn’t make up for the loss of a guide and hunter.
“You’ll be responsible for her,” Claggett said, turning his back. “This is the second time you’ve made me back down, Saddler. No matter how it goes, there won’t be a third. I mean that sincerely.”
I knew he did. Claggett was sincere about everything. If he brooded about me flouting his God-given authority, it could come to killing long before we reached the California line.
“My God! What a pickle puss that old man is,” Rita said. “If I had a face sour as that, I’d wear a mask.”
I was sick of all the bickering. “You don’t have to talk tough all the time,” I said. “I don’t know what goes on in Claggett’s head, but I do know he’s trying to do some good. Maybe he’s going about it the wrong way. That’s not for you to decide. So, keep a damper on that fuck you talk and maybe—just maybe—you’ll get to California, Rita. What’s your last name, anyway?”
“The name is Halsmann, and from now on I won’t say anything stronger than ‘dam.’ That mild enough for you?”
“Fuck you, Miss Halsmann,” I said, grinning at the sassy farm girl from PD country.
Rita bobbed up and down. “Well, I certainly hope you will, Mr. Saddler. If your prick is as hard as your jaw line, we’ll have a great time.”
Just then Maggie O’Hara came out from the train and looked Rita over at close range. I guess she liked what she saw. Maggie ignored me, at least at first. “You’re welcome to bunk in our wagon,” she offered. Her freckled Irish face had the expression of a hungry man staring at a porterhouse steak. “We have a real big wagon, and there’s lots of room. Is it a deal?”
I expected to hear some strong language, but all Rita did was to smile sweetly. “Thanks, but no,” she said. “I talk in my sleep the whole night long. You’d never get any rest with me aboard.”
Maggie knew she had been pegged for what she was. “Oh, that wouldn’t bother us. Why don’t you give it a try?”
Suddenly Rita dropped her ladylike act. “Find somebody else to diddle and lick,” she said.
Without thinking, Maggie placed her hand on the butt of her gun. “You’ve got a dirty mouth on you for a rube,” she said. “I’m sorry I even asked. Who in hell wants a dirty whore in their wagon!”
“You do,” Rita said. “You try to come at me unawares, and I’ll break your darned neck.” Rita smiled at me when she said darned.
Maggie was furious because I was there and could hear everything. “If I wanted you bad enough, I’d take you, rube. I’d take you, and there isn’t a thing you could do about it.”
Then it was my turn to get it. Maggie said, “You stay out of woman-business, Saddler. I figure you already turned this girl against me and Flaxie.”
I was tired. It had not been a good day, by any means. “You’re wrong about Flaxie. I like your wife very much.” Once again, it got close to killing between us. I wondered if Jake Steiner could juggle eggs or do card tricks. Anything to ease the tension that never seemed to go away.
“One of these days ...” Maggie said as she walked away.
“I hope not,” I said after her, watching her back, because I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t whirl and fire. She was capable of it. She was capable of anything. The thought of what she’d be like in bed continued to gnaw at me.
Rita looked at my face, and her eyes were troubled. “Would you really have shot her? Killed a woman, I mean.”
I nodded. “If I had to. It may come to that before it’s over.”
Rita looked along the line of wagons. In a few minutes we would be on the move again.
“Just one big, happy family!” Rita said.
Chapter Eleven
We crossed the line into Nebraska at a place called Fairburn, keeping to the Oregon Trail until we reached the South Platte. Nothing much happened on the way through Nebraska. A few years before, Nebraska had been full of hostile Sioux ready to take on the Army or anyone else who trespassed into their territory. The grassy plains of Nebraska had been nourished by the blood of red men and white.
It had taken a merciless campaign by Colonel MacKenzie, a merciless man himself, to enf
orce an uneasy peace on the Sioux. Feared even more than the Indian-hating Custer, MacKenzie’s cavalry, supported by infantry, swept through Nebraska like lire and sword, burning and killing without discrimination. MacKenzie vowed to pacify the Sioux even if it meant wiping out every man, woman and child. Now, a few years later, Nebraska was peaceful.
Now and then a small band of Sioux would come to trade for salt or sugar. I told Claggett to let them have the salt for nothing. Buffalo were getting scarcer all the time, and they needed salt to preserve what meat they had.
Whenever such a band came to the train, they let it be known, well in advance, that their intentions were peaceful. They always, or most always, carried a flag of truce and kept out of rifle range until we waved them in. But even then, no doubt thinking of MacKenzie, they approached warily and were elaborately polite. They were fascinated by a whole wagon train of women with just a few men to protect them. I doubted that they had ever seen anything like it before.
They were peaceful, but I watched them just the same. One band larger than the others wanted to know if we had any whiskey. I was firm about that. No whiskey, I said, now or later. Not for gold, not for anything. I explained to their leader, who spoke halting English, that Reverend Claggett was down on whiskey and wouldn’t be caught in the same territory as it. I guess one look at Claggett’s Old Testament face convinced them that I was telling the truth. We gave them salt, and they rode away into broken country. That night I doubled the guard, thinking they might decide to come at us in the dark, but the night passed quietly.
It was good to have Jake Steiner along; at last here was a man I could talk to. I liked Culligan better than I had at the start of the trip, but we had no words to trade. At some point in his life the Irishman had decided to live as a loner, even in a crowd. I was pretty sure he hadn’t been born that way; something had changed him, but what it was I had no idea. It must have been something bad, because most Irishmen are friendly enough. Culligan worked and drank and slept. I can’t say honestly that he ever got completely drunk. If anything happened in the night, he could rouse up as quickly as any man in the train. Sometimes I thought it was odd to be with so many people I knew nothing about.
Jake Steiner was the only one there who didn’t seem to lie. Of course, maybe everything he told me was a lie, but I didn’t think so. He sure as hell hadn’t lied about being a crack shot with a rifle.
I paid passage for Rita in a wagon with two hard-faced young women. They needed Rita’s money—my money—and they took it, but didn’t talk to her. Rita didn’t give a damn. She had a one-track mind, that girl. She was going to get rich in Frisco, and nothing was going to stop her.
I guess Steiner and Rita were the only real friends I had in that train. Steiner was the most talkative son-of-a-bitch you ever met, yet I never tired of his stories. He never repeated himself, and he had been a lot more places than I had, and that’s saying something because I’ve been all over. I’ve been a drifter all my life, but Steiner had me beat hollow. He had spent two years in South America looking for emeralds.
“They called them Green Fire, but they didn’t burn for me,” Steiner said. “One time some old Indian fraud told me about a place far back in the jungle where the green rocks were thick as fleas on a mongrel. I gave him money and other things, and indeed there were green rocks when I finally got there. Unfortunately, that’s what they turned out to be—green rocks. By then I knew what emeralds didn’t look like. Then, one morning I woke up and decided that God hadn’t intended for me to find emeralds of any size. If he had, I would have been born with emeralds in both baby fists.”
So far, that had been the story of his whole life, always coming close to what he thought he wanted, then having it slip from his grasp at the last moment. There was some bitterness in him, but not much. He took life as it came, and mostly it was hard.
“I don’t know why I can’t make a go of something. I know I’m smart enough, and some of my ideas aren’t bad.”
“Maybe what you need is a partner,” I said that night as we watched for Sioux. “Don’t look at me, Jake, because I’m not the partnering kind. Don’t need to be, the way I make a living. I can make my way with a gun and a deck of cards. You, you’re different. You’re a born businessman, only you get it wrong somehow.”
Steiner sighed. “I know you’re right, but good partners are hard to find. I had a partner once in New Orleans, the coffee business, and he robbed me blind before he took off for parts unknown. Since then I’ve been wary of partners.”
Somehow my idea of a partnership got into Rita’s mind. I know I didn’t mention it to her, and I’m pretty sure that Steiner didn’t. Rita liked the tough, fat Jew right from the first day they met on the road from Junction City. Back in the old country, Steiner had gone to a good school before the army grabbed him. He spoke German, French and English; his years in South America made him fluent in Spanish as well. All this impressed Rita, who had never been out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania until she went to Kansas. Jake had read a lot in rooming houses all over the world, and there wasn’t much he didn’t know.
Little by little, it came out that Rita could barely read English. She could struggle through a printed page, but for her it was rough going. To make up for this, Steiner elected himself president of a one-woman academy, and at night when he wasn’t working or standing guard, he huddled by the fire with her, going over her spelling and grammar. The hardest job he had was to make her stop talking dirty. Rita was a foul mouth. Every other word was “fuck” or “shit” or “balls.” Steiner stopped her every time she came out with a mouthful, and he kept on doing it.
Everybody except Culligan regarded them with suspicion and hostility. They were having a good time together, and that annoyed most of the ladies, Maggie O’Hara most of all. It bothered Iversen, too, that he couldn’t seem to get Rita interested in him. Lord knows he tried, and her indifference must have come as a slap in the face, for he was sort of a handsome fellow, kind of dumb, but handsome. I knew that many of the other ladies would have welcomed the chance to get in bed with him. But he wasn’t horny enough to go against Claggett’s orders. No sex with the “saved” women was the preacher’s rule, and Iversen obeyed it out of fear.
The fact is, there was good reason to be afraid of Claggett. Claggett was a fierce man and probably more than a little crazy. Anyway, Iversen, a sailor by trade, was no kind of gunslinger. He wouldn’t stand a chance if he crossed the preacher, though I had no doubt that he was handy enough with his fists. But there would be no fisticuffs with Claggett. Iversen would get a bullet in the heart, and the train would move on.
Trouble between Steiner and Iversen was inevitable. I saw it coming, but there was nothing I could do about it. Both were big, tough men with hard lives behind them. It wasn’t my place to tell them what to do. Claggett was the chaplain of the outfit, not me, but he didn’t seem to be aware of what was developing. I couldn’t take sides in it, though I liked Steiner a lot more than Iversen.
Steiner did his best to keep out of Iversen’s way, not an easy thing to do, the way we were thrown together day and night. Sometimes Iversen would mimic Steiner’s accent, making it sound a lot more Dutchy than it was. In fact, Steiner spoke the best English in the whole train. When Iversen made fun of his accent, Steiner pretended to take it as a joke. But that didn’t work.
The homier Iversen got for Rita, the more hostile he got towards Steiner. The poor, dumb son-of-a-bitch did everything he could to make her notice him. He was good with his hands and worked like a bastard to make a braided rawhide belt for her. I’d see him working at it, late at night by the fire. In the end, it didn’t get him a goddamned thing. One morning, while Steiner was sleeping in Culligan’s wagon after standing the last watch, Iversen presented Rita with the belt. His sea tanned face flushed red when she said thanks, but she didn’t need a belt.
Iversen had been a lot of places, but that hadn’t taught him manners. He flung the belt in the fire and said, “You’d t
ake it quick enough if that fucking foreigner Jew gave it to you.”
Rita gave him her sweetest smile. “Yes, I probably would. But he doesn’t have to give me a thing. Look, Mr. Iversen, there’s no need for this. We’re going to be traveling together for a long time.”
“That we are,” Iversen said, watching his present burn and curl into ash in the fire.
By now we were well out on the Overland Trail and making fair time. There were some delays, mostly caused by broken wheels. But our luck was holding, and it continued to hold as we moved along just north of the Wyoming line.
The worst delay came when it rained for two whole days and everything turned to mud. Winter was over, but the rain came down in cold, gray sheets that chilled the body and numbed the mind. There was nothing to do but keep on going—because that’s the principal rule in a crossing of the Plains—keep moving, no matter what. Finally, the rain let up and the sun started to dry the land again. It was good to see the sun shining on the wet grass early in the morning.
Our destination, for the moment, was Fort Bridger, in the southwest corner of Wyoming, the last army post we would come to before we reached California. For hundreds of miles past Fort Bridger there was nothing but desert and mountains and semi-arid plains. Out there was where the real danger lay.
Past Bridger the Overland Trail took a slant to the southwest, rough traveling all the way. I still figured Nevada as the place for a possible attack. The Army patrolled the northern part of Utah, so that made Nevada the logical place for Kiowa Sam to come at us. I felt it in my bones, the way an old man feels his aches on a damp day.
Some of the women could shoot, but most of the foreign and city women had never handled a gun of any kind. I went from wagon to wagon, talking to the women who said they could shoot. I warned them not to waste time bragging and lying. It could get them killed; it could get us all killed. If they couldn’t shoot, it was best to give their weapons to the women who could. I found a few Southern mountain women who knew rifles and was glad to get them. I divided up the weapons, giving the nervy city women the handguns.
