Jim Saddler 5

by Gene Curry

  “I think Sam would risk it to get at the women,” I said. “If he gets them, he can name his own price. A wagonload of women could set him up for life.”

  “I still can’t give you an escort.” Captain Flack wiped beads of sweat from his upper lip, though a cool morning breeze came through the window and stirred the papers on his desk. “I’d like to help you, but I can’t. I just can’t. I’d be forced to resign if I went against my present orders.”

  “What orders?” I could be impatient too.

  “On this very day my orders are to proceed to the Sawtooth Mountains where the Mormons are said to have established a new settlement of polygamists. Every time we think we have the Mormons in line, they move on to some remote place. Now there are rumors about Mormons living in a canyon far back in the Sawtooth range. Instead of obeying the law, they just move on.”

  “Then you’re just marching on a rumor?”

  “I’m not marching on anything, not by myself. I don’t think up my orders. I just follow them. If the polygamists are there, I am to arrest the men and burn the settlement and crops.”

  “What happens to the women and children?” Captain Flack didn’t like to be questioned by a civilian. “If it’s any of your business, I’m to take them back to this fort and await instructions from my superiors. They will get their instructions from the Department of the Interior.”

  Flack’s face softened a little. “Listen, Saddler, I have nothing against the Mormons. Some officers do. Not me. If I had my way, I’d let them have all the wives they want. The more white people out here, the better. But my orders come from people who don’t know anything about the situation. I don’t know how this whole Mormon thing got started—politicians’ wives probably. They say whole bands are moving to Mexico, where the government won’t bother them. Good luck to them! I wish they’d all go.”

  I knew I wasn’t going to win, but I had to keep trying. “If they think they’re safe in the Sawtooths, they’ll still be there a month, a year from now. They only move when they’re bothered. There may be nothing in the Sawtooths, Captain, whereas I have a whole wagon train of living, breathing young women. Why can’t you give us an escort and then go into the Sawtooths?”

  Captain Flack had creases of hangover pain between his eyes. “I can’t help you, Mr. Saddler. You look like an experienced man; you must have known what to expect when you started out with these women. If it’s any consolation, my patrols to the west haven’t seen anything. No activity at all.”

  I knew the Army would not have seen Sam’s raiders. If they worked with a man like Kiowa Sam, they would be a wily bunch, well-experienced in dodging Army patrols. When it came right down to it, I couldn’t fault the boozy captain. He didn’t look like a fire-eater, a Mormon-hater. He was just a getting-old man, who drank too much and wanted to hang onto his job because it was all he had.

  He stood up, his way of telling me there was nothing more to talk about. “The best I can do is give you extra ammunition. I’ll have to give you shells that are getting old. I recommend that you test some of them.”

  I said I would take anything I could get. We shook hands again, but he didn’t walk out with me. I got over to the sutler’s and found Culligan drinking at the rough plank bar in the far corner of the big room. The sutler was a bearded, burly man with a leather apron and a straw hat with a broken brim. No soldiers were there. Some of the women had gone back to the wagons. Claggett had gone too. But not Maggie O’Hara. She was drinking, keeping as far away from Culligan as she could. Claggett had forbidden the women to drink, so it looked like Maggie was getting bold.

  I got the sutler to set up a bottle and glass for me. I asked him if he stocked dynamite. No, he said, the one thing he didn’t stock was dynamite. The Army had no use for it, and there were no settlers to buy it. I swallowed the bad news along with my drink. Maybe it was just as well. It would make the women even more nervous if they knew we were carrying explosives. I didn’t offer to buy Culligan a drink; he wouldn’t have liked the intrusion.

  “We’d better get going,” I told him. He threw back his drink, picked up a sack of bottles and went out without a word.

  But Maggie wasn’t to be hurried. “You didn’t get an escort, did you, Saddler?”

  “No escort,” I said. “We’ll have to go it alone.”

  Maggie snapped her whiskey against the back of her throat. “Our hero!” she sneered.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It continued to rain as we started out again. All of northern Utah lay ahead of us, rough country, jagged and forbidding. The rain came down as if it would never stop. With the rain would come sickness. Dr. Ames would have his work cut out for him, but there is only so much a doctor can do on the trail.

  The train was silent as we moved away from the fort and down a long grade, keeping to the south bank of a creek. Some of the women looked back until it was out of sight. The only sounds were those of the turning wheels, the creak of harness and wood. And the rain, that goddamned rain! It drummed on the wagons and splashed in the creek. You get to hate rain like that because you know it’s trying to kill you. I knew it could well kill some of the women. It starts with a shivering that rapidly becomes pneumonia. There was nothing to be done about it. Stopping and making camp didn’t help. We would just lose time.

  We moved on through the day and, except for the rain, the going wasn’t too rough. Then there came a point where the creek turned sharply, cutting right across the trail. If it hadn’t been raining, it wouldn’t have been much of a creek. Now, built up by flood water, it roared like a fast-flowing river, overflowing its banks, tearing up bushes and small trees. There was no way to get across it, so we stopped short of it and made camp, wet and cold as we were. It was hard to get the fires started and hard to keep them going when the wood began to burn. I was helping with one of the fires when Rita came up to me and said the girl in her wagon was down with a bad chill, shaking all over and bringing up blood when she coughed.

  “I think she has the same consumption her mother died of,” Rita said. “Dr. Ames is with her now.”

  I went to the wagon. Ames was giving the girl spoonfuls of some dark medicine to help stop the coughing. After a while the coughing stopped and the girl fell asleep. I climbed out of the wagon with Ames. “I think she has consumption,” he said in his peculiar high voice. “I don’t think it’s too bad, if she doesn’t come down with pneumonia.”

  “Will she?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Then she’ll die.”

  “That’s right.”

  And she did, early the next morning. The pneumonia started late in the evening. By midnight she was delirious, sweating and babbling. By first light the girl was dead. Rita stayed with her to the end, sponging her face with a damp cloth, talking quietly to her. Rita held the girl’s hand until she shuddered and died without ever regaining consciousness.

  I’ll say this for Ames: he did everything he could. It was no use. He closed the girl’s eyes after she died and climbed down from the wagon. His daughter had kept the deathwatch with him, sitting silently beside him, saying nothing. Ames looked very tired when it was over.

  During the night the rain had stopped, but it was full day before the level of the creek began to drop. We buried the girl while the flood lessened. By the time the preacher read over her, it was time to take the first wagon across. I took Claggett’s wagon because it was the biggest and heaviest and went across easily. Culligan rode with me. After we got across, we strung ropes across the creek and started to bring the other wagons across. We had all but the last wagon across when, suddenly, an uprooted tree came sailing along in the still-strong current and struck the wagon in the center, busting the sides and front wheels. The two women in the wagon were Germans, quiet sturdy women of about thirty-years-old—the ones who had prepared Hannah Claggett’s body for burial. The tree swept the wagon away, and it turned over on its side in the swift current. They screamed for a moment, but then there was no
thing. The wagon came apart under the battering of the tree and the current. I saw one of their faces for a moment; then it was gone.

  I told the rest of the train to stay where they were while I rode downstream, followed by Culligan and Steiner. There was no sign of either of them. We rode for a mile, stopping now and then to look for the bodies, but there was still no sign of them. They were gone for good. It would be a waste of time to keep on looking, so we turned back finally, and the wagon train moved on.

  The next one to die was Isabel Ames, the doctor’s pretty daughter, the short-haired girl with the bossy ways and a real dislike for me. I never did find out what it was she had against me. It wasn’t like with Maggie O’Hara. No spark had passed between us.

  It started with nothing: a bite from a prairie dog in a hole near where we had halted for the noon meal. As usual, Isabel cooked the meal for her father and herself, and she ate it with him. If we had moved on a few minutes sooner, it wouldn’t have happened at all. But Culligan had to work on a wheel that was giving us trouble. That held up the rest of the train, because it was the rule never to split up, even for a short time.

  I noticed that the girl had been teasing the doctor, and that struck me as kind of odd. Both were in a nervous, smiling mood. She whispered in his ear and ruffled his thinning hair, making him blush. In her loose canvas trousers and thick wool shirt, Isabel Ames was damn good-looking. Not the kind I favored, though. I like women when they’re not so skittish, and not so bossy. The way she fussed over and teased her own father was a caution.

  You’d have to describe her behavior as silly; as if some sudden girlish mood had taken hold of her. She rolled on the grass in front of Ames, smiling at him all the time. He smiled back, but it was plain that he was embarrassed, although he didn’t want to offend her.

  I happened to glance over at her as she stuck her hand into the prairie dog burrow. I yelled at her to take it out. Her hand still in the hole, she turned an indignant face toward me, ready to tell me off. Then she yelped—a yelp, not a scream—and jerked her hand out of the hole. It was bleeding slightly from a small wound. She ran to Dr. Ames, holding it out in front of her.

  “Something in there bit me,” she said, holding up the hand for the doctor’s attention. Some of the women exchanged hard-eyed glances. All that fuss about a bite from a prairie dog. People had died on the trip with a lot less fuss.

  Dr. Ames opened his black bag and was doctoring the small row of punctures when Culligan announced that they could move on. I didn’t think any more about it until we were camped for the night. I made the nightly count of those standing guard and those in or around the wagons and cook fires. I was getting to the doctor’s wagon when he climbed down over the end gate. His face was creased with worry and a kind of mental fatigue. I hoped he wasn’t getting sick on us. I jerked my arm away when he grabbed at me, unaware of what he was doing. Then I looked at him again and knew something was wrong.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He grabbed my arm again; this time I let him do it. He led me around to the other side of the wagon where the others couldn’t hear. There was sweat on his long upper lip, where a heavy mustache had flourished until recently, I felt sure. I felt his hand trembling on my arm.

  “Oh, dear God!” he said. He paused until he had control of himself. What he said next brought a trickle of cold sweat from my armpits. “I think my daughter has come down with bubonic plague, Mr. Saddler. She has all the symptoms. I can’t be mistaken.”

  Cold sweat slid over my ribcage. “Can it happen that fast?”

  “Yes,” he said, trying to fight the tremor in his voice. “It’s been more than eight hours since she was bitten. Already she’s running a high temperature and the spots are beginning to appear on her face.” He sucked in breath before he went on. “I know what the plague looks like. I saw it twice before in Panama, as a young man. There can’t be any mistake about it. You’re going to have to leave us behind, or the whole train will become infected.”

  I removed his hand from my arm, but not in a rough way. “You could be infected; so could I. What about other people who have been close to your wagon during the day?”

  “I don’t know,” Ames said. “They could be. We don’t know exactly how it spreads. That’s why you have to move on right now. Leave us and move on as fast as you can. Do what I tell you, Mr. Saddler. The longer you stay here, the more danger you’ll be in.”

  Ames climbed back into the wagon. I went to tell Claggett, and even his rough-hewn face blanched at the most dreaded word on the Plains—plague!

  “I’m going to stay with them,” I said. “I have to know for sure if she’s got it. Move on about three miles and wait for my signal, three • shots fired at five second intervals. Send somebody back when you hear the signal. Tell them not to get too close.”

  Claggett glanced down the line of wagons. “What does the doctor say we should do?”

  “Put up red plague warnings. Flags. Make sure they can be seen. Ames says that’s all you can do right now. Get a move on, Reverend, before we all come down with it.”

  It was one hell of a lonely feeling to see the wagons pulling away. Word had spread, and the women looked fearfully at the Ames’s wagon as they drove their own teams around it, staying as far away as they could. I stood by the fire until the last wagon disappeared into the darkness. It was Culligan’s, and he thrust a bottle of whiskey at me before he left.

  I hadn’t done much drinking on the trip. Now I needed a drink. I felt as if I needed the whole bottle. Uncorking it, I took two big swallows before I stoppered it again. The whiskey burned in my gut without doing much good. There are times when whiskey is like that, and this was one of them. The fires burned down, and it was quiet except for the night wind and the sounds coming from the wagon.

  In a while, Isabel’s moaning became screams, and she kept on screaming, though whether from pain or terror I couldn’t tell. I waited in darkness, drinking now and then, and listened to the dying girl puke away her life.

  The hours passed slowly, one after another. Far away on the prairie I could see the fires Of the train burning low. The fires winked out, and the sky was streaked with gray. No more sounds came from the wagon.

  I had enough whiskey in me when I climbed up to take a look. I had to force myself to do it. Two coal-oil lanterns hanging from hooks threw a yellow glare on the girl’s body. Isabel Ames looked like a rotting corpse, her face covered with running sores.

  At first, Ames didn’t seem to notice me. I waited on rubbery legs, wanting to be anywhere but where I was.

  “She’s dead,” he said quietly, then bent forward and kissed her full on the lips. I waited without speaking until he turned away from the face with a strange, fatalistic look on his pale, middle-aged face.

  “We had what we had, and now it’s over,” he said.

  The stench of death was strong in the wagon, because Isabel hadn’t died easy. I found myself looking at Ames as if for the first time. The final act of kissing the plague-ridden body had changed him in my eyes. Whoever they were, whatever she had been, there had been real love between them.

  “She wasn’t your daughter,” I said, then stopped. “You don’t have to tell me anything.” I wasn’t prompted by sympathy. I didn’t want to hear his story. I felt the weight of too many lives on my shoulders, and there comes a time when you don’t want to know any more about them. I had signed on like a drummer-boy larking off to war, and here I was up to my neck in grief.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ames said. “No, she wasn’t my daughter. Her name wasn’t Isabel, just as mine isn’t Ames. But I am a doctor—was a doctor—and if I do say so, a good one. She was my nurse back in New Jersey. Her name was Jenny Sills, mine is Robert Belknap. She brought such joy into my life, Mr. Saddler. I’m fifty years of age, and until last year I thought my life was over. Now it is, but I had most of one good year in an otherwise miserable life.”

  Then I remembered the name Robert Belknap. I don’t
bother much with newspapers except when I’m in a barbershop and have to wait my turn. But I remembered the name Robert Belknap. The wife-killer, the yellow press called him. The newspapers said he had battered his wife to death with a poker, planning the deed with his pretty young nurse, then lost his nerve and fled. The paper said they were being hunted by police all over the country. I don’t approve of killing middle-aged ladies—I figured she was middle-aged—but I couldn’t see why the paper was making such a fuss over it. It must have been because Ames—Belknap was a doctor. People expect doctors to be better than they are, and want them to pay hard when they do wrong. Or maybe the papers were short of good scandals that week. Belknap didn’t look much like a killer.

  He looked at me. “Have you ever hated someone so much you found it hard to breathe in their presence?”

  “Never that much,” I said.

  Belknap said, “That’s how I felt about my wife. Twenty years ago she was my nurse. I was just getting started and ... well ... we became intimate.”

  For a wife-killer, Belknap was a pretty delicate fellow. “I liked her well enough, but I didn’t love her,” he said. “When she told me she was pregnant, I agreed to marry her. It seemed the right thing to do. Too late I discovered she wasn’t pregnant. Well, I was prepared to be philosophical about it—after all, I had my work. I don’t know when she came to hate me. Perhaps it was because she had to trick me into marriage. There had been broad hints, but I ignored them. Whatever the reason, she set out to make my life a misery, and for twenty years she succeeded.”

  Again, I tried to stop him. It was no use.

  “She belittled me constantly,” Belknap went on. “As it got worse, I kept suggesting that we separate, but she just sneered at me. I was her husband, and I was going to remain her husband no matter what. She was going to make me suffer—her actual word. In time, I grew to hate the sound of her voice, her presence, everything and anything about her. On the night she ... died ... I thought she had gone to Philadelphia to visit her sister. But she was just waiting for Jenny to stay late after office hours. She crept into the house and caught us together. I think now she must have been insane. She tried to kill Jenny with a poker, but instead I wrestled it away from her and killed her with it. I didn’t just strike her once. Twenty years of hate went into that murder. You have to believe that, Mr. Saddler.”