by Gene Curry
A strong guard was posted while supper was prepared. This was high desert country, and it got cold as soon as the sun went down. I warned Iversen about walking in front of the fire. Culligan didn’t have to be warned, and neither did Steiner. Iversen’s face had healed, but he would never be the same. He had grown more sullen, but I couldn’t decide whether it was because of Kiowa Sam or the missing teeth. I didn’t expect him to snap back at me when I warned him about getting shot by firelight. He muttered something, and stepped away from the light.
Iversen didn’t have anything else to say, so I took my plate of food and moved away from the fire so I wouldn’t have to look at him. I sat on my heels and ate without much interest. When I looked up, Maggie O’Hara was standing over me, going to stand guard after having eaten. I kept on eating, wishing she’d go away. At any other time the thought of matching words with the woman-lover would have interested me, especially this woman-lover. But with things as they were, I wasn’t in the mood.
“I heard what you said to Iversen,” she said. “Nerves getting tight are they, Saddler?”
“Go to hell!”
Maggie, cradling her rifle, hunkered down beside me. “That’s what’s got you jumpy, isn’t it? The idea that they’ll lay back and try to pick off the men. If they’re plague-scared, that’s what they might do. Pick off the men at long distance with no danger to themselves. With the men dead, they’d count on the women to give up. Then all they’d have to do is wait and see if there really is a plague.”
I set down my plate and looked at her. She was right. That was what I’d been thinking. The women would give up, most of them would anyway.
“I don’t know what they’re going to do,” I said. “That’s the same answer I gave the sailor.”
Maggie replied irritably, “I’m no sailor, friend. You can talk straight American to me. Pretend I’m a man. It’s not that hard.”
She was wrong there. It would have been hard to think of her as a man, even if she had been wearing a potato sack. Somehow, the tight pants she thought made her look mannish only served to make her appear more feminine.
“They could try to wear us down by sniping,” I admitted. “If they start that, the men will have to ride in the wagons, or else the train has to travel by night.” Maggie found that funny. “You wouldn’t like that, would you, Saddler? Traveling in a wagon out of sight, while women protected you.”
I grinned at her. “Depends on whose wagon I was in.” Her temper boiled again. “Don’t start that fucking shit or we’ll have trouble. We came close a few times, so don’t lean too hard on me. You and the other men could go all the way. Wear dresses and poke bonnets.”
That was supposed to make me mad. Maybe I was edgy. I started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“I was thinking of Culligan in a dress.”
Maggie stood up, holding the rifle. “You’re a hard one to figure, Saddler.”
“Then don’t try.”
“I do what I like. You have to remember that. For what it’s worth, tell me this. Are you as tough as you think you are, or is it all for show? The other men I figured out long ago. Open books to me, even old man Claggett. You, you’re different in some way.”
“What’s so different about me?” I wondered what in the name of Christ she was leading up to, if anything.
For a moment she stood looking at me, and I think she was as puzzled as I was. Then she said, “You might just be the first real man I ever met, Saddler. All my life I’ve listened to men brag about how tough they were. From my drunken father on down the line, that’s all I ever heard. When I worked in that whorehouse in New York, it wasn’t any different. More than half the men that came there didn’t come to fuck the women. The dear darlin’s came to talk and show off. I got paid whether they talked or fucked. No difference to me. Some bragged about how rich they were. Some even bragged about their wives and children. A lot of them sounded off about the size of their cocks. If you knew how to do it right, without giving the appearance of lying, you could always count on a big tip for telling a man what a big cock he had. I asked Flaxie, and she said you have a real big one when it’s standing. Is that true, Saddler?”
“Gosh! I don’t know. I never got to comparing with the other fellers.”
My lack of response angered her. “You think nobody can make a dent in you?”
“I have a few dents,” I said. “You want to try to make a fresh one?”
Suddenly, there was confusion in her face; the rifle was turned on me. I’m sure her sudden bewilderment was genuine, as if this peculiar conversation had triggered something inside her—something she had buried and wanted to keep buried. I didn’t want to get shot over it, and I didn’t want to shoot her.
Maggie said quietly, “If I wanted to make a dent in you, I’d have you begging for mercy. You’d beg for mercy, and then you’d beg me not to stop. They didn’t call me the best fuck in the Tenderloin for nothing. I’d break your back, Saddler. I’d break your back, and you’d be glad to be a cripple.”
Maggie stalked away and left me with my plate of cold stew. Overhead, the stars came out in a blaze of soft, white light. Ah, the language of romance, I thought. Me and Maggie O’Hara and starlight on the desert.
Break my back, would she? Well, sir, my back was there any time she wanted to break it. For a few brief minutes I was able to forget about Kiowa Sam.
Chapter Sixteen
I was standing the last watch of the night when a woman began to scream. There was less than an hour to go before first light. The sound, wild and despairing, made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I knew this was no nightmare, but death in all its finality and ugliness. It came from one of the wagons at the far end of the oval from where I was hunched down with my rifle. Before I straightened up the scream came again.
The two women in that wagon were sisters who had worked together in the same Philadelphia cathouse. Their names were Lily and Julie. Lily was the one who was dead. I climbed up in the wagon, and the other woman wouldn’t stop screaming, so I hit her. That stopped the screaming. She collapsed and began to sob, almost knocking over a stub of a candle that guttered in a bean can with holes punched in the side.
Lily had slashed both wrists with a sharp, meat-cutting knife. She lay on her mattress with a peaceful look on her face. For her the trip was finally over. Sometime during the night she had decided that she couldn’t stand anymore of it. I didn’t blame her much, and maybe she was better off.
I called Rita and Steiner, and they took the dead girl’s sister to their wagon. “Get some of Culligan’s whiskey for her,” I said, adding Lily to the growing list of the dead in my mind. I heard Steiner calling for Culligan when Claggett came to the wagon and climbed up into it.
The preacher’s face had no expression as he stared down at the dead woman. “God forgive her,” he said. “She has done a terrible thing. There is no greater sin than the sin of despair. We’ll bury her as soon as it’s light, and move on. What else can we do? I’m beginning to think God is angry with me, so many terrible things have happened since we began this journey.”
I didn’t care how mad God was at the preacher. I hated what I had to say next. “We won’t bury her,” I said. “We’ll burn the body along with the wagon. The sister will have to bunk in with the Steiners or in some other wagon.”
At last I had said something that shocked the preacher. His thin lips moved before he spoke. “You want to burn the body so the raiders will think we have the plague?” I didn’t mind his disapproving stare. That was all right. I didn’t approve of it myself. “I’ll go farther than that, if I have to,” I said. “You hired me to get you to California. That’s where we’re going. It can’t make any difference to the dead woman.”
“I won’t have anything to do with it,” Claggett said. “You’ll have to do this on your own.”
I shrugged. “She’s going to need a prayer no matter how she goes.”
“I thought you did
n’t believe in prayer.”
“Not your kind of prayer, Reverend. But I used to see the dead woman listening to you while you preached your sermons on Sunday. The least you can do is read a few words over her.”
Claggett was sharp enough. “That’s not the real reason. You just want to make it look right, if Kiowa Sam is watching.”
“That’s another reason. It’ll do.”
Before he climbed down, Claggett said to me, “I don’t know if you’re a good man or a bad man, Saddler. But I’ll do as you ask.”
I called Steiner and told him to keep feeding whiskey to Julie until we got the job done. “I don’t want her to see it,” I said.
Steiner’s face was lined with strain. “She’s almost unconscious now—shock and whiskey. We’ll be miles out before she wakes up.”
I said, “Make sure of it, Jake. It won’t be easy to face her after it’s over. She’s not to know about the burning.” Steiner laid a heavy hand on my arm. “We’re all part of it. It’s not just you.”
Sure, I thought, but I’m the one who thought of it. I’m the one who’s going to light the match.
“Sure, Jake,” I said. “We’re all in this together.”
I made sure it was full daylight before the rest of the wagons began to move on, leaving me with Claggett and a can of coal oil. Claggett stood in the cool morning, his sparse hair ruffled by the wind, and read from his Bible. Once that was done, I soaked the wagon and set it on fire. Flame and smoke boiled up into the clear air as we rode on to rejoin the wagons.
Everything had been done quickly, the praying and the burning, as if we couldn’t get away fast enough. We were turning away from the flaming wagon when I caught the first flash of morning sunlight on glass. We had our heads bowed a moment before, so they must have thought it was safe to glass us from afar.
It must have looked pretty convincing: the dead woman, the burning wagon. Still, Sam was a foxy old killer, and maybe fooling him wouldn’t be that easy. But the other raiders had seen the burning wagon, and there was no way that Sam could make them believe that we had burned a woman just to make it look good. The cautious ones and the cowards would be scared.
I knew I was. Maggie’s talk about long-range sniping came back to me. The only good cover was out of range of even the most powerful rifle. They would have to get in closer if they meant to do some sniping. Could be that some of them were closer than I figured. No way to know that with experienced stalkers. I could feel rifle sights lining up on my chest. That could’ve been fact or my imagination. It’s a hell of a thing to be stalked like an animal; the hunter has all the advantages. I began to sweat, because I’m no hero. We’d know pretty soon how it was going to be.
If I had been with the train, I might have got it instead of Iversen—me or Claggett, we were the tough ones in our bunch. But we weren’t there, so Iversen got it first. The shooters were up ahead, waiting for the train to pass. I was glad it wasn’t Steiner or Culligan; they were men too valuable to lose.
Iversen was driving the preacher’s wagon, because the preacher had to stay behind with me. We were hurrying to catch up with the train when the first shot boomed and echoed across the hills. I heard Iversen yell as the bullet knocked him back into the bed of the wagon. Then bullets came at Steiner and Culligan, but they were under cover by the time Iversen had finished dying.
Claggett and I ran to the last wagon—Culligan’s—and climbed into it. Bullets splintered the thick sides of the wagon without ripping through them all the way. We lay on the floor of the wagon, breathing hard. Culligan lay with the reins in his hand, blowing his whiskey breath on us. I edged up to the front and yelled at the women to keep moving. Maggie O’Hara yelled back that she would drive the preacher’s wagon. I yelled at her to go ahead. I knew she was safe enough. They wouldn’t kill any of the women unless they had to. Women were what they wanted, and they were no good dead.
The sniping started again when Maggie dropped down from her wagon. At least one of the shooters had taken her for a man, what with the pants, boots and cowpuncher’s creased hat. I wondered how pleased she was at being mistaken for a man. Bullets chased her as she ran along the side of the train. Then I couldn’t see her any more, but the shooting went on. Then suddenly it stopped. Somebody with good eyes had realized that they had been making a terrible mistake, trying to kill one of the best-looking women in the bunch.
The train began to move faster after Maggie took over the driving of the preacher’s wagon. I told Claggett to stay where he was. “I’m going up there with her,” I said. “That’s my wagon,” Claggett said angrily.
“You don’t move fast enough, Reverend.”
Claggett knew I was right. His gun hand was the only fast thing about him. “What’re we going to do, Saddler? We don’t have to guess anymore.”
“Right now we stay as we are and keep moving. They’re scared to come in, or they wouldn’t have started sniping. We still have the scare working for us.”
How long it would go on working was the unanswered question. The way things were, we were in a kind of moving standoff. A slow-moving standoff, with the raiders still too scared to attack and the rest of us unable to show ourselves.
I showed myself as I dropped from the wagon, and bullets came at me from behind a long ridge on the closest hill. I was glad they had no cover to shoot from on the other side. On that side the country was flat and ran flat and bare for miles. A bullet tugged at the tall crown of my borrowed hat, but when the next bullet came I was on the safe side of the wagons. But I had to show myself when I crossed the open spaces between the moving wagons. Every time I did, I got shot at. But long-range shooting isn’t that easy with a moving target—whoever had shot Iversen was pretty good—and I wasn’t just moving, I was running hard.
I came closest to getting killed when I reached the wagon and started to climb up over the end gate. The end gate was up, and that made it hard to get over. They turned all their bullets on me then, and I don’t know why one of them didn’t find me. I probably would have been killed if Maggie hadn’t dropped the reins, grabbed the preacher’s Winchester and started blasting in the direction of the snipers. There wasn’t a chance of hitting anything—the Winchester didn’t have the range—but when someone is shooting at you, it can put you off your aim. Maggie’s wild shooting gave me the time I needed to get into the wagon. I lay panting, telling her to stop shooting. “Somebody could get mad and shoot you off the box,” I yelled. “You’ll get killed if you don’t stop.” As I yelled, a bullet tore into the wagon cover not far from Maggie’s head. “Sons of bitches!” she yelled, mad enough to pull her belt gun. I jumped to the front of the wagon and yanked the pistol from her hand.
“Quit it!” I said.
She struggled furiously until her anger wore itself out. Any temper left was directed at me. “Don’t ever do that again, Saddler. I swear I’ll kill you if you do.”
I thought it was safe to give her back her gun. “Peace!” I said. “The enemy is out there.”
Maggie holstered her gun while I reloaded the Winchester. “What in hell are you doing here?” Maggie raged. “You were supposed to stay in cover.”
I grinned at her. “I’m in cover now. I wanted to see how you were doing.”
The shooting from the ridge had stopped. Maggie said, “You see how I’m doing. I don’t need your help.” Slowly, she grinned back. “I was right about the sniping, wasn’t I?”
“I wish you’d been wrong,” I said. “At least it’s out in the open.”
“Nobody’s out in the open except us,” Maggie said. “What do you think they’ll do next?”
“Keep on sniping when they think there’s a chance of hitting something. Maybe just keep on sniping, hoping to wear us down. They may try something else after it gets dark.”
Maggie didn’t like the idea that anything could wear her down. “They can just pull it,” she jeered. “Let the bastards try anything they like.”
The sniping started again
, and we ducked our heads, though the bullets buried themselves harmlessly in the side of the wagon. Maggie straightened up defiantly. “Fuck ’em all!” she said. “You too, Saddler, if you’d like to be included.”
Another rifle bullet socked into the heavy wood. I knew we were safe enough for the moment. “Tell me,” I said, “are you really as tough as you make out, or is it all for show?”
Maggie grinned. She was a wild, crazy woman I was beginning to like. A lot of strange things had made her what she was, just as they had made all of us.
“I won’t bullshit you, Saddler. Why try to bullshit a bullshitter like you. I’m tough enough, I guess. Tough as I have to be.”
Another bullet tore into the wagon. “Stay tough for now,” I said.
“Just watch me!” Maggie said.
We moved on through the day, and so did the snipers. At first we had to stay close to the line of hills because broken ground strewn with big rocks and slashed by deep ravines separated us from open country. It was hours before we were able to turn the wagons and head out onto the flat. I wasn’t sure that they wouldn’t attack when they saw the train moving out of range of their most powerful rifles. I got back in the wagon bed and made a slit in the cover and watched the hills as we moved away from them. And then for the first time I saw the raiders, some outlined against the top of the ridge they’d been shooting from, others coming down from higher up on the slopes. It was too far to see much. As we moved farther out onto the flat, they mounted up and began to nudge their horses down the side of the broken hills.
Maggie had seen them too. “They’re coming after us but taking their time about it. They’re scared all right.”
“They’ll have to decide after a while,” I said.
We traveled on, and the raiders stayed with us, but at a good distance. I stood up on the box and could see them a long way back, eating our dust as we went deeper into the desert. There were a lot of disheartened marauders out there in the heat and glare, I thought. It wasn’t going at all like Kiowa Sam had told them it would. Instead of enjoying more women than they’d ever dreamed about, they were eating dust behind what could be a plague wagon.
