Arrow Keeper

by Judd Cole

Sudden anger and jealousy pinched Matthew’s throat almost closed. “You going?”

  Kristen’s eyes flashed indignantly. “Of course not! I said no. But Matthew, father is more upset than I’ve ever seen him. I think he suspects I’m meeting someone.”

  “That settles it,” said Matthew. “We’ll tell him today.”

  Her eyes widened. “Tell him about us?”

  “Sure. Tell him about us—and we’ll tell him that today I asked you to marry me,” he added on an impulse.

  “You won’t be telling me any such thing,” rumbled a gravelly voice behind them, and Kristen cried out in fright. Matthew whirled around to confront Boone Wilson and the speaker, Hiram Steele.

  “I told you, Mr. Steele,” Wilson said. “I told you she was meetin’ up with this Injun whelp!”

  “I ain’t no Injun,” Matthew said hotly.

  “Oh, this red varmint is all grit and a yard wide, he is,” Wilson said scornfully.

  Steele’s hard, flint-gray eyes bored into Matthew’s defiant black ones. “You better stick to your own kind.”

  Before Matthew could reply, Steele nodded to his underling. “Let’s have us a huggin’ match, red boy,” Wilson said, stepping forward quickly.

  Wilson’s first punch—a vicious uppercut— slammed Matthew’s head back and knocked him against the pine tree. Wilson waded in quickly, following through with several powerful punches to Matthew’s face and stomach. Matthew slumped against the tree as if he’d been pole axed. Kristen screamed when Wilson slipped a sharp Bowie knife out of the sheath on his belt. He squatted and held it right under Matthew’s bloody, swelling nose.

  “Next time we hug, you red devil, I’ll cut you open from asshole to appetite!”

  Kristen lunged toward the knife, but Steele caught her in one hand. “Put that blade away, Wilson.” Holding his daughter back with one hand, he shook his other at Matthew as he said, “You’ve had your fair warning. I mean it, boy. Your kind is not welcome here. God have mercy on your heathen soul if I find you with my girl again.”

  Matthew ignored him, his eyes finding Kristen. Moving his swelling lips with difficulty, he said, “They don’t matter. Do you want me to stop coming?

  Kristen’s face was a study in misery. Her gaze flicked from her father’s stone-eyed authority to the wicked blade Wilson was sheathing. If she said no, she realized, she was as good as killing Matthew.

  “Yes,” she lied.

  At that moment, Matthew would have gladly welcomed Wilson’s knife instead of that single word.

  Chapter Two

  “Damn redskins got enough guts to fill a smokehouse,” said Enis McGillycuddy. “I’ll be dogged and gone iffen they didn’t sneak right up on our camp last night and make off with half our horses and supplies!”

  Matthew was unpacking a crate of new leather harnesses and hanging them on pegs behind the broad deal counter. He watched the black-bearded miner switch his quid of chewing tobacco from his left cheek to his right. The miner’s heavy, hobnailed boots had left thick divots of dried red river clay on the bare planks of the floor. He held a scattergun loosely in his left hand, both barrels pointing down. His right fist pounded the counter as he emphasized his words to John Hanchon.

  “We need more help from the fort! The Injun is a natural-born killer and thief with no respect for property rights. All this talk about learnin’ ’em to farm and raise cattle is pure bosh. I wish them fancy-fine greenhorns back east could see what Injun braves does to captured white women.”

  John was too busy stacking supplies on the counter to reply. McGillycuddy shifted his cold, flat eyes sideways and dwelt on Matthew’s bruised face, though he still directed his words to the storekeeper.

  “Well, lead’s going to fly. You can put that down in your book. There’s plenty of color left in them hills, and I aim to mine it, Injuns or no, even if it comes down to the nut-cuttin’!”

  His eyes still holding the boy’s, he untied a leather pouch attached to his belt by a rawhide thong and shook some gold out of it. It took Matthew a moment to understand why the miner made sure he saw the pouch: it was made from a bull’s scrotum.

  Normally, Matthew simply ignored such hostility. But now, only a few days after the incident at Hiram Steele’s, he felt heat rising to his face. Abruptly, he threw down the harness he was untangling and headed toward the dogtrot to the house.

  Your kind isn’t welcome here. Steele’s words still burned in his memory like embers of glowing punk, their truth made all the more undeniable by Kristen’s decision to reject him. Now, all the past slights and insults in his life took on a new and clearer meaning.

  Stick to your own kind. Suddenly, after that humiliation, Matthew had wanted to know who he was and where he had come from. All the years of deliberate silence left him with a desire as powerful as hell thirst to solve the blank mystery of his past. He was tired of feeling like an intruding coyote.

  The day before, he had finally worked up the courage to ask his father. “It’s no use to lick old wounds,” John had replied evasively. So Matthew knew his only hope was mother.

  He found her in the bright, cheery kitchen, using the bottom of an empty whiskey bottle to press biscuits out of sourdough mash. She looked pretty and efficient in a calico skirt and soft yellow shirtwaist. Her copper hair was pulled into a tight bun on her nape.

  “I thought you’d be getting hungry ’long about now,” she greeted him, “judging from the food you left on your plate this morning. I’ll fix you up some side meat and eggs.”

  Matthew shook his head. “Who was my real ma and pa?” he said bluntly.

  Scarlet points appeared on his mother’s pale cheeks. For nearly sixteen years, she had put that question out of her mind. Now she slowly set the bottle down on the table and wiped her hands on her apron.

  “Did you ask your pa that?” she said.

  “Yes’m. He wouldn’t tell me, though.”

  “Well, you just leave him alone about all that. He won’t brook such questions.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  She picked up the bottle again and vigorously resumed pressing out biscuits. “Land o’ Goshen, child!” she said with false gaiety. “You will jabber on so! You’ll fret me into an early grave!”

  “Will you tell me?” he said. “I got a right to know.”

  “I knew something was troubling you,” she finally said with surprising gentleness. “Especially when you wouldn’t tell us who you had the fight with.”

  She sighed, pretending great absorption in her work as she spoke. “Son, there’s surely some questions it’s best not to ask. The good Lord, in His infinite wisdom, saw fit to make sure your path crossed ours. You already know that an officer from Fort Bates saved you after an attack on some Cheyennes. He brought you back to town, and I fell plumb in love with you. You were such a pretty baby. And now you’re a handsome young man with his whole life ahead of him. Don’t dwell on the past, son.”

  Matthew shook his head. “Lately, seems like my whole life is behind me, and won’t nobody tell me nothing. Didn’t the officer at least say who my real ma and pa was?”

  “We didn’t want to know. All we cared about was that you were our son.”

  “Well then, who was that officer?”

  Sarah hesitated. “He would be long gone now, Matthew, and anyway, I don’t recall his name.”

  The tight bitterness rose in his throat before Matthew could stop it. “’Tarnal hell! You’d think a body was askin’ for the moon on a platter, close-mouthed as everybody around here is!”

  “Wait, Matthew!”

  But he had already stormed back into the store and past his startled father and McGillycuddy. He crossed the wide, deep-rutted street to the feed stables. He found Old Knobby in the tack room off the stables, putting calks in horseshoes.

  “Heigh-up, Matthew! What’s on the spit?”

  The boy shrugged, suddenly tongue-tied despite his urgent need to talk.

  Old Knobby slipped a bottle of
whiskey from a pair of saddlebags hanging nearby on the wall. He pulled the cork out with his few remaining teeth and took a deep swallow.

  “Ahh, now that’s good doin’s,” he said, lowering the bottle and corking it again.

  “Knobby?”

  “Speak up, boy, ’less you got a chicken bone caught in your throat.”

  “Is it true that the Injun is a natural-born thief and killer?” Matthew asked shyly.

  Knobby cocked his grizzled head and gave the youth a puzzled look. “’Pears to this hoss that you’re talkin’ the long way around the barn, Matthew. Spell it out plain, sprout. What’s got you all consternated? Some soft-brained fool been ridin’ you about your Injun blood?”

  Matthew tried to speak, but the memory of his beating and humiliation and the loss of Kristen were still too fresh.

  Knobby eyed the grape-colored bruise discoloring Matthew’s jaw. “Blamed fool world,” he muttered. “No, I don’t ’spect it’s true that the Injun is a natural-born killer, though they do seem to take to thievin’. It’s just that the Injun’s stick floats one way, the white man’s another. They ain’t meant to live together. The Injun figgers he belongs to the land. The white man figgers the land belongs to him. The Injun don’t realize yet there ain’t room in the puddle but for one big frog. And that frog is the paleface.”

  Matthew hung on the old man’s every word. When Knobby fell silent, Matthew sat quietly considering something. Knobby peered at him closely and saw an emotion in his face that worried him.

  “The Flathead tribe has got a saying, Matthew. ‘Don’t go lookin’ for your own grave.’ Whatever’s eatin’ at you, colt, just leave it alone. It’s a bad business tryin’ to mix with Injuns if you ain’t been raised among ’em. Lookin’ like a Cheyenne don’t make you one.”

  “Maybe. But being raised all your life amongst the whites don’t make me one of them, neither.”

  The bitter remark surprised Old Knobby. Although he was given to referring to the boy as an Indian, he had never heard Matthew talk about the white settlers as if he weren’t one of them.

  “Allasame, you just listen. Mebbe I’m old ’n’ all tied up with the rheumatiz. But my brain ain’t gone soft yet. I can see that you got good leather in you, boy, even though you ain’t got your growth yet. Some day you’ll be tough as ary grizz, or I don’t know gee from haw! But you can’t rise up on your hind legs ever’time a white man high-hats ye.”

  Despite his words of comfort, the old codger could see that Matthew was thinking hard and barely listening to him. Knobby sighed and shook his head.

  “It’s no use. Young pups is quick to say they’re full dogs, I reckon. Well, daylight’s burnin’. I got hosses to grain.”

  Knobby picked up a wide grain scoop from the nearest shelf and headed back out into the stable, and Matthew followed. When the boy reached the wide-open front doors, Knobby called out to him, and he turned around.

  “Lemme give you one piece of advice. Iffen you’re ever took prisoner by Injuns, and it looks like they’re goin’ to kill you or do something like cut off your pizzle, don’t beg for mercy. Give ’em a war face and spit in their eyes to prove you ain’t scairt. They’ll respect you then, and you might have a chance. They might still kill you, but leastways they’ll do it quick.”

  More a warning than a piece of advice, the old-timer’s words seemed to chase the boy out the door. Matthew crossed the street and was abreast his family’s buckboard when something caught the corner of his eye. He glanced sideways toward the seat.

  The bolt of blue silk looked like a luxurious cushion. He had forgotten Kristen’s material. Seeing it, Matthew felt the old warmth of love and hope fill him for a moment. Was there still some way to make things as they once were?

  He reached out to feel the silk. But in that same moment, he pictured Kristen’s eyes after Boone Wilson had whipped him. And it seemed clear to him that it was shame he had read in those eyes, not agony or love.

  The Injun s stick floats one way, the white man’s another. They ain’t meant to live together.

  Lost in thought, Matthew paid little notice when a handsome black stallion trotted up to the tie-rail beside him. The rider swung down, the sharp-tipped rowels of his spurs jangling, and looped his reins. A minute later Matthew became uncomfortably aware that someone was standing close to him, waiting.

  He turned his head for a good look. The soldier who stood staring back at him was no more than twenty, though his sneer of cold command belied his youth. He wore a blue uniform with yellow trim, a saber, and a silver-gripped Colt revolver in a stiff pistol belt. Instead of the dark blue forage cap of an enlisted man, he wore a black-brimmed officer’s hat turned up on one side. When Matthew tried to move around him, the officer stepped with him, trapping him.

  “The name is Carlson,” he said. “Lieutenant Seth Carlson, Seventh Cavalry. I had a visit last night from a concerned citizen named Boone Wilson. He informed me of some matters I definitely did not want to hear.”

  Again Matthew tried to edge around the officer. And again Carlson blocked him.

  “I’m going to add my warning to Hiram Steele’s,” the lieutenant said. “You steer good and clear of Kristen. She’s spoken for. But even if she wasn’t, she’s a white woman. So you just steer good and clear, hear?”

  Until that moment, Matthew had had no plans to see Kristen again. His pride would not let him beg after she had told him she did not want to see him. But the arrogant, blue-eyed fool angered him. Lately he had his belly full of threats.

  “Kristen and I will do what we damn well aim to do,” said Matthew. “And the fact is we aim to get married.”

  When he heard Matthew’s response, Carlson flushed so deep with rage that his earlobes turned pink. This time when he tried to stop Matthew from stepping around him, Matthew shoved him back hard. Enraged, Carlson swung a fast right hook at him. But he was still off balance from Matthew’s push, and his punch was only a glancing blow.

  Suddenly, Matthew’s anger rose up out of him with the force of an explosion. He set his legs for good balance and punched hard, driving a fast right fist into Carlson’s stomach. He followed with a left that smashed the officer’s lips. Another hard right to the jaw left Carlson sprawling among the wagon ruts in the road. Then he slowly shook his head like a confused bull, clearing his vision.

  Swaying slightly, the soldier stood up. His pistol was halfway out of its holster when both he and Matthew heard the loud click of a hammer being cocked. They stared across the street. Knobby stood in the doorway of the feed stable, a long Kentucky flintlock aimed at the officer.

  “Do it, shavetail,” said Knobby, “and you’ll be shovelin’ coal in hell!”

  After a long moment, Carlson’s hand came away empty from his pistol belt. But as he dusted himself off, he spoke in a low voice that only Matthew could hear.

  “In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new mercantile going up over in Red Shale. I know the owner, and so does my commanding officer. There’s nothing carved in stone that guarantees John Hanchon’s contract with Fort Bates. Way I and some others see it, why should the army take its business to those who feed and clothe its enemies?”

  The clear threat in this remark left Matthew numb. Without a word, he watched the officer mount his horse and ride out of town at a canter. His face grim with worry, Matthew turned back to the buckboard and reached for the silk.

  Abruptly, he dropped his hand and left the cloth where it was. After all, he told himself bitterly, it would only end up as a fancy dress Kristen would wear to please her young officer.

  After that day, Matthew realized, he would be making no more deliveries for his father. The set-to with Carlson was the last straw. It was bad enough to be told he didn’t belong. But when the man and woman who had raised him began to be threatened with ruin because of him, he had no choice.

  The decision had just been made for him—Matthew knew what he had to do.

  Getting through the rest of the day felt t
o Matthew like acting in a play. Matthew stocked goods, delivered supplies to the Widow Johnson’s place on Sweetwater Creek, and took his supper with his parents, just as on any other day. But when his ma kissed his cheek that night at bedtime, he felt as if a knife were twisting into his guts.

  Long before midnight, the town of Bighorn Falls was as silent and dark and still as a prairie graveyard. Matthew sat up wide-awake in his cramped cubbyhole off the kitchen, writing in the flickering light of a tiny candle stub. He wanted to explain the confused knot of feelings inside him. But when he couldn’t find the words, he gave up and settled for a short note.

  Dear Father and Mother,

  I love both of you very much. You always been so good to me. But there’s too many others who don’t feel the way you do. Others who might hurt you because of me. I am sick and tired of being treated like a animal. I am sorry I can’t do a good job of telling you what it is I feel. But I have to go find out if there’s some other place where I belong. Pa, I will try to send money someday for the bay and the rifle I took.

  Your loving son,

  Matthew

  He moved silently, wincing every time a floorboard or joist creaked. Matthew spread his slicker open on the bed. Then he tiptoed into the larder and took hardtack, biscuits, beans, and jerked beef. He wrapped these in cheesecloth, then placed the bundle in the slicker, along with a few sulphur matches, some coffee, and his new calfskin boots. He bundled up the oil-treated cloth and moved out front to the store.

  Matthew had an old .33 caliber breechloader he used for hunting rabbits. But he left it, selecting instead a Colt Model 1855 percussion rifle. He also took a bore brush, gun oil, caps, and powder. He filled a buckskin pouch with lead balls and piled everything on the counter. As an afterthought, he added a canteen.

  A few minutes later, he was easing the double doors of the stable open, frowning when the weathered wood groaned like a man in pain. Pale moonlight slanted through the open loft window over the doors, illuminating the shadow-mottled interior in a ghostly light. One of the horses whickered, and the sound startled Matthew. But Knobby’s steady snoring from up in the loft went on in an uninterrupted cadence. The strong smell of whiskey stained the manure-fragrant air.