Eye of the Wolf

by Theodore V. Olsen

  The destruction pleased him. His brain went cold again. He picked up his hat and walked to the door and paused. He looked on his work and was satisfied.

  "You'll have a pretty hope chest for the devil, sweetheart."

  He laughed and tramped out.

  The back yard was unkept, overgrown with rioting weeds and brush. Bethany had hidden herself in a tangle of shrubbery, flattening her body down on the dew-soaked ground. She heard Frank come to the back door and softly call her name. After a minute his footsteps retreated. The sound of things being smashed reached her faintly. Then the front door slammed. Maybe he was gone, but she did not know, so she lay for a long time, not daring to move in spite of the wet chill of the ground.

  Finally, unsteadily, she got up and moved to the open door, listened for several minutes and then went inside. She knew where a gun was, a gun she had never touched. Dennis used to wear it in a shoulder holster under a frock coat—an affectation that had irritated her—and after most of their other possessions had been pawned, some illusion of manliness had made him hold onto the gun. She tiptoed down a corridor to the dark bedroom, opened the commode drawer that still held Dennis's things and located the gun by feel. She saw it in her mind: a small one-shot British pistol that Dennis had always kept loaded.

  It felt strange in her hand. Always she had deemed herself so secure; thoughts of prowlers had never troubled her. After tonight, she wondered, would she ever feel secure again?

  Bethany went out to the sala. She gazed at the carnage, the ruin of cherished things, with sickened eyes. Slowly then, her back straightened. She went to the door, shot the inside bolt into place, returned to the kitchen and locked that door too. Then, in her bedroom, she lighted the lamp on the commode and looked at herself in the Adamesque mirror mounted on the armoire.

  Was that her? Dear God. Bodice and camisole hanging in shreds, hair in straggles, skin and clothes smudged with moist earth, great bruises on her bare arms. She arched her neck, wincing at its soreness. It wore the mottled prints of Ulring's fingers. He is crazy. Her lips formed the words, but only a croaking whisper came from her bruised throat.

  Fool, she thought bitterly. Brave? There was no virtue in stupidity. Trying to be so cocksure, coolly admitting the man she was sure had killed Dennis, letting him see her preparations to leave. All that would be necessary should he get out of hand (she hadn't dreamed he would dare) would be a single piercing scream. Neighbors would hear, friends would come. She had frighteningly underestimated the bull-fierce fury that could crush a woman's fragile self-assurance like a straw.

  Insane… ? No. Too easy a gauge. It was deeper. Soul-deep. The callous evil in the man went beyond crazed whim or ruthless resolution. He was immune to decency. Had to be, to have calculated so long and patiently, to execute so deliberately. Qualms? Misgivings? She doubted he had ever felt them. He was a man who simply wanted… and took.

  Bethany began to tremble; her lips quivered. She bit her lip, determined not to cry. But she could not stop the wild trembling. She remembered, miracle of miracles, that Dennis had left a quarter-full bottle among his effects. Whiskey. God, she hated it. She had reason to. But anything…

  She poured a drink and took it, coughing and shuddering. She filled the wash basin and wet a cloth and wiped the smudges from her face, feeling the liquor glow warm her. What should she do? Leave tomorrow on the stage as she had intended?

  She felt the whalebone spirit of her puritan blood tighten her spine. Why should she run… from Frank or from anything? It wasn't in her nature. Never had been. She had hated the itinerant years with Dennis, but not to have joined his runnings would have meant another sort of running—from her duty, from herself.

  She must do something to bring Dennis's killer to justice. She could tell friends what had happened… tell them the whole story. They would believe her, but would it be enough? They could protect her from Ulring. They could even arrest him. But at considerable risk, for Frank was a dangerous man and would be doubly so if he were cornered.

  Even if they took him, it would be for nothing. There was simply no proof that he'd killed Dennis. Nothing but the word of a half-breed boy.

  Would that be enough? Not before, she thought, but maybe now, backed by her own story, it would be. It was a chance, but it had to be taken. Certainly Will-Joe would be no worse off. Sooner or later, so long as he stubbornly refused to leave the region, he was bound to be captured or killed.

  She had to find Will-Joe. But how?

  The Navajos. If anybody knew his whereabouts, they did.

  Tomorrow, she thought. She knew where the village was; she had been there once, in a fruitless effort to enlist some of the children in her school. Old John Thunder had been polite but disinterested.

  This time he would listen. He had to.

  Squatting on his heels behind a screen of brush, Billy Hosteen watched a pair of young girls saunter down the path to the spring. He was a hundred feet away and could watch them unobserved. He wore a fixed frown and broke small twigs between his fingers, listening to their chatter and laughter while they took their time filling their skin waterbags.

  Where was she? Always, at this time of day, she came for water. He had waited for her many times before the sharp words had passed between them. But it had been a long time since they had spoken, and he could no longer quiet the bitter festering in him. He must talk to her. He hoped that she would be along soon. And that these clucking children would be gone before she came.

  Finally they had filled their waterbags and were returning up the path. As they passed out of sight, he heard them speak Rainbow Girl's name. Then he heard her voice. They had met her in the path and the three of them chatted for a minute, the two girls teasing her. Jahzini, they said, was a catcher of horses; it would take her a long time to water so many horses.

  Billy ground his teeth. Everyone knew that she meant to go daily to Jahzini's hiding place, taking him food. No doubt, as such things went, when he was well enough, he would tie his horses before Adakhai's hogan in the way of any courting youth. No doubt too, Rainbow Girl would water them to signify her acceptance.

  Billy Hosteen's thoughts were dark and bitter. Long ago he should have brought his horses to her lodge. But he had never been sure of her. She had a grave gentle way of holding him at arm's length so that he was never sure of her feelings. And then Jahzini had returned and he had sensed at once that he had lost all favor in her eyes. Even as a child, he remembered, her eyes had been for Jahzini alone. They had been children together and their attachments as they played their childish games had been warm. Jahzini had been his friend, and nothing else had mattered. But they were no longer children.

  The talk broke off and Rainbow Girl came into view on the path, smiling a little as she descended into the brush-enclosed swale where the spring lay. She knelt and dipped her waterbag. Billy Hosteen rose and walked to the spring. She looked up once, then lowered her gaze to the water. He stopped a few yards away.

  "Ahalani, Rainbow Girl."

  "Ahalani, Narbona."

  He sat down on his haunches and picked up a handful of sand, sifting it through his fingers as he watched her. "In three suns," he said tentatively, "I go to work breaking horses for the white-eyed rancher Johnson."

  "You have worked for him before."

  "Yes, but I only cut hay for him. Now he will pay me for each horse I break. I will make more than the white-eyes who take care of his cattle."

  "That will please your father."

  "I do not care about that." Anger rose in his voice; he tried to suppress it. "Soon I can buy whatever I want. If I had a woman, she would have finer things than any other Navajo."

  "Perhaps that would please her, then."

  "Please her. Of course it would."

  "If she cared about such things, of course."

  Her voice remained solemn and pleasant and quite indifferent. He ground his teeth in a quiet fury. She rose to her feet, holding the filled waterbag, round and darkly g
listening now, in front of her.

  "Narbona," she said quietly, "sometimes two things are said where only one is meant. Often we do this. But sometimes it is not a good thing. There are others who would be happy if Narbona's ponies were tied before their hogans."

  He stood up too. Saying the words thickened his throat. "You would never water them."

  "There are others, Narbona."

  She turned away and he moved quickly and caught her sleeve. She looked at him and he let his hand drop.

  "It is Jahzini. Why?"

  "How can I answer that? There is a difference."

  "Yes," he said thickly. "He wears a Belinkana name."

  "So do you, when you go among them."

  "But I am not part white-eyes. I think that is it."

  "No. It's you who would like to be a white-eyes, Narbona. You who think their ways so fine that you want the things they have. You would live among them as an equal if they would let you. Because you want this, you think that others do."

  Her stare was straight as an arrow. It made him uncomfortable.

  "Then what is the difference?"

  "You are not Jahzini. That is the difference."

  She turned her back and headed up the path. Rage clotted his brain. He opened and closed his fists. Jahzini. If not for him…

  He knew what he would do. Now.

  It had been in his mind before. He had been thinking of it since this morning when he had followed her to the place above the racing water where the cave was. He could do the thing safely; none of The People would know how it was done. Yet he had hesitated.

  Now it would be easy to do.

  A little later, jogging down the trail toward the Winnetka basin, he felt less sure.

  Tsi Tsosi… Yellow Hair. Just the name made a dryness in Billy Hosteen's throat. He remembered too well the time that the sheriff had caught up with his brothers and him after they had run off cows from a valley ranch and how he had narrowly escaped. How Ulring had coolly shot both his brothers through the head and left their bodies for the Navajos to find. For a time Billy had lived in the fear that Yellow Hair would come looking for him. But he never did. He had made his point.

  Still, Billy Hosteen had more reason than any Navajo to fear the sheriff. He tried to reason it away: Tsi Tsosi would listen to one who could lead him to Jahzini. And afterward be in his debt… or at least consider the old score suitably evened. Thinking about it did little to ease the knot of drying phlegm in Billy's throat. But he thought of Jahzini too. And Rainbow Girl. Which made it easier to think about the other…

  Rousing with a start, he reined up his horse. What was that? Someone coming up the trail. Tall pines mantled the south slope of the ridge he was crossing; he could not see the rider below, but he identified a muffled thud of hoofs on needle detritus. A stab of guilty reflex, and not a well-grounded reason, made him pull his horse offside into the timber. He did not want to be seen by whoever it was… not just now.

  Soon he saw the rider coming through the trees. A Belinkana woman riding sidesaddle. Slits of sunfire rippling across her moving form turned her hair to quiet flame. It was the teaching woman from Spurlock. In a minute she had passed out of sight.

  Puzzled, he turned his mount back down the trail. Why was she riding toward the Navajo town? Could it have anything to do with Jahzini? Billy Hosteen did not know, but he urged his horse on a little faster…

  The Winnetka ran wide and shallow at its upper stem, but as it cut through this arm of rugged foothills it roiled turbulently between the rocky narrows. Here and there its brawling current broadened out shallowly again; at its most tumultuous, the Winnetka was more a large creek than a true river. At these places the boulder-strewn banks pulled back against the tall bony ridges that flanked the stream for miles along its lower run. If a man were high enough on a ridge, he had a picturesque and rather panoramic view of the rivercourse. Little timber other than the usual scrub evergreens and a few dwarf aspens. But the rock strata exposed by age-old erosion of the dropping streambed was pleasant to look at, especially when sunrise and sunset turned the salt and iron in the rock to a slapdash painter's palette of glowing colors.

  Will-Joe, however, had gazed on the scene for a day and a half. This morning, sitting in the cave mouth with his torso propped up by a willow-weave backrest and his splinted leg out straight before him, he wished he had something to read. He liked to read in the winters when there wasn't much to do. He used to borrow from Miss Bethany's library, particularly Scott's romances. He wished he had Kenilworth or Ivanhoe. Worlds of pageantry, knighthood, strange Anglo-Saxon customs that he knew had shaped half his heritage.

  As it was, all he did was sit in the cave opening and stare out and think. He was tired of thinking; his thoughts spun in circles back to their starting points.

  The Navajos had brought him here on a horse drag after dark two nights ago, afterward taking pains to obliterate the trail. Rainbow Girl had come the next day. She brought cooked food so he wouldn't have to risk a fire and she changed the dressings on his leg. They had talked a lot, and he looked forward to her visits. More for her company than for the particular delicacies that she prepared with great care, remembering how he liked them.

  He thought about her now, lazy satisfying thoughts, and about what he might do after his leg had healed. He still wasn't sure. He thought of Bloodgood, for whose death he would be blamed if the remains were ever found. He almost smiled at that: how many killings could they hang you for?

  The cave was cool and roomy with a roughly arched ceiling and a sandy floor but an opening so low and tight that it couldn't be spotted from below. Even seated in the mouth, he was sheltered by jaws of rock to either side, shaded by an overhang above. Yet he could see a good way up and down the river gorge.

  He had felt wary at first, less from fear that any Navajo would betray him than that Rainbow Girl's comings and goings might be spotted; she might be trailed. But yesterday she had told him that at last, out of disgust or boredom, the two white-eyes had broken off their long vigil above the lodges and left.

  Will-Joe yawned and lay back, half-shutting his eyes. He scratched the pleasant itch in his knitting leg. Finally he dozed.

  A brittle sound of horses' hoofs brought him sharply awake. He lay very still for a moment, his heart pounding.

  He should have seen whoever was coming, but by now they were at the base of the ridge, cut off from his view by shelving rock. Two horses, he thought, one of them shod. Now they were halting. He palmed up his pistol from his side. And waited. It was all he could do.

  He heard the riders slowly ascend the steep flank of the ridge, nearing the cave. Then Rainbow Girl's soft voice: "Jahzini!" He answered, feeling a flood of relief.

  A moment later she climbed up past the rock shelf, and behind her came Miss Bethany. He stared. He could hardly believe it, even when she knelt by his side and took his hand. She was wearing a green riding habit with a fancily draped skirt, wrinkled as if she had slept in it, a ridiculous little hat perched on her red-gold hair. Her smooth and cool touch made his heart slug in his throat; he had difficulty finding words:

  "How did you get here?"

  "Not too hard… with a good guide."

  She smiled at Rainbow Girl who was on her knees opening a parfleche bag she had brought. She did not look up. Will-Joe felt a small embarrassment. He said in the Navajo tongue: "You should not have brought her."

  "I thought you would want to see her." Rainbow Girl's voice was very flat. "She came yesterday to the lodges. She told Natani that she would see you, but his face was closed to her. I told her if it was her wish, I would make a place for her in our hogan and in the morning I would bring her here. I thought this would be your wish too."

  He didn't know what to say. Miss Bethany looked from one of them to the other, then said: "Is something wrong?"

  "No, ma'am. I only wondered why you came."

  "Something happened… I think it changes the situation."

  She ta
lked. He listened carefully to her words, noticing the dark bruises on her neck above the lacy throat ruffles of her jacket. Anger blazed in him. Ulring. He had done this—he had dared to hurt her. I could have killed him, he thought. Many times while he looked for me I could have waited for him.

  He had felt the same when Adakhai had told him that Rainbow Girl had saved his life by knocking up the sheriff's rifle and that Ulring had struck her. Remembering that too, he wished more than ever that he had killed the white-eyes when there had been the chance.

  "Will-Joe… you said once that you would be willing to stand trial. Are you still willing?"

  "Why?"

  "Because now it's the way. Don't you see, with my story to back up yours…"

  "He's still the law. Do I give myself up to him?"

  "No. When your leg is better, I'll come again… with friends. We'll take you to Spurlock. There's a thing called citizen's arrest. We can arrest the sheriff and hold him in custody for the circuit judge. Then the law will decide. But not Frank Ulring's law… I promise you."

  He said nothing.

  "What's the matter? Before, you—"

  "That was before." His voice was flat and emotionless. "He has hunted me. Soon this leg will be well. Then I will hunt him."

  "No… oh no! Why? If it's because of me—"

  "And her."

  He looked at Rainbow Girl as he spoke. Her face lifted quickly; he met her eyes, wanting her to understand, knowing that she would.

  Miss Bethany leaned forward. "Listen to me. You always listened, at least."

  "Yes'm."

  "I told you how our judicial—how a court works."

  "Yes'm. Judicial system."

  She flushed. "Then you know that what you propose is as much murder—"

  "That man deserves to be killed. That is the difference."

  "In the eyes of the law, it's the same! And you'll be where you are now… hunted, a wanted killer. Don't you see, he will hang for what he's done, and it would be for nothing!"