Wife Stealer

by F. M. Parker

  Ben couldn't bring himself to shoot the man without warning. He settled the sights of the rifle on the black horse and fired. The animal staggered back at the punch of the big bullet and sank to its knees. Carlos sprang clear as the horse toppled to its side on the ground.

  Ben levered another bullet into the firing chamber of his fine killing weapon. He pressed the trigger and sent the bullet into the horse of the rider to the left of Carlos. Immediately he shot a third horse.

  He lowered the rifle. He felt revolted at what he had been forced to do. Carlos, you son of a bitch, go back to Mexico now.

  The three remaining riders spun their mounts, and lashed them back down the bank and into hiding among the cottonwoods by the river.

  Carlos rose to his feet and faced toward Ben, lying unseen in the grass. He raised his fist and shouted out in English, "You ugly bastard, I'll kill you for this."

  "Not right now." Ben lifted his rifle again and fired. The bullet struck the ground between Carlos's legs and clods of dirt and fragments of lead stung him. The man jumped, and in his hurried action, stumbled and fell to his knees. He straightened, and stood aiming his eyes in Ben's direction.

  After several seconds, Carlos slowly and deliberately turned his back to Ben. He spoke to the other two men who had lost their mounts, and all three removed their canteens and rifles from their dead horses. Carlos bent down and started to loosen the cinch of his saddle to remove it. Ben fired a warning shot close above Carlos's head. He had once seen the saddle and knew its high value.

  Carlos jerked back from the saddle. Ben could see the man shaking with anger. Without looking again in Ben's direction, Carlos stood erect and went down the bank toward the river. The other two men went with him, throwing nervous looks behind as they moved.

  Carlos shouted out angrily ahead. His three mounted riders came out of the woods to meet him.

  Ben rose up from the grass and stood watching the Mexicans, riding two to a horse, cross the river and go south. He chuckled to himself. By trying to catch him they had lost three additional horses and a very valuable saddle, and had a long distance to travel riding double back to the Valdes rancho. When the riders had become lost to sight and none of them had dropped off a horse to stay behind to trail Ben, he snapped his spyglass closed and turned away.

  Carlos would know that Ben could have killed him; still, that would do nothing to lessen the Valdes family's desire for revenge. Ben took the saddles and bridles from the dead horses and fastened them upon the backs of three of his. Carlos's riding gear was heavy, with beautifully sculptured silver ornaments, and the most valuable Ben had ever seen. Hardly a section of the equipment was free of decoration by the precious metal. The saddle and bridle were worth as much as all the horses.

  Ben mounted Brutus, and the fall of hooves carried him and his prizes north into the awesome emptiness of the Staked Plains.

  * * *

  The sun had rolled down its high-sky trajectory and lay flaming on the far, flat horizon when Ben drew close to the spring he had guided his course toward. While still out of sight of the spring, he left his horses behind and stole forward. He wanted to be certain no enemy had laid claim to the water ahead of him.

  He reached the lip of the valley and peered over. The valley, shallow and narrow with a dry watercourse in the center, lay deserted. The spring, its location marked by three trees clumped together, was on the far side of the valley directly opposite Ben. He felt an increase of his thirst for he knew the water, coming from some deep subterranean reservoir, was sweet and cold.

  Ben gathered his animals and went down into the valley. After hobbling the front legs of the stolen horses with short lengths of rope, he turned them loose to graze the wild grass. Brutus was left free for he would always hang close to Ben.

  Ben spread his bedroll on the thick mat of leaves beneath the trees. Taking his canteen, he went to the spring. The water came to the surface on top of a layer of sandstone, poured down into a pool some five feet across, and then flowed away for a few yards before disappearing into the ground. He knelt and leaned over the pool of water.

  A devil's face rose up out of the depths of the water to look at Ben. The reflection was of Ben's face, a face mutilated and scarred and, God, so horribly ugly. A Union cannonball had struck him a hard, glancing blow on the face and ripped the flesh from the skull. A Confederate surgeon had attempted to restore Ben's face to a human appearance, but so torn and mangled was the flesh that the surgeon had failed, failed horribly.

  When Ben returned from the war to El Paso, he had asked for his old job back as deputy sheriff. The sheriff had been his friend, and reluctantly returned the badge to him. He'd quickly learned that he could not take up where his prior life had ended. The world had changed most drastically for him. Men he met on the street would take one look at him and then turn hastily away, for they were unable to endure the sight of his grotesque features. Women and children ran from him in horror. Within hours of receiving his badge, he had returned it to the sheriff. He bought a broad-brimmed hat and kept it pulled low, and also held his head slanted down so that his face was mostly hidden from the people he encountered.

  Once he had gone to a brothel to satisfy his twenty-three-year-old body's needs for a woman. No amount of money could persuade one to lie with him. When a woman finally offered herself if he would put a pillow-case over his head, he ran from the whorehouse in heartrending humiliation.

  He had often reflected during this past year on how it would be to have a loving wife and several children, and how at his death they would be gathered around him. That was not to be, for his ugly wounds had changed the rules of the world. He was an outcast and would be alone forever, and would die, and his body would rot and waste away, in some wild and lonely place.

  He leaned closer to the gargoyle face in the spring. He shivered in revulsion at his own image. He was overwhelmed at the unjustness of such a wound. He should have been killed outright; that would have been so very much better than this. Now all he had was a bleak, empty life stretching out ahead of him. A burning anger seized him. He closed his right hand into a fist and smashed the face in the water.

  The reflection shattered, vanishing in a turbulence of waves. But the water quickly quieted and his image reassembled itself, thrusting itself before him with its twisted features screwed into even greater ugliness by his raw anger.

  In a paroxysm of violent blows, he began to beat at the repugnant face. The water jumped and splashed under his driving fists. Beat the damn thing. Destroy it. He hammered and hammered at it.

  Finally Ben controlled his crazed outburst of swinging fists. His arms lowered to hang by his sides. He hunkered there by the spring, breathing through his ragged slash of a mouth.

  The reflection of his mutilated face came together again as the water stilled. He cried out, the anguish-filled voice rushing out across the plain. A sob escaped him before he could trap it in his throat.

  He pulled his pistol and placed the end of the barrel against his head at the temple. There was a way to end all his suffering.

  On the plain not far from Ben, a young female wolf halted her smooth, fluid lope and froze into a gray statue when the cry of suffering reached her. She cocked her ears in the direction from where the sound had come, and heard the human sob of anguish that followed after the cry. In her wolf's way, she sensed the other creature's deep pain. Earlier this day, the male wolf she had journeyed with since being a pup had been killed by a bull buffalo, and her feelings of loss and aloneness were still tormentingly fresh.

  She raised her head and howled a long and lingering cry full of her own sorrow. She breathed and again howled, a mournful sound flowing out through the dusk of the evening.

  Ben lowered the pistol from his head and listened to the plaintive wolf call. He tried to pinpoint its source, but it had no origin, seemingly coming from nowhere and everywhere. He was struck by the similarity of the sound to his own voice raised in lament. Why had it responded to his
cry, and at the exact moment when he was prepared to send a bullet crashing into his head? A wolf had saved his life. For what purpose?

  Ignoring the face in the spring, he lowered his canteen into the water and filled it. The canteen was laid aside and he lowered himself to drink straight from the pool. He blew against the water to break up his image, and drank, the water sliding down his throat cold and delicious. There was always tomorrow to use the pistol.

  * * *

  The black wave of the night came stalking, and Ben went to his bedroll and lay down. He couldn't sleep, and lay watching the full moon come up, a huge yellow sphere that faded to a silver dime as it rode higher in the sky. Later he was still awake when the star-filled sky, whirling about its axis, swept the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades right up overhead. Brutus finished feeding and came to stand close to Ben. The horse lowered his head to be petted, and Ben stroked the long, bony jaw.

  "Brutus, old horse, it's just you and me. I'm damn glad that you don't care how ugly I am."

  THREE

  Vicksburg, Mississippi, Morning, July 5, 1863.

  General Grant took a long pull on his cigar and blew the smoke out into the morning air. His heart was beating nicely. He had won the battle, wresting Vicksburg from the rebel Confederacy after a bitter siege of forty-eight days. This victory more than redeemed his defeats at Belmont and Shiloh.

  Grant stood on the top-floor balcony of the two-story house he had commandeered for use as his headquarters. The house was located on the highest point of the town and two hundred feet above the Mississippi River. From here he had an excellent view down over the cannon-shattered city, and beyond that some quarter-mile distant to Commander Porter's flotilla of ironclad ships, gunboats, and river steamers tied to the wharfs on the Mississippi. Commander Porter had held the water side of the siege line and prevented the Confederate army from escaping or receiving supplies by boat.

  The general savored the quietness after weeks of constant cannon fire, and the air was sweet, cleansed of its sulfurous stink of burned gunpowder. Today there were no battle plans to devise. All the deadly forts, the strong redoubts, salients, and bastions of the enemy-fortified city, had been surrendered the day before and were now occupied by his troops. Squads of Union soldiers patrolled the city streets to enforce his Orders of Occupation.

  Within but a few minutes after the Confederate forces had surrendered the city, the news had made a quick passage through both armies. Then a strange and moving sight had occurred. Brothers and cousins and uncles and nephews who had minutes before been enemies had come out from the opposing armies and into the narrow no-man's-land between the trenches, and laughingly shouted out greetings to their kin. Every man, happy to be alive and glad to see his relatives were also among the living, had embraced without constraint.

  The fourteen thousand enemy soldiers, stripped of their weapons, had been allowed to leave the city. Grant had no way to hold them prisoners, so he had paroled them upon their sworn oath that they would never again take up arms against the Union. Of course, Grant knew that many would immediately break that oath. Left behind were three hundred Confederates too badly wounded to travel. They were being cared for in private residences in the town.

  Heavily armed Vicksburg, with its strategic position on the high ground overlooking the Mississippi, had controlled that vital artery of transportation and denied the Union its use. Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, had called Vicksburg the Gibraltar of the West and the lynchpin that held the South together. General Grant had knocked that lynchpin loose. All the machinery of the factories and mills of the town were salvageable and would be quickly put into operation for the Union. The full length of the river now belonged to the Union, and its soldiers and cannon, all the necessities of war could move freely. Texas, Louisiana, and Kansas had been severed from the Confederacy. Grant knew his victory would substantially shorten the war.

  "General, sir, may I speak with you?" Colonel Crowley, the chief surgeon, said from the top of the stairs at the end of the balcony.

  "Come up and share the view with me, Colonel Crowley," Grant replied.

  "Thank you, sir," Crowley said. He came to the railing of the balcony and looked west across the battered town toward Louisiana on the far side of the river.

  "A much more enjoyable view this morning than the ones we've had these past many days," Grant said.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Victory does that, changes the complexion of everything," Grant added.

  "It's sad that men have to fight and kill each other."

  "At times fighting is necessary. And fighting means killing." Grant's tone was sharper than he wanted. Still, many Union and Confederate soldiers had been killed in the battle for Vicksburg, and Crowley shouldn't have brought that into the conversation and ruined a glorious day. "What did you want to see me about?" Grant asked, still angry at the chief surgeon.

  "Captain Payson has requested to be released from duty and discharged," Crowley replied. The general's tone had stung.

  "Discharged? He can't even stand on his feet." The young captain hadn't recovered from the injury he'd received when the Confederates had tried to break out of the siege three weeks earlier. The enemy's attempt to breech the encircling Union lines had been near the hospital, and in the bitter fighting, a pistol bullet had struck the tent where Captain Payson had been operating on the wounded. The bullet had entered his right chest, penetrating his lung, and lodged against the spine.

  "He can get better treatment from you and your staff than from any civilian doctor," Grant added.

  "He's very ill and wants to go home to Texas."

  "Do you think he'll die?"

  "The odds are greatly against him, for lung wounds are almost always fatal and his was an especially serious one. He survived the injury and the operation to remove the bullet because he has such a strong will. But the internal bleeding won't stop and he continues to cough up blood. I believe the injured lung has adhered to the side of the chest and simply his breathing keeps the wound open and bleeding."

  "What does he say?" Grant wanted the captain's opinion, for he judged him to be one of the best surgeons in the medical corps, even though he was the youngest at twenty-five years.

  "We've discussed the wound, and though he hasn't said so, I think he agrees with me. He appears to have accepted the likelihood of dying and now just wants to choose his burial place."

  Grant considered most of his officers likeable fellows. He found Captain Payson the most pleasant of all. In the evenings he would assemble his staff and discuss the results of the day's fighting and the plans for the following day's action. After the meeting he would frequently invite Payson to stop by his tent and they would talk, sometimes play chess, and sip a little bourbon. Grant sorely missed the man's company.

  "Sounds like foolishness. But let's go and hear the captain's plans," Grant said. He led off with the colonel following him down from the balcony to the ground. Grant's two orderlies, armed with rifles and pistols, came to attention at the foot of the stairs. They were also his bodyguards, for there were thousands of men in the city who wanted him dead. They fell in behind Grant and the colonel and went off along the street with them.

  FOUR

  "What's the Johnny Reb doing there by the officers' hospital?" Grant asked Colonel Crowley. He pointed ahead at the man in faded gray uniform leaning against a tree in the front yard. "All of them that can travel should be gone."

  Immediately upon capturing the city, Grant had evicted the occupants of half a hundred houses and moved his wounded officers and enlisted men from tents east of town and into houses. He had chosen the houses on the highest ground so that any breeze that blew would find and cool the injured soldiers and make the July heat more bearable.

  "His name's Davis, Corporal Davis," Crowley replied. "He's agreed to help Captain Payson get to Texas."

  "Why would a Reb do that?"

  "They're both from El Paso and knew each other there. But more th
an that, the corporal feels he owes the captain. He was seriously injured in the leg when we took him prisoner in our first attack on the city. Most of the surgeons thought the leg too badly damaged to save and wanted to amputate it. But Captain Payson didn't agree and did some excellent work. The corporal will always limp but he's got his leg."

  "Your own leg, even if you limp, is certainly better than a wooden one," Grant said.

  The Confederate corporal, a short, stocky man with a wide face, came to attention as Grant drew close. The general thought the corporal was going to salute, but the man just stood rigid, with his eyes cold, and watched him pass.

  Grant continued on into the hospital. His head lifted as his nose caught the biting odor of disinfectant and the morbid, ugly stench of gangrene that came from the rotting flesh of living men. The smells were all too familiar to him after two years of heavy fighting. He shut them off from his thoughts.

  Grant had kept track of Captain Payson's condition and had come a few times to visit him, but not so many that the other wounded officers would think him too much a favorite. He went directly to Payson's room on the main floor. The captain lay motionless upon his cot with his eyes closed. He was gaunt with his bones sharply etched against skin the gray hue of the dead. Grant felt a deep sorrow for the young captain. He was a gentle man. Grant ordered men into battle to be killed or wounded, while this man used his remarkable skill to save their limbs and lives.

  Grant had first seen Evan at the end of the battle at Fort Donelson in northern Tennessee. He had gone to the hospital area to visit his wounded, and there had been a stranger in civilian clothing, fearfully splattered with the blood of his patients, operating alongside the army surgeons. Grant had stopped to observe the man at work and noted his great skill, and an amazing swiftness that was very important in the absence of anesthetics. A man could stand just so much pain before he died. Grant learned that Evan, fresh out of medical school in Philadelphia and on his way home to Texas, had come upon the scores of wounded soldiers lying on the ground and awaiting treatment. He had stripped off his jacket, laid out his private surgical instruments, and waded in to help. Grant needed surgeons badly, and had persuaded Evan to join his army.