Wife Stealer

by F. M. Parker

  Ben threw back his head and laughed, the sound ringing with bitterness and as hard and brittle as the clang of metal upon metal.

  "You don't know what real pain is. The pain of being so ugly that it drives you mad." Or how near I came to killing myself, and only a wolf that was probably as mad as I was stopping me. "I can take the pain. Whatever amount there is of it."

  "It would kill you."

  "No, it won't. When we're ready to begin, dose me as best you can with laudanum and cut away."

  "I'm not going to do it."

  "I've saved eight thousand dollars. It's all yours for helping me to be a man again and not a sideshow freak."

  "No amount of money will change my mind. I'm just not going to do it."

  "You're a selfish bastard," Ben said with disgust.

  "Goddamn you, Ben!" Evan growled, openly angry. "No man can't say that to me." He started to rise to his feet.

  "Stay down there, Evan. I don't want you swinging at me. I can whip you with one hand, but I don't want to hit you." Ben knew he had gone too far in calling Evan a selfish bastard. The man had a right to be a surgeon, or not be one.

  "I apologize, Evan. I was wrong in saying that to you."

  Evan remained there halfway to his feet, staring through the gloom at Ben. Then he dropped back to the ground. "Maybe I am selfish, but that's the way it's going to be."

  Without another word, Ben stood erect and went into the night.

  * * *

  For a long time Ben sat morosely on the riverbank and thought of his conversation with Evan. He had so desperately wished Evan would agree to work on his face, to take away some of the ugliness, no matter how little. But between the wish and the thing was a whole world. Life had a bitter taste.

  Ben pulled away from his anger at Evan for refusing to help him. He focused on the night, the murmur of the water flowing past at his feet, and the chittering song of the insects of the darkness. The night creatures seemed especially tuneful. The half-moon was overhead and was casting a beautiful silver light down upon the water of the river. There was beauty around him and he could see it, hear it. He was the only ugly thing in all the night.

  Ben couldn't continue to travel with the two men after the argument with Evan. His quick temper had robbed him of that pleasant association. He rose and whistled Brutus to him.

  He collected his belongings and loaded his packhorse. Without a word to the other two men, he rode into the darkness, and onward through the night and into the next day. At noon, he finally halted in a clump of trees growing in a hidden place. He lay down to rest. Sleep came fitfully, and he dreamed with the image of his face in the water of the spring haunting him.

  TWENTY THREE

  Marcella was exhausted, yet she continued to walk in her endless circling of the camp. She felt her way with her feet for in the deep darkness of the night, the ground beneath her was invisible. The moon had long ago deserted the sky and the faraway stars were mere pinpricks of light and cast no rays down on the prairie. She managed to hold the camp as the center of her circle by viewing the outlines of the buggy and the tethered horses against the sky.

  Karl still lay in their blankets. She knew he would be awake and listening to her passage through the tall prairie grass. He was always watching her. His never-ending spying was awfully aggravating.

  They had passed through Abilene with but one short halt to replenish their provisions and to have a blacksmith replace a horseshoe that one of the horses had lost. They were now far west of that town. The camp had been made on the open plain when night overran them.

  Marcella had slept for a portion of the night, then had awakened, as she often did, and lay fretting about the lack of memory of her past life. Unable to remain quietly on the blankets with Karl, she had dressed and begun her pacing through the darkness.

  The days since coming to consciousness with a strange man as a husband, and the swift, daylight-to-dark journey across the land, had left her bewildered. Her presence in this time and place seemed unreal and she felt lost. Even her husband had an unreal feeling about him. Worse still, each day that passed was adding to her fear that she would never remember her past.

  She sensed a great urgency to remember the past. Somehow she knew there was danger in not knowing. She wanted desperately to discover the nature of the danger, and where it would come from so that it could be avoided. Frightened by her certainty that there was danger, Marcella spent most of every day trying to peer backward into that gulf of nothingness and bring forth something of substance, a picture, a word. The return of the woman she had seen that one time before would have been a godsend. To identify one person could perhaps open a door that led to a series of remembrances, to the complete history of her existence.

  At the thought of the woman, a thin ghostly whisper of a woman came out of the darkness on the prairie.

  "Rachel," the voice said.

  Marcella spun to the right from where the sound had seemed to come. Her eyes stabbed at the darkness. "Who's there!" she whispered.

  She waited for a reply, and her eyes battled the darkness lying thick on the land. "Talk to me," Marcella pleaded. "Who are you?"

  Marcella caught herself. The voice wasn't real. There was no living woman out there on the black prairie and calling to her. Yet she knew it was real in that it must come from somewhere in her memory. And it sounded so very familiar. She held the voice tightly, concentrating on its timbre, its inflection, striving to remember whose it was.

  No answer would come, and she was angry at herself. Why couldn't she make herself remember? Her mind seemed perfectly fine in all other things.

  She cried out with frustration. The cry was lost in the murky depths of the plain.

  She relented from her effort to discover the owner of the voice. However, she stored it carefully away for later recall and investigation. There was the other question. Who was this Rachel the voice had called out to?

  Marcella again took up her pacing. Around and around the camp she went. She saw the gray twilight come creeping in from the far regions of the east. It gave way gradually to the day and the plain became visible, stretching away beyond the limits of her vision. A wind arrived with the morning and the tall, wild grass began to run before it.

  Marcella looked out over the prairie with the waving grass making it appear to be moving. There was not one rise of land to slow the wind, not one animal within sight. The emptiness of the land brought a disconsolate feeling to her of just how insignificant a woman was. She, who had no memory to give life a foundation, was merely a dream woman and did not matter at all.

  "Marcella, it's late," Karl called. "I've got the horses harnessed. Let's get on our way."

  Karl's voice was sharp, commanding, and Marcella hated the tone. He was becoming ever more domineering the farther west they traveled. The thought of leaving him and striking out on her own was growing strong.

  "I'm coming," she called back.

  * * *

  Two hours into the day, Marcella and Karl came to a river. As they approached the ford she saw two men breaking camp under a big tree down the river a ways. Both men turned to look at the buggy and its occupants. The taller of the two raised his hand in greeting.

  The men were too far away for Marcella to see them clearly. Still, the man's gesture seemed friendly and she lifted her hand in reply.

  "Don't do that," Karl snapped. "They may be going our way and we don't want strangers tagging along with us."

  "Nobody could keep up with us even if they wanted to," Marcella said heatedly.

  "Just do as I say," Karl retorted. He struck the horses with the whip and drove the buggy down the last slant of the bank and out onto the rock-ribbed ford. The team splashed their way across.

  Marcella looked behind and saw the two men had mounted and were riding toward the river crossing.

  TWENTY FOUR

  Maude looked up from hoeing the garden when she caught sight of movement in front of the house. Her father, Simon Bra
dshaw, was riding up the short lane that led from the main street of Canutillo to Lester's house. He was astride his big sorrel, his prize horse.

  Maude dropped her hoe and went to meet her father. This was the first time he had come to visit her since she had told him that she wanted to leave Lester. She was glad that he was no longer angry at her.

  "Hello, Father," Maude said happily. She went to be close to him as he tied the horse to the fence that surrounded the yard.

  "Hello, Maude," her father replied. "Is Lester home?"

  "Yes, Father, he's at Mary's. That's the third door down. She's fixing lunch for him." Lester rotated among his wives for his noontime meal.

  "I'm ready to have something to eat," Maude said. "Come in and have a bite with me."

  "I don't have time," Simon said shortly. He walked away without a further glance at Maude.

  Simon's uncaring attitude hurt Maude. She was lonely for her family, and she wanted her father to sit and talk with her, to show she was his daughter and worth a few minutes of his time. She loved him for he was her father. She had already decided that she did not like him.

  The sorrel tossed its head and nickered to Maude. She went to the horse and petted its head and sleek, muscular neck. It smelled Maude and rubbed its head playfully against her shoulder.

  "So we're still friends, eh, Red?" she said. She ran his pointed, velvet ears through her hands. Unlike most horses, he had always liked that.

  The sorrel was a magnificent horse with deep chest and long legs. Her father had ridden it to win many of the local races. It was nine years old and she and it had grown up together. Due to her small size, she had been the first to ride upon its back when it was still a colt. Even now as a woman, she barely tipped a hundred pounds.

  Her breath caught as a wild scheme came to her. She quickly looked along the front of the building that held the apartments of Lester's wives. No adult was in sight. Two boys of three and four, Mary's children, played in the front yard in the shade under a tree.

  "Red, let's you and me go for a ride," Maude said in a confidential voice. "If we're sneaky about it, maybe for a very long ride."

  She hastened into her apartment and stopped by the chest near the front door. Swiftly she dug out the pants, shirt, hat, and boots, and exchanged them for the dress and bonnet she wore. The purse with the eight dollars was stuffed inside her shirt. She quickly filled a gallon canteen from the water bucket, and carrying it, went to the door and peeked out.

  The front yard still held only the two boys. Maude, watching along the front for someone to come outside the home of one of the other wives, hastened down the walk to the sorrel horse. The canteen was tied to the saddle horn, up close and snug so that it wouldn't bounce and flop around when Red moved. She swung astride and reined the horse onto the lane to the street.

  "Where're you going, Maude?" the larger boy shouted.

  At the boy's call, Maude's heart began to hammer. She twisted to look behind, waiting for Lester, or her father, to come and look outside. But no one showed in any of the doorways.

  Maude reached the street with no shouts behind her. She reined the horse left.

  "Faster, boy," Maude said, and touched the horse with her heels.

  The willing beast nickered his understanding and raised his pace to a trot.

  Half a block farther along, and out of earshot of the people at Lester's house, Maude spoke again to the horse. "It's time, old friend. Time to leave this town for good."

  She touched him twice with her heels. The long-legged steed broke into a swift gallop through the town.

  Maude rode south toward El Paso, lying twelve miles away. Andrew Preston and his wife were on the street and she waved at them. Old Man Breslin saw her from where he sat rocking on his porch. Half a score of others noticed her passing. Each one of them would tell Lester the direction she had gone.

  Maude would have liked to go to California for she had heard that it was a beautiful place, but there were more than a thousand miles of desert to cross to reach that destination. Not knowing the roads nor the locations of the water holes, she could never make it. She would go east. The escape was the important thing, not the destination.

  Canutillo fell away behind. Then it dropped from sight entirely as a hill intervened.

  Maude leaned forward close to the sorrel's head, and petting his neck, spoke to him. "Red, we've been friends for years and I've got a favor to ask."

  The ears of the big horse angled back to hear Maude's voice.

  She continued. "I'm in big trouble now. Don't let Lester catch me. Please, please, don't let him catch me."

  Maude took a deep breath. "Let's go," she cried and slapped the horse a smart blow on the side of the neck.

  The horse responded instantly to the command. His ears flicked to the front, and the long legs began to swing fast and far, devouring the ground with great strides.

  Maude leaned forward over the powerful front quarters of the running animal, the position that would allow her weight to tire him the least. She felt the powerful muscles of the animal between her legs, bunching and then reaching for distance. The air on the desert was hot, and now made a hot wind as the running horse tore onward. Red was the fastest horse in Canutillo. If he didn't stumble and fall, nothing could catch him.

  Maude smiled without humor. Her father had unwittingly provided her with the means to escape from Lester. She couldn't think of a better trick to play on both of them.

  Minutes later Maude came to an area of hard rocky ground and she slowed the horse and guided him off the main road. She had no intention of going to El Paso. She would ride southeast to bypass the town to the north and strike the main road that ran east several miles beyond.

  Now off the main road and out of sight of any travelers, Maude let Red move at a trot. She must conserve his strength. Still, even at a trot, give her until dark and she would be forty miles from Canutillo. Allow her the night and tomorrow and she would be a hundred miles away.

  * * *

  The land slanted upward, climbing toward the Franklin Mountains, a barren, north-south-trending range of peaks. Maude could see the deep notch of McKelligon Canyon that provided passage through the mountains. She dismounted and walked leading Red. She meant to give the horse as much help as she could to outdistance her pursuers.

  Maude reached the summit of the pass with the rocky spire of Comanche Peak towering above her. She had driven herself hard and was pouring sweat. She drank from the canteen as she looked back down the mountainside. She saw no riders.

  The horse, smelling the water, came close and nuzzled her for some. "Sorry, Red none for you just yet." Maude knew she could water the horse at the Rio Grande, which lay some seven to eight miles distant.

  She climbed back astride and descended into the desert east of the mountains. El Paso lay off on her right too far away to be seen.

  An hour later, she came upon the main road. She took Red down to the Rio Grande, which was close to the road here, and let him drink, but not too much. Then they set out to the east.

  * * *

  In the early night, Maude passed Fort Hancock, sitting on the bank above the Rio Grande. She and her father had stopped and entered the fort once when they had been on a journey to Sierra Blanca to visit relatives. Now she looked at the lights in the fort and identified the barracks of the enlisted men, the row of small homes of the married officers, and the bachelor officers' quarters. The Union soldiers had been forced from the military installation at the beginning of the war, and now a company of Confederate soldiers manned the fort.

  Maude was weary, and lowered her head and dozed as the horse carried her on through the darkness. He had been set upon the road, and would follow it until she guided him differently.

  She came awake with Red standing motionless and resting in the road. The night was darker and the moon shadows were long and thin, for the celestial body that had been high in the sky was now hardly a hand's width above the horizon. She had slept much
longer than she had intended. Maude climbed down from the saddle. She would walk until the moon was completely gone.

  * * *

  Maude lay upon her thin blanket on the ground and rested. The bed was hard, but that was nothing for she was free.

  The sound of the horse tearing at the tough desert grass nearby was comforting. She loved the big animal, and was sorry she could not have given him better food. Tomorrow she must find water for the horse and herself.

  Her thoughts turned to Lester. He would be looking for her, that was a certainty. She had done her best to mislead him. Perhaps he would be searching for her in El Paso. If not and he guessed she had gone east, how far behind was he?

  There was one thing for sure. Lester couldn't track her in the darkness. With that thought in mind, Maude went to sleep.

  * * *

  Daylight found Maude upon Red's back and the steed moving at a trot. In the early dawn, she had veered aside a mile to the Rio Grande and allowed the horse to drink and to graze the lush grass along the riverbank for a quarter hour. They were now traveling east on the main road toward Sierra Blanca some thirty miles distant.

  Near noon, sweaty and thirsty, and twenty miles farther along, she came to the Arroyo Calero Ranch. The main house was just off the road, and she saw a cowboy working with horses in the log corral nearby. He gave her permission to use the well. She thanked the man and hurriedly drew water to fill her canteen and water Red. In a few minutes she was back on the road and moving fast with the sun burning down and the deep dust of the road boiling up behind.

  She believed she had eluded Lester, and if not, that she had a good lead on him. Still, there was a nagging feeling and she twisted in the saddle to look behind.