So when Hannigan came to his tent that night, clearing his throat in the absence of any solid door upon which to knock, Cuttrell was already awake. “Damn it, Ezra, spit if you need to, but don’t stand there all night making those repulsive noises.”
“Sorry, Colonel,” Hannigan said. He ducked inside, carrying a lit candle. “One of the men on picket detail reported—well, he’s not sure what he reported.”
“What does that mean, Ezra? It’s too late at night for riddles.”
“He thought he heard a sound,” Hannigan explained. “Footsteps, he thought. Not animal, he said, but human. He challenged, but got no response. He took another trooper and they went out with a lantern, but they found no one.”
“Apaches,” Cuttrell said. “They can be devilishly quiet when they want to.”
“No, sir. At least, according to the guard.”
“If he didn’t see anything, how does he know?”
“He’s … not quite sure, sir. He says the sound was there, and then it wasn’t. It didn’t fade away, or drift away. It was just that sudden. There, and not there.”
“We can’t have pickets who are inebriated on duty,” Cuttrell said. “That’s a good way to kill us all.”
“I smelled his breath myself. It’s Carlton. He’s as sober a man as has ever worn a uniform.”
“That’s not saying much.”
“Still,” Hannigan went on. “He’s sober, I’d swear to it.”
“What do you think he heard, then?”
“I have no idea.”
“And you’d like me to do what, exactly?”
“I … I’m not sure, Colonel.”
“Do you think Carlton really heard something?”
“He says he did.”
Cuttrell tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. Finally, Hannigan continued. “I believe him, sir. Or I believe that he thinks he did.”
“My best guess is still Apaches,” Cuttrell said. “Double the pickets. No, triple them. If they hear something else they can’t identify, tell them to shoot. Better we wake up the men for no reason than let them sleep through an attack.”
“Yes, sir,” Hannigan said. “I’ll take care of it.”
“See that you do,” Cuttrell said. When Hannigan was gone, he tried to settle in again, but there was no comfort to be found on the ground. He thought about Sadie, alone in their bed, and the pleasures offered by a mattress and a pillow, the soothing weight of a quilt, and he knew that he had slept his last for this night. Morning couldn’t come soon enough.
* * *
Kuruk watched the increase in the number of posted guards with trepidation. He’d heard what sounded almost like the rasp of booted feet out in the darkness. He slept lightly at the best of times, and even more so when he was away from the fort. This night, he had not even tried, because he wanted to keep an eye on Little Wing. He had heard, too, the muffled conversation between the troopers, Carlton and Root, and though he couldn’t catch every word, he got the gist of it.
Most of the soldiers would assume an Apache raid was imminent. Although he’d been a scout for years, their assumption would lead them to doubt his loyalty. He was barely trusted as it was; any time there was Apache trouble, that trust was stretched ever thinner. It hadn’t sounded like Apache to him, though. If a raid were in the offing, a lone brave wouldn’t venture so near the army camp. Even if one did, he wouldn’t wear boots.
And though he had at first assumed he’d heard the scrape of a boot sole against a stone, when he listened to it again in his mind, it sounded more like a hoof than a boot.
At any rate, it wasn’t what he had heard that disturbed him. It was what he sensed. A presence, in the darkness. Malevolent and strong. He was almost glad the troopers couldn’t see it, because if they could, they would engage it. Who knew what harm might befall them if they did?
Little Wing was moving in her sleep. She lay on her left side. Her legs, bent at the knees, shifted as if she were walking up a steep staircase. Her hands reached, grasped, and released empty air. Her brow wrinkled, her nose twitched, her mouth opened and closed, releasing occasional mewling sounds. Kuruk moved to her side, stroked her shoulder, her soft cheek.
“Be still, little one,” he told her. “No harm will come to you.”
Her only response was a frightened whimper. That worried Kuruk more than the fears of the troopers. What was she seeing that scared her so?
He brushed her brow, which was damp with sweat. “Fear not,” he whispered. “Kuruk watches over you.”
After a few minutes, she relaxed again. Her hands opened, her lips parted, the twitches and tics of her face stilled.
He sat beside her and watched the soldiers, anxious for the dawn, peer into the impenetrable night.
* * *
She woke with the sun.
It had just edged from behind the far hills, painting the undersides of the clouds with shades of rose and salmon. Kuruk watched it, spoke a few words of thanks, and when he looked back at her, Little Wing was sitting up. She rubbed her eyes with her fists, and a smile broke across her face. The effect, Kuruk thought, was much like that of the sun on the eastern sky.
“How do you feel?” he asked, not expecting an answer.
“Re … redemp … tion,” she said. Her voice was thick, raspy as a rusted hinge that hadn’t been used in months. She had spoken the single word slowly, as if trying it out for the first time. Kuruk handed her a canteen and she drank deeply, then handed it back with an open-mouthed smile. Her eyes were wide and bright, her gaze level.
“Redemption, did you say?”
“Re … birth,” she said haltingly. “Re … flection.”
He understood the words, but not the meaning. Not the way she was using them. “I don’t follow you.”
“Sun.”
“Yes, the sun is rising. Giving birth to a new day?”
“Each morning … births a new day … a new chance for re … demption.”
“Yes,” he said. “But—”
“Don’t,” she said.
“Don’t what?”
“Comp … licate.”
“Complicate how?” He wasn’t sure he had ever been so lost in a conversation. White folks were always saying crazy things, but not like this.
She frowned then, and twisted her head and shoulders away from him, as if he had hurt her feelings in some way.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She glanced his way, shook her head. She acted, Kuruk thought, like someone just learning to speak a new language, with complicated concepts in her head that she couldn’t find the words for. He had been the same way as a young man, trying to learn the white man’s tongue.
“I am Kuruk,” he said. He patted his chest when he said it. “Kuruk. Who are you?”
She met his gaze. “Blessed,” she said.
He touched his chest once more. “Kuruk. What is your name?”
“Call me…” she began. “Little Wing.”
He was about to ask her more, though he doubted that she would provide any real answers. Still, he wanted to know if she had heard him call her that, or if it really was her name. He wanted to know where she had come from, why she was traveling with the mule train. He wanted to know what had happened to the train.
But before he could, Ezra Hannigan strode up to him. “Colonel Cuttrell wants her in that wagon,” he said. “We’re rolling out of here soon.”
“Are you ready to travel?” Kuruk asked her.
“Blessed,” she said again.
“When the wagon’s ready,” Kuruk said, “she will be, too.”
* * *
Sadie opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling. It was unfamiliar, not the hammered tin ceiling of the bedroom she shared with Del. There were sheets twisted around her, and she was on her back, so in somebody’s bed.
She shifted her head just enough to see a muscular arm and a hairy back. Jimmy, she remembered. Jimmy McKenna. “God,” she said.
“Mmmh?”
he answered. He turned toward her, blinking. “What?”
“I was just suffering a momentary bout of self-respect,” Sadie said. “Don’t worry about it; it’ll pass soon enough.” She sat up in the bed. Her head felt like someone had taken a hatchet to it. Unconcerned by her nakedness, she stood and walked to a table. “Where’s that bottle?”
“Do you have to say things like that?” McKenna asked her. “That’s cruel. Don’t you know how that makes me feel?”
“I know I had a bottle here,” she said.
“The laudanum again? You just woke up, darling. Do you really need it already?”
She found the bottle, underneath where her bloomers had been tossed. Not broken, thankfully. There was no spoon handy, or glass, so she unstoppered it and took a sip right from its mouth.
“‘Darling?’” she repeated. “Jimmy, let’s not pretend what we have here has anything to do with love.”
“But, Sadie, I—”
She slammed the bottle down on the tabletop, hard. “Don’t!” she said. “Don’t you say that. Don’t say anything to me that you wouldn’t say to one of Senora Soto’s girls. That’s all this is, Jimmy. The only difference is that I’m not asking you for money.”
“That isn’t true, Sadie. It’s not like—”
“It is for me,” she said, cutting him off. She checked the bottle, to make sure she hadn’t cracked the glass, then walked around to his side of the bed. He was sitting up now, his gaze fixed on the sway of her heavy breasts. She sat beside him, reached under the sheets. “In fact,” she said, “that’s exactly how I want you to treat me. Right now, Jimmy. If I were one of her girls, what would you do with me right now?”
She felt him stirring to life under her hand, and she smiled. The attack of self-respect had passed even quicker than she’d expected.
That was fine, though. For a woman in her position, self-respect was a luxury she could ill afford.
Chapter Fourteen
Cale had worked for Jed Tibbetts long enough to know the rancher was trying hard not to break down weeping at the sight of two more dead cowboys. He would later, Cale was certain. For the moment, though, he was trying hard to contain his emotions.
When they rode up, Montclair’s man, Colby, was sitting on the ground near the bloodied corpses, rolling a smoke. He saw Tibbetts and Cale coming, put the cigarette in his mouth, struck a match and held it to the tip. When it glowed brightly, Colby shook out the match, tossed it aside. As Tibbetts dismounted, Colby eyed him through a long ribbon of smoke.
“What happened here, Colby?” Tibbetts demanded. “What happened to those men?”
“Got killed,” Colby said. He was still sitting in the dirt. Cale wanted to kick him for his disrespectful tone.
“Killed, how? You were with them, weren’t you?”
Colby shrugged. “Something bothered the stock,” he said. “They didn’t want to ride out to look, so I did. When I came back, they were here, like this.”
Cale jumped down from his horse. “I don’t believe it! Gamewell weren’t afraid of nothing! He was as loyal as an old dog.”
Tibbetts held up a hand toward Cale, silencing him. “What the boy says is true, Colby. I don’t believe for a second these two men would sit here and let you go out by yourself. I told all of you to stay together.”
“Reckon they didn’t listen, then,” Colby said. Finally, he stood. Kicked at the dirt. “You can believe me or don’t. Makes no never-mind to me.”
“Listen, Mr. Colby, as long as you’re in my employ—”
“I ain’t. Mr. Montclair pays me.”
“Well, you’re on my spread. I’d fire you if I could. I might just kick your ass if I have to look at you for another minute, so if I were you, I’d light the hell out of here.”
Colby tossed his smoke on the ground. “Have it your way,” he said. “Boss.” He climbed onto his horse and rode away at a slow walk. Tibbetts watched him go, his hands shaking with anger.
When he was some distance away, Tibbetts turned back to Cale. “I don’t like that man,” he said. “I don’t like his attitude. I don’t like the way he smells. I see him again, I’m likely to shoot him.”
“I wouldn’t blame you, Mr. Tibbetts,” Cale said.
“You see him around here again, Cale, you can shoot him, too.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“See you do.”
Tibbetts looked at the bodies again. They had been hacked up, like the others. He started to say something more, but then the sorrow overtook him. A tear slipped from his left eye, and then he doubled over and dropped to his knees. Spasms rocked him, and he fell forward into the dirt.
Cale left him to his grief and fetched a shovel.
* * *
“Maybe it’s time, Edith,” Jed Tibbetts said. “Past time, more like. We’ve talked about it before.”
She sat in the rocker he had made for her a dozen years earlier. Her feet were firmly planted, as always. Her hair hadn’t been gray then, like it was now. Her face had been less lined. But her stubborn expression hadn’t changed in any meaningful way. She knitted her brow and turned her mouth into a straight line and crossed her arms across her chest, and when she looked like that she didn’t really have to speak, because her feelings were as plain as day. “That’s nonsense, Jed, and you know it.”
“You don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “The way the men look. The brutality. It’s sickening.”
“I’m sure it is. But it can’t last forever. The sheriff’s got to do something, right?”
“Behan’s got a whole county to look after, but he can hardly be dragged out of Tombstone. Marshal Turville’s twice the man he is. Almost makes me wish we lived in Carmichael town limits. Now there’s two more dead, I sent a man up to let Behan know it’s gettin’ worse, not that he’ll do anything. Still, this isn’t anything normal-like. There’s no stock bein’ rustled, nobody bein’ robbed. Just cattle and men being chopped up and left there for no reason.”
“Could there ever be a reason for that? One that made any sense?”
“I reckon not.” Tibbetts looked out the window. The view outside was as it had always been. A dusty front yard, with the corral and barn off to the west and the bunkhouse the other way. The land sloping down toward the San Pedro River in the far distance, a line of cottonwood trees standing along its banks. On the horizon, the Mule Mountains glowed under the noontime sun.
There had always been dangers in that landscape, from weather, from snakes and bears and mountain lions and other creatures, from Apaches and whites alike. But he and Edith had carved out a life here, built a ranch that kept them fed and clothed, and neither had fallen victim to those constant threats.
Whatever was out there now, though, was something different. Something elemental, he thought, and steeped in evil. Something that killed, as his wife said, for no reason at all. No that wasn’t quite true, there had to be a reason. It just wasn’t one he could understand. It killed because it loved the act of killing, because it wanted to taste blood, to see bones and muscles and organs opened up to the air. It killed because killing was the only thing it knew how to do. He would never know the real reason until he learned what it was, and maybe not even then.
“I don’t want to lose anything else,” he said to the window. When Edith didn’t reply, he continued. “No more people, no more stock. If we sold out now, before we lose any more head, we could maybe get somethin’ for the land, somethin’ for the beeves. Find us a place in town somewheres, Carmichael or Tombstone or even Tucson. Stop gettin’ up before dawn every day of our lives.”
He heard the chair squeaking, which meant she was rocking, which further meant she was getting angry. “Nonsense,” she said. “Jed, you would hate that life. You’d sit in a chair and rot if you didn’t have chores to do, animals to attend to. You wouldn’t be happy for an instant of it.”
He whirled away from the window. “You think I’m happy now, woman? Ridin’ out every mornin’ to s
ee what’s been slaughtered?”
“You talk to the sheriff,” she said. “Don’t send one of the men. Tell him he’s got to stop it, or bring in the army and let them do it. You’ve got your hands full as it is.”
“Reckon I could try that,” Tibbetts said. “It’s my ranch, so it’s my problem. But Behan might could be useful if he’s pushed hard enough.”
“You’ve always been good at pushing, Jedediah Tibbetts. You weren’t, we wouldn’t be here now. Well, you might be, but not with me.”
“No way I’d rather have it, Edith.”
“So we’re staying put, then.” She didn’t say it like it was a question, and she had stopped rocking. Her feet had never left the floor, and he expected it would take a cannonball to budge her.
“I reckon so.”
“Good. I’d hate to have to put up with you moping around some house in town all day long, every day. You belong here.”
“You’re right, Edith.” He didn’t mind admitting it. He wouldn’t tell her how relieved he was that she hadn’t agreed to his suggestion. She was right; he hated the very idea of living in town, and he would hate the reality of it even more. But he’d wanted to make the offer anyway. Bad enough to be losing cattle and hands, but if whatever was doing that came closer to home—if Edith was threatened in any way—he wouldn’t be able to live with it. If it could keep her from harm, he would live in a city a thousand miles from the Arizona territory. He wouldn’t do it gladly. He loved everything about this place, despite the various hazards and the often harsh climate and the dry years when the grama grass didn’t want to grow and the cattle went hungry.
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