by Ed Gorman
A man named Silas, a man big as Kriker himself in bib overalls and a red wool sweater, said, “We owe you our lives, Kriker. We’re not meanin’ to be ungrateful.”
Kriker said, “I can’t leave now. The girl’s too sick to travel.”
A woman said, without anger, “Kriker, we need a doc. The granny woman can’t help us. And when the doc comes the law’ll come, too, because they think you murdered those people in town. You know there been some people in town just waitin’ to burn this place down. We don’t want to give them no excuses, Kriker.”
Kriker came away from the wall and glared at them—the young, the old, the lame among them, and the strong. They’d been his people, his flock, as it were, all these years, and now they regarded him as stranger.
“It’s our settlement, Kriker,” said another man. He was bald and wore a rough denim jacket and rough denim jeans. “You kept to the old ways—the ways we fled. But we learned the land, Kriker, and now those are our ways. We don’t rob no more, and we don’t have no law on us.”
Kriker’s grief turned to anger as he leaned on his Sharps.” You think I couldn’t kill you, Jonathan?”
“You could kill me, Kriker.” The man waved his hand to the others. They had guns of various kinds, too. “But you couldn’t kill them.”
Father Healy said, “We need to remember two things here. Without Kriker there would be no settlement. Each of us owes him more than we can say. Isn’t that right?”
He addressed the group of them. Heads hung now, both with shame and with an obvious sense that perhaps the priest was going to try and peruade them not only to let Kriker stay, but to put off sending somebody for a doc in town.
“Isn’t that right?” Father Healy repeated.
He was chastising them, the way a parent scolds children.
“Right,” somebody at the back of the group said.
Then most of the people took it up, there in the cabin with the potbellied stove and the walls lined with jars of strawberry preserves and corn and string beans. There were quilts here, too, warm and beautiful ones, and a fiddle in the corner that sang sweetly on nights of festivity—and what Healy did with his words and hard glances was remind the people of who in the first place was responsible for all this.
Kriker.
Then the priest surprised everybody by turning to Kriker and saying, “But as grateful as we are Kriker, I have to put the good to everybody ahead of your own good.”
Kriker seemed to sense what was coming.
The priest said, “You must leave tonight.”
“Without the girl?”
“She can’t travel, Kriker.”
“You’re supposed to be my friends.”
“There are other children here, Kriker, and the threat of cholera. That comes before anything.”
Kriker started to heft his gun.
Guild, who had been rolling a cigarette in the corner and just watching the proceedings, said, “The way cholera moves, you should send somebody right now.”
“Tonight?” a man asked.
Guild nodded. “With the best horse you’ve got.” Guild stood up and started edging toward Kriker because he could see what was about to happen. Kriker was getting ready to raise his Sharps.
Guild moved then, grabbing a chair and smashing it across the back of Kriker’s head just as the man raised the Sharps.
Several people screamed, and for the next few moments there was great confusion as Guild threw himself down on the still-conscious Kriker. Guild needed to get a punch off clean and hard enough to knock the man out completely.
The man named Jonathan saved him the trouble by coming over and kicking Kriker in the side of the head.
Kriker’s head slammed against the floor. He was unconscious. Guild got his handcuffs from his gun belt and cuffed Kriker and then dragged him over to the wall.
When he got up he saw the man named Jonathan standing there staring down at Kriker. “I don’t want to do that.” He sounded on the verge of tears. “We owe him everything.”
“You didn’t have any choice,” Guild said. To the priest he said, “Now let’s get a rider. We need a doc and we need Sheriff Decker and a few deputies out here. One of you a good rider?”
He looked at the group and they pushed forth a young woman in braids and freckles. She was maybe sixteen. “She’s the best,” the priest said. He smiled affectionately. “She likes horses better than people.”
“Yeah, all except for Jim Courtner over to the other village,” a voice from the rear said. “She likes him best.”
The young woman blushed.
“You think you can reach town in this storm?” Guild asked.
She nodded.
“All right,” Guild said, “here’s what you need to tell Decker, and here’s what you need to tell the doc.”
Chapter Twelve
Thomas Bruckner crouched next to a pine just on the edge of the settlement.
His brother James, walking on his haunches, came up from behind. James said, “Maybe he won’t give a damn about her anymore.”
“You heard the way he’d talked about her to Rig and Tolliver.”
The moonlight sparkled through the blowing snow. Thomas Bruckner’s eyebrows were white with the freezing stuff.
James said, “It wouldn’t be right.”
Which was what Thomas had been waiting to hear—the thing that was really bothering his brother. Ever since Thomas had suggested taking the girl and using her as a way of getting the bank money from Kriker, James had been acting the way he usually did when he didn’t want to do something but was afraid to say so.
A spindle-legged doe appeared in the moonlit clearing. Then, sensing the two men, it took off faster than seemed possible west of the cabins.
Thomas said, “You want to make me mad?”
“You know better’n that, Thomas.”
“Then you do what I say.”
“She’s a little girl.”
Thomas wiped snow from his face, then sighed. “You remember that time in Kansas City?”
“What time?”
“The time with the red-haired woman who said you were ugly.”
James waited a very long time before speaking as he crouched there next to her brother. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I remember.”
“You remember what I did for you?”
Nothing.
“You remember, James?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well, you think it’s right that I’d do something like that for you, and here I ask you a simple little favor and you won’t do nothin’ for me at all?”
Nothing.
“You think that’s right, James?”
“No, I guess not.”
“I wish you’d say that louder so’s I’d know you mean it.”
“No, I guess it isn’t right.”
“I cut up her face real good for you, didn’t I?”
“I didn’t want you to do that, Thomas.”
“But I did it.”
“I didn’t even want you to do it.”
“But I love you, James. You’re my brother and I love you and that’s why I was obliged to do it.”
“If you loved me, maybe you wouldn’t have thrown that kerosene on me in the first place.”
“I thought we had that agreement.”
Nothing.
“I thought we had that agreement.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I thought we had that agreement that said I feel so bad about throwin’ that kerosene on you that I never want to hear about it again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But about once every couple weeks you go and break that agreement. You ever noticed how you do that, James?”
“I’m sorry, Thomas.”
“Now I cut up that whore for you and it seems to me that the least thing you could do for me is go in there and get that little girl and bring her back out here while I stand guard. Doesn’t that seem like the least little thing you cou
ld do for me?”
“I guess so.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
“Sometimes I’m not sure, Thomas. Sometimes I’m not sure about anything.”
The wind came again, and the freezing snow, silver dust devils of it now. Thomas said, “There’s a line shack about a mile from here. We’ll take her there and we’ll all be nice and warm. Then we’ll tell Kriker we’ve got her and then we’ll get the money and then you and me can head for California.”
“You shouldn’t have cut her.”
“Hell,” Thomas Bruckner said. “Hell if I shouldn’t have.” Then, in to the smell of fire and human warmth downwind on the shadowy night, he said, “You go get her, James. You go get her right now.”
Once he reached the camp, James Bruckner felt a familiar fear—that of desertion. As a boy he’d been lost in a rainstorm and he’d felt that he would never find his way home again. He felt surrounded by hostile entities he could not see. But then his brother Thomas had come looking for him and had guided him home.
Now James felt surrounded by hostile entities again. Only these he could see—or at least glimpse: the people of the settlement. People whose eyes would settle on the burned part of his face and narrow in disgust. People who would snicker and point behind his back. People who could never see what he was—but only what he appeared to be. Ever since being doused with the kerosene, he had imagined that people wanted to get their hands on him, to tear him apart the way a lynch mob had torn apart a black man in Keokuk one day when he and Thomas had been riding through, literally rending the man with their fingers and fists.
If the people of this settlement caught him stealing the girl, then the same fate would be his.
For the next ten minutes, he went cabin to cabin. In three cabins mothers sat with broods of children, humming, knitting, rocking infants. In one cabin an older man sat reading a yellow paperbound book by kerosene lamp.
In the fourth and largest of all the cabins, he heard the meeting taking place and heard what the settlement people were saying about Kriker, and what Kriker said about the little girl.
From this, James Bruckner learned what he should be looking for—a young girl who was sick from something, though he could not quite decide what from the conversation.
So he set about checking out other cabins, and finally he came to the one where an old woman sat in a rocking chair next to a cot where a fevered-looking young girl lay asleep.
The old woman held in her right hand, by its tiny feet, a dead bird which she was switching back and forth over the face of the sleeping girl.
A granny woman, James Bruckner realized.
He leaned back from the burlap window and pressed himself against the rough bark of the cabin wall as he heard feet crunching through the ice and snow.
His heart hammered as he thought of the black man in Keokuk and what the mob had done to him, what it wanted to do to anybody who was different from itself.
The crunching feet drew closer.
Cherry pipe smoke trailed on the night air.
The moon was so round and clear, even through the haze of snow, it looked unreal.
He pressed himself against the wall so hard the back of his head hurt from the pressure.
Please just go on by. Please just go on by.
Which is what they did, finally, two men, one of whom said, “I never seen Kriker like that. The way he looked back there.”
“He looked old.”
“It’s the girl. It’s like she’s his own.”
“She’s never spoken since the day he took her. Never a word.”
“He shouldn’t have taken her. He should have left her.”
“Never a word.”
Then they were gone and James Allan Bruckner knew that he needed to move quickly now.
He yanked his Navy Colt from his holster—the leather sodden with snow—and walked carefully around to the front door of the cabin.
He moved almost without sound, having become, during his years since leaving home, very good at jobs that required stealth. Or at least that’s what Thomas always told him when he insisted it was James Allan who should go into this place or that while Thomas stood some distance away “watching out.”
He eased in the door, and before the granny woman quite had time to look up, he had the Colt aimed straight at her face and the hammer cocked.
“I don’t want to hurt you, granny woman.”
She had frozen now, holding the dead bird still above the sleeping girl’s face.
“I just want the girl.”
“Oh, no,” the granny woman said. “This is Kriker’s girl.”
“I need to take her, granny woman. I need to take her and I want to do it without hurtin’ you. Do you understand me?”
“She’s Kriker’s girl,” the granny woman said again.
But for the moment, James Bruckner wasn’t listening. He had been so long out in the bitter cold—first lashed to the tree and then hiding out on the edge of the settlement—that now all he could do was stare at the warm and comfortable cabin. There was food in the pantry—bread and rice and beans—and there was a potbelly stove and a tin tub for soaking in steamy hot water and a beautiful painting of the Lord and—
And the granny woman was staring at his face.
He sense it and his head snapped around and then his eyes confirmed it.
Obviously fascinated and repelled at the same time, the granny woman rested her eyes on his patch of burned skin.
Most people couldn’t.
“What happened to your face?”
“Why would you care?” He sounded mean now.
“‘Cause I might know a treatment for it.”
“There ain’t no treatment for it.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. Knew this granny woman in Wisconsin. She said there was a treatment for it and she spent several days tryin’ but it came to nothin’.” Then softly, “Nothin’.”
“She try a robin’s egg?”
“Yep.”
“She try tyin’ a mackerel to your head?”
“Yep.”
“She try a—”
“She tried everything. Everything.”
The granny woman, small but not at all frail, sat back in her rocking chair thoughtfully. “What you goin’ to do with her?”
“Can’t see how that’s your business.”
“You’re shiverin’.”
“I’m cold.”
“You’re shiverin’ ‘cause you’re scared, too. You don’t really want to take this little girl.”
“Got to.”
“Why?”
“Like I said, can’t see how that’s any of your business.”
“She’s got the cholera.”
Without moving his Colt from the granny woman’s face, he eased his gaze to the girl. She almost looked dead, so still and pale. Only the sweat on her face spoke of fevered life.
“I got to take her, granny woman.”
“She’ll die if you move her.”
“I got to take that chance.”
“You know what Kriker’ll do to you?”
“Help me git her bundled up, granny woman.”
“It’s gonna be terrible, what Kriker’s gonna do.”
“Help me git her bundled up,” he said.
She helped him. She tugged a heavy woolen coat on the girl and then boots and then mittens and then a heavy woolen scarf around her head.
The first time James Bruckner touched her, he felt how hot the girl was. He couldn’t see how anybody could be that hot and still be alive. He thought of cholera and the stories he’d heard about it and of a marshal he’d known who’d been fine at nine one morning and then dropped straight down dead at four that afternoon.
Cholera.
He hefted the girl under his arm like a bundle and said, “I’m gonna have to put you out, granny woman.”
“Hit me?”
“Yep.”
“You don’t sound like you
want to do that.”
“Ain’t a matter of want. Matter of need.”
Which is when he struck her. He had learned over the years how to hit somebody just to put them out briefly and how to hit somebody to hurt them. She would not be out more than ten or fifteen minutes the way he’d just done her, and then all she’d have at worst would be a headache. He had only made a mistake once, in a Northeastern Territory town where Thomas had briefly been sheriff, when he’d hit a Mexican prisoner. The man had had epilepsy and had gone into convulsions right there at James Allan’s feet. And he had died at James Allan’s feet, too, and not for months could James Allan forget it, the way the man had spewed silver froth from his mouth, the crazed animal eyes, and the entire twitching body.
James Allan Bruckner hefted the girl under his arm and ran out into the night.
Chapter Thirteen
Guild got Kriker set up in a chair, still handcuffed, of course, and then got himself set up in a chair and then had a cigar while he waited for the big man to come to.
By now the others had left the central cabin. Guild sat there listening to the fire pop inside the potbellied stove and to the way the snow sounded like salt granules sprayed against the west side of the cabin.
When Kriker made a noise, Guild said, “I need you to tell me where the money is.”
Kriker made no intelligible response. He moved his head from side to side as if he were in a great deal of pain, and then he said, “The girl.”
“The granny woman’s with her.”
He was coming awake now, Kriker was. “She all right?”
“She needs a doc, Kriker. The priest is right.”
“He ain’t a priest.”
“What?”
“He ain’t a priest.”
“He wears a cassock and a collar.”
“He still ain’t no priest.”
“What is he, then?”
“Cardplayer from Chicago.”
“I’ll be damned,” Guild said, and knew instantly who the man was. The missing fingers became a wanted poster and the wanted poster became a man. A cardsharp wanted for second-degree murder in the death of another cardsharp. Guild had one of those memories. He didn’t recall everything about the poster—couldn’t, for example, recall the amount of the reward—but he remembered the words “cardsharp” and “missing fingers.”
