by Ed Gorman
But now that wasn’t so important as the robbery money. To get that reward, all Guild needed to do was ride back to Sheriff Decker. To claim the priest he’d have to go all the way back to Chicago.
He said, “You’re being selfish, Kriker.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The girl. She needs a doc and you need to let her go.”
“She’s my daughter.”
“She’s your daughter the way Healy is a priest.”
“Her folks got killed and I took care of her.”
“She needs a doc.”
“A doc killed my wife and son.”
Guild sighed. “They told me what happened, and it doesn’t sound like it was the doc. It sounds like it was the disease.”
“What disease?”
“Same one as this one. Cholera.”
“She’s got a touch of the bug is all.”
“You know better.”
“Hell.”
“Hell, too,” Guild said, “and you know it.” He paused. “Where’s the money?”
Kriker grinned. “We’re talkin’ about a little girl’s life here and all you give a damn about is the money.”
Guild grinned back. “I like your piety, Kriker.”
“What’s ‘piety’?”
“You’ve been killing people and robbing people all over the Territory for twenty years and I try to collect a reward on you and you get all pissed up and self-righteous.”
“I never killed nobody innocent.”
“Somebody killed the girl’s folks.”
“Wasn’t me.” He sighed. “Anyway, later on I killed the man what done it.”
“I’ve got half of what I wanted.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’ve got the Bruckner brothers tied up. Now I get the money and I’ll have all I wanted. I’ll take the money and the brothers back to Sheriff Decker and get the reward and ride out of here.”
“What about me? You don’t want to take me in?”
“We’re going to make a trade.”
“A trade?”
“You’re going to tell me where the money is, and then you’re going to get on your horse and get out of here.”
“What about Maundy?”
“The girl’s staying so a doc can help her.”
Tears came into the mountain man’s eyes again, and Guild could see that his fear and hatred of docs was just as powerful in the voodoo sense as the granny woman’s medicines. “The doc’ll kill her! The doc’ll kill her!”
But Guild was past it now with the man. He felt sorry for him and was moved by his love for the little girl, but the little girl needed a doc and Guild needed the reward money and needed to turn over the Bruckners, who’d killed Rig and young Tolliver. The one part of hunting bounty he’d never liked was that not everybody made it easy for you. Sometimes Guild saw that he was very little different from the man he was stalking, and sometimes that made things difficult indeed. But you got past it and the professional part of yourself took over and while it was not an admirable part of yourself perhaps it was a necessary part.
Kriker had put his head down and was starting to sob, and Guild said, “I’ll stay here with the doc personally, Kriker. I’ll be with him all the time. I’ll make sure that he doesn’t do anything to the girl. You understand that?”
Kriker raised his head. His eyes and nose were running and his beard was filled with mucus. “I don’t want her to die, Guild. I don’t want her to die.”
He sounded unimaginably young and terrified, and now all Guild himself could do was put his own head down.
When he raised it, he said, “Where’d you put the money, Kriker?” He said it very softly, so softly the popping of the potbellied stove nearly covered his words.
“There’s a cave on a ridge to the north of here. There’s a crooked oak in front of it. The money’s in there. I don’t give a damn about the money no more. I just want Maundy to be all right.” He stared at Guild. “You promise you won’t let that doc hurt her?”
“I promise.”
“’Cause I’d find you.”
“I know.”
“And I’d kill you.”
“I wouldn’t blame you.”
“‘Cause I love her.”
Guild stood up and that’s when somebody burst through the cabin door and said, “Somebody took the girl and knocked out the granny woman!”
Kriker made a noise Guild could equate only with a huge animal that had been badly wounded.
Guild picked up his double 10-gauge and said, “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”
Then they all went to Kriker’s cabin.
Chapter Fourteen
“You got what you wanted, didn’t you?” Kriker shouted at the priest half an hour later.
The two men stood only inches apart in the center of the cabin where the girl had lain.
The granny woman, favoring her head with a knobby hand, sat in a corner shaking her head as if she could still not believe what had taken place.
Inside the stove, wind from the chimney chased the flames in a whoosh of fire.
Three settlement men stood and watched as Kriker, still cuffed, paced back and forth in the cabin after screaming at the priest.
“You got what you wanted, you miserable son of a bitch! I wouldn’t be surprised if you had something to do with it!”
The granny woman glanced up and said, softly and sorrowfully, “He didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, Kriker. Nothin’ at all.”
Kriker waved his cuffed fists in frustration and fury.
The snow was getting heavy and wetter. Guild went down the long slope of the hill, digging in his heels. By now the moon was so snowed over there was nothing but shadow and snowdrifts on the land. The only sound was the wind and, faintly, his own boots, the creak of leather and crunch of ice.
They were gone from the tree, the Bruckner brothers, just as he’d expected.
Uselessly, he bent down and picked up the rope that had bound them. He hefted it in his hands as if it had the power to impart some knowledge he vitally needed.
But he was stalling and he knew it. He just didn’t want to have to see Kriker’s face again. The girl gone, Kriker had become the sort of animal the human mind cannot comfortably deal with, one so lost in grief he is capable of any act at all.
Guild threw the rope down and started back up the slope, the wind knocking him to the left and then to the right, not permitting him straight passage.
He was about halfway up the hill, black sky behind the rocks and pines on the rim, when he heard a moan he first dismissed as the wind.
But the moan came again and he knew better, and now he went left on purpose, over across a sheer shine of ice coating to a jagged boulder. The closer he got, the clearer two thick black sticks became.
Then he realized that the thick black sticks were human legs.
The old Indian had crawled behind the boulder for protection from the wind. It hadn’t done him much good. He had ten or twenty breaths in him and no more.
Guild raised the man’s head and said, “Where’s your horse?”
The Indian, parchment brown, parchment wrinkled, smelled of urine and sweat despite the cold. He said, “Lawman.”
The Bruckners, of course. “Burned face?”
The Indian nodded.
Guild said, “I’m taking you to the settlement.”
The Indian started to cry.
Guild threw the old man over his shoulder and started once more down the hill. The old man had the effect of anchoring Guild. The strain was greater, but the wind no longer blew Guild around.
He could feel him dying. You could tell by the coughing. The old Indian’s lungs pressed against Guild’s back and he could feel death come that way. In little spasms. Then there weren’t any spasms at all.
Guild didn’t put him down, though. He carried him the rest of the way to Kriker’s cabin and then set him on the floor and everybody
there looked at the dead brown man and shook their heads, and one said, “Bruckners?”
And all Guild could do was nod and stare over at Kriker, who had his face buried in the pillow where the girl’s head had lain.
Guild was watching Kriker roll his face back and forth on the pillow when one of the settlement men started gagging just before he started vomiting.
Guild said to Healy the priest, “It’s starting. The cholera.”
Healy the priest said something he probably shouldn’t have. He said, “Shit.”
Guild said, “Now we’ve got to wait for two things.”
“What’s that?” Healy said.
“Word from the Bruckners on how they want to make the trade for the girl.”
“And?”
Guild nodded to the two men helping the sick man out of the door. “And the cholera to start. You know how it goes. Half this settlement could be dead by tomorrow night.”
This time the priest responded more appropriately. He said, “My God.”
Chapter Fifteen
Once there had been a city named Yankton, and it had been a fine city with electric lights that glowed in the darkness and fine shiny carriages pulled by fine shiny horses and a park where a calliope could be heard on summer nights and a band shell where a hundred musicians played music so beautiful that even the stars seemed to brighten.
Once there had been a two-story house with the kind of exterior decoration called gingerbread (which the girl always giggled at hearing, thinking of gingerbread as something little girls such as herself ate as special treats). Once there had also been a sunny room where a gray cat named Naomi stretched in the sunlight and where a plump pink doll named Estelle watched everything that went on in the room with her blue button eyes. Maundy was the only one in the world who knew that Estelle could talk; she had decided it would be best for all concerned to keep Estelle’s abilities a secret.
Once there had been a tall, handsome father given to three-piece suits and working late at his law office, and once there had been a short, pretty mother given to holding Maundy on her knee and reading to her stories by a man named Sir Walter Scott and a woman named Louisa May Alcott. Maundy liked especially Louisa May.
Then one summer there had been a stage trip (Father having said, “There’s no direct train route there,” and then cursing as always the territorial government for its inadequacies) to see Cousin Daniel on his farm.
And that’s when it happened—the frightened shout of the stagecoach driver, the pounding of hooves coming from the surrounding woods, and then the quick sharp ear-hurting sound of gunfire, and the tart gray smell of it, too.
The robbers had made Father, Mother, and herself step down from the stage and raise their hands the way people had to in the melodramas her parents liked to attend, and then for no reason two of the robbers simply started shooting and—
—and she could remember nothing else about that period of her life.
Occasionally she would try to reconstruct the rest of what had happened that day, but something in her mind would not let the images form.
The gunfire…and Father screaming and Mother leaning down to him and screaming herself and…
Then there was the man named Kriker. He had a beard like a bear’s and a belly like a bison’s, and he wore hide for clothes instead of cotton or flannel, and when he spoke he talked the way the poor people of Yankton did, with “ain’ts” and “ain’t a gonnas” and all those other things that Miss Meister always said made her “positively cringe.”
Kriker was one of the four robbers, but he hadn’t done any of the shooting. In fact, he shouted for the shooting to stop, but by then it had been too late.
Kriker took her back to the settlement then and began the long process of trying to get her to talk. That was the funny thing about Kriker. You wouldn’t think a man who wore hides and who shunned civilized things would have such patience or sweetness or gentleness, but he did. Those qualities glowed in his eyes and gentled his tongue, and she had learned quickly enough not to be afraid of him.
But still she couldn’t talk.
Green summers and white winters came and went, and she found herself becoming part of the settlement itself, doing chores and picking wild flowers and learning how squirrels and raccoons were skinned for stew meat and how milk snakes were ugly but could not hurt you and how rattlesnakes were pretty in their way but could kill you.
Her hair grew long and her limbs grew longer. One day Kriker brought from town a doll that resembled Estelle not in the least, but a doll she loved in as peculiar a way as she loved Kriker.
But still she could not talk.
The granny woman spent hours with her, fumbling with herbs and mice bones and rabbit pelts, but still she could not talk.
The priest spent hours with her, fumbling with holy water and incense and fine blue swaths of cloth, but still she could not talk.
Kriker spent hours with her, holding her in his lap there in the rocker as birds sang softly in the purple dusk, but still she could not talk.
She wanted to talk, of course, and tried to talk, and sounds welled in her throat and filled her mouth, but they were not words, just sounds, and so she did not, no matter how she tried, talk.
And the settlement people came to accept this, shaping the air with gestures that said “Thank you” or “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” or “Would you like to run in the woods?” or “Is it time to fill your belly?”
There had been a time when she could talk—when, indeed, Father at the Sunday table filled with roast beef and chocolate cake had called her his “little chatterbox”—but words now were some secret lost seemingly forever.
Forever.
She dreamed of these things as she lay in the corner of the line shack where the two men who’d taken her from the village had placed her.
She dreamed of these things and of a visit to St. Loo and of a train trip east to New York and of how her mother had said that someday Maundy would have her own children and of how Father smelled after shaving, clean and spicy, and how her cat had stretched so gray and beautiful in the sunlight on the white spread of her bed.
She dreamed of these things as she lay there dying.
“He won’t kill you.”
“He sure will.”
“We’ve got the girl.”
“You know what he’s like.”
“I know what he’s like, but I also know we got the girl.” Thomas Bruckner paused. “You put a piece of that white sheet on your carbine and you ride into that settlement and you ask to see Kriker.”
“I wouldn’t even get that far.”
“I wouldn’t send you if I thought he’d kill you.” James Bruckner shook his head. “You can just imagine what he’ll be like now.”
“I can also imagine that robbery money. It’s part ours, anyway.”
James Bruckner looked around the line shack. When the railroads had cut through the timber paralleling the frozen river below, they’d needed temporary facilities for materials and bosses. Shacks such as these were dotted all over the Territory. They smelled of wood and creosote and damp earth. The grave probably would not smell much different. In the summer dogs and rats and cats and snakes slept in them, and termites and worms feasted on them. But now it was too cold for anything except human beings.
When the girl moaned, James Bruckner looked over at her. He’d set a match to a kerosene lantern twenty minutes ago, and now the lantern light showed that her lips were so dry from fever they’d started to crack and bleed.
James said, “She better not die.”
“She won’t die.”
“I could barely feel her pulse.”
“She won’t die.”
“He’d hunt us down if she did. There wouldn’t be anyplace we could go without him findin’ us.”
“You just take that piece of sheet and the carbine and the horse and you ride into that settlement and you tell him if he gives us the money, then an hour later he’s got the gir
l.”
“I still say he’ll kill me.”
“You’re just like Ma.”
“Don’t say nothin’ against Ma.”
“I ain’t,” Thomas Bruckner said, knowing how sensitive a subject Ma was with James. “I just mean you always look on the dark side.”
“Sometimes that seems like the only side there is.”
“I look on the bright side.”
“You don’t have my face.”
“You know that woman in St. Loo. She liked you that time.”
“That’s ‘cause she was crippled and she knew what it was like havin’ people stare at you all the time.”
“She said she wanted to marry you, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, but I saw how she always looked at those other guys. The ones without faces like mine. I saw how she looked at them.”
The girl moaned again.
“You better be headin’ out, James. You better be headin’ out right away.”
“He’s gonna shoot me, Thomas. He’s gonna shoot me for sure.”
But Thomas wasn’t listening. He went over and tore off a piece of the soiled sheet on which the girl lay on the rusted springs that had once been a bed. He took the white rag and tied it to the cold steel barrel of the carbine and then he handed it back to James.
“I love you, James. I surely do.”
Thomas leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. The burned cheek. “I’m sorry for the way I am sometimes. But I do try to be a good brother, James. A true one.”
Thomas always did this whenever James wavered about doing a particularly dangerous job. A brotherly kiss and then kind words.
But he sent James out anyway, of course, and without hesitation at all.
Just the way that day, so long ago now yet so perfectly frozen in James’s mind, when Thomas had splashed the kerosene on him and then tossed the match.
Just the same way.
Chapter Sixteen
