Blood on the Moon

by Luke Short

They washed up at the bench outside the door, breaking a thin film of ice on the water in the bucket. The cold shocked Jim awake, and he found that he was wolf-hungry. A light in the cookshack told Jim breakfast was not far off. He rolled his blankets and then he and Elser headed across for the veranda in the darkness. Against one corner of the porch were stacked Jim’s pack and grub that had been made up for him last night. There was a lamp lighted in the house kitchen, and Jim knew it would be Amy. She had promised last night after the talk with Lufton to see him off in the morning.

  He and Elser picked up the gear and headed for the barn. Elser got a lantern and hung it on the corral pole, and the three horses inside, their breaths steaming in the cold morning air and their eyes bright and dark, whickered softly. There was a paper-thin sheet of ice on the watering trough, too, Jim noticed, and it reminded him again that it was the passage of time he was bucking now.

  His own bay, Elser’s horse and a short-legged sorrel mare that was Jim’s pack horse were the only horses in the corral; Jim’s two had been kept in and grained last night while the other horses were turned out to pasture.

  Jim saddled his gelding and then helped Elser put the pack on the sorrel. Elser’s presence here told Jim that he had been accepted provisionally by the Blockhouse crew. In his quiet and unsmiling way Elser was letting him know that if the boss had passed him he was home. Jim found himself beginning to like Elser; he liked the way he worked with horses and the thorough, methodical way he distributed the pack and secured the diamond hitch and afterward tested it. He was unhurried and mild-spoken, without a trace of the stubborn fight he had shown Jim yesterday.

  They led the horses out of the corral and tied them to the hitch rack at the corner of the bunkhouse and went into the cookshack.

  The long table looked even longer with all the places set and empty. The Chinese cook brought them their breakfast, and the two of them ate in silence. Jim was ravenous; he had not really eaten in thirty-six hours, and it might be another thirty-six before he ate again.

  Finished, he rolled a smoke and went back over the plans to discover what he’d missed. Last night Lufton, Amy, Carol and Cap Willis had planned this with him, plotting each move with care. None had pretended it would be easy to hide a man for weeks in this country. When the discovery was finally made Jim could count on their searching for him. The odds were heavily against him, for the men who would hunt him knew every canyon and ridge of the Three Braves, and he did not. It was this ignorance that Cap Willis had tried to dispel last night. Alternate hide-outs were chosen and directions to them given, and then Cap had explained the rough geography of the range. It was this last that Jim had listened to most carefully, for he knew that when his luck played out this would be all important. His luck, he knew, would be short, for he had not forgotten Carol Lufton’s note that night in Sun Dust. If she had betrayed her father once to Riling she would betray his plans again—and Jim with them.

  The sound of footsteps outside the cookshack made him turn his head, and then Amy and Carol entered.

  Carol was dressed in her riding habit. Amy was wearing a dark blue belted wrapper and slippers, and her pale hair was gathered at her neck in a knot. Carol gave him an indifferent good morning and went around the table to Elser.

  Amy came up and said, “With this start, Jim, you’ll be over the pass before dark.”

  Jim nodded, but he didn’t hear her. Instead he heard Carol say, “Ted, I think I’ll ride this morning. Will you get me Monte?” She’d paused and said, “I’ll ride alone, too, please.” It had been spoken in a low voice intended only for Elser, but Jim heard. Elser nodded and went out, and Carol wandered into the kitchen.

  Jim went outside with Amy. It was still hours till daylight, and the blackness seemed more profound than before, the silence deeper. His horses moved restlessly at the corner of the bunkhouse. Above their stirring he heard the faint sound of someone running behind the bunkhouse. That, he knew bleakly, would be Carol heading for the corral and then for Riling.

  He heard Amy say, “Jim, I’ve been talking to you.”

  Jim pulled himself up. “I was thinking about this,” Jim said.

  Amy turned to him in the cold dark. “Jim, tell me the truth. What are your chances of getting away with it?”

  “Good—with luck.”

  “Dad doesn’t think so.”

  “No, I don’t suppose he does,” Jim answered. “When you’re not a young man any more you quit countin’ on luck. He’s quit.”

  Amy shivered. “I wish it wasn’t like this, Jim. I wish you weren’t going to do it.”

  “Do you?” Jim murmured.

  “Not really,” Amy said quickly. “Only, you’re so alone. We can’t help you—nobody can.”

  “I don’t need help,” Jim said quietly.

  Amy murmured, “No, I don’t think you do, Jim. You want to do it yourself, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you will. I know you will.”

  “There’s something I want to say to you,” Jim said stiffly. “Last night there at the river, I was pretty rough. I was trying to drive you home, Amy. If it hadn’t been for that I’d never have done it.”

  Amy was silent a long while and then she said, “I see.” There was something in the way she spoke, a kind of aloofness and a faint disappointment, that puzzled Jim.

  Then she put out her hand and said, “Good luck, Jim. Come back.”

  He took her hand. It was slim and warm and firm, and then it slipped out of his hand, and she was gone into the night. Jim had a brief, baffled moment of knowing that something was wrong. “Come back,” she’d said. He put that away from his mind and turned toward his horses.

  Once there, he did not mount. He stood there in the dark, turning over in his mind what he had to do.

  Then he stepped into his saddle, left the pack horse and cut back toward the corral.

  He dismounted by the lantern and went into the corral. Carol was at the pasture gate, holding it open. Jim could hear the distant rumble of the horseherd approaching, could hear Elser’s sharp, hazing whistle.

  Jim went on through the corral, and as Carol watched him approach her face grew tense. Once at the gate, Jim gently disengaged her hand from the bar and swung the gate shut. The horses were so close now that he didn’t speak but waited there. The lead horses saw the gate closed and swung off to the right, the others following. Elser’s whistle stopped suddenly, and he rode up to Jim and Carol.

  The light from the far lantern barely lighted Carol’s face. Jim’s was shadowed by his Stetson, and Elser looked from one to the other, puzzled.

  “Anything wrong?” he asked.

  Carol tried to speak imperiously. “I don’t know, Ted. He pulled the gate out of my hands and shut it.”

  They both looked at Jim now. He said quietly, “She doesn’t ride today or for the next two days, Elser. Don’t give her a horse.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ask her,” Jim said briefly.

  Both men looked at Carol, waiting for her to speak. Jim wasn’t going to say that by keeping Carol home today he was insuring himself against Riling and his crew overtaking him before his job was done. He was going to let Carol do any talking that was done.

  A blazing anger mounted in Carol’s eyes now. She came over to Jim, facing him. “I don’t think you’re hired by Blockhouse, are you?”

  “No.”

  “So you haven’t even a puncher’s authority around here?”

  “No.”

  Carol’s anger lashed out at him. “How dare you tell me if I can ride or not. Get away from that gate!”

  “No.”

  She lashed out at Jim, slapping him across the face with the palm of her hand. Jim didn’t move, didn’t speak. Elser was held motionless by the scene.

  “Will you get away from that gate?” Carol raged.

  Jim said softly, “No. I could tell you why I won’t, but maybe you wouldn’t want to hear it.”

  Carol stared at
him. The anger slowly washed out of her face, and in its place was alarm, and behind that, fear. She said uncertainly, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You know,” Jim said quietly.

  She held his gaze for seconds, then wheeled and ran off into the darkness toward the house.

  Elser watched her go, and then his sober glance shuttled to Jim. “So you know too.”

  Jim’s head came up. Slowly he tramped over to Elser. “How did you know?”

  “I followed her to Riling’s.”

  Jim’s voice held a hint of anger as he asked, “Then why do you let her ride?”

  “If a man’s own daughter isn’t loyal, I’m no man to tell him so,” Elser said quietly.

  Jim fought down his impulse to anger, but there was a bitter soberness in his speech as he said, “I don’t give a damn who you tell, Elser. But you keep her off a horse for three days or I’ll have a bullet in my back before sundown.”

  “All right.”

  “I mean that,” Jim said harshly. “I’ll take my chances with a man, but with a sweet redheaded beauty cutting my throat, I’ve got to know.”

  “Careful what you name her,” Elser said quickly, quietly. Plain warning was in his voice.

  Jim’s eyes narrowed and he murmured, “So that’s the way it is?”

  “That’s the way it is,” Elser replied. “Any comments?”

  Jim smiled faintly. “None I haven’t made already—and none I didn’t mean.”

  Elser nodded. “She won’t ride for three days. That’s a promise.”

  Jim believed him. He went back to his horse, picked up the pack horse at the bunkhouse and rode out into the dark morning toward the Three Braves.

  A fair wagon road from Sun Dust to the agency cut across the upper part of Massacre Basin and slanted a little south for the pass in the Three Braves. Jim picked it up sometime after daylight. The dawn broke cold with a low scud of clouds blotting out the peaks, and Jim knew snow was not far off. It gave an urgency to his business and made him quietly impatient. By noon he was in the steep canyons below the pass, and a fine snow was sifting down and disappearing immediately.

  Soon after midday Jim left the road and cut up a small canyon whose slopes of red rock were stained purple in places with the snow water. He left the road where he forded the canyon’s stream and he kept to the stream for a mile or so, his eyes watching for a likely place. He found it soon, a pocket in the canyon slope where wind had eroded out a cave of sorts. Dismounting, he stowed the load from his pack horse in the shelter of this rock overhang, then turned and retraced his steps, leading the pack horse in the stream. His provisions were deposited now, and he could travel faster.

  Once on the road again, he drove the pack horse ahead of him as he had been doing, so that nobody but a sharp tracker following him could spot his cache by the absence of the pack horse’s tracks. Three miles beyond he circled the pack horse and drove him back down the road.

  He had planned last night to camp this side of the pass but he knew now that he couldn’t chance a deep snow in the night cutting him off from the other slope. He hunched down in the Mackinaw he had borrowed from Lufton and let the dismal afternoon thread on as he climbed. Before dark he came to the old snow, which was almost ice and had been rutted deeply with the broad tires of the wagons freighting to the agency. The steep slopes up to the peaks were blotted out by whirling snow, and a cold wind funneled down the canyon he was winding through. A scattering of aspen and an occasional pine interrupted the dismal gray of the landscape when the walls broke away for a high meadow.

  He remembered the last time he had crossed these mountains, avoiding the pass and skulking into the country like something hunted. When the time came for him to leave he might go out the same way, but it would be with the satisfaction that he had made up for many things in the past.

  Darkness came on him in the pass, and with it a steady-flowing, bitter wind from the west. Presently the trees grew denser, and he knew he was over the pass and on the other slope of a country that was new to him.

  He camped late that night in the pines, grained his horse and threw his blankets under the wide spread of a tall spruce that the wet snow had not reached.

  His supper eaten, he wrapped a blanket around him and sat cross legged before the fire, again returning to his plans. His lean face held a kind of sober peace; occasionally a faint smile would light his eyes and shape his face anew, and he would rise then and poke the fire and sometimes lose himself in contemplation of it.

  The snow would make a difference, depending on how much of it there was, he knew. A heavy snow would shut him off from the other slope and drive him down out of the high country to avoid leaving a wide-open trail. He wanted badly to make it back to the other slope, the Massacre slope. Besides having his food cached there, he felt more familiar with it. There was another important reason too. On that slope there would be few Indians. On this, once the alarm was raised, the Indians would be on his trail, not for the judgment they would place on his crime but for the sheer fun of finding him. Beyond this he couldn’t plan, and he turned in his blankets and was asleep before his fire was coals.

  He was traveling before sunrise again next morning. The clouds had lifted from the peaks, revealing them in their new white, but the sky was still overcast. It was a raw day, and Jim knew this wasn’t the end of the snow and he hurried. In midmorning, slanting into the lower country, he saw his first Ute lodge. A little later he met a Ute buck on the road, his squaw riding some fifteen paces behind him. The Ute hailed him and talked with great dignity for some moments and then asked him for tobacco. Jim left him his sack and rode on, considering the gift a form of toll.

  The country, still high, leveled off into a piñon plateau now, and Jim rode it through the long morning and into the afternoon. He saw many meat camps with their drying racks and their poles and an occasional lodge, and once a band of horses crossed the road ahead of him, their tails leveled out and heads high. An Indian boy who was so small he had probably needed a stump to mount his horse was chasing them, lying flat on his horse’s neck and riding bareback. At sight of Jim he pulled his horse into the trees and vanished.

  In late afternoon the country shelved off in a broad, bare valley bisected by a sizable stream, and here lay the agency.

  It sprawled on a grassy shoulder of land free of trees and bare as a stone save for the ragged willows fringing the stream.

  The wagon road formed the only street, and in tumultuous disarray on either side of it were the skin-and-canvas lodges of the Utes. A hundred dogs skulked about the camp, which was littered as far as the eye reached with the bleached bones of game and beef. Wide-eyed children dressed in a mixture of ill-fitting store clothes and buckskin watched Jim’s entry and did not greet him. Campfires burned in front of most of the tepees, the smoke riding the heavy air barely above the camp. Sprinkled through this army of lodges was an occasional log cabin, ill constructed, roofed with brush or sod, windowless and doorless and its yard littered with refuse. Pole corrals lay among the lodges, and off to the west beyond the camp were log storehouses and a bigger corral where the beef issues took place.

  At the far end of the camp, on the brow of the hill, was a long log building comprising the store and quarters of a white trader. Beyond it, close to the far slope of the valley, was the stone house of the agency and office. A picket fence, badly needing paint and repair, enclosed the yard where a garden had died without anybody’s caring or noticing. The barns and corrals were separated from it by an orchard of new trees which Jim guessed the former agent had planted.

  He tied his horse at the hitch rail by the gate and went up to the house. It was L shaped, the front angle comprising the office, on whose door was painted the legend “Agent.”

  Jim knocked and, waiting for an answer, looked around the yard. It was as littered as the Indian camp below. The last wind had wedged an open newspaper against the fence, where it was aging unheeded into a rich brown. Bottles, Jim not
ed dryly, comprised most of the litter.

  “Come in, come in!” A voice shouted impatiently from inside.

  Jim palmed the knob and stepped inside. The office was gloomy in the fading afternoon light, and he could see nobody at the moment. Then he spotted Pindalest standing in the doorway that let onto the living quarters of the house.

  The agent was in shirt sleeves, his galluses trailing down behind him, his sparse hair mussed, his boots off. He stared stupidly at Jim for a moment, small mouth pursed in sleepy truculence.

  Then recognition came, and he said, “Why, hello, Garry. Jim Garry, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. How are you, Mr. Pindalest?” Jim asked affably.

  Pindalest shuffled over, and they shook hands.

  “Sit down, man, sit down,” Pindalest invited. “Been riding all day and was just having a nap. Here, fire up the stove. It’s cold in here. I’ll be back in a minute.” He started back for the other room and said over his shoulder, “Might light the lamp too.”

  Jim went about these simple chores carefully, rehearsing what was to come. He was in luck that Pindalest recognized him, for what he was about to say would carry more weight now. He threw a chunk of wood in the Franklin stove and raised the draft, though to him it was hot in here now. He lighted the lamp and looked around him. Pindalest’s roll-top desk in the corner was littered with papers. The spittoon needed cleaning, and the whole room a thorough sweeping. It had an air of shiftless disinterest about it that semed to go with petty officialdom, Jim thought.

  His judgment of Pindalest at Sun Dust had been accurate enough, even without Riling’s contemptuous dismissal of him, but he had no intention of underestimating his man. When Pindalest came in carrying a tray with a pitcher of water, two glasses and a bottle of whisky on it Jim was sitting patiently, almost broodingly, hands folded, like any puncher on an errand to his superiors.

  “Here, pour your own,” Pindalest said. “Make mine light, very light.”

  Jim poured the drinks, and Pindalest sank into the swivel chair by his desk. It creaked ominously under his soft bulk, and he tilted it back against the wall.