Three days passed. Then a new factor changed the situation on Bill Williams Mountain from absurd to desperate. The supply party from Fort Buford did not arrive. Takins ran entirely out of salt beef and hardtack. Ammon Swing was reduced to swapping with the squaws for mescal, which tasted like molasses candy and brought on the bloat; but the commodity for which the Apaches were most greedy turned out to be castor oil, of which he had only two bottles in his medicine chest. He considered butchering Annie or Grover, but that would mean one less mule to send down to Cox’s Tanks for water.
Water! He could not wait on that. But to obtain it, and food as well, would short him by two men. If an attack were ever to come it would come when the station had only three defenders. Worse yet, it was his turn to go down the mountain day after next, his and Takins’s, and he wanted very much to go to Cox’s again. Why he wanted to so much he would not admit even to himself.
The next morning he traded the last drop of castor oil to the squaws for mescal. In the afternoon the water casks went dry.
At day-die Ammon Swing called Heintz to him and said he was sending him down for water and food with Takins. It was his own turn, but he should stay in case of attack.
The Dutchy puffed his cheeks with pleasure. “Goot. You be zorry.”
“Why?”
“I ask dis voman to vedding. I ask before, bud zhe zay no. Dis time zhe zay yez, I tink.”
One end of the iron rod of duty in the sergeant stuck in his crop. “Why?” he inquires again.
“I goot farmer. Zhe needs farmer to raunch. Alzo zhe iz nod much young. Nod many chanzes more vill zhe get. You change your mind, Zarge?”
“No,” says Ammon Swing.
As soon as Heintz and Takins and Annie and Grover had started down in the morning Sergeant Swing would have bet a month’s pay this was the day. Something in the pearl air told him. He ordered Mullin and Bobyne to stand guard near the heliostat and have hands on their weapons at all times. They would change off on the telescope. No man was to leave the sight of the other two.
The morning inched.
They had not had food for twenty-four hours nor water for eighteen. Nor would they until Heintz and Takins returned. The squaws did not come to visit nor the kids to play.
One message winked from Rucker Canyon and was shuttered on:
RELAY GENL MILES REQUESTS PLEASURE COL AND MRS. COTTON OFFICERS BALL HEADQUARTERS FT BOWIE 22 AUGUST
By noon they were so thirsty they spit dust and so hungry their bellies sang songs. It had never been so lonesome on Bill Williams Mountain.
Then they had visitors. The three squaws came waddling along the ledge, offspring after them, and surrounded a pile of brush not twenty yards off. In one hand they held long forked sticks and in the other small clubs. Mrs. Noseless started a fire. The soldiers had no notion what the Indians could be up to. When all was ready, the fire burned down to hot coals, the squaws and kids began to squeal and shout and poke into the brush pile. Curious, the soldiers came near.
What they soon saw was that the Apaches had discovered a large convention of field rats. Under the brush the animals cast up a mound of earth by burrowing numerous tunnels. When a stick was thrust into one end of the tunnel, the animal, seeking an escape route, would dart to the opening of another and hesitate for an instant, half in and half out to scan for his enemy. In that split second another Indian would pin the rat down with forked stick, pull it toward him, bash it over the head with his club, and with a shout of triumph eviscerate it with a stroke of the knife and pitch it into the fire. In a trice the hair was burned off, the carcass roasted to a turn, impaled on the stick and the juicy tidbit lifted to a hungry mouth. Starved and horrified, the soldiers were drawn to the banquet despite themselves. There seemed no end to the victuals or the fun.
A little girl ran laughing to Bobyne with a rat. The young man sniffed, tasted, and with a grin of surprise put down his rifle and commenced to feast. Mullin was next served. Then a squaw bore a plump offering to the sergeant. It was done exactly to his liking, medium rare. He could no longer resist. The taste was that of rodent, sort of like the woodchuck he had shot and cooked as a sprout. He had, however, to keep his eyes closed.
What opened them was the terrible silence immediately smashed by a scream.
For an instant as the food fell from his hands he was stricken with shock and fright. The kids vanished. A dying Mullin staggered toward him, screaming. An arrow transfixed his body, driven with such force into his back that it pierced him completely, feathers on one side, head and shaft on the other.
One squaw ran full speed toward the tents to plunder, holding high her grimy calico skirt.
Like deer, three Apache bucks leaped from their hiding place in the greasewood and sped toward him, letting arrows go from bows held at waist level.
Another squaw made for the heliograph and, giving the tripod a kick, toppled the instrument onto rock, shattering the mirror.
An arrow skewered through the fleshy part of Swing’s left leg. He cried out with pain and went down on one knee, reaching for his rifle.
Young Bobyne retrieved his and began to blaze away at the oncoming bucks when Mrs. Noseless seized him from behind in powerful arms and hurled him backward into the fire of hot coals as she might have barbecued a rat, kneeling on him and setting his hair afire and bashing in his skull with her club.
Shooting from one knee, Ammon Swing brought down one of the bucks at twenty yards and another point-blank. But it was too late to fire at the third, who swept a long knife upward from a hide boot.
He had only time to glimpse the contorted brown face and yellow eyeballs and hear the death yell as a bullet slammed life and wind out of the Apache and the buck fell heavily upon him. He lay wondering if he were dead, stupified by the fact that the bullet had not been his own.
Then the buck was dragged off him by Miss Martha Cox. She took the Indian’s knife, knelt, and slitting the trouser leg began to cut through the arrow shaft on either side of his thigh.
“Soldiers and wimmen,” she snorts.
“You shoot him?” he groans.
“Sure.”
He asked about Heintz and Takins. Dead, the both of them, she told him—ambushed on the way down. When they had not shown at the ranch, she rode up to find out why.
She had the arrow cut off close to the meat now and bound his leg with shirt cloth. As he sat up she said he would bleed a little; what was dangerous was the chance of infection, since the Apaches had as much fondness for dirty arrows as they did for dirty everything else. He was to ride her horse down as fast as he could manage. Her brother would have the tools to pull the shaft piece, and water for the wound.
Ammon Swing saw that she wore the best she owned, a long dress of gray taffeta and high-button shoes. When furbished, she was near to handsome.
“Heintz was intending to ask you to marry.”
“I figured it would be you coming down today,” says she. “So I got out my fancies. Ain’t had them on in ten year.”
“Oh?” says he. “Well, help me.”
With her arm round his waist he was hobbling toward her horse when he caught the flash from the Mogollon Station, to the south.
“Message.” He stopped. “I ain’t trained to read it, but it better be put down.”
“It better not,” says she, bossy.
But he made her fetch pencil and paper from a tent and wait while he transcribed the signals according to length, long and short. When the flashes ceased, he cast a glum look at his own shattered heliograph nearby.
“Ought to relay this,” says he. “It’s maybe important.”
“Mister Swing,” says she, “infection won’t wait. You army around up here much longer and you might have to make do without a leg.”
He did not even hear. He sat down on a boulder and tried to think how the Sam Hill to send the message on to Rucker Canyon. The piece of shaft twinged as though it were alive, the pain poisoning all the way to his toes. There was no oth
er mirror. There was neither pot nor pan bright enough to reflect sun. Miss Martha Cox kept after him about infection, but the more he knew she was right the more dutiful and mule-headed he became. He would not leave with chores undone. Such a stunt would do injustice to his dead. Suddenly he gave a finger snap.
“Making apology, ma’am, but what do you have on beyunder that dress?”
“Well I never!” says she, coloring up real ripe for a woman who had just put down a rifle after a killing.
“Would you please remove same?”
“Oh!” she cries.
The sergeant gave a tug at his buggy whip. “Govermint business, ma’am.”
With a female stamp of her foot she obeyed, hoisting the taffeta over her head. Above she wore a white corset cover laced with pink ribbon and below, a muslin petticoat so overstarched it was as stiff and glittering as galvanized tin, touching evidence that it had been a long time since she had made starch.
“We are in luck, ma’am,” says he. “We have a clear day and the whitest unspeakabout this side of Heaven, and I calculate they will see us.”
Being most gentlemanly, he escorted her near the lip of the ledge facing Rucker Canyon, took her dress and, reading from the paper, began to transmit the message by using her dress as a shutter, shading her with it, then sweeping it away for long and short periods corresponding to the code letters he had transcribed. And all the while poor Miss Martha Cox was forced to stand five thousand feet high in plain sight of half the military department of Arizona, being alternately covered and revealed, a living heliograph, flashing in the sun like an angel descended from above and blushing like a woman fallen forever into sin. When her ordeal and her glory were ended, and Rucker blinked on and off rapidly to signify receipt, she snatched her dress to herself. To his confusion, a tear splashed down one of her leathery cheeks while at the same time she drew up breathing brimstone.
“Ammon Swing,” cries she, “no man has ever in all my days set eyes on me in such a state! Either I put my brother on your evil trail or you harden your mind to marrying me this minute!”
“Already have,” says he.
Thoughtfully she pulled on the gray taffeta. “We better kiss on it,” says she.
“Folderol,” says he. But they did.
Then she helped him on her horse and together they went down Bill Williams Mountain.
So much for the petticoat, the three squaws, the rat roast, the sergeant, the other soldiers, and the old maid.
The signals reaching Rucker Canyon Station twelve miles off were less distinct than usual, but by means of the telescope and much cussing they could be deciphered and sent on:
RELAY COL AND MRS. COTTON ACCEPT WITH PLEASURE OFFICERS BALL BOWIE 22 AUGUST
So much for the message.
Bill Pronzini has worked in virtually every genre of popular fiction. Though he’s best known as the creator of the Nameless mystery novels, he has written several first-rate Westerns, as well as a half-dozen remarkable novels of dark suspense. This is not to slight his western stories at all, with novels such as Starvation Camp, Quincannon, and Firewind establishing him as a master of the Western. In addition to his novels, Pronzini is an especially gifted short-story writer, several of his pieces winning prestigious awards, including the Shamus.
Fear
Bill Pronzini
He sat with his back to the wall, waiting.
Shadows shrouded the big room, thinned by early daylight filtering in through the plate-glass front window. Beyond the glass he could see Boxelder’s empty main street, rain spattering the puddled mud that wagon wheels and horses’ hooves had churned into a quagmire. Wind rattled the chain-hung sign on the outer wall: R. J. CABLE, SADDLEMAKER.
Familiar shapes surrounded him in the gloom. Workbenches littered with scraps of leather, mallets, cutters, stamping tools. A few saddles, finished and unfinished—not half as many as there used to be. Wall racks hung with bridles and hackamores, saddlebags and other accessories. Once the tools and accomplishments of his trade had given him pleasure, comfort, a measure of peace. Not anymore. Even the good odors of new leather and beeswax and harness oil had soured in his nostrils.
It was cold in the shop; he hadn’t bothered to lay a fire when he had come in at dawn, after another sleepless night. But he took little notice of the chill. He had been cold for a long while now, the kind of gut-cold that no fire can ever thaw.
His hands, twisted together in his lap, were sweating.
He glanced over at the closed door to the storeroom. A seed company calendar was tacked to it—not that he needed a calendar to tell him what day this was. October 26, 1892. The day after Lee Tarbeaux was scheduled to be released from Deer Lodge Prison. The day Tarbeaux would return to Boxelder after eight long years.
The day Tarbeaux had vowed to end Reed Cable’s life.
His gaze lingered on the storeroom door a few seconds longer. The shot gun was back there—his father’s old double-barreled Remington that he’d brought from home yesterday—propped in a corner, waiting as he was. He thought about fetching it, setting it next to his stool. But there was no need yet. It was still early.
He scrubbed his damp palms on his Levi’s, then fumbled in a vest pocket for his turnip watch. He flipped the dustcover, held the dial up close to his eyes. Ten after seven.
How long before Tarbeaux came?
Noon at the earliest; there were a lot of miles between here and Deer Lodge. If he could work, it would make the time go by more quickly … but he couldn’t. His hands were too unsteady for leathercraft. It would be an effort to keep them steady enough to hold the shotgun when the time came.
A few more hours, he told himself. Just a few more hours. Then it’ll finally be over.
He sat watching the rainswept street. Waiting.
IT WAS A quarter past twelve when Lee Tarbeaux reached the outskirts of Boxelder. The town had grown substantially since he’d been away—even more than he’d expected. There were more farms and small ranches in the area, too—parcels deeded off to homesteaders where once there had been nothing but rolling Montana grassland. Everything changes, sooner or later, he thought as he rode. Land, towns, and men, too. Some men.
He passed the cattle pens near the railroad depot, deserted now in the misty rain. He’d spent many a day there when he had worked for Old Man Kendall—and one day in particular that he’d never forget, because it had been the beginning of the end of his freedom for eight long years. Kendall was dead now; died in his sleep in ’89. Tarbeaux had been sorry to hear it, weeks after it had happened, on the prison grapevine. He’d held no hard feelings toward the old cowman or his son Bob. The Kendalls were no different from the rest of the people here; they’d believed Cable’s lies and that there was a streak of larceny in Tarbeaux’s kid-wildness. You couldn’t blame them for feeling betrayed. Only one man to blame and that was Reed Cable.
Tarbeaux rode slowly, savoring the chill October air with its foretaste of winter snow. The weather didn’t bother him and it didn’t seem to bother the spavined blue roan he’d bought cheap from a hostler in the town of Deer Lodge—something of a surprise, given the animal’s age and condition. Just went to show that you couldn’t always be sure about anybody or anything, good or bad. Except Reed Cable. Tarbeaux was sure Cable was the same man he’d been eight years ago. Bits and pieces of information that had filtered through the prison walls added weight to his certainty.
Some of the buildings flanking Montana Street were familiar: the Boxelder Hotel, the sprawling bulk of Steinmetz Brewery. Many others were not. It gave him an odd, uncomfortable feeling to know this town and yet not know it—to be home and yet to understand that it could never be home again. He wouldn’t stay long. Not even the night. And once he left, he’d never come back. Boxelder, like Deer Lodge, like all his foolish kid plans, were part of a past he had to bury completely if he was to have any kind of future.
A chain-hung shingle, dancing in the wind, appeared in the gray mist ahead: R. J. CABLE
, SADDLEMAKER. The plate-glass window below the sign showed a rectangle of lamplight, even though there was a “closed” sign in one corner. Tarbeaux barely glanced at the window as he passed, with no effort to see through the water-pocked glass. There was plenty of time. Patience was just one of the things his stay in the penitentiary had taught him. Besides, he was hungry. It had been hours since his meager trailside breakfast.
He tied the roan to a hitch rail in front of an eatery called the Elite Cafe. It was one of the new places; no one there knew or recognized him. He ordered hot coffee and a bowl of chili. And as he ate, he thought about the things that drive a man, that shape and change him for better or worse. Greed was one. Hate was another. He knew all about hate; he’d lived with it a long time. But it wasn’t the worst of the ones that ate the guts right out of a man.
The worst was fear.
WHEN CABLE SAW the lone, slicker-clad figure ride by outside, he knew it was Lee Tarbeaux. Even without a clear look at the man’s face, shielded by the tilt of a rain hat, he knew. He felt a taut relief. It wouldn’t be much longer now.
He extended a hand to the shotgun propped beside his stool. He’d brought it out of the storeroom two hours ago, placed it within easy reach. The sick feeling inside him grew and spread as he rested the weapon across his knees. His damp palms made the metal surfaces feel greasy. He kept his hands on it just the same.
His thoughts drifted as he sat there, went back again, as they so often did these days, to the spring of ’84. Twenty years old that spring, him and Lee Tarbeaux both. Friendly enough because they’d grown up together, both of them town kids, but not close friends. Too little in common. Too much spirit in Tarbeaux and not enough spirit in him. Lee went places and did things he was too timid to join in on.
When Tarbeaux turned eighteen he’d gone to work as a hand on Old Man Kendall’s K-Bar Ranch. He’d always had a reckless streak and it had widened out over the following two years, thanks to a similar streak in Old Man Kendall’s son Bob. Drinking, whoring, a few saloon fights. No serious trouble with the law, but enough trouble to make the law aware of Lee Tarbeaux.
A Century of Great Western Stories Page 21
