by Clyde Barker
‘I don’t know that I’m the best man to consult on manners and such,’ said O’Shea with a laugh. ‘I ain’t moved in those circles where fancy behaviour was needed. But you’d best mind your sister, if nothing else.’
All three of them were dog-tired and they settled down to sleep as best they could, even before it was completely dark. Emily took quite a bit of settling and her sister fussed around her, trying to make the child as comfortable as could be in the circumstances. For his own part, O’Shea fell asleep almost at once and slumbered soundly until dawn, when he was awoken by a ferocious roaring sound, accompanied by frantic screaming.
Emily Covenay had had a restless night’s sleep, tossing and turning on the stony soil where she lay. When she finally drifted off at around midnight, it was to doze fitfully, her sleep disturbed by lurid and alarming nightmares in which she was chased through dark passages by unknown but terrifying creatures.
At first light she opened her eyes and was enchanted to see what appeared to be an animated toy snuffling around a few feet away from her head. It was something big and black and furry and Emily felt an overwhelming desire to throw her arms around whatever it was and cuddle it. She accordingly threw off the rough blanket which her sister had placed tenderly over her sleeping form and stood up. The furry creature did not seem at all nervous of her, but evinced what Emily took to be the desire to play. It gambolled around a little in front of her, then scuttled off a few yards and turned round to peer back at her, for all the world as though it wanted to say: ‘Come and catch me!’ Nothing loath, she scooted across to the little ball of fur and attempted to throw her arms around it.
Having lived the whole of her life on a farm, which she left only to visit a town, it was not to be expected that Emily Covenay would be familiar with the ways of black bears. She had from time to time glimpsed them from a distance, but had never been this close to one, let alone one like this, which was so playful. The cub was only three months old and, although it weighed a good thirty pounds, was very much still a baby.
Black bear cubs are especially vulnerable to predators and it is common for them to carried off by bobcats, wolves and mountain lions. For this reason, their mothers tend to be acutely sensitive to any perceived threat to the young and although black bears are in the usual way of things fairly timid and shy of humans, a mother with cubs can represent a great danger to those who are foolish enough to come to close.
So it was in this case, because as Emily Covenay chased the cub and it ran from her, an enormous female bear emerged from the mouth of the old mine and, after giving a tremendous roar, lumbered straight after what she believed to be a mortal hazard to her offspring.
Even first thing in the morning, as it was now, Rick O’Shea’s mind worked out matters relating to life and danger of death very quickly and efficiently. He saw that a gigantic bear was reared up on its hind legs, roaring and trying to get at something which was cowering behind an old wooden cart. Then he glimpsed a smaller shape, which he saw at once could only be a bear cub.
Everything fell into place at once and he knew that the most urgent priority was to get that bear away from its intended target. Already it was pushing its bulk against the wagon, heaving it aside to get at the terrified child wedged behind it. The obvious way to distract the bear from its prey was to offer it a new diversion for its wrath, so O’Shea jumped up and ran over to the cub, making roaring noises of his own as though he meant to eat up the little ball of black fur.
Rick O’Shea’s gambit worked better than he could possibly have hoped, for the she-bear instantly forgot whatever lay behind that old cart and turned its attention to a new threat to the cub. For a creature of such great bulk, it moved faster than you would think possible and began running towards O’Shea, with the evident intention of tearing him to pieces.
For short bursts, a black bear can run almost as fast as a racehorse and O’Shea had no time to plan anything. All he could hope to do was remain out of reach of those teeth and claws. He ducked behind a boulder, just in time to avoid a mighty swipe from a paw which was almost the size of his head. Then there sounded a crack. The bear let out another roar of anger and turned away from him. Jemima Covenay had snatched up the pistol that he had taken from Jackson after their little contretemps and she had fired at the bear, seemingly hitting it. The sight of that slim woman, dressed in boy’s clothes and with her hair cut short, standing there facing down a bear with the pistol in her hand, left a memory that stayed with Rick O’Shea for the rest of his life.
Infuriated by the pain of the ball, which it received in its side, the bear bounded across the clearing towards Jemima, who fired twice more before the beast skidded to a halt and collapsed only a dozen feet from the white-faced young woman. O’Shea hurried over to her.
‘I never saw the like in my life,’ he said. ‘There’s not one man in a thousand would’ve stood his ground like that, with the animal charging at you and all.’
‘It’s not the first bear I killed. Though the last occasion was with a rifle. I didn’t know if this pistol would answer or not.’
‘Yet you stood your ground still,’ said O’Shea, admiringly. ‘You never flinched.’
‘I have to tend to my sister. Excuse me.’
O’Shea quite expected young Emily to develop a fit of hysteria and he, for one, would not have blamed her in the slightest. Truth to tell, he felt a little shaken himself by the onslaught of the bear. But Emily, whatever shortcomings she might have mentally, showed the same tough resilience that he so admired in her big sister. She seemed quite stoical about the whole business when once her sister had explained that the mother bear was only looking out for her cub.
‘Like you look after me, you mean, ’Mima?’
‘Just so, darling. You know how cross I’d be if anybody hurt you? That’s all that mother bear was about. She didn’t know that you were just playing with her cub, see.’
‘Just a mistake, you mean?’
‘That’s right, just a mistake.’
O’Shea spoke up.
‘Tell me, how’d you know where to shoot the thing? I’ve heard tell of men emptying their guns at a bear and the thing still carrying on and mauling ’em.’
‘When you’re hunting big animals, you have to aim for the dead centre of their brain,’ the girl explained. ‘That’s what my pa taught me. Imagine a line running from ear to ear, and wherever you’re firing from, you have to aim for the mid-point on that line. So when that bear came for me, I knew I had to shoot right between its eyes if I was to kill it.’
‘You gave me to understand that you was no great shakes with pistols,’ remarked O’Shea. ‘That don’t square up with what I saw this day.’
‘I’m better with a rifle.’
After all the noise and shooting, Rick O’Shea deemed it wise for them to be leaving the vicinity sooner rather than later. The horses were looking a little droopy and could do with some water and feed. The three animals had remained surprisingly untroubled by the bear’s antics and the subsequent shooting.
‘One thing which is encouraging,’ O’Shea said to Jemima, out of earshot of her sister, ‘is that Yanez has either given up on hunting me down or he took the road through the Gap, as I hoped. Either way, he didn’t come upon us while we were sleeping and cut our throats, which is something to be thankful for, at any rate.’
‘Yes,’ said Jemima drily. ‘We must thank heaven for small mercies.’
By the time they were ready to move out the bear cub appeared to realize that its mother was no longer around to protect it. The little thing was nuzzling its mother’s lifeless body and making pitiful mewing noises, which put them in mind of a lost kitten.
‘It’s awful sad,’ Emily said. ‘Can we take the baby bear along of us?’
‘No,’ said O’Shea, in a voice which brooked no opposition, ‘we most certainly cannot.’
Chapter 8
They were all of them getting hungry by the time the sun was fairly up in the sk
y, although where they were likely to obtain food and drink between there and San Angelo was something of a mystery, at least to Rick O’Shea. As they picked their way over the ridge and down to the level ground on the other side of the Reds they chanced upon a sparkling mountain stream, which meant that the three travellers and their mounts were at least able to slake their thirst.
‘There looked from up there to be something in the way of a farm or smallholding over to our right,’ O’Shea said when they had all drunk their fill. ‘It might not take us far from our path were we to ride over and enquire if they’d be kind enough to sell us some bread or something.’
‘I’m hungry,’ said Emily, ‘real hungry. Can we go and get some food, ’Mima?’
‘If Mr O’Shea thinks it a good idea, then I don’t see why not.’
The three of them trotted in the general direction of the little house in the fields that O’Shea had spotted from the mountainside. It lay only a little way off the track that led to the Gap. As they neared the place the hairs on the back of Rick O’Shea’s neck had risen and were tickling him.
‘Rein in, the pair of you,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ asked Jemima, looking around to see if O’Shea had spotted something that she had missed.
‘I couldn’t rightly say,’ replied O’Shea slowly, ‘but something’s amiss. Take my word for it.’
They were only a half-mile or so from the neat little house, which looked as innocent and inviting a building as you could hope to find.
‘You two wait here,’ O’Shea said. ‘Don’t come on at all unless I give you the word to do so.’ Then he spurred on his mare, drawing the pistol from its holster and cocking it as he went.
When he’d reached the rail fence surrounding the farmhouse O’Shea called out in a loud voice:
‘Hallo, in there! Anybody at home?’ There was no reply. He noticed that the door was slightly ajar.
How he knew that there was death around, Rick O’Shea would have been quite unable to say. Perhaps he picked up subliminally on clues that his conscious mind did not notice and built up a picture in that way, or maybe it really was a sixth sense for danger: something quite inexplicable. Whatever it was, he knew before he’d even dismounted that he was about to see something unpleasant.
He was proved right when he kicked open the door of the little farmhouse and found a man and woman lying on the floor surrounded by more blood than O’Shea had ever seen in his life before. The two people, presumably the owners of this place, had both been slaughtered like hogs, by having their throats cut.
Although by no means a squeamish man, even O’Shea was slightly sickened by what he saw. In spite of this, his revulsion did not prevent him from making his way to the kitchen and seeing what vittles, if any, were to be found there. There was nothing to be done for those poor devils and his chief – indeed only – concern at that moment was getting that poor child safely back to her home.
There was a burlap sack lying in one corner of the kitchen, which O’Shea filled with all the eatables upon which he could lay his hands. There was bread, apples, cheese and a haunch of ham, together with a few oatcakes. Enough perhaps to keep three people going until sundown. Then, treading carefully around the corpses, around which a cloud of flies was buzzing, he left the house and saddled up.
Judging by the fact that the blood was only just congealing around the very edges of the pools, O’Shea figured that those people had died only a few hours earlier.
When he rode back to where the Covenay sisters were waiting for him patiently, O’Shea forced his face into a smile. This was enough to deceive Emily, but not her elder sister.
‘What’s to do?’ she asked.
‘I’ll tell you later. We need to get away from here as soon as might be.’
‘Which way? Straight for San Angelo?’
‘I don’t know and that’s the honest to God’s truth of it. Which side of town does your father’s spread lie on?’
‘You mean, do we come to it before reaching town?’ queried Jemima. ‘No, we live about four miles past the town from here. Why?’
‘Because I’m afeared that we’ve got somebody holding the road against us and I’m thinking on what’s best.’
Emily was talking quietly to her horse, so O’Shea walked his mount closer to Jemima and lowered his voice.
‘To speak plainly,’ he said, ‘there’s two dead people in that house yonder. One of them is a woman.’
‘You think it’s Yanez and his men?’
‘It’d be the hell of a coincidence were there to be two bands of murderous rogues on the loose in the district. No, I reckon it was him.’
In the end there didn’t seem to be any other choice than to head straight for San Angelo and then perhaps to skirt around the town, either to the east or to the west. Even that was a doubtful and debatable point. Would they be safer in the town itself? Yanez obviously knew where the Covenays lived. Might he not fetch up there and wait in ambush?
In the usual way of things O’Shea would have a pretty good idea of what to do: whether to fight or to cut and run, for example. Now, his hands were tied and it was not a pleasing state of affairs. He could not just ride off and leave these girls to fend for their own selves. He had to work out what was best for others besides himself.
They were all hungry, so they dismounted and had breakfast. O’Shea marvelled anew at the astonishing resilience shown by Emily Covenay. Her recent encounter with an angry bear, bent on killing her, did not appear to have dented her good spirits in the least, and she talked cheerfully while they ate. Jemima was a little more sober, wondering, like O’Shea, if they were likely to get back safely. When they had finished eating and had washed down the cheese and ham with draughts of water from the canteens, O’Shea spoke to Emily.
‘I hope you won’t take it amiss,’ he said, ‘if I have a private word with your sister, Emily. It’s just about our route, you understand.’
‘Don’t mind me. ’Mima, can I have some more cheese?’
‘Just a little, darling. You don’t want to make yourself sick, you know.’
The two adults walked a little distance from the child.
‘I reckon as we’re best heading to San Angelo, rather than going to your father’s place first,’ O’Shea said when they were out of earshot.
‘How so?’
‘Yanez is after killing me, that’s certain. I reckon as he’s likely given up hope of getting any reward. It’s just what the Italians call a vendetta now. You mind what I mean?’
‘I heard of such things,’ said Jemima. ‘But, without meaning to be rude, how does that affect me and my sister?’
‘Your sister knows a heap. Yanez, like as not, don’t know about her . . . infirmity. For all he knows to the contrary, she could testify – get him hanged – if he was caught the wrong side of the border one day. He’d sleep easier if she were dead. Then again, I wouldn’t want you and Emily to get caught up in any crossfire. There’s liable to be sparks flying when me and Yanez cross paths. I was thinking, what about that old priest – Father Flaherty, is it?’
‘You think Father Flaherty’d be some help to you in a shoot-out?’
Despite the grimness of their predicament, O’Shea smiled and so did Jemima.
‘You surely got grit, Jemima, to be joshing at such a time as this,’ he said. ‘No, I was wondering if we could leave Emily in his care? I don’t look for Yanez to start a gun battle on Main Street. We might ride into San Angelo, then I could leave you and your sister with the good father and let what will come, come.’
‘I’ll thank you not to talk of “leaving me” anywhere, like I was a parcel or a lost umbrella,’ said the young woman with some asperity. ‘I’ve a crow of my own to pluck with that bandit for what he’s done.’
‘No! Don’t even think of it. I’ll set to with Yanez if need be. You have no part of it.’
‘Well, let’s do as you say and take Emily to safety. We can talk more then.’
The journey to San Angelo was unremarkable, apart from both girls showing signs of being distinctly weary and uncomfortable after two days in the saddle. When the town hove into sight Emily let out an excited squeal.
‘Look, ’Mima, we’re nearly home!’ she cried.
It was early evening and they reined in on the slope above the town to finalize their plans. O’Shea had just drawn breath to set out his own views and opinions on what was to happen next when Jemima Covenay cut the ground from under his feet by announcing to her sister:
‘Listen Emily, before we go home you’re going to see Father Flaherty for a little while. You want to see his cats again, don’t you?’
‘Ooh yes. You think he’ll let me give them a saucer of milk again, like I did before one time?’
‘I’m sure of it. Me and Mr O’Shea have some business to tend to – just boring grown-up stuff. Is that all right?’
So enchanted was Emily at the thought that she might once more have the opportunity to offer milk to the priest’s cats that she was quite oblivious to anything else.
‘ ’Course it is, ’Mima. Just as you say,’ she said.
The older sister turned to O’Shea.
‘Well that’s settled, then,’ she said.
‘The devil it is!’ he replied, but Jemima had already started down towards the town with her sister.
As they drew near to the church it seemed to Rick O’Shea considerably more than four or five days must have passed since he had gone into that place and been tricked into this mad adventure by that crafty old priest. But, totting it up in his head, he realized that less than a week had gone by since he’d made that strange confession.
The interior of the church was just as he remembered it and there, fussing about near the altar, was Father Flaherty himself. His face lit up in a smile of sheer joy when he caught sight of Emily Covenay, who skipped down the nave and threw her arms around the priest in a fierce hug.
‘My sister said I can give your pussy cats a bowl of milk again, Father,’ she said. ‘Can I really?’
‘To be sure you can, my child. I’ve been praying for you and now here you are.’
