Ilsa’s strong arms swung the pot of hot beans fast, lashing the steaming contents deep into Leroy’s lap and across Mitch’s face. Both men shouted, screamed, swung their fists out towards her but she was too fast for either of them.
At the same time that Ilsa had been serving the beans, the rosy-cheeked and blushing Irma had brought the frying pan up fast into the breed’s hungry face. Burning hot fat bit into his eyes, blinding him as he flailed both arms and screamed. The edge of the pan followed through and cut deep into the side of his mouth, fetching blood.
Herne had dived sideways as soon as he saw Mary Anne Marie’s hand start to emerge from the folds of her skirt. He ducked his head low and threw up his arms, going into a quick rolling motion that brought him close to his boots, his right hand already snatching at the hilt of the bayonet in its interior sheath.
The Apache was up into a crouch, the rifle at his shoulder.
Herne drew the bayonet and arched himself backwards, arm high over his head.
The rifle swung round, seeking him out.
Herne hurled himself forwards, seeking to flatten himself on the ground; his right arm whipped over fast and his fingers opened; the heavy bayonet sped through the air and the blade struck the Apache immediately below the Adam’s apple. The rifle jerked upwards from his hands and a bullet fired harmlessly at the lightening sky. The Apache thudded hard against the ground, both hands grasping the end of the bayonet blade and struggling to pull it from his throat while blood welled around it. Three or four inches were buried inside him and air choked and hissed and burbled with the pink, threshing blood.
The Apache’s feet kicked high into the air and his legs danced.
Herne pushed himself up with both hands and turned fast.
Mary Anne Marie levered the catch on the derringer with the thumb of her right hand and used the forefinger and thumb of the left to turn the barrels over. She held out both arms at full stretch in front of her, pointing down at the writhing figure of Juan Miguel Jesus Almazan.
Ilsa let Leroy have the rest of the beans in his eyes and swung the heavy-bottomed pot sideways so that it caught Mitch on the corner of the chin. He yelled and kicked out and she hooked one of her large feet beneath his ankle and yanked backwards. Mitch landed on his back with a groan and she hurled the pot at his face before she turned and ran.
Irma was standing with her legs spread wide enough to straddle the half-breed Mexican, ladling the underside of the broad frying pan down onto his face and head again and again and again.
Herne was on his hands and knees staring at the man who’d taken his gun. Only now the Colt wasn’t pushed down into his belt; now it was tight in his hand and the hammer was being cocked back. The man was steadying himself against the cedar, squinting along the barrel.
Herne levered his body forward fast and rushed him.
As he did so, Stephanie let fly with the rifle she’d taken from the wagon. She was aiming at the breed and she didn’t allow for the gun’s recoil. The slug went several feet above the man’s head and ricocheted off the trunk of the tree with a high-pitched whine.
It didn’t hit him but it was enough to still his finger, enough to make him turn his head.
Herne crashed into him, driving him backwards and forcing the wind from his body. As the breed cannoned back from the tree he swung the Colt down towards Herne’s head. At the last moment Herne ducked his head away and the barrel hammered hard against the top of his left shoulder, making his arm suddenly numb. The pistol went up for a second blow and Herne drove his right fist, short and hard, under the man’s heart. He lurched back, mouth open, eyes glazed. The Colt was up above his head. Herne punched him twice – one time in the belly and again around the heart. He caught the Colt as it fell from between the man’s fingers.
‘Look out!’
He heard the girl’s scream and swung low and fast to his left. Somehow Leroy had struggled clear enough to get his own gun in his hand and was facing Herne in a crouch. Herne fired as he was still turning, fired again as he stilled, again a split second later.
The first shot had torn at the sleeve of Leroy’s left arm and plucked it outwards without even scratching his skin.
The second had ripped through the soft flesh between his right arm and chest, immediately below the bone.
The third had splintered his breastbone into tiny fragments and driven them across into his heart, down into his liver, they had pierced several arteries and at least one major vein.
Leroy was kicked away by that last bullet and he hopped half a dozen yards before cracking the back of his head against one of the trees and pitching forward, mouth open.
No blood showed at the mouth; just a little trickled from the ears and nose; a fraction more discolored the front of his shirt; more still darkened the back. To see him bent forward at the base of that tree would not be to see a man who was inches from death.
Most of Leroy’s bleeding was internal.
As soon as the impact of the last slug made itself felt and the minute and sharp particles of bone did their work, massive hemorrhaging had occurred. The inside of his upper body, the chest cavity and the stomach were flooded with blood.
Leroy’s fingers scratched at the earth on which he slumped, scratching like a dog anxious to bury his own bones.
Herne clicked back the hammer on the Colt and straightened up. Looked around. Stephanie had hurried after her abortive attempt to shoot the breed to where Christiane was laying under her blanket, her hands close to her mouth in excitement and fear. The blonde girl stood behind her, the rifle stretched out to offer her protection.
Irma had ceased hammering the other half-breed’s head with the frying pan for the sole reason that he was now very bloody and unconscious.
Mitch staggered to his feet, wiping the mess of beans and thick sauce from his face. He saw Ilsa and immediately started for her with his hands raised: that was when he noticed Herne with the gun. He stopped in his tracks and slowly let his arms slide back down to his sides. Ilsa smiled with something close to triumph.
Mary Anne Marie got up from checking the pulse at the side of Almazan’s neck. There was no movement, no beat whatsoever. One side of his face was creased in a grim smile, the other seemed remarkably calm and peaceful save for the slight splashing of blood that stained his drooping moustache.
Herne heard the man back of him beginning to move again.
Without looking round he swung his arm and heard the barrel of the Colt connect with the breed’s temple. Then the shout and clumsy fall.
He went down to Mary Anne Marie and handed her the Colt.
‘Watch him,’ he said, nodding towards Mitch.
Herne went up onto the higher ground and set one foot across the top of the Apache’s chest, gripping both hands about the haft of the bayonet and pulling it from his throat. It came free with difficulty, with a loud slow sucking sound.
Herne wiped the long blade clean on the soiled white pants of the dead Indian and retrieved his pistol.
Taking it back his hand touched that of the woman for an instant.
‘You were good,’ he said, shaking his head in something close to wonder. ‘You were damned good!’
Mary Anne Marie looked back at him straight-faced. ‘You sound surprised.’
~*~
They held guns on Mitch and the two breeds while the three of them dug graves for their former comrades -not that they’d really been that. When Almazan and the other two were buried, they stripped the survivors of their gun belts, boots and saddles. They left them three mounts to ride bare-backed and tied the three surplus horses on behind the rear wagon.
Herne stood and listened while Mary Anne Marie told them exactly what would happen to them if they harbored any thoughts of revenge for what had gone down. Not one of them looked as if he had the stomach for facing up to that particular bunch of women again – not even armed with a Gatling gun.
When they were well out of sight and hearing, Herne climbed into th
e saddle and Mary Anne Marie raised her whip.
‘Ready?’ he called.
She nodded and cracked the whip through the air.
Herne flicked his reins and touched his spurs to the animal’s flanks. ‘Move ’em out!’
Six
Ilsa’s family had immigrated to America when she was sixteen. Her younger brother and her uncle had been turned back at Ellis Island: the brother because of his obvious ill-health and the uncle because he had become separated from the rest of the family and unable to convince the authorities that he had either adequate means of support or promise of a job or friends who would take him in.
Ilsa spent nine months living in a basement on the Lower West Side of New York, sharing a bedroom with five others - her grandmother, mother, a sister and a cousin. By day she worked fourteen hours laundering and dying material for a clothing manufacturer. By night, fitfully, she slept, exhausted.
Like many others she read the railroad company advertisements about the joys of traveling West to make a new life, a new start. She talked to her friends, the girls she worked with; more than ever she scrimped and saved. She began working as a dishwasher in a neighborhood restaurant on her one day off. Eventually she had sufficient money to buy a ticket as far as Minnesota. On the day that she was going to the station, both her cousin and a girl from her workplace told her they were not making the journey.
Ilsa traveled alone.
The cars were crowded and uncomfortable and sleep more or less impossible. She could not afford to buy food when they stopped and kept herself going on water and the small amount she had brought with her. Her pride stopped her accepting the charity of others who clearly had little more than herself.
At Minneapolis she left the train, bundled her few possessions onto her back, wrapped her feet in rags and set out to walk the two hundred miles across the state to Lake Shakotan. It was already late in the fall.
Winds cut across the Great Plains and into her face: day after long empty day. Everything around her seemed to reach for an eternity: the same horizon from dawn till dusk. Home in Sweden there had always been mountains capped with snow, deep ravines that cut through the slabs of glistening, black rock – sudden fields that took your breath away with their color. Here there was only the sun to suggest time or distance and after a while not even that. The sky was coated with lead and the cold bit deeper.
Twice Ilsa made vast detours towards distant lights, desperate enough now to beg for food. The first time they set the dogs on her and the second she could find no source of light at all.
She struggled back towards the road, arms swaddled about her chest and fearing for her sanity.
At a place called Sacred Heart a priest gave her food and fresh milk and told her to sleep in the barn and she did so for close on thirty hours without waking. He tried to persuade her to winter with the mission and set off again with the thaw. Ilsa thanked him but refused; she wanted to reach her relatives at Lake Shakotan before Christmas. She had set her heart upon it. As a way of paying the priest for what he had given her, she worked for a week, washing and scrubbing and cooking, before beginning her journey again.
Almost as soon as she had left Sacred Heart the snow began. It sped into her eyes with a knife-edge wind at back of it and Ilsa came so close to turning back that she fell to her knees and wept. Before she stood up again, her body was shrouded in white. She stumbled on for what seemed like days and finally collapsed and tried to crawl for shelter. But there was no shelter.
She made a sign of the cross with her numbing fingers, made an act of contrition, prayed for her soul and allowed the snow to press her eyelids closed.
The couple who prised her out of the snow were on their way to Minneapolis to stay with friends; there was work for them there in the city and they had tried for three years to make a go of life in a sod house farm with three hundred and sixty acres of land. What little they had left was piled on their wagon.
They rubbed at Ilsa’s limbs and gave her brandy to sip, hardtack and dried meat to eat. It was impossible to build a fire. Her chilblains stung and her raw feet bled like porous rags. She was fading in and out of consciousness.
The couple tried to insist that she stay with them, resting inside the wagon, but Ilsa would not give up her quest. To return to Minneapolis, to negate that long journey, that would have killed her. As it was she had some semblance of life remaining. She would go on.
The snow eased after eight days and she was wandering as though some unseen maze had trapped her out in the middle of that vast land. She didn’t even see George Sealey or his two mules until she came close to stumbling into them. Sealey was heading in the same direction, bound to join a partner in a mining venture that would take them through South Dakota and Nebraska to Colorado.
Sealey’s parents had come over on the boat from Southampton when he was thirteen and that had been twelve years since. Now his mother lay buried in a cemetery in Washington and he had as little idea where his father might be as when the sun would next shine. He was handsome in a military sort of way and Ilsa couldn’t help but wonder if he had been in the army and if so why he had left. She was too nervous of him to ask.
But Sealey allowed her to ride on his pack mule, he gave her a blanket to sleep under and made her share what food he carried with him or was able to shoot with his rifle. At night, before they fell asleep, he would get her to tell him of her life in Sweden and would listen, fascinated, until his eyes trembled shut and she knew she could stop.
It was, he said, all the payment he wanted for his kindness.
That was not true. On their last night on the trail together – camped close to the south bank of the Yellow Medicine River, he got inside her blanket. Ilsa didn’t protest, she didn’t struggle – save at the last moments and by then it was too late. Partly she was motivated by a sense of debt, partly simple and genuine curiosity.
After the first sharp pain it did nothing to her. She was amused by his language, his hectic breathing, his obvious lack of control. She washed herself carefully, thoroughly, and slept as if nothing particular had taken place.
The next day, Sealey was taken with shame and could hardly bring himself to look at her. Their farewells were hasty and embarrassed. Ilsa wanted him to believe the extent of her gratitude but sensed that he did not.
She trudged the remaining miles to the small settlement north of the lake and asked for her relatives and was told that they had moved away when their summer crop had been attacked by grasshoppers and almost totally destroyed.
Some said they had gone back east, others that they had joined a wagon train heading across the Sierras to California; still another insisted that they had decided to try another farm, this time in Kansas.
Ilsa had nothing but what she stood up in and that was falling to pieces; she had no idea where to go. There was nowhere to go. She found an old sod and log shack that had been deserted when the grasshoppers struck and cleaned it out as best she could. From somewhere she found an old trough that would serve as a bath. She worked in the little store and saloon for just as long as it took to earn a washboard and several evil-smelling slabs of soap. She took in laundry from every soddie and farm and shack in the area, riding out on a borrowed mule to collect and deliver over huge distances.
When she had enough money saved, she moved across the state line into South Dakota and opened a laundry in Sioux Falls. After a year she left that in charge of the woman she’d taken on to work for her and moved south to Omaha where she opened a second laundry.
She had two good years and then some half-crazed drunk set fire to the block and her laundry went up in flames. All of the money that she’d saved went with it – Ilsa had never brought herself to belief in banks. She turned her back on Omaha and went back to Sioux Falls to discover that the woman there had sold the laundry a month before to a Chinese family and run off with the money.
Ilsa felt like screaming or crying or just laying down in the middle of the street and jamming h
er hands over her ears and eyes. That feeling persisted for maybe fifteen minutes. After that she got herself together and went to the hotel and bought herself several glasses of brandy. She had soon learned in Sioux Falls and Omaha that there were alternative ways of making a living and some of them seemed far less arduous. A fourth brandy and she was on her way to the two-story building just beyond the stage depot where there were lace curtains in the windows and a red lamp burning over the front door all through the night.
Seven
‘How long d’you figure stayin’ over in Banning?’
Herne and Mary Anne Marie were sitting up in the lead wagon, Stephanie stretched out inside catching some sleep. The run-in with Almazan and his bunch of border rats had left all of the women on edge and tired, no matter how well they had coped at the time.
Mary Anne Marie nodded backwards. ‘Wouldn’t hurt to pass a little time, I guess. We been travelin’ pretty well up to now.’
‘Early days yet.’
‘I know that.’
Herne shrugged and sucked in his right cheek. ‘Guess it wouldn’t hurt the horses none.’
‘I wasn’t thinkin’ of the horses,’ she snapped back.
Herne gestured with both hands. ‘I know that.’
‘Then we’ll spend a couple of days?’
‘Make it a day an’ two nights.’
‘That’ll be handy,’ Mary Anne Marie smiled.
It took several moments for Herne to take in her meaning. ‘Listen! You ain’t reckonin’ on—’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because it weren’t no part of our deal.’
‘Exactly!’
‘Meanin’ what?’
‘Exactly what you just said, it weren’t no part of our deal. It ain’t nothin’ to do with you. You get us there, Sacramento. That’s all there is to it. Whatever we get up to is our concern.’
‘Not when I’m travelin’ with you it ain’t.’
‘What’s suddenly so high and mighty ’bout you?’
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