Not the first time a gun manufacturer argument has broken out between Melchior and Grip on the trail. Why don’t they discuss these matters while they ride, so the rest can choose their distance?
“If you feel as confident in your weapon choice as you claim,” Sam says, “you should not have anything to prove.”
“Just ’cause a man knows in his own mind what’s what doesn’t mean he hasn’t got to educate mudsills.”
Rosalía snorts. They look around.
“Sorry—not my concern.” She ducks her head after a quick glance at Melchior, looking like she’s trying to avoid laughter.
Melchior scowls from her to Grip, then lays down his precious revolver to buckle on chaps.
“I will bring in brush,” Ivy says, getting stiffly to her feet. Better to start doing something useful than risk being called to action on the critter. And she needs to pee. One more harrowing ordeal.
The sun is well up before two jackalope legs are speared over the small fire and more chunks of meat are being cut into the pot for a stew of jackalope, rice, and tomatoes.
Melchior and Rosalía attend to the cleaning of the animal and preparation of the meal while Sam and Ivy gather more and more brush and scrubby sticks to keep the fire going. Grip wanders among the horses and splits open the second bag of grain from the stable.
It takes an awfully long time to cook meat on a fire with their tiny Dutch oven devoted to stew preparations: wonderful odors rolling up, outside black, though the meat inside remains raw.
Yap-Rat paces about camp, licking his chops, until Melchior throws him one of the jackalope’s antlers and he retires to chew. Rosalía glances up at this, but says nothing. They all know Grip does not approve of handouts for the animal.
Ivy cannot stop looking toward the railhead while they wait. No strange smell up here, nothing but tobacco smoke, wood smoke, roast meat, sagebrush, horse, sweat. The place looks more approachable by light of day. Still, she shudders as she looks that way, even under sunlight.
The jackalope, when they finally eat it, is excellent. Nothing like Aunt Abigail’s jackalope stew, but a welcome and satisfying change from beans, chiles, and corn.
Melchior is so smug over the whole event that she hates to mention how good it is, though she cannot help smiling while she eats, warming with food and sun, as he recounts the story of waking at dawn to see the curious herd approaching camp. She remembers him refusing to go near the stable the night before, noticing the boarded windows, staying beside her and Luck. And he is a good shot, even with an apparently substandard weapon.
No train on the horizon, no freighters coming in. Ivy avoids looking that way too often, for her gaze falls again and again on the little row of timber buildings with false fronts and three-step porches.
Melchior is cleaning his bloody hands by rubbing them with dry sand when he notices Ivy looking toward the structures.
“Now burn it?”
She glances at him. “Not without knowing for sure what’s in there.”
“Swagger a guess.”
“That is not good enough. This place was someone’s home. Someone’s business. We cannot set it on fire without being sure there is a terribly good reason.”
“Proposing anything? Knock on the door, say? Give them a how-d’ye-do?”
“I don’t know. Pry off a board on the window, perhaps. We cannot walk away from here without doing something if it needs doing and we cannot do that without knowing for sure.”
It is late morning before they have polished off a fair part of the jackalope and scrubbed dishes—with similar application of sand, then wiping with handkerchiefs—before they return to the railhead. Someone must stay behind with the horses and this causes debate. Despite Melchior seeming the obvious candidate on account of being lame, he is the only one who knows how to use the fire-shooter and does not seem keen on handing it over to anyone else. Not that they act particularly interested in having it.
In the end, Sam and Rosalía remain behind: the only two with long-range weapons, in case of incidents below. Luck being the only horse now beside camp, Melchior pulls her hobbles off and jumps on her bareback with the lead rope clipped to her halter, packing his fire-shooter and Colt, sungoggles on and hat tipped down.
“Are you certain you do not want to take my horse, old man?” Sam asks, glancing across the top of the rise where the rest of the horses are scattered. “If you are setting that building on fire, this one might not care for it.”
“She’s dandy. You worry on cotton, Sam.” Melchior pulls Luck’s head up from nibbling dry grass with the rope and nudges her forward with his knee.
To Ivy’s surprise, the chestnut walks off as quiet as any old plow horse.
Ivy turns to Sam, pulling on her own sungoggles. “Why do you call him that? He is only nineteen. Surely much younger than you.”
Sam smiles. “Do I seem so old?” He lifts his hat to push his fingers through his hair. “Four and twenty. I do because he is quite as stubborn and set in his ways as my grandfather.”
She watches him, pulling down her own hat. Only eight years older than herself after all. And she is almost seventeen. “No ... you don’t seem so old. Not yet a grandfather, anyway.”
“Thank you.” He smiles. “Be careful down there. You know what you are doing? No more starting into something without thinking it through?”
“We are only taking a look around and setting the place on fire if we find sign of the sickness. That’s it. Just....” She glances from him to Rosalía, still scrubbing dishes, but with her carbine beside her. “Keep an eye out for us. In case you see anyone doing something dim.”
He jerks his head after Melchior. “Like taking that mare down?”
“She is doing a lot better.”
“Relativities, Ivy.”
She looks into his eyes through her goggles. Relativities again. So, so many.…
“We will be right back,” she says, finding it hard to tear her gaze from him and start after Grip, Melchior, and the red mare.
Down the small, dusty road, sun blazing like true summer now, Ivy does not smell the faint, rancid edge of decay until they are fifty yards from the boarded building. In daylight, she can see others have doors standing open, even belongings strewn outside: a hat, spent shell casings, a shot glass, broken bottles. These items draw her eyes to porches spattered with dry blood. Here, flies buzz. More hum in and out of the buildings, and a large number circulate about the boarded one, entering through broken windowpanes mostly concealed by boards covering them.
“This could just as easily be human trouble,” Grip says, walking up a bloody porch to examine casings and an open door. He looks around at Ivy. “You suspect risers?”
“What could have happened here which did not involve them?”
“People are capable of terrible acts, Miss Jerinson. They don’t need Plague to prove it. If the train is never running, goods never coming, the pass may have been the victim of shootist attacks just to get at what they had.”
“What about the windows?” Melchior slides carefully off Luck’s back and slings her rope around the hitching post before the boarded building.
“They have barred the door,” Ivy says. “If they lured risers in there to trap, they would not need to: they won’t turn knobs and open doors. They forget fine motor skills like that. They try to push through or climb over obstacles in their way.”
“Don’t mean nothing,” Melchior says, eyeing the stout board nailed across the front door. “Folks here don’t know that. I’d have boarded the door.”
“Let’s leave that one. Look around the rest.”
The smell in the next doorway is so thick Ivy will not enter, remaining on the porch with her gun in her hand. Melchior limps inside with his fire-shooter, Grip stepping past, revolver in his hand. He also seems to limp, Ivy thinks, though it is hardly noticeable. On the right side. The same side as the weak arm and eyepatch.
“Stiff,” Melchior says.
“Not sick though,” Grip says.
They return outside, Melchior batting flies, Grip ignoring them.
“Dead feller in there,” Melchior tells Ivy. “Long time and varmints been at him. He didn’t get the sickness. Reckon that one was shot.”
Grip nods, stepping past them down the stairs. Feeling sicker than ever and extremely relieved she did not go in, Ivy pulls a handkerchief from her pocket and wraps it about her face, tucking the top below the rim of her goggles.
“I wish there was something to be done about the air.”
Melchior grins. “Something more than a square of cotton?”
“I realize it’s feeble,” Ivy snaps. “Do I look like I have anything to put on it?”
“Piss on it,” Grip says, walking away.
Melchior chuckles.
“What is wrong—?”
Grip turns back to her. “Your pardon, Miss Jerinson.” He does not sound sorry so much as tired and exasperated. “But, if you mean to persist in being so easily offended, I recommend you remove yourself to more agreeable society in lieu of riding expeditions such as ours.”
“Stringing as many extra words together as Sam,” Melchior says, still amused. “’Specially for a man seldom moved to speech. All you’re meaning to say is, ‘Can’t stand the gaff, wrinkle the sheets.’”
“That”—Ivy rounds on him—“makes no sense. Where do you hear these things?”
Melchior frowns. “Everyone knows these old—”
“And, for the record, I was thinking of peppermint or lavender oils.”
“Un montón de idiotas,” Grip says, starting to the next building.
“¡Cuidado con lo que digas delante de una dama!” Melchior calls after him.
To Ivy’s astonishment, Grip laughs, shaking his head. She has never before heard him laugh. Never even seen a real smile on his face—barring the time Chucklehead kicked Melchior for examining his hind hooves.
They discover only one more body. No sign of illness, and Ivy begins to wonder if no disease has reached this remote place after all. Only that boarded building now.
While Grip fetches a bale of hay back to the hitching post with Luck, Melchior and Ivy walk around the last structure.
Melchior limps up steps, scattering flies off bloodstains. He studies the bar on the door, also tying his blue neckerchief around nose and mouth.
“Reckon we could pry it off....” He goes on to a front window. He shifts, squinting through cracks and partly broken panes, Ivy watching from the steps. The smell here is overpowering.
“What can you see?”
“Too dark. Glass covered in blood. Have to rip out two or three boards and break out the window. Better off opening the door.”
Of course. “We would need a pry.”
He limps back toward her, face turned from the fly-thick window. “Or pony up and burn it. Smells like Hell in there. If there’s nothing but dead bodies, why’s it boarded?”
“Grip says outlaws may have trapped people.”
“Bull. Sard lot of work to do something like that. Men come through here to raid the place, they’d shoot folks who got in their way. Why build a jail?”
“Well?” A voice behind her.
Ivy looks around. Grip has just walked up with a second bale, which he drops by Luck. The mare is too skittish to eat, pulling back against her rope, eyes rolling, flesh quivering as flies crawl across her.
“Will it spread to the whole row?” She looks at Melchior. “The brush?”
“On a still day like this?” He glances to the neighboring buildings. “May jump onto those roofs, but you won’t start a brush fire. Nothing but dirt and sand far as the railhead.”
Burning the whole outpost down on a strong suspicion does not seem good enough. Opening a door and endangering all their lives just to be certain when she is already certain in her own mind ... even more ridiculous. Never believe everything you know. Never question everything you know.
Waiting for her: Melchior, Grip, even Luck. Sam and Rosalía watch from camp with the horses. All waiting for her to decide. She may have been trying to find income for them, to recommend ventures, but she has never been able to think of herself as in charge of this company. Now they await her word, Melchior and Grip watching her in silence—Melchior holding his fire-shooter, Grip with his left hand on the butt of his revolver.
Ivy starts down the steps. “Burn it.”
She unslings the rope from the hitching post and allows Luck to scamper across the road toward the dead end of the rail track before both turn back to look. Grip follows with one of his bales. Melchior returns to the window he tried to see through. One hand on a grip and trigger, the other on some sort of lever on top, he bashes the nose through an exposed pane hardly large enough to admit it and pulls both back.
Fwooo. A rush of fire bursts into the closed building, lighting every visible chink of glass, sending flies exploding out. Panes break. Ivy feels the warmth across the street.
Luck throws back her head and tries to rear, but Ivy already has her halter clutched in both hands and keeps her steady.
Melchior jumps off the porch, landing on his good foot and grabbing up the second bale to limp after them. His face is white above the bandana. He does not need to speak for Ivy to guess what he saw in the blast of fire, illuminating the whole interior. She can hear it.
The previously silent building clatters with the sounds of someones or somethings blundering about inside. A chair knocked over, a wall crashed up against, as if several people are staggering blindly across rooms. All without a scream, without a cry, without any sound at all from a human throat.
Ivy’s heart hammers as she clutches the head of her chestnut horse. Grip is silent, apparently unmoved beside her. Melchior, on her other side, panting.
“Go on,” Ivy says, pulling Luck beside Melchior. “Let’s get out of here.”
He drops his bale, gives Ivy the fire-shooter, then steps onto the hay to jump on Luck’s back. Grip hands the bale up to him and he rests it across her rump. Ivy is about to hand him the rope, but he stares toward the boarded building, still white and breathing fast. She leads the mare on, Grip coming behind.
It is not until they return to camp and Sam asks what happened that Melchior speaks. Rosalía takes the heavy bale from him. He slides off the horse with Sam’s help while Ivy holds the rope.
“Folks in there,” Melchior says. “Bodies all over the floor, most eaten up. Bunch of them around one, eating with their faces down like a pack of wolves.” He looks around at Grip. “Sure looks like someone locked Plague-sick and healthy folks in together back there.”
Ivy is clutching Luck’s head again as the mare presses her red and white face into Ivy’s chest. “Who would do something like that? Why?”
Grip glances back toward the building, now with flames visible licking over the roof. He looks north toward Colorado. Then he turns to Rosalía, who looks away.
“Do you know something about this?” Sam asks him.
Grip shakes his head. He walks past them with his bale, out to the horses. Rosalía follows, not meeting any of their eyes.
Sam and Melchior look after them, but Ivy would just as soon not know any more. As it is, she wishes Melchior had not shared what he saw in that quick blast of fire.
She hobbles Luck, then sits alone on her bedroll, gazing across the pass through a plume of black smoke, wishing for a book, a letter to write, even a good argument among her company or a horse to wrestle. Everyone is silent, however, the horses back to eating in peace.
Ivy wraps her arms around her knees, resting her chin, looking north, thinking of robbers and murderers and evils of the world since, apparently, Daray’s disease alone is not enough. Not in the Northeast, where black market and looting runs rampant. Not in New Mexico, where a man can have two thousand dollars on his head and still ride free.
Something shimmers on the horizon. The sun is high, glinting off a distant metal serpent rushing toward them. Ivy blinks
, adjusts her goggles.
A train approaches Raton Pass.
Twenty-Seventh
Freighters
The mystery of no rendezvousing freighter teams is solved as the company meets the train—their horses saddled, camp cleared away, a small portion of hay and grain packed along in case of continuing grass shortage.
Ivy and Sam stand in front, leading their horses, while the rest wait in saddles just behind. As the heavily armored maker’s train rumbles to a halt at the end of the track, Ivy and Sam glance at one another. Men stand in each car doorway, more on top of a cattle car, each one armed with a rifle in hand and a six-shooter on his belt.
“It would appear they are well-guarded right now,” Ivy says.
“And do not fancy the sight of us waiting for them,” Sam says.
Iron and steel screech, gears grind, steam billows to mix above with smoke from the flaming building.
A man steps down from the engine car in pinstripes, beaver hat, starched white shirt, pine green suit, gleaming leather shoes. His mustache appears waxed and his gloves are white as his shirt. Another man, with a Winchester rifle in his hands and revolver below his open morning coat, accompanies him.
“Good afternoon, lady and gentlemen,” the gloved man tips his beaver. “To what do we owe this privilege?”
Northerner, a Yankee, and Ivy suddenly views the scene from his eyes. A burning outpost, apparently looted, the people driven out, only this band of armed rabble remaining to meet the train and take spoils. Perhaps they should not have come rushing down.
“We are here to escort the freighter party,” Ivy says clearly, though her throat feels dry, heart beating fast as she looks at all these men with rifles pointing more or less in her direction.
“Is that ... so?” A slow, disbelieving voice matching the smile now spreading across his face.
“It is,” Sam says, touching his hat. “Samuelson, sir. This is Miss Jerinson. We are here from Santa Fé, where all are badly in need of the goods we expect this party to bring. Since we heard, it seemed reasonable to assume those poorly disposed to the idea of allowing the convoy safely through these mountains may also hear. We should like to prevent trouble by accompanying your freighters southward.”
Lightfall Two: Fox, Flight, Fire (Lightfall, Book 2) Page 8
