by Paul Lederer
‘I’m leaving now,’ Regina said. ‘If you have any sense, you won’t try to follow me, because I will shoot you.’
She was near enough that it was easy for me to end the stand-off. I swept out a hand and knocked her feet from under her. She sat down hard and I wrenched the big Sharps from her hands, carefully lowering the hammer. She sat glaring at me, a strand of hair in her eyes, her fists tightly clenched.
‘I don’t like you,’ she hissed.
‘I’d already gotten that idea,’ I answered. I sat there, the rifle across my lap, staring back at her. ‘Just where is it you think you’re going, Regina – and how do you plan to get there?’
‘I just … after my sister, of course! To find Della.’ Her voice was still firm, but a note of doubt had crept into it. I nodded.
‘I don’t think you have an idea in the world what you mean to do,’ I said, ‘and I know you have no idea how to go about it.’
‘I’d be away from you at least!’ she said hotly. I sighed through my teeth and clambered to my feet, holding my ribs with one hand.
‘What is it you dislike about me so much?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral.
‘What you did to my sister! What all the men like you did to Della.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Della is a friend of mine. Nothing more.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ That note of doubt was gone from her voice. She was convinced that I had led Della down the wrong trail in life.
‘Let’s drop all that, Gina,’ I said.
‘Don’t call me that! Only my friends and family call me that!’
I was looking out at the long land, flat and white and endless, nearly featureless until, far to the south the hills began to rise and fold as the long trail neared the outskirts of Steubenville.
‘We have to find Della. You’re right there. You didn’t tell me how you came to have Henry Coughlin’s rifle.’
‘Back there,’ she said nodding vaguely. ‘When we stopped to rest the horses. I wanted to walk out by myself. Henry insisted I take his rifle for protection.’
I nodded. That sounded like Henry. Slowly Regina got to her feet to stand with but not close to me, staring out at the empty land. A cloud of snowbirds rose in unison from the flats across the coulee and exploded into the sky, probably startled by a stalking coyote or bobcat. There were certainly no horses, no men out there to frighten them into flight.
‘Where do you think they have taken Della?’ Regina asked in a slightly softened voice. ‘And who has done it?’
‘I was hoping you could tell me,’ I said, frowning at her, but she shook her head.
‘I told you – I was out by myself. …’ she blushed ever so faintly. ‘I heard three shots. Two different guns.’ At my curious look she flared up again, ‘I’m not that stupid! I know the difference between a rifle and a pistol shot.’
‘I didn’t say a word. Which were these?’
‘One was a pistol shot, the other two were both rifles, but one of them was a much heavier weapon – like a .50 Sharps or maybe a .56 Spencer.’
I smiled with reluctant admiration. The girl did know a few things about weapons, then. Probably learned from her brother who was certain to know much about them – including how to use them with deadly precision.
‘What kind of rifle was your brother carrying?’ I asked.
‘You saw it. A Winchester, like yours. But the rifles I heard didn’t have the sharp crack of a Winchester or of a Henry repeater … why do you ask?’ she asked, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.
‘I was just trying to put a mental picture together of what might have happened back there. Did you see anyone on the ground?’
‘Mister, I took to my heels, skirts flying. I was down into the coulee with that Sharps at the ready in seconds.’
I looked at her, not smiling this time. The girl had sense. And I was beginning to consider that I might have been closer to trouble facing the muzzle of that old buffalo rifle with it in her hands than I’d considered.
‘We’ve got to find them,’ Regina said, not harshly, but definitely.
‘We will. They must have stopped somewhere during the storm, so I doubt they’re more than a few miles ahead of us. I don’t think they’ll be heading to Steubenville now. Do you know of another place? Did your brother mention any?’
‘I don’t know this country, Miles,’ she replied, using my name for the first time I could recall. ‘Why is it you keep asking questions about Brian, anyway. You can’t think he…?’ She didn’t finish her question.
I decided that I had better tell her what I’d been told by Lazarus and Barry and so I did, as calmly as possible. I could see her fury rising as I repeated the conversation. At one point she spun in a half circle, throwing her arms into the air in frustration. She then took a step toward me and glared up furiously.
‘They are liars! Whoever they were. I happen to know that story, mister. It’s one reason Brian decided that we should come west. He had heard the gossip too many times.’ She looked away and thumped her fist against her thigh. ‘Now it’s followed him out here!’
She went on defiantly, ‘My brother is a good man who lost his arm fighting for his country. He would do anything for me, anything for Della. You don’t know Brian Adair.’
I didn’t. I had to admit that. Truth or fiction, the stories didn’t matter at that very moment. We were going to have to start walking out of there before the weather took another turn.
We proceeded.
The snow glare was blinding in its brilliance. We slid and fumbled our way down the coulee bank and clambered up the far side. I was guessing the wagon’s direction, but my guess was based on this thinking – that wagon was not going to be able cross that ravine at this point. It was simply too deep and wide. Therefore, they would be forced to continue south toward Steubenville – which I doubted they would wish to reach if real mischief had been done – or turned toward the east. There were a handful of little hamlets very widely scattered around this section of the Dakotas, usually where there were river or crossings, but I could not guess which of them was familiar to DeFord, to Lazarus and Barry or to Brian.
And which of them was now in command? Who had been shot at back along the trail? I could not guess and so I plodded on through the crystal-white day, the snow crackling under my boots, leading the small blond girl in her divided skirt and fringed buckskin jacket.
We found Henry Coughlin about two miles on.
I couldn’t be sure at first that it was a man. Flat against the ground, half-covered by drifted snow, I saw a hint of color, a dark blue patch that proved to be Henry’s scarf. I went to my knees to uncover him, placing the rifle aside. Regina for once was struck dumb. Shocked, she stood back, her fingers to her lips.
‘It’s Henry, isn’t it?’ she asked, almost hopefully. Maybe she had feared that it was her brother lying there in the snow.
I sat Henry Coughlin up. He was stiff and as cold as if he were dead, but his eyes opened as I breathed on his face and rubbed his hands.
‘Miles,’ he said in a voice as faint as a muffled breeze.
‘It’s me, Henry. What happened?’
Blinking the snow from his eyelashes, he shuddered, then began to tremble violently. Little wonder after spending a night in the open. He kept trying to talk, but his teeth chattered so that I couldn’t understand him.
‘I never told them, Miles,’ he said, gripping my collar with his clawlike hand.
‘I knew you wouldn’t,’ I answered. I wasn’t sure what he meant but the answer seemed to calm him a little.
‘I never even told Della,’ he said, more frantically, but more weakly. I knew then that he meant the location of the gold under the floorboards of the wagon.
‘That doesn’t matter right now, Henry,’ I told him, continuing to rub his hands.
‘Sure it does. Della has to have it. I need it because when she builds her house, I’ll have a place to live out my days.’
>
His teeth continued to chatter; his lips were numb and swollen. It had taken him a long minute to frame those few sentences. ‘What happened?’ I asked again. Regina, I saw from the corner of my eye had edged nearer so that she could understand his weak voice.
‘They came on us … four of ’em. …’
Four? Then it could not have been Lazarus and Barry – unless they had other searchers with them that I had been unaware of. Henry coughed, a long, pain-wracked deep-chest cough, convulsing his features. ‘They got me pretty good, I guess,’ Henry said.
‘Where are you hit, Henry?’ I asked, beginning to unbutton his sheepskin coat. ‘Where’d they get you?’
He sagged back against my arm and looked up at me with eyes that seemed to be smiling but did not blink. I lowered him gently to the cold earth and stood slowly. It didn’t matter any more where he had been wounded. One of them had been a killing shot. I wiped my brow with the back of my wrist, angrily snatched up the rifle from the snow and hovered over him, not praying exactly, but mourning the passing of a man and his lonely dream of finding a simple place to live out his days in comfort.
‘He’s dead,’ Regina said. I didn’t answer. ‘We couldn’t have done anything for him anyway. Couldn’t have taken him with us.’
I was ready to shout an angry word at her, but looking at her face I saw that she had meant nothing disrespectful. My own voice trembled slightly; I had to put a growl behind my words to feign hardness. ‘We can’t leave him here. The wild things will be at him.’
Then I handed her the rifle and shouldered Henry’s body. I carried him forward as the cold wind began to gust into my face once again. I took him down into the coulee and laid him in a shallow hollow. Then, clambering up the snow-dusted bank I began kicking at the sandy soil until the earth began to shift and cave down over the earthly remains of Henry Coughlin.
I slipped down the bank again, marched to Regina and snatched the rifle out of her hands. She looked at me as if I had hurt her. Her blue eyes were wide and bewildered, her yellow hair drifting across her face.
‘Come on,’ I muttered, maintaining a gruffness to cover my own sorrow.
We walked on as the sun rose and the wind continued to stiffen. There were more stacked thunderclouds to the north, but they didn’t appear to be imminently menacing. The snow which had been granular, crackling underfoot, now began to melt into slush. The cold mud underneath sucked at our boots, making our progress still more difficult.
‘Miles!’
We had come perhaps a mile from where we had buried Henry. Now Regina grabbed my arm and pointed to the east, her eyes fixed on the moving distant figures. Squinting against the snow glare, I could make them out too. It was a line of about twenty Indians, Cheyenne at my guess. Traveling southward, they were nearly in the tracks of the buffalo herd we had seen earlier. Their faces were not painted for war, nor were their horses decorated for battle. They were a small solitary group of nomads fleeing the winter, following the buffalo as their ancestors had done from time immemorial.
‘They don’t have any interest in us,’ I told Regina. ‘Let’s keep moving.’
‘And just ignore them!’
‘I didn’t say that,’ I answered tightly. ‘It behooves us to keep an eye on them, but I doubt they want trouble.’
Fearfully she smiled, and for a little while as we started on our way again she unaccountably clung to my arm. The day continued bleak and cold. We saw no horses, wagons, only occasional clumps of broken oak trees, with here and there a lone sycamore. For some reason a flock of crows had briefly followed us, darkening the sky. Regina eyed them unhappily as if they were birds of omen.
‘How do you know which way to go?’ she asked me, pausing to wipe back her hair and take in a dozen deep breaths. ‘Everything looks the same out here!’
‘No,’ I told her. ‘Not at all.’ I had to point it out to her, but when I did she understood. Earlier the snow had sheathed all of the land in anonymity. Now, as it slowly melted it had begun naturally to sink into the lower-lying ground while it lasted longer on higher. I pointed out to her what I had been following. Before the snow had fallen, a heavy wagon had cut grooves into the soft earth. With the snow melting, these tracks appeared again, showing themselves as long bluish southbound ruts.
‘What’s off in that direction?’ she asked, squinting into the vast distances. I shook my head.
‘I don’t know. Some small settlement, maybe even an outlaw camp. But that’s the direction they’ve taken.’
‘We’ll never catch up with them!’ Regina complained.
‘Maybe not. But, those horses aren’t having an easy time of it either, drawing that wagon through this half-frozen mud.’
‘But if we do. What then?’
I didn’t respond. I didn’t know what then. I didn’t know how many men I was going up against. I didn’t even know who I faced. None of them were friends of mine, that was for sure. But I had promised Della. I had taken on this job and I would fight it out to the last if need be.
I only wished that I didn’t also have that small blue-eyed girl in tow.
We trudged on, the woman a few steps behind me. Sometimes, seeing that she was lagging, I slowed my pace. But for the most part she kept up with me, her face grim but determined. Our shadows were already long before us, crooked wraiths darting here and there across the blue snow when I heard her gasp and call to me in a whisper.
‘There’s a house!’
I was about to respond that there could be no house standing alone on the wide prairie when I saw the low form of a soddy built near to a twisted stand of tall oak trees. What’s more, smoke rose from the crude structure. I narrowed my eyes as we stood shoulder to shoulder, looking that way. Still from the smokehole, curlicues of gray smoke weaved their way skyward and we knew the place to be inhabited.
There was no wagon to be seen, no men standing watch. I hesitated to approach the mysterious building which I took to be an abandoned stage station taken over by squatters. For no man could raise crops on this desolate earth or run cattle here in unfenced Indian territory.
‘They may have food,’ Regina said hopefully.
‘We have to risk it,’ I said after a moment’s consideration. ‘Whoever’s in there may have seen Della’s wagon pass.’
I didn’t like it, but we slogged on through the deep mud toward the shanty which had no windows, of course, but only rifle slits cut out of the sod for fending off Indian attacks. What forlorn hope of freedom or wish for land could have led to someone building this sad little shelter on the open prairie?
Nearing the soddy, I cocked the rifle and slowed my pace. No one stirred, nothing moved but the slimmest branches high in the reaches of the broken black oak trees. Regina grabbed my arm suddenly.
‘Look!’
I did so and my astonishment deepened. Standing tied to an upright post sunk into the sodden earth was my black horse, Dodger. He was unmistakable, even at a distance with that single white ear and the splash of white on his flank. He was still saddled, and as we approached with caution, he lifted his head, pricked his ears and strained at the tether holding him.
‘Be careful,’ I said to Regina. ‘We don’t know who might be holed up in there.’
I had no sooner said those words than the front door of the soddy was flung open and a bulky, squat man, hatless and bowlegged, stepped out of the hovel to face us, a double-twelve shotgun in his hands. We stared at each other for a long while. Then I lowered my rifle and hoisted a hand.
‘Hello the house! All right to approach you?’
‘Come ahead,’ he shouted back after a short pause. I guessed that the curious sight of a woman out in this wild country indicated to the property owner that we were not raiders.
Cautiously we walked toward him. He stood on the threshold of the sod house, his eyes narrowed. His shotgun was now held loosely, not threateningly, in the crook of his arm. The breeze shifted his sparse hair across a nearly bald dome. His tiny eye
s watched with interest, but no apparent hostility. I could understand why a man alone on the prairie would be ever cautious and took no offense at it. I did have to wonder, though, if anyone else was in the house, hiding.
‘Name’s Carlton,’ he said in a rather thin voice as we drew within ten feet of him. ‘Welcome to you.’
I introduced myself and Regina, then told him, ‘You’re wondering why we’re afoot out here. Well,’ I inclined my head. ‘that’s my horse.’
‘I guess you can prove that,’ Carlton said uneasily.
‘His name’s Dodger. If you untie him, he’ll come when I whistle. He’s branded ‘JJ’ for the Jackson Jewel Ranch of Wyoming on the right shoulder. If you’ll look under the saddle skirt you’ll find my initials “M.D” burned into the leather. If you’ll look on the flap of that buffalo coat tied up behind, you’ll see the same initials marked there.’
Carlton’s face sagged into unhappiness. ‘I knew it,’ he said sadly. ‘I never do have no luck. I found the black wandering, reins trailing and thought I’d come into some cash money.’
‘You didn’t see where it came from?’ Regina asked eagerly, but the old plainsman just shook his head.
‘Seen no one around?’ I chipped in.
‘No, son. Just your horse looking for a place to belong. What you tell me is true. I know that. I already looked under the saddle skirt where a man normally burns his initials. Figured someone had been attacked by the Indians or killed by robbers out there.’
Carlton looked so miserable that I had to offer: ‘I’d be happy to give you a few dollars for catching him up.’
I still had some money left from what Della had given me to take care of the stable bill and the purchase of the Conestoga at Jocko’s stable in Deadwood. Carlton brightened at my words and smiled for the first time.
‘I thank you,’ he said. ‘Would you two care for some coffee – well chicory, actually. It’s the best I can do.’
‘I’d be grateful for anything warm,’ I told him. ‘Regina?’
