Well Traveled

by Margaret Mills

  It seemed damned strange to think that, since he’d been bedding the man regular for over a month now.

  Jed saw Mrs. Hennessey to her bedroom door, with George right at her side, promising to let himself out the back and keep an ear out for anything at all. When they finally went to the barn to sleep, Jed stopped Gideon’s latest effort to get him to talk by putting his tongue in Gideon’s mouth. Gideon had to admit, it was a damned good way to shut him up.

  Still, he turned his head to get his mouth out of reach. “Jed!” he hissed. “We can’t—”

  “The children are asleep. Mrs. Hennessey will not leave the house. We can.”

  When he put it that way, especially when his hands were already worming inside Gideon’s drawers, there wasn’t much reason to argue. Not that Gideon had the will to try, because this seemed just about the best way in the world to chase away the heaviness he’d carried in his heart since they’d stumbled across this farm. They went about it quick and quiet, a repeat of what they’d given each other in their only time in a bed, back in Carson City. That seemed like a long time ago, but it was what Gideon thought of: the last minute everything had been just about perfect, before Jed had opened his mouth and dosed him with reality. Before the shit out in the world had run across his path again. It was funny that back then it’d been Jed who was worried about getting caught.

  Something had changed between them, or maybe just in Jed.

  When they finished, Jed eased Gideon’s cock back into his pants and even buttoned him up with gentle hands. “We should sleep now. Deputy Rock said he would be here early.”

  “We should talk now,” Gideon tried.

  “No,” Jed said, his voice quiet and thoughtful, “we should not. This was good. Please, Gideon, take this to your dreams. Save talk for the morning.”

  Gideon didn’t like it, but he knew Jed was tired, and he knew Jed was trying to appease him. “Go on,” he sighed. He curled up onto his side, peering through the shadows to try and make out Jed’s shape as Jed moved back to his blanket. “You ain’t gonna be gone when I get up, are you?” he asked, frowning.

  “No,” Jed said. “I will not.”

  “All right then.”

  Chapter 8

  MAYBE because he’d slept so hard the night before, and maybe because he was worried Jed would slip off again, Gideon’s dreams were restless and dark, and he woke before the sun. Jed was barely stirring, making less noise than Star when she shifted her weight from hoof to hoof. Gideon coughed to clear his throat and pushed up onto an elbow. “Jed?”

  “It is early yet.”

  “You’re up,” Gideon reasoned, and forced himself to throw back his blanket. It was cold as hell this early in the morning, so he dragged on all his clothes and pulled his bedroll up over his shoulders for good measure before following Jed out to the fence for a piss. Night was just barely giving way to morning, the sky bluer than black and all but the brightest stars faded to nothing. He could see the cows standing together at the far side of the corral, and that more than anything else reminded him to wonder what Jed had really been doing out there in the wild, yesterday.

  He tucked it in and buttoned back up, wishing they had a fire, or coffee, and wondering when Mrs. Hennessey and the kids would rise so he could go fetch some. They went back to the barn, bumbling around in the dark to get Star fed, and Gideon used the lantern to make his way along the path to the creek, rubbing his hands together and beating on his shoulders while she drank her fill. She was a good horse that way, and didn’t waste his time; mornings like this, he appreciated it especially.

  By the time he got back to the barn, the sun was awake behind the mountains, casting a cold white glare over the lower peaks to the east and south. He couldn’t see it yet, but it gave off plenty of light for him to move by.

  Jed leaned where Gideon had left him, at the fence just outside the barn. He was staring off toward the rising sun, and Gideon thought he might be chanting, but he couldn’t hear it.

  He let Star loose with the cows and strode over to stand by him. “Jed?” he whispered. “You ready to talk now?”

  “About what?” Jed asked. His voice was so placid and soft, all it made Gideon think of was how hard and angry it had been the day before last.

  “About why you’re so peaceable today, for one,” he offered. “Two cows ain’t gonna do that, not after all we seen here.”

  Jed looked out on the land and one thin shoulder lifted slightly. “I left after you fell asleep, to find them.”

  “Find them.” Gideon knew he wasn’t talking about the cows.

  “Yes. Do not worry,” he said, still so calm. “I killed them as a white man would. I left no tracks.”

  Gideon realized his jaw had dropped open because his tongue was getting dry from the chill morning air. “Yeah,” he said blankly. “That was what was worryin’ me.” Shock and anger made his skin crawl—that Jed had just up and decided that, that Jed could do it, that Jed had done it without his help. He drew a slow breath before he spoke, because under it all, he knew he wasn’t really surprised. That maybe shocked him more than anything. “Jed,” he finally managed to start, “you can’t just—”

  “It is already done,” Jed cut him off, his voice still calm. “Do not waste time trying to change my mind about something that is now in the past.”

  Gideon swiped a hand over his face and looked around to be sure George hadn’t slipped up on them before he hissed, “Jed! It ain’t in the past, there’s bodies out there now! You got any idea how that’s gonna look?”

  Jed nodded. “It will look like we find the bodies when we go to retrieve her cattle. When we run across them, we will tell your sheriff where they are.”

  “When we find ’em….” Gideon’s throat was dry. He’d been traveling alone with this fella for weeks, fucking him for most of them, and… and he’d seen that woman, seen the pain and the shock in her, and the fear and the grief in her kids. Helped bury the bodies of her men. He swallowed and looked out toward the horizon. “How many were there?” he asked. “How many men did you kill?”

  “I didn’t kill any men,” Jed said evenly. “I killed animals.”

  Gideon let that sit a while, long enough that he decided it might even be true. He still wasn’t sure if it was right—but the thought of Mrs. Hennessey and the young’uns having to sit through a trial, having to face those bastards and tell what they’d done…. He sighed. “Long as you’re sure they won’t know it was you. And they might guess, just ’cause there ain’t no sign.”

  Jed waved a hand. “Let them guess.”

  They stood there in silence for a long, long while, long enough that Jed started chanting, low in his throat. “Okay,” Gideon said after a time. The disk of the sun edged over the mountaintops behind Jed, blinding, and the morning was shaping up clean and clear, as if Jed’s prayers were drawing it forward. “I’ll let ’em guess. Long as you tell me why you did it.” He couldn’t fault Jed for that kind of retribution; men like that were animals, and they deserved to be hunted down like one. The thing that was bothering him most wasn’t that someone had done that, but that it was Jed. It was nigh on impossible to reconcile the man who could hunt down and kill Lord knew how many men and walk away from it without a scratch with the man he’d seen in the house last night, laughing and telling stories to the children.

  Jed’s head had been hanging low, his chin almost touching his chest, and he swiveled it now to look at Gideon. His hair spilled down, and Gideon watched him reach to pull it back over his shoulder, revealing his face. “Do you know of buffalo birds?” Jed asked.

  Gideon frowned confusion at him. “I know they were birds that lived on buffaloes’ backs. I’ve seen pictures….”

  “That is not the only thing they are known for. They travel with the herds, so they do not make their own nests. Instead, they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, and leave their young for those other birds to raise. That is why I have my name.” His face hardened perceptibly
, and he looked right into Gideon’s eyes, those night-blue eyes spearing Gideon with knowledge and anger. “A white animal, a raider, came to my people’s reservation. He and his kind did what these men did to Mrs. Hennessey, to many of the women of my mother’s day. I am his child. My real father—the man who raised me, not the animal who committed that crime against a woman—he claimed me as his own, raised me as his own. But my mother felt shame for a long time, Gideon, even though there was nothing she could have done to stop what happened. No man who forces another is a man. He is an animal.”

  He turned back to the mountains then, to the sun, closing his eyes and picking up his chant. It was just as soft as it had been, but Gideon heard the strength behind it. Jed had told him it was in thanks, and he wondered now what Jed was being thankful for: finding those men, killing them, or not getting caught himself? Probably some of all of it.

  “How come white folks are like this?” he asked after a time, and Jed startled him by laughing.

  “It is not just the whites who are born with the badger spirits. Sometimes, they make great warriors. Sometimes, they hunt their own for sport.”

  “Well….” Gideon frowned. Somehow, between Harold Crowe and the other Indians in Bill Tourney’s show, and Jed, he’d come to think that most of the strange tales about Indians, even Indian mysticism, were just bullshit. “What do you do with ’em?”

  “Release them from their enchantments when we can,” Jed said. “Just as I did yesterday.”

  THEY came upon the camp filled with dead men not long after they’d stopped for lunch, a cold meal the posse had packed out from a restaurant in Sutter Creek. The food turned to stone in Gideon’s belly as he stared at the bodies, and he put a hand to it to try and quell the nausea. Jedediah Buffalo Bird had done all this.

  “Looks like they had a fight amongst themselves,” Sheriff Bishop said. He shook his big head, almost unseating his hat, which he’d pushed all the way back so he could see. He was a tall man, in his forties at least, broad-shouldered and handsome enough with too-long, wavy hair and a week’s worth of beard growth. When Gideon had asked, Rock had told him Sheriff Bishop had been riding hard lately, trying to find these bastards. Deputy Rock was a chatty man, the kind who made a good barber, and by the time they’d found this camp, Gideon knew that Bishop had lost his wife to childbirth a few years back. Just like Mrs. Hennessey had said, Bishop had a teenaged daughter, and two more nearer George’s age. His kids were back in Sutter Creek, caring for the house. “Smells like they had enough to drink.” The smell of alcohol was strong, but not strong enough to mask the smell of blood and death.

  Gideon looked around, too, keeping his eyes off Jed despite the urge to be his friend’s shadow out here.

  “We’ve eight dead here,” Deputy Rock said, pointing with the barrel of his revolver as he counted. “Most of ’em look shot.”

  Five of the other men in the posse moved around the camp, calling out confirmations that there’d been a lot of drinking—empty liquor bottles littered the place, and some of the dead men held guns in their hands.

  “This one here got himself knifed,” one of the men called from the far edge of the clearing. He was bent over a body, his hat pushed back like Sheriff Bishop’s. “Reckon he was trying to get away when the blood loss got to him. Looks like he was headed toward the horses.”

  They’d found the horses first, tied out together on long lines of rope by a creek near the clearing. The cows and two mules grazed together in a meadow past the edge of the trees. Jed had tracked them—it looked like he had, anyway—pointing out to Bishop and anyone else who asked how he knew where he was going. The men in the posse had been wary of the Indian at first, but since they were all on horses and Jed was on foot, and since Jed seemed to know what he was doing, the wariness had slowly given way to respect. They’d pretty much relegated Jed’s skin and hair to the land of nobody’s business, where it belonged, by the time they stumbled into the camp.

  Gideon hadn’t once forgotten the things Jed had told him that morning. When he’d caught the first smell of death, and Jed’s body had stiffened in front of the group of riders, Gideon had registered the stillness that could only mean one thing, and his tension climbed so high that Star started sidestepping under him. Now, with Star well away with the other horses and nothing to do but stare at the mess, he just felt queasy.

  The knot in his stomach pulled tighter when Bishop looked over to Jed, who was poking at the coals of the big fire in the center of the camp. “Good thing you found those cows when you did,” he called. “If you’d come much further along, we could be looking at your body, too.”

  Jed didn’t look up from where he was spreading out the dying embers so they’d burn out faster. “I expect so,” he agreed. “These are the kind who kill for the sport of it.”

  “Yeah,” Bishop agreed. “Probably why they killed each other.” He drew a deep breath but grimaced when the stench of lost blood and loosed bowels on the air caught at him. He spat on the ground before asking Jed, “Can you look around, make sure nobody got clear of this? If we’ve got somebody else to hunt down, I’d like to hire you on for the job.”

  Jed nodded and walked the camp’s perimeter, and Gideon stood still and watched him, watched the way his hair fell forward when he knelt to look at something on the ground, and watched the way his mouth moved to chant a silent prayer each time he rose. Gideon swallowed down the knowledge that Jed wouldn’t find any sign because Jed hadn’t left this to chance. Nobody had gotten clear of this.

  “He’s damned good,” Bishop said softly, startling Gideon.

  “He got me and my horse from Montana to here in one piece,” Gideon replied. “Around mining camps and right through Indian country. He’s a good man.”

  Bishop made a noncommittal sound and nodded, and Gideon let his eyes wander back to Jed. Jed finished his circuit and prowled back to the dying fire where Bishop stood waiting, and shook his head. “There are no tracks leading away from this.” He tilted his head toward the man who’d tried to crawl away. “And he was their leader. He is big. His guns are the nicest, and he wears finer clothes of any of these other men.”

  Deputy Rock frowned and took long strides toward the corpse on its belly, but when he got there all he did was stare down at it. “Looks like he started something he couldn’t finish,” he called thoughtfully.

  “Yes,” Jed said. “It does.”

  Rock just stared at the dead man for the longest moment, before Bishop shook himself and called to his men, “Let’s get these sons of bitches buried, clear this place up.”

  “Take him back with us,” Jed said to Bishop, inclining his head toward Rock and the man he’d knifed. That death hadn’t been quick or easy—not the kind of death a white man would have designed, Gideon decided—but he felt no remorse. If anything, he liked Jed all the more for this carnage, and that thought unsettled him some. He liked to think he was a modern, civilized man. For the most part.

  “Why?” Bishop bristled. Clearly, he wasn’t liking the idea.

  “Let Mrs. Hennessey identify him. Let her know he is truly dead.”

  “We can gather up their stuff, too,” Gideon offered, “give it to her to compensate her for all they took.”

  Rock had walked over to join them while they talked. “I knew George Hennessey,” he said stiffly. “He was worth more than eight horses.”

  Gideon held up his hands. “I didn’t mean no offense, Deputy,” he assured the man. “I could tell just by her kids that her husband was a good man. Brother-in-law, too, I reckon. Still, if anybody deserves this stuff, it’s her.”

  Rock turned to look at him square on. “Hers ain’t the only farm these men rode through.”

  Gideon squared his shoulders back and answered Rock with a glare of his own. “Hers is the only one I saw with my own eyes,” he said, hard.

  Rock kept staring for a minute, then he shrugged and shot a look at Bishop. “Usually we sell things like this at auction, help pay the d
eputies and compensate the posses. I can’t make that decision.”

  “What do you think, Earl?” Bishop asked. “You think there’s enough folks left on those other farms to warrant trying to parcel this out?”

  Rock shrugged, diffident.

  “You think anybody deserves it more than Moira?” he asked, harder now. “She survived what they done to her, Earl. Plenty of women wouldn’t have. I talked to her this morning, and she’s already putting her life back in order. If she wants any of this, I’m inclined to give it to her.”

  Gideon heard the admiration in Bishop’s voice, and knew he had an ally here, a man who’d known the Hennesseys and respected them all. “I’m right there with you, Sheriff.”

  Bishop looked at him and shrugged. “I’ve known her and her family since George was born. She’ll be looked after, I can promise you that.”

  Gideon glanced around. “Fair enough,” he said, thinking anything but. He set it upon himself to check the horses and roll up the leader’s body in a bedroll. The big bay’s ears swiveled forward when Gideon dropped the body beside it, but other than that, it made no move. Good horse, he thought. Steady. Behind him, the deputized men had started digging two big graves, not nearly so deep or square as the ones he and Jed had dug for the Hennessey men, and it didn’t take long, not with the twelve of them working at it. By early afternoon, they had seven bodies dumped and covered, and most of the possessions gathered up and loaded onto the horses. Gideon had planned to throw the leader’s body on the bay, but Jed grabbed a hank of mane at its withers and swung up onto it before Gideon could get a saddle on its back.