Skin had grunted, like always, but he was thinking that he’d be damned if he was going to take much to heart from a fellow who was concerned with pennies in life, not when there were whole banks and depot offices and payroll stages filled with dollars waiting to be cracked open like big eggs.
So, naturally, Skin found it funny that here on the trail, of all the yammering Sinclair had done when Skin would rather have been sleeping, he should call to mind that bit about keeping the sun to one side or the other.
That cursed sun, pinned high in the clear blue sky behind him and to his left, broiled the top of Skin’s head and neck. It chased him as always, a hellhound nipping, nipping, nipping but never taking enough with each nip to bring you down. No, that wasn’t the way with a coward like that big roasting egg yolk in the sky.
Skin came upon the man a few hours before the sun drew its curtains on the long, hot day. He smelled smoke from a campfire and let his sniffer lead him to the spot. It didn’t take much effort, as it turned out, as the lone traveler was encamped for the night in a wide spot in the roadway.
By the unrolled blankets sat a small but lively fire bounded in a rough circle by fist-size rocks. Beyond that stood a bony black horse, muscled enough to keep him alive and lugging a sizable man. It was also old and thin and bone rack enough to keep from being made off with in the night by someone with an envious disposition.
“Hey, mister,” said Skin. The man hadn’t heard him approaching and Skin liked that. It told him he hadn’t lost his old catlike moves. Skin was wearing a faded blue denim smock with a dark spot on the front where a patch had once told the world he’d been a recent resident of Tin Falls Prison, and that wasn’t the sort of fellow most folks would want to see coming.
He’d been able to gnaw away the threads that held the numbers in place, then buried the patch the day before. No matter, because the back of the shirt still bore the prison name in big inked letters.
He’d been tempted to shuck it and bury it, too, but that would have left him without a shirt. And not having a shirt, even if it was only for a time, was not good thinking in autumn time in Utah Territory. As hot as it could get during the day, the nights grew downright shivery.
But good fortune, Skin decided, had finally shone on him once again. Here was a man crouched near a fire, forking over hunks of slab bacon. And the man looked as though he was about Skin’s size, too.
“I said, hey there, mister.” Skin walked up, forced a smile, and held out a hand palm up, as if trying to hold back something approaching. “I wonder if you could maybe help a fellow out of a hard scrape.” He stopped some yards from the man and stood looking at him.
The man rose, still holding his three-tine wood fork in his left hand.
Yep, thought Skin. Just about my height. In fact, they both had similar hair—black but peppered now with the creeping in of whiteness that comes with age. It was curly enough that Skin’s friends had picked on him when the war was on, claiming they were fighting to free him. Skin had never found that funny.
This man had a similar beard, too. Leaning toward thick, curly like his topknot, and about as untrimmed. Skin tried a smile again. It was not a facial feature he was accustomed to wearing and it pained him. He even thrust out a hand for a shake, knowing some men liked that sort of thing.
“I’m right pleased to make your acquaintance, mister. Again I ask, would you happen to be inclined to lend help to a starving fellow traveler?”
The man’s overly bushy eyebrows came together in the center. “You”—he touched a fingertip to his mouth. “Sprechen sie Deutsch?”
It was Skin’s turn to wince and flinch and squint. “What? Naw, naw.” He shook his head. “I speak in English and that’s all. Been enough so far, I reckon. You want to try English?” Skin tapped his own mouth. “English?”
The man almost smiled, but shook his head. “Deutsch.” He shrugged and pointed the fork at his half-sliced brick of bacon meat. Skin took that as an offer of food, and he nodded with vigor.
He hadn’t realized how very hungry all that walking had made him. Soon enough, following a strange stretch of silence while they watched the bacon and corn cakes fry, the pair of men, though strangers, enjoyed a meal together.
Skin figured he’d tend to business once he’d had his fill. Wouldn’t make sense to commence beforehand, as he’d only have to cook the food himself. Avoid labors whenever you can. That was another of Chilton Sinclair’s shavings of advice. Skin admitted it was a sound one.
“I guess you are my size, roughly, which I’ll grant you is uncanny. Is it too much to hope that you also carry some decent amount of money and a working firearm about your person? Huh?”
The other man’s vast eyebrows, the bushy look of them vexing Skin more by the moment, pulled together in the middle, creating one long, bushy rope of hair on the man’s brow. “You . . . Deutsch?”
“Huh? No, no.” Skin shook his head rapidly. “I ain’t nothing but a man whose folks were maybe this or that. I don’t rightly know, but don’t try to pollute the subject now.” Skin snatched a hank of jerky from an open saddlebag nearby and set to work on it. After a few moments of chewing, he looked up to see the man staring at him. “What’s the problem?”
It was what Skin had been waiting for. He needed to see doubt drift into the man’s eyes, wanted to see it. It would give him reason enough to set to work, as if someone had shouted, Go!
He had no knife, no gun, nothing but what that worm of a warden had turned him loose with. Wasn’t supposed to be that way. He’d heard tell you were supposed to be given a few dollars, clothes that didn’t mark you as a prisoner—someone had even said something about a train ticket to somewhere away from the prison, but he wasn’t so certain of that part. Still, none of it mattered because none of it had happened.
The German fellow made no effort to hide the sheath knife hanging on his belt. It was laced at the top, knotted, but Skin reckoned he could surprise the man long enough to untie that thing. He hadn’t wanted to have to drop the man with a split of firewood. That would take all the sport out of the task, but it seemed he was offered no other choice in the matter.
Skin sighed, smacked his hands on his knees, and rose to his feet. His host eyed him with raised eyebrows and looked as if he wanted to say something.
Skin didn’t want to hear it, more of the same foreign gibberish. He was tired and wanted to get out of the prison clothes. Skin nodded, tried to smile back, and gestured toward a clump of trees. He thought maybe the man would take it to mean he needed to pee, but he didn’t really care what the man thought. He just didn’t want the other man looking at him.
When he walked back from his visit to the trees, he stopped halfway back to the fire, where the man’s back faced him. He was scraping the bottom of the pan with a stick.
Skin palmed a round, smooth rock, gray with flecks of pink and veined with black. This rock is as big as a baby’s head, he thought as he held it loosely in his long fingers.
The man still didn’t look at him. Good. Skin stepped forward once, twice more. As soon as he was close enough to lunge, Skin’s left foot ground into gravel, barely loud enough to wake a mouse yet loud enough to alert the man.
The German looked over his shoulder. Any doubt he had on his face was replaced with a messy mash of confusion, then fear as he took in Skin’s crouching stance and the rock held loose in his fingertips. Then Skin saw anger draw down the man’s face, his eyes narrowing as he tried to stand.
He was not fast enough because Skin was already in motion. A smile—the first genuine smile he’d felt inclined to wear in a whole lot of years—pulled Skin’s mouth wide. At the same time, his right arm rose up.
Instead of bringing the rock down on top of the man’s head, he changed his intention midmotion because he realized the blow would spatter blood and bone and brain on the man’s shirt. And what would the point be of going
to all this trouble to get himself decent clothes to wear if he up and sullied them before tugging them on?
“No!” The man’s voice was low and harsh, as if he knew he could not rise in time to ward off the coming blow. The best he could do was crouch and raise his left arm to receive the full force of the downward swing.
It didn’t work.
The rock met the lone man’s temple from the side. Skin felt the old comforting reassurance of bone collapsing beneath the swing’s momentum, and that was about all there was to it. The German man’s head jerked fast to one side—Skin thought maybe his neck had snapped—and he slopped to the ground.
The horse, still standing hipshot, flicked a long ear.
Skin let out a held breath, steady and smooth. Good. He’d not lost his nerve while in prison. “Only one other thing to do,” he said, tossing the rock toward the road. He bent, shoved the side-sprawled man over onto his back, and flinched when the man gasped.
“Huh,” said Skin. “Tough bugger, huh?” He quickly untied the rawhide lace and freed the man’s knife, a wood-handled, wide-bladed piece of steel that had decent heft in Skin’s hand.
“Let’s see how she works,” he said, and with no hesitation raised it high and rammed the butt of the handle against the prone man’s temple. A quick barking sound escaped the man’s bearded mouth, then clipped off.
“Settle down, mister,” said Skin, growing annoyed with the rascal. “Man ought to have sense enough to know when he’s licked.”
A close look at the man to see if he was breathing offered no sign, but Skin had been tricked in the past. Skin bent low, listening to the man’s chest, knife held high and ready to strike downward. He heard no heartbeat. Still didn’t mean all that it should, so he would strike the German a final blow once he relieved him of his clothing, boots, and such.
It took Skin a couple of minutes to strip the man down. He left the fellow the dignity of his long underwear. Besides, he didn’t know what sort of man the German was, if he had slovenly personal habits. “Be thankful I am of a kindly disposition,” he said, grunting as he dragged the man out of the campsite and behind a rocky, shrubby spot.
“There.” Skin belched and looked down at his handiwork. He was tired once more and so not inclined to slice the man open. It was a messy task and made for a stink that clouded a man’s nose for far too long afterward. He refused to believe that this meant he had softened in prison.
To prove it to himself and whatever demon whispered in his left ear, always the left ear, he found the same rock and once more slammed it into the fellow’s head. That time something else inside crunched and there was no doubt any longer that the German was good and dead.
“By the time you draw flies, I’ll be long gone from here. Won’t be nothin’ left to point to me but these trees.” He looked up into the sparse web of aspen branches. “And trees don’t talk.”
Then he had a fine idea, perhaps one of the best he’d had in a long ol’ time. He shucked off his raggy, baggy prison shirt and trousers and tugged them on the dead man. They looked enough alike that should anyone ever wonder, it might come about that Skin Varney had died on the road, done in by a vicious campsite marauder all because he’d been turned loose from Tin Falls Prison with scanty gear by that no-account warden.
“That Warden MacNichol is a menace,” said Skin, dressing in the German man’s garments and feeling a little sorry for his dead self.
Dark was still a couple of hours off, by his reckoning, and his belly was full and he had a horse and gear once more. Why, thought Skin Varney, there don’t seem to be much sense in sharing my campsite with a dead fellow. Not much conversation to be gotten that way.
It took him longer to settle the lone traveler’s scrap of a horse than it had taken to dispatch its previous master. It didn’t help that Skin wasn’t a patient sort, never had been. He knew this of himself, but couldn’t help it, and he didn’t care enough to want to.
Bulling his way through life had worked most of the time, but whomping on a horse that looked to be close to death wasn’t going to get him far.
He sighed and saddled and loaded up the dead man’s gear—now his gear. “Settle yourself, naggy! We’ll get on fine until I have to plug you in the head. And I promise not to do that until we find a replacement for your sorry self. Okay?” He said this with as much kindness as he could muster.
He was tempted to rummage in the saddlebags. No, he told himself. That treat will wait until later when I get to where I’m going. Then it will be special.
For now he figured it would be wise to travel on, lest someone should stop and wish to pass the time of day with him and then get feeling so they had to visit the bushes themselves, where they might discover the German. It was more of a headache than he wished for that night. Best to move on.
He toed dirt over the fire, then urinated on it, steam rising up before him. “Okay, horse,” he said, buttoning up. “Time we get acquainted. You will see I’m not as bad as all that.” The horse offered a halfhearted hop, but it was too old for much more.
“I told you,” said Skin as he swung up into the saddle, “we’ll get along better if you know your place.” They paced out into the roadway and pointed northward. “Gain us some hours, then we’ll encamp once more. Might be you’ll find I am a worthy companion of the road. Might not. Either way, I do not care.”
And so they walked. Skin tested the horse’s abilities to carry him, and he had to admit the bony beast was more impressive than he had thought on first glance that it might be. “Don’t mean I won’t be swapping you out when the opportunity shows itself. Keep that in mind, you cursed bone rack.”
Skin smiled once more, this time for the good fortune with which he had presented himself. “Yes, sir, Skin Varney, you are still an enterprising fellow. There can be no doubt of that.”
As he and the horse walked northward, far to his left the sun slowly dragged itself to sleep.
CHAPTER FOUR
Two weeks after he left Providence, Fletcher J. Ralston found himself sharing a rattling Concord stagecoach of the Bull and Bull Line, out of Schenectady, with an overstuffed woman in a garish green satin and black lace dress of a size she’d left behind some years before.
Beside her sat her equally bulging husband, a close-bearded fellow in a gray pin-striped suit and a gray bowler wedged atop his dimpled head. When he wasn’t snoring and passing gas as if in competition with his perfumed spouse, he was tugging out a new and, as he took pains to explain several times, expensive pocket watch the diameter and thickness of a holiday meat pie.
“Where is it you said you were headed, Mr. . . . ? Ahh, I’ve forgotten your name, young man.” The woman canted her feather-covered head and smiled at Fletcher.
“I didn’t say, madam.” Fletcher saw the look of sudden shock on her face as if he’d slapped her. She looked at her husband. Perhaps he had been rude. He girded himself and said, “That is to say, I’ve not yet mentioned my destination, but I am happy to do so: Promise, Wyoming Territory. I daresay a city bearing such a bold name will offer all the goodwill and wonder of that most excellent word.” He offered them a winning smile.
The portly pair exchanged glances once more, then turned forced smiles of sympathy on him. “Yes,” she said. “Well, ah . . . yes.”
“You are familiar, then, with Promise, I take it, Mrs. . . . ?”
“Cunningham. Our name is Cunningham,” said her husband. “And yes, oh, yes, we have had . . . dealings in Promise, though it has been years since we have been forced to—that is to say, since we have had the opportunity to visit that fine town.”
Their hesitation was revealing and failed to reinforce in Fletcher Ralston the hopefulness he’d been working his best to maintain. His journey thus far had been a headache enmeshed in a nightmare, and his Sunday togs were now sagged and near ruined—a metaphor, he thought, for his very soul.
“Not to worry,” said Mr. Cunningham, seeing worry creep across the young man’s features. “You have your youth!”
The bubbly pair slipped back into their not-so-quiet, gassy napping, and the stagecoach rumbled and swayed and bounced and slammed westward, drawing Fletcher J. Ralston ever closer to an encounter he felt less confident in with each passing dusty moment.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham departed the stagecoach at Drover’s Bend, Nebraska, after wishing Fletcher all the luck the world had to offer a young man. He swore he saw their smiles slip away, replaced with looks of horror as the stage rolled away from the stop.
He was now the sole passenger, save for a fresh sack of mail and a wobbly scatter of paper-and-string-wrapped parcels stacked on the floor and on the seat across from him.
Fletcher wedged his low black boots, topped with gray spats, now hopelessly dusted, against the bench across from him in an effort to stay seated as the coach slammed and rolled. His traveling finery was coated with a fine dust that seemed to work into and through the very fabric of each piece of his attire.
He had patted himself down regularly early on in the trip, but soon realized the futility of doing so. For his black kid-leather gloves themselves picked up the sand-colored dust and left handprints up and down his sleeves and across his lapels. Fletcher vowed to visit a launderer as soon as he arrived in Promise.
Holding a once-white dust-clogged handkerchief to his nose and mouth, he gazed again at the vast depressing landscape. Never had he seen such . . . hopelessness. It was as if the very word had been rendered by a formidable artist who knew the futility of color.
And yet, when he allowed himself to see, truly see the land through which he was being driven, he admitted that the sky—and there was oh so much of it—bore a color not unlike hammered silver swirled with a blue as light as a fair maid’s eye. And there was, surprisingly, green to be seen, too.
Ralph Compton Guns of the Greenhorn Page 2
