The High Divide (21 page)

“Yes.”

“And didn't I say no chasing after meat?”

Eli's instinct was to argue with the man, though he knew that was a bad idea. He glanced at his father, whose face was blank, eyes dark.
What the hell,
Eli thought, and he said, “This is a hunting party, isn't it?”

“If and when we find something to shoot at, yes. Until then—until we make permanent camp, like I said—we'll exercise caution. We don't want to draw undue attention to ourselves, which is prudent, considering.”

Still in his crouch, the strand of grass clenched in his teeth, Ulysses said, “It could be you're overstating the general threat.”

Bayliss turned. “The general threat, as you put it, happens to rest on my shoulders and not yours, Mr. Pope. I have rank here.”

Ulysses stood up. Eli could tell he was angry by the steady gaze of his eyes and the way his lips were flattened and drawn tight, like a line of fencing wire. His hands were loose at his sides. Bayliss took a step back. Ulysses said, “I mustered out in sixty-nine. That's a long time ago, and I don't give a rat's ass about rank.”

Hornaday came forward and put himself between the two men, who both towered over him. He took the stub of cigar from his mouth and blew a pair of perfect smoke rings in the still air. He said, “I respect your sense of duty, Sergeant, though I have to remind you that Mr. Pope is in my employ. And Mr. Pope, I want you to hear this. Until we reach the hunting grounds and establish our camp there, it's your obligation to defer to Bayliss in all matters regarding security. As we all must. Which means, Eli”—Hornaday turned—“that next time you have an antelope in your sights, you better ask before you squeeze your finger.”

“Yes, sir,” Eli said.

“Mr. Hornaday, if he had asked first, we'd be nooning up meatless,” Ulysses said, nodding at the two privates who had already skinned the animal and were cutting strips of flesh from the carcass. McAnna in the meantime had built a fire, which was popping and smoking on green willow branches.

Hornaday looked from Ulysses to Bayliss and back again. He said, “We need to have an understanding here.”

“We have an understanding,” Ulysses said, though his gaze remained steady on Bayliss, who didn't speak.

“All right then?” Hornaday asked.

“All right,” Bayliss muttered, and he walked off toward a small outcrop of rocks, kicking up dust with his boots.

Toward evening a bank of purple clouds massed in the west, swallowing the red sun. By McAnna's estimate they'd gone eighteen miles, easily the farthest Eli had ever ridden a horse in a single day, and he could feel every mile in his back and legs and ass. He was not at all sure he'd be able to climb back on in the morning but was looking forward to it all the same. As the men made their first camp, glancing up now and then to watch the thunderheads build, McNaney, who'd been scouting ahead, came riding back at full gallop.

“Indians,” he said. “Two of them, mounted. Up there a mile or so.” He pointed northwest, toward an elevation topped with a small crown of rock.

“Moving which way? What are they doing?” Bayliss asked.

“Just settin' their horses is all. Watching us, carbines on their lap.”

“They make any sign?”

“Nope.”

“Just two of them?”

“That's all I saw.”

“We better go have a little parley then. You”—Bayliss pointed at Ulysses—“Come with me.”

As the two rode off together, Eli got started on the fire for supper, the job he'd been assigned by Hornaday. All afternoon he'd been collecting deadfall—willow, dogwood, the occasional stunted juniper, anything burnable—and tossing it up into the wagons. Now as the old cook mixed up corn biscuits, beans, and antelope stew, Eli lit the kindling and built a steady flame. There was enough flow in the creek for the horses now, and they'd been turned loose to water themselves before being rubbed down, fed from the store of oats, and picketed.

By the time Ulysses and Bayliss rode back into camp an hour later, all the tents were pitched and everybody was sitting around the fire, their plates empty, drinking coffee brewed with creekwater too brackish to boil clean.

“Lost them,” Bayliss said. “But found nothing to say there's more than just the two. Scavengers, likely. We'll have to keep an eye out.”

“See any buff?” Hornaday asked.

“Don't you think we'd tell you?” Bayliss handed off his horse to one of the troopers and accepted a plate of food.

That night clouds moved in like giants with bulbous heads and massive shoulders, like the Danish gods in the stories his mother used to tell him. Storm gods, she called them. Eli watched through the front of the tent as they changed shape, growing into beasts with terrible noses, eyes swirling as they searched for a place to spend their fury.

“We're going to have a gully washer,” Ulysses said.

But the storm passed on by, saving itself for the buttes to the east. Unable to sleep, Eli crawled out of the tent he shared with his father and watched the exhibition of lightning, each flash beginning at the center of heaven and following a complex geometry to earth, again and again, the booms jarring the ground before they arrived as thunder in the air. Later, Eli dreamed of home and his father standing in the yard, smoking, his mother at the kitchen window saying,
Where is he, I don't see him,
though in fact he wasn't twenty feet away in full sight. When Eli pointed him out to her, she gripped the neck of her dress with both fists and ripped it open. And in that moment, at the sound of cloth tearing, he woke up, aware of his father leaving the tent, brushing past the canvas flaps. Eli checked his impulse to call out and instead grabbed in the dark for his pants and boots, shirt and coat, and moved quickly toward the horses, picketed a hundred paces or so to the south. He could just make out his father's long shape and also that of the horses against the darkness.

“What are you doing?” he whispered.

“Just a little scouting trip.”

Eli ran quietly back to the tent for his bridle, and when he came back Ulysses was waiting for him.

“You're going after them, aren't you.”

“No need to come along,” his father said.

“I'm coming. But we should bring our rifles.”

“No,” Ulysses said.

They led their animals north for a quarter of a mile, then mounted up and rode bareback at a fast walk, hunched in their coats against the cold air, down through a dry coulee and then up along a narrow divide that angled northwest. They stopped at the top of a hill, from which they could see, beneath a break in the clouds, a declining landscape of canyons and gullies and hoodoos. It looked like a place where the skin of the earth had come loose, torn away by some coarse hand to expose another world, the close edge of it marked by a stone spire.

“They're down in there?” Eli asked.

“Bayliss and I came this far but couldn't tell if they went straight on or broke off to the north on high ground. As we turned around to leave, though, I caught sight of a smoke line. Down there, yes.” Ulysses pointed ahead. “Bayliss didn't see it.”

The ground changed beneath them now, the iron shoes of their horses crunching and grinding on loose rock, and Eli sensed the mare's hesitation as she picked her steps carefully, rolling her neck this way and that, lifting her nose to smell the air. They came around the side of a rock face and then down another decline, this one steeper, Eli leaning back but sliding forward onto the mare's thick mane, nothing to do about it. And then he smelled something, camp smoke, and his father swung off the Appaloosa and crouched on one knee. He lifted something close to his face.

“It's cold, they've been gone awhile,” he said.

“Do we go after them?”

“It's too late. And it's going to storm again. There'll be another chance.”

As Ulysses spoke, the clouds filled in above them and the world closed down. Eli's mare trembled as if struck by a cold wind, and from the west came a quiet rumble, like a man clearing his throat in the next room.

“Let's go, come on,” Ulysses said, mounting up. “It's going to get slick in a hurry down here.”

They swung around and headed back, Eli in front this time—though every minute or so he pulled up to make sure his father was still there, saying, “You coming?”

“Just let her go, Eli. She'll take you.”

The climb was steep, though, and it was no easy thing staying on, saddleless, especially when the icy rain came, which it did. Eli flattened himself on the horse's wide back, one fist twisted into her mane, the other gripping the reins, as the mare scrambled for purchase in the loose rock. Then a flash of brilliant light poured through a rip in the sky and all was momentarily visible, including the spire of rock Eli remembered from before, the monument marking the edge of this broken ground. Beneath him the mare, as if jarred into some new understanding of her purpose, began running hard, all out, the earth flattening here, the ground stable again, and Eli hanging tight like a monkey on a circus horse.

Side by side with Ulysses in the raucous storm, Eli was aware again of his anger. What did his father think he was doing, chasing after this man? How did he imagine it was going to turn out? What did he expect, a clap on the shoulder? A clean conscience? And what would he tell the man if he ever found him?
I'm the one who shot your son—your whole family is dead because of me.
It was hard to imagine it moving toward anything but calamity. His father might as well be some figure out of the Bible, one of the mad prophets—except none of those men, touched as they were, would have been so foolish as to offer himself up to those he had wronged.

The rain was steady as they rode along a ridge between two creeks, dry before but flowing now, and when Ulysses eased close and tapped him on the shoulder, Eli refused to look over at him.

“Hold up, something's wrong,” his father said, and slid down off the mare. Eli reined in and turned to watch him lift the Appaloosa's left rear leg.

“What?”

“Busted a shoe back there. Split the hoof, too.” With his picket pin he pried off the broken shoe and tossed it away. “We'll have to walk,” he said.

“
You
will,” Eli told him.

The rain was modest but steady, and most of the lightning stayed off to the south, punishing the country down around the Yellowstone, line after crooked line, sometimes four or five strikes in the same instant, as if there were no end to what the sky could give or the earth receive, as if all the light in heaven were being channeled through a few small punctures in the clouds.

By the time they got back to camp the storm had passed, the eastern hills just visible beneath pinking clouds. The men were up but silent, shaking out wet blankets and packs, rubbing down their horses. There was a fire crackling and smoking, the damp wood hissing like a pile of snakes. Bayliss and Hornaday stood next to it, watching Ulysses and Eli come on.

“She ran off when the noise started, yanked her pin and lit out,” Ulysses said, nodding toward the Appaloosa. “Chased her three, four miles, at least. And then she threw a shoe on the way back, in loose rocks.”

“Thought it was
you
that run off on us,” Bayliss said.

“And what would I do that for?”

Bayliss said, “You got to admit they're nice horses. Top quality.” He aimed his stubbled chin at Ulysses, looking down along his weatherworn nose like a judge and rubbing his fat belly.

Ulysses looked right at him. “I never stole a thing in my life, and I'm too old to start up now.”

Hornaday blew into his hands. “We got a little anxious, that's all,” he said. His cowboy hat, which looked new yesterday, was dented and stained and pulled down low on his ears against the damp cold.

“Anxious, shit.” Bayliss turned and stalked off.

“The man's in a foul mood,” Hornaday said.

The storm gave way to full sun, and by eight o'clock, after a breakfast of corn mush and bacon from the fort, they were moving again, Ulysses on one of the extra saddle horses, a roan gelding this time, the Appaloosa mare tied off behind the mule team at the rear of the column. For an hour or so the night's rain rose as steam from the ground, and when it finally burned off, the day started warming. Eli was aware of Gumfield on the light wagon and the way he kept looking over, a sneer on his face. About noon Eli rode up alongside him.

“Have you got some kind of a problem?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“I was thinking you must have something to say, the way you keeping craning your neck at me. And of course being stuck on this wagon, and probably too shy to call out.”

“I call out when I want to call out,” Gumfield said.

“What's on your mind? I'm tired of your eyes.”

Ahead, Ulysses sat the roan gelding, waiting for Eli to catch up.

“Go on ahead,” Eli called to him.

Ulysses glanced from his son to the other boy and then clicked his tongue and went on. There was only one rider behind Eli, one of the privates from Fort Keogh, keeping pace with McAnna and the six-mule team, a good hundred yards back.

“What is it?” Eli asked. “You got a corncob stuck up your backside?”

“You think you're clever, don't you. The both of you.”

“Clever?”

“Trying to make off with the horses like that. Your animals didn't run off like you say. I woke up before the storm hit, and seen you leaving.”

“You've got eyes like an owl, then, seeing in the pitch dark.”

“Well I seen
somebody
down by the horses. And then you're gone this morning.”

“You saw somebody, but didn't get yourself up out of your bedroll and go check? That tells me you're either lazy or a chickenshit. One of the two.”

The young man glowered at him from his seat on the buckboard, his blunt nose, hanging mouth, and sharp teeth giving him the look of a rodent. Eli knew he might feel sorry for Gumfield except for the anger still burning in his stomach against his father and the entire mess.