The Homesman (17 page)

•   •   •

Then, that afternoon, while he had the reins, he stopped the wagon suddenly and stared. She followed his gaze and went cold all over. On a ridge, a quarter-mile to the north, a strange band of horsemen had stopped. She stared till her eyes watered. She counted eight men, Indians. Some were mounted on spotted ponies, some saddled, some bareback on blankets.

“What are they?” she asked under her breath, as though they could hear.

“Pawnee, prob'ly. Maybe some Otoe.”

They were a ragtag bunch. She could spot several blue coats and caps and rifles.

“Somewhere along the line,” said Briggs, “they've killed them some U.S. Cavalry.”

He clucked to the mules and the wagon moved on east. Up on the ridgeline the riders walked their horses east. Man and woman behind the span of mules heard a blat sound.

“What's that?” she asked.

“Bugle.”

Briggs pulled up the mules again. The horsemen reined up and waited.

“What do they want?” whispered Mary Bee.

“Whatever we've got. Trouble is, they don't know what that is. They've never seen a wagon like this. Could be goods inside, soldiers, anything.” He was thinking. “Stand up.”

She stood, he with her. From the compartment under their seat he took out her rifle and some shells and gave them to her. They sat down again. He started the wagon. The Indians started with them along the ridge, keeping distance but keeping pace. Briggs reined up. The Indians did likewise.

“They won't turn us loose,” said Briggs. “I count four rifles. If they think we're worth it and come on down here, we're dead.”

Again the bugle blatted. Mary Bee got gooseflesh. Indians were what she had most feared.

Briggs decided. “All right, I'll try to buy 'em off.” He jumped down, fished inside his cowcoat, and handed up to her his heavy Colt's repeater. “If they come, don't fool with the rifle. Get inside the wagon as fast as you can and shoot the women. In the head. Then shoot yourself.”

And before she could protest, he was off behind the wagon, and before she could stop him, he had untied Dorothy, led her out facing the Indians, let go of her bridle, and given her a whack, and she, good, obedient mare, was on the run to the Indians.

One hand over her mouth to keep from crying out, the other gripping the pistol, Mary Bee watched her go, and watched as one of the horsemen rode out, caught dear Dorothy by the bridle, and galloped her back up the ridge. When she was surrounded by milling animals and riders, two or three rifles were fired in the air as acknowledgment and the whole band went to the trot off the ridge and disappeared.

Briggs climbed up to the seat, put away rifle and revolver, took up the reins, and got the wagon moving. It was at least a mile before Mary Bee could trust herself to speak.

“I loved that mare,” she said.

Briggs was silent.

After another mile, she spoke again. “Oh, if I'd only done that to your horse. When you sat on him with a rope around your neck.”

Eventually she brought herself to ask, “What will they do with her?”

He shrugged. “Fine, fat mare like that? My guess is, eat 'er.”

•   •   •

She marked the days off in her mind. When they woke the morning of the nineteenth day out, it was sprinkling and Arabella Sours was gone. She had somehow managed in the night to untie her wrist from the wheel spoke. Her rag doll was gone, too.

Mary Bee said it was impossible, the girl hadn't taken a step by herself since she was first carried to the wagon.

Briggs said it was probably a damn waste of time but he'd look for her. He told Mary Bee to feed the women, load the wagon, and leave the mules unpicketed to graze. He saddled his hammerhead horse and rode in a wide circle till he found the girl's bootprints. These he followed away south.

The grass was wet, her prints deep. Rather than making a beeline, she had wandered around in the dark like a child, which she was, the little bitch, wasting his time, holding up the wagon. Even so, she could cover ground. He was by his guess a good two miles from the wagon when her prints stopped and bunched and were replaced by hoofprints, which turned straight south. Somebody had offered her a ride. She was up on a horse with somebody. Another mile and he made them out ahead through the sprinkle. He kept going and caught up, and they stopped and turned toward him.

The horse was a black-and-white calico gelding showing some rib. The man in the saddle was thirty or so and short, with a mane of oily hair, and wore a buckskin shirt and thigh-high Mexican boots. Behind him, one arm around him, the other holding her doll, was Arabella Sours.

“Morning,” said Briggs.

“Mornin',” said the man.

“Where you from, friend?” Briggs asked.

“Off a freight train down south a bit.”

“Big one?”

“You bet. Thirty wagons, six yoke. Two weeks out of Falls City, headin' for Salt Lake.”

“You a whacker?”

“That's right. Huntin' meat. You seen any? We eat one hell of a lot of meat.”

Briggs nodded. The freighter had a rifle in a scabbard. As he spoke, he eased open the front of his cowcoat. “Well,” he said, “I'm out looking for this young lady. She's lost.”

“She ain't now,” said the freighter.

“Well, let me tell you,” said Briggs. “I've got a frame wagon back there. Three weeks out of Loup on the way to the river. I'm carrying four crazy women. Taking them to Ioway to a church so's they can go home, back east. This young lady's one of 'em. Her name's Sours. She's married and had three little kids. They all took sick and died of the diphtheria in short order, and she lost her mind. She ran away from us last night. I'm her friend.”

“So'm I,” said the freighter. “Say, she'll have a passel of friends I get 'er back to the train.”

Briggs frowned. “You wouldn't want her. Not the way she is.”

The freighter grinned. “She can spread 'er legs, we ain't particular.” He thumbed backward. “Whyn't we leave it to her?” He turned his head slightly to address his passenger. “See here, you sweet thing—who'd you ruther go with, him or me?”

Arabella Sours rested her chin on his shoulder and stared over it at Briggs.

“There you be,” said the freighter. “She cottons to me already.”

Briggs regarded him soberly. He had a cast in one eye, which gave him a look of evil, but Briggs had no animus toward the man. On the contrary, he admired freighters. Many the train he and his dragoons had escorted west from Fort Kearney, riding in awe of what a bullwhacker could accomplish with a Wilson wagon and three tons of freight and six yoke of oxen and a fifteen-foot whip with a buckskin cracker. This one, now he had the girl, would be a hard cat to skin. To convince him to do what's right and proper, Briggs thought, I might even have to kill the son of a bitch. With an elbow he eased open still further the front of his coat.

“Friend,” he said, “I'm taking her home.”

“Not likely. She's mine now. Possession nine points of the law.”

“Sorry,” said Briggs. “I'll just have to have her.”

With one scoop of his arm, down and up, the freighter had his rifle out of its scabbard and pointed at Briggs. Then his good eye narrowed, the reason being that Briggs had materialized a Navy Colt's out of thin air and cocked it and pointed it at him. They recognized a standoff.

“Goddlemighty,” said the freighter.

Both men thought it over.

“Fight you for 'er,” offered the freighter. “Best man takes the prize—how's that?”

“I'm agreeable,” said Briggs.

“All right, I say pitch and we pitch these guns—how's that?”

“Anytime.”

“Pitch.”

Each man swung his arm, but neither let go of his weapon, with the result that rifle and revolver ended up in their original positions, pointed.

“Goddlemighty,” said the freighter.

“Say it again,” said Briggs.

“Pitch!”

Both men tossed guns this time. Briggs swung off his roan and was starting to free himself of his cowcoat when the freighter, unwilling to wait, vaulted out of the saddle and with a shout hurled himself at Briggs like a cannonball and bore him to the ground. It was rough-and-tumble fighting. They rolled around in rain and wet grass like a dog and a badger in a barrel. They cursed and spit blood and whistled air. They tried to bite ears, gouge eyes, crack skulls, break bones, knock teeth out of jaws, and knee stones. At one point Briggs rammed two fingers of one hand so far up the freighter's nostrils that the man's eyeballs bulged. But he was a bullwhacker, he had more muscle than Briggs, especially in his right arm, his whip arm. He had ten years on him, too, and Briggs was bothered by his coat, and in the end these told. Briggs's heart banged like the bass drum in a dragoon band. On top of him, the freighter finally got a chokehold on Briggs's neck, tight and tighter, and Briggs could not draw breath and was going limp and unconscious when suddenly there was a world-ending detonation, very like gunpowder going off in a dugout, and his neck was released and he sucked air and something warm and sticky flooded one side of his face. He opened an eye, only to look directly into another eye. It was sightless. Briggs lay under a dead man. He pushed the buckskin off and away from him and hauled himself up on an elbow.

What was on his face was brains. The whacker's head had exploded.

Arabella Sours stood over them, Colt's in one hand, doll in the other. She had put muzzle to the freighter's temple, pulled trigger, and blown half of his face and head away, a good deal of it onto Briggs.

He sat up and flipped the bone and slop from his physiognomy and cleaned it with a coatsleeve. He struggled to his feet, dizzied, heaved a breath or two, moved to the girl, held out his hand, and she gave him the repeater. He stowed it under his belt and made an effort to smile at her. With her youth and flaxen hair and heart-shaped face, she was quite a looker.

“Missus Sours,” he said, “I am very much obliged. I thank you.”

“Goodbye,” she said.

He went through the freighter's clothing, finding nothing of value except a double-edged bowie knife with a spear point. It was a wonder he, Briggs, hadn't got it in his gizzard. He hung the knife in its sheath on his own belt. Then he mounted the girl up on the calico, which seemed to be a reasonable animal, took her reins, and started off trailing horse and girl but stopped beside the freighter.

“You dumb son of a bitch,” he said to the corpse. “I told you she was crazy.”

Halfway to the wagon he could have kicked himself. He had forgotten the freighter's rifle, pitched into the grass. So be it.

To see as far over the prairie as possible, Cuddy stood on the wagon seat, shading her eyes against the morning sun. As far as he could see, she had failed to feed the women or load the wagon. When they came up she ran to Arabella Sours, helped her dismount, then flung her arms around the girl as though she were her own flesh and blood.

“Thank God, thank God,” she said, and then to Briggs, “Did you have to take an eternity?”

He was dismounting. “Cuddy,” he said, “you've lost a horse. Here's another one.”

She let go of the runaway and gave the black-and-white gelding a quick look-over. She made a face. “Where did you get this one?”

“Man let us have him.”

“I don't believe you. Why?”

“He was dead. Missus Sours shot him.”

“I don't believe you.”

•   •   •

“What can be done?”

“Why, put in new.”

Several nails had sprung from the sideboards of the wagon box. With hammer and nails Briggs had brought from her place, he replaced them, the work of a few minutes. She would never have thought to bring hammer and nails.

“What can we do?”

“Bind it and hope.”

This was another day, and he'd found a small crack in the night shaft of the wagon. If the shaft broke, they had no means of making a new. With the bowie knife he'd acquired, Briggs cut a long strip of the buffalo hide he'd taken from the Winnebago burial scaffold and bound the shaft as tightly as he could. She might have thought to try that. On the other hand, she might not. But then, she would not have had the buffalo hide.

“What happens if it comes off?”

“Wheel breaks up.”

“Mercy.”

“We need a blacksmith.”

“You can fix it.”

Briggs scowled at her. This was still another day, and the iron tire on the left rear wheel of the wagon had loosened. If it came off, and the wooden wheel disintegrated, they were helpless, high and dry. Buster Shaver would have wedged the tire or heated it red-hot and let it cool to a snug fit, but Briggs lacked a forge and tools. For the next hour he drove very slowly, sparing the tire and listening to it ring over stones, going out of his way to drive down into every draw.

“What're we looking for?”

“Water.”

At length he located a stream wide and deep enough. When the wagon was unloaded and the women out, with the mules he backed it into the water so that a good portion of the rear wheels was underwater.

“What'll that do?”

“Wood's dried and shrunk away from the tire. Soak those fellows good and they'll swell and we'll have us a tight fit again.”

During the night he waked her, and she put a shoulder to the wagon with him until they pushed it far enough into the stream to soak another section of the wheel. She was sleepy and surly.

“This is ridiculous.”

“Ride or walk.”

In the morning, when the wagon was on dry land and they headed out again, tire and wheel fit perfectly, without a wobble. Briggs hummed “Money Musk” on the seat beside her, but Mary Bee was darned if she would thank or congratulate him. She might not have brought hammer and nails, she conceded that, and probably couldn't have repaired the cracked shaft, but a tire, tightened to fit by whatever means, was scarcely one of the Seven Wonders of the World.