The Outsider (23 page)

“You there, boy. What’re you doing straying so far from home?”

The boy opened his mouth. He opened his mouth wide as if he would scream, but nothing came out of it but strange sucking noises.

Woodrow Wharton sent a thick stream of tobacco juice splatting into the grass and smiled. It was a wolf’s smile, Quinten thought. Nothing behind it but teeth.

“Let’s go ahead and string him up, Quin. Have ourselves a necktie sociable.”

Quinten’s gelding edged sideways again, jingling his bit chains. Quinten looked up into the empty pines. He heard only the sough of the wind, and the boy’s harsh breathing. The boy’s throat and jaw muscles were working hard, like bellows.

“Do you know this is Circle H land you’re on, boy?”

The boy fisted his hands behind his back as if he needed to brace himself. “Muh!” he shouted with such force that Quinten saw his spit spray through the air. “Muh—muh—muh—”

“He thinks he’s a woolly monster,” Wharton said. His eyes were getting that crazed look again. “Are you a woolly monster, boy? Baaaa! Baaa!”

“Muh—m-my friend . . . huh—huh—he’ll sh-shoot you all s-stone d-d-dead!”

The boy whirled and broke into an all-out run, scrambling back up the slope of the coulee toward the stand of jack pines. He ran awkwardly, with his coat flapping and his thin arms splayed out from his sides.

Quinten thrust his gelding into the path of Wharton’s
horse and leaned over, grabbing the shank of the bit to keep him from bolting after the boy.

Wharton stared at him, still wearing that wild smile. “Scare him, Quin. I was only going to scare him.”

Quinten looked up into the trees where the boy had disappeared. He shook his head. “You scared him. Half out of what little wits he seems to have.”

Wharton wiped the wet tobacco flakes off the ends of his goatee. “I always knew Injun blood made a man’s hide go red. I didn’t know it also turned his guts yellow.”

He dug his spurs cruelly into his horse, jerking its head around hard, and sending it back down the coulee in a spray of mud and chewed-up grass.

Quinten stared after him, frowning. It wasn’t the insult; his hide might be red, but it had also grown thick over the years. Rather, it was Woodrow Wharton himself, and the wild unpredictability Quinten had seen in those spit-colored eyes. He’d known animals with eyes like that, eyes that couldn’t be tamed, but he’d never seen them on a man before.

He wondered what had motivated the Baron to take on a man like Woodrow Wharton at the Circle H. No real hand would ever dude himself up in Wild West clothes, like chaps with silver conchas and fifty-dollar boots so skintight the man’s feet were starting to curl like a ram’s horns. No real ranch hand packed a pair of pearl-handled Colts rigged up for a quick draw.

Quinten felt his jaw tighten. Sometime during the months he’d been gone, his father had hired on a cowboy who seemed to know damn-all about cows. A hand more handy with a gun than a branding iron.

“Damn maggot-brained fool,” Quinten swore aloud, then shook his head at himself. He hadn’t been home a
day and already he was letting his father rub him raw, like a poorly made saddle.

Quinten rode his horse up the coulee through the jack pines. If there had been someone else with the boy, hiding up in these trees, they were both long gone now. He went on climbing the slope of the butte. His horse shouldered through the timber, and he had to duck under low swags of pine branches or lose his hat. From time to time he caught the cold whiff of an old snowbank.

He broke through the tree line. The way was rugged here with shale and rocks thrusting out of the red earth. This was wild, tangled country. He looked up, squinting against the glare of the sun. The sky was so wide and empty and blue it hurt to look at it.

He stopped when he got to the shoulder of the high bluff. Up here, the wind was blowing strong, and he had to anchor down his hat with the bonnet strings. Yet the wind brought with it its own silence, he thought, until you began to wonder whether it was the wind you were hearing or the beating of your heart.

He straightened his legs to stand up in the stirrups, stretching out his body, stretching out his mind.

God, it felt so
good
to be home.

Sometimes it seemed that he could feel his very blood and breath in the big sky, wide as forever, in the ragged mountains and open prairie. Feel it so deep that it hurt, a sweet, sad seizing of the soul.

For almost two years he’d tried to please his father by attending college back in Chicago. He’d been shut up indoors all day, hunched over books in the winter, slaving in the heat and stink of the stockyards during the summer. He thought of Chicago, with its soot-grimed buildings that blocked out the sky and sun, its belching smokestacks and
the blood stink of the slaughterhouses always thick in the air. To Quinten’s mind that place had a jump on hell when it came to creating the miseries in a man.

But at least he’d discovered one thing of importance during what he’d come to think of as his time of exile. He was only nineteen years old, but already he knew what he wanted for the rest of his life.

He wanted that life to be here, on the Circle H. He wanted to wake up every morning and look out to see the mountains propping up the big sky. He wanted to ride the miles of prairie and not see another living thing, except maybe for a jackrabbit or a sage chicken, and his own shadow moving ahead of him on the thick buffalo grass. He wanted to raise cattle and horses and a family on this land, where you could ride and breathe and feel alive.

Below him a hawk had been riding the wind. The hawk banked suddenly now and flew straight off, like a shot arrow, into the deep and empty sky. From up here Quinten could almost convince himself he was seeing the Miawa as it had once been, back when it was new, before it had been claimed and tamed. Back when there were no towns, but only sagebrush and the wind. Back when this high mountain valley had been dark with buffalo and his mother’s people had hunted the woods and fished the streams, and lived in tipis that left behind no mark on the land but a white circle of bare earth in the tall grass.

Now his mother’s people lived on a reservation and bought their food from a general store with government scrip. And the only signs of buffalo were the bones left scattered among the rocks and sage and tumbleweed.

His father, who had been born near the coal mines of Glasgow, had once told him of a Scottish epitaph that went: “Here lies all of him that would die.” Quinten didn’t think
often about dying—he was too young to worry much over the inevitability of death. But he did understand that epitaph. He wanted the heart and the guts and the spirit that were Quinten Hunter to live on in this land forever.

QUINTEN HUNTER PULLED HIS
galloping horse up hard beneath the ranch gate.

So maybe it wasn’t the prettiest place on earth, he thought. The signboard above his head was pocked with bullet holes. The cottonwoods that lined the road shivered naked in the wind. The grass was gray, the corrals were muddy, and the windmill was missing a sail. But the sight of the big white house, with its gables and dormer windows and stately spooled-rail galleries, still made him smile.

It was good to be home.

He rubbed his lathered horse dry with a gunnysack, and gave him an extra ration of oats. On the way to the big house, he walked by some of the cowhands, who were playing a game of pitch on the bunkhouse porch. He called out a good evening to those he knew, and nodded to those he didn’t.

He paused on the gallery, sitting down on a bent willow rocker long enough to unbuckle his spurs so he wouldn’t leave marks on the parquet floor. He used the iron foot scraper next to the door to clean the mud and stable muck off the soles of his boots.

Once inside, he paused again in front of a hall stand made of stag antlers to hook his hat on one of the points. He slicked down his shoulder-length black hair and rubbed the worst of the spring mud off his face with his bandanna.

From the winter parlor he could hear the sounds of two people talking. Or rather he could hear his father shouting
in a voice roughened by thousands of cigars, and the cool, murmuring response of his father’s wife.

“I built up this spread when there was damn-all out here but Indians and coyotes. You’re daft if you think I’ll brook the death of it.”

His father’s wife said something then, too low for Quinten to hear.

His father roared back in his gruff Scottish brogue. “We made a bargain, you and I, and for fourteen miserable years I’ve kept to my end of it. So you just go on keeping to yours, you bloody-minded bitch, or by God I’ll—”

His father must have cut himself off then, for Quinten heard nothing more. Yet he held his breath, waiting. He knew the bargain his father spoke of had something to do with him, to do with that time when he had been brought to the ranch after his mother had died when he was a boy of five. For a lady born and bred as Ailsa Hunter was, to agree to take in the breed son of her husband’s squaw, there had to have been one hell of a bargain struck. A Devil’s bargain.

Quinten started when his father appeared suddenly in the parlor doorway. He stood spread-legged with his thumbs in his breast pockets, anger sharpening the prominent bones of his face.

The Baron had a face that was all blades: a bowie knife of a nose; a jaw shaped like an ax, as if he used it to chop his way through life; a mouth that curved sharp and down like a sickle. He was a bit bandy-legged after years of straddling a horse. The skin of his face and hands had been leathered by the Montana wind and the sweat of hard work, the grindstone life of ranching. His hair grew thick off his broad, flat forehead, white and flowing.

As usual, the Baron had emerged from his wife’s presence in a riled mood. He looked his son over now with eyes
that were hard and black, staring down at him as if sighting a rifle. “Where the hell’ve you been?”

“Out riding.”

“I was led to believe that you were going to start in on taming those wild broncs for the spring roundup. Now you tell me you spent the time ‘out riding,’ ” he said, with a mocking lilt on the last words. “You’re a lazy scalawag, boy, and if you weren’t my kin, I’d fire your bloody arse.”

“When did that detail ever stop you before?” Quinten said with a wry half-smile.

The Baron had thrown him off the Circle H a half dozen times over the years, only to go after him and bring him back. And Quinten had let himself be brought back, because of the ranch that he loved with his every breath and heartbeat. And because of the woman, his father’s wife, listening in the other room.

Quinten had to jerk his head back as his father’s stiff finger stabbed at his face. “If you think, just because I’m letting you get away with quitting on college, that I’ll tolerate you going back to the blanket, living up there on the res with your mother’s people, to squat outside a bloody tipi, wearing a breechclout and tippling firewater like some no-good breed—”

“Not
like
some breed, Baron. I am a breed.”

“What you are is my son. And, by damn, you’ll stay here on the ranch and you’ll work for your bloody keep, and you’ll start by taking the buck out of those broncs tomorrow. Maybe getting your tail pounded proper will nail some sense into your thick head.”

“Yessir,” Quinten said. But he was talking to his father’s disappearing back.

No sound came from the parlor, but Quinten knew she had heard. And that she would now be expecting him. He
almost kept on going down the hall and into the kitchen to wash up, which was what he had been headed to do. It would serve her right, for once, for him to do the thing she did not expect of him . . . except that he knew it would serve her nothing. He could come to her, or walk away, and she would care not at all.

He went to her because he couldn’t help himself.

He stopped just inside the door, and he let the old feelings come and settle deep, the yearning and raw longing that gripped his heart whenever he looked at her.

The room smelled of the lemon oil that had been polished into the gleaming satinwood wainscoting. The walls were papered in a pale green silk stripe to complement the thick forest green velvet curtains and cream satin upholstered sofa and chairs. Dried flowers were arranged in a spray of white in a gilded vase on the mantel. The parlor was elegant and beautiful and cold, and a perfect setting for the woman within it.

Her hair was the blue black of a crow’s plumage, her skin a pale translucent white. She had violet eyes. Not dark blue, but the pure deep purple of hothouse violets.

Elegant and beautiful and cold.

She had been born Ailsa MacTier, the tenth daughter of a Scottish lowland squire. The family might have been titmouse poor, but they were gentry. The centuries-old kind of gentry where the bloodline was as cherished, and as fragile, as old crystal. It was a mystery to Quinten what had ever drawn her to this wild, crude place to marry a coal miner’s son. He thought it was probably a mystery to her by now as well.

She was cleaning the milk glass globes of the parlor’s brass chandelier. The arms of her gray silk dress were protected by a pair of white linen dust sleeves, which showed not a mark of soot or dirt. Even doing this mundane task,
she moved with the fluid straight-backed grace of a princess at a ball.