The Outsider (35 page)

T
HE HERD OF CATTLE
bore down on Rachel’s son with hooves that could trample bones to dust. She screamed his name, although she knew he couldn’t hear her over the churning roar of those deadly hooves. She lunged for the cemetery gate, but her half boots got tangled in her skirts and she went sprawling.

Noah grabbed her arm, pulling her to her feet with his man’s hard strength. “Rachel—” She turned on him, snarling and clawing like some rabid thing, and he let her go.

She plunged down the hill faster and faster, all the while knowing she’d never get to her son in time. She could see his head jerking. His tongue, tangled up with his words, had tied his feet as well.

“Benjo!”

The shout hadn’t come from her, although her mouth was open and she was screaming, a silent scream that tore through her belly and seared her breath.

“Benjo!” the outsider shouted again, and he was there, running down the lane, running so fast his boots kicked up gouts of mud in his wake. And still he was too far away.

The earth shook. The thunder of the pounding hooves reverberated against Rachel’s ears. The outsider launched himself the last few feet, knocking the boy to the ground, covering him with his own body as the panicked cattle swarmed and crashed over them. Rachel could see nothing but motley red hides and slashing hooves and tossing horns and black bawling mouths in white faces and, once only, the flash of something pale that might have been his shirt, or his hand.

Rachel screamed, over and over, but the scream was trapped inside her throat, flattened the way her son was being flattened between the pounding hooves and the unforgiving earth. She would have run right into the path of the stampede if Noah hadn’t caught up with her. He wrapped his arm around her waist, holding her fast while she flailed and clawed at him and screamed her silent scream.

For just a moment the bellowing, trampling herd parted around the man and the boy, as rushing water breaks around a rock in a stream. They seemed nothing but a pile of clothing
in the mud of the road, but then the man stirred. He pushed himself up on his elbows and in his one good hand he had a pocket pistol. He fired point-blank into the crush of wild cattle that was once again bearing down on them.

The rumble and roar of the thudding hooves drowned out the shots. But Rachel saw one of the steers slew sideways and stumble to his knees. The front-runners in the herd parted to go around the flailing steer. More kept coming—until suddenly one reared up on his haunches, bellowing and tossing his horns, and fell in a tangle of slashing hooves.

The rest turned then, bolting in rolling-eyed terror. They crashed into Sol’s pretty whitewashed fence, smashing it to splinters. They exploded into the pasture, trampling the bunch of frenzied sheep in their path.

The long and silent scream that was tearing out Rachel’s throat must have ripped through her ears as well, for she could hear no sound. She watched the shattered pieces of whitewashed wood fly tumbling end over end across the blue sky, watched the cattle’s hooves churn over grass and bloody scraps of wool, watched the panicked ewes and lambs scatter and fall, their black mouths open wide. But she could hear no sound.

Hands were holding her, fingers digging into her arms. She twisted free and ran to her son through the silence of her scream.

She threw herself onto her knees beside him in the mud of the lane, ran her hands over him, over and over every inch of his body, over the solid and yet giving warmth of his living flesh.

“He’s all right.”

The words were like a slap against Rachel’s ears, breaking through the shroud of silence. She could hear bellowing
cattle now, bleating sheep, men shouting, someone praying. A woman’s sobs.

She looked at Johnny Cain. A gash below his eye showed the white of bone. His clothes were in tatters, exposing bruised and bleeding flesh. A deep cut in his hand, the hand that still held the fancy pearl-handled pocket pistol, dripped blood into the hoof-churned mud.

Rachel took that hand. She lifted his hand and brought it to her mouth. She rubbed her lips over his hand, tasting his blood, and the mud of her father’s lane, and the metal of his gun.

His hand trembled beneath her lips, and then he pulled it away from her.

His gaze narrowed on the bloodied pasture, on a single sweat-foamed horse coming toward them. Rachel realized that she had seen men on horseback with the cattle all along. Men who might have been trying to turn the cattle, if they had not been driving them to this destruction. Fergus Hunter’s men, who hated the Plain People and wanted them gone.

The outsider got slowly to his feet. Rachel stood as well, bringing Benjo with her. She looked across the ruined pasture. Her throat burned raw. Her skin felt as if it had been peeled off in strips.

Sheep carcasses lay in bloody mounds on the ripped and flattened grass. The thick stand of jack pines at the edge of the horseshoe-shaped meadow had finally blunted the cattle’s wild stampede. Men on horseback, Hunter men, had the herd bunched beneath the trees now, a churning, milling mass of bawling steers.

The sheep that weren’t dead bleated wildly. The cattle too were nervous, humping their tail ends, shaking their
heads, lowing. Yet they seemed less dangerous now, with their matted tails and swayed backs, their coarse motley hides and dark wet eyes. One cowboy was singing, a lilting song that was like a lullaby. Another of the men had left the herd and was trotting toward them.

“Take your boy,” Cain said, “and run on back to the house.” His voice was flat, quiet, and he stood with his hands loose at his sides, his head a little bent. But the air around him pulsed and thrummed.

Rachel grabbed Benjo’s arm. He pulled away from her. She grabbed him again. His throat was fisting over his words, his lips peeling back from his teeth. She dragged him back down the road.

Her father and her brothers and Noah all stood unmoving at the front of the yard, with the rest of the community behind them. But they would come no further, they would shout no warnings or challenges or curses, for it was the Plain way to meet threats from the outside world with silence and with acceptance.

“Nuh—nuh—nuh!”

Benjo dug his brogans in the mud, jerking her to a stop. They were still far from the yard, far from safety—although, as the outsider had once told her, there was no such place.

The rider reined his horse up in front of Cain in a slurry of wet mud. A man with a short pointed beard, a cheek bulging with tobacco chaw, and a big, long-barreled buffalo gun in his hand. A man who had once taken his rope and hanged a woman’s husband, a boy’s father, from the limb of a cottonwood tree.

A lone lamb bleated loudly, crying for its mother. A cloud floated across the sun, and shadows spread like a stain down the lane and across the bloodied pasture.

The man on horseback spewed a fat glob of tobacco spittle out the corner of his mouth. “My name’s Woodrow Wharton. You ever hear of me?”

“I can’t say that I have,” the outsider said in his easy drawl.

The man nestled the gun’s butt into his shoulder and cocked his head, sighting down the barrel. He had strange eyes, Rachel thought, nearly colorless, yet shimmering with light, like sun-struck ice. “They say you’re the genuine article, a dead shot.”

And she waited for the outsider to raise his own gun and kill him with it, kill this man who had hanged her husband and sent stampeding cattle to trample her son.

Woodrow Wharton’s lips lifted off his teeth like a snarling dog’s. “But then a man,” he said, “can’t be a dead shot with nothing but an empty boob gun to hand. Can he, Johnny Cain?”

One of the other cowboys had left the cattle and was riding hard toward them now, shouting something. It distracted the stock inspector for a moment, then his eyes burned brighter. “It’s a pure shame, it truly is, for me to have to put a hole in a man of your rep.”

Johnny Cain stared up into the gaping black maw of the gun, and he smiled. “Are you going to do it, sir, or is it your intention to bore me to death talking about it?”

The light faded from Woodrow Wharton’s eyes, and the hand that cradled the gun tightened its grip.

A harsh, strangled sound erupted from Benjo’s throat. He started to run toward the outsider. Rachel made a wild grab for him and then she was running herself, running past Benjo now. She tried to scream, to beg, to pray, but it felt as if her chest were being crushed.

Something flew past her eyes, like the blurred beat of a hummingbird’s wings.

The stock inspector’s horse leaped as if bee-stung, shrieking and rearing, just as the buffalo gun fired. The roar of it smacked against Rachel’s ears, and stopped her heart.

White smoke hazed the air. Her eyes filmed and burned. Then she saw him and he was still alive, his gaze riveted on Woodrow Wharton, who now knelt in the mud. Wharton no longer had his buffalo gun, but he was reaching for the revolver at his hip while trying to cling to the reins of his spooked horse.

A bullet whipcracked through the air. The frightened horse reared again, jerking loose the reins, and cantered off. Wharton fell back, his hands flailing at the air as he choked on the chaw he’d swallowed.

At first Rachel thought the outsider had somehow managed to fire his empty pistol after all. But Wharton’s watering, angry eyes were on the other Hunter man, the one who’d come riding at them hard, shouting. Smoke wisped from the gun in the cowboy’s hand.

Wharton choked and wheezed, his eyes streaming. “You’re starting to annoy the hell out of me, breed.”

The cowboy kept his revolver pointed at the stock inspector. The click of the hammer cocking sounded hugely loud. “That’s enough,” he said, his voice soft and dry.

Wharton shook his head hard, as if he weren’t hearing right. “You keep forgetting which side you’re on, boy, dithering like a virgin in her wedding bed when it comes to these Plain folk. You know your pa’d be the first to tell you we’re not gonna chouse them outta here by treating them kindly.”

“I said we’ve done enough.”

He wheeled his horse’s head around, turning his back on Wharton as if finished with him, careless of him. He walked his horse through the shredding smoke. He drew abreast of
the outsider and the two men exchanged a long look, and then he turned his gaze on Rachel.

She saw that he was closer to a boy than a man. A boy with long sleek black hair and a sharp bony face and a silk handkerchief, the color of wet blood, sagging from his brown throat.

Rachel had drawn Benjo up against her, one hand pressed to his heaving chest, the other smoothing his hair over and over. The young man stared down at them, his eyes dark and intense beneath the curled brim of his hat. He seemed to be absorbed with the movement of her hand stroking Benjo’s hair. His mouth tightened.

“Is he your son?” he said.

Rachel’s hand slid off Benjo’s head and gripped his shoulder so hard he flinched.

“I’m Quinten Hunter, the Baron’s . . . son.” The young man’s gaze fell away from them. He patted the neck of his sweating horse. “I’m sorry we spoiled your frolic.” He twisted sideways in the saddle, to look at the pasture where his cattle milled and bunched and tore at the tender spring grass. Where the bodies of trampled sheep were already drawing flies.

His Adam’s apple bobbed above his silk kerchief. His jaw pulled rigid. “They’re wild this time of year,” he said, “after the winter and all. We were doing some cutting out for branding when a sage hen flew up from her nest cackling and set them off.”

Rachel said nothing. She didn’t believe him. There was a bitterness in her mouth, hot and powdery, like the taste of ashes after a prairie fire.

“That’s it, Quin. Why don’t you just coddle them some more before the slaughtering.” Woodrow Wharton had gotten to his feet and he was now trying to knock the mud out
of his hat by slapping it against his thigh. He slammed the hat down on his head and clawed the mud out of his beard. His gaze sheared off the outsider and fastened on Rachel. His eyes glittered with hatred, and though Rachel knew little of outsider ways, she understood that this man had been humiliated, and would be even more dangerous now because of it.

“You woolly punchers aren’t wanted around here,” he said. “Maybe you ought to think about moving on.” He jerked around and limped off down the road to chase after his horse.

Fergus Hunter’s son watched him go, then he turned back to Rachel. He sucked hard on his lower lip, as if he had words he wanted to say that would hurt coming out. But in the end he kept the words to himself. The other Hunter men had started to haze the cattle, quieted now, out of the Miller pasture and back down the lane. Quinten Hunter tipped his hat and rode off to join them.

He left behind a breath-held quiet, as if the very heart of the earth had suddenly stopped beating. Yet it seemed to Rachel that she could still hear the gunshots ringing in her ears, that the rank stench of gunpowder still pinched her nose.

The bleat of a lamb broke the silence. The Plain People walked slowly down the road, praying as they came. Sol stopped before the shattered fence. He seemed unable to look beyond it to the blood-smeared pasture. Levi knelt beside a dead ewe. Fannie screamed and threw her apron over her head. She screamed again and then began to sob, and Sadie wrapped her arms about her, pulling her head against her breast.

Rachel knelt and began to wipe the mud off her son’s face with her apron. She made her eyes as wide as possible
to hold back the tears, but it didn’t work. She felt as if a fist were squeezing her heart.

She had nearly lost him. If she had lost him, she could not have borne it—not Benjo, her son, her heart, her life.

She gripped his face between her hands and pressed her lips hard to his forehead. She closed her eyes and saw churning hooves and tossing horns, and a man with a buffalo gun, a man who had hanged her husband and sent stampeding cattle after her son. She had waited for Johnny Cain to raise his pistol and kill that man. She had wanted Woodrow Wharton dead. With all her heart she had wanted him dead.

“M-Mem!” Benjo twisted away from her, swiping his cuff across his forehead, and then the outsider was there before them, and he was holding out his hand to Rachel’s son.