The Outsider (72 page)

His mother’s people believed that a man couldn’t own the land, only his own life. But he felt a possessive love for the Circle H that ran gut deep. If he couldn’t own the land, then he would allow it to own him. In that at least he was every bit his father’s son.

A
COYOTE HOWLED A LAST
sad lament to the deepening night.

Benjo Yoder shivered, and then looked to see if the other boy had noticed. But Mose was busy turning the grouse that was sizzling on a stick over the campfire, while at the same time trying to wave the billowing smoke away with his hat. The wind was blowing wild tonight, swirling and gusting, and they kept having to shift around the fire.

The sheep were bunching, the ewes calling to their lambs and the young ones answering. The woollies liked to huddle during the night, protecting themselves from the darkness, Benjo supposed. But then people were much the same, in
that they liked to sit around a campfire, putting its warmth and light between them and the dark.

He felt proud that he’d been sent up alone to do the camp tending for Mose this week. This wasn’t the first summer he’d been given the responsibility, he’d done it once or twice before, and he thought he was probably getting big enough to handle a few weeks of shepherding, too. But his mem would have none of that yet. Criminy, she got nervous enough when all he had to do was drive the wagon back and forth between the sheep camp and the farm.

Benjo watched while Mose opened a couple of cans of deviled ham with a knife and emptied them into a pair of battered metal dishes for their dogs. MacDuff dug right in, but Mose’s dog, being female, approached her food with a bit more daintiness, even sniffing it at first. Mose’s dog, Lady, had a sorrel hide that was going gray in patches so that she looked like she had a bad case of the mange. She was getting real old, was Lady. Too stiff-legged to do the herding much longer. Benjo had overheard Deacon Noah threatening to have her put down come the end of summer.

That thought led to thoughts about coyotes being put down, and gave him a tight feeling in his belly. He told himself for maybe the thousandth time that he had done the right thing, the manly thing. She was a sheep killer. She had been teaching her pups how to be sheep killers. He had done the right thing.

“Duh—did that b-bear ever come back for its kuh—kill?” Benjo asked the other boy, wanting mostly to get his mind off that coyote. Yesterday, at the preaching, he’d heard Mose’s father tell how a bear had killed one of the yearling wethers. Bears liked meat better after it had spoiled some, so they would often bring down a sheep and leave it lying for a while.

“Nope, she hasn’t yet,” Mose answered. He patted the
stock of the Winchester rifle he kept handy by his side. “But when she does, you can bet I’m ready for her.” He cocked a grin at the wide waistband of Benjo’s broadfalls. “So, how about you, David the giant killer? You got that sling of yours all loaded up and ready to fire?”

Benjo grinned right back at him, saying nothing. The fact was, he did have the socket of his sling filled with a stone. His sling was the reason why they were having a big fat juicy grouse for supper.

The grouse had turned a nice golden color, dripping fat that flared in the flames and made a delicious sizzling. Benjo leaned over to punch at the fire with a stick, sending red sparks spiraling into the blue of the night.

He thought at first it was the sparks that set the sheep off. Even in their calmer moments, the woollies went through life in a near panic. They could look at something they’d seen a hundred times and suddenly spook. So when they spooked this time, he thought it must have been the sparks that set them off.

Until the men with no heads came riding at them from out of the black night.

MACDUFF LET OUT A
night-splitting woof, but it was Lady who charged, snarling and growling, at the galloping phantoms. There was a shot, then Lady howled and went down in a spray of blood and red-gray fur.

“Bastards!” Mose cried, reaching for his Winchester.

But it was Benjo who screamed as the other boy’s arm exploded into a spurt of blood and bony splinters.

The men on horseback spread out over the clearing, going after the frenzied sheep. Mose lay on the ground, writhing and crying in pain, cradling his shattered arm. The
most Benjo had been able to do was stand up. All of him, his muscles and bones, had locked up with fear.

He understood why he’d thought the men were headless. He hadn’t seen their faces because they had gunnysacks pulled over their heads, with holes cut in them for their eyes. But although their faces were hidden, the Circle H brands were plain on their horses.

And they had clubs in their hands.

They rode among the bleating, milling sheep, smashing those clubs into woolly skulls. MacDuff, instinctively protecting the herd, went after a blaze-faced sorrel, leaping up at the rider’s leg with his snarling teeth.

The man on the sorrel twisted in the saddle and swung his club, catching MacDuff with a terrible
thwack.
The dog went flying backward, yelping and smacking hard into the ground. He lay whimpering, with his hind leg twisted crooked, splintered bone ends sticking up through blood-wet fur.

Bastards!
Benjo screamed inside his head. He pulled out his loaded sling. He gripped the two ends of the rawhide cords in his left hand and whipped it hard above his head. He let go of one cord sharply, and the rock whizzed through the night air.

He’d aimed for the red glint of reflected firelight he saw in the slit of the mask, the man’s eye, and the rock struck true. The man shrieked, throwing up his hands, grabbing for his face, blood spilling out from between his fingers.

Eye for an eye! Eye for an eye!
Benjo screamed in his head.

Another man came galloping up to the campfire. He had a torch in his hand, which he set alight. He held the torch high as he spurred his horse, jerking its head around by the reins.

“No, Pa! Don’t!” cried the man on the blaze-faced sorrel.
He tried to follow after the man with the torch, but he reeled dizzily in his saddle, nearly falling. Where the eye slit in the gunnysack mask had been, there was only blood.

The man with the torch was laughing. He leaned over and set the blazing wood to the back of a fat ewe. The ewe turned into a bawling wild-eyed torch herself and ran, frenzied, into the middle of the flock, touching off the entire herd in one blazing lanolin-fed fireball.

The masked men rode around the clearing, clubbing all the bawling, woolly heads they could find, sending others with their fleece in flames off into the pines. And then they seemed suddenly to ride back into the black night, from where they had come.

Only one man stayed behind. He hadn’t been doing any sheep killing. He’d just sat there on his horse and watched, his cocked shotgun in his hand.

Now he sent his horse in a slow walk toward the campfire and Benjo watched him come, the sling hanging empty from his own hand.

The burning sheep had set the pines and the buffalo grass on fire. Benjo could feel the heat of it blazing at his back. The fire had lit up the whole clearing with an eerie red glow. And the world was full of terrible noise: the crackle of flames, Mose’s cries, MacDuff’s whimpers, the screaming bleats of the sheep, the roar of the wind.

The man brought his horse right up to Benjo. He had his shotgun lying across his lap, his finger on the trigger. He leaned over, and the mask made him seem as if he were looking at Benjo with a blinkless stare. “You know a Johnny Cain, boy?”

Benjo’s chest was crushed with fear. He was sure he’d never get the words out, that all of his words were dammed
forever in his throat. But they surprised him by coming out with barely a hitch. “H-he’s my father.”

Benjo couldn’t see the man’s smile, but he could feel it, like a cold draft from behind the gunnysack. “You tell him that Jarvis Kennedy don’t give a shit whether he’s gotten religion or not. You tell him that I’m getting plumb wore out waiting for him to rediscover his guts. He can find me in the Gilded Cage. Anytime tomorrow, I’ll be there.”

He turned his horse’s head around and started off, but then he came back. “You tell him, too, that if he don’t show, then I’ll be coming to wherever he’s at.” The man laughed. “You tell him I am his Armageddon.”

MOSE’S BLOOD SEEMED TO BE
everywhere, lying in puddles on the grass, smeared over the pine straw, splattered in black wet streaks all over his clothes.

Benjo knelt beside him, and Mose looked up, wild-eyed with pain and fear. “Benjo . . . I need to get to a doctor, bad.”

Benjo nodded his head extra hard so that Mose would be sure to see. There was no way he was ever getting any more words out of his throat. His throat felt like it had a noose tightened around it. A hangman’s noose.

He didn’t realize he was crying until he brushed the hair out of his face and his hand came away wet. He took off his coat and wrapped Mose’s arm up with it, wrapped it up tight. He didn’t want to think of what that arm was like.

He went to check on MacDuff next. The dog’s leg was broken in two places and the bone had cut through his hide. He was whimpering, soft little yelps of pain. His eyes showed white around the edges.

They had to get off the mountain. Not only because they
needed to get to a doctor, but because the whole mountain was going up in flames. The fire was blazing wildly through the drought-struck pines, licking hungrily through the dry grass. And the wind that came roaring out of the night was whipping at it, feeding it.

Somehow he got both Mose and MacDuff into the wagon bed, although he couldn’t have explained afterward where he found the strength. The sky rained cinders, blistering their skin. Thick roiling clouds of black smoke rolled overhead, burning their throats raw. Benjo drove the wagon, lurching, over the trail, with the fire crackling and clawing at their backs.

He looked back once. It was as if all of heaven had gone up in flames.

RACHEL STOOD IN THE
yard watching as her son drove their wagon across the corduroy bridge and turned into the yard, hours before she expected him.