The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (60 page)

“Get off that horse,” said Jennie. “Oh, your poor arm.”

When he slid down, she hung around his neck and cried and cried. My father said later it was the pent-up floodwaters, from wondering, and worrying, and holding it in to herself for so long. We felt awful. I could see my father swiping his hatband again, which was his usual sign of commotion, and even Uncle Ned, who was a perfect stranger to Coulter, worked his Adam’s apple up and down.

“This is some better,” said Coulter, running his hand over her shiny black hair. “But it isn’t all that bad. I’ll own up that arm got in my way. I do everything better with my right, and the other was jealous. I’m glad to get shut of it.”

“Your poor arm,” Jennie kept saying, and touched the sleeve carefully.

We went back to the shop and locked up, then Mrs. Kissel sailed into a breakfast that set some new marks around there. Even Uncle Ned said he’d never seen anything like it, and he’d eaten her cooking for near onto five months. She had corn cakes and eggs and beefsteak and biscuits and liver and coffee and milk and turnip greens along with beef chittlings and sweetbreads and a few other oddities of that sort. Besides bacon and beans, of course. She said Coulter was about forty pounds underweight, and evidently she hoped to pull him up to scratch in one heave, if she could get his co-operation.

But the truth is, he didn’t eat much. He’d been deadly sick, and told us about it while we drank our coffee. After we left, he and Bridger had stalked around behind Brother Muller and his Danites, going soft-footed in the rain, and surprising them had killed five outright. Brother Muller was one of the first down. But the remainder made a fight, which scrabbled back and forth over the rocks, and before they had finished—and they
were
finished, every last one of them—Bridger was creased on the scalp and Coulter
shot through the upper left arm, the ball smashing the bone and everything around it. Bridger eliminated the surviving Danite by overhauling him, pulling him off his horse, and knifing him through the throat. Then he knotted a shirt around Coulter’s arm, loosing now and then, and packed him home to the Fort.

“Jim and his squaws sliced her off near the shoulder,” said Coulter, not really seeming to feel bad about it, “but rot set in and I was back-flat for a spell. If you ask me, they did a job of nursing.”

My father shook his head. “Coulter, you’ve given up your arm in the cause of this party. There’s no way on earth we can repay you.”

“Oh, it might be worked out,” said Coulter, looking at Jennie with a grin, but she turned red and then got up and left in a huff.

We went over our adventures, while a number of people pounded on the shop for service. For once, we let them pound.

Within a week, Coulter was looking fit again, gaining weight and taking on color with the good food and rest. We noticed that he’d changed in other ways, too. Whatever it was that had bothered him was gone; he seemed, as my father put it, at peace with himself at last.

The Kissels went on operating the shop, while Uncle Ned and my father, using the mules, worked up a very fair trade packing supplies out to miners. As he mended, Coulter helped with one thing and the other, and Todd and I did the chores.

We were prospering, much better than mining, but one afternoon Coulter and I went into Vernon to get a fresh jug of spring water from a tap owner that bought our meat. When we got inside his place, toward four o’clock of an October day that had a nice blue crackle to it, there was sitting at a table not only the mangy pair from Missouri that had swindled us, but John and Shep besides. They looked prosperous, and meaner than Hades, but John’s eyes suggested that if he wasn’t outright insane by now, he was very close to it. They were drinking grog. The woman didn’t look sickly at all now, but was spruced up and being very friendly
with Shep, which didn’t appear to put her husband in a better humor.

Except for two elderly whiskerandos standing at the bar, they were the only people in the place.

I sung out, “Lookee there!” and they scrambled back out of their chairs, turning one over with a crash. Coulter stood his ground and watched Shep, with what sounded like a deep breath of satisfaction.

“Those other two are the ones—” I cried, but he interrupted in a perfectly easy voice, “Yes, yes, never mind that right now.”

After his first scare, Shep began to get his bluster back, and seeing Coulter’s empty sleeve, he said, very bold, “Well, if Buck ain’t lost a flipper. Don’t tell us you bumped into somebody face to face.”

Coulter said, “Come out in the street, Shep.”

The two miners at the bar turned around very slow, as if they hadn’t heard but were changing their position naturally. They kept talking to one another in a low tone, as if nothing was going on. I knew them slightly; they were rough, hard cases, though old, and very good men at heart.

“Why, Buck,” said Shep, but his voice wasn’t quite so brash as before, “was you aiming to tackle a grizzly with one fist? I never knowed you to be forward with your old chums. What do you hear from Sandy?”

“I’m done about that,” said Coulter. “You’re chose. Are you walking out, or do I drag you by the scruff?”

Suddenly I saw John gradually drawing a pistol out of his waist, the same one, I reckon, he used to shoot Todd’s mother and father with, a long time ago back there at St. Genevieve.

When it was almost out, being unobserved by anyone but me, I thought, there was head-numbing explosion and a revolver bullet splintered through the floor right at his feet. It didn’t miss his left toe a half inch. It was fired by one of the miners standing at the bar, without the gun ever being drawn from its holster, the lead passing out of the open end. Neither did the two men appear
to interrupt their conversation, except that the one who fired the shot said, in a friendly enough tone, “Best fight fair, particular when a stranger’s rowing with one oar. It’s hostile, like.”

I thought the knotted-up veins on John’s forehead were going to bust, but he lowered his hand, as slowly as he’d raised it, and Shep said, stepping forward a pace, “You want your teeth knocked out and stomped down your gullet, Buck?”

Right then a customer stuck his head in the door, but hauled it back out again fast. He didn’t waste a second. I could hear him hollering “Fight! fight!” as he ran up the street.

“You always was scared of me, wasn’t you, Shep? You never figured I’d fight, long as you had that about my brother.”

One of the miners turned to the other and observed, “I’ve seed a number of sizable men that wouldn’t toe-up when chose. You take many of them, and they run more to mouth than fist.”

Shep looked uncertain before, but this was something he could handle. He walked up to the miner, who weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds in his boots, and said, “You looking for a bareknuckle fuss with me, brother?”

“I wouldn’t claim no priority,” said the miner, undisturbed. “That gentleman yonder with the absent meat-hook’s first in line. I’d admire to take the leavings, though.”

“He means me,” said Coulter, whirling Shep around and smacking him across one fat red cheek with the back of his open hand.

The bartender, a red-haired Irishman named Costello, hadn’t moved a muscle up to this, but now he sailed around with a blackthorn club in his hand, and there was a scramble. This bartender had a prejudice; he didn’t allow fighting in his tap—he said it wasn’t “genteel.” I found myself outside: fifty or sixty other men were there, too, and in the center I saw Coulter and Shep standing face to face, white and ready.

I didn’t know what to do. First, I was afraid Coulter might get himself killed, having only one arm, but I wanted to run back and tell the others so we could collar the swindlers as well. Anyhow, I made up my mind too late; the fight was on.

Shep stalked him around in a circle, hands working like Matlock’s; and his little yellow-black eyes squinted up like a coyote’s you’ve cornered. He was afraid of Coulter, all right, but he’d done a heap of bully-brawling, no doubt about that, and he held all the cards here. He was an ox, almost like Mr. Kissel, and in spite of flabbiness around his middle, he was in generally hard shape. What’s more, he was strong as a mule. But he was slow, and it cost him trouble.

Coulter leaped in, struck him smartly with his right fist, and stepped back before either of those hooking arms could reach him. But there was something wrong; without a left arm, he hadn’t anywhere near as much leverage. He wasn’t quite on balance. The blow lacked the sting that had buckled Matlock’s knees.

Shep shook his head, then finding himself damaged but working, commenced to take on confidence.

“It’s coming, Bucky boy, it’s coming,” he said between split, bloody lips. “You’d better say your prayers, you Kentucky mudcat bastard.”

Coulter hit him again in the face, then once in the neck and ducked under a roundhouse swing. And when Shep charged in, stung reckless, he kicked him in the stomach with both feet, falling on his back in the dirt. But as he scrambled up, Shep was on him, working both hamlike arms. He hooked him first one side of the face, and then the other, and barely missed closing him in a bear’s hug.

I heard several men cry, “Shame!” and “Unfair!—only one arm like that,” but Shep, grinning now, rushed in like a bull, ready for the kill and willing to take any punishment involved to make it.

Anybody playing Coulter for done in a fight was running an awful risk, whether one arm or two, and I wasn’t surprised to see him twist out of the way, slip beside Shep, and send him sprawling with a hip-and-arm heave. And before he got up, Coulter kicked him flush in the face with the heel of his boot.

But he couldn’t win, and everybody knew it. It was only a matter of time. Nose mashed to a pulp, both eyes blacked, and his mouth
split. Shep commenced to punish him with those roundhouse blows, first the left and then the right, knocking him down to his knees, down flat, down to his knees again, and finally picking him up so as to knock him down some more. Altogether, he did it seventeen or eighteen times. I couldn’t see how a human could stand up under such treatment.

I have no way to tell whether Coulter could have beaten him with one arm if he hadn’t been sick. But right now he was in no shape for fighting, not of this sort. Even so, he made a friend of every man there.

The muttering and protesting grew louder and louder until Shep, having his man all but finished, clubbed him down once more and then flopped on top, pulling his head back with both hands locked across the forehead.

“Now, you brother-killing skunk, we’ll see if we can’t take your ugly knob off by the roots.”

It was all I could stand. They lay there, ragged and bloody in the dust, directly at my feet, and I jumped on Shep’s back and clawed like a wildcat for his eyes.

Maybe the crowd was only waiting for a signal like this, because as many as a dozen leaped in to snatch me up and haul Shep off, too.

I kicked off my shoes and clipped out down the road. It was just after five; there were a few miners weaving around in the path, but I made good time. When our shop came in view, I could see them staring at me, and when I stumbled up, fighting for breath, Jennie ran out.

“What’s the matter? Where’s Buck? What’s happened?!”

Uncle Ned and Todd had just got in, and before I gasped out my story, Jennie was running back up the street, holding her skirts high in both hands.

Uncle Ned was chewing tobacco, and as I told what happened, he kept on chewing in the same rhythm, only he took out his rifle and gave it a good inspection, then put on his wolfskin cap.

Todd said, “You promised, Uncle Ned.”

“Fair’s fair, as I remarked previous. I don’t withdraw dangled goodies from children.”

“Wait a minute,” cried my father. “Hold on. What are you fellows planning to do?”

I guess they didn’t hear, for a minute later, they got up, taking their rifles, and started up the street, not in any special hurry, with the rest of us trailing after and crying out to stop, that they’d be killed.

Neither one turned around. I was right behind, and could hear them talking.

Uncle Ned said:

“It’s uncommon odd how things turn up when you least expect them.”

“Uncle Ned, do you favor a belly shot or a head shot with a half-swung-up rifle?”

“It’s a matter of taste, son. I’ve had a power of satisfaction out of head shots, myself. They make a nice spatter. When the person’s did you a disservice, that is.”

“Hark, now. You said you’d take the thin man and leave the fat one to me. The one I ear-whistled from the wagon.”

“I don’t want you to feel bad about that, son,” said Uncle Ned, kindly. “A rolling-wagon shot is about the toughest kind there is. Seems like a person can’t take picks, no matter which way he sprawls.”

They sounded as if they were on their way to a turkey-shoot. It was the cold-bloodedest talk I ever heard. And otherwise they were the mildest pair I ever met. The boy, too. When you came down to it, there was no positive proof that both of them wouldn’t be killed within the next ten minutes. Because nothing we could do, no amount of pleading, or arguing from the rear ranks, appeared to faze them. They kept right on walking, up the middle of the street.

Seeing them, people fell away to the sides and began to whisper to each other behind their hands. And heads took to popping out of store doors and windows. There wasn’t any way to mistake
the nature of this dead-march, but it was perfectly easy and quiet, too, if you know what I mean.

The buzz of conversation ran right on up the street, which was fuller, now, on the sides, more of the miners having come in after work. What they left was a wide lane, no interference, no loud talk, only a slammed window or a dog barking to break the silence, clear up to Costello’s tap.

Across the way, Coulter was being washed at a horse trough by some men, and Costello stood on the steps of his place, looking worried. From inside, when we got near, I could hear the sound of loud laughter and the clinking of glasses—the buzzards were celebrating—and Shep’s bull’s voice rising over everything. But when Costello turned to go inside, the noise broke off sharply. There wasn’t a sound either there or up and down the street. It was awesome.