Of Grave Concern Part 24

I began to object, but his face told me I should let it drop.

"We'd better round up the horses," Calder said. "We'll find them in the low ground, down by the creek."

We found the horses. Calder suggested we make camp, because it was full night and we didn't want to be stumbling around in the dark. I agreed, but was uneasy about sleeping near the open cellar, where the cabin had been. We walked the horses onto the plain, a few hundred yards to the west, then staked the horses and shook out our bedrolls.

"No fire tonight," Calder said.

We stripped off our wet clothes and placed them out to dry, and we used our blankets as robes. I was disappointed that Calder, who had turned his back like a gentleman, did not once try to sneak a look before the blanket was around my shoulders. I did not really know why I was disappointed, because I had expected nothing to happen between us. Calder was not the type of man I had ever been attracted to. He seemed to care little for things like literature and art, and I found his history of vigilantism barbaric.

Our supper was some stale corn bread and wiry beef jerky Calder took from his saddlebag. As we ate, we made the sort of idle conversation expected in such situations.

"Wish we had a can of peaches," Calder said. "And a tin of sardines."

"Wouldn't mind the peaches," I said. "But not with sardines."

"I like oysters, too."

I made a gagging sound.

"Oysters and beer," he said. "Now, that's a meal."

I made a louder gagging sound.

"That's a mess on the floor about an hour after," I said.

"Well, what's your favorite?" he asked. "If you could only eat one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be?"

"This is what men talk about on the trail?" I asked.

"Yeah," Calder said. "Food, beer . . . women."

"In that order?"

"Depends on how long a man has been on the trail," Calder said. "So come now, what's your favorite meal?"

"Brisket," I said. "For dessert, pecan pie."

Then I realized we would soon be facing something quite grave, and I grew weary of the expected.

"Tell me about your wife."

"Why?"

"Because this might be the last chance you have to talk about her."

"This is not a chat I am comfortable having."

"Because I'm a woman?"

"That's part of it."

"Then pretend I'm your boon companion, Orion Wylde. We have come through h.e.l.l and high winds today and find ourselves hunkered down for the night on a dark plain beneath the Milky Way. Tomorrow we will face mortal danger, yet again. So tell me, as you would your best pal on the trail. What is your best memory of your wife?"

He gave a wistful smile.

"If somebody had asked me that question when she was still alive, I would have imagined that it would have been the marital relations I remembered best," Calder said. "I do, of course, but that's not my favorite memory of Sarah. As the years have pa.s.sed since she was killed, the memory that comes back to me, again and again, is something that I hardly noticed at the time. It was in the spring, and the boy had not yet turned one, when we were still on the ranch in Presidio County. Satisfied at the end of a long day of work, I was sitting in the shade of a cottonwood tree, with Johnnie on a blanket nearby. Sarah brought me a cup of water. She handed it to me and sat down on the blanket with the boy, touched my knee, and then she smiled-and the whole world seemed right."

He shook his head.

"I've never felt anything was right since," he said. "We were on the trail to Kansas a month later-and found ourselves in the middle of the Red River War."

"What happened?"

"At Sharp's Creek, in the Texas Panhandle, we came upon Quanah Parker and his band of about three hundred Indians," Calder said. "They spotted us, of course. It's hard to hide a wagon loaded with household goods. There was a wagon train in front of us, and they made a run for Adobe Walls, an outpost of buffalo hunters, just north of the Canadian. The train made it. We broke an axle. That was on June seventh."

He rubbed his eyes.

"While Parker a.s.saulted the Walls, a raiding party of Comanche found us and our broken wagon. There were about five of them, on a low ridge maybe three hundred yards away, watching us. We were going to ride away, to leave them the wagon and everything else, because that's what they wanted-they needed food. I had just boosted Sarah up into the saddle of one horse and handed her the boy, then turned to mount the other horse, when I heard Sarah make a pitiful sound. She pitched backward from the saddle before I heard the thunder of the rifle. It was an old fifty-caliber ball. Do you know how big that is? Half an inch in diameter. Bigger around than your thumb."

Calder took a breath.

"The bullet had pa.s.sed through both her and the boy. They were dead before they hit the ground."

"Oh, G.o.d," I said.

"What G.o.d?" Calder asked. "There was no G.o.d, at least not on Sharp's Creek that day."

"What did you do?"

"Before or after I tracked down and killed three of the war party?" Calder smiled. "That's how I became a bounty hunter. I discovered I have a talent for tracking down and killing people. The three Comanche were dead by nightfall. Then it was dark, and I went back and dug graves for Sarah and the boy, and built a big fire, using parts from the wagon. I kept guard over the bodies to keep the wolves away. Then at dawn I buried them, burned what was left of the wagon and the truck inside, and rode away."

"That's horrific."

"I went to Adobe Walls, where the hunters had driven away Parker with their buffalo rifles, because of their longer range. They packed up and headed home to Dodge City, and I went with them."

"How far are we from-"

"Those graves along Sharp's Creek?" Calder asked. "Sixty or seventy miles, I reckon. You know, it's funny. The Comanche believe that the dead travel the road to the west. I reckon they're right."

He paused.

"I've never told anybody that story," he said. "At least not all of it."

"Do you feel better?"

"No," he said. "There were still two Comanche that got away. Now it's your turn. No holding back. Pretend I'm one of your woman friends and we've just finished low tea or whatever it is that women do before they get down to hen talk. Tell me what you miss most about your lost man."

"That one's easy," I said. "His smell."

31.

In the morning, we pulled on our cold and wet clothes and rode along the creek in the direction of Ciudad Perdida. The water snaked through a series of rolling hills, and gradually the bluffs got steeper, and soon we were riding right down the middle of the shallow creek.

In an hour, we came upon the broken body of Pollux Adams tangled up in the branches of a willow tree. His neck was bent at an angle that was painful to look at.

"Wonder what it felt like," I mused.

"Which part?" Calder asked. "The flying or the dying?"

"The flying."

"Why don't you ask him?"

"Ghosts can't answer a direct question," I said. "Besides, I don't hear anything. His spirit isn't here. Back at the cabin, maybe."

We urged our horses on.

The banks along the river became steeper, and there began to appear square and rectangular holes here and there-windows and doorways leading to rooms filled with dirt and debris. At the back of my mind, I could hear murmuring voices, but I couldn't make out what they were saying.

"We're getting close," Calder said.

"Do you have a plan?"

"Nope," he said. "I was hoping you'd have one. After all, you're the one who talks to the dead."

I shrugged. "I can hear voices, but they're very old voices," I said. "I don't know what they're saying. They just sound sad, mostly."

We went another quarter of a mile, and the bluff dwellings became thicker along the north side of the creek. In some places, the walls had collapsed, revealing steps going down and rooms that were so big they hadn't been all filled in with dirt yet.

"How many people could have lived here?" I asked.

In my head, the voices had become a chorus of loss.

"Thousands," Calder said. "You've got fresh water here, you're protected from the worst of the winter wind, and there had to be plenty of buffalo and other game. It must not have been a bad life. You could raise a family here."

He was staring at the silver trunk of a cottonwood when he said it, and I knew he was thinking about when he had his own family, not so long ago in Presidio County.

"Come back, Jack."

"I'm here," he said, standing in the saddle and peering down the creek. "There's smoke there, through the trees. I think we are upon the whiskey trader's hideout."

"I see it. And it smells like they're roasting some kind of meat."

"Okay, here's the plan," Calder said decisively. "I am going to ride on in by myself and kill the sonuvab.i.t.c.h, and you're going to wait here. If I don't come back in an hour, you turn that Arabian around and head back toward the trail."

"That's the dumbest plan I ever heard, Jack. First off, we want to bring the whiskey trader back for trial. Second off, if you get in trouble, I'm no good to come in and get you out of it. So it's obvious that I'm the one who has to go in by myself, and you wait here. And if I don't come back soon, then you shoot your way in."

"I don't like it," Calder said. "Maybe we should try to smoke them out first."

"If we were after ordinary criminals, that might work," I said. "But Vanderslice is something there's not even a word for yet, and Malleus isn't even human. I don't think smoke is going to bother them."

"But if you walk in there first, they have you as a hostage."

"I'm only good as a hostage as long as I'm not willing to die," I said. "Jack, you know that I'm not expecting to come out of this alive. Unless I get my aura back, there's no point in my coming out alive. I'll just turn into something more and more ugly. You have to promise that if they threaten to kill me to get you to throw down your guns, that you won't do it. Shoot me if you have to, to prove the point."

"I won't shoot you."

"That's sweet, but not helpful."

Calder smiled.

"Jack," I said. "There's something I need to tell you."

"Well," he said, "me too. But you first."

"There's a thousand-dollar reward out for my capture, dead or alive, in Ohio. I conned a pork baron there out of a few thousand dollars and he squealed pretty loud. So I'm not Kate Bender, but there is a pretty price on my head. If I'm dead when this is over, you ought to ship my body back to Cincinnati and ask for the reward."

He looked a bit odd.

"Now, why the h.e.l.l would you tell me that?" he asked.

"I'd rather you get the money than County Attorney Sutton," I said. "Now, what is it you want to tell me?"

"It was nothing," he said.

"Nothing?"

"Just that when we get out of this, you should stop cussing in French. It disturbs people. That's all."

Calder dismounted and tied the reins of the horse to a bush. Then he checked his revolver and pulled the rifle from the saddle scabbard and cradled it in one arm. Finally he pulled a cigar from his vest pocket and stuck it in the corner of his mouth.

"All right," he said, "I'm ready. Let's kill us a demon."

I dismounted and handed Fatima's reins over to Calder. Then I closed my eyes, said a silent prayer to whomever or whatever good might listen, and began walking toward the smoke. I was nervous, but I walked deliberately. My head was high, and the breeze trailed the black ribbon behind my hat. They had to hear me coming, because my ankle-high shoes made an awful racket sc.r.a.ping against the gravel and sloshing in the water.

When I rounded a bend in the creek, I saw the hideout, a big complex of ancient rooms tucked into the bluff. The rooms and the stairs going down to them had been cleared of mud, and I could see shadows moving inside.

Outside, on the broad sandbar in front of the complex, stood Vanderslice surrounded by at least a dozen of the wild whackers I had seen before. Some of the whackers were dressed in rags, and others had no clothes at all. They were cl.u.s.tered around a hunk of browned meat being turned on a spit over a fire, and Vanderslice had the bone-handled skinning knife in his hand. He was carving off slices of meat and throwing them to the whackers, who snapped and snarled at one another.

"Down, boys," Vanderslice said. "There's plenty for everyone."

Also on the sandbar was a farm wagon, a buckboard, unhitched but with barrels of whiskey in the back. More barrels were on the sandbar, not far from the stairs leading down into the ancient rooms. Around the barrels were bottles of all shapes and sizes, ready to be filled and corked. An Indian woman and a boy of about twelve were working to fill the bottles, ladling whiskey from the barrels and pouring it into metal funnels in the necks of the bottles, and then stopping the bottles with a cork.