Evan Hunter - The Chisholms - A novel of the journey West

“How far’s Carthage from where we’re at now?”

“A hundred miles or thereabouts,” Will said.

“It’s more’n that,” Hadley said. “A good hun’ twenty at the least.”

“I can travel that in four, five days,” Will said.

“That’s if’n he’s headed for Carthage, which ain’t likely. Man tells you his ma’s a certain place, he ain’t about to steal no horse and head straight for that place.”

“Nobody says a horse thief’s got to be smart, Pa.”

“Nor necessarily dumb, neither. Lester didn’t strike me as no fool.”

“Either way, I’d have a fair chance of over-takin you in Independence.”

“How do you figure, son?”

“I’d be travelin faster, just me on horseback.”

“Still be a hard pull.”

“I’d like to go after him, Pa.”

“What’ll you do if you catch him?”

“Take him to the law.”

“Where?”

“In Carthage, if that’s where I find him.”

“Suppose you find him in the woods someplace, cookin his supper or skinnin a cat?”

“I’ll ride him to the nearest place there is law.”

“I don’t like you goin out alone after no horse thief.”

“I’ll go with him,” Gideon said.

“Leave me alone with Bobbo and the mules, huh? I’ll tell you, boys, I don’t like the whole idea. If there’s wagons still in Independence, we’ll have to leave when they do. And if there ain’t, we’ll have to move out straightway and try catchin up with them’s already gone. Suppose you ain’t there yet?”

“Then you just go ahead without us,” Will said. “We’ll catch up wherever.”

“I don’t know,” Hadley said, and shook his head.

“Man stole my horse,” Will said.

“I know what he done, damn it!”

Bonnie Sue wished they’d ride out after Lester and bring him right back here, where she’d declare her love for him and save his life. At the same time, she wished they’d ride out after him and hang him on the spot instead, in punishment not for having stolen Will’s horse but only for having deserted her. Her cheeks still burned with the memory of their ardor, burned with anger, too, and with what she supposed was shame — was she only imagining Annabel’s intense scrutiny? Or was her fornication as evident as the mist on the meadow beyond, where the picketed mules and horses stood sniffing the morning air and pawing the ground?

“Pa?” Will said.

Hadley nodded.

“We can go?” Gideon said.

“I reckon,” Hadley said, but he looked troubled.

Minerva hugged her sons close.

“Be careful,” she said.

“He ain’t even armed, Ma,” Gideon said. “Lost all his hardware in that poker game.”

“So he said. But it’s my experience a horse thief’ll lie about anything, includin his own name. You don’t know for sure he ain’t got one of them little pistols tucked in his boot.”

“We’ll watch out for one of them little pistols,” Will said, and grinned.

“Don’t be so smart,” Minerva said.

“Ma, you needn’t worry. There’s two of us.”

“Just be careful,” she said, and kissed them both, and then climbed up onto the wagon seat Only thing that worried her was Lester. She knew her sons could take care of themselves anywhere, and Illinois was as civilized a place as anyone had a right to expect. It was Lester bothered her. Will’s raindrop gelding was branded and earmarked both; there was no way Lester could disprove their claim to the animal once they caught him. He was a man threatened with the noose, and that made him dangerous. She watched silently as her sons studied the tracks again, and mounted their horses. Will waved to her and turned the horse he was riding, Bobbo’s black mare. From astride his piebald, Gideon called, “See you in Independence!” and then the two rode off toward the north. She watched them through the dust raised by the horses’ hoofs, watched till she could no longer see anything but dust, and then not even that.

From inside the wagon, Bobbo said, “One of the rifles is gone, too, Pa.”

“He’s armed then,” Minerva said, almost to herself.

Sitting beside her on the wagon seat, Bonnie Sue burst into tears. Minerva looked at her in surprise, and then put her arm around her and hugged her close. In a little while, Hadley cracked his whip over the backs of the mules, and yelled “Ha-ya!” and the wagon lurched forward with a jolt toward St. Louis in the distance, and Independence far beyond.

Bonnie Sue was still crying.

He had to find his father.

This damn Independence wasn’t so big that a man couldn’t locate another man when he needed to tell him something. Had to find him fast, too, before the opportunity drifted away like early morning mist back home. Pretty much like home, this town was. Bigger and more sprawling, no mountains, of course, but the same easy mix of houses and business establishments, same grid pattern of streets and cross streets. There were sturdy brick buildings everywhere Bobbo walked, chimneys smokeless now in June, steeples and steps, doorways arched in stonework — a right proper town except that just outside its doorstep was the wilderness. What all the charts called Indian Territory. Or unorganized Territory. Meaning there was nothing between here and the Pacific Ocean but a few trading posts and lots of—

“You’ve killed my snake, y’bloody bastard!”

The voice was his father’s, and it was coming from inside a saloon dark as a dungeon. Bobbo pushed open the doors to the place and saw first his father standing at the long bar, and then the bartender with a bloodstained meat cleaver in his fist. Hadley’s rattlesnake was wiggling on the bartop, its body in three separate pieces.

“Come bringin no damn poison snake in here ,” the bartender said. He was a squat solid man in striped shirtsleeves and apron, a thick handlebar mustache under his nose and curling downward over his mouth. “Now pick up that shitty quiverin thing,” he said, “and get it the hell out of here.”

On the bartop, the snake’s head lay motionless, but the other two severed parts were still wiggling and jumping. Hadley looked down at all three parts, and then reached across the bar and seized the bartender by the front of his shirt. The bartender’s apron was flecked with the rattler’s blood, the bloodstained cleaver was still in his hand. As Bobbo moved quickly forward, the bartender raised the cleaver over his head, and Bobbo’s heart lurched into his throat.

Hadley said, “What!”

There was indignation enough in his voice to have stopped a stampeding herd of cattle, no less a mere barkeep with a cleaver in his fist Bobbo knew that voice well. It had dogged him all the years of his youth; he had heard it razoring across mountaintops and meadows, gullies and gulches. It was the voice of Hadley Chisholm himself, whose ancestors had fought widcairns in Ireland, that could cut you dead to the ground with the icy edge of it, sharper than the blade on the cleaver in the bartender’s hand. That cleaver hesitated somewhere behind the man’s ear now. His eyes went wide, the brows shooting up in arcs that echoed the arc of his handlebar mustache.

“You dare to raise a weapon?” Hadley asked.

The cleaver still hung there undecided. The bartender felt he’d rightly and justly slain a wild creature placed on his bartop for no reason he could fathom. He’d reflexively reached under the bar for the cleaver and snick-snack , there went the head, and there went the body neatly cut in two. He wasn’t in the habit of having his shirt front gathered in a stranger’s hand. He was, in fact, widely reputed for his vile disposition and the meanness with which he wielded the cleaver he kept under the bar. But he held back the cleaver now, and stared into Hadley’s indignant blue eyes, and hesitated. He wasn’t afraid of the man, he certainly wasn’t afraid of him — but there was something told him to belay separating his head from his body as he’d done the snake’s.