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

“Is that the squaw you’re living with now?” Will asked.

She nodded.

“Who put those scars on your back? Who beat you, Catherine?”

Brother, she wrote.

“Your brother? I thought—”

She shook her head.

Husbin brother.

“Your brother-in-law, you mean? The one who...”

She nodded.

“And you left in the spring, is that it? You and the squaw both. The son of a bitch let you go?”

Killed. Big batil, she wrote. Dakotah.

“And so you came here.”

She nodded.

On the paper she wrote: It is a bern, you need not wurry .

“I wish I could do like you,” Gideon said. “Get myself drunk, push it out of my head that way.”

“It don’t help none,” Will said.

They were sitting high above the fort, the river at their backs, the Indian village below. This was the first of August. They had been at the fort for three days and three nights, but had not yet talked together about what had been waiting here when they arrived. There was a surprising chill on the early morning air now, and Will sat hunched inside his coat, his arms folded across his chest, his back against the rock ledge behind him.

“Just don’t seem like us no more,” Gideon said.

“I know.”

“Without her, I mean. It don’t seem like the family, Will.”

“Won’t never be the family no more, Gid,” he said. “Not the same family anyway.”

“I wish we could get them to move on,” Gideon said. “I have the feelin it ain’t good for them here. Too many damn Indians here. Remind them all the time of what happened. Don’t you think, Will?”

“I don’t know,” Will said.

“We could make it to Fort Hall before winter, couldn’t we?”

“I reckon. Be hard to get them goin, though. Pa’s already wrote to the government about buy-in a quarter section on the river. He’s plannin to squat there till he hears. Be a cabin goin up before you know it, Gid.”

“Will...” Gideon said, and hesitated. “I wouldn’t even mention this if I didn’t think they’d be safe here. But they’ve moved into that empty apartment now, and they’ll be comfortable there till a cabin gets built. Will, I don’t see no earthly purpose you and me could serve here, do you?”

“Pa’ll need help raisin the cabin.”

“Bobbo’s a man now.”

“Still and all...”

“Will, I don’t rightly know how to put this. But I think you and me has come to this late, and are apt to grieve longer. I know that ain’t the right way to say it. I cry all the time at night, Will. I lay on that buffalo robe and just cry into it. Cause I loved her a lot.”

“Yes,” Will said, and nodded.

“And I think we’re going to be hind’rin the others. I think they’ve made some kind of peace toward livin with it, Will. I ain’t done that yet, and I don’t think you have either.”

“I haven’t, no.”

“What I’m suggestin is that we ride on out ahead of them. Meet them next year in California, if they’re of a mind to come on after us.”

“I think once that cabin’s up, they’ll be staying here.”

“All the more reason for us to move on now. Do you want to stay here?”

“No, not particularly,” Will said, and thought immediately of Catherine and wondered why he was worrying about a whore. Seemed to him when you started doing that, why then it really was time to move on. He had to keep telling himself it was true she was a whore. He knew it was true, damn it, but he had to keep reminding himself anyway. Catherine Parrish — Woman of the Wind — whoever the hell — was a whore who’d lay down with anybody had the price. Sailor, soldier, Indian chief, throw her a few scraps of meat, she’d roll right over on her back for you. She was a whore, there were no two ways of looking at it. It was time to get out of here, move on west like Gideon was saying.

“Seems to me the Indians out there’ve got enough trouble finding what to eat, never mind botherin anybody on the way to Fort Hall.”

“Well, according to Orliac—”

“You been talking to him, too, huh?” Gideon said.

“I been asking him some questions.”

“What’d he say?”

“About what?”

“About whether—”

“Whether the Indians’tween here and Fort Hail’d be bad? He said yeah, they would.”

“He told me the same thing. You believe that?”

“Well, the ones here at Laramie seem all right, and lots of them are Sioux, ain’t they?”

“I don’t understand this whole damn Indian shit anyway,” Gideon said. “Do you understand it?”

“No, I don’t understand it,” Will said.

Didn’t understand the Indian shit, nor the white man shit either. Sons of bitches, served them right to get theirselves scalped afterward. Would’ve scalped them himself, he’d come across them. Bad enough they raped her, but then to cut out her tongue — Jesus! Fourteen years old, you’d think her father and brother’d have known better’n to leave her alone, think at least one of them would’ve stayed behind. Hadn’t been the trappers got her, would’ve been the Indians. Got her anyway , an Indian did, threw her on his horse, took her home to where he already had another wife. Shit, a goddamn squaw was what she’d been, never mind that Woman of the Wind shit.

From a distance he saw the rider approaching. Came out of the east, the sun behind him, rode out of it in a shimmer of haze. He was wearing a coonskin hat like Davy Crockett in pictures of him getting killed at the Alamo, buckskins like Dan’l Boone. He had long black hair and a black beard. Will wouldn’t have recognized him but for the Appaloosa he was riding, an altogether distinctive raindrop gelding, sixteen hands high, black leopard spots on...

He shoved himself off the rock ledge and began running down the slope of the hill, sliding, digging in his heels, arms flapping like he was a big bird. Gideon was right behind him. His hat fell off, but he didn’t stop to pick it up, kept racing along behind Will, helter-skelter through the Indian camp, dogs chasing them, nipping at their heels. On the Appaloosa, unaware, Lester Hackett rode leisurely toward the main gate of the fort.

They came puffing up behind the gelding, and he heard the yapping dogs an instant too late. Will was coming around one side of the horse, Gideon around the other. He tried to whip the horse forward, but Will grabbed him from the saddle and pulled him to the ground. The horse reared, wheeled in fright toward the wall of the fort. Crouched in the dust, Lester pulled a dagger from a legging sheath. He was coming out of his crouch to thrust it at Will when Gideon kicked him in the head from behind.

He sprawled flat in to the dirt.

Gideon stepped on his hand, grinding his heel into the back of it. Lester screamed and let go of the knife. Will was coming at him. He scrambled to his feet and ran for the horse. He almost had the rifle when Will grabbed him from behind, hand in the collar of the buckskin shirt. He fell over on his back in the dirt, and Gideon kicked him again, in the rib cage this time. He felt another kick; son of a bitch knew nothing but to fight with his feet. Will twisted a hand into the front of the buckskin shirt, pulled him off the ground. They both had him now, one on either side, and were running him toward the wall of the fort. Jesus, they were going to — Jesus — bang his head against the clay bricks like a battering ram. “Hey, listen,” he said, and suddenly they turned him, and stood him against the wall, and began punching him in the face and in the chest.

He was unconscious when they dragged him inside and told Orliac he was a horse thief.