Ralph Compton - Blood and Gold

“You’re quite the rake, aren’t you, Mr. Hannah?” Lila asked, frosting over like a corral post in winter.

I had no answer for that, so I retreated into confusion, mumbling: “I’ll go see to the livestock.”

As I walked away, I felt Lila’s eyes burning into my back. She was very young, little more than a girl, yet she had an assurance and poise that constantly kept me off balance. Sometimes it’s difficult to understand a woman, and this was one of those times.

Was Lila jealous of Sally Coleman?

I shook my head, dismissing the thought. Lila was pretty enough to have her pick of men. Why would she be interested in a forty-a-month puncher like me who couldn’t even grow a man’s mustache? It just didn’t make any sense.

Besides, I would wed Sally very soon. Sally, born and bred on the range, knew and accepted the narrow limitations of the puncher’s life, so the whole thing just wasn’t worth thinking about.

But as I stepped to the wagon, the face I kept seeing in my mind’s eye was Lila’s, not Sally’s, and that bothered me considerable.

Ned Tryon was sound asleep in the back of the wagon, his mouth open, trickling saliva, the whiskey fumes vile on his breath. I let him stay where he was and unhitched the oxen.

I didn’t have much experience with oxen, but when I turned them loose, the big animals immediately started to graze, so I figured they weren’t much bothered by the rain and I let them be.

The black I led into the barn, which was small but dry and warm. I unsaddled him and rubbed him down with a piece of sacking. The droppings told me there had been three horses there, no doubt taken by the Apaches, and the saddles were gone, too.

There was no hay but I found a sack of oats and I poured a generous amount into a bucket.

After that, I spent some time pulling up grass for the horse and laid an armful in front of him and only then did I go back to the wagon for Ned.

The man was still unconscious and I half dragged, half carried him into the cabin. I dropped him, none too gently, onto one of the bunks, then turned my attention to Lila.

Her clothes hung on a string the outlaws had tied from one of the cabin walls to the other, probably for this very purpose, and Lila sat at the table, a blanket drawn around her.

I figured she’d planned to do this all along, but had made all that fuss about being naked just to see me suffer.

She rose from the table and said: “I’ll take Pa’s boots off.”

Lila stepped to the bunk and pulled off one of her pa’s boots, then the other. But not before the blanket slipped from her shoulders and I caught a fleeting glimpse of a small, firm breast, creamy white, tipped with pink.

My breath catching in my throat, blood rising to my cheeks, I suddenly felt shabby and awkward in my faded blue shirt and down-at-the-heel boots and stepped quickly to the stove, muttering over my shoulder: “I’ll see about lighting a fire.”

“Yes, you do that, Dusty.”

The husky tone of Lila’s voice surprised me and made me turn. She was standing there, the blanket once again firmly in place, smiling at me, a bemused expression on her face I couldn’t read.

“Getting cold in here,” I said, the breath once again balling up in my throat. Had she let the blanket slip on purpose?

No, that couldn’t be. And yet . . .

“We have some bacon and flour in the wagon,” Lila said, interrupting my thoughts, and her smile was gone.

I nodded. “I’ll get it after I get the fire going.”

“What about the Apaches?”

“I figure they’ve moved on,” I replied. “I’ll keep the fire small and trust to the rain and wind to scatter the smoke.”

“You’re so wise, Dusty,” Lila said, smiling again, just a faint tugging at the corners of her beautiful mouth.

“I try to be,” I said, trying to regain control of the situation. “Now there’s got to be wood around here somewheres.”

There was a small stack of oak and cottonwood branches beside the stove and with them some pages torn from a woman’s corset catalog.

I fed paper and wood into the stove and within a few minutes had a fair blaze growing. Thankfully the wood was very dry and didn’t send up much smoke.

I’d told Lila that the Apaches were gone, but with Indians there were no certainties, just guesses. They were mighty notional by times and might just decide to ride back this way.

I filled the coffeepot at the creek and later fried up some bacon, adding thin strips of my own salt pork. I made a batch of pan bread, stirring flour and salt into the fat, then dished up the meal.

Lila crossed the room and tried to wake up her pa, but the man just thrashed and groaned in his stupor, and waved her away.

She came back to the table and I poured coffee for us both, my hand unsteady on the pot, the scented, woman closeness of her and the sight of her dark loveliness filling my reeling brain like a growing thing.

After we ate, Lila talked and I listened. Mostly, she spun sugarcoated dreams about how she and her pa would make their farm a success and how he would give up his drinking.

“All he needs is another chance in life, Dusty,” she said, touching the back of my hand with her fingertips, her slender arm exposed to the shoulder. “We tried to make it on one hardscrabble farm after another, but it just never seemed to work out for us. Then, after Ma died, Pa started to drink heavier and everything fell apart quicker than usual.”

Her eyes searched mine, pleading for something I knew I could not give. “You think we can make it this time, don’t you, Dusty?”

I went part of the way, unwilling to surrender more. “Lila, that’s hard country down on the Brazos. Maybe you can make it, maybe you can’t. But believe me, it won’t be easy.”

The girl nodded, reading more into what I’d said than was intended. “Thank you, Dusty. I needed to hear that, especially from you.”

She touched my hand, and again I found it hard to breathe.

Later, after Lila was bedded down on one of the bunks, I took up my Winchester and scouted around outside.

The rain had stopped for now. A waning moon rode high in the sky, hiding her face behind a hazy halo of silver, dark lilac and pale blue, and the air smelled of grass and the tang of distant thunder. The shadowed hills were still as things asleep and the fragile night silence crowded around me like broken glass.

I climbed to the ridge of the hogback and looked down at the trail below, seeing nothing but a wall of darkness.

Then I heard a muffled step behind me.

Chapter 11

I turned as the Apache came at me fast as a panther, a knife upraised in his right fist. As he closed I swung the butt of the Winchester, trying for his head. The Indian saw it coming, dodged at the last moment and the rifle hit only the hard muscle of his left shoulder. The impact was enough to stagger the man, but he recovered quickly and jumped at me again.

Around us were only jagged rock and the dark canopy of the sky and I realized with a sickening certainty that soon, very soon, a man must die here tonight, and maybe two.

I grappled with the Apache, my left hand on his wrist, desperately keeping his knife away from me. Now, our feet shuffling on the wet grass, I felt his wiry strength and it scared me. This man was taller than me and he was as strong, and maybe stronger, than I was.

We moved very close to each other, the warrior’s belly pushed against my own. He was bending me backward with the sheer, brute strength of his arms and shoulders, and his merciless black eyes glinted in triumph.

I let myself fall on my back and the Apache landed on top of me. His knife hand broke free and he raised it to strike. I twisted my body and arched upward, my bared teeth lunging for his throat. I bit down hard on the left side of his neck and tasted smoky blood as his knife came down. The blade raked along the outside of my shoulder, burning like a red-hot iron, and I heaved with all my strength to my right, throwing the Apache off me.