“Let’s go home, Daddy,” the daughter said, and laid her hand on her father’s wrist. Harmon flicked it away as if a bothersome fly and stood up.
“God damn the both of you,” he said.
Harmon opened the frock coat and freed the bowie knife from its leather sheath. The blade caught the late-afternoon sun, and for a moment it appeared the mountaineer held a glistening flame in his hand.
“Go get Sheriff McDowell,” Buchanan yelled toward the courthouse steps, but none of the men moved.
Pemberton unsheathed his knife as well. He felt the elk-bone handle against his palm, its roughness all the better for clasping. For a few moments he relished the knife’s balance and solidity, its blade, hilt, and handle precisely calibrated as the épées he’d fenced with at Princeton.
Buchanan made a move to step between the two men, but Pemberton waved him away with his free hand.
“This is best done now,” Pemberton said to Buchanan. He glanced at Serena. “Better to settle it now, right?”
“Yes,” Serena said. “Settle it now.”
Pemberton took a calculated step toward Harmon. The old man kept the knife head high and pointed toward the sky, and Pemberton knew he had done little fighting with a blade. Pemberton took a step closer and Harmon slashed the air between them. The man’s tobacco-yellowed teeth were clenched, the veins in his neck taut as guy wires. Pemberton kept his knife low and close to his side. He took another step forward and raised his left arm. The bowie knife swept forward but its arc stopped when Harmon’s forearm hit Pemberton’s. Harmon jerked down and the blade sliced Pemberton’s forearm. Pemberton took one final step, the blade flat as he slipped it inside Harmon’s coat and plunged half the blade’s length into the soft flesh above Harmon’s right hip bone. He grabbed Harmon’s shoulder with his free hand for leverage and quickly opened a thin smile across the mountaineer’s stomach. For a second there was no blood.
Harmon’s knife fell clattering onto the platform. The man placed both hands on his stomach and stepped back to the bench, slowly sat down. After a few moments he lifted his hands to see the damage, and his intestines spilled in gray ropes onto his lap. Harmon stared at them, studied the inner workings of his body as if for some further verification of his fate. He raised his head a last time, leaned it back against the depot’s graying boards. Pemberton watched the man’s eyes. The way they clouded over was no different than any other animal he’d watched die.
Serena stood beside him now.
“Your arm,” she said.
Pemberton saw that his poplin shirt was slashed below the elbow, the light blue cloth darkened by blood. Serena unclasped a silver cuff link and rolled up the shirtsleeve, examined the cut across his forearm.
“It won’t need any stitches,” Serena said. “Just a dressing and some iodine.”
Serena picked up the bowie knife and carried it over to Harmon’s daughter, who grasped her father by the shoulders as if the dead man might yet be revived. Tears flowed down the young woman’s face but she made no sound.
“Here,” Serena said, holding the knife by the blade. “By all rights it belongs to my husband. It’s a fine knife, and you can get a good price for it if you demand one. And I would,” she added. “Sell it, I mean, because that money will help when the child is born. It’s all you’ll ever get from my husband or me.”
Harmon’s daughter looked at her now, but she did not raise a hand to take the knife. Serena set it on the bench beside the younger woman and walked across the platform to stand beside her husband.
“Is my car here?” Pemberton asked Buchanan.
“Yes, but you and Mrs. Pemberton can take the train if you want to get there faster. Chaney can drive your car back.”
“No,” Pemberton said. “We’ll take the car.”
Pemberton turned to the baggage boy, who was staring at the blood pooling copiously around Harmon’s feet.
“Take that trunk and put them in my car. We’ll get the grips.”
“Don’t you think you’d better wait for Sheriff McDowell?” Buchanan asked.
“Why?” Pemberton said. “It was self-defense, a half dozen men will verify that.”
The boy followed Pemberton and his bride to the Packard, where they loaded the trunk and grips in the backseat.
Pemberton was turning the key when he saw McDowell coming up the sidewalk. The sheriff wore his Sunday finery, no badge or gun visible. Pemberton pressed the starter button on the floor, then released the hand brake and drove the Packard north into the higher mountains.
WHEN THEY GOT to the camp, a youth named Parker waited on the front steps. Beside him was a cardboard box, in it a bottle of wine, meat and bread and cheese for sandwiches. Parker retrieved the grips from the car and followed Pemberton and his bride onto the porch. Pemberton unlocked the door and nodded for the young man to enter first.
“I’d carry you over the threshold,” Pemberton said, “but for the arm.”
Serena smiled.
“Don’t worry, Pemberton. I can cross it myself.”
Serena stepped inside and Pemberton followed. She examined the light switch a moment as if doubtful electricity existed in such a place. Then she turned it on.
In the front room were two captain’s chairs set in front of the fireplace, off to the left a small kitchen with a stove and icebox. A table with four cane-bottom chairs stood in the corner by the front room’s one window. Serena nodded and walked down the hall, glanced at the bathroom before entering the back room. She turned on the bedside lamp and sat down on the wrought iron bed, tested the mattress’s firmness and seemed satisfied. Parker appeared at the doorway, a trunk that had formerly belonged to Pemberton’s father in his grasp.
“That one in the hall closet,” Pemberton said. “Put the other at the foot of the bed.”
The youth did as he was told and soon brought the second trunk, then the food and wine.
“Mr. Buchanan thought you might be needing something to eat,” Parker said.
“Put it in the icebox,” Pemberton said. “Then go get iodine and gauze from the caboose.”
The youth paused, his eyes on Pemberton’s blood-soaked sleeve.
“You wanting me to get Dr. Carlyle?”
“No,” Serena said. “I’ll dress it.”
WHEN THE BOY had delivered the iodine and the gauze, Serena sat on the bed and unbuttoned Pemberton’s shirt. She removed the knife and sheath wedged behind his belt buckle, took the knife from the sheath with her left hand, and examined the dried blood before placing it on the bed.
She opened the bottle of iodine.
“What was it like, killing someone with a knife?” she said.
“Like fencing, but more intimate.”
“You’ve never killed a man like that before?”
Serena gripped his arm harder, poured the auburn-colored liquid into the wound.
“No,” Pemberton said. “The other time was with fists and a beer stein. But they both had certain satisfactions.”
Once Serena finished wrapping the gauze around Pemberton’s wound, she picked up the knife and took it into the kitchen, wiped it clean in the basin with water, soap, and a washcloth. She dried the knife with a hand towel and returned to the back room. She set the knife and sheath on the bedside table.
“I’ll take a whetstone and sharpen the blade tomorrow,” Serena said. “Will you store it with your hunting equipment?”
“No,” Pemberton said. “I’ll keep it in the office, close at hand.”
Serena sat down in a ladder-back chair opposite the bed and pulled off her jodhpurs. She undressed, not looking at what she unfastened and let fall to the floor but directly at Pemberton. She took off her underclothing and stood before him. Her eyes had not left his the whole time. The women he’d known before Serena had been shy with their bodies, waiting for a room to darken or sheets to be pulled up, but that wasn’t Serena’s way.