Chance shook his head. “No,” he said. “No.”
Grawson’s shovel-steel eyes glowed with pleasure. “Shoot,” he said.
Chance noticed that Grawson’s face seemed strangely quiet. His gaze was level. The face did not move. The movement was gone.
Chance shook his head. The pistol wavered in his grasp. “I can’t,” he said.
Grawson’s left eye suddenly jerked shut and opened and his face seemed contorted with rage.
“You’re a murderer,” he ‘said. “Shoot.” Grawson’s fists clenched. “You killed once-you’re a killer-shoot.”
Chance backed away.
Grawson advanced a step.
“I can’t,” said Chance.
With a cry of rage, almost a berserk fury, the huge body of Lester Grawson lunged at Chance, those great hands opened like the clawed paws of the grizzly he was, but Chance shoved the barrel of the pistol sharply, deeply into the diaphragm of the lunging figure, and Grawson doubled up in agony, his hands moving out to clutch at nothing. With the butt of the pistol Chance struck Grawson across the back of the neck, and then, carefully, holding the dazed man by the collar, he struck the man again, a dangerous blow, but with a physician’s skill, not to open nor injure the skull, and the body of Lester Grawson lay on the stones of the alley.
Chance stood over the man, his own head a terrifying whirl of images. Chance stood over the man, scared. He held the muzzle of the pistol to the back of the man’s neck, where the bullet would sever the vertebrae, but he did not fire, he could not, nor did he want to.
Once before he had stood thus, on a field north of Charleston, and had known that he would run, and that somehow he would never escape.
Once again his hand moved, and his finger touched the trigger, but gently, and the weapon did not fire.
Chance replaced the weapon in his bag, and turned away.
Grawson would come after him.
Once before he had run.
His choice seemed to him, standing in the alley, that hot night in a New York summer, to kill or to flee, and he had known what he would do.
He looked down at Grawson. “Why did you want me to kill you?” he asked. But the mute form lay like a mound under its coat, inert on the bricks of the alley. Chance bent down and felt the man’s pulse. Grawson was strong.
Chance stood up again. “I am not a killer,” he told himself. And he said it to himself very simply, and was a little surprised, and found that he had no reason to disbelieve it. And for the first time in five years, Edward Chance, though he was ready to run, and would, stood as straight as a man can.
He saw a milk cart trundling by down the street, looking yellow in the light of the street lamp.
He turned away and walked down the alley.
It was Sunday morning.
Three hours later, Edward Chance, unshaven, hungry, his coat torn, a bit of blood matted in his hair on the left side of his head, crouched in the straw in the corner of a boxcar of the New York Central Railroad and watched New York slide past the open wooden door.
He heard church bells.
He knew little more than the fact that the train was heading west.
What does it matter, he thought. What does it matter?
Chapter Three
One month had passed since the Sunday morning when Kicking Bear had first come to Standing Rock, the same morning that Edward Chance, a physician of New York City, some half a continent away, had fled from an ex-lawman of South Carolina, a man named Lester Grawson who pursued him in connection with the killing of Frank Grawson, his brother.
Lucia Turner, a slender, blue-eyed birch of a woman, her pale face flaked red by the Dakota wind, her blondish hair faded in the prairie sun, trudged from her soddy to the one-room, plank school where she would begin another day’s teaching.
She carried a broom handle and swept it through the grass in front of her where she could not see her step. That way the rattler, if any should lie in her path, would strike at the stick.
At least that was what someone had said. She had forgotten who. She hoped that he was right.
There were plenty of rattlers on Standing Rock, as elsewhere on the prairie. William Buckhorn, one of her students, a Hunkpapa boy, not much taller than her broom handle, perhaps nine years old, killed them and cut the rattles off for her. She had had a coffee mug filled with them, before Aunt Zita had discovered them and thrown them out into the prairie. She had spent an hour looking for them, in case young William might wonder where they had gone, and she had recovered many. She now kept them in an empty baking-powder can behind the soddy.
Lucia paused on the top of the long, sloping hill that lay between the soddy she shared with Aunt Zita and the school.
It was desolate, the land, and the sky was huge and gray, and the wind was always blowing.
She could see the school from where she stood, the broomstick in her hand, the sandy wind cutting her face.
Two years ago it had been painted white, but now the paint had chipped, and the wind had pitted the walls with sand, and the sun and the rain, and the winter and the heat of the summer, had buckled and warped the wood. Rags and mud had been wedged into the cracks. On the north side, an abandoned wagon box had been leaned against the wall for extra protection. The one window, on the south, had been broken by a rock, and tar paper covered the hole.
Lucia missed Saint Louis, and the stone house that her father had built, and the calls of the young men on Sunday afternoon.
The school was cold in the winter, and it would be winter soon. The grass was already high and brown, and the wind more sharp, and the day shorter.
The squat, secondhand stove in the building, which Lucia tended herself, did not furnish much heat. There was no coal for fuel, and very little wood. Some of the boys would twist grass for her or gather cow chips. When the stove was lit it smoked, and the cow chips, predictably, smelled. Still it was better than the cold, the simple cold.
In the winter Lucia would add petticoats, wrap a blanket around her high shoes, and knees, and tie a heavy scarf over her head.
At least in the winter one didn’t have to worry about the rattlesnakes.
Lucia feared snakes, dreadfully.
But she thought it kind of young William Buckhom to think of her, and the baking-powder can filled with rattles was one of the few things that she cared for on this forsaken prairie.
Lucia, sweeping the broomstick before her, started down the hill toward the building.
Yes, she said to herself, it has seen its better days. And, she said, I am only twenty-two, and I look like I was thirty, and the prairie does that to a girl, a woman, and there are no young men here, and I am lonely, so lonely.
In what was supposed to be the play yard of the school Lucia had arranged for two swings, but the timbers from which they should have hung were as lonely as Hunkpapa burial poles. The ropes of the swings had been stolen the first night, two years ago, presumably to be applied to some more utilitarian purpose.
It was morning, a few minutes before the time to ring the bell. The children would be waiting in the draw behind the school. They would come when the bell rang. They had no wish to jeopardize their family’s share in the rations, distributed every second Saturday.
There was a single teeter-totter in the play yard, but it had not been popular with the students.
It had been pointed out to Lucia by several of them that it was poorly built, for there was a leg in the middle rather than one at both ends, and of a consequence it was unstable, and perhaps dangerous.
Nonsense, had said Lucia, and had attempted to demonstrate its use, which was not easy alone.
But then she had placed two of the younger boys on the other end and had bounced up and down several times, grimly. It is fun, had said Lucia feeling very silly. But it does not go anywhere, had said William Buckhorn. It just stays where it is.