He is not much of a dreamer. When he’s awake he’s awake, and when he sleeps he sleeps. But this night on the desert, collapsed over the back of the galloping black mare, he dreams he is traveling in a stagecoach with a beautiful woman in black who is twice his size. They are passing through dangerous country full of Indians and bandits, and she is telling him a story about a brave, resourceful, and adventurous youth on a perilous journey into a demonic wasteland. He was honest and strong, possessed of a preponderance of muscular development and animal spirits, she tells him, with square iron-cast shoulders and limbs like bars of steel. He tries to picture this, while she turns, showing him the black beauty spot in her cheek, to peer wistfully out the stagecoach window as though the beautiful youth might be out there somewhere. The stagecoach is being attacked, but somehow they are only spectators. He had golden curly hair and a manly brow, she goes on softly, turning back to him, and he had sparkling blue eyes, which were tender and soulful in repose, but firm and determined under excitement. His aquiline nose was as straight as an arrow and as if chiseled from the finest Parian marble, and he had a square jaw and cleft chin and a perfect set of even white teeth, which gleamed when he smiled like rows of lustrous pearls. She smiles faintly as though to demonstrate this pearly luster, though in fact her mouth is full of shadows. He did not take advantage of his superior strength, nor use it without considerable provocation, and then only in a fair competition. And he was always chivalrous toward women. They are completely surrounded now by Indians or bandits or both and the ride in the rocking stagecoach is getting rougher, the wooden wheels slamming against the ruts and stones and bouncing high and coming down again with a rattling jar, the leather springs squealing, bullets and arrows pimpling the paneling. He believed that he was independent and free and in control of his own destiny, she adds, sorrow clouding her face, but of course he was merely an agent of fate. And on top of that, she sighs, he is dead. Dead? he asks. He wants to crawl up on her lap and be hugged, but her hands are folded there. The coach driver up top, she says. Haven’t you been paying attention? He’s dead. The horses are out of control.
That’s why they are going so fast and heaving about so wildly. He knows he must prove his own courage and resourcefulness; it may even be why they have undertaken this harrowing journey. He crawls down off the seat and opens the coach door. It tears away with their violent speed, sweeping several attackers off their horses as a thrown wooden block might knock down toy cavalrymen. It is not easy to reach the driver’s seat; he must work his way up the side of the speeding stagecoach, hand over hand, grasping the window frames and moldings and railings and brass fittings, and many times he is nearly flung off. Clinging to the lurching coach is like riding a wild horse, and he realizes that he may be the only person in the world who can do this. All the while, gunshots and arrows slam into the side of the coach, narrowly missing him or perhaps even hitting him, he can’t be sure, nor does he much care; he doesn’t expect to get out of this alive, he just wants to get the next thing done.
The driver’s seat atop the express box is vacant and then it is not: a man looms high above him with burning eyes and rough grizzled chops. He is shouting at the thundering team of horses—hi! hi! — and lashing them with a long black whip, driving them ever faster. The driver seems to know that he is there, crawling up the side of the coach, but he pretends not to see him. This cannot be the real driver. The bandits or Indians must have killed the real one. Whom he loved, or may have loved (if he knew him). Hi! cries the wild-eyed driver and cracks his whip. Though he has reached only the height of the driver’s knees, he somehow wrests the whip away from him. The driver shrinks away from him in terror as he raises the whip over his head — he seems to be standing a yard or two in front of him, as if on a platform over the first pair of horses — and then he snaps the whip and with a single stroke whisks the driver’s head clean off: it flies away, bouncing off the top of the stagecoach, with a look of blind amazement. He turns to grab up the reins but there are no reins, and the runaway horses are at full gallop, hauling the careening stagecoach toward a yawning precipice. Beside him on the seat, the driver’s headless body rocks stiffly from side to side, hammering his shoulder as if trying to knock him off the box and get back at him for taking his head off. He would jump from the doomed coach, but the lady in black is still down inside, so he has to stop it somehow before they reach the precipice. The only way he knows to do that is to crawl forward to the lead horses and rein them in. Without hesitation, he throws himself down on the first pair of horses below him, but he misses and falls between them into the tackle that conjoins them, which for some reason he associates with garter belts. He wants to rise and make his way to the front, but he is somewhat entangled, and the rhythm of the team’s galloping hoofs is lulling him to sleep. As he’s drifting off, the woman in black joins him down there in the tackle. It’s all right, she says, stroking his forehead (with her nose?). It’s not your fault. And she stretches out beside him, cradled there amid the thundering hoofs, and, at peace with himself at last (the precipice? it’s nothing, forget it), he drops off, snuggled safely up against her.
When he awakens, he is not sure at first from what he is waking or whose might be the warm body against which he’s pressed. He keeps his eyes closed for a moment to retain something of the comforting aura of the dream before the hard world overtakes him again, the sense it gave him of knowing who he is and why he’s here, but in fact that aura has faded away and all that’s left is the memory of being at the edge of something (some woman?) and the look on the grizzled old furtrapper’s face when he told him he was the only person in the world who could do this. He’s not even sure he was himself in the dream, it was like he was somebody else, someone who was taking him somewhere he didn’t want to go. Which makes no sense. Hanging on to dreams is like trying to eat a smell. Everything is so vivid and real and full of significance at the time, but afterwards only these dim ghostly images remain to haunt the woken head.
Well well. Mornin, sunshine. He opens his eyes a slit. It’s the saloon chanteuse standing in the doorway. Some doorway or other. Yu two sleep well?
He’s lying on a rancid old mattress with straw ticking and rags for blankets, but it’s more easeful than the desert floor or a jolting saddle, to which he is more accustomed, and he has slept hard. And long: must be the middle of the day. His companion in the bed is the black mare, lying on her side with her back to him. He rolls away from her and sits up, still trying to recall the dream, but it’s mostly gone. Can’t remember how he got here, either. Here being a dilapidated wooden shack, badly shot up and with half the roof gone. His boots and buckskins have been removed; he’s wearing only a black union suit and a neckerchief.