“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.
They locked him in a storeroom on the gallery. It was there she went to talk to him the next day. There were kegs and barrels in the room, stacked wooden crates, bulging hempen sacks, buffalo robes. A single window opened onto the courtyard, and a man with a rifle stood outside that window all the while they talked. Bonnie Sue expected he heard every word they said.
Lester said, “Ah, it’s good to see you, Bonnie Sue,” and opened his arms to receive her, but she stood where she was, just inside the door locked from the outside, looking at him and trying to see through the beard to the face she knew and loved. He seemed older than she remembered. She herself had turned sixteen since last she saw him, her birthday having fallen on the twelfth day of July, with Annabel close to dying and no one dreaming of celebration. She thought to tell him she was sixteen now, tell him too the secret that was surely his to share. She told him neither.
“You left of a sudden,” she said.
“I did,” he answered.
“And took Will’s horse with you.”
“Aye,” he said.
“They’ll hang you for that, you know.”
“I didn’t steal that horse, you know,” he said.
“Ah, didn’t you? They seem to think you did.”
“I was off after highwaymen.”
“And did you find them?” she asked.
“I’ve missed you, Bonnie Sue,” he said, and again opened his arms to her. She did not go into them. “I’ve thought of you often these past two months. I knew your brothers were behind me; my mother told me of their visits. And I knew they were thinking I’d stolen the Appaloosa, but there was no way of telling them—”
“You stole it, Lester,” she said flatly.
Their eyes met
“I stole it for sure,” he said.
“Why?”
“Cause I was bound for Carthage and needed a horse to get there.”
“You said you had friends in St Louis who’d—”