“I have friends nowhere,” he said. “Not even here, though I hoped someone here might love me.”
“Not me,” she said.
“I guess not,” he answered.
“They’ll hang you,” she said. “The horse Is branded and earmarked both. You were a fool to come this way.”
“I thought you’d be long since gone. I knew I’d lost your brothers...”
“Where are you bound then?”
“California,” he said, and grinned. “To make my fortune there.”
“Your fortune, aye,” she said. “They’ll hang you here for sure.”
“Then they’ll hang me,” he said, and she almost went to him in that moment, but still she delayed. “Would you care, Bonnie Sue? Would it matter to you?”
“Why’d you run from me?” she asked.
“I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of loving you,” he said. “I’m twice your age or more.”
“I’m sixteen now,” she told him. And almost told him the other as well. But did not. Could not. Could not bring herself to do it.
“Sixteen,” he said. “Ahh.”
“Lester,” she said, “did you plan to steal Will’s horse all along?”
“It was sounds I heard in the night. I jumped on the horse’s back and rode off to investigate, taking with me a rifle as well, in case the noise I’d heard—”
“You told me a minute ago you’d stole the horse for sure.”
“Yes,” he said. “But that’s a lovers’ secret, and not for the ears of those who’d hang me.”
“We’re not lovers now,” she said. “We’re man and woman standing here with nothin between us except what happened a long time ago.”
“Are you sure of that, Bonnie Sue?”
“As sure as I am of my own name.”
“Then there’s little to say but goodbye. Will you kiss me farewell, love? Will you let me hold you in my arms just once again before—”
“Stop it,” she said. “I’m no longer the fool I was.”
“I’ll no longer be the man I was, come sundown. You’ll find me hanging by the river, swinging in the wind. The Indians’ll wonder at it all. They’ll ask what crime I’ve committed, and when told I stole a horse, they’ll marvel at the ways of the white man. The Indians, you see, believe that capturing horses from the enemy is an honor. Yet hanging from a tree will be a man who—”
“My brother wasn’t your enemy. You needn’t have took his horse. You wanted it so bad, he might even have given it to you.”
“Ah, sure.”
“You don’t know Will.”
“I know his sister, and she’s refusing me now the last chance I have to live beyond this day.”
“I’m refusing you nothing.”
“You’re refusing to tell them what you saw and heard the night I fled — or seemed to flee.”
“You fled indeed.”
“I was chasing voices I’d heard.”
“There were no voices...”
“Unless you swear there were.”
“No voices but yours and mine.”
“You heard that I heard, Bonnie Sue. Voices that could’ve been highway robbers. You heard them.”
“I heard only a liar telling me he loved me.”
“That was true.”
“Aye. Loved me so dearly he left by morning. True love indeed.”
“Let me kiss you, Bonnie Sue.”
“I’d sooner kiss a snake.”
“Let me touch you.”
“No,” she said, but she allowed him to take her in his arms. He drew her close and kissed her face, and she remembered that night in June and fell suddenly limp against him. His lips brushed hers lightly, his hands moved immediately to her waist, the fingers spread to frame her belly. She drew her mouth away from his, and whispered, “Lester...” as he lowered her to one of the buffalo robes, and then turned her head sharply toward the window of the room, fearful the sentry outside might be watching. But the buffalo robe was in a quarter of the room beyond his field of vision; he could not have seen them unless he thrust his head full inside the narrow opening. Lester had already raised her skirt above her waist and was unfastening her underdrawers, lowering them familiarly over her rounded belly. She wondered if he would place them on the floor here as delicately as he had on the floor of the forest that night.
“Lie for me,” he whispered.
“No,” she answered, but was hardly sure the word found voice in the raggedness of her own sharp breathing. She tried to close herself against him, squeezing her thighs together so he could not take off her drawers completely. He tore them instead, ripped them raggedly up the middle so that now she wore a part of them around each thigh and across each buttock, but nothing at all between. He said what he’d said that night outside St. Louis, “Open,” and she replied, “No, damn it!” for if she opened she was lost. He seized her where the fabric of her underdrawers still encased each thigh, and spread them forcibly apart. She felt his hand upon her nakedness between, his fingers gently spreading her lips below. He said again, “Lie for me,” and she shook her head, and he said, “Lie for me, Bonnie Sue,” and she felt the rounded hugeness of him urging entrance, and spread herself wide to receive him and said “Yes,” and thought she heard the sentry cough, or laugh, but didn’t care by then.
It was Orliac’s idea to hold the trial in the courtyard of the fort, where everyone — Indians included — could see and hear the proceedings. “A court in a courtyard,” he said, and winked at Will, who found nothing at all amusing about the matter. Lester Hackett was an accused horse thief. Seventy years ago perhaps, before independence, a man convicted of such a crime might have been treated as leniently as though he were still living in the mother country. His ears would have been nailed to a board, the letter H branded on one cheek, the letter T on another. There was no such gentle consideration for horse thieves now.
The judges in the courtyard trial were three — Orliac himself, Schwarzenbacher the clerk, and a trapper named Sebilleau, who could neither read nor write. A long table had been brought out from one of the lower apartments, and the three presiding officials sat behind it now, the prisoner and his accuser sitting side by side on a puncheon bench before them. The courtyard and the balcony running around the upper level of the fort were thronged with company men, eager for whatever mild diversion the trial might provide, and Indians curious to witness the white man’s method of dispensing justice.
The trial started with Orliac explaining to everyone present that the man Hackett was accused of stealing a horse, and these judges were assembled to determine his guilt or innocence. The punishment for stealing a horse, he further explained, was to be hanged by the neck till dead. The Indians wondered about this. Suicides by hanging were common in their tribes, but they did not know of hanging as a punishment for theft. Or was this to be a ceremony of sorts? In the Sun Watching Dance, warriors fulfilling vows suspended themselves voluntarily from a sacred pole, by means of cords fastened to painted sticks and passed through the flesh on their chests. But the white man’s hanging was a hanging to the death. The Indians had never seen a ceremony of this sort. Would the white man first pierce the neck through with a blue stick and then attach a cord to it?
“Mr. Chisholm,” Orliac said, “would you tell this court why you believe the Appaloosa now in the company corral was stolen by the accused?”
Embarrassed, Will got to his feet, cleared his throat, and looked out at the Indians and white men standing in the courtyard and on the gallery above.
“Well,” he said, “Hackett here was guiding us to St. Louis, been with us since we met in Louisville. Just outside St. Louis he disappeared, and so did the gelding. So I rightly believe he was the one went off with it, since there was only the horse’s tracks leading north, and the land was all so flat there you could see for miles if a man was out there on foot, which Hackett wasn’t. Anyway, he’s the one came riding up on the horse yesterday, so he’s the one had to have rode off with it in the first place.”