As I waited the argument inside the tent fell off until I could hear only one of the women standing up to Zar’s tirades. She appeared outside and it was the plump one, Mae. Mae stalked over to the wagon and climbed in and started to throw things over the side. A pot, a blanket, a carpetbag. “I ain’t goin’ to, no sir,” she was yelling, “y’all can fry here in this hole for all I care!”
Zar had followed her and he was standing by waving his fist: “You think you are too good for this place! You think you know better than Zar what to do! I will kill you with my hands, Maechka!”
For answer she threw out an oval looking glass and it caught him square on the side of the head. I could have laughed but the Russian roared with rage. Jumping up on the wagon he stuck his arm inside and pulled the woman out and threw her to the ground.
“Hey Zar!” the tall one, Jessie, called. “None of that!” She and Adah were standing in front of the tent, red-eyed, watching the battle. In the bright daylight and rumpled with sleep, none of the women looked too good. Their face paint was rubbed off and their hair was hanging and they all looked the worse for wear.
“I say what we do, no one else!” Zar was shouting. And to make his point he was kicking Mae as she tried to get up. When she got to her feet and tried to run he knocked her down and kicked her again. She was screaming and he was saying, “You will shod up, shod up!”
I ran over and pulled him away from the girl, she had given up trying to get away and was just lying there curled up and crying with her head between her arms. Zar let me lead him away but he turned every few steps to curse her in Russian.
The Chinagirl had run inside the tent when Zar came out but Jessie and Adah went over to Mae and helped her up. Adah put her arm around the bruised girl and mothered her. Witnessing this I was ashamed of myself. But I left Zar sitting cross-legged and surly by his cooking fire and I went over to the unhappy women and allowed they could use the bathtub by the well if they liked.
They must not have seen a tub in months. Mae forgot her peeve in a moment and she and Jessie stripped themselves clear down to their hides and took turns sitting in the tub, splashing and laughing like children. They rubbed themselves with a piece of scented soap which Adah brought out to them. “It’s genuine Parisiun!” Adah called to me. “Got it from some son of a bitch what stole it from a Colonel’s lady!”
The Chinese stood off a ways just looking on, and she was smiling with delight. Those two jumping in and out of the tub, red down to their necks and up to their wrists but white everywhere else, were as unmindful of anyone watching as if they had been whole dressed. One watcher was Jimmy, standing against the dugout, and I couldn’t tell him not to, I was another.
That evening I sat at the Russian’s fire and I told him it would be a good idea to put up some tolerable buildings before the stage came. I remembered that Fee bought some of his wood from the mines but that most of it he garnered from dead towns in the territory.
“So let us find such a town,” Zar said.
“Well there’s one I know of,” I said, “name of Fountain Creek.”
“Good. We go now.” He stood up. This fellow had a better mind than Avery ever had but it would outrun you with your own intentions. I used to own a horse like that, you spurred him once and you couldn’t hold him.
“Wait on,” I said, “it’s a half day’s travel. You don’t gain anything losing a night’s sleep. We’ll head out at sunup.”
But once it was decided I began to worry the whole idea. It was all too quick for me; glad as I was to be staking out in earnest I couldn’t believe in it altogether, almost against my will I found myself glancing up at the shadows of the rocks. I didn’t like leaving Molly and the boy untended for a day and maybe a night too.
Well I was up and waiting for the dawn. When the first light ran through the sky I went over to the Indian’s shanty. As I feared, John Bear was in no humor to keep a watch out for anyone, he had not come out of his shack since Zar had knocked him down; and I saw him through the door sitting hunched up in front of a dead fire, he was deep in a brood. There isn’t much worse you can do to an Indian than touch him. Bear wore a shirt and britches and he was living in this shack where ten years before he wouldn’t have sat down under a roof — but for all he felt now he might just as well have stayed a blanket Indian.
In the chilly early morning Zar had unloaded his wagon and now he was stripping it down, pulling off the canvas and lifting the struts away. On the ground were trunks, sacks of grain, boxes, a barrel, bedding — he packed a lot in that wagon. The women were up and about, laboring to get it all inside the tent.
“I am soon ready, frand,” he called. I went over to him and told him Bear was in the dumps. He wasn’t too concerned, he said: “The savage will get over it.” I remember those words.
“Well that may be,” I said, “but meanwhile there’s no one here to keep an eye out while we’re gone.”
“So?” He shrugged. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t want to leave — especially with Molly in the dugout the way she was. But there seemed to be no way out of it. I finally asked around till the tall girl, Jessie, said she had an old dress she might be willing to sell. I offered her the two dollars that pimply boy had given me to post his letter.
“No,” she said, changing her mind, “it’s too good for Madam Bitch in there.”
“Give it him,” Zar said, scowling.
So the exchange was made and I took the frock in to Molly. She was sitting up facing the doorway and she was holding the buffalo robe to her shoulders. Those green eyes in that peaked face made me feel again the queerness, the dismal shame of trying to speak to her. I had to clear my throat.
“Molly, things are going good, these people want to stake out here. I’m going off with the Russian to find a load of wood for building.”
She nodded, she didn’t seem to care.
“Jimmy’ll stay behind,” I said. “And this is a dress.”
It was to plague me for a long time, like this, that I couldn’t tell what she would answer or if I might find a moment’s favor in her eyes. She didn’t say anything till I began to wonder if she’d heard me; and then I saw she was crying, not making a sound, just looking at the ground as if her whole life was laid out in front of her, while the tears ran down her face.
“Molly, it’s a proper dress,” I said. But she wouldn’t take it. “Wear it yourself, Mayor.” She sat there biting her lip and running her hand through her hair. I didn’t know what to answer, so I went back outside with the dress.
Jessie saw me and by the time I reached the tent she and Adah and Mae had stopped what they were doing to gather around me.
“I knew it,” Jessie said, “why she suckles bobcats, she’d do it with a horse, that bitch, the dress is too good for her.”
“I’ll be damned,” Adah said.
“How do you like that Lady Bacon Ass,” Jessie said to Mae, “that’s somethin’ ain’t it?”
“Trouble with that ol’ girl,” Mae said slowly, “she were burned not hardly enough.”
I was scratching the stubble on my chin; and listening to these women made me say something I don’t understand to this day. Maybe I wanted to keep Molly from their scorn; maybe it was just some mournful deviltry in me.
“Molly’s my wife,” I said. I think I was just saying what I knew, that we had been wedded by the Bad Man from Bodie.
Well they looked at me as like struck dumb. I saw a doubt in Jessie’s eye — she may have wondered why I’d left my wife to lie in an Indian’s shack where they found her — but it was gone in a second. I suppose there is nothing that a whore will respect more than a married woman. Those ladies stammered and blushed like virgins, and the next thing I knew Adah had taken me inside the tent, opened her trunk and dug something up from the bottom of it.