A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters (3 page)

“And you wondered if I came following that talk?” Prudence nodded. “In a sense. I’ll assure you, though, I have no desire to stir up further trouble.”

She didn’t say more, and she guessed something on her face told the fat man that she wasn’t going to do so. He sipped the last of his coffee and rose.

“Pleasure meeting you, Miss Bledsloe.”

“Pleasure,” Prudence echoed, and meant it.

After Reverend Printer had left, Prudence sat thinking over what she’d learned. She didn’t think it was Indians causing the trouble, but if she told Reverend Printer her suspicions, it wouldn’t help. No one would believe her. No one who hadn’t lived through what she had.

The dining room was cool and pleasant compared to outdoors, but if she was to pitch her camp she should get moving. Prudence found Maria in the kitchen, rolling out what looked like pie crust.

“I’ve come to settle my bill,” Prudence said.

“No bill,” Maria said firmly. “I saw your rifle on the windowsill. I don’t think you would have shot Nathan. Come back tonight. I am making peach pie.”

Prudence put her coin purse away. “Thank you, and I just might.”

She collected Buck and Trick from Ricardo. The horses’s coats and their tack gleamed. Buck nibbled with sleepy contentment along her arm, telling her he’d been treated very well indeed. Prudence paid what was asked without dickering and added a tip besides. Then she rode for the cottonwoods.

It was a nice stand, plenty shaded, with a pole corral and stone fire circle already in place. Prudence pitched her tent, then built a fire, going a bit afield to gather something other than cottonwood. Cottonwood burned hot and messy, tending to flare out of control.

Like some folks I know,
Prudence thought.

She didn’t go into town for dinner, but sat by her small fire. If anyone had been watching, they would have seen her taking the single piece cartridges she had bought from Mr. Eli and methodically changing the lead bullets for some she took from a box she took out of her own gear. These bullets shone brightly as she inspected each in the firelight . . . shone like silver.

Prudence had banked her fire to dull coals and settled her head against a rolled blanket when she heard stealthy footsteps approaching. She was reaching for her six-shooter when she smelled peppermint.

“May we come in?” came a hushed, female voice.

Prudence hadn’t heard this voice before, but she knew who it must be. She didn’t put the gun aside, but she did ease her finger off the trigger.

Two small figures came into her camp and stood where she could see them, but where they would not be visible from outside the camp. One was the little girl she’d seen in Eli’s mercantile. The other was a Navajo boy just slightly taller. He smelled of wood smoke, mutton, and sage, spiced with peppermint.

Interesting,
Prudence thought.

“Welcome to my fire,” she said. “Coffee?”

“No, thank you,” came the girl’s voice. “And thank you for the peppermints. They’re my favorite, but Grandpa only gives me a few at a time.”

“Good for the digestion,” Prudence said. “I don’t see any harm in them.”

“Your name is Prudence Bledsloe,” the girl said, rather as one confirming a fact, not asking a question.

“It is. And you are Miss Eli?”

“Miss March. April March. April. My mama was an Eli. This is my friend, Vernon Yaz.”

“Pleased to meet you both. Does your grandpa know you’re out, Miss March?”

“I . . . well, no. I piled up the blankets in my bed, though, and he and Grandma are well and truly asleep.”

“Still, you shouldn’t stay out late, just in case. I think you and Hosteen Yaz have something to tell me?”

The boy laughed softly. “Hosteen” was a Navajo title of respect, roughly translating as “old man.” He had caught her joke and appreciated it.

“You were asking questions,” he said. His words were flavored with the accent that marked a Navajo speaker:
t
s and
d
s blending,
g
s vanishing, vowels elongated. The syllables were run together, as if the speaker was accustomed to much longer words. “I heard Maria telling Nathan—he’s my mother’s brother—what Reverend Printer told you, but Reverend Printer doesn’t know it all. April said you should hear this.”

“So there is a Navajo side to the trouble, too,” Prudence said. “I thought there might be.”

“We have lost sheep. We don’t have cattle, but the peaches have been ruined on the drying racks. And our children—three little ones—have been stolen. There are whispers that a witch is at work.”

“Tell me more.”

Vernon did so, going into great detail. Prudence listened carefully, making little noises to indicate that she had understood, but otherwise not interrupting. She needed to hear what Vernon had to tell, but if children were disappearing, the last thing she needed was to have these two found in her camp.

Vernon’s story matched what Reverend Printer had told. The thefts showed a level of malice beyond what rustlers or simple thieves would commit. Goods had been spoiled. Misery, not gain, had been the goal. And no trace had been found of the missing children.

“When did these things happen?” Prudence asked.

Vernon told her. His way of giving dates didn’t follow the Gregorian calender, but he had a firm awareness of phases of the moon. That was good enough. With his permission, Prudence took out a scrap of paper and made notes.

April was less certain when the white children had been stolen, since they didn’t belong to the town community, but she did know when her grandparents had started watching her more carefully, keeping her from going outside to play.

“I have a new pony,” she explained. “Vern and I were practicing for the races. Grandma and Grandpa hadn’t minded, then all of a sudden they did.”

“And they’ll mind,” Prudence said firmly, “if they find you out of bed. I’ll walk you back to your house. You staying in town, Vern?”

“Nathan,” the boy said, his smile flashing in the dark, “is visiting Maria. I am supposed to be sleeping off very much peach pie.”

“I’ll walk you both back,” Prudence said firmly. “Buck, mind the camp.”

The stallion snorted and shifted his weight from side to side.

After April and Vern were delivered to their respective beds, Prudence hurried back to her camp. She tried to sleep, but memory warred with conjecture, keeping her awake long after the coals of her fire had guttered into ash.

 

The next morning, Prudence broke camp and headed out toward where Vern had told her the worst of the “witch trouble” had occurred.

Most white folk thought of the Indians—when they bothered to think about them at all—as living the life of hunters and gatherers. To some whites this was living in savagery. To others the Indian way was the ideal of the noble savage. In the case of the modern Navajo either image was also completely false.

Although the Navajo were not town dwellers, as were the various tribes the Spanish had dubbed “Pueblo” Indians, neither were they tepee-dwelling migrants as were many of the Plains tribes. The Navajo built houses—most commonly the various styles of hogan—kept flocks of sheep and herds of horses. Some even maintained orchards, favoring peaches and other stone fruit. When Kit Carson had wanted to drive out the Navajo, he’d burnt their trees.

But Prudence’s route didn’t head toward the stream beds or river bottoms where those orchards would likely be, nor did she turn toward where flocks of sheep and goats grazed on the sparse summer vegetation. She set Buck’s head toward the hot, dry, rocky reaches, a land of majestic stone cliffs and vegetation closer to grey than green in color. The trail they followed once they left the town and its outliers was merely the suggestion of a trail, a path of least resistance rather than one that indicated frequent travel.

As Prudence journeyed away from the town, she thought about what had brought her to these hot, dry lands, so far from where she’d grown up, and with nothing but two mustangs as companions.

Prudence Bledsloe had been born in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, in a tangled green hollow well away from any of the towns listed on any map. The Bledsloe clan had been part of a small community of a dozen or so families, all of whom were descended from a group of immigrants who had come to the New World from Eastern Europe.

Those original immigrants had been lured by the promise of unsettled land. More importantly, they longed for a degree of tolerance toward different creeds and ways of life that was impossible to find even in the most isolated parts of Eastern Europe.

The Bledsloe clan had consisted of Prudence’s parents, her elder brother Jake, and a couple of younger cousins who had moved in with them after a sickness took their own parents. Sometime later, a return of that sickness had wiped out Clan Bledsloe along with much of the community. Most of the survivors had resolved to rebuild. Jake and Prudence had decided to head West.

The two remaining members of Clan Bledsloe hadn’t had much, but they were adaptable. The skills they needed merely to survive in the Smokeys had served them well on the trail. Sometimes they’d linked up with a wagon train, but most often they traveled alone.

Prudence thought about those long days on the trail, eating dust on foot at first, later eating more dust on horseback. Those hadn’t been precisely happy days—shelter was often scanty, and Prudence and Jake both mourned those who had died of the sickness. They’d done all right for food, though, both being skilled with various weapons. And they’d had hope, hope of finding a place where they could settle, raise cattle, and maybe someday forget.

Buck snorted and shifted uneasily. Prudence shook herself from the dangerous distraction of memory. Pulling her rifle from the saddle boot, she swung down to get a look at what had disturbed the big mustang.

She found it within a few yards of the trail: a sheep, one of the hardy, four-horned
churro
breed that the Navajo favored. Telling much more was pretty near impossible. The sheep hadn’t just been killed; it had been flayed open. The guts had been pulled out and much of the meat had been stripped from the carcass. The hide had been left intact, but many of the bones were splintered and sucked clean of marrow.

Flies buzzed over what remained, their wings making enough noise that Prudence knew she should have heard it from the trail. The carcass stunk, too. She should have smelled that.

Prudence scanned her surroundings, resolving that no matter how compelling the past was, old memories had to wait on the present. That is, unless she wanted to give up all hopes of a future.

A new thought hit Prudence, making her catch her breath.

Did she honestly care if she had a future? The future had been taken from her twice: once when the Bledsloe clan had been wiped out by disease, once when Jake had been taken from her.

She’d been drifting since then, drifting west, drifting after rumors that might lead her to . . .

Prudence forced herself to think about what she was seeking, forced herself to accept.

To lead her to what Jake had become.

Standing under the hot sun, hearing Trick shift nervously under the packs, Prudence faced the memories.

She and Jake had gotten wind of a town where cattle buyers were congregating. She’d never been quite sure whether the buyers had come because the cattle were being driven there or whether the cattle were being driven there to meet the buyers. What she did know was that for a couple of weeks there was plenty of work, even for a couple of scraggly drifters.

Prudence had gotten work washing dishes and chopping stuff in the kitchen of the railroad hotel. Jake—who dreamed of owning a ranch someday—had gotten a job keeping the gathered herds in order. After weeks in the saddle, the cowhands were eager for the delights of civilization, even as offered by a rough-edged nowhere town like this one.

That their delights included women was a given, so Prudence kept back in the kitchen. Days had passed. The buying and selling ended. The loaded trains rattled back toward Chicago.

The cowboys, their pockets fat with severance pay, remained, wilder than ever. Jake’s work, however, had evaporated when the cattle were shipped out, so he and Prudence decided to move on.

Had the cowboys tracked them or had the meeting been chance? Prudence didn’t know. Her memories of that terrible night began with waking to the sound of coarse laughter, the smell of tobacco and whiskey. Of Jake’s voice, superficially tough and angry. Trembling beneath the anger was a thread of fear.

Prudence had been jerked from her bedroll by a rough hand. Still half-asleep, she’d staggered, trying to catch her balance. Instead, she’d fallen into the arms of the man who had pulled her up. He started pawing at her breasts, pushing aside the fabric of the loose cotton nightshirt she wore for sleeping.

“Leave my sister alone!” Jake had shouted.

The cowboys had only laughed. Prudence fought to get loose, froze when she realized her struggles only excited her captors.

And Jake . . . Jake had lost control. The moon was full, and but for that they might both be dead now: raped, anonymous corpses, if ever they were found.

There was a reason that the Bledsloe ancestors had immigrated to the New World. There was a reason that once they got there, they moved to lands at the fringes of human habitation—lands the white man didn’t want, but the red man had been driven away from.

There was a reason, and that reason was that the Bledsloes were not entirely human.

All across the world, legends tell of those who can take on the forms of animals. In Europe, that animal is most often a wolf or bear. Werebear met with some toleration, even respect, but werewolves met with none at all.

Jake had changed. He had not become a wolf all at once. With almost human hands, Jake had grabbed the six-gun from a man who had been laughing at him a moment before. With almost human hands, Jake had shot that man dead.