Hondo (1953) (18 page)

He gulped his coffee, then said quickly, "Not before I show you something."

He took the tintype from his pocket and handed it to her. She looked at it, and then at him.

"Did Ed give it to you?"

"No. I took it off his body."

She had known this. She had felt it from the moment she saw the tintype with the bullet scar. Now she waited, but she felt nothing. There was nothing to feel. Later, she knew she would. But Ed ... for months now he had seemed like somebody who had never really been. Like someone who had walked across the page of her life and left no tracks.

"He's dead."

When she had spoken the words, tears came to her eyes. There were no sobs, just a welling of tears. She sat silent, and no words came to help.

"I tried to tell you last night. I wanted to."

"I'm not surprised. It's ... it's like something that happened long ago. I guess I never really expected him to come back."

Hondo tasted his coffee and tried to find the words to tell her the rest of it. But how did you tell a woman you had killed her husband? One of you had to be in the wrong. He was not prepared to accept the blame for trouble he had not wanted. Nor was he sorry for Ed Lowe. He was sorry only because the dead man had been the husband of Angie.

The door burst open and Johnny came charging back into the room. He rushed at Hondo, seizing his arm.

"Look out for his hand, Johnny." She crossed the room to the stove. "It's very noble of you."

"Noble?" Hondo looked at her under his brows. "Me?"

"You came in here to get us out."

"I'm going to give you something," Johnny said. "My Indian emblem. Vittoro gave it to me, didn't he, Mom?"

He started off quickly to get the headband. Hondo shifted his feet under the table and allowed Angie to fill his cup again. He was deeply stirred. Johnny's prize possession, and he wanted him to have it.

Angie hesitated, putting the coffeepot back on the stove. "The Indians," she said at last, "place such a great value on dying well. Did Ed die well?"

"Yes, ma'am. Well."

Angie resumed the ironing halted by the coming of the Indians. Something in Hondo's attitude disturbed her, but she could not explain her feeling. It was unlike him to be so silent.

It was something about Ed. Something was wrong there, very wrong.

Nevertheless, she said, "When Johnny is old enough, and when he has to be told, it will make him proud."

Johnny came in with his emblem. He placed it on the table before Hondo. "Here's the emblem. You're a chief now!"

Hondo Lane turned away from the table and picked up the headband. He turned it in his hands, studying it. After a while he put it back on the table. Talking to a child ... what did he know about that?

"Johnny," he said slowly, uncertain of what to say, "I'd like to take it, because that's a mighty fine gift. Guess there ain't anything you could give me that would be nicer. But you see, that headband was given to you, not to me.

"It was given to you by Vittoro. He meant it for you. Now I'd like to have you give me something, but this is yours: Wouldn't be right, nohow, to give it to me. Vittoro, he's a mighty big chief. Not many folks he likes. He must admire you quite some to give you that, so you stick by it.

"You an' me, Johnny, we got a lot of ground to cover together. Vittoro wants you to know how an Apache gets along. Good thing to know, too. You live in this country, you better know most of it. Man can never tell when he'll be lost in the desert, have to feed himself, find water, maybe. All that you've got to learn."

"Will you teach me?"

Hondo placed his hand clumsily on the boy's shoulder. "I reckon I'd like that, son. I sure would. I guess I've learned so much I'm up to here with it. Need somebody to learn it from me."

When Angie was washing clothes at the edge of a pool in the creek, Hondo rode down the slope with an antelope slung behind his saddle.

Angie looked up with a smile. "More fresh meat. We're living high."

Johnny sat on a round rock some distance above the pool, fishing.

Hondo swung down from the saddle and said quietly, "Don't turn around too fast, but there's an Indian up on the rim right now, just under that stunted pine."

"I can't see him. You must have wonderful eyesight."

"Learned. There was one up there day before yesterday, too."

He ground-hitched the lineback near a patch of grass, then walked back, starting to roll a smoke.

"Why? I don't understand."

"To watch the boy, I think. Vittoro must set store by him."

He left Angie to her washing and strolled upstream to where the boy was fishing. He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. It was cool under the cottonwoods, better than out there on the desert. Was he getting soft? Or had this life got to him?

"If you want my opinion, you won't catch any fish there."

"He never does," Angie said, "but it keeps him amused."

"Might as well catch him a bass while he's at it." He glanced around, his brow furrowing. "Course, I don't mean to interfere."

"Please do."

She dipped a boy's shirt into the water, rinsing it. When she straightened up, she said quietly, "He needs a father. He's getting to that age now. He loves me, but I'm a woman. Sometimes he tolerates me."

Hondo grinned. "Boys are that way. Wait'll he gets older. He'll do mor'n tolerate a pretty woman."

She flushed a little, but she was pleased. "He has lots of time."

"Grow up before you know it."

"I ... I don't want him to be here. Not when he's older."

"No, ma'am. But right now he's best off here. Boy should know how to hunt. How to get along. He'll learn better here, and you're safe, long as Vittoro lives."

She looked at him quickly. "You don't think I would be if he died?"

"Don't figure to scare you, but what'd you think about Silva?"

She remembered the hatred in the Indian's eyes, the way he started toward them that first day, the way he had killed Sam.

"He'll be the big man when Vittoro dies," Hondo said. "Do to think about."

Johnny trudged downstream to Hondo, who shoved his hat back on his head and looked down at the boy. "Where's the sun?"

"There." Johnny pointed.

"On the back of your neck." He indicated the shadow the boy threw upon the water. "Shadow. If you can see it, the fish can see it. Always fish with the sun in your face. That's if you want my opinion. And that bank's the place."

"Can I, Mommy?"

Angie hesitated. She was afraid of the creek. There were deep pools, and some old snags that had washed down from upstream. "Some of those pools are deep. I worry about him out here."

"He can't swim?"

"He's so young."

"I've seen Indian boys that age swim the Missouri at flood." He watched the boy lazily as Johnny started across the stream on the stones. At the far bank, Johnny stepped ashore. "Hey, boy!"

Johnny hesitated, looking back, and Hondo said, his voice carrying easily across the small stream, "Hot this time of day. Was I you, I'd walk on the sunny side of that rock. When it's hot the snake will be in the shade, when it's cold he'll be in the sun."

Johnny skirted the rock, then found a good place and seated himself, dropping his hook into the water.

"Funny thing. An Apache won't eat fish."

"What?" Angie was astonished. "I thought all Indians fished."

"What most folks think. Maybe it's because they live mostly in desert country, but no Apache will eat fish."

"I never heard of such a thing!"

"Fact. Down at Camp Grant the 'Pache kids used to hang around, beggin' candy or biscuits. When the pony soldiers got tired of havin' them around, they'd open a can of fish and set it out. They'd all leave." He threw the stub of his cigarette into the water. "Two reasons for that, though. Partly it was the fish, partly the label on the can.

"The label?"

"You know that red devil they have on some brands of fish? Scares Apaches. They call it ghost meat." Hondo squatted on his heels, watching her wash. "That Indian's gone from the rim."

"How do you know? You haven't looked up."

"I looked."

Angie dried her hands. "Do you think Vittoro really means it when he says he'll make an Apache out of Johnny?"

"If I were you I'd believe him. There's a lot of dead men that didn't believe what Vittoro said."

"He seems to love the baby."

"Baby? That kid's no baby. He must be five or maybe six."

"He's six. But he's still a baby."

"Time there was a man around here. Treat him like a baby and he'll be one. Spoils a boy to be protected. How'll he ever learn to care for himself?"

It was cool beside the stream. Hondo put his back against the trunk of a huge old cottonwood and watched the water. The clothes were drying in the sun, and Angie sat on a stone at the water's edge, her hair a little disarranged, lovely in the morning sun. Hondo Lane squinted his eyes at her, seeing her clear, poised beauty, yet uneasy at what lay between them.

The boy sat upstream, watching the line that hung into the water, slow-moving at that point. Before Hondo it rippled over stones, chuckled into hollows, and slid silkily past the weathered trunk of a blown-down cotton-wood, long dead.

He glanced at the lineback, lazily cropping grass in the shade, and then past him at the hills. A man could get used to this. He grinned when he thought of Major Sherry. He was probably throwing a fit by now, thinking him dead, his scalp hanging in some Apache wickiup. "Mommy! Mommy! I caught one!"

Johnny came running across the rocks toward them with a fish flopping at the end of his hook. Hondo was unimpressed. He slashed a thong from his buckskin shirt. "You can gill him on this, if you want to."

"Thanks, Emberato."

Angie turned on Hondo. "He calls you Emberato all the time."

"My Apache name. I told him."

"What does it mean?"

Hondo shrugged, turning his shoulder against the tree. "You can't put Apache words into English. It means Bad Temper."

Angie looked at him again, studying the line of his profile. Bad Temper? How could he get such a name as that? Or had they taken him seriously with his growling? He was as gentle as his ugly brute of a dog had been. All Sam had needed was a chance. And a little petting. The thought made her flush, but it amused her, too, and she looked at him quickly. He was watching the boy with his fish.

Another thought occurred to her. "You cut that thong from your jacket. Aren't you afraid you'll have no ornamentation left if you cut off all that fringe?"

"Isn't for ornament. Not only. The fringe helps the buckskin to shed water. That's why it's there."

Johnny tied his fish to a stick and let it hang in the water, then he came back to Hondo and Angie.

"You say he can't swim?" Hondo sat up. "You do what you want to, but if it was me, I'd see the kid could swim." He reached out suddenly and picked Johnny up by the seat of the pants and threw him into the deepest part of the pool.

Angie sprang to her feet, crying out. She started to the pool and Hondo came to his feet quickly and put a hand on her shoulder.

Johnny surfaced, spluttering and floundering. Angie was furious. She struggled to pull way, but he held her, while Johnny, floundering but clumsily swimming, made his way to a rock. Clutching the rock, he turned to Hondo. "Emberato! I did it!"

"Just reach out your hand and grab a handful of water and pull it toward you, not too fast. Keep your fingers together so it won't get away. That's how I learned, if you want to know."

He released Angie, and she looked up at him, her anger dying. "Sometimes you're cruel."

"Am I? The kid can swim, can't he?"

He gathered the reins of his horse and picked the fish from the water. "I'll go clean the fish for him. Right he should eat it tonight, eat his own game himself."

"But how will he get back?"

"Swim."

"He may drown!" she protested, staring anxiously at Johnny, cheerfully kicking at the cool water.

"I don't think so."

He turned and walked off, leading the horse. Johnny yelled after him, then slid into the water and paddled awkwardly to the bank and climbed out. He was swelling with childish pride. "I swam, Mommy!" he said.

Hondo Lane had vanished toward the stable, and Angie took Johnny's hand and started toward the house. She was still not over her anger at his sudden and to her unbelievably brutal action. She mentally told herself he was cruel. He was rough. He was no fit man to be around a child. But the fact remained that now Johnny could swim.

Chapter
Seventeen

The wind talked among the junipers and brushed cheeks with the skeleton face of the cactus and along the hills walked two horses and two riders. Hondo Lane, the killer from the Brazos, and a boy of six, riding Old Gray.