King of Spades (21 page)

He followed her, wondering.

She led the way back to the main gulch; turned down it. Some hundred yards below where his horses were staked out, on the left, she walked toward a pinnacle of granite standing apart from the wall of the gulch. She stepped around it; and vanished.

“Hey.” He hurried to catch up.

A cave opened behind the pinnacle.

“Erden?”

Then he saw her. She was standing just inside the cave, in shadow, smiling, a modest hand to her mouth. The single pinnacle served as a perfect screen.

He stepped into the cave beside her. A gentle wind, coming out of the deep back of the cave, breathed over them. The gentle wind felt cool in contrast to the warm air outside.

His eyes adjusted to the semidarkness. Gradually he made out the articles of an Indian home: a willow backrest facing a circle of hearthstones in the center of the cave, various storage parfleches set in a row to one side, dried beef
hanging from icicles of crystalline. The floor was covered with several bearskins. The back of the cave, where it became a natural tunnel, was curtained off with a huge piece of buckskin. Off to one side, out of the draft, opened another and smaller room. Its floor was laid with woven sweetgrass on which were spread buffalo-skin sleeping robes.

Ransom was amazed at the lovely wonder of it all. “Just enough draft to keep it cool and carry out the smoke. With a cozy little bedroom off to one side. This beats all, this does.”

Erden gave him the smile of the child who'd successfully come up with a truly great surprise.

“A real hideout. There ain't a road agent on earth but what he wouldn't give a pretty penny to know about this.” He gave the rock wall in the bedroom a closer look. “And all of it probably peppered with gold.” He flashed a big smile. “Need some hard cash, Ransom, old man? All right. Chip a piece of your house and have it weighed at the bank. And, at the same time, give yourself that much the more elbow room in it.” Slowly he shook his head at the wonder of it all.

She touched him on the arm, again gesturing for him to follow her.

He laughed. “Lead on, my Swallow. After this I'm ready for anything.”

She led him back to the horses. She pulled up the picket pin of the docile packhorse and motioned to him to do the same with Prince's.

She took them down to a bend in the gulch below her cave. A draw led off from the point of the bend, going up into a dense stand of ponderosa. The draw narrowed into a dark defile, then into an awful redstone chasm some thousand feet deep and only a dozen yards wide. The gloom was suddenly deep and profound. They went a short ways, when of a sudden the red chasm opened onto a small glade. The floor of the glade was carpeted with lush buffalo grass and veils of daisies. In the falling sun the light-green grass and the yellow daisies seemed to grow out of a thick mat of blue
shadows. A small trickling stream ran down the center of the glade. The red stone and the dark-green pines and the autumn-touched quaking aspen gave the little glen the aspect of such glory as to make Ransom's eyes widen high and green.

“By the Lord,” Ransom whispered. “A perfect little park. All we need to do is build us a little pole fence across the pass here and we've got our horses safe. Even a panther'd have to be careful how he went in after a horse here.” He gave Erden a great smile. “Girl, this is just like finding the Garden of Eden. The one Adam and Eve lost.”

The horses neighed with pleasure when they were freed. The horses cropped a few test bites, then threw up their tails and ran around and around in their new grass heaven.

Erden laughed with delight at the frolicking horses. She made the sign to show that the horses had sunrise in their hearts. Ransom replied with the sign of yes. And together Ransom and Erden fixed a temporary pole gate across the pass into the pasture.

They next went back to his campsite and collected his gear, as well as his tools stashed above, and brought it all into her cave.

She got out another willow backrest specially for him and faced it to the hearth. She gestured for him to take his ease on it.

Smiling, he tossed his sombrero to one side and let himself down and lay back.

She pulled off his boots. She got cool water in a Sioux pot, and kneeling, and placing his feet in a basin in her lap, washed his feet, and rubbed his ankles, and soothed his calves.

“A king never had it better.”

She got kindling and firewood. Brushing away the ashes in the hearth until she found live embers, she soon had a little fire going.

He glowed as he watched her.

By the time the sun had sunk, she had a pot of soup and meat for him.

He ate ravenously.

After she had dampered the fire with a handful of ashes, she sprinkled the warm ashes with wisps of sweetgrass. Soon the cave and the little bedroom off to one side were filled with a sweetish smoking aroma.

They went to bed early, naked.

They slept sweetly together on a dark buffalo robe. He lay with his body curled around her. He did not touch her, though occasionally upon a deep breath her child-naked back brushed against his boy-naked belly.

He reveled in the incense coming from the hearth and in the smell of dried sweetgrass rising from the woven mat beneath them.

He couldn't get over the sudden wonder of it all. It was almost a dream. Whatever it was, truth, dream, or parts of both, he wasn't going to spoil it with lust.

 

Early-morning sunlight struck into their hideout and woke them. They opened their eyes. At about the same time they turned their heads and smiled upon each other.

He formed an incomplete circle with his thumb and forefinger and holding it horizontal to the left, raised it a little. “Morning.”

“Hanhanna.”

They smiled some more, each delighting in the sleepy appearance of the other.

Ransom found his hand sliding under the warm robe and reaching for her bare shoulder.

She appeared not to see it and before his hand could touch her, she was up and out of bed.

“Erden.”

She stretched deliciously in the cool air, rising to her toes at the end of a deep yawn, her young breasts flattening a little along the edges.

“Erden?”

Even as he spoke she skipped outside naked. He heard her bare feet padding on the path a moment; then silence.

He rose on one elbow. “What the heck? Running outside stark nun naked?”

A few minutes later she came back, dripping water, cheeks a dark rose-brown, eyes merry. She saw his questioning eyes, and said, “Oihduzaza hanhanna.” With her hand she made the sign for the morning bath.

“So that's what you were up to.”

He loved her wet body. In the shadowy light of the cave he saw again how white her bell-like belly was. Her face, neck, hands were like those of a lighter-skinned Indian, but the rest of her as pale as shimmering egg peel.

He loved the lithe form of her, especially her hips which had only just begun to swell with coming womanhood. She was almost too perfect to touch. He regretted having once touched her at the same time that he longed to touch her again.

He thought to himself: “And then, there's Katherine.”

Erden turned. A questioning look opened her face.

Quickly he made the sign for eating.

She quirked her gray-ringed eyes at him. She'd caught on that he'd just then remembered someone else. She smiled, and with a wink forgave him, and motioned for him to stay abed while she got him something to eat. She put on her buckskins and skipped into the larger room.

“The sweet little rascal,” he thought, stroking his beard, “she ain't so dumb.”

They had breakfast of roast venison and sliced pemmican and thimbleberries washed down with clear spring water.

When he'd finished eating, he held his hand level against his heart and swung it briskly out and to the right. “Good.”

She nodded. “Was-te.”

He lay back on his willow rest, bare toes to the fire.

She put the parfleches away.

He brooded on the problem of what to do about Katherine. He wondered what Katherine might be doing at the moment.

Erden tidied up the cave.

After a while, musing on the fire, he got to wondering about the various Sioux words Erden had used the day before. Using sign language, he had her interpret them while she did her housework. “Paha Sapa” not only meant “the Black Hills” but also “that place where a dark jealous spirit full of great vengeance guarded many forbidden secrets.” “Wakantanka” meant “the Spirit of All Spirits.” “Sanyan” meant “whitewash.” “Poge we” meant “nosebleed” or “you have broken my maidenhead.” “Uwa” meant “come.” “Mazaskazi” meant literally “yellow silver.” “Sha” meant “scarlet,” “very wonderful.” “Kazanyan” meant “parting.” “Anawin” meant “to tell what is not true.”

They talked in liquid gestures. Both were quick to catch the other's thought.

He made out that she did not remember anything about white parents. Her first memory of life was of riding a spotted pony very fast in moonlight. She had good Indian parents at first. They loved her dearly. She lived very happy with them for at least six winters that she could recall. Then the hated white man with his blue breeches and his terrible wagon guns came and wiped out her village. She herself had been wounded. She showed him a white bubble of a scar in her armpit. Somehow she had been overlooked by the bayoneting white man. Afterward she had crept, then run, to the safety of certain tribal cousins of her foster parents. Several winters passed. Her new parents had little to eat. They soon let her know she was not welcome. Besides, her skin turned white when she did not run naked in the sun as she had when a little girl. She became more and more unhappy living with them. On one of their trips to the Black Hills to get lodgepoles, and to treat themselves to thimble- berries, she jumped camp and fled into the higher Hills. She
knew her second parents would not follow her because of their fear of the mad spirits in the Black Hills. They believed that the mad spirits deliberately sought to terrify man and beast with their vindictive lightnings and their terrible rumblings and their black snouts of whirling winds. She herself wasn't too afraid of the spirits and their mad behavior. Soon she found the cave off the gulch and then the high little park. The place of the gold she knew about from her first Indian father's description. It had not taken her long to learn to live alone, and like it. She'd felt terribly lonesome at first, yes, but soon the pines and the bushes and the streams and the flying two-leggeds and the preying four-leggeds got used to her, and she got used to them, and then they became friends.

That spring, several months before Ransom came along, some white prospectors had stumbled upon her, and she'd almost been caught. But she was too swift, too wary, for them and their bullets. A few days later she managed to stampede their horses with a scaring robe. Later still she'd scared the daylights out of the grizzly prospectors themselves by yowling the Indian death cry and following it up by starting a small avalanche into their camp. The prospectors left in a rush, cursing and muttering about a “banshee.” She had to smile as she told about it.

Then Ransom had come along.

She had to know about him too.

He told her some things about himself, about his adventures with Sam Slaymaker, about his attempts at mining, about his tries at driving mules.

She had tears in her gray eyes when he finished signing that his early memory was wiped out and that like her he too was an orphan. The two of them were heart kin.

He didn't tell her about Katherine.

She asked him by sign if he'd ever eaten the white man's “snow in summer.”

It took him a moment to understand what she meant.

Then it came to him. Ice cream. He told her, yes, he had, and that someday when they should go to the great place of many wooden lodges at Cheyenne he would get her a whole parfleche full.

“When?”

“Soon. Perhaps before the snow flies.”

That afternoon they checked the horses in the little park pasture. The horses were fine. The horses pricked up their heads and came trotting over to the pole fence and nuzzled them both. Ransom ran his hand over their backs for sores and found none. Sam would have been pleased with his grooming.

Ransom wanted to see the mother lode of gold again. Erden frowned at the thought, but went along anyway. To her it was not a treasure to gloat over.

He was struck again by the richness of the milky quartz and couldn't help but fill a pocket with a handful of nuggets the size of rose hips.

She frowned at that too.

He dreamed ahead to that great day when, after he'd mined it himself or had sold it outright, he would be a wealthy man. He swore he'd build himself a great mansion in one of the little parks around. Katherine would adore him for it.

Erden touched him on the elbow.

He jumped. And then groaned as if struck in the belly by an arrow.

She touched him again. “Uwa.”

He made up his mind to push all thought of Katherine to one side and concentrate on Erden.

She signaled that she had yet another secret place to show him.

“All right, little Swallow Blue, lead on.”

They climbed a small hogback to the northeast; filed past thrusting fingers of shining granite; dropped into a canyon
with flared sides. The walls of the canyon were brilliant crimson sandstone and studded with patches of blue spruce. Then, going up a side ravine, they descended into yet another little perfect park. Here too the meadow was lush with wonderful grasses, and instead of daisies it was veiled over with myriads of nodding sunflowers.

Ransom's eye fell on some red deer grazing nearby. A big buck cropped alone off to one side of the herd.

Erden put a finger to her lips. She threw a soft look back at Ransom, and then, seemingly out only for a stroll, casually headed toward the deer. She paused now and again to lift the sunburst head of a sunflower. She had the appearance of a red doe out grazing.