News of the World (8 page)

The road was open before them, a two-track stretch in the pale of the moon, rolling over the lifts and falls of the prairie country of central Texas. They passed a farmhouse set back among trees. The farm buildings appeared to be great dozing animals that had gathered near the house in the night. There was a light shining in a window. Somebody was waiting up for somebody. Pasha tested the air for the scent of a mare. Had there been one he would have called out, making promises he would never be able to fulfill, but since all he could smell was a donkey and another gelding he held his peace and trotted on. Here and there were copses of post oak holding up wiry armatures of limb and twig, rattling with old brown leaves, and in the cold night air a hissing swift shape passed in front of them.

The girl cried out.
Sau-Podle!
She bent herself forward and carried the red wool up around her nose as if she would not
breathe the air. Sau-Podle brought news of a death; soon, here. It cut the air like a blade and trailed plump legs like a child's in fluffy pantaloons.

Great horned, said the Captain. Ignore it, Johanna. Pretend it was a night hawk.

A
T FIRST LIGHT
the Captain and Johanna were only a mile or so from the Brazos. As they went on they came to the little road that ran alongside the north bank. Then they came to a place he remembered as Carlyle Springs. The spring fed down out of a bluff of red sandstone into a ravine and then into the Brazos itself. It sparkled all the way down, jumping in transparent streams from pool to pool. The Captain looked up and thought he saw a way to get up there; a faint wagon track zigzagging up the slope.

He turned Fancy off the road and went uphill. After a hundred yards he had to get down and lead the mare through agarita and spiky young live oaks that tore at the underside but all he could think of was
Get under cover, get under cover.
He felt like he was pulling the load of the world behind him, Fancy and the girl jolting around in the driver's seat and Pasha scrambling behind. Everything was dripping wet and bedewed and soon he was soaked to the knees.

At the top he found the only flat place to stop. There were
trees and thickets of sumac to give them some concealment. Some stumps; somebody had been up here cutting fence posts. From a layered stack of red sandstone, crenellated and thick as a barbican, he could see the road below.

He bent over with his hands on his knees to relieve his back muscles. He was stiff from the long night's drive. Everything hurt. He straightened up and turned to her with the wrapped bacon in his hand. She took it from him, dropped the tailgate, and laid it down.

I cook! She smiled up at him. Then she held out a piece of divinity candy. Good horse lady, she said. Eat, Kep-dun. Her little face was round as an apple.

He returned the smile. Yes, very good, he said. He ate the piece of divinity and the sugar hit his bloodstream in a rush. He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his white hair. His coat hung open to the morning wind. He felt in his pockets for his pipe.

The girl collected dry wood in her skirt as if happy to discover that skirts were good for something after all. He handed her the match safe and she started the fire in the little cookstove. With the butcher knife she expertly carved the bacon. She sang to herself. This was life as she knew it, and it was good. No roofs, no streets. Her new-washed taffy hair flew in loose ribbons in the morning breeze. Every so often she lifted her head to run her gaze over the live oaks around them and listen for an enemy presence. Then she went back to slinging rashers into the skillet.

The Captain stuffed tobacco into his kaolin pipe. And here he was in his mild and mindless way still roaming, still reading out
the news of the world in the hope that it would do some good, but in the end he must carry a weapon in his belt and he had a child to protect and no printed story or tale would alter that. He considered the men who must be following them and also that the smell of tobacco smoke carried far and wide, far more than meat smoke, so on second thought he laid down the pipe.

He unharnessed Fancy and tied her beside Pasha and rubbed them both down with a rice-straw brush. If the Captain and Johanna had to run for it they would do better on horseback than in the wagon. He paused over the saddle and blankets. Not yet. But he found Pasha's riding bridle in the heap of tack and laid it over a wheel where it would be ready to hand.

He pulled on his riding boots with the undershot heels and then his spurs and shoved in the toggles to fix them and keep them from ringing. From his pockets he took out his gold watch and some pennies and his penknife and laid them on the tailgate. He wanted nothing about him that would clink, make a noise. He took out the revolver and once again made sure every chamber was full. He put it back into his waistband. The eight-inch barrel made it feel like he was carrying an axe handle. Whitewing doves sat up in the oaks and shifted from one pink foot to another and bobbed and sang because they wanted to come to water at the spring but were afraid.

The Captain wished he could go back down to the road to see how much of the wagon was visible from there. He guessed probably the top boards. He did not know how soon Almay and his friends might have started from Dallas after them. Probably at about seven-thirty, eight in the morning when he did not show up at the Tyler Stage Roadhouse. When they saw no
tracks on the Meridian Road, he hoped they would have doubled back to the Waxahachie Road and stayed on it. With luck they would be far away to the east bumbling along and crying out, Where did they go? Where did they go? But they would wise up soon enough and they were on horseback and therefore faster.

He did not go down. They might catch him down there on foot with a long climb back up to the wagon among the rocks. He lay on his stomach and watched the road. It was red dirt, two tracks with a strip of mullein and Indian grass in the middle. He could see two sections through the trees, one about a half-mile away and another piece just below.

He wiped at his tired eyes and then took up his guard duty again. In the increasing light of day the Captain thought he saw the moving and reflective slash of a horse's tail. The doves became silent. Hm, he said. He climbed up to the wagon seat for a better view.

It was perhaps fifty degrees. A thin watery sun laid its gunmetal shine on the country below. The hills were ridges widely separated from one another in great tree-covered waves, as if they were drifting apart from one another across the stone underpinnings of the earth. On the horizon of cedar-covered hills, a thick billowing of smoke rose into the sky. Somebody was burning slash or stubble about three or four miles away.

The little stove erupted in a singing clatter of broken pipe and scattered coals. The hurtling skillet lid sailed away over a wave of flying hot grease. Another earsplitting
Bang!
Bacon and coffee spun into the air.

The girl was under the wagon in less than a second. The
Captain fell sideways off the seat. He landed on his left side. It was quicker and safer than standing up to climb down. He scrambled under the wagon. Another round hit the sideboards above him and splinters sprayed into the air. He thought of the flour keg with the .38 ammunition in it.

They won't want to kill the horses and they won't want to take a chance on killing the girl.
He lifted himself on his elbows and made a reassuring gesture. She was flat on her stomach and her face was turned sideways to him, keeping her eyes on his square old hawk's face. They were lying among rocks and small spiny agarita; a lizard fled in a running of dark chevrons.
They're firing up from the ravine. They have rifles.

The Captain crawled from under the wagon to the edge of the caprock and found a notch in it. He pulled out the revolver. Another shot from the right, different place. They had both been from the right. So where was the third man? He spat on his hand and then smeared it on his revolver barrel and then sifted dust over it. The Smith and Wesson with its long barrel was accurate but nowhere near as accurate as a rifle. And it didn't have the range. Their rifles were good for two hundred yards or more. They could stay out of range and blast away at him till the cows came home.

The shotgun was good only for close work; he had only fifteen shells of light Number Seven, what they called turkey shot or dove shot, which would at most pepper somebody's face with a permanent tattoo unless you jammed it right up against them at face-to-face range and that was a situation he would not be likely to survive. In the shot box were powder and caps and hulls to make up more shotgun shells, as if it mattered. He lay
still and felt running tremors in his belly. Fear for himself, for the girl.
Help me.

He turned and saw Johanna crawling toward him, dragging the box of .38 ammunition. She had got it out of the flour keg. It was covered with flour, so were her hands.

He took the box and then pointed sternly to the wagon. She wriggled back.

This was not the first time that someone had wanted to kill him but the other times had been what one might call fair fights. The two rifle shots sounded to the Captain as if they had come from Henrys. A Spencer made a flatter, barking sound. But it could have been the gunpowder they were using. He smelled the gunpowder smoke rising up from below in long windless strands that snarled in the cedar. His mouth was dry. They had been traveling the entire night and he was weary and the cloudy light was diffuse so it was difficult to see.

He had not thought they would turn so quickly to murder. He had thought if they caught up, they would bluster, threaten, offer a certain amount in silver, perhaps even claim they were the girl's relatives. He saw himself pointing the long barrel of the Smith and Wesson into their faces and saying something like, Begone or I will blow you through. This was clearly not going to happen. Human aggression and depravity still managed to astonish him. He had been caught by surprise.

The girl was under the wagon. She was listening. Then she lifted her hands and whipped her long hair into a braid and tied it off with a piece of lace edging she tore from her skirt. She was not astonished. Not at all.

He lay still in the crumbled stone and blue-green agarita behind the protection of the caprock. He waited. He and Johanna were exposed to the wooded slope behind them, higher ground, but it was a good quarter mile away. Almay and the Caddos were coming up from below. The wagon must have been just barely exposed. He waited. The wind was cold.

He heard, remotely, the lever action of another Henry and then saw another puff of gunpowder smoke below, from behind a long slanting buttress of red stone on the right side of the ravine. Instantly afterward he heard a sharp, flat crack and the noise of the wagon being hit again. Splinters burst into the air and rained around him. Pasha fell back on his halter rope but it did not break so he came up straight again. He wasn't hit. Fancy was more determined and tore her halter rope loose and went crashing away into the trees and stopped. She was hung up on something.

The Captain waited for the other, or two others if they were all armed with rifles. He had to hoard his revolver ammunition and watch for the best shot even if they were right in his face. It seemed his eyes would start from his head. He had to shut them for a moment. Then a .45 long Colt round struck to his right like a hammerhead, about six feet away and then he heard the muzzle blast. He didn't turn his head but only noted where the smoke came from. It had also come from the right side of the ravine, farther down. Number three. The shot did not have that deep, biting bark of a rifle, so it was a revolver. They had all three come up single file on one side. Stupid. They were overconfident. They were up against nothing but an old man and a girl.

In some ways he wouldn't mind going out in a blaze of glory. Seventy-one was a good long time to have lived. But then there was Johanna.

The mild, watery sun of early March poured down a shadowless light. Not many reflections. Another shot. It chipped the face of the dark, dense limestone to his left. He did not duck nor glance in that direction but watched for the smoke.

He saw it. Same rifle. Two, that's all they had. The third man was the odd man out and had to make do with a revolver like himself.

Then he saw a man jump from one buttress of rusty-red stone to another to cross the ravine to the other side. He was carrying a rifle. The Captain fired three times, chipping the stone around the man, sending up sprays of cedar duff and the sumac leaves like little airborne ears. It was one of the Caddos. They were trying to nail him between two lines of fire; a rifle to his left and a rifle and a handgun to his right.

A brief glimpse; the Caddo was wearing a heavy leather glove on his left hand. So he was right, they did have Henrys. There was no floor arm on the Henry and its hot barrel and the magazine tube had to be handled with a glove. Another shot. He waited for the flash of a rifle barrel on his left, within the range of his revolver, saw it, fired twice and heard a yell and the rifle flew away and got wedged among the rocks.

Got him. At least he had knocked the rifle out of his hand. And now the stupid fool was going to go after it.

He aimed and waited. He was sure the Caddo was going to try to retrieve his precious expensive rifle.
Go for it, man.
Over
on the other side of the ravine he caught a glimpse of the crown of a hat. He was too smart for that. It was on a stick.

Johanna, get back!

The girl ignored him. She was edging along the caprock to his right. She ducked in and out between the great tabular sections of red sandstone, holding on to the unforgiving rock with her bare hands. She peered over, she ducked back. She carried the stove lid lifter in one hand and now she began to lever at the base of a flat layer of stone. She had pulled the back hem of her skirts between her legs and tucked it into the dainty belt at her waist in front so it looked as if she were wearing big Turkish pantaloons. She was still barefoot. She looked like the engravings he had seen of Circassian children in their rags and bandoliers fighting the Russian troops somewhere in the Pontus. This was clearly not her first gunfight.
Mao sap-he,
she said.
Caddos. The Ring-in-the-nose people. They will die.
She didn't care if he did not understand her, it was simply important to say,
They will die.

The Captain turned back to his notch and through the leaves on the left he saw the Caddo's black hair glinting as he dodged from rock to rock, down the ravine, going for his rifle. He fired again. A yell, then whimpering. One wounded. How bad he didn't know. Sweat ran from under his hat, from the tattered sweatband and into his eyes and he wiped his eyes on his shoulder one after the other, quickly. He was surprised when he saw he had to reload. He had not thought he had fired so many rounds. His hands had flour on them from the box of shells.

Johanna was still levering at the base of a slab of stone with
the lifter. To his amazement she tipped it up, and then over, and it rolled end over end like a flat plate on edge, leaping downhill, smashed in half on an outthrust boulder and then shattered and fell in pieces upon somebody. There was a deep shout, almost a grunt, and a man fell forward out of concealment and rolled.