Sacred Is the Wind (37 page)

Panther Burn turned around and held her, brushing the hair away from her cheek as he talked softly of his love for her. She lowered her eyes as a maiden might, to hear such a one open his heart.

“Little Bird. You are next to my heart. My spirit has no home except when you are with me.”

“I shall pray here by my fire and listen to the secrets in the wind. And will ask the
maiyun
to show me the paths that lie ahead. And while I pray, no harm can befall you.” Rebecca pressed her cheek close to his, and when it came time for him to leave, she grudgingly let him stand. Panther Burn took up his rifle and walked to the horses. Rebecca found a raven feather from among her belongings and gently fanned the flames, which leaped up like tongues of fire. Coals grew ruby red and pulsed with life. She began to sing as Panther Burn rode away, and closing her eyes, she envisioned a panther at bay, its back against a cliff, with no place left to run. The image saddened her. And in her mind she saw the wild dogs approach, in a hunting pack, fangs bared, froth dripping from their muzzles. Nowhere to run, to hide. No escape. The panther made its stand.
No. I have no use for such a vision. Leave me. This is an evil spirit
. Her song droned on, a chant of protection and courage. She sang and the sun climbed higher in the sky, until at last her mind was freed from the grip of the troubling visions. The panther faded then, but the hounds remained, and leading them, a wolf. The wolf became a man.

Her son.

Michael Spirit Wolf walked his gelding up into the left fork of a narrow creek bed. A crystal-clear ribbon of water flowed underfoot in lazy undulations that would carry it down toward the forest below. The wind gave a cool kiss to his cheek and he paused to let his horse drink its fill. He dismounted, stepping clear of the creek, and with his left hand caught hold of a wind-eroded pocket in the stone walls and worked his way up the wall of the ravine until he gained an unobstructed view of the valley he had just crossed. Golden meadow dappled with cloud shadows, purple mountains distant, a swatch of forest land wrapping the slopes, everything as it should be. Michael nodded, satisfied. It was the second time in the past hour he had checked his back trail and the twelfth time since starting out from Lame Deer. He had told Marshal McKean that the son of Panther Burn would not lead an armed posse to his father's lair. But Michael offered to go alone and present Sabbath's case to Panther Burn. And Sabbath, after due consideration, had agreed.

Michael eased himself down the wall and leaped onto his mountain-bred gelding. The Cheyenne pulled a denim jacket from its ties on his saddlebag and tugged it on. He ran a hand through his thick black hair, and shielding his eyes, glanced up at the sky and thought to himself how blue were the eyes of Katherine Madison. He wondered what Panther Burn would do when he saw his son again. Their first meeting had been brief but certainly to the point, if attempted murder could be called that.
Of course, Father may have only been trying to trample me
partly
to death
, Michael consoled himself. He patted the gelding's nut-brown neck and nudged the animal's flanks.

Half an hour later the walls of the ravine leveled and Michael rode at an easy gait out across another valley floor that rose sharply through a stand of ponderosas. When he cleared these, a smaller meadow waited to be ridden through. Beyond it, in a grove of lodgepole pines mingled with the more stately sentinel ponderosas, Michael had helped Rebecca build a cabin, as if she had known all along she would need it someday, this place where even a panther might live in peace.

“There it is. By damn, there it is,” Bragg said, craning his neck over the rotted trunk of a fallen pine. He stretched out alongside McKean on the needle-carpeted earth. Here on the forest's fringe the two men watched as Michael walked his gelding directly toward another stand of timber higher up; the direction Michael took inadvertently pinpointed the cabin with its camouflage of dead gray limbs and underbrush.

“Now what?” Bragg said. “I'll bring the others. We can rush him. We'll nail that red devil's hide—”

“Shut up,” said McKean. “Ease on back. Keep flat to the ground.” He started back the way they had crawled up, easing their way under deadfalls, deeper into the forested barrier intersecting the valley. Only when the hillside was completely lost to sight did Sabbath permit them to stand and run the rest of the way to the clearing where they had left Marley and James Broken Knife.

The tribal policeman sat cross-legged in the shade of a fir with his back to a mule-sized chunk of granite. He was whittling on a slab of jerky and hungrily devouring the shavings. Marley, stretched out on the ground, was nursing on his canteen. He sat upright when Sabbath and Jubal entered the clearing.

“Well?” the big man growled.

“The younker is a good trailsman. But I'm better,” McKean said. He held back and let Jubal Bragg get ahead of him. Then he tugged his Colt revolver out from under his jacket and leveled it at the two white men. Bragg, seeing the look of surprise on Marley's face, turned and stared slack-jawed at the marshal.

“What in blazes are you doing?” he asked, his voice soft, almost a purr.

“I am taking your guns. Now!” Sabbath glanced over at James, who stared at the lawman in astonishment. “Go take their guns,” Sabbath ordered. James pointed to himself with his beef jerky. “Hurry up, lad.”

James stood, set aside his food and knife, and hooked his thumbs in his suspenders. He looked from Marley to Bragg, then after reflection, liked the idea of disarming Jubal Bragg. He sauntered over and took Bragg's matched set of Smith and Wessons and Marley's Army Colt. He tossed them over to Sabbath, who nodded in approval.

“Bragg … have a seat with your man there,” said Sabbath.

“Son of a bitch,” Marley spat. “Low-down son of a …”

Sabbath shoved Bragg forward onto the ground and stepped over him and slapped Marley across the face with the barrel of his revolver, opening a gash from the man's mouth to just below his left ear. Big Marley rolled over and crawled to his knees. “You're lucky you got that gun,” he spat, wiping the blood from his cheek. Sabbath holstered the revolver. Marley charged, rising up like some primordial beast to lunge at the man who had hurt him. Sabbath hurt him some more. The marshal waited for Marley to straighten. Then he kicked him in the crotch. Marley grunted, doubled over, and Sabbath clubbed down on the big man's unprotected neck. Marley dropped face-down in the earth. Sabbath drew his gun and knelt by the fallen man and leaned forward so that Marley could not help but hear him.

“You've gotten old, Marley. Old and soft.” He stood and glanced around at Jubal. “And you, Bragg. You're still like blued steel inside. But you're apt to find out there's a hell of a lot of difference between hiring your killings and having to do them yourself. All I know is I don't want you tracking around and messing things up. It has been a lot easier to know just exactly where you were.”

“He killed my brother,” Jubal said. His eyes lowered in defeat, his expression downcast, his voice bitter. He seemed to sag in on himself as if crushed by the weight of his memories and dreams.

“We've all got things to answer for, Bragg … Panther Burn, me, and you. Maybe you most of all, for what you started long ago, back on the Warbonnet. Look to yourself, Jubal Bragg, 'cause one day they'll come for you, all those poor dead ones you left behind. How can you stand such an army of ghosts—the slaughtered men and women and children? Look to yourself, Bragg. But stay the hell out of my way. I have work to do.” Sabbath looked around at James Broken Knife. “Watch them. If they move, shoot. That is an order, Sergeant.”

The tribal officer drew his service revolver and cocked the weapon. “I understand,” he said.

Sabbath holstered his revolver and hurried over to his horse. He led the animal from its grazing out of the clearing.

“What if you don't come back?” James asked.

“Give them their guns and ride like the devil, 'cause you won't be any match for Panther Burn. None of you will.” Sabbath vanished on horseback into the emerald shadows of the forest. When he was lost from sight, Jubal straightened. His mask of despair seemed to melt away as he crawled to his feet and dusted himself off, appearing to take no notice of the tribal policeman. It was fortunate that McKean had no knowledge of James Broken Knife's prior association with Jubal Bragg. The colonel hurried over toward the Smith and Wessons lying in the dust. James Broken Knife intercepted him, brandishing his own Army-issue Colt.

“Oh, come on, man, I doubt you have any love for Panther Burn,” said Jubal. Behind him, Marley sat up and struggled to stand, groaning and cursing with the effort.

“I have no love for you either,
ve-ho-e
.” James sneered.

“But you have a love for this,” Jubal said, and reaching inside his shirt, he withdrew a small leather pouch. He untied the pouch and shook out a half-dozen shiny gold coins, which he tossed in the air. They sparkled, spinning in flight, and landed at the feet of James Broken Knife. The Cheyenne stooped and picked them up.

“I'll double the amount if yours is the bullet that drops Panther Burn,” Jubal said as he picked up his guns. He turned and looked around at Marley, who had moved over to his horse and stood leaning on the saddle, his hand on the stock of his Winchester. Bragg holstered his matched pistols, one at his belt and the other in a pocket in his black frock coat. He walked over to the ex-sergeant and stood in the man's shadow.

“Are you all right, Marley?”

Marley dabbed at his face where the blood had already begun to coagulate along his swollen, bruised cheek. He sighed, his great weight sagging against the horse. Big Marley looked aside at Bragg. “One moment I'm ready to ride hell-bent for leather. The next, Sabbath McKean leaves me facedown in the dust and it gets me thinking, Colonel. What the hell are we doing here? You ain't fired a gun in years. And me, I'm thinking the war was a long time ago. Once I could have taken the likes of McKean. I got no doubt of that. But once ain't now.” The big man shrugged. “I'm thinking, and it's piss poor timing, I know, but … well, dammit, Colonel, a fella chases his nightmares long enough, he's apt to catch 'em. And then what? Katy bar the door, I warrant.”

“Get your rifle and come on,” Bragg said. He glanced over his shoulder and saw James Broken Knife disappear down the deer path Sabbath had taken. Bragg fixed Marley in a steely-eyed glare. “Sergeant … that's an order.”

Marley stiffened. The military tone worked. Reflex made him obey the voice that had led him in the past. He reached for the rifle before he realized exactly what he was doing. Then his hands froze on the stock a moment more. They had come this far. What else was there to do? “Did I ever tell you about my brothers?” said Big Marley with a weak grin lighting his battered homely features. “Lord but they were dumb. They wanted to come out west, only they couldn't figure out where it was.” Jubal was too close to the end of a lifelong hunt to enjoy his old friend's comfortable retort. Instead he turned and hurried out of the clearing.

And Marley, despite the first clear premonition he had ever known, took up his rifle and followed.

The places set, in the golden glory of the day, the deadly act unfolded. Michael Spirit Wolf reined his gelding to a stop a few yards from the cabin. His mother sat before a medicine fire, soft brown features hidden behind a coruscating curtain of smoke. Michael checked the woods around the cabin, then glanced at the empty doorway as if expecting his father to emerge. He looked to his mother, shifted in the saddle, but found it difficult to make her out.

“I have come to speak with Father. He must talk to me. He must listen to what I have to say.”

Rebecca raised a hand and cut through the smoke with the raven feather she held. The smoke parted and when she waved her hand twice more through the smoke, a breeze stirred and swept the curtain away. “My son. He will not listen and the time for talk is ended. I have seen the trail he must take written here in the fire and heard it whispered in the wind. But why have you chosen to stand against him?”

“I love him,” Michael said.

“Then why did you bring the
veho-e
?”

Michael stared in surprise. “I came alone,” he said, anger rising in him. “Where is Father?”

“Gone to hunt those you brought to hunt him.”

“I came alone,” Michael protested again. “I brought no one …” The words died in his throat as the realization hit. McKean! And the others! What a fool he had been to trust the marshal. They had tracked him from Lame Deer. Michael darkened with fury and he wheeled his horse about and savagely dug his heels into the animal's flanks. In the medicine fire a coal cracked apart and its fiery center poured out like blood. Rebecca gasped in horror and stared after her son.

“Michael! No!” Too late. He could not hear. Rebecca scrambled to her feet and ran toward the horses tethered in back of the cabin. She had to stop him. She had to save her son.

A forest at peace. A world held in the still and fragile grip of a September afternoon. In emerald shadows, through slanted barriers of golden light, the hunters came and Panther Burn waited for the one he wanted more than the others, the one he had recognized from a distance when first the Cheyenne had spied the strangers entering his valley. Panther Burn was one with the breathless quiet, one with the shimmering sliding light, as patient as time itself. And he was rewarded at last as Jubal Bragg stepped around a grove of fir trees and started up the wooded slope directly toward Panther Burn. The Cheyenne thumbed the hammer back on his rifle and silent as his namesake padded past the ponderosa he had used for cover. Jubal did not see him. At least not at first. Then he stumbled, regained his balance, kicked a pine cone out from underfoot, and looked up. The colonel froze as he beheld his death.