The Savage Curse (16 page)

“Not this time,” he said.

“What do you mean ‘not this time'?”

“This time, I won. He lost. I think he might have become a friend. In time.”

Gale snorted.

“A friend? More like a sworn enemy. The minute you turn your back on one of them redskins, they want to lift your scalp.”

“I have to try,” John said. “My pa always said if you could make a friend out of an enemy, you got a good mark in the Lord's book.”

“Oh, he said that, did he? Well, you're not going to try and make a friend out of Oliver Hobart, are you? If so, I'll keep that chunk of ore and you and Ben can just ride on to Tucson and shake hands with the enemy.”

“Gale, I can't explain it. Just let it drop, will you?”

“Sure, I'll let it drop, John Savage. Just mark my words. That Injun's goin' to remember you and first chance he gets . . .” She made a cutting sound and drew a finger across her throat.

Ben was already mounted up when Gale and John took the reins of their horses from him.

“I put your rifle back in its scabbard,” Ben said. “At least that Injun didn't get that.”

“Yeah,” John said, conscious of the withering glare from Gale as he climbed into the saddle.

They rode off the mesa and down the long slope back to the road. The sky filled with clouds, their white bellies turning dark as soot. In the distance they heard the rumble of thunder and by the time they turned toward Gale's sheep ranch, they could see jagged streaks of lightning lacing the black clouds to the west. The horses were nervous and jittery. Gent seemed to jump underneath the saddle every time a roll of thunder pealed across the heavens.

John thought of Coyote, wondering how he would fare in the storm. He was no Indian lover, he told himself, but he still had the feeling that he and the Navajo could have been friends. More than that, he wondered how he would feel now if he had pulled that trigger and sent the man scampering through the valley of death. It would have been easy. Just to pull that trigger.

That was the trouble. The trouble with the six-gun hanging from his belt. It wasn't cursed, he was sure.

But it had gotten a mite too easy to kill a man with that pistol.

Way too easy.

20

THERE WAS NO SUNSET THAT DAY. THE SKIES HAD DARKENED WITH black elephantine clouds by the time Gale, Ben, and John reached the sheep ranch. Thunder boomed in the distance and lightning streaked the far sky, stippling the clouds with vibrant latticework that looked like liquid silver. Ben and John helped the herders get the sheep into barns and by the time they were finished, the winds were blowing grass and sticks across the fields and slamming into Gale's house with a lashing fury that rattled the shutters and keened a banshee wail in the eaves.

Gale lit the lamps in the front room and the kitchen as Ben and John stood in the dim light, watching her move like a wraith, her snowy hair flowing like a white cloud above the floor.

“You boys set down,” she said. “There, on the divan.”

She left the room as the two men sat down. They heard her footsteps as she went into the kitchen. Gusts of wind pounded at the door, rattled the windows, and made the windmill outside change pitch and sing a whirring melody.

Gale poured whiskey into stout glass tumblers and barred the front door. Lightning flashes glazed the windows and thunder made the house shudder with every loud crash.

“In my wildest dreams,” Ben said, “I never thought I'd wind up as a sheepherder.”

Gale laughed.

“You didn't herd those sheep, Ben, the dogs did.”

“Yah, that's true,” Ben said. “What kind of dogs were those, anyway?”

“They're Border collies,” Gale said. “Bred to tend and herd sheep.”

“I never saw a dog work that hard,” Ben said.

They had eaten from their saddlebags on the ride back and now they drank the whiskey and watched the lightning flicker on the windowpanes and listened to the rumbling thunder. It had not yet rained.

“Back there, when the thunder started,” John said, “and that lightning crackled, I thought I heard gunshots. Either of you hear it?”

“Must be your imagination,” Ben said, smacking his lips and licking off the spilled whiskey.

“Come to think of it,” Gale said, “a couple of those lightning cracks did sound a lot like rifle shots.”

“That ain't nothin',” Ben said. “Most of 'em do sound like rifle shots.”

“I don't know,” John said. “It gets a man to thinking.”

He was thinking about those soldiers and Hobart. But he was also thinking about Red Hand and the Navajos. If they were in cahoots with Ollie, a cold-blooded killer, he couldn't think of a more diabolical and vicious collection of murderers. If Lieutenant Bellaugh had been ambushed by such a force, he would have had a fight on his hands. He hoped those weren't gunshots he'd heard, but if they were, he hoped Bellaugh and the soldiers were victorious and had Hobart slung across a saddle, dead, or in irons.

“A penny,” Gale said to John.

“Huh?”

“For your thoughts,” she said.

He told her what he had been thinking. She waved a hand in the air.

“Why worry about something you can't do anything about?” she said. “You and Ben have your work cut out for you in the next several days.”

“I know,” John said. “Tomorrow, we'll take that ore sample with us to the mine. Ben and I will do some lab work on some of those tailings, put them in the mine, then take the ore to the assay office in Tucson and wait for the test results.”

“Then what?” Gale asked.

“Oh, we'll brag about our mine and let word get out to Hobart.”

“Then we'll wait,” Ben said. “Just the two of us.” There was more than a trace of wry sarcasm in his voice. He looked gloomy, John thought. Gloomy as a kicked dog.

“That's something we'll have to work out,” John said and took another swallow of whiskey. He wasn't a drinking man, but it had turned cold outside when they were rounding up the sheep and the whiskey warmed him, felt good in his belly. Ben held his glass out for another drink and Gale poured his glass full. She sipped at hers but offered more to John, who shook his head.

“Clarence liked his whiskey,” she said, dreamy-eyed. “So I learned to tolerate it. But if I take a drink twice a year, that's enough for me. Tonight doesn't count.”

The wind raged outside like some snarling beast. It sniffed at the cracks and crevices in the house, bolted in through small openings, carried a chill with it.

“I think I'll light a fire,” Gale said. “This is turning into a real blue norther.”

“I'll help you,” Ben said. He got up and walked to the fireplace, bent down, and began stacking kindling on the grate. Gale opened the damper in the brick chimney, took a taper from the mantel, struck it on the hearth, and lit the dry wood. Flames licked the kindling and the wood crackled like a thousand crickets, the released gases whispering and hissing like snakes.

Ben added logs to the kindling and the heat from the fire began to warm the chilly room.

“I'll get you that ore sample, John,” Gale said when the fire was blazing. “You might want to leave early in the morning.”

“I do,” John said. “Think this rainstorm will blow over tonight?”

“Hard to tell,” she said. “Most do. You might have to watch out for flash floods. The way that wind is a-blowin', the storm might just whip on by in a hurry.”

She left the room and returned a few minutes later with a wooden box. It had a lid. She set it down in front of John and then sat in the chair opposite the divan. John opened the box and took out the rock.

Ben whistled as John turned the ore over in his hands so that they could see all sides of it.

Bands of gold were threaded through the rock. They saw specks of mica and quartz, but the gold veins gleamed in the firelight.

“The ore is rich,” Ben said. “We never found ore like this out in Colorado. Chunks and specks, sure, but not veined gold like this. That mine of your'n ought to be worked.”

“I just couldn't go there after Clarence died,” Gale said. “I knew he was in that mine and I knew I would feel his presence. I—I just wanted to cherish it as a kind of shrine, I suppose. Something left in his memory.”

“I understand,” John said. “I couldn't go back to our mine, either. My father's spirit is still there. My mother's and my sister's, too.”

Ben and John returned to the divan. John set the ore on the table next to their drink glasses. The rock seemed to pulse with energy. It caught the lamplight and the firelight and seemed to glow with a powerful energy.

“You poor boy,” Gale said. “I—I mean, I know you're not a boy, but losing your whole family like that.”

“You don't mind us using the mine to catch Hobart, Gale?” John asked.

She sighed.

“You know, I've thought about it a lot since we were up there. When—when we went inside, I could almost feel Clarence's presence. I kept thinking we'd see him at the end of that shaft.”

John nodded.

“When my father died,” he said, “I felt that presence. Very strong. When Ben and I found the pistol he had given me, and the gold that was cached away, I felt my father's spirit, I guess you'd call it. It was in the mountain air, in the stream, in the very air we breathed. I almost felt that if I closed my eyes and then opened them, I'd see him squatting by the creek, panning gold, or working one of the rockers, or swinging a pick up in the mine.”

Ben cleared his throat.

“I—I reckon I must have felt the same way, Johnny. I never told you because I was so choked up and seein' everybody dead, I just couldn't say what was in my mind. But I felt them all there, somehow, lookin' at us, pinin' for us, and it seemed like I could hear them whisperin' on the breeze that blew along that creek. Ever' last one of 'em.”

Gale let out a breath as if she had held it pent up in her chest for a very long time.

Then they heard the first spatters of rain, like shot thrown against the walls of the house, against the shutters and the panes of glass. They all listened to it and stared at the fire in the fireplace and became still as if each was feeling some personal presence and as if the wind that flung the rain was full of whispers, whispers from the dead each had lost.

Thunder boomed close at hand and lightning smeared a silver sheen on the windows, brief but vivid, the light vanishing like ghostly apparitions and leaving an afterimage on their retinas.

“Here it comes,” Gale said.

“Yep, there's the rain,” Ben said and took another swallow of whiskey.

John held up a hand.

“Listen,” he said.

Echoes of the last thunderclap reverberated across the skies. The rain pattered on the windows, soft except when gusts blasted the drops.

“Just thunder,” Gale said.

“No, underneath. I hear something.”

They all listened. The spatter of rain against the glass windows, the small thuds of the drops against the outer walls. The sob of the wind in the eaves.

“There,” John said. “Hear it?”

“I don't hear nothin' but rain and wind,” Ben said.

“I—I might have heard something,” Gale said. “Can't quite make it out.”

“Someone's calling,” John said. “Far off.”

Gale got up and walked to the front window. She looked out, then pressed her ear against the glass.

“I hear it now,” she said. “Someone is calling. Maybe the sheep ...”

John and Ben joined her at the front window. They could all hear someone yelling.

“Help,” Ben said. “It sounds like help.”

“It sure does to me,” John said.

“I think you're right,” Gale said. “Don't sound like none of my hands, neither.”

John went to the door and opened it.

He heard the sound of hoofbeats, very faint, but distinguishable in between gusts of wind and the splash of rain. He stepped out of the light and stood peering into the darkness.

He saw them then, two riders, their horses sloshing through puddles of water, throwing up a silvery spray.

“Somebody's coming,” he called into the house.

“I can't see 'em,” Gale said.

“How many?” Ben asked, still standing at the window with Gale.

“Looks like two. Can't make them out,” John said.

“Help, help,” one of the riders called and his voice was snatched away by a gust of wind. But they could all hear it, and then a ripping spear of lightning cracked through a cloud, splintering into a dozen branches. The light lit up the fields and illumined the two riders, freezing them in brilliance for a split second. Then the thunder drowned out all sound, even the rain.

John waved at the riders, hoping they could see him. That was an American voice, he knew, and whoever called was in trouble.

“Over here,” John shouted, but it was like yelling into a vacuum, into the rolling thunder. Yet the riders came on, galloping through grass and puddles of water. They appeared to be in slow motion, slowed by the weariness of their mounts and the curtains of rain, the blowing wind.

Gale and Ben rushed outside and stood beside John.

“Who is it?” Gale asked.

“I don't know,” John said. “But they're hurting for sure.”

The riders came into view, two silhouettes, faces dark, unidentifiable.

But John saw the yellow stripes on their trousers and the gleam of brass as another sheet of lightning burst light over a wide area.