The Tall Men (5 page)

“Brother mine,” boomed Clint, his grin flashing
white in the darkness, “you been misinformed.
I ain’t playin’!”

“Hang on,” ordered Ben. “We’re goin’ out.”

With the wave, he kicked the black gelding out past the cutbank. Behind him the thirty-foot lengths of the Texas lariats sang tight. The three-horse chain cleared the bank, the weary mounts staggering as the full blast of the hurricane wind struck them. They were lost to view in as many seconds as they had men in their saddles, and in as many more the ironshod marks of their passing were flattened and filled with the white smother of the driving snow.

In the center of a south plains blizzard all senses are at once destroyed. A man is a blind, deaf mute, his mount an unreasoning, terror stricken wild animal, fighting both him and the storm with equal dumbbrute fury. All points of the prairie compass are blotted out. In any direction and in all directions the fearful needle may swing, only blackness beckons, only death by cold awaits. There is no time, nor any sense of it. A minute may be an hour, an hour but twenty seconds—or five—or no seconds at all.

Fighting for his breath against the strangling clot of the snow, Ben kept the black moving. Behind him Clint’s and Stark’s horses fought the growing drifts. He could see neither of them, hear nothing but the insane yammer of the wind. He knew they were there only by the tension on his rope.

How long they had been riding before he realized they had lost the river, he did not know. He only knew that one minute the yellow surge of the Arkansas was still roiling ten feet to his left, and then there was nothing over there where it should be but the piling, dirty white of the unbroken snows.

He did not stop the black and did not dare to.

There was no chance for them, now, which they would not make worse by a rope-tangling halt. He kept the black digging, reining him back to the left, cursing him on.

The big horse fought him at once. He threw his head, flinging and jawing at the bar of the bit, bowing his neck, humping his spine, grunting and whickering fiercely. Ben put the spurs into him to their shanks, nearly jerked his head off sawing back on the left rein. The horse took it and held now to the left, but a man could feel by the way he went, sidestepping and hipswinging constantly to the right, that he was being driven against his crazed will.

Ben began to count now, shouting the numbers aloud. That river had to be close, he could not have lost it more than a few seconds. But time was a crazy thing when a man could not see or hear. If he lost track of it now—

The count reached one hundred. Then two. The leaden pile of the snow rolled on, unbroken. At two hundred and fifty, Ben knew five minutes had gone. And that the Arkansas had gone with them.

All that was left now was something he had been told all the days of his ranch boyhood was no good—a horse’s sense of direction in a blue norther. But in the big Texan’s mind was another memory from that same boyhood, and not from the ranch. A memory from that other part of that boyhood. One from the Comanche camps along the North Concho. The red brother did not agree with the white. There was a proverb among those Kwahadis. An old, old proverb. From a people who had been horse Indians a hundred years before the Sioux left Minnesota on
foot, or the broadfaced Cheyenne trudged down onto the plains from their Uinta Mountain fastnesses. A proverb that went,
“Tsei hou-dei kyh-gou-p gaux-kin
—a blind horse has more brains than a bright man in a blizzard!”

Ben eased up on the black, shook out the reins, let them fall slack. The horse stopped dead. He gathered his haunches, stood waiting uncertainly. Ben shook the reins again, ticked him with the spurs, leaned up in the saddle.

“Go along, you black bastard!” he yelled. “I ain’t bright and you ain’t blind, but we’re sure as hell in a blizzard!”

The big gelding flung his head around, walled his eyes at his crouching rider. He blew the snow from the moist red bell of his nostrils, began shortly to move ahead. Within twenty steps Ben felt him veer back to the right. Before a minute had passed, he had completely reversed their left-hand course, was blundering and bucking the hock-deep snows in a direction Ben’s instincts told him was directly away from the river.

“Ka-dih
!
”
Ben yelled into the storm, suddenly thinking of Clint and his crazy laugh. “Don’t you make no liar out’n me and my poor old grandmother!”

Hearing the shout, the black seemed to redouble both the speed and sureness of his stride. Ben let him go. He was feeling the cold now. Feeling its tingling, swift deadliness closing in on him. Numbing its spreading way up his arms and legs. Creeping relentlessly past wrist and ankle. Pushing its leaden weight toward knee and elbow.

As it did, he knew without benefit of white boyhood ranch lore or red-memoried Kwahadi proverb
exactly where the black gelding was taking him and Clint and Nathan Stark. Once you knew that, the next grim question for Ka-dih was easy.

How long did it take three white men to freeze to death in the belly of a blue Texas norther?

There was no way for a man to know how long he had been unconscious in the saddle. He only knew something struck him heavily along the right thigh, then twice along the left, nearly scraping him from his horse. He remembered pawing for the saddlehorn, getting his eyes open. Then he saw them, thick and blackstemmed, all around him.

Trees. Cottonwoods, alders, willows. They were in the timber. Dense, grove-thick timber. Timber that shut out the hammer of the wind as suddenly as though there had never been a blizzard.

They were saved. Saved by the grace of Ka-dih and the memory of a Comanche proverb—by the will of a heathen Kwahadi god and the brains of a “blind,” black horse.

The big gelding had brought them into Timpas Creek Grove.

It was only seconds after Ben’s clearing vision recorded the trees that he was aware of the fire which gleamed beyond them. Moments later, the black broke free of the intervening scrub and into the tiny cleared space which sheltered the blaze.

The snow blindness was still harsh and glaring in front of his peering eyes. Ben could make out only blurred forms coming toward him. His ears, still full of the shriek and howl of the outer wind, could not clearly distinguish the voices which came with the forms.

He tried to dismount, to get down off the black gelding and move to meet them. He could not. His frozen limbs would not relinquish their hold of the horse’s barrel.

He remembered the voices growing suddenly clear and close, saw for a moment the swim of upturned, white faces which came with them. He felt, numbly and far off, the reach and grasp of the friendly hands. Then the momentary clearness withdrew. The faces faded out, the voices fell away. There was an instant’s prolonged sensation, half floating, half falling, of leaving the saddle and coming away from the black gelding. After that, there was nothing but the darkness and the silence.

His next memory was so disturbingly beautiful he wondered for an idle, suspended moment if despite a hard and heretic life he had not somehow managed to get past the pearly gate check point. To slip by old St. Pete, unculled, and make it on into the celestial range with the main herd of highgrade beef.

But at that precise moment the surpassingly lovely vision chose to smile down upon him. With that smile all thoughts of the great beyond faded from Ben Allison’s mind. There would be no place in heaven for a smile like that, nor for the face that smile was coming out of. Only the devil could fashion a set of lips like those. And hell alone could hold the haunting beauty of the face behind their moist, warm curve.

“Easy now, partner. Feeling better—?”

He could only nod, dumb and stiff, and go on looking up at that face.

It was an oval, angular face, carved that way by nature to begin with and now hollowed and wasted
to a shadowed gauntness that told at a glance of the hunger and privation which inhabited the little camp they had stumbled upon. The drawn skin was startlingly white save for where the wide, red fullness of the warm mouth broke its pallor. The eyes, set deep and wide above the sculptured cheekbones, were of a dark cobalt, almost an indigo blue. And at their outer corners they had that sweeping upslant which put their long lashes to curving black and wicked above their depthless color.

“Don’t strain yourself, stranger.” The voice was as deep and disturbing as the eyes. “You’re not strong enough to be thinking about
that
yet.”

If Ben was a simple man, he was not that simple. Her boldness hit him hard and bad, and he did not like it. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he muttered. “Guess I’m purty done in. Didn’t mean to stare, I reckon.”

“Reckon none of you ever gets too done in to take a good look,” said the girl evenly. Then, the full lips breaking away to show the snowflash of the teeth again, “Coffee’s on and long boiled. I’ll get you a tin.”

The way she put it let a man know she was from his own country, at least from somewhere west of the Big Muddy and not any eastern or northern girl. And the tone and look she put behind it let him know he wasn’t the first hombre that had sidled up to her and been eared down for his trouble.

In the moment before she returned he found himself already wondering about her, who she was and where she had come from. The same moment was long enough to tell him that while she may have come with these people, she was not one of them. The rest of the folks in the little camp were emigrants, pure and simple. Sod hut farmers, for sure. Looking
to be from the Missouri or more likely the Kaw bottomlands from say around Olathe or Fort Leavenworth. And heading west chasing the same old settler shadow—more and better land and fewer folks to share it with.

A man could see all that in the one glance he had time to throw across the fire to where they were fussing with Clint and Stark.

There were just seven of them, all told. Four men, three women, not counting the girl. Naturally, she made eight. But she didn’t belong and you counted her out, right off. The others were all older people, tired and gray looking, without children or the hope of children, and mean poor. Their three slatbed wagons and half-dozen ribsprung mules weren’t fit for a Sunday drive around the settlements, let alone for bucking out across the open prairies to God knew where.

But by the time you got to that point, the girl was back with your coffee and you were thinking about nothing else but getting it past your frost-cracked lips and down into your solid-ice belly.

After it was down there you’d have a better head for asking questions.

Ben seized the steaming tin, not feeling the sear of it on his numbed fingers. He fumbled it, almost dropping it, and the girl took it away from him.

“I’ll pour, you drink,” she ordered softly.

Before he could move to object, she had an arm behind him and the cup to his lips, was pressing that close to him that no amount of snow and cold could keep the fragrant, heated perfume of her body away.

“Damn it all, ma’am, I kin feed my ownse’f—!”

He straightened awkwardly, shouldering her away,
reaching for the coffee tin. She shrugged, laughed, low and bubbly like slowing mountain water, handed him the tin. “Don’t be bashful, boy,” she murmured. “I won’t bite. At least,” she paused, eying him, “not till you’re better.”

He took the coffee, needing both hands to get it to his mouth. When it was drained, he handed the tin back, caught her level stare and held it. “All right, ma’am, let’s have it. Who’re these folks and what’re you all doin’ here?”

“Back where I come from,” said the girl, “strangers don’t ask questions.”

“Back where I come from,” echoed Ben slowly, “strangers don’t ask questions less’n they’re aimin’ to git answers.”

“So what?”

“So I got a big nose for trouble, girl—” She didn’t miss the omission of the previous “ma’am,” nonetheless gave no sign of it, sat waiting through the little pause ahead of his conclusion. “Right now,” Ben grunted, “I’m smellin’ bad news, back to back, hunkered tight down on this camp.”

The girl looked at him, nodding slowly.

“There’s nothing wrong with your nose, mister. We’ve got hard luck till hell won’t have it. Question still is,” she added expressionlessly, “so what?”

Ben returned the look, feeling the hardness of the girl and the bitter strength of her. “So nothin’, ma’am.” His own face was without expression now. “We owe you and your folks one, that’s all.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meanin’ we aim to pay off, likely.”

“With what?” she shrugged caustically.

Ben saw how it was with her, then. Three shrunken-bellied men, unfed and provisionless, had stumbled
into a winter-bound camp where there wasn’t enough food for the eight souls already starving to death in it. He found the girl’s eyes again, his voice softening.

“That bad?” he said quietly.

“That bad,” she nodded. “The coffee you just had was
it.”

“No fatback? No beans?”

“No saltpork for three weeks. Beans gave out three days ago. There was a little parched corn for the mules. We boiled it day before yesterday. Last of it went last night.” She stopped, then nodded with a sudden, strangely bright smile. “I’ve been eying that damn lead mule all day!”

Ben nodded, came stiffly to his feet.

“Well, keep eying him,” he said, wide mouth spreading to the first of the quick grins. “And learn yourse’f suthin.” He fumbled the cavalry coat open, slid out from its hidden neck-thonged sheath the eight-inch blade of the Kwahadi skinning knife.

“Up-comin’, ma’am, you got one damn fast, free and firsthand lesson on how they dress out Missouri Elk along the bonnie Arkansas—”

The girl rose lithely, stood facing him, her upturned face white against the storm darkness pressing in on the fire’s thin glow. The taunting, cynical smile was swiftly gone from the parted lips, their full warmth framing itself heatedly behind the low words. “You speak my language, mister.
My name’s Nella Torneau.”

It was a whisper meant just for him, coming deliberately back-turned to the fire and to the others beyond its light. Ben checked to its soft challenge, stood towering over her, silent now and suddenly narrow-eyed.

“Mine’s Ben Allison,” he said at last. “Likely we’ll git on, you and me.”

He wheeled away with the words, all at once awkward and angry with having said them, and with the way he had said them. He strode quickly toward the picketline, not looking back, not wanting to look back. He had said enough already. It was time to get away from her, far away from her, before he said too much. Women like that were not for him. He had little way with the best of them, none whatever with her kind.

The girl watched him until his lean form was only a shadow, lost beyond the picketline and the nightfall gloom of the eddying snow gusts. When she moved at last toward the fire and the huddled group around it, the haunting half curve of the wanton smile was back in cynical place.

Ben Allison had not turned away quickly enough.

He had already said too much.

Clint and Stark, recovering from their ordeal more slowly than Ben, did not see Nella Torneau until she returned to the fire after watching the latter start for the picketed mules. At this late point Clint had only time to stumble to his feet and breathe his standard, “Good Gawd Amighty!” when Ben was calling over to him to come help with the butchering.

Turning to go, Clint took another long look at the girl, noting a few things his less worldly brother had not. Like the winter-pelt glossiness of her hair. And how blue-black and luxuriant as any Indian woman’s it was beneath the fox fur hood of her parka. But also how deep-curly and soft it was, like no Indian woman’s that ever lived. Then, too, the full, long grace of her figure, hardly complimented by
the formless bulk of the old wolfskin trapper’s coat she had wrapped around it. Still, to an eye as young in ideas and old in practice as Clint’s, no set of pelts could hide the thrust of those deep breasts, nor the wicked mold and movement of those curving buttocks. Then, lastly, it wasn’t just having those things under that coat, but the way she stared back at you when she caught you noticing them that told you she was not only all the woman she looked, but more than likely not too dead set against proving it to you.

Ben, whether noting his hesitation and its reason or merely anxious to get on with the skinning-out, called again and irritably now, and Clint grinned. To Nathan Stark, gaping openmouthed at the girl as though he had never seen a set of breasts before—not even under a winter coat—he drawled broadly. “Lay off. You hear me, little man? I seen ’em first.”

He said it deliberately loud, so that the girl would not miss it.

She didn’t.

“Run along, junior,” she said unsmilingly. “Go help daddy cut up the nice mule. Mother’s hungry.”

Clint laughed.

He threw back his head and really let it come out in that sudden crazy way of his. Then, just as quickly, his voice was back in its old appealing drawl. “Mama,” he grinned loosely, “you ain’t one half so hungry as little Clinton Allison! Age, twenty-three, ma’am,” he said soberly. “Free, three quarters white, and single as a skunk at a Sunday school picnic.”

With that and a second quick laugh, he was gone, striding free and long across the snow toward the picketline, whistling and swinging his wide shoulders as though starvation, south plains blizzards
and slaughtering mules were all in the average day’s work.

Nella looked after him as she had Ben before him, but with one difference.

For Clint there was no curving smile, there was only the trace of tightness around the long-lashed eyes, the hint of uneasiness in the straightened set of the soft lips. This one would make trouble. All women were alike to his kind. You could see his play coming a mile across the table, and you knew there was no least chance of bluffing him out of it.

She shrugged, turning her cool stare on the last man.

Nathan Stark blushed, lowered his eyes, got suddenly busy with his empty coffee cup.

“It’s all gone, mister,” she said to him sarcastically. “You can suck on that tin till spring and you won’t get another drop.”

This third stranger was not her kind. Maybe he was big and maybe he was all the man he looked. But he was too square and heavy through the body, too dully straight and blankfaced as well, and too dead set and bulldoggy looking around the jaw. That kind got ahold of a woman and never let her go. And never gave themselves, or her, an inch of love or fun in the bargain.

With the dismissal she turned away from him to the emigrant menfolk of her own party. Rousing them from the apathetic regard of the fire, into which they had sunk back following the resuscitation of the frozen newcomers, she began rattling orders with all the feminine delicacy of an outpost drill sergeant.

“You, Jed Bates, leave off your mooning and stir up the fire. Tom, you haven’t had any tobacco in that
pipe for three days. Now quit sucking on it like a damn lost calf and get out and rustle in some more wood. Mr. Johnson, you chop up what he lugs in. Todd Bliss, rig up a spit. Best make a rack for the pot, too. Miz Bates—!” She called toward the wagons, one of the grayfaced women peering out beneath the canvas in dull-eyed answer. “Bring the big kettle. Scoop it full of snow on your way. The boys are killing a mule. We’ll boil a mess for tomorrow the same time we’re roasting that for tonight.