The Tall Men (8 page)

There was no pursuit from the grove. The reason was white and cold and it was bucketing through the air about them at a nice, steady, forty-mile clip. It wasn’t a full blizzard, just a medium rough spring snowstorm. The wind was due out of the north and a man could set a course by it and make fair slow time by holding to the high ground along the eastwest ridges, staying south of their crests, naturally, to be out of the wind.

But the black gelding was packing close to three hundred pounds. By midnight, Ben felt him beginning to stagger and sensed, through his clamping knees, the flutter and tremble beginning to wrack the big ribs. At the same time the wind started to rise, the temperature to drop.

“The hoss ain’t goin’ to last it to the fort,” he told the girl. “We got to hole up.”

She tightened her arms around him in a way that put a thrill through him, cold or no cold. She pressed her head closer against his broad back, the quick tones of her voice letting him know the words were coming through that bright, hard smile.

“Mister, you’re doing fine. Just find your hole, I’ll crawl into it with you.”

He turned the black up and over the ridge, heading him for the Arkansas. They were about halfway to the fort, roughly opposite the spot where he had seen the buffalo skull earlier in the day. Along the
river at that point he remembered having seen a high clay bluff based with willows and honeycombed with wind and water holes. The base of that bluff would be shelter enough and he reckoned they might even find an undercut or a cave that would do even better.

He reckoned right.

Old Ka-dih was still with him.

The spot looked like just another watercut under the bank at the first sight of it through the stormdark. But once down off the horse and feeling into it, a man could tell it ran on back under the bluff into a regular cave. Nor was that all. Last spring’s high water had stacked up a dam of driftwood in its throat that would, if necessary, last them for firewood from now on until the ice went out.

He helped Nella off the black, careful and gentle about it as if she were a child, and thinking as he did so, how many men could have stood up to what she’d seen in the past hours. And faced it through without a whimper, the way she had—with her eye lining up a Sioux buck down a rifle barrel half the time, and her arms hanging on back of a frozen saddle through fifteen miles of ice and wind the other half.

His own arm, circling her shoulder in the darkness, guiding her in under the bluff, tightened with the thought. She felt the pressure, instinctively sought for his big hand. Finding it she clung to it, the trusting touch of the slender fingers feeling to Ben like they’d wrapped themselves around his heart rather than his hand. They were back under the overhang now, out of the wind and the lash of the now. He stopped then, all at once confused and clumsy-feeling inside. “You set here along the wall,” he said gruffly, pushing
her down in the darkness and pulling his hand away from her. “I’ll be back directly. Got to see to the hoss and fetch in some wood.”

Outside, he fumbled an armload of wood out of the drift-pile, carried it back under the overhang, struck a light and got it going clear and strong. With the firelight pushing the blackness back and out into the willows, he led the gelding in under the bank. Pulling the saddle, he slipped the bit and bridle. While the big horse nuzzled his arm, he slid his hand along the crested neck, back and down across the steaming flank. Satisfied he was not too lathered to cool out safely without blanketing, he gave him a final pat and low word of assurance, moved off and let him stand.

The weary gelding didn’t shift a hoof, only shook himself out, eyed the fire, blew the snow out of his nostrils, whickered gratefully, dropped his head and went to dozing in the reflected heat of the driftwood blaze.

With his horse taken care of, thought Ben, a man had best look to his woman. He grinned as the thought struck him.
His
woman? Now there was a hell of a note. What put a thing like that in a man’s mind? It sure wasn’t anything she’d done, or said. Or that he had. Well, no matter, he had to look to her.

Turning to do so, he saw what he should have known he would—Nella Torneau looking to herself.

While he was fussing with the horse, the girl had lugged in more wood, banked the fire, shaken the snow out of the bedroll, toted the saddle back into the cave, fetched out the mulemeat, produced a small sheath knife from under her wolf-skin coat, gone to slicing off pieces to roast over the flames.

Looking down on her, Ben grinned again. “You sure you ain’t part Injun?” he asked. “You work faster’n a Kwahadi squaw.”

“When in Rome,” said the girl soberfaced, not bothering to look up from her slicing, “ride with the Romans.”

“Meanin’ I’m a damn redskin,” said Ben.

“Close enough to it,” she nodded. “Cut me a couple of green sticks.”

He went out into the willows, cutting the required roasting sticks and not thinking very much about what he was doing while he was at it. Right then a man didn’t have mind for much except how funny it felt, and how deep-good, to be ordered around by that cussed big-eyed girl in there past the fire yonder. He ducked back into the cave, as schoolboy-grateful to be there as if he’d been gone a month.

“Miss me?” he said, and for no damn reason he could think of at the moment.

She looked up quickly, studying the shadow of quizzical soberness crinkling his eye corners.

“I knew you’d be back sometime this winter,” she smiled. “Help me off with this coat and get out of my way.”

He took off the coat, moved back out of her way and shouldered off his own. By now the place was toasting up warm and proper. While she spitted the meat and began to broil it over the flames, he dropped to his haunches, eased back against the warming clay of the wall with a contented sigh. Presently, he shifted his glance from the girl, surveyed, with a growing sense of restful satisfaction, the cozy interior of their Arkansas boudoir.

The cave was perhaps twenty feet wide and seven or eight high at its outer opening within which the black stood dozing. It narrowed to no more than six feet where he had built the fire and where the girl was now tending the mulemeat. Back of the fire it opened out again into a regular room, small, about ten-by-ten, and very low ceilinged, maybe no more than four or five feet. Its floor was of clean, dry river sand, the red clay of its walls showing no hint of seepage or dampness. The backflung heat of the fire fed snugly into it, while what little smoke there was worked its way along the higher slope of the outer opening to dissipate itself among the wind and the willows beyond.

Ben brought his eyes back to the girl by the fire. He nodded to the growing, drowsy warmth of the cavern and to the sizzling, crisp burning aroma of the mulemeat. About now a man could look up to old Ka-dih and mutter a word or two in what little he remembered of Kwahadi, by way of belated thanks.

Ben did so now. But the offering was not limited entirely by the brevity of his Comanche vocabulary.

He had never seen Nella Torneau out of the bulk and clumsy bundle of the trapper’s coat. He was seeing her out of it now. The prospect put Ka-dih and the cave and the crisping mulemeat as far from a man’s mind as the last star out.

She was dressed, not in emigrant homespun or frontier linsey-woolsey, nor yet in prairie fringe and buckskin, but in a soft checkered, settlement calico of cool green and pale tan. Under the dainty ankle length of the city frock’s hem, the crude cowhide farmer’s boots bulked large and ludicrous. But also
appearing below that Sunday-go-to-meeting hem was something neither oversize nor out of place—the slim, trim, frothy frill of a lace petticoat.

But even the airy undergarment could not keep a man’s eyes long off of what it was clinging to.

The girl, for all her gauntness and spring willow tallness, had a body under that calico print. And that body was anything but underweight.

The way she was kneeling to the fire, quartering away from him only enough to be unaware of his watching her, and the soft, clean calico tightening over her breasts and buttocks as she moved, while the shifting light of the fire caught and highlined every curving line of her, made a man think about something far removed from getting to Bent’s Fort tomorrow.

She looked over at him, dark hair mussed and tumbled from the removal of the fox fur parka, face flushed, eyes squinted and frowning against the heat and smoke of the fire. If she had caught him staring at her, she gave no sign of it. She brushed back the loose forelock of curls, waved the smoking chunk of mulemeat toward him. “Come and get it, mister.” She broke out the swift, sharp smile. “Before I throw it to the woodpeckers!” With the gesture and the smile, came the low laugh, the clean white teeth flashing behind it.

Suddenly, Ben laughed too. It sounded strange even to him. A man couldn’t remember the last time he had done that. Laughed like that. But then, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been happy, either. “Don’t throw it, ma’am,” he grinned. “I’m on my way.”

She looked at him as he came to her side and
took the willow stick. “Mister,” she said slowly, “you laughed. I never allowed you could.”

“Miss Nella,” he smiled, settling back against the wall and unsheathing the Kwahadi knife, “I done it and I’m glad.”

She came to him, sitting crosslegged beside him, so close the tumbling hair brushed his shoulder.

“Mister,” she repeated, holding his eyes through the little pause, her voice so low he barely heard it above the sudden hammer of his heart,
“so am I!”

He banked the fire, building the sand of the cavern floor carefully around its base, covering its coals with heavy drift chunks and with snow brought from outside the entrance. The wetted wood simmered, settled into the glowing firebed. Watching it a moment, he nodded. It would dry out and burn down through the night, leaving a live heart of coals for morning and keeping, the back cave toast-warm, meantime.

The thought of the back cave made him restless.

The girl was taking a long time. A man wanted to give her all the time she needed to get herself decently bedded down and covered up before he came in and rolled into his own blankets. He had figured she would want to undress with the cave so warm and dry and with her probably not having been out of her clothes for the best part of a week. But there was a limit to a man’s patience once he was thawed out and full of roast mule and the godblessed peace and quiet of the place. And warmed through, too, in a way no fire could do it, with how she had looked at him and told him she was glad he had laughed.

He shook off the last thought, knowing from long experience how lonely people in a common tight,
and shut off from all else, naturally drew to one another, meaning nothing by it that wouldn’t dry up the minute they were back where others were around them.

No, the girl had meant nothing by the look and the words, nothing except that she was glad they were alive and safe and had each other to talk to. That was all, there wasn’t any more. He’d go in there shortly, sleep the storm away, get up in the morning, take her on into Bent’s Fort and never see her again. She’d forget him before he was out of sight down the south trail, would go on following her own hardeyed way wherever she was letting it take her, and never think again of a lonely Texas boy named Ben Allison.

He tried to shake off that thought, too. Tried to make himself think he’d forget her just as quick, maybe quicker. He had a one-third piece of something bigger than anything most men even dreamed of. His next year’s work and the bright trail of the years past that were laid out ahead of him. He had plenty to do, little enough time to do it in. He
had to
forget that girl and he would.

The high resolve held just long enough for her voice to melt it away. “All right, mister. I’m ready if you are. Bed’s made and turned down.”

He felt awkward now. Like he was about to walk into a strange girl’s bedroom. And that she’d be afraid of him and what he was thinking and what he might try to do.

“Reckon I’ll set outside here a spell,” he muttered hoarsely. “Fire’s goin’ to need watchin’ till she banks down and settles in. You go on to sleep, I’ll be along shortly.”

He thought he heard the low bubble of the laugh,
but wasn’t sure. “Come along now, boy. Don’t be bashful,” she called softly. “I’m all tucked in.” She added the last like she knew he would want to be sure she was.

“All right,” said Ben, feeling himself tremble all over with the word. “You got your coat in there? I’m goin’ to throw mine over the hoss.”

“I’ve got it,” said the girl. “Come along in and tell me goodnight. I’m like to float right away for being that drowsy—”

He came away from the black and was ducking through the inner opening then, crouching over to fit his six feet four under the low curve of the ceiling. A moment later his eyes were adjusting to the reflected glow of the fire’s shadows.

Beyond him, he saw the dim-lit warmth of the little room—and within it, the waiting, single bed of the wolfskin coat and her carefully tucked blankets. He felt the thick-lashed, sleep-lidded impact of her strange blue-violet eyes, sensed in them a primitive pleading that put the dark blood drumming in his ears. He heard, muffled and faint and wordless, the murmur of her husky voice.

She reached a slender arm, bare to the rounded shoulder, from beneath the blankets. She did not take her slanted eyes from his, as the reaching hand sought and found his corner of the bedding. The full lips fell apart and waited there, wide and warm and hungrily beckoning in the half darkness. Her eyes still holding his, the slim hand moved suddenly downward, bringing the blanket back and away from his side of the bed—and startlingly back and away from a part of hers.

Beneath the turned back cover, wickedly naked upon the deep, rich pile of the wolfskins beneath it,
he saw the long, slow movement of the sinuous, rose-pink body.

“Tell me goodnight!” she whispered fiercely. Then, strangely soft, shadowed with loneliness, haunted with desperate longing—”

“And tell me that you love me!”