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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

BOOK: White Desert
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“One can die but once,” I said.
“Monsieur le depute, I
cannot impress upon you too strongly the need for absolute silence.”
Philippe's whisper was warm in my ear. I nodded. He lowered his cupped hands then and leaned back into his wooden saddle, wincing when it creaked slightly. He had said nothing to Fleurette riding behind him or Claude standing up to his calves in snow by King Henry's woolly left flank. The boy's labored breath—he had been running—clouded thickly around his head. Both kept silent.
A brush fire had scalped five or six hundred acres of trees sometime within the past year. Crossing that bald country, we had topped a rise overlooking a stream where the forest resumed abruptly. At the base of the hill, standing hock deep in icy water, an enormous shaggy moose raised its head and looked our way, twitching nostrils as big as hen's eggs. Its heavy coat, deep red-brown streaked with black, stretched taut over raw, unfinished muscles that put me in mind of exposed machinery. A ragged beard like a buffalo bull's hung from its chin, shallow beneath the long curved snout and streaming water, and its shovel-shaped
antlers spread six feet. The beast would have dressed out at twelve hundred pounds easily—if one could picture its ever placing itself in that position.
Its black eyes, small and almond shaped in nests of wrinkles like an old Indian's, were fixed on the mounted strangers staring at it; but it must have trusted its nose before its eyesight, because after two or three minutes—or hours, take your pick—the great head swung back around and it waded on across the stream slowly and gracefully, mounted the opposite bank with an elegant hop, shook itself with a grunt that reverberated among the trees on that side, and slid in among them without ever looking back. The impression remained that it was aware of us the whole time but didn't estimate us highly enough for hurry.
Thirty more seconds crawled past, then Philippe let out his breath. “A near thing,” he said. “The moose, he does not like surprise.”
The ground shook suddenly, heavily enough to vibrate up to the seats of our saddles. The great bull crashed out of the brush, pounded down the bank, and smashed into the water, charging straight at us. It raised its head just once, opening its pink mouth with a bawling roar, then lowered its muzzle, nodding as it ran, the huge antlers tipped fully our way like the icebreaker on a snow train. My mustang nickered shrilly and tried to back up, hunching its shoulders to buck when I pulled the reins tight. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the big dun lift its head and look alert for the first time.
Philippe's weapon was a single-shot Springfield carbine he wore slung behind his shoulder. He unlimbered it, but not before I slid the Evans from its scabbard and, squeezing the mustang with my knees, nestled my cheek against the stock and drew a bouncing bead on the broad space between the moose's eyes. The head kept bobbing and I missed the first shot. The Springfield
boomed just after; the moose stumbled, found its footing on the near bank, and continued its charge up the slope with a stream of blood glittering between the bunched muscles of its chest.
That was it for the Springfield. The mustang screamed and twisted away from the onrushing beast. I turned in the saddle, drew a fresh bead, and fired, racking and firing again and again without pausing to see where the slugs were going. I fired a dozen times, the smoke of my own fire obscuring the target, but I squeezed three more into the haze. I heard a grunt like a boulder falling onto soft earth. When the smoke thinned, the moose was on its knees ten feet in front of us, struggling to rise, its antlers tilting right and left with the effort. I took aim again, but by this time Philippe had reloaded. The Springfield boomed, the great head swung around and up with a snap, and dashed to the ground. The shoulders bunched twice as if the will to stand up had outlived the animal itself; then the body sagged on over. One rear leg kicked twice, bent to kick again, and settled into the snow.
The echo of our shots walloped around among the trees for a long time, then growled away like far thunder and died with a hiss.
“
Mon dieu
!” breathed Philippe.
I couldn't think of anything to improve on that.
The moose's musky odor reached us, a swampy stench of heavy sweat and tremendous heat. It did nothing to calm the mustang, and I bailed out, leaning back against the reins when I hit the ground. I fought it for twenty feet until my foot found a burned-over stump under the snow, and I took a hitch around it, knotting it tightly beneath a knob where the grain twisted. Then I retraced my steps to where King Henry stood calm as Sunday with nobody on his back and his reins on the ground.
All three du la Rochelles had gathered around the fallen hulk, where Philippe knelt with a butchering knife, carving a chunk out of its coarse-haired rump.
“By Mary, but I wish we were near home,” he said. “We would eat for a month.”
I said, “You wouldn't have any teeth left at the end of it.”
“But you have not tried moose. The meat melts like lard upon your tongue. Afterward the strength of the beast passes into you.”
“What made him charge like that? He was safe on his way.”
“Who can say? He was an old bull, many times the victor. See those scars upon his shoulders? They are made by the antlers of other bulls who envy his station. One does not survive such a battle unless he who left them perishes. ‘This river, and everything you see,' he says perhaps, ‘is mine. I shall not share it.'
Un bâtard magnifique,
this fellow. A magnificent bastard.” He patted its side. It sounded like someone slapping a drum. “It is a heroic thing to live and die upon one's own terms.”
Fleurette said something in which I caught the word
imbecile
. During the quarrel that followed I thought again that she took in far more than she let on.
I noticed Claude then, on his knees in the snow beside the huge carcass, stroking the long stiff hairs that covered its neck. I had yet to hear the boy speak in any language, and wondered if he was mute.
At length, having harvested some steaks and gone inside for the great quivering liver, Philippe packed them securely behind his pine cantle and we crossed the stream, upwind of the moose to mollify the little snake-faced sorrel. The gray, which had stopped below the rise, had neither seen nor smelled anything to upset it, and had held its ground when I let go of the line to
wrestle with the mustang. I'd begun to wish I'd traded for another saddle horse when I bought the gray.
After we'd ridden a mile, Philippe asked me how many times I'd fired at the moose.
“Fifteen.”
He thought about that for another twenty or thirty yards. “Hadn't you better reload? There is more than one moose in Canada—and many grizzly.”
“I still have eighteen in the magazine.”
That kept him silent for a quarter mile.
“This is truly a magical weapon, monsieur,” he said then. “What is it called?”
“Evans repeater. They quit making it a couple of years back.”
“I should not wonder. A shopkeeper would die of loneliness waiting for a customer to return for more ammunition.” He touched his moustache. “I have a cured buffalo robe of unusually fine quality I have been saving. It would bring as much as two hundred dollars in Ottawa. Would you consider trading your Evans repeater for this robe?”
“The gun isn't worth two hundred. When a part wears out you can't replace it.”
“I am not without ingenuity in these matters. Will you trade?”
“I may look you up when this is over.”
He uncorked his golden grin. “I cannot guarantee this offer will hold,
monsieur le depute
. When this is over there may not be as much need for a rifle that shoots thirty-three times without reloading. The market is, how you say, not stable.”
“Thirty-four,” I said. “I discharged a round at an escaping prisoner in Montana.”
“The robe, monsieur.”
“I'd consider it a favor if you stopped calling me monsieur.
Deputy Murdock will do, or Murdock if you're in a hurry. The other makes me want to order frog legs in St. Louis.”
“I did not intend to commit offense. I await your decision, Deputy Murdock.”
“I'll have to see the robe.”
“It is in a cedar chest in my cabin.”
“In that case I may look you up when this is over.”
“You do not trust me, Deputy Murdock?”
I shook my head. “Too many gold teeth.”
“
Fils de la catin.”
He spoke beneath his breath.
“I understand a little French,” I said.
“I felt certain you did, Deputy Murdock.” He put his heels to the big dun and cantered out ahead. Claude sprinted to keep up on foot.
 
 
The sun was two hands above the horizon and still yellow when Philippe drew rein and said we would camp.
“Getting tired?” I asked. “We've got another half hour of daylight.”
“That would put us too close,
monsieur le
”—he corrected himself—“Deputy Murdock.” He swung down and gave Fleurette his hand to help her out of the saddle.
“Too close to what?”
“Shulamite. Those settlers have lived here for a generation; they can smell strangers an hour away. We do not want to come upon them without sufficient light to defend ourselves.”
“The night's as dark for them as it is for us.”
“I will not argue. You have hired me to guide you. If you will not accept this guidance, I will return to you your double eagles and leave you to your fate. Perhaps the wolves will have left me a portion of that moose.”
“You ought to write ten-cent dreadfuls, Philippe. Your talent's wasted in this rough country.” But I stepped out of leather and went back to unpack the gray.
We built a small fire to avoid attracting undue notice, and Fleurette cooked the moose, which was as good as Philippe had said. After supper, he produced his wooden flute and stretched one leg to jostle his son, who was dozing over his book, with the toe of his moccasin. “‘Ma Petit Marie,' Claude, eh?”
Instantly the boy was awake, his sunburned face bright with anticipation. He listened to his father tootling the opening bars of some bright tune I had never heard, lips moving slightly as if he were counting the beats, then opened his mouth and sang, in a pure, clean soprano:
Au printemps,
l'éte, l'automne,
et passer par tous l'hiver,
je promene la ruelle
avec ma petit Marie.
When the song was finished, Philippe barked a short laugh of Gallic pride, leaned forward, and, taking Claude by his ears, pulled him close and kissed him on both cheeks. When he let go with a push, the boy nearly fell over on his back. His father turned his bright dark eyes on me.
“A
protégé,
is he not? If we but lived in Paris, he would be the toast of a continent.”
“
Et pas Métis,”
put in his wife.
“Oui.”
Philippe nodded, the brightness fading. “And were we not Métis.”
“I'd made up my mind the boy couldn't speak,” I said.
“There is no need for speech when one can sing like the angels.”
“Angels you all be, iffen you don't keep still.”
This was a new voice, harsh and deep, and belonged to a scarecrow figure that had materialized against a night sky made pale by starshine reflected from the snow. The figure itself was dead black, as if it were gathered from the darkness the sky had surrendered. For punctuation, an angular elbow straightened and bent with a jerk, accompanied by the crisp metallic crackle of a shell jacking into the chamber of a lever-action carbine.
We remained quiet. Not
even Fleurette made so much as a gasp. We kept our places around the fire and watched as another figure, this one shorter and broader, joined the first, and then a third came into the group, all armed with rifles and carbines. At length an arc of orange light crept above the bulge where they stood, and rose like a miniature dawn swinging from a bail in the hand of a fourth party who appeared to carry no weapons. The lantern painted glistening stripes along the long guns' oiled barrels and made ovals of the facial features beneath the floppy brims of the newcomers' hats. I was not much surprised to find they were black faces, male and grim as open graves.
“This the bunch, Brother Enoch?” asked the man with the lantern. His voice was a gentle rumble, oddly soothing.
Enoch, evidently the scarecrow who had appeared first, stirred himself. But the question was answered by a fifth man who slid out of the shadows on the other side of our camp; a man nearly as large as all the others put together, who made no noise at all when he walked. He carried a full-length Sharps big-bore
rifle that looked like a boy's squirrel gun in his huge hands.
“There's only three horses,” he said. His voice was light for his size.
The man with the lantern nodded. “I'll have your weapons. Take them out slowly and throw them into the light.”
I unholstered the Deane-Adams between thumb and forefinger and flipped it onto the ground near his feet. Philippe slid the Springfield carbine from beneath his blankets and tossed it after. I had my Winchester leaning against my saddle, which I was using for a backrest, and the Evans lying alongside. I added them to the pile.
“The woman and the boy are unarmed, monsieur,” Philippe said.
The lantern came up a little, spreading its light over Philippe's face. “You Métis?” The rumbling tones smoothed out another notch.
“Oui.
Yes. The woman is my wife and the boy is my son.”
Now the lantern swept slowly across the others and stopped. I squinted against the glare.
“Who's this, your brother?” Now there was nothing soothing about the man's speech.
I'd been working on a number of answers to just that question since the moment I'd made my decision to stop at Shulamite, but I discarded them all in favor of the truth, which required less effort to maintain. “The name is Murdock,” I said. “I'm a deputy United States marshal in pursuit of a gang of fugitives wanted in Montana Territory.”
Enoch took in his breath with a little rattle, like a snake's. I got the impression then he was consumptive. That would explain his thinness. In the lantern light the skin of his face barely covered the bone. “I knowed he was some kind of law. They all gots that mean look.”
“Any of these fugitives happen to be black?” asked the man with the lantern.
“Not that I know of. One of the leaders is half Mexican. The other's Cherokee.”
“That sounds mighty like a description of Lorenzo Bliss and Charlie Whitelaw.”
“You've seen them?” I asked.
The man with the lantern shook his head. “Read about them. Brother Enoch goes to Fort Chipewyan once a month for needs and possibles. He brings back the Ottawa newspapers when the Mounties are through with them. Does it surprise you to learn a black man can read?” There was no hostility in his tone. The words carried all that was necessary.
“Some of the places I've lived I was surprised to meet a white man who could. We all have the same opportunities.”
He laughed then, loudly, deeply, and entirely without amusement. Then he stopped. His face more than the others' was a mass of ovals, turned this way and that to represent nose, cheeks, forehead, and chin, as if it were assembled from identical machine parts, with each part moving independently of the rest. When he spoke and laughed, only his mouth moved. When he registered curiosity or surprise, his forehead shifted upward like a typewriter carriage. “It's a good thing you didn't lie about where you came from, Marshal. Only a white American could say what you just said without spitting.”
“I didn't mean to offend.”
That brought about the shift of the forehead mentioned above. He could tell I hadn't said it just because he held my life in his hands. “My name is Hebron,” he said. “I am the elected leader of the free African community of Shulamite, of which these four gentlemen comprise the Committee of Public Vigilance. I am telling you this so you don't take the idea you've
been unlawfully abducted. You are all under arrest and will come with us.”
“What's the charge?” I asked.
His mouth formed a smile, again without amusement. “In your case, trespassing while white. These others are your aides and abetters.”
“Will there be a trial?”
“Possess your soul in patience, Marshal. All things will be known in the fullness of God's time.”
I'd attended church often enough to take that to mean he didn't know the answer to the question.
The men formed a circle around us with their rifles and carbines at hip level while we saddled up and I untied the packs from the tree where I'd hoisted them out of the reach of bears and wolves and secured them on the gray. Hebron insisted that Claude ride behind me on the mustang so they could keep an eye on him. Ropes were produced and Philippe's hands and mine were tied to our saddle horns. The big man, whose name was Brother Babel, brought the men's horses—older mounts mostly, some as old as King Henry, but well fed and groomed to a high shine—and without awaiting instructions the riders split into escort formation, three in back and two in front, the leaders taking charge of our reins while one of the men at the rear led the gray. Four of them rode bareback, but I noticed that Hebron straddled a McClellan. That, and the way he rode, back straight and elbows in—suggested cavalry experience. That explained the formation, which came right out of the section on prisoners in the manual of arms; I'd used pages torn from it to light fires during the winter of 1863.
I don't know why—never having seen one outside of a framed lithograph hanging on a wall in Judge Blackthorne's private study—but whenever I'd thought about Shulamite I'd pictured
a walled city, with or without a moat to repel invaders. But there was nothing medieval or even forbidding about the scatter of log buildings that greeted us as we followed the long gentle slope to the S-shaped river at its base, the buildings black against the snow, with lighted windows hanging among them like pinecones. It might have been any settlement of trappers or miners, carved from the evergreen forests that surrounded it, with a large meeting hall standing more or less in its center and a watchtower affair built like a derrick with a roofed platform for spotting Indians and fires.
Hebron drew rein fifty yards short of the riverbank, raising one hand for the others to do the same. Enoch, seated to his right, lifted his carbine from across his lap—I saw now it was a Spencer—pointed it skyward, and fired. The echo of the report was still snarling in the distance when a puff of smoke answered from the high platform, followed closely by the crack of a rifle. Hebron's hand came down then and we crossed the river. The water was just fetlock high, but there were ice shards glittering in the current and I had to kick the sorrel twice before it would step off the bank. I knew by the sound of its snort as it made contact with the water that I would pay later. King Henry, the big dun of chivalric stock, crossed without protest.
The buildings were laid out in two ragged rows alongside a rude street, bare of snow and ringing like iron beneath the shoes of the horses. I saw heads silhouetted in the windows, but no one came out, as might normally be expected in a remote settlement when strangers entered. The man in the tower, outlined against the square of sky between the roof and the platform, turned as we rode past, the barrel of his rifle following us like the head of a coiled snake. I felt uncommonly white. I had experienced that same sensation years before, when I had entered a hostile Cheyenne village as the captive of the chief; but even
on that occasion, the warriors and their women had stepped outside their lodges to stare at me, and packs of nondescript yellow dogs had come trotting alongside to yip and snap at my heels. Of all the places I had visited, of my own free will and otherwise, Shulamite alone met me with only silence. I thought that if someone would take a shot at me I'd welcome the variety.
At length we stopped before the big meeting hall, if that's what it was, and Hebron handed Enoch King Henry's lead and stepped down and tied his slat-sided chestnut to the hitching rail in front. A shallow flight of steps made from half-sawn logs led to a porch that ran the length of the building, but unlike similar porches on ranch houses across the American West this one contained no rockers or gliders or anything else to indicate that the porch was used for anything other than to keep rain and snow off whoever crossed to the door. Hebron knocked at the door, waited, then went inside.
My fingers were numb, either from the cold or from the tightness of the ropes binding my wrists. I asked Enoch if I could step down while we were waiting. He didn't answer or even turn his head to show he'd heard. He coughed a little—the phlegmy, hollow-lunged cough of the consumptive—but it wasn't intended as a response. He hadn't spoken since Hebron had made his appearance.
In a little while the door opened again and Hebron stepped out. In the light coming from the window on either side he was a middle-built man of about my age, with a black goatee trimmed close to his chin, a broad mouth, and sad eyes—or eyes anyway that didn't appear to expect much beyond more of what they'd already seen. He wore, in addition to the floppy farmer's hat that seemed to be a uniform among his group, a sheepskin coat with the fleece turned in, heavy woolen trousers stuffed into the tops of high lace-up boots like lumbermen wore, a flannel
shirt, and a broad belt with a U.S. Army buckle, which backed up my supposition about his cavalry training. All of these items had seen their share of wear—scuffed, faded, torn, and patched—but they were clean and well kept, the belt and boots shining with oil and the brass buckle polished. Whatever the nature of his service was, it had taken.
He had been wearing leather gauntlets, which he had taken off inside. He seemed to realize he was still holding them and stuffed them into his belt. Then he pointed at me. “The others can wait. She wants to see you.”
“Who does?” I asked.
He showed surprise for the first time, edged with contempt for my ignorance.
“Queen Fidelity,” he said. “Who else would
she
be?”

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