Zachary's Gold (29 page)

After this lengthy tirade she burst into tears, and sobbed and wailed into the lap of her dress for several minutes. I was not altogether convinced of the genuineness of this display, but if its purpose was to hold me at bay, it succeeded. I couldn't hope to make myself heard, and if I had felt any impulse to try to comfort her in any other way, it would have been stilled by her eloquent description of what would result should I attempt to touch her. Finally her volume subsided, and I tried to interrupt.

“Please, miss. Please—I have something I must ask you. I can tell you . . .”

“Monster! You are a stupid beast with stupid questions! It is you who should be told a great deal. What could you possibly tell me? You are a creature sent from hell. You are sent to torment poor girls, but for what reason these things happen to innocent souls is the question of the ages. If you want to explain something, then explain that. But no, you should just shut up, you vicious dog.”

It was amazing to me that someone could for several hours be so quiet that I was unaware of her ability to speak my language, and immediately thereafter could launch into such an endless vituperative onslaught that it was impossible for me to interject two sentences. Any gaps in her haranguing were filled with overdramatized sobs and loud moaning. She insulted me with every caustic noun and derogatory adjective she knew, then used some others whose meaning she clearly did not understand. When she ran out of English slurs, she lapsed into Chinese, but her basic meaning could not be misunderstood.

I was too tired to fight the verbal battle any longer. Stepping behind her, I swept up the little woman with one arm and dumped her unceremoniously onto the horse. We walked along the line of low hills, May Sang still muttering low derogations.

When at last she quieted, no sound disturbed the stillness of night except the endless shuffling of eight hooves and two feet. I had decided to let the objectionable young lady stew in her own juice until her countryman could set her straight. My sense of the passing of time disappeared completely, supplanted by the ache in the small of my back.

Only once did the woman distract me from my somnambulant self-pity with a question.

“What is your name, sir?” she asked politely.

“Beddoes. Zachary Beddoes.”

It was mildly pleasing to me to be allowed simple honesty in such an elementary matter as my name. Soon enough this young woman would hear my entire story.

ONCE WE REACHED THE CREEK
and began to follow its banks, not much of my attention was required to keep our course, and I focused more on the dimensions of my own exhaustion than on the details of the countryside around us. Thus it was not altogether surprising that our little company wandered several hundred yards past our objective. Even when I raised my bowed head and found that I recognized the little quarry-like basin we were crossing, it took a long minute for me to figure out that we must turn around.

Going back downstream, I also realized that the outlines of objects around me were becoming more visible. Day was dawning.

I had missed the island on our first pass because I irrationally expected to see a fire burning there, and of course we found no such thing. I waded the animals across the little channel and left them drinking from the shallows for a moment, while I helped May Sang from the saddle, removed the bindings from her hands, and walked over towards the little campsite.

“Come on this way,” I told her. “Someone over here that I think you know.”

She hesitated for a moment, then stepped tentatively forward.

“Are you there, partner?” I spoke quietly into the shadows at the base of the big cottonwood trees. “Are you all right, Rosh?”

I stumbled over the cold remnants of the campfire. My heart chilled with dread for a moment before a slight movement caught my eye. Then I was able to discern the outlines of his bed and saw the pale circle of my companion's face as he turned towards us.

The girl stood immediately behind me. One last wave of uncertainty assailed me as I prayed that I had done the right thing and was not about to bear the brunt of a horrible misunderstanding.

“I brought someone to see you, Rosh. I brought May Sang.”

“May Sang?” Rosh's response came as a shout.

She started upright as if she had been stabbed with a needle.

“Who is there? Who is it?” she demanded.

A short burst of two-directional Chinese ensued, and the girl threw herself at the figure beneath the blankets. A momentary whirlpool of questions and answers was replaced by embraces, endearments, and a torrent of tears. I left them and plodded back to bed down the animals.

Our long-suffering animals had behaved heroically. Never again would I permit anyone to use the mule as a symbol for a lack of cooperation. They had blandly traversed every step that I had, but with heavy loads on their backs, and had never balked once. If I had been a better man, I would have put aside my fatigue long enough to curry and towel them both.

As it was I let the saddle and baggage fall to the ground on the far side of the creek and stumbled back to the island.

It was light enough now to see the smile on Rosh's face and the trails of tears down May Sang's cheeks as she sat beside him on the ground, stroking the hair off his forehead. As I returned, I saw her shifting her posture a bit, straightening and half turning to me.

“You called this man your partner, I believe?”

“Yes I did,” I said. “I tried to explain that to you earlier.”

She turned to the invalid lying before her and spoke briefly. In response he grinned and nodded positively.

Before either one of us had the chance to move a muscle, May Sang pulled her left arm back in a roundhouse windup and gave Rosh an openhanded belt to the side of the head. He howled like a coyote. By the time I had shaken my astonishment enough to come to his defence, she had gripped one of his sideburns in each fist and was shaking his head like someone trying to shake the last drips from a slop bucket. As I sprang towards them, she paused long enough to jab her elbow solidly into my solar plexus. It was a lucky shot, but it knocked the wind out of me.

When the stars had faded from my vision, she was once again stroking the skin on the man's bruised cheek and cooing at him like a fretful dove. I presumed he was in no more need of help, so I sat where I was, listening with a mixture of relief and disgust to the gentle tones of their singsong exchange.

As I stood up to depart and give them their privacy, May Sang spoke to me once more.

“I have heard about you, Zachary Beddoes. I have heard you are a wild and murderous animal with no conscience or respect for God or man. How you made my poor love to be your helper, I don't know. Even if I forgive him, it is because I should not have let him go so far off away from his home, and I might still rip you to pieces. You know you should have kept your evil to yourself and left my poor, poor love out of this.”

I was much too tired to argue. I swept the rocks and sticks away from a patch of moss near one end of the little islet, pulled my coat over me, and fell asleep.

I didn't sleep for long. I felt like the corpse of someone long drowned, being hauled slowly to the surface of a deep tropical pool, and it required almost a supernatural effort to make my eyes focus on the face before me.

“Wake up. Wake up now, Mr. Beddoes. You are always so difficult, and here I am trying to be nice to you. I know you are awake. Please open your eyes.”

May Sang crouched directly in front of me, at the centre of my blurred vision, with her elbows resting on her knees and a short stick in her hand, tapping on my shoulder. When she judged that my eyes were stuck open, she gave me a thin smile. At least, from the context of her words, I would assume that such was meant to be her expression.

“It seems I have misunderstood you, Mr. Beddoes. I have judged you badly perhaps, and I should apologize.”

The greatest token of her remorse and esteem would have been to allow me to return to my slumber, but my lips would not move quickly enough to interrupt her with this suggestion.

“I spoke a little harshly in the night, I think, but you must realize that I was very confused. You should remember, Mr. Beddoes, that it is extremely discourteous to spirit away young ladies in the dark, and what was a poor girl such as me to think? And if you absolutely must kidnap a girl, you should at least be gentle, you know. Here I am with bruises all over, and a cut on the knee. Yes, and all night I was thinking that in the twinkle of an eye I might be killed.”

She managed to make the apology seem more like a lecture than any statement of remorse.

“Still,” she said, turning her head to a profile, “I was hasty in my thinking perhaps, although what can I hope to know, except what has been told to me about such things and about you in particular? Now, of course, Leung has told me the full story, and I appreciate the predicament more fully.”

The peculiarities of her speech and her train of thought made it difficult for a half-awake man to follow her.

“Who's Leung?” I asked.

“What a question!” she chirped. “Leung is Leung!”

“You mean Rosh?”

“Ah, here is this Rosh business again. What is ‘Rosh' supposed to mean?”

“That's his name, girl. His name is Rosh. He told me so when we met.”

“Oh no. Oh no. He thought your name was Rosh, and it was very hard for me to convince him that no, it was Beddoes.”

I was confused and frustrated, and I couldn't begin to figure what I was doing awake.

“I've been calling the man Rosh for three hundred miles, for heaven's sake,” I insisted, but her reply was equally confident.

“Leung says you have called yourself Rosh ever since he discovered you.”

I was tempted to demand to know what was meant by him discovering me, but I was too impatient to pursue it.

“I have called him Rosh for too long now,” I shouted, “and I will continue to call him Rosh. I am Beddoes and he is Rosh, and I am going back to sleep now.”

That, of course, was not about to happen. No sooner had my eyes closed than the tapping resumed on my shoulder. My first impulse was to lunge forward and bite the stick in half, but instead I merely glared at my tormentor without lifting my head.

“You are once again being most impolite,” she informed me. “Here I am, being most humble and apologetic, and you shout back at me. I am forgetting the demands of my station and trying to be friendly with you. Whatever Leung may say about your good attributes, I am suspicious still that you may be a villain. I am not such a precious, naive young girl as you think, and I heard about you before you ever came to Ashcroft Station. Still I am trying to be friendly, and you insist on shouting.”

She was waiting for a response to her last outburst, so I apologized for shouting.

“Now I really must get some sleep,” I mumbled.

“Oh no!” she exclaimed, and jumped to her feet as if she had just discovered that she was sitting on a rattlesnake. “Get up! Look around! Feel the sky!”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I wasn't about to leap to my feet for the sole purpose of indulging my senses.

“Poor Leung is very sick. He's been shot, you know, shot and beaten very badly. Then, I'm ashamed to say, he was left all alone by you to shiver and gnash his teeth in the dark while you went off travelling. You should have come and got me much sooner. Now we have to look after the poor soul. It might rain any time. It might snow. You can feel it. Get up now, and we'll all go where we can get under cover. Come along.”

I concluded that I had made a grave mistake in travelling fifteen miles or more across naked wasteland to bring this black-haired demoness to our camp. I have never been a man to ignore or escape my problems, but in this case, every fibre of my being demanded that I pull my coat over my head and retreat once more into unconsciousness. May Sang, unfortunately, was not the sort of problem who would allow herself to be avoided. She disappeared for only a moment, then returned once again to chide and chatter like an angry squirrel and tap her little stick on my coat. Finally it seemed easier to submit than to resist, and I climbed unsteadily to my feet and followed her.

When my head cleared, enough of my sensibility returned for me to object to the plan at hand.

“Listen, young lady, we are not on some city street corner here. The nearest place of shelter is the place we just travelled from, and Rosh is in no shape to make that kind of trip. Besides, I don't know how much of our situation he explained to you, but it would be a bad idea for either of us to be seen in public. I at least have some things that I couldn't explain to a magistrate.”

She dismissed my protests with a shrug.

“I know all about your troubles. Don't you worry, Mr. Beddoes, I know all sorts of things of which you are ignorant. Come along. Three miles up this very creek is the Farrell homestead, and we can move Leung into their old cabin. No one will suspect a thing. Mr. and Mrs. Farrell built their new house over the hill by the road because the cabin was dark and ugly and small, but we will be quite happy there. It will be dry, and we can make it warm. Look here, I've already loaded the mule and saddled the horse. You must help Leung up now.”