King of Spades (24 page)

Erden stood slim and apart from him.

“Swallow.” He slipped his hand around her naked waist and then around her belled bottom. “Come.”

But she would have none of it. With a laugh and a skip, barefoot, she was out into the falling snow.

“Hey!” he cried. “At least put on some clothes, you idiot.”

In an instant her dark braids and hair were white. All he could see of her was the diaphanous dancing outline of her naked body. Even her triangular patch of pubic hair soon whited over.

“Erden!”

She put on a little show for him on the path down to the stream. She danced a grass dance in the snow. Then, laughing, she mimicked a frolicsome fawn. Then, gravely, she put on she was a mother grouse shamming a broken wing.

“Come back here. That ain't rain, you little fool.” He shivered, thinking how cold it must feel on her skin.

What she did next utterly dumfounded him. She went beyond play. She lay down in the snow. Leisurely. Then she stretched her arms above her head and slowly and luxuriously became lost in herself, in vagary, in sweetest self-joy. Flakes caught in the fuzz of her armpits. Snow caught in the short hairs over her belly.

“My God in heaven.”

She rolled from side to side as if she were bathing in a pond. She laved her face and arms and shoulders and breasts with handfuls of loose white fluff. She covered herself as though with sand on a river bar, heaping it up over herself. At last only the point of her nose and the nipples of her breasts and the nails of her big toes were visible.

“Even if she does take baths in the winter, this is going too far.” He hugged himself to keep warm. Shivering, he snuggled naked within his own armclasp. His manhood shrank to nubbins.

She lay very still under the snow.

“She'll turn into an icicle.”

Snowflakes, huge and wafer-like, continued to dazzle down. First the tips of her toes, then the points of her small breasts, then even the point of her nose went under.

That was enough. He ran out to get her.

To his surprise the snow underfoot wasn't cold at all. It wasn't warm, but it wasn't cold either. It was like running in cool massy cottonwood fluff. And where a few of the big snowflakes melted on his skin it even felt hot. Delicious. No wonder she was dazed over it.

He stood above her. He called her name. “Blue Swallow?”

Little openings, paired, appeared in the snow. It was where her eyelashes parted. Pure gray eyes stared up at him out of pure white snow.

In a gush of affection, he fell beside her in the snow. His hand sought her body under the tender white blanket. The two of them hugged each other for the wonder of it all. Deliriums of white joy suffused them. In the white snow their bodies became as slick as chilled grass.

A few kisses. Then to his surprise he found himself wanting to hurt her again. He found himself wanting to bite her, crack her in his arms, crush her beneath him, thump her powerfully. Somehow he managed to resist the brutish impulses.

“Eagle.”

“Swallow.”

Her body sought his hand again as before. Even in the snow her quiver was warm to his touch.

He couldn't hold back then. His pendant of flesh rose. Snow melted on its red comb. He went in. He became very rough with her.

“Ahh,” she cried, “the war eagle pecks his hen.”

He thought: “But this is wrong. This ruins our snow heaven.”

“Sometimes my foster father treaded upon my foster mother in a like manner in their sport. He was like the pecking eagle with my foster mother. Then it was she trilled for joy on the grass.”

Ransom began to punish Erden.

“Akk! Husband! On the white grass it is even better.”

He thought: “Thank God I'm not married legal to Katherine.”

Snow lovers.

 

Snow fell heavy for two days and two nights. Then a great wind rose. The wind blew and blew for another two days. When it was over, the gulch was almost level full.

They were truly locked in at last. It would be months before they could travel in the Hills. Or before anybody else could move into the Hills. They were safe for a time.

They tumbled into winter housekeeping as peaceful as two pups in a basket.

There was plenty to do. She mended their leather clothes and made new ones. Preparing for the coming baby, she made a cradleboard and fashioned little leather shirts and pantlegs and moccasins. She made all their meals. She kept the cave as clean as barked pine. Meanwhile he kept the entrance to the cave free of snow. He made them both a pair of snowshoes out of ash branches and buckskin strings. He cared for their two horses in their park pasture, sometimes bringing them sweet cottonwood branches as a treat. He shot an occasional red deer or an antelope, and skinned and fleshed them out. He brought in such firewood as was needed for the cooking fire. He cleaned his gun meticulously. He honed his knife on a deer hoof until it cut fuzz.

He loved her neat ways. He thanked his lucky stars she wasn't buggy like some people were out in the wilds. He couldn't abide people who tolerated lice.

As the winter deepened into January, then February, her face and hands slowly turned light, and she almost looked white again even in her buckskin garb.

The returning white in her skin made Ransom happy. He swore again to himself that someday soon he would take his Erden, his little Blue Swallow, to some big city in the East and show her off.

Her belly swelled slowly with child. Already he loved the
little pear growing in her. He longed to see it. He longed for the time when the little pink eyelids would flutter apart and the little pink mouth would open in a bawl.

Just so he hadn't made Katherine with child that last time they made love together in Cheyenne.

 

He had helped Erden clean up after breakfast, and had stepped outside to slip on his snowshoes on his way to look after the horses, when he heard the great whistling high in the Hills again. It was March and cracking cold outside, very still, and the sound of it prickled in his nose. The whistling began as though at first a giant were blowing low over an empty bottle, and then gradually the whooing deepened, and then the giant seemed to shift his lips to a bottle with a larger opening. The giant held the big note for a long full minute. A few seconds of silence followed. Then the giant played back and forth on the two bottles for a while, and then, very slowly, the whooing fell away and died.

Ransom turned, to find Erden standing directly behind him, a pale hand to paler lips. Her wide gray eyes looked above and beyond him toward the granite peaks.

“Do not worry, Little Swallow. Your husband is with you.”

Slowly her head began to shake under her hand. The shaking moved her body. Her hand was clapped so tight over her mouth that where the fingertips pressed into her cheek the skin slowly turned bluish white.

“Erden?”

She spoke in suddenly aged accents. “Ai! The gods are weeping. It is because the Great White Giant has escaped. The gods foresee much destruction. A great shaking will level Forbidden Hill and all the other hills. Oh-oh-oh-oh.” “Come now, my Swallow Blue, it—”

Immediately there the great whistling was again, and this time a multitude of whistlings, piercing cries, and all coming out of the needle peaks to the south. The great shrieking hurt the ears. Even their cave began to howl.

Ransom stiffened. Great spooks were aprowl then in the Hills. Erden's earth spirits really were there. And they had gone crazy. Ransom could feel his beard bristling out over his cheeks.

Erden tottered.

Ransom drew his gun; saw how ridiculous that was; reholstered his gun.

Erden fell flat on her face in the snow.

The otherworldly screeches continued for another long minute; then, abruptly, broke off. Echoes succeeded echoes, and only slowly faded, until at last they too fell away.

“Swallow?”

She didn't move.

When he went to pick her up, she weighed as one dead. He carried her inside. He wrapped her in their sleeping robe. He comforted her in his arms. He chafed her wrists. He rubbed her ankles. He stroked her swollen belly gently. He kissed her cheeks.

“Swallow?”

No answer.

He wrapped her in yet another fur robe and lighted a roaring fire in their already warm cave and then once again took her close in his arms.

“Swallow?”

It was a week before a little of the old-time fluid motion returned to her limbs. Sparkles never did return to her gray eyes.

3

Two weeks later, a chinook passed over the land, and spring came in, and all too soon the snow melted away. It all went out of the Hills with a rush. Every gulch and every canyon roared with brown crashing meltwater.

Ransom checked his claims. He found the stakes at the
white-quartz claim still in place. But the stakes around the meadow above the beaver dam were gone. Again. Only this time they were replaced by another set with someone else's initials on them, T.
B.

A smell of burning pine knots and frying bad bacon came wafting out of the trees below. Looking, Ransom spotted a plume of smoke rising from behind the beaver dam.

Ransom checked his gun; then stepped onto the dam.

A man in very ragged black trousers and red shirt was sitting on his heels and was just then spearing up a piece of bacon from a sizzling pan. The man wore a gun on his hip.

“What the hell you doing here, mister?” Ransom called down.

The man's head whirled and looked up. His eyes were light, almost moon eyes. He had a rusty beard. “I'm sinking a shaft here.” He pointed to a hole he'd dug into the near wall.

“Didn't you see my stakes? With my name cut into 'em? Earl Ransom?”

The man's light eyes turned shifty for a second. “I didn't see any stakes.”

“Well, this is my ground and I warn you to get off. I'm chief here.”

The man carefully set his sizzling pan to one side of the fire and slowly stood up. “The hell it is and the hell I will.” The man's right hand opened a little.

“Don't do it.”

“Well, I ain't getting out.”

“The hell you ain't. And while I don't aim to shoot yet another man, I will if I have to.” Ransom found himself cool and easy. It pleased him.

“So that's the way it is.”

“Yes.” Ransom set his feet a little wider apart. “Tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to put down a new set of stakes. Where I had 'em before. Because this is mine. I've been here all winter guarding 'em.”

The man said nothing.

“And I'll be back tomorrow. If I find you at work here again, I'll stuff you dead into your own prospect hole.”

Pause,

“You hear me?”

“Anybody stake out below you yet?”

“You don't see stakes around, do you?”

“No, I don't.”

“Then it's yours.”

“Well.” Pause. “I was just asking to make sure. I don't mean to raise a trouble.” Pause, “I'd just as soon be neighborly, I guess. A man alone ain't gonna have much of a chance here a week from now.”

“Why in a week?”

“Friend, they're coming out of Cheyenne like starved cattle making a beeline for a fresh stack of hay.”

God in heaven. The dream was done. The idyll with Erden was over. “What's the matter with the U.S. Army?”

“The Army has decided to play hands off now. The guv'ment's about to sign a treaty with the red devils and turn all of the Hills over to the whites. First come first served.”

By the Lord. All too soon his green canyon would be a dusty roaring encampment. He'd seen it happen before in the Rockies above Denver. Men and mules would come driving up, one after another, and drive Erden and him and their bobolinks out, even their whistling granite gods. The cursed thirst of gold.

“Partner, I guess I don't have to tell you that there is considerable sand here.” The interloper moved nearer Ransom. “We better be ready to guard it.”

“I know.”

“Where you holing out?”

“Up the gulch a ways.”

“You better camp down here with me. So we can take turns guarding it.”

“I suppose so.”

“We better file our claims the minute some kind of guv'ment comes in.”

Ransom nodded. Well. It was all over with. Done. Gone. Because right behind the hordes of wild-eyed prospectors would come Katherine and all her fancy household goods.

The interloper held out his hand. “Well, Earl, my name's Troy Barb.” Again the man's moon eyes turned shifty for a second. “It's a deal then?”

“Call me Ransom.”

“Ransom? Ransom it is then.” Troy Barb still held out his hand. “It's a deal then?”

Ransom shook hands with some reluctance. At least the fellow would act as a sort of a stopper for a while and that would give him that much more time to figure out what to do with Erden.

“Me, I can't wait until they've built up Deadwood. Hain't got enough clothes left on me to dress a China doll with.”

“Deadwood?”

“Yes.” Troy Barb pointed up at the gulch rims where long ago a forest fire had flashed across the country. “Got to name it after something everybody'll recognize.”

“Might as well.”

“As a name it ain't nothing special. But it'll hold.”

“Where did you put my stakes?”

“I burnt 'em. For my cook fire.”

Ransom nodded. “Fair enough. I'll cut your name off your stakes here and put my own in place of it. And you make yourself some new ones for your claim below the dam here. That clear?”

“It'll have to do.”

Ransom examined Troy Barb critically. It was obvious the man's red shirt was lousy.

“When will you move down and join me?” Troy Barb asked.

“Quite a population you got there already, I see.”

“Can't find any red ants to take care of 'em.”

“I can't stand lice.”