Medicine Road (35 page)

"Don't be a hawg, son." The words were for
Johnny but the blue-dark eyes behind them went
into the upswinging, wide gaze of Lacey O'Mara.
"Leave some for your old man....

He stood with the tear wet of her thick lashes
locked into the hollow of his shoulder, his lean
face, flushed and fever-dark, buried in the warmth
of her hair.

"It's all right, Lacey honey. Everything's all right,
now. We got our young 'un back and the three of us
are going to make it to Californy before snow flies.
And if they want, we'll take your Kansas folks along,
too. Listen to me, honey. We got the world in a jug.
And Lacey, gal"-his deep growl dropped softer
than new snow-"there ain't nobody but God
Almighty ever going to pull the stopper on us again."

The night dark came down heavily as the trailweary muleskinners kneed their ambling mounts along the path of Jesse's campward gallop. The wiry
little horses picked up to a shuffle trot, moving eagerly toward the cheery fire blooms. Through the
settling dust of their passing, the last member of the
returning caravan plodded unsteadily.

There was enough light to make out her pop-eyed,
outsized head, her wobbling cow hocks and stiffsplinted knees, even the ugly, smoke-dirty color of
her lather-stained hide. And then there was just
enough light left over to mark the memorable snow
flash of Watonga's eight-foot eagle-feather war bonnet, where it swung and jolted in tired and final triumph across the bony withers of Heyoka-The
Clown-all that was left to signal and dignify the final skinning of Black Coyote.

After that, there was only black sky and quiet
starlight over Carson's Canon and the old Medicine Road.

Henry Wilson Allen wrote under both the Clay Fisher
and Will Henry bylines and was a five-time winner of
the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America.
He was born in Kansas City, Missouri. His early work
was in short subject departments with various Hollywood studios, and he was working at M-G-M when
his first Western novel, No Survivors (1950), was published. While numerous Western authors before Allen
provided sympathetic and intelligent portraits of Indian characters, Allen from the start set out to characterize Indians in such a way as to make their
viewpoints an integral part of his stories. Some of
Allen's images of Indians are of the romantic variety,
to be sure, but his theme often is the failure of the
American frontier experience and the romance is
used to treat his tragic themes with sympathy and
humanity. On the whole, the Will Henry novels tend
to be based more deeply in actual historical events,
whereas in those titles he wrote as Clay Fisher he was
more intent on a story filled with action that moves rapidly. However, this dichotomy can be misleading,
since MacKenna's Gold (1963), a Will Henry Western
about gold-seekers, reads much like one of the finest
Clay Fisher titles, The Tall Men (1954). His novels,
Journey to Shiloh (1960), From Where the Sun Now
Stands (1960), One More River To Cross (1967), Chiricahua (1972), and I, Tom Horn (1975) in particular, remain imperishable classics of Western historical
fiction. Over a dozen films have been made based on
his work.

"I am but a solitary horseman of the plains, born a
century too late and far away," Allen once wrote
about himself. He felt out of joint with his time, and
what alone may ultimately unify his work is the
vividness of his imagination, the tremendous emotion with which he invested his characters and fashioned his Western stories. At his best, he wove an
almost incomparable spell that involves a reader
deeply in his narratives, informed always by his
profound empathy for so many of the casualties of
the historical process.