The Savage Trail (5 page)

He looked away, down at Ben, who had stopped his horse opposite the mule and wagon, and now was looking up at him. John raised his hand and beckoned for him to ride up, not just sit there on Dynamite, gape-mouthed and puzzling over somethingneither of them would ever understand.

A slight breeze tugged at the man's shirt and that was the hardest part for John. Seeing his clothes like that, encasing his dead body, and the boy's hair. Invisible fingers of air tousling it. He choked at the sight. Something rose up in his throat and stuck there. And he thought about the young men in the miningcamp, their bloody bodies strewn everywhere like drowned sailors floated to shore from a shipwreck, all lifeless, gone forever, but their voices still sounding in his ears. It was like that, seeing the three people in the wagon, all dead, their lives snatched from them and only their clothing and their bodies to mark their passing, their abrupt stop on a desolate hillside in the shadow of the Rockies.

John dismounted and tied Gent to a rear wagon wheel, then walked over to where the woman lay. The boy was clearly dead, and so was the man, but the woman was lying on her side and he could not see her face. It appeared to him that she had been reaching backward for the young man, who was most likely her son. He leaned over and touched the woman's chin, lifting it gently.

She let out a low moan. The sound startled John and he felt a rippling chill on the back of his neck as the small hairs stiffenedand goose bumps crawled up both of his arms.

Gently, John slid an arm under her shoulder blades and turned her over, so that he could see her face, the front of her dress. He saw the blood on her blouse and felt a sticky wetnesssomewhere on her back.

He leaned down and put an ear to her mouth. There was a faint warm seep of air through her lips.

“You're alive,” he said softly.

Her eyes were closed. Then they opened and stared up at him. They were a frosty blue.

“Yes,” she said, so low and soft he barely heard her.

“You're hurt bad, ma'am.”

“Ollie,” she said.

“What? Did you say ‘Ollie'? Is he the man who shot you?”

“Yesssss,” she hissed, as if she could not stop the breath or did not want to stop it.

John heard the ring of a horseshoe on stone, heard the rustleof brush. He turned and saw Ben riding up. He was no more than ten yards from the mule.

“What you got there, John?”

“A woman. She's still alive. Just barely.”

He turned back to the woman, spoke to her.

“I-I'll try to help you,” he said.

Her eyes were closed and when he leaned down again, he could not detect her breathing. He put a finger on one of her eyelids and pried it open.

Ben rode alongside and looked down at the ground. He saw the open box. It was empty.

John looked at him, a sadness etching lines in his face.

“She—she's gone,” he said. “Not breathing.”

“Them others dead, too?” Ben asked, his voice just above a whisper.

John nodded. That lump was back in his throat again. Choking him.

“Mighty sorry sight,” Ben said.

“She said Ollie shot her. In the chest.”

Ben moved closer and peered at the woman. He could see the bullet hole in her chest.

John looked at her again, saw the trickle of blood that had stopped oozing from the corner of her mouth.

He hadn't noticed it before. It might have come out with her last breath, he thought.

John sagged as if all his energy had gone out of him. He slumped there on the seat, next to the dead man, shook his head.

“It don't get no easier, Johnny, does it?” Ben said.

“Shut up, Ben. Just shut up for a minute.”

It seemed as if there was a sigh in the wind that rushed over him, stirred the brim of his hat, touched the back of his neck, and blew on the sweat stain darkening the back of his shirt. The lump in his throat softened as tears spilled unbidden from his eyes and coursed down his cheeks.

Ben took off his hat, held it over his heart.

John did the same.

There was only silence as the breeze suddenly went slack and vanished under the mindless glare of the sun.

7

Ben stepped out of the saddle in a groaning whine of leather, tied his horse to a wagon wheel with sweat-slippery reins, and picked up the empty wooden box. He smelled the inside, sniffing to pick up any vagrant scents. He was thinking about candy, cigars, or the fragrance of baked flour in biscuits.

“Not a food box,” he said aloud. “Cash box, maybe. Has that funny smell, like paper money.”

John said nothing, his throat wound tight as if it had been coated with alum. His eyes closed up tight as fists as he fought back tears.

Ben looked at him, realizing John had gone to an island only he knew, some stark place in his heart where grief and sadness, remembrance, perhaps, were his only companions. He set the empty box in the rear of the wagon. Then he looked at the young man, the youth with the mangled throat, a throat that looked as if it had been clawed apart by some taloned beast with long hair or dusty feathers, one out of storybooks or mythical tales first told in ancient castle dungeons on nights so black a man couldn't see his hand in front of his face.

“All dead?” Ben sniffled, feeling his own throat tighten up as if it had been suddenly encased in a vise made of the coldestiron.

“Yeah.”

“It's like looking at eternity, ain't it, John? Like starin' down into a bottomless well.”

“I don't know what you mean, Ben.”

“They've gone on from this place. God only knows where they are now. But, wherever they be, it's for the rest of eternity.”

“Yeah. I guess I never looked at it that way.” Even now, the thought was beyond comprehension, like a distance you can't measure, some endless dark sea.

“Any idea of who they were?”

“Why don't you start trying to find out. I'll go through the man's pockets, you check the boy's. There has to be somethingin the wagon that will tell us who they are.”

“I reckon,” Ben said.

“Then, we'll bury them. Cut that mule loose first chance.”

“I'll do 'er,” Ben said.

John steeled himself to go through the pockets of the dead man on the seat. He didn't find much. There was a sack of tobaccoand rolling papers, a box of wooden matches, a few coins, all of which he put back. The boy had nothing in his pockets. In the wagon itself, he found a carpetbag belonging to the woman. It had a number of items in it, including a comb, a small mirror, a tin of rouge, but most important, there was a letter that seemed recent, since the paper was still crisp and the ink strong and distinct.

The letter was addressed to Melvin and Darlene Willis c/o General Delivery, Cheyenne, Wyoming. The return address was: Jesse Malone, 142 Locust Street, Fort Laramie, Wyoming.

John folded the letter and put it in his shirt pocket.

The people in the wagon, he reasoned, must be Darlene, Calvin, and Melvin. Jesse must be Darlene's brother, or a cousin, maybe. When they got to Fort Laramie, he vowed silently to look up the man and tell him what had happened to his kin. Maybe he would know something about the goings-on in Fort Laramie that involved Ollie Hobart.

He heard the mule braying and then a whack, saw it run down to the river and wade across to the road. It turned south, trotted a few yards, then stopped in its tracks.

“Wonder where he'll go,” Ben said.

“I thought he might turn north and go back to where he came from. Cheyenne.”

“You know he come from Cheyenne, Johnny?”

“That's where these folks have been staying for a spell. Beforethat they were in Fort Laramie.”

“And how do you know all that?”

John patted the bulge in his shirt pocket.

“I got a letter written to them.”

“Is there a shovel in that wagon?” Ben said.

A few minutes later, John handed Ben a shovel. He found a spade, too, and both set to digging the graves on the softest,least rocky part of the hillside. When they finished, they were drenched with sweat, their shirts black with it, their arms streaked with it, their mouths tasting of salty brine. They wrapped the bodies in blankets, carried them to the singlescooped-out patch of earth that would serve as a grave. They lay the bodies in the ground with reverence and began covering them up. John put Darlene's carpetbag in the grave with her.

“You going to say a few words, John?” Ben asked when they had finished covering the graves with dirt and rocks.

“Not out loud.”

“Well, we ought to say somethin'.”

“You say it, then.”

Ben took off his hat. So did John.

“Lord,” Ben said, “we give these kind folks back to the earth. Dust unto dust. You take 'em into Heaven with you, you see fittin'. Amen.”

John put his hat back on.

“That was a real fine prayer, Ben.”

“Liked to not have finished it. Got me a lump in my throat.”

“I know what you mean,” John said. “Let's light out, let our sweat dry out some.”

THE TWO MEN RODE AWAY WITHOUT A BACKWARD GLANCE.

“They couldn't have had much,” John said, an hour's ride up the trail.

“Huh?” Ben said. “What're you talkin' about?”

“Those people Hobart killed back there.”

“No, I reckon not.”

“He murdered three people. For money. What kind of man does that?”

“A bad man, John.”

“Hobart's more than bad. He didn't have to kill them like that. In cold blood.”

“They were witnesses, John. They saw his face. He had to kill 'em, I reckon.”

John shook his head.

Ben could see that the killings had been bothering his friend. John hadn't said a word in better than an hour and now he was talking a blue streak. He had never talked much about his folks being killed, which had bothered Ben. A man hadn't ought to keep too much inside his self, he thought. It wasn't good for a man to carry too much weight on his shoulders. But John never got drunk, never cried in his sleep, and never let on how much grief he was packing in that young mind of his.

“No need to shoot the woman and boy,” John said. “He could have just given them all a warning. Worse, I don't think Hobart needed what little money they probably had.”

“No, I reckon not. He took us for a pretty good chunk of gold. He ain't had time to spend it, and he's probably still got the shares of those you and me put six feet under.”

“That's what bothers me, I guess. Hobart doesn't have a conscience. I think maybe he kills just for the fun of it.”

“John, there's something I been meaning to tell you. Maybe now's the time.”

John sat up stiff in the saddle and looked at Ben.

“What, Ben?”

“About Ollie Hobart.”

“You been keeping something from me, Ben?”

“Afraid so, John.”

“Why?”

“Just waitin' for the right time, I reckon.”

John looked at his friend sharply, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. Ben hacked something up from his throat and spit it into the wind.

“And this is the right time, you figure,” John said.

“As good as any. Your pa. He knew Ollie Hobart. Knowed him a long time back.”

“What?”

“I think Dan was doin' his best to forget Ollie Hobart 'cause when they knowed each other, they was right young and Ollie . . . well, he had a hankerin' for your ma, Clare. The both of them did, and there was bad blood atwixt 'em.”

“Ollie Hobart was courtin' my ma?”

“Hell, he aimed to marry her. There was a hell of a row when Clare turned him down, said she was going to marry Dan Savage.”

“I never heard anything about it.”

“No, I reckon not.”

“How come you know about it, Ben?”

“I was tradin' horse, twixt Missouri and Arkansas. Your pa's pap traded with me. I come in on it when Hobart and Dan was at it, tooth and nail. Hobart threatened to kill Dan and they had a big fight. Fists and knives. Dan cut Hobart pretty good and laid him up. Him and Clare got married whilst Hobartwas in the infirmary. They had to push his bowels back in his belly and sew him up like a Christmas turkey.”

“I never heard any of this.”

“Well, Dan went and came to work for me and then we got the gold fever. Never saw hair ner hide of Hobart until that day he jumped our claim and you and me saw him and his bunch kill everybody in sight. But Hobart was carryin' a grudge, all right. It warn't no accident he come up to our camp.”

“Why in hell didn't you say something to me when we were up in that mine looking down at all the slaughter?”

“You was carryin' enough on your shoulders right then. I didn't see no sense in makin' things worse.”

“It couldn't have been any worse.”

“Yep, it could have been a sight worse, Johnny. If you'd have known who Hobart was, you'd have gone down there bare-handed and got yourself kilt. For no reason.”

“But to kill my mother . . .”

“To Hobart that don't make no never-you-mind. He kilt his own mother. He was wrong from the first squall, that boy. Everybody in town knew it. Everybody was too scared of him to do anything about it. That bastard should have been put in a gunny sack with rocks and throwed in the river with the cats.”