The Searchers (12 page)

She said now with compassion, “Dear heart, dear little girl—Martin will come back. He’s bound to come back.” She didn’t know whether they would ever see Martin Pauley again or not, but she feared the outrageous things—the runaways, the cheap marriages—which she herself had proved young girls to be capable of at this stage. She wanted to give Laurie some comforting hope, to help her bridge over the dangerous time.

“I don’t care what he does,” Laurie said miserably. “It isn’t that at all.”

“I never dreamed,” her mother said, thoughtfully, ignoring the manifest untruth. “Why, you two always acted like—more like two tomboys than anything. How long has …When did you start thinking of Mart in this way?”

Laurie didn’t know that herself. Actually, so far as she was conscious of it, it had been about an hour. Mart had been practically her best friend, outside the family, throughout her childhood. But their friendship had indeed been much the same as that of two boys. Latterly, she recalled with revulsion, she had idiotically thought Charlie MacCorry more fun, and much more interesting. But she had looked forward with a warm, innocent pleasure to having Mart live with them right in the same house. Now that he was suddenly gone—irrecoverably, she felt now—he left an unexpectedly ruinous gap in her world that nothing left to her seemed able to fill. She couldn’t explain all that to her mother. Wouldn’t know how to begin.

When she didn’t answer, her mother patted her shoulder. “It will all seem different in a little while,” she said in the futile cliché of parents. “These things have a way of passing off. I know you don’t feel that way now; but they do. Time, the great healer...” she finished vaguely. She kissed the back of Laurie’s head, and went away.

Chapter Fifteen

After days of thinking up blistering things to say, Mart judged he was ready for Amos. He figured Amos would come at him before they were through. Amos was a respected rough-and-tumble scrapper away from home. “I run out of words,” Mart had heard him explain many a tangle. “Wasn’t nothing left to do but hit him.” Let him try.

But when he caught up, far up the Salt Fork, it was all wasted, for Amos wouldn’t quarrel with him. “I done my best to free your mind,” Amos said. “Mathison was fixing to step you right into Brad’s boots. Come to think of it, that’s a pair you got on. And Laurie—she wanted you.”

“Question never come up,” Mart said shortly.

Amos shrugged. “Couldn’t say much more than I done.”

“No, you sure couldn’t. Not without landing flat on your butt!” Mart had always thought of Amos as a huge man, perhaps because he had been about knee high to Amos when he knew him first. But now, as Amos for a moment looked him steadily in the eye, Mart noticed for the first time that their eyes were on the same level. Mrs. Mathison had been right about Mart having taken a final spurt of growth.

“I guess I must have left Jerem’s letter lying around.”

“Yeah. You left it lying around.” Mart had meant to ball up the letter and throw it in Amos face, but found he couldn’t now. He just handed it over.

“This here’s another thing I tried to leave you out of,” Amos said. “Martha put herself out for fifteen years bringing you up. I’ll feel low in my mind if I get you done away with now.”

“Ain’t studying on getting done away with.” “ ‘Bring the reward,’ he says here. From what I know of Jerem, he ain’t the man to trust getting paid when he’s earned it. More liable to try to make sure.”

“Now, he ought to know you ain’t carrying the thousand around with you!”

“Ain’t I?”

So he was. Amos did have the money with him. Now there’s a damn fool thing, Mart considered. Aloud he said, “If he’s got robbery in mind, I suppose he won’t tell the truth anyway.”

“I think he will. So he’ll have a claim later in case we slip through his claws.”

“You talk like we’re fixing to steal bait from a snap trap!”

Amos shrugged. “I’ll admit one thing. In a case like this, two guns got about ten times the chance of one.”

Mart was flattered. He couldn’t work himself up to picking a fight with Amos after that. Things dropped back to what they had been before they went home at all. The snow melted off, and they traveled in mud. Then the weather went cold again, and the wet earth froze to iron. More snow was threatening as they came to Jerem Futterman’s stockade, where Lost Mule Creek ran into the Salt Fork. The creek had not always been called the Lost Mule. Once it had been known as Murder River. They didn’t know why, nor how the name got changed, but maybe it was a good thing to remember now.

Jerem Futterman was lightly built, but well knit, and moved with a look of handiness. Had he been a cow-horse you might have bought him, if you liked them mean, and later shot him, if you didn’t like them treacherous. He faced them across a plank-and-barrel counter in the murk of his low-beamed log trading room, seeming to feel easier with a barrier between himself and strangers. Once he had had another name. Some thought he called himself Futterman because few were likely to suspect a man of fitting such a handle to himself, if it wasn’t his right one.

“Knew you’d be along,” he said.

“Have a drink.” “Have one yourself.” Amos refused the jug, but rang a four-bit piece on the planks.

Futterman hesitated, but ended by taking a swig and pocketing the half dollar. This was watched by four squaws hunkered down against the wall and a flat-faced breed who snoozed in a corner. Mart had spotted four or five other people around the place on their way in, mostly knock-about packers and bull-team men, who made up a sort of transient garrison.

The jug lowered, and they went into the conventional exchange of insults that passed for good humor out here. “Wasn’t sure I’d know you standing up,” Futterman said. “Last I saw, you were flat on your back on the floor of a saloon at Painted Post.”

“You don’t change much. See you ain’t washed or had that shirt off,” Amos said; and decided that was enough politeness. “Let’s see the dress!”

A moment of total stillness filled the room before Futterman spoke. “You got the money?”

“I ain’t paying the money for the dress. I pay when the child is found—alive, you hear me?”

The trader had a trick of dropping his lids and holding motionless with cocked head, as if listening. The silence drew out to the cracking point; then Futterman left the room without explanation. Mart and Amos exchanged a glance. What might happen next was anybody’s guess; the place had an evil, trappy feel. But Futterman came back in a few moments, carrying a rolled-up bit of cloth.

It was Debbie’s dress, all right. Amos went over it, inch by inch, and Mart knew he was looking for blood stains. It was singular how often people west of the Cross Timbers found themselves searching for things they dreaded to find. The dress was made with tiny stitches that Amos must be remembering as the work of Martha’s fingers. But now the pocket was half torn away, and the square hole where the sample had been knifed out of the front seemed an Indian kind of mutilation, as if the little dress were dead.

“Talk,” Amos said.

“A man’s got a right to expect some kind of payment.”

“You’re wasting time!”

“I paid twenty dollars for this here. You lead a man to put out, and put out, but when it comes to—”

Amos threw down a gold piece, and Mart saw Futterman regret that he hadn’t asked more.

“I had a lot of other expense, you realize, before—”

“Bull shit,” Amos said. “Where’d you get this?”

One more long moment passed while Jerem Futterman gave that odd appearance of listening. This man is careful, Mart thought; he schemes, and he holds back the aces—but he’s got worms in his craw where the sand should be.

“A young buck fetched it in. Filched it, naturally. He said it belonged off a young’n—”

“
Is she aliver?
”

“He claimed so. Said she was catched by Chief Scar the tail end of last summer.”

“Take care, Jerem! I never heard of no Chief Scar!”

“Me neither.” Futterman shrugged. “He’s supposed to be a war chief with the Nawyecky Comanches.”

“War chief,” Amos repeated with disgust. Among the Comanches any warrior with a good string of coups was called a war chief.

“You want me to shut up, say so,” Futterman said testily. “Don’t be standing there giving me the lie every minute!”

“Keep talking,” Amos said, relaxing a little.

“Scar was heading north. He was supposed to cross the Red, and winter-in at Fort Sill. According to this buck. Maybe he lied.”

“And maybe you lie,” Amos said.

“In that case, you won’t find her, will you? And I won’t get the thousand.”

“You sure as hell won’t,” Amos agreed. He stuffed Debbie’s dress into the pocket of his sheepskin.

“Stay the night, if you want. You can have your pick of them squaws.”

The squaws sat stolidly with lowered eyes. Mart saw that a couple of them, with the light color of mixed blood, were as pretty as any he had seen. Amos ignored the offer, however. He bought a skimpy mule load of corn for another twenty dollars, with only a token argument over the outrageous price.

“I expect you back when you find her,” Futterman reminded him, “to pay the money into this here hand.” He showed the dirty hand he meant.

“I’ll be back if I find her,” Amos said. “And if I don’t.”

Little daylight was left as they struck northward along Lost Mule Creek. The overcast broke, and a full moon rose, huge and red at first, dwindling and paling as it climbed. And within two hours they knew that the lonely prairie was not half lonely enough, from the standpoint of any safety in this night. Mart’s stud horse told them first. He began to prick his ears and show interest in something unseen and unheard, off on their flank beyond the Lost Mule. When he set himself to whinny they knew there were horses over there. Mart picked him up sharply, taking up short on the curb, so the uproar the stud was planning on never come out. But the horse fussed and fretted from then on.

Though the stud could be stopped from hollering, their pack mule could not. A little farther on he upped his tail, lifted his head, and whipsawed the night with a bray fit to rouse the world.

“That fool leatherhead is waking up people in Kansas,” Mart said. “You want I should tie down his tail? I heard they can’t yell at all, failin’ they get their tail up.”

Amos had never seen it tried, but he figured he could throw off on that one by percentage alone. “That’s what I like about you,” he said. “Man can tell you any fur-fetched thing comes in his head, and you’ll cleave to it for solemn fact from then on.

“Well, then—why don’t we split his pack, and stick a prickle pear under his tail, and fog him loose?”

“He’d foller anyway.”

“We can tie him. Shoot him even. This here’s the same as traveling with a brass band.”

Amos looked at him with disbelief. “Give up a fifteen-dollar mule for the likes of Jerem? I guess you don’t know me very well. Leave the brute sing.”

The thing was that nothing answered the mule from beyond the creek. The stud might have scented a band of mustangs, but mustangs will answer a mule same as a horse. Their animals were trying to call to ridden horses, probably Spanish curbed.

“I see no least reason,” Mart said, “why they can’t gallop ahead and dry-gulch us any time they want to try.”

“How do you know they haven’t tried?”

“Because we ain’t been fired on. They could pick any time or place they want.”

“I ain’t led you any kind of place they want. Why you think I swung so far out back there a few miles? That’s our big advantage—they got to use a place I pick.”

They rode on and on, while the moon shrunk to a pale dime, and crossed the zenith. The mule lost interest, but the stud still fretted, and tried to trumpet. The unseen, unheard stalkers who dogged them were still there.

“This can’t run on forever,” Mart said.

“Can’t it?”

“We got to lose ’em or outrun ’em. Or—”

“What for? So’s they can come on us some far place, when we least expect?”

“I can’t see ’em giving up,” Mart argued. “If this kind of haunting has to go on for days and weeks—”

“I mean to end it tonight,” Amos said.

They off-saddled at last in the rough ground from which the Lost Mule rose. Amos picked a dry gully, and they built a big tenderfoot fire on a patch of dry sand. Mart did what Amos told him up to here.

“I figure I got a right to know what you aim to do,” he said at last.

“Well, we might make up a couple of dummies out o’—”

Mart rebelled. “If I heard one story about a feller stuffed grass in his blanket and crawled off in the buck brush, I heard a million! Come morning, the blanket is always stuck full of arrows. Dozens of ’em. Never just one arrow, like a thrifty Indian would make do. Now, you know how hard arrows is to make!”

“Ain’t studyin’ on Indians.”

“No, I guess not. I guess it must be crazy people.”

“In poker, in war,” Amos said, “what you want is a simple, stupid plan. Reason you hear about the old flim-flams so much is they always work. Never try no deep, tricky plan. The other feller can’t foller it; it throws him back on his common sense—which is the last thing you want.”

“But this here is childish!”

Amos declared that what you plan out never helps much any; more liable to work against you than anything else. What the other fellow had in mind was the thing you wanted to figure on. It was the way you used
his
plan that decided which of you got added to the list of the late lamented. But he said no more of dummies. “You hungry? I believe they’ll stand off and wait for us to settle down. We got time to eat, if you want to cook.”

“I don’t care if I never eat. Not with what’s out there in the dark.”

Only precaution they took was to withdraw from the ember-lighted gully, and take cover under a low-hung spruce on the bank. About the first place a killer would look, Mart thought, once he found their camp. Mart rolled up in his blankets, leaving Amos sitting against the stem of the spruce, his rifle in his hands.

“You see, Martie,” Amos went back to it, “a man is very liable to see what he’s come expecting to see. Almost always, he’ll picture it all out in his mind beforehand. So you need give him but very little help, and he’ll swindle hisself. Like one time in the Rangers, Cap Harker offered five hundred dollars reward for a feller—”