Winding Stair (9781101559239) (41 page)

“But in that attic? She had to have heard something.”

“That's been gnawing at you for a long time, hasn't it? Well, you can forget it. You don't think the old man told her who was coming when he put her there, do you? If she'd known who it was, she likely would have fought going into that attic. He had to scare hell out of her to get her up there to start with. Remember the shape she was in when we dragged her down? Half-hysterical and the other half-fainted.”

Once more, as it had so many times since this had all begun, I tried to imagine the things going through Thomas Thrasher's mind when he first saw those five ride into his farmyard and recognized Johnny Boins and the milk-eyed man. And when Smoker Chubee stepped into the breezeway before he'd had a chance to hide Mrs. Thrasher . . .

“Don't forget, Eben, Johnny Boins was on the stand, too. And if that girl had been involved, he'd have spilled it.”

“It's still hard to believe, her writing that note to frighten Emmitt.”

“She was trying to protect her pretty boy. Up 'til then all we had was Emmitt. Without him, no case. It was too bad that she had to give it the first time to such a pretty boy who was also a son of a bitch.”

“You put it all so delicately,” I said bitterly.

“Just so you understand it. What I'm trying to say is, knowing how you feel, it's too bad you couldn't have been the first.”

I poured another glass of brandy and threw it down and almost choked. He watched me with those impersonal blue eyes. The matchstick in his mouth had been chewed to splinters and he took it out and tossed it on the floor.

“I want to ask you something. The time she came up here, to this room. What happened between you two?”

“None of your goddamned business.”

“No, it ain't. But it's the kind of thing a man wonders about.”

“How in God's name did you know that?”

He seemed about to smile.

“It's part of my work, knowing what people do around here,” he said.

The bedsprings squeaked as he rose. He came to the desk and placed something there beside Smoker Chubee's pistol. It was the little china dog. I could see the hand-printed legend on the side.
Eureka Springs, Arkansas, 1890
.

“I found this, too,” he said. With that, he turned to the door, moving into the dark shadows of the room. “Well, I better get to business.”

But he stood with his hand on the doorknob for a long time, watching me. When he spoke, his voice seemed not so harsh, not so brusque as it usually was.

“I'm sorry about all of it, Eben. But I figured it was better you knew everything.”

He swung open the door and started into the hall.

“Wait a minute,” I said abruptly. “I'm going with you.”

He may have smiled then. I was too busy throwing winter gear from my trunk to notice. There was a sudden urgency to get away from here, to find some new country, some new people.

Although it was only a little after suppertime, the streets were empty when we went down. The snow had stopped, as Oscar Schiller had predicted it would, but the wind was blowing fresh from the west. We hurried along beneath the gaslights, neither speaking. I thought of a thousand other questions but each seemed only a repetition of something I had already asked. Beyond the Frisco depot and across the tracks, we moved down to the waterfront, where a small ferry was waiting at one of the slips. There was a lantern swung from a pole at the bow, another at the stem where we jumped aboard. Horses were there saddled and standing heads down and close together, their steel shoes making rough thump-ings on the deck as they shifted about on the gently lifting vessel.

Except that now they wore winter coats, the two Osages looked much as I recalled seeing them the first time, when we rode the Texas freight to the Winding Stair. Blue Foot stood silently, wearing a hat now, his brooding eyes watching me, a heavy Winchester held under each arm. Joe Mountain came up to me as I jumped on the ferry, his teeth showing and the tattooed dots along his cheek looking inky black in the lantern shine. When he saw I was carrying saddlebags, his grin widened.

“What you got in them bags, Eben Pay? Railroad passes?”

“No. Some sardines and tobacco.”

“Yeah, I told the Cap'n you'd come. You got all stocked up, didn't you?”

I suppose it was true. I suppose that, after all, the most important thing was being here, with these men, a part of them. One of Parker's men.

“This here is gonna be a good one, Eben Pay. Murders are always the best kind,” Joe Mountain said as we leaned against one railing and watched the two ferrymen throwing off stern lines and then manning the large sweeps. Slowly, we moved out into the current, away from the Arkansas shore. “I bet you got Old Smoker's Colt in them bags, ain't you?”

“Yes.”

He laughed abruptly, sending a great cloud of vapor into the cold air. “By God. With Old Smoker's Colt, you're gonna be hell on the border, Eben Pay.”

The ferry slipped through the water without a sound. Everything was as it had been. Joe Mountain had begun to tell of some ancient ancestor, before the war, fighting the Cherokees along the Verdigris River. Blue Foot, farther along the railing and in shadows, making no sound, was watching, the roach of hair hanging down his back beneath his wide-brimmed hat. Leaning against one of the horses, Oscar Schiller stood with saddlebags between his feet, fishing peanuts from his coat pocket and hulling them, popping the meats into his mouth in a cloud of breath vapor. The lanterns put a glaze of white across his glasses.

I slipped the china dog from my pocket. After a moment in my hand, it grew warm. Toward the south was the rising structure of the new railroad bridge and beyond that the pale ribbon of water bending back into The Nations. Faintly the limestone bluffs of Belle Point thrust into the night sky, along with the dark square forms of the old fort commissary and the federal building. In my mind, I could see the compound, and the outline of the gallows, stark and barren now, but waiting, always there waiting.

I dropped the china dog over the side and listened for its fall into the water, but the only sounds were the rushing wind and the sweeps in the oarlocks and Joe Mountain's voice, droning on about the way it once was. How the deer came down to drink along these shores and there were black bears in the hills and not so far west the great herds of buffalo, and the people would paint their faces yellow and black to go out on war parties, and then come home again to dance.

 

The National Archives

The National Park Service

The National Historic Site, Fort Smith, Arkansas

And Most Especially To:

Billy Ben Putman, swordsman, gourmet, counselor, cherished friend—and the best damned trial lawyer who ever stood to the defense of an accused killer.

Douglas C. Jones
was a three-time winner of the Western Writers of America's Golden Spur Award, as well as the recipient of their Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement.

Read on for a preview of Douglas C. Jones's

Winner of the Spur Award for
Best Historical Novel

 

“Jones is not a bright new voice in Western fiction. Instead, his might be called a rich, seasoned tone, mastered through a series of increasingly impressive novels.”

—
The Dallas Morning News

 

“Jones . . . has long demonstrated a seemingly effortless ability to paint richly detailed pictures of nineteenth-century America.... This is work of a master craftsman.”

—
The Cleveland Plain Dealer

 

“Few writers can summon forth the agonies and joys of the rites of passage as poignantly as Douglas C. Jones, who in
Roman
counterbalances that highly personal experience with a broader one of the coming of age of the American West.... As always, Jones's vision is as singular as a thumbprint.”

—Loren D. Estleman, five-time Spur Award–winning author of
The Undertaker's Wife

 

—FROM ROMAN'S DIARY

 

 

 

T
he Cheyenne had come twice already, straight down the streambed toward the island, their charge splitting at the last moment to pass on either side. And he knew they would come again and in greater force because he could hear them out on the plain beyond the cutbanks and around the bend in the river, shouting, working up to it. He thought he could feel the earth tremble with the shock of the prancing pony hooves.

“One in the chamber and a full magazine,” the commanding officer shouted from somewhere behind him. The commanding officer had been everywhere, moving as smart as if on parade, a huge army-model Colt revolver in his hand, now down with two wounds to the legs, still shouting instructions to the huddled troop of men. “And this time, don't shoot until I say!”

He levered a round into the chamber of the Spencer carbine; the weapon was hot to the touch from the last firing. Then he slipped the long, tubular magazine from the butt, replacing it with a full one from the wooden box that lay open on the sandy earth beside his shallow rifle pit, a tiny trench that had been scooped out with a mess tin less than twenty minutes before, when they had first ridden here, a headlong dash as the first Indian fire came at them from the high riverbanks, steep inclines no more than a pistol shot away on either side of their tiny island. Then the first horses had fallen with terrible screams and there had been the screeching curses, soldiers' curses, from men struck and bleeding.

He was at the far point of the island because he was a good marksman and had been placed there with others like him. He could see directly along the riverbed, dry now on this late-summer Thursday just a week short of the fall equinox. The sand and the low bluffs on either side reflected the sun in a blinding gray-white brilliance, as though the earth here were a mirror. The short grasses, gone brown and brittle from lack of rain, were bending with the movement of the wind. Behind him he could hear the soft rustle of leaves in the lone cottonwood tree and the wild plum and other scrub growing on the island.

But the wind was not strong enough to keep away biting September flies or the nasty little sand gnats that seemed intent on eating off his eyelids.

And not enough wind to blow away the smells, either. There was the stench of hot gun oil from the Spencer, and of sweating horse from his mount, which lay in front of the rifle pit with one hind leg pointing toward the pale sky. The big stallion had been hit twice on their dash to the island, but had stayed on his feet to this sandy beach, where he fell, a barrier of flesh against bullets and arrows.

There was the scent of blood, too, something he could remember from the many times of hog butchering on the farm. But there seemed to him a harsh difference between pigs' blood and that of horses. And of men.

Already he could hear the last gasping, incoherent babbles of men wounded to death, one of them their surgeon, shot through the head at the first rush of the hostiles. And the whistle of a crazed horse that finally broke away and ran across the narrow strip of sand on the south side of the island, scrambled up the cutbank in a cloud of dust, and disappeared. His last impression of that horse was a whipping tail and flapping, empty stirrups.

“How many did you tally?” he asked the man to his right.

“I heerd the major quote four hundred that first go. They'll be a sight more of the bastards this next round. Cheyenne mostly, but some Sioux and maybe some Arapaho.”

“And us only fifty.”

“Fifty, hell! They ain't even that many now.”

Not far from where he lay, this drought-diminished streambed ran into the Republican River. It in turn flowed across Nebraska and then veered south into Kansas, and he wished he were anywhere along its course. Anywhere but here, with the gnats chewing and the flies biting and the sun making a dazzle on the land that caused his eyes to run water.

“You're seeing history made, boys,” the lieutenant had said. “Nobody ever saw 'em fight like disciplined cavalry before this day!”

He'd as soon not see such history being made, he thought, and wondered if, far out there to the east, beyond the heat-wave-wrinkled horizon, there was a single soul who gave a good damn about what was happening on this strip of sand in the bottom of a riverbed at the edge of Colorado Territory.

Sweat was running into his eyes, attracting gnats in gigantic little swarms. Every gnat on the damned Arikaree River is biting me, he thought. The sun was hot, burning into his head through his wide-brimmed slouch hat. Beneath him, in the sandy depression, he could feel the seep of moisture, and it was warm as Mama's soup.

Mama's soup! Maybe that was what made him start remembering in little flashes, remembering all the women he had ever known. His mother, Ora Hasford, standing in her kitchen, arms whitened to the elbows with flour; his sister, Cal, married to a former Yankee Army officer wounded at the battle of Pea Ridge; a whore in Ellsworth whose name he didn't even know and ashamed at the thought of her because her image came so close behind his sister's. And Katie Rose with her doughy kisses, and Victoria Cardin with her lovely face, and the sad cow eyes of Olivia Smith. And little Catrina Peel with a brutal black bruise across one cheek and her eyes with that deep melancholy you see only in the eyes of a child who knows the anguish and despair of a world peopled with cruel adults.