Sanctuary (13 page)

“I can take care of the bones, and maybe I can do something for the pain, although I have to be careful there. Wouldn't take much to stop his breathing.”

“But this!” Doc's hands ranged over the upper left quadrant of Ten Horses' belly. The skin was stretched tight and rigid.

“His spleen is ruptured. No question about that. Could be, too, that he has head injuries.”

“Nothing I can do about either of those injuries, not yet anyway. So the best thing to do is to set the arm and leg and give him a quarter grain of morphine for the pain and hope the spleen stops bleeding on its own. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't.”

“Judd, maybe you wouldn't mind giving me a hand with this, and give the preacher a chance to talk to the sheriff.”

Judd nodded, and the preacher and the sheriff stepped into the waiting room, settling into a couch that lined one wall.

“He tell you what happened?”

The preacher nodded. “Early morning, before first light, some yahoos brought a herd of cattle up through the river bottom and across a garden Jack has been working on.”

“Ten Horses has been gardening?”

“Doing a good job of it, too. Anyway, he tried to head off the cattle, and one of the drovers—a man named Jasper Higgins—ran him down. Ten Horses was knocked unconscious and the herd was driven over him.”

The sheriff was silent for a moment, his mind picking methodically through the web of the story looking for frayed edges.

“If it was full dark, how could Ten Horses know it was Jasper?”

“He recognized him by his laugh.”

“By his laugh? Charley Altheimer, Esquire, would have fun with that,” Timothy spat “He represents all the Bar Nothing boys. Dirk Newcombe would hang Charley on Ten Horses' neck like a noose, and you can bet by the time he finished, a jury would be ready to finish the job.”

“Are you saying you won't do anything?”

Timothy's voice took on an edge like a rock crusher with a granite boulder stuck in its craw.

“Didn't say that at all. You want me to, I'll arrest Jasper. What I'm telling you is that it'll be Jasper's word against Jack's, and Altheimer will twist that jury around his finger and shove it up Jack's … rear end.”

“What'll it be, preacher?”

“It won't be justice,” the preacher said. “Whatever it is, it won't be justice.”

Doc was still hovering over Jack Ten Horses when Judd and the preacher opened the door to the surgery. Doc glanced up, distracted for a moment, and waved his hand before returning his attention to his patient.

“Jack will be all right,” the preacher said as they stepped through the door. “Doc will make sure of that.”

Outside, the three men from the village were waiting in the wagon box. The preacher and Judd climbed into the seat, and the preacher slapped the reins on the horse's back.

“We'll take the men back to the village, and then return the wagon to the livery.”

“I thought you had hired the wagon for work in the garden.”

“What?” the preacher asked, obviously distracted. “Oh, I did. Not much we can do there now, though, with a wagon.”

“What were you going to use it for?”

“Some chores needed doing. That's all.”

The wagon rattled along for nearly a quarter of a mile before Judd could ask the question that had been plaguing him all morning. “You knew Jack was going to be hurt, didn't you?”

Mordecai cupped his chin in his hand and turned his full attention to Judd. “How could I know that?”

Judd shrugged, but not once on the long trip back to the village did his eyes leave the preacher's face.

Ten

The night was pitch black, and the preacher, riding more by ear than eye, nudged his horse along on the prairie above the Milk.

He stopped, silencing the squeak of leather and the jangle of the bridle, to listen. A coyote caught in the mystery of the night barked somewhere ahead, and a prairie breeze popped in the preacher's ears, but silence heavy and black underlined those faint sounds.

Mordecai knew steers grazed the pasture, but it sprawled across twenty square miles, and the animals could be anywhere. He swung his offside leg across the saddle horn, turning his attention to the black sky while the horse reached down to tug at the tender spring grass. The moon would be up before long, painting the prairie silver and black, and Mordecai wanted to be clear of the Bar Nothing before then.

There! The rattle and thump of creatures running, hooves striking the ground. Cattle? No, these animals were bouncing, not running—mule deer disturbed while they nibbled at sage redolent in the cool night air. The deer would have hidden in the blackness until he passed, but when he stopped their nerve broke, and they ran.

The coulee creased the prairie near here. Cattle had worn a path down its walls to a tiny creek and reservoir below, seeking water and soft grass in the day and beds to escape the wind skipping across the prairie at night.

The preacher looked up, his eyes roving the skies for the Big and Little Dippers. They were just where they should be—over his left shoulder—so he was still traveling east. Any time now.

Mordecai's dead reckoning proved remarkably accurate. The gelding ambled along for less than a hundred yards before coming to an abrupt halt. The preacher, having had no warning of the animal's intent, lurched forward in the saddle. He waited in blackness so still, he could hear his own heartbeat and the rustle of the wind through the grass. What had the horse sensed ahead in that void?

But the night was empty, and the preacher touched his heels to the gelding's flanks. The horse stepped ahead and off the edge of a hill Mordecai couldn't see, clumping stiff-legged down the steep wall of the coulee.

The preacher leaned into the stirrups. Shale poked black and slick as oil from the coulee walls, promising a dangerous tumble for an unwary rider. But the hillside here was clothed in grass, and the horse bottomed out without slipping.

Mordecai heard one steer ambling away. The animals weren't unduly spooky. That would make his job a lot easier. The steep coulee walls would be as good as fifty riders funneling the cattle toward the Milk.

Mordecai would cut ten head from the herd down there, drop the barbed-wire fence and drive them across the Milk and into the heavy brush along the river and then go back and fix the fence. It could be days before a cowboy stumbled on the trail, and even then he might pass without investigating. It could be that Dirk Newcombe would never know he was missing the cattle.

The preacher touched his heels to the gelding, humming “Rock of Ages” as he pushed the cattle down the coulee.

A curl of rancid smoke rose into the still air from a fire set the night before at the dump. But that was the only movement on the river bottom.

The garden, fenced now, stood abandoned, green lines marking the emergence of new plants, and the school stood like a sentinel guarding one corner of it.

After Jack Ten Horses was almost killed, the people abandoned the garden, but the preacher had promised them meat if they would reseed the parcel, build a strong fence, and finish the ditch.

Once work began, the garden pulled the people together. They met there each day until the morning when the preacher announced they had earned their pay, and there was meat waiting on the bottom down-river.

The people had disappeared then, the children lingering for half a day at the school, their minds and their eyes pulled downstream until finally Mary Dickens had waved them away. They disappeared like smoke.

Mary sighed. She might as well go back to the teacherage. Still, she had been curious about the killing place, as the people called it, and a moment later she followed her curiosity and the path down the riverbank, enjoying the shade cast by the cottonwoods and the heavy smell of mint.

She didn't hurry, stopping to pick the wild roses that grew along the river bottom and then to pick the fine, sharp thorns from her fingers. She cupped her hands around the fragile pink blossoms, immersed in their delicate beauty and subtle scent.

She smelled the camp before she saw it, wood smoke curling through the river bottom. The smoke grew heavier, seasoned with the odor of curing meat, as she neared.

And when Mary Dickens stepped into the killing place, she felt as though she had stepped through a rip in time.

Willows from the riverbank had been cut and woven into racks. They hung heavy with meat over slow-burning smoky fires, tended by women with faces so dark it appeared that they were curing, too.

One fire, coals red in the dim light, sputtered as it licked at grease dripping from a side of beef turning slowly under the ministrations of a woman Mary didn't know.

The men lay in little knots on the grass, talking and smoking, their laughter and the squeals of children competing with the murmur of the Milk.

Trees at the other edge of the clearing were hid in smoke, dark and obscure. Sunlight streamed through the cottonwoods overhead like the shafts of arrows loosed by the sun. But that light cast no shadows, not in the dark, intoxicating smoke.

A shudder teased the hair on the nape of Mary's neck. There was something primitive here, something dark hidden in the smoke and the people's skin and in their eyes. She remembered that day last fall.…

Mary had packed a picnic lunch to walk the river bottom.

Now she followed game trails upstream along the Milk, avoiding patches of impenetrable wild rose and willow.

At one point, the Milk looped to the east, opening a large clearing below the bluff that defined the ancient course of the river. She heard voices and made her way through the trees to the clearing.

Three men toiled there, dragging bones from below the bluff and dumping them into a wagon. They stopped occasionally to wipe the sweat from their foreheads, but the breaks lasted only seconds before they dug into the hillside again.

Mary watched until the scent of old wood smoke and leather pulled her eyes back toward the river. She started when she saw an old man standing only a step away.

He was dressed in wool pants and a red flannel shirt worn soft and brown through the years. Over the shirt was a leather vest adorned with elk teeth, and on his feet were moccasins laced halfway up his calves.

The old man's hair was white, thin and wispy, spraying from beneath a flat-brimmed, high-crowned black hat. A feather poked like an afterthought from the hat's brim.

Skin, dry and crinkled as parchment, stretched over the sharp, protruding bones of his face. Only his nose seemed to have any weight to it. Fat as a camel's hump, it dominated his face, overwhelming tiny black eyes that twinkled in its shadow like stars on a dark night.

“Aieee,” he said, his eyes wandering past Mary to the men working on the hillside. “Is it not a mystery?”

Mary took a step back. “Where did you come from?”

The old man pondered the question for a moment. “I have been following them,” he said, his finger settling on the wagon. “Is it not a mystery?”

“I mean just now. Where did you come from just now? I didn't hear you.”

The old man waved his arm behind him. “Back there. Indians move without making noise. Didn't you know that?” His eyes probed her face. “Don't you read those dime novels? All Indians move without making noise.”

His shoulders shook as he laughed at his own joke, but then his eyes moved back to the working men and the laughter stopped. “Aieee, is it not a mystery?”

“What is this place?” Mary asked.

“Pishkin.”

“Pishkin?”

“Yes.”

“What is pishkin?” Mary asked, exasperation creeping into her voice.

“Come sit beside my fire,” the old man said. “I will tell you about the pishkin, and maybe you can tell me about the mystery.”

Mary hesitated. She didn't know the old man. His dress and background and speech put him outside her frame of reference. She didn't know what niche, if any, he fit in, and she found that frightening. But her curiosity proved stronger than her wariness, and she followed the old man deeper into the trees, listening carefully to see if he could, indeed, walk without making any noise.

The fire burned dirty orange and quiet on cotton-wood branches and leaves. The old man had built it in front of a fallen cottonwood, and he settled on that log after feeding the fire from a pile of wood nearby.

He gestured for Mary to sit beside him and began rummaging through a small bag he carried on a thong over his shoulder. A moment later, he pulled a pipe from the bundle and a doeskin bag of tobacco. He packed the pipe, lit it with a stick from the fire, and then turned his attention to Mary.

“Pishkin is Blackfoot for buffalo jump,” he said. “I am a Blackfoot. In the old days, before even the horse, my people drove buffalo over that bluff back there.

“Then we would camp along the river. The men would smoke and talk while the women smoked and dried the meat and made pemmican and cured robes. It was a good time. We always had plenty to eat, and the children would hunt rabbits and gophers and swim and do children's things.”

“Pishkans were good, but bad, too. Sometimes we killed more buffalo than we could eat, and they would rot unless our brothers the coyotes and wolves came to feed on them in the night. The manitou did not like us to waste the great gift the buffalo were.”

“So when the horse came to my people, we stopped using pishkins. There was not so much waste in hunting the buffalo on horseback.”

The old man stopped talking, and a grin crossed his face. “It might be, too, that we hunted on horseback because it was more fun.”

“That pishkin”—his arm swept over his shoulder in the direction of the men and the wagon—“was used for many years. The bones of many buffalo lay there.”

“But why do those men pick the bones and carry them away in wagons? This is the mystery. I have followed them now for the spring and the summer and the fall and still I do not know.”