Butcher's Crossing (27 page)

After he had warmed himself, Miller walked across the campsite, following the irregular path that he and Andrews had made earlier, toward the place between the bales where Charley Hoge still lay. Andrews watched him go, following his progress with eyes that moved in a head that did not turn. The heat from the fire bit into his skin and pained him, and still he had the urge to get closer, to hover over the fire, to take the fire inside himself. He bit his lips with the pain of the heat, but he did not move away. He remained before the fire until his hands were a bright red, and until his face burned and throbbed. Then he backed away and instantly he was cold again.

Miller led Charley Hoge back across the snow toward the fire. Charley Hoge went before Miller, shambling loosely in the broken path, his head down, stumbling to his knees now and then. Once, when the path turned, he plowed into the unbroken snow, and halted and turned only when Miller caught at him and turned him gently back. When the two men came up before the fire, Charley Hoge stood inertly before it, his head still down, his face hidden from the others.

“He don’t quite know where he is yet,” Miller said. “He’ll be all right in a little while.”

As the fire warmed him, Charley Hoge began to stir. He looked dully at Andrews, at Schneider, and back at Miller; then he returned his gaze to the flames, and moved closer to them; he thrust the stump of his wrist close to the heat, and held it there for a long time. Finally he sat before the fire and rested his chin on his knees, which he cradled close to his chest with arms folded tightly around them; he gazed steadily into the flames, and blinked slowly, unseeingly, every now and then.

Miller went to the corral and inspected the horses; he returned leading his own horse, and reported to the men around the fire that the others seemed to be in good shape, considering the weather they had gone through. Digging again into the cache of their goods, he found the half-filled sack of grain that they had brought along to supplement the grass diet of the horses; he measured out a small quantity and fed it slowly to his horse. He told Schneider to feed the others after a while. He let his own horse wander about the area for a few moments until its muscles were loosened and it had gained strength from its food. Then, scraping the ice and snow off the saddle and tightening the cinch around its belly, he mounted.

“I’m going to ride up toward the pass and see how bad it is,” he said. He rode slowly away from them. His horse walked with head down, delicately lifting its forehooves out of the neat holes they made, and more delicately placing them on the thin crust and letting them sink, as if only by their own weight, through the snow.

After several minutes, when Miller was out of hearing, Schneider said to the fire: “It ain’t no use for him to go look. He knows how bad it is.”

Andrews swallowed. “How bad is it?”

“We’ll be here for a while,” Schneider said, and chuckled without humor; “we’ll be here for a spell.”

Charley Hoge raised his head and shook it, as if to clear his mind. He looked at Schneider, and blinked. “No,” he said loudly, hoarsely. “No.”

Schneider looked at Charley Hoge and grinned. “You come alive, old man? How did you like your little rest?”

“No,” Charley Hoge said. “Where’s the wagon? We got to get hitched up. We got to get out of here.”

Charley Hoge got to his feet and swayed, looking wildly about him. “Where is it?” He took a step away from the fire. “We can’t lose too much time. We can’t—”

Schneider rose and put a hand on Charley Hoge’s arm. “Take it easy,” he said, gruffly and soothingly. “It’s all right. Miller’ll be back in a minute. He’ll take care of everything.”

As suddenly as he had arisen, Charley Hoge sat back on the ground. He nodded at the fire and mumbled: “Miller. He’ll get us out of here. You wait. He’ll get us out.”

A heavy log, thawed to wetness by the heat, fell into the bed of coals; it hissed and cracked, sending up heavy plumes of blue-gray smoke. The three men squatted in the little circle of bare ground, which was soggy from the snow that had turned to water and seeped from the closely surrounding drifts. Waiting for Miller to return, they did not speak; torpid from the heat of the fire and weak from the two-day lack of food, they did not think of moving or feeding themselves. Every now and then Andrews reached over to the thinning bank beside him and lethargically took a handful of snow, stuffed it into his mouth, and let it melt on his tongue and trickle down his throat. Though he did not look beyond the campfire, the whiteness of the snow over the valley, caught and intensified by the brilliant sun, burned into his averted face, causing his eyes to smart and his head to throb.

Miller was gone from the camp nearly two hours. When he returned, he rode past the campsite without looking at anyone. He left his trembling and winded horse in the snow-banked corral and slogged wearily through the snow up to where they waited around the fire. He warmed his hands—blue-black from the cold and ingrained powder smoke that remained on them—and turned around several times to warm himself thoroughly before he spoke.

After a minute of silence, Schneider said harshly: “Well? How does it look?”

“We’re snowed in good,” Miller said. “I couldn’t get within half a mile of the pass. Where I turned back, the snow was maybe twelve foot deep in places; and it looked like it was worse farther on.”

Schneider, squatting, slapped his knees, and rose upright. He kicked at a charred log that had fallen from the fire and was sizzling on the wet ground.

“I knowed it,” Schneider said dully. “By God, I knowed it before you told me.” He looked from Miller to Andrews and back again. “I told you sons-of-bitches we ought to get out of here, and you wouldn’t listen to me. Now look what you got yourselves into. What are you going to do now?”

“Wait,” Miller said. “We get ourselves fixed up against another blow, and we wait.”

“Not this feller,” Schneider said. “This feller’s going to get his self out of here.”

Miller nodded. “If you can figure any way, Fred, you go to it.”

Andrews rose, and said to Miller: “Is the pass we came over the only way out?”

“Unless you want to walk up over the mountain,” Miller said, “and take your chances that way.”

Schneider spread his arms out. “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” Miller said, “if you’re fool enough to try it. Even if you rigged up some snowshoes, you couldn’t carry anything with you. You’d sink down in the first soft snow you came to. And you can’t live off the land in the high country in the winter.”

“A man with belly could do it,” Schneider said.

“And even if you was fool enough to try that, you take a chance on another blow. Did you ever try to wait out a blizzard on the side of a mountain? You wouldn’t last an hour.”

“It’s a chance,” Schneider said, “that could be took.”

“And even if you was fool enough to take that chance, without knowing the country you came out in, you might walk around for a week or two before you saw somebody to set you straight. There ain’t nothing between here and Denver, to speak of; and Denver’s a long way off.”

“You know the country,” Schneider said. “You could point us the way to go.”

“And besides,” Miller said. “We’d have to leave the goods here.”

For a moment Schneider was silent. Then he nodded, and kicked at the wet log again. “That’s it,” he said in a tight voice. “I might of knowed. It’s the goddamned hides you won’t let go of.”

“It’s more than the hides,” Miller said. “We couldn’t take anything with us. The horses would run wild, and the cattle would go off with the buffalo that’s still here. We’d have nothing to show for the whole try.”

“That’s it,” Schneider said again, his voice raising. “That’s what’s behind it. Well, the goods don’t mean that much to me. I’ll go over by myself if need be. You just point out a route to me and give me a few landmarks, and I’ll chance it on my own.”

“No,” Miller said.

“What?”

“I need you here,” Miller said. “Three—” He glanced at Charley Hoge, who was rocking himself before the fire, humming tunelessly under his breath. “Two men can’t manage the wagon and the hides down the mountain. We’ll need you to help.”

Schneider stared at him for a long moment. “You son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “You won’t even give me a chance.”

“I’m giving you your chance,” Miller said quietly. “And that’s to stay here with us. Even if I told you a route and some signs, you’d never make it. Your chance to stay alive is here with the rest of us.”

Again Schneider was silent for several moments. At last he said: “All right. I should have knowed better than to ask. I’ll sit here on my ass all winter and draw my sixty a month, and you sons-of-bitches can go to hell.” He turned his back to Miller and Andrews, and thrust his hands angrily toward the fire.

Miller looked at Charley Hoge for a moment, as if to speak to him. Then he abruptly turned to Andrews. “Dig around in our goods and see if you can find a sack of beans. And find one of Charley’s pots. We got to get some food in us.”

Andrews nodded, and did as he was ordered. As he was poking through the snow, Miller left the campsite and returned a few minutes later dragging several stiff buffalo hides. He made three trips back and forth between the campsite and the place where the hides rested, returning each time with more. After he had made a pile of about a dozen, he poked in the snow until he found the ax. Then, with the ax on his shoulder, he trudged away from the camp, up the mountain, among the great forest of pine trees, the lower branches of which curved downward under the weight of the snow. The tips of many of them touched the whitened earth, so that the snow that held them down and the snow upon which they rested appeared to be the same, eccentric and bizarre curves to which the trees conformed. Under the arches thus formed Miller walked, until it appeared, as he went into the distance, that he was walking into a cave of dark green and blinding crystal.

In his absence Andrews threw several handfuls of dried beans into the iron kettle he had dug out of the snow. After the beans he scooped in several masses of snow, and placed the pot at the back of the fire, so that the kettle rested against one side of the rock. He had not been able to find the bag of salt in the snow, but he had found a small rind of salt pork wrapped in oilskin and a can of coffee. He dropped the rind into the kettle and searched again until he found the coffeepot. By the time Miller returned from the forest, the kettle of beans was bubbling and the faint aroma of coffee was beginning to rise from the pot.

On his shoulders Miller balanced several pine boughs, thick and heavy at the raw yellow butts where they had been chopped, narrowing behind him where the smaller branches and pine needles swept a heavy trail in the snow, roughing it and covering the tracks he made as he stumbled down the side of the mountain. Bent beneath the weight of the boughs, Miller staggered the last few steps up to the fire and let the boughs crash to the snow on either side of him; a fine cloud like white dust exploded up from the ground and whirled for several minutes in the air.

Beneath the grime and dirt Miller’s face was blue-gray from cold and exhaustion. He swayed for several minutes where he had dropped the logs and then he walked with unsteady straightness to the fire and, still standing, warmed himself. He stood so, without speaking, until the coffee bubbled up over the sides of the pot and hissed on the coals.

His voice weak and empty, he said to Andrews: “Find the cups?”

Andrews moved the pot to the edge of the fire; his hand burned on the hot handle, but he did not flinch. He nodded. “I found two of them. The others must have blown away.”

Into the two cups he poured the coffee that he had brewed. Schneider walked up. Andrews handed one of the cups to Miller, and one to Schneider. The coffee was thin and weak, but the men gulped at the scalding liquid without comment. Andrews threw another small handful of coffee into the steaming pot.

“Go easy on that,” Miller said, holding the tin cup in both his hands, juggling it to prevent his hands from burning and cupping it to gather its heat. “We ain’t got enough coffee now to last us; just let it boil longer.”

With his second cup of coffee Miller seemed to regain some of his strength. He sipped from a third cup and passed it along to Charley Hoge, who sat still before the fire and did not look at any of the men. After his second cup, Schneider returned to the edge of the circle, beyond Charley Hoge, and stared gloomily into the coals, which glowed faintly and grayly against the blinding whiteness that filtered through the trees, intensifying the shadow in which they sat.

“We’ll build a lean-to here,” Miller said.

Andrews, his mouth loose and tingling from the hot coffee, said indistinctly: “Wouldn’t it be better out in the open, in the sun?”

Miller shook his head. “In the daytime, maybe; not at night. And if another blow came up, no lean-to we could build would last more than a minute on open ground. We build here.”

Andrews nodded and drank the last of his coffee, tilting the cup up and throwing his head back so that the warm rim of the cup touched the bridge of his nose. The beans, softening in the boiling water, sent up a thin aroma. Though he was not aware of hunger, Andrews’s stomach contracted at the odor and he bent over at the sudden pain.

Miller said: “Might as well get to work. Beans won’t be ready to eat for two or three hours, and we have to get this up before night.”

“Mr. Miller,” Andrews said; and Miller, who had started to rise, paused and looked at him, crouched on one knee.

“Yes, boy?”

“How long will we have to be here?”

Miller stood up, and bent to brush off the black peat mud and wet pine needles that clung to his knees. From his bent head and under his black, tangled brows, he raised his eyes and looked directly at Andrews.

“I won’t try to fool you, boy.” He jerked his head toward Schneider, who had turned in their direction. “Or Fred either. We’ll be here till that pass we come over thaws out.”

“How long will that take?” Andrews asked.

“Three, four weeks of good warm weather would do it,” Miller said. “But we ain’t going to have three or four weeks before winter sets in hard. We’re here till spring, boy. You might as well set your mind to it.”