Come Spring (11 page)

Buck returned to the table and studied the woman’s slant-topped writing box that was sitting beside his things. It was bordered with gilt scroll work, the writing surface padded with rich, brown leather. He reached out to touch it, glanced over to see that Annika still slept, then lifted the lid. The contents were in a jumble from the ride to the cabin. He imagined she usually kept them all neatly arranged. He took out the inkwell, which in itself was like none he’d ever seen, but he had heard of the spill-proof sort. He studied it intently, then set it aside. There were various sheets of plain paper, matching envelopes, a small case that contained pens and nibs. There was a odd, rectangular book decorated with hearts, flowers, and cherubs, all mingled in wild disarray on the cover.

Buck picked it up and opened the cover. The flyleaf read, Forget Me Not ... A Collection of Thoughts and Observances. And beneath that, in the same beautiful handwriting was the name Annika Marieke Storm, 1892.

Buck carefully returned the book to the box without reading more.

“My brother is Kase Storm.”

He had not believed her.

“When my brother hears about this, he’ll kill you.”

The Kase Storm he’d heard about would probably do just that.

What would happen to Baby then?

Buck dragged a chair over to the fire and sat down heavily. He crossed his long legs at the ankles and his arms over his chest and stared into the flames. There was no getting around it now. He’d done a stupid thing when he had not listened to her. Wanting to convince this beautiful woman he thought was Alice Soams that she should indeed follow through with their bargain and marry him was one of the biggest mistakes he’d ever made. He’d have to apologize to Annika Storm tomorrow and then take her back down the mountain to her brother. There was no getting around it.

He wondered how his letter to Alice Soams had ended up beside Annika Storm on the train, then realized all too clearly that the real Alice must have seen him long before he’d seen her and left the letter beside Annika just to throw him off her trail. Her rejection was all too clear.

“I think you’re a stark raving lunatic.”

He was mad to have forced Annika Storm off the train. It was a stupid thing to have done even if she had been Alice Soams. He should never have decided to marry. Never. It was a ridiculous idea. What woman in her right mind would want to marry a potential madman?

Buck turned around to look over at Baby and found her curled up asleep beside Annika Storm. The child looked like an innocent cherub with her pink cheeks and thick blond ringlets. When he took the woman back down the mountain, he ought to find a decent home for Baby, too.

No one would fault him for giving her up, no one but himself. He had tried to keep her for three years now, even gone so far as to carry her along hunting and trapping in a pack on his back once she grew too old to leave her behind asleep in the cabin in the big box crib he’d made her.

Now she was getting far too old and rambunctious to carry on his back papoose-style, and Baby was much too active to sit by quietly while he stalked the game that provided the furs for their livelihood. Leaving her home alone was impossible. He had thought that marriage would solve his dilemma, hoped that Alice Soams would accept the responsibility of raising his niece along with her other duties as his wife, but now his well-laid plans had gone awry. Alice Soams had rejected him outright and he had kidnapped the sister of the man who had wiped out the Dawson gang.

Things couldn’t get any worse.

Buck stood and ran his hand through his hair. Baby’s dirty dress lay on the floor near the tub, so he picked it up and rinsed it out in the tepid bathwater. Wringing it out, he hung it near the fire where it would dry. He realized the voracious appetite he’d possessed earlier had flown, but he ambled to the table and opened one of the packs anyway and took out a strip of leftover jerky. He opened the door and glanced out at the still-falling snow. The large flakes drifted soundlessly to earth, a thick curtain of white that prevented him from seeing farther than a few inches. He hoped it stopped before the pass was closed. Buck reckoned Old Ted had made it through or he would have been back, pounding on the door by now.

If the old man stuck to his usual habits, Buck wouldn’t see Ted until spring. It was a stroke of luck that the old man had happened by when he did and was able to care for Baby, or Buck would have been forced to take the child with him to Cheyenne.

The fire had burned low. Buck threw on another log and sat back down. Maybe he was already crazy and didn’t know it. Crazy as Pa and Patsy. Pa hadn’t even known him at the end.
Why should I be any different?
he wondered.

No, things couldn’t get any worse. Of course, he’d been thinking that most of his life now, and fate had tended to make him a liar. Things always got worse. He could hardly remember the good years anymore because they hadn’t lasted long at all.

He’d been born in Kentucky in 1860, and then his father, Silas, went off to fight for the Confederacy a year later. They lived in the hill country then, and Buck grew up running the hills and hollows barefoot and carefree. His mother, Irene, a midwife for the surrounding hamlets, let him roam as far as he cared to go as long as he promised to follow the creek bed so he wouldn’t lose his way. She took him with her whenever she went to deliver babies.

Silas returned from the war defeated in spirit and took to moping about their log cabin, unwilling to do little more than swill whiskey, stare at the wall, or make love to his wife. When Buck was six, his sister Patsy was born. Two years later, his mother had Sissy. Irene kept them together by selling her home-brewed elixirs and midwifing. From the time he was old enough to learn about the herbs and potions she mixed as curatives, Buck had dreamed of becoming a real doctor, a healer.

When Buck was twelve, Irene Scott ran off with a handsome drummer who’d come to the door trying to sell them a new frying pan. Two things came of her betrayal: Silas Scott was forced to get up and care for his children, and Buck’s dream of becoming a real doctor died.

A drifter passing through told Silas there was money to be had hunting buffalo out West and one man’s word was all it took to convince the elder Scott to pack up Buck and the girls, who were then six and four years old, box a few staples, and leave Kentucky behind. They set out for Dodge City in a rickety wagon pulled by two old mules. Buck had charge of the girls from then on. He was to see that they were fed and “made to mind,” as his pa put it.

Just as his mother had taught him to read from the only books they owned—
Doctor Jayne’s Medical Almanac and Guide to Good Health,
a frayed-edged Bible, and a tattered copy of
Antony and Cleopatra,
one volume of a set another drummer had left behind as a sample—Buck taught Patsy and Sissy to read. Patsy took to reading like a duck to water, but Sissy had been another matter. Whenever she had tried to concentrate, a passing butterfly, a sudden noise, or a mere daydream would cause her to stare off into space. Her lack of attention was more than Buck’s patience could stand and he soon gave up on her. Patsy read until she had memorized the story of the Egyptian queen and made Buck and Sissy act out the drama with her.

The winter of ‘seventy-two was the first that the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe operated out of Dodge City. The coming of the railroad helped to further eradicate the wild buffalo herds around Dodge, for the hunters could then ride along and shoot the animals from the windows of the train. Hides were loaded on box cars that sat waiting on spur lines, cars piled from floor to ceiling with buffalo skins. So manyof the beasts had already been destroyed that by the time Silas Scott arrived in Dodge with his children, the herd had almost been totally annihilated.

They lived like nomads. Buck tried to control the girls, but they ran wild most of the time, blond, dirty-faced urchins who had only each other for friends. They never stayed in one place long enough to plant the seeds of friendship, nor did any of the town’s children extend their friendship. Like Gypsies, his family traveled from place to place, always living on the outskirts of towns in ramshackle cabins or cheap boardinghouses.

When the Kansas plain was played out, word spread that there were buffalo to be had in Texas, so Pa moved them south. By 1876 the Texas and Pacific Railway had completed a line to Fort Worth and another massacre began in earnest. Buck was sixteen by then and had been skinning alongside his pa for two years, ever since the day he became fed up with trying to care for his sisters. He thought of those years as a skinner as the bloody years, because all he saw from morning until night was blood, until it seemed the world was awash with it.

A good buffalo hunter could skin from one hundred and fifty to two hundred buffalo a day, and Buck was one of the best. Down in Texas he worked with one hand on the knife and another ready to grab his rifle in case of an Indian attack whenever the local tribes did not take kindly to the slaughter of the mainstay of their diet.

Not only did he learn to skin, but he alternated with the others in his crew in stretching and baling hides. The odor of death was always about him, death mingled with blood and grease. He spent every waking hour killing and stripping buffalo of their hides.

When it looked like the Texas herd was nearly gone, Silas Scott wanted to be ahead of the rest, so they moved north in ‘seventy-nine. They’d been working the north for two years when the Northern Pacific laid track across the Montana plains. They and others like them had become so proficient at their work that in two years there wasn’t a buffalo to be seen. Silas Scott found himself out of work for the first time in ten years.

Buck asked his father if he ever thought about farming when homestead land was up for sale in the north, but Silas would have none of it. Why should they break their backs sweating over the soil when they had made a small fortune hunting? Silas ignored the fact that he had spent most of their fortune on fancier rifles, whiskey, ivory-handled knives, women, and gambling.

They became wolfers then, joining the many who poisoned the buffalo carcasses and took the hides off the wolves, badgers, kit foxes, and coyotes that came to feed on the carrion. When the carcasses were stripped clean, money could still be had by scavaging the hooves, horns, and bones that had been left behind. The same railroads that had once hauled hides now transported tons of buffalo bones to the East. Sugar refineries used fresh bone char to purge raw sugar liquid. Phosphorous fertilizer was made from weathered bones.

Sissy grew more and more vacant over time. Still, she helped them during the wolfing and bone scavaging. She was never one to want to leave and go off on her own like Patsy, who often disappeared for weeks at a time and then would show up back in the camp with one of the hunters. The men in camp took advantage of Sissy as often as they could get away with it. For a bauble or a new ribbon she would sleep with them, until Buck spent as much time fighting to protect her as he did skinning.

Buck had finally insisted they needed a real home. Over the years his father had become more and more forgetful and irresponsible, so much so that Buck finally decided it was time to make the decisions for all of them. He rounded up Patsy and her common-law husband along with Sissy and Silas and moved them all to Blue Creek Valley high in the Laramies where they could survive doing what they had done for the past ten years away from the condemnation of polite society in the small towns and growing cities of the West.

Thus the “bloody years” ended, almost as quickly as they had begun. Although he was still hunting, trapping, and skinning, his work was secondary to the way things had fast deteriorated among the occupants of the mountain cabin. Hecalled the ensuing years the “crazy years,” and for good reason. By then, his pa had gone completely insane, former forgetfulness deteriorating into sheer madness.

It tore at Buck’s insides whenever he thought about the way he’d had to keep his father tied to his bed when he was not around to control him. But it was that final day, the last day he saw his father alive, that would burn forever in Buck’s memory.

He hadn’t been far from home when the screaming had started. As was his usual habit, he was up the mountainside checking his traps when he heard it, high and piercing, like banshees from hell. He’d never forget how he had prayed that the haunting screams would stop as he pounded down the mountainside toward the cabin. But the hideous screaming went on and on, intensifying as he burst in the door and found his father standing over the blood-soaked body of Patsy’s common-law husband. Patsy clutched Sissy in the corner. Their eyes were wide and wild, both of them screaming incessantly as they watched Silas methodically slice the skin off the other man with the same skill and dexterity he’d once used on buffalo.

Buck hadn’t hesitated. He’d shouldered his rifle and killed his father then and there.

Suddenly, the slightest sound behind Buck startled him out of his dark thoughts. He sat up straight in the chair, glanced over his shoulder, and saw Annika Storm sitting on the edge of the bed, looking disheveled and disoriented.

He stood up and shoved his hands into the waistband at the back of his pants. The way she was staring at him made him want to shake her again, but that was exactly why she was looking at him as if he were some sort of monster. A log on the fire behind him popped and shattered, sending sparks up the chimney. He knew he should put her mind at ease, tell her he knew who she was and that he’d take her back as soon as they could travel, but damned if he didn’t hate to admit he had acted like the crazy man she’d accused him of being. The crazy man he was sure to become.

He watched her stand and steady herself with a hand on the edge of the bed. Her wool skirt and matching jacket were a mass of wrinkles, her hair had fallen down around her shoulders. It was longer than he had suspected, fine as spun golden threads. Her eyes were deep, dark pools of worry, smudged with purple shadows beneath them.