Heart of the West (63 page)

A stream of tobacco shot through the air, interrupting Erlan's thoughts, barely missing her protruding stomach, and splatting with dead-eye precision on a knot on the hitching rail.

Erlan planted her fists on her hips and cast an exasperated glare at Mr. Pogey, who sat on the deacon's bench beneath the window, working his jaws like the rods on a locomotive. She had set the bench out in front of the mercantile to encourage customers to linger awhile and perhaps spend more money. But Pogey and Nash had established squatter's rights; most of the prospecting they did these days was for gossip, not gold.

"Good day to you, gentlemen," she said, shuffling up to them in her awkward, mincing gait.

The old prospectors stumbled to their feet, doffing their hats. "How there, Mrs. Woo," Nash said. He waved at the spot on the bench he'd just vacated. "You oughta sit down here and rest a spell. You're lookin' kinda peaked." The smile he gave her was so broad his store-bought teeth slid off his gums. "Reckon it's that heavy load you're carrying that's wearin' you down."

Pogey, who was in the act of resettling himself, stopped halfway to stare up, round-eyed, at his partner. "Good God and all the little god-almighties! What you want to go insultin' Mrs. Woo for? No woman likes a man pointin' out to her how ugly she's lookin'. Even Chinee women've got their sensitivities."

"I didn't say she was looking ugly. Only kettle-bellied. Like someone tried to draw her through a knothole headfirst."

Erlan covered her mouth with her hand to stifle a giggle.

Pogey gave his partner a long, slow look. "Shee-it, Nash," he drawled. "Once you get your toe in your mouth, I guess you figure you might as well shove your whole foot in."

"Can I help it if I still ain't used to bein' surrounded by women and their sensibilities ever' whichaway I turn?" Nash restaked his claim on the bench. He hooked his thumbs around his striped suspenders, stretched them out, then let them snap back onto his red plaid chest with a loud pop. "What you see when you look at me is one of the original items—a trailblazer extraordinaire. Why, when I first set foot in this country, there were few white men, let alone women, to take offense every time a body opened his mouth. Now we got ourselves ladies' societies and schoolteachers and temperance shouters who damn a man for being a man. And no one can say whoa to 'em."

Pogey fingered the chawed cud from his mouth and put in a fresh one, stuffing it deep in his cheek to let it soak. "Yeah, well, that was then and this is now, and all your jawing won't make it any different. Trailblazer extraordinaire... Christ all get out. You couldn't find shit in a cow barn with a compass and a pitch torch. The hot wind you blow would put a chinook to shame."

Mr. Nash was truly full of windy talk, Erlan thought, and she turned her head so that he wouldn't see the laughter on her face and think her rude.

She caught sight of a giant of a man walking among a group of miners bound for the Four Jacks and the afternoon shift. But if Jere Scully saw her he didn't let on. It had been months since he had come around to the mercantile. She had been so cruel to him, so cold, that at last she had driven him away. And she was glad of this. Oh, yes, truly she was glad—for he frightened her with his talk of kisses and forever-after.

She noticed Clementine McQueen unloading her butter crocks and egg crates from the back of a spring wagon. And Hannah was on her way over to help. Perhaps there'll be a whiskey party this afternoon, Erlan thought with sudden pleasure. She enjoyed it so when the three of them got together to talk of their men and babies and the homes they had left behind and the homes they were making out of the raw Montana wilderness.

"Why is it you always got to start argufying with me?" Nash was saying in a loud, peevish voice. "Seems like i can't open my mouth no more without you jumpin' on me like june bugs on cow paddies."

"You're the one who's gone all wrathy lately," Pogey shouted back at him. "You been as cantankery as a plucked jaybird ever since you were shot that time at the Gandy Dancer, that Fourth of July when it rained bug juice."

"When a man has a close brush with dying, like I did, it rearranges his thinking. Settles his priorities into new alignments, so to speak." Nash stretched out his skinny legs, laid one dome-toed boot on top the other, and settled back to chew on the topic. "For instance, once upon a time I was an excitable individual. The least little thing could agitate my nerves and get my choler to boilin'. But nowadays when folks see me a-strollin' down the street, they say 'There goes a man who's as calm as a hog on ice.'"

"Christ bejesus, Nash!" Pogey snatched off his hat and slapped him on the thigh with it, then whacked his own leg for good measure. "You ever
seen
a hog on ice, ya goddumb fool? Dewlaps flapping like flags in the wind and trotters flyin' all over the place till you can't tell t'other from which. You can say a lot of things about a hog on ice, but calm ain't one of 'em!"

Nash arranged his owl-eyed face into a look of great sadness and infinite patience. "If you ain't a prime example, Pogey, of a man who's gone and let his priorities get all skewed. Here I was havin' a nice quiet philosophical conversation with you one minute, and in the next instant—bang! if your choler don't start to boilin', which goes and makes your face red and your eyes watery, and causes great turbulences inside your belly..." His words trailed off as he straightened and squinted down the street, shading his eyes from the glare. "What do ya reckon that ol' polecat's up to?"

The old polecat in question was Marshal Dobbs. The fat man was going fast, for him, even leaving a bit of stirred-up dust in his wake. He pulled his belt up over his belly and unsnapped his holster strap. Suddenly the hot air seemed to vibrate with a strange rustling and humming sound, like a disturbed beehive. Or like a nest of rats, Erlan thought, feeling a prickle of unease.

Pogey let loose a long splatter of tobacco juice as he got slowly to his feet. He pulled hard on his pendulous ear. "I hear trouble coming."

Erlan stepped off the boardwalk. Pogey and Nash joined her. "I
see
trouble coming," Nash said.

A surging crowd of men came around the corner from the east end of town where the new railway line was being laid. The men were making a frightening baying sound now and Erlan noticed several of them were armed with ax handles, shovels, and picks.

At the head of the crowd was a strange apparition—a shiny black demon covered with feathers. The feathered demon was being prodded forward by a long black paddle. Beside her, Nash started and uttered a shocked cry of alarm.

"God and all his angels..."

Erlan let out a wail of horror. It was Sam! Merciful Kwan Yin, what had those sons of turtles done to him? He was stripped down to his socks and long drawers, and the top half of him was covered with a gleaming black treacly substance and clumps of chicken feathers. His skin, where it showed through in patches, was blistered red. His shattered spectacles had been wedged onto the end of his tarred nose, their wire temples twisted and dangling. He stumbled in advance of the prodding paddle, his mouth open and distorted, though no sound came out of him.

And then Erlan saw a worse horror, and another wail escaped her clenched lips. No queue! Sam's hair had been shorn off at the neck. To cut a man's queue was to doom him to wander forever from the land of his ancestors. No Chinese could return to the Flowery Land
woo-pien,
without a tail, for a man's queue was a sign of his respect and obedience to his emperor. To be without it was a thing so shameful that death would be preferable.

The mob stopped in front of the mercantile. The baying subsided a moment, then rose up again, like the cries of street peddlers all vying for a single sale.

"String 'im up!" someone shouted. And others took up the call. "String the Chink up! Hang 'im high!"

"Let him go, you lily-livered bastards!" Nash shouted. He started forward and took a punch in the jaw that sent his false teeth spinning though the air and knocked him cold. Pogey let out a roar that ended in a strangled chirrup when the point of a pickax jabbed him in the throat.

"Don't reckon a coupla Chinks are worth dyin' for, do you, old-timer?" the man at the other end of the pickax said with a mean smile.

The man with the paddle poked Sam hard in the small of his back. He was a big man with a head of bushy gray hair and a mad glint in his eye. "Let's hear you crow, China boy." He jabbed Sam again with the end of the paddle. "Cockle-doodle-do! Cockle-doodle-do!"

Sam began to shake violently, although he still made no sound.

"You spawn of camel's dung!" Erlan screamed and lunged at her husband to pull him away from the men who were tormenting him. She cried out in horror as her hands sank into the hot black goo on his chest.

"Let's teach these Chinks a lesson, boys," the bushy-haired man shouted. "Let's show the yellow-skinned bastards we don't want none of their kind doing business in Rainbow Springs."

Hunks of horse dung and rocks flew through the air. A brick crashed through the plate-glass window and a boy, laughing maniacally, tossed a lighted firecracker inside.

Rough hands gripped Erlan by the shoulders and tore her away from Sam. Her golden lilies became entangled together, and she landed on the hard-packed dirt of the road with such force it drove the air from her lungs.

"Lily!"

She thought the cry had come from Sam, but his mouth was still open in that soundless scream, and this wasn't his voice. "Lily!"

She struggled to sit up, fighting breathlessness and the gravity that pulled on her big belly. Through tear-blurred eyes she saw Jere Scully charge into the mob, fists swinging, his lips pulled back in a snarl. He fought his way to her side, heedless of the blows he took from ax handles and shovels.

Jere gripped Erlan's arm and tried to haul her to her feet, but his back and head were being pummeled, and he staggered under the blows.

"Save yourself!" she cried out to him. "They mean to kill us!"

But she doubted he heard. The screams and roars of the mob were louder than the howling winds of a
tai-fung.

She looked up and saw the bushy-haired man looming above them. He threw back his head in a bark of laughter, his eyes glowing wild. He swung his paddle in a wide arc, and its wooden blade hit Jere square in the forehead, felling him like an axed tree. Erlan tried to shield him with her body, but someone grabbed her by the hair and hauled her backward so roughly that she screamed from the pain of it. A hobnailed boot caught her in the hip and she screamed again. She rolled over and curled into a ball to protect her stomach.

Jere swayed to his knees. Blood from a long cut on his forehead ran in streams over his face. The bushy-haired man laughed again and raised the paddle high in the air to finish him off.

And the blade of the paddle exploded into a hail of chips and splinters.

The rifle shot smacked though the air with a loud echoing clatter like a stack of lumber dropping. The silence that followed was so sudden and complete that Erlan could hear the spent shell casing hit the ground.

"Get back," Clementine McQueen said in a soft high-toned voice that was at odds with the smoking rifle in her hands.

Hannah Yorke stepped up beside her, her derringer pointed into the belly of the mob. "I reckon you fellas oughta do like the lady says. And while this li'l gun of my own may not look like much, it's been known to shoot the pip out of an ace at twenty paces."

No one but Sam Woo noticed the gray smoke sifting out of the jagged gaps in the sheet glass window. He saw it through the cracked and prismatic lenses of his spectacles, and the smoke looked like damned souls floating out of the bowels of hell. He tried to open his mouth and realized it was already open. He tried to shout, but only a little squeak came out. He took a shambling step forward. No one tried to stop him. He took another. He felt on fire. Smoke... fire... Another little squeak popped out of his open mouth.

Marshal Dobbs waddled over from where he'd been safely hovering on the edge of things. "Hannah Yorke, and you, too, ma'am," he said, frowning at Clementine, "you don't want to get yourselves involved in this. This is men's business."

The horse trough beside the hitching rack suddenly sprouted holes and another loud crack split the hot air.

The bushy-haired man leaped backward and dropped the splintery remains of his paddle. "Christ Jesus!"

"We just made it women's business, Marshal," Hannah said in her smoky drawl. "And, being women, we're liable to be a mite excitable. So I suggest y'all don't make any more sudden moves."

Sam Woo tried to point at the smoke that was wafting out through the broken window. But his arm was tarred to his side. He took another step, hit the edge of the boardwalk, and almost fell.

Clementine slid another cartridge into the Winchester's loading gate and levered it into the breech. She gave the marshal a wide, cool look. "I suggest you exert yourself for once, Mr. Dobbs, and arrest these men for inciting a riot."

The marshal scratched his grizzled jaw. "Pardon me, ma'am, but it's you and Miz Hannah here I oughta be arrestin', fer waving guns around and endangering the lives of innocent citizens. The way I figure it, it's them Chinks what started the trouble."

"How start trouble?" Erlan cried. "By living?" She pushed herself to her hands and knees. A groggy Jere Scully crouched beside her in the churned, blood-splattered dust. He reached for her, but she squirmed away from him. She flung her head back and shouted at the men, who stood now in shuffling and abashed silence, their ax handles and shovels hanging forgotten in their hands. "What trouble is it to come to a place so big and empty that even the clouds get lost in the sky—"

A strange whistling noise pierced the air, sounding like a hen with its throat cut. Sam Woo stumbled onto the boardwalk and took three short, staggering steps toward the door.

Holy God!
he
cried, or tried to. But the only sounds coming out of his mouth were these awful little squeaks.