Heart of the West (79 page)

A murmur arose among the women when the shriek of the Four Jacks' whistle cut through the air. A few faltered, but then Mrs. Pratt, one of the miner's wives, fired a pistol into the murky clouds. "Come on down and face the medicine, Jack McQueen, you one-eyed scalawag!" she shouted, and the laughter that followed eased the women's nerves.

Mrs. Pratt soon got her wish. The mine owner arrived driving his Peerless buggy, Percivale Kyle and the Mick riding horseback on either side of him.

"I reckon there's about to be more excitement around here than in a corral at brandin' time," Hannah said into Clementine's ear. She was now carefully ignoring the marshal and wearing a tight-lipped smile.

Without even having to talk about it among themselves, the women formed a living corral in front of the heap pit. It was as if, Clementine thought, they were of one mind and one heart. As if all the cumulative moments of their women's lives, all their women's tragedies and triumphs, had come down to this single, suspended moment in the middle of a Montana prairie.

And it seemed as if all the earth had gone quiet, holding its breath. The women of the RainDance country stood shoulder to shoulder, their children interspersed among them. The fumes stung their eyes and scratched their throats, but they held their heads high.

The men had stopped when there was still a good bit of red Montana mud between them and their women. They stared in wonderment at the shovels and weapons in the women's hands. But to Clementine's surprise not one demanded to know what they doing, not one ordered his wife home. It was as if they sensed that, perhaps for the first times in their lives, they wouldn't be obeyed.

Jack McQueen pulled his buggy up within twenty yards of the women and the heap roasting pit at their backs. He looked the situation over, his lips pursed in smirking amusement. "Aren't you ladies out roaming a little far from your kitchens this morning?" he drawled. The Mick and Percivale Kyle both laughed. "Who's minding the stove and doing your chores?"

"Don't listen to the one-eyed son of a turtle's whore," Erlan said, loud enough for him to hear her.

Jack McQueen dismissed her insult with a laugh. He pointed the butt of his whip at Clementine, his mouth still smiling. "I don't need to guess that you're the cause of this latest trouble, daughter-in-law. I'll be durned if you aren't taking on the nature of being a sore trial to me. Just what do you aim to do with this congregation you've assembled?"

Clementine took a step toward him, her chin leading the way. "We aim to bury this pit."

Jack McQueen poked his tongue in his cheek and looked around him in exaggerated wonder. "Do you, now? And do you figure to shut down the mine whilst you're about it?"

The miners all stirred at this, making a low rumbling noise. The Mick's hand settled on the butt of his gun. Percivale Kyle was still trying to look smugly bored, and not succeeding all that well, what with the tears streaming down his pale cheeks from the fumy smoke.

Jack McQueen waved his whip at the empty space on the seat beside him. "Why don't you climb on up here, Mrs. McQueen, and I'll take you on back into town and we'll talk this over all reasonable-like."

She didn't trust him. He was all wily smiles and pleasant,
reasonable
words that would melt like mist once he got her away from here. She could feel the women standing solid behind her, feel their steadiness and their courage.

She raised her shovel into the air like a standard. "We're burying this pit now."

Jack McQueen leaned forward, gathering up the reins. "I don't think so—"

"Haw!"

A twenty-mule freight wagon rolled out of the smoke-filled prairie. Nickel Annie stood on the lazy board, snapping her rawhide whip through the air. "Haw, you whoring bitches and whoreson bastards. Haw!"

She pulled up at the edge of the smoldering heap and cackled a laugh. "Mornin', One-Eyed Jack," she said into the sudden, quivering silence. "Wish I could say 'twere a pleasant mornin', but it ain't—not with this heap smoke chokin' the life out of folk."

Jack McQueen's mouth pulled back into his conjureman's smile. "Annie honey, I thought you'd be wanting to line up on my side. How many years is it you've been hauling freight for the Four Jacks?"

"Too damn many. Now, I got me a hundred pounds of giant powder connected to a mighty short fuse in this here wagon of mine." Her cheeks were stuffed with chewing tobacco, and she paused a moment to unload some juice. "I figure to set her alight and drive her right at you and your boys, Jack
honey.
So the way I see it, y'all've got two choices: either stand yer ground and meet yer Maker, or run like the snake-belly cowards I figure you to be, and leave us women to do what we've set out to do, and that's bury this gol-damned pit."

Nickel Annie brayed another laugh as she broke a kitchen match off a block and scratched it alight on the knee of her leather britches.

Hannah gripped Clementine's arm. "Oh, Lord have mercy. This wasn't in the plan. Tell me it wasn't in the plan."

Clementine shook her head. "She can't blow up her wagon and Mr. McQueen without hurting her mules, and Annie would never do that. They're her babies."

"But the revver don't know that, does he?" Rafferty said from beside her, startling her so that she jumped. She thought he had joined the men, but he was here, he was with her, and the laughter was wild and dangerous and seductive in his voice.

Jack McQueen's eye had taken on a sleepy cast as he contemplated the mule skinner. He smiled. "Better men than you have failed to run a bluff past me, skinner. Let's see what you got in those britches of yours."

Nickel Annie's face split into a wide grin. "I was hopin' you'd say that." She put the burning match to the fuse. The wick sputtered and flared and began to burn.

The Mick's hand tightened around his gun, pulling it half out of its holster. "Uh, boss..."

"Gee-up, you devil-damned offspring of whores and pimps!" Annie bellowed. The deep-bed wagon lurched forward. "Haw!" She swung the team into a wide left-handed circle, picking up speed. The left rear wheel hit a deep hole; the wagon dipped wildly and almost toppled.

Hannah flapped her hand in front of her face. "Oooh, my... I feel faint."

Annie's whip cracked. Her curses snapped through the smoke-choked air. The cask of dynamite rattled around in the big empty bed like a marble in a bucket. The wagon swayed and groaned, mud squeezing out from under its large red iron-rimmed wheels. It bore down on One-Eyed Jack and his men, with Nickel Annie's hands firm on the reins and her lips pulled back from her brown teeth in a maniacal smile.

The smile was melting off Jack McQueen's face faster than snow in a chinook. "Well, hell, Annie... Well, all right then... God damn it,
stop?'

The bull-throated roar carried through the thick, bitter smoke. Annie hauled hard on the reins, and the wagon's back wheels slithered and slewed in the mud.

The mule skinner stared, grinning at the man, for an interminable second while the fuse continued to burn. Then she shot two thick, gloppy, and well-aimed streams of tobacco juice at the sputtering cord. It fizzled and went out.

Jack McQueen's face was wine-red, and his chest pumped as he sucked at the rotten air. He was half standing in the buggy, as if he'd been about to leap out of it in a panic. The Mick, either too stupid or too scared to move, sat stiff-legged in the saddle, wide-eyed, his mouth hanging open. Percivale Kyle was already halfway back to Rainbow Springs, going at a dead gallop.

Nickel Annie threw back her head and let out a great bray of laughter. "I reckon I had you pegged proper, One-Eyed Jack. You still had a whole five seconds to spare when you started yellin' chicken. A real man—and not one with a yellow stripe down his back—would've stuck with calling my bluff and took his chances on meetin' me in hell."

Jack McQueen eased back into his seat. He puffed an obsequious laugh. "All right, you've had your fun, Annie. Now why don't you go on home? Why don't all you good ladies go on back to your homes now and leave us men to settle things here?"

Hannah startled Clementine by hooting a laugh of her own. "Like every fool man I've ever known, Jack McQueen," she shouted, "there comes a day when durned if you don't wear out your welcome." She thrust her shovel into the ground, leaned on it with her foot, and scooped up a bladeful of Montana gumbo. "Ladies... we got work to do." And she swung around, flinging the mud into the smoking heap pit.

Clementine had half turned when from beside her Rafferty erupted into a blur of movement. A whacking crack split the dense air. She spun around in time to see the tam-o'-shanter go sailing as the Mick's whole body jerked hard and he flopped rag-doll loose off the back end of his horse, a red stain blossoming in his chest. His hand still gripped the vulcanite butt of his drawn gun.

For a moment no one moved, except Rafferty, who trained the smoking muzzle of his Colt on his father's chest.

"Don't make me kill you," he said, but so low Clementine wondered if the man even heard him. It didn't matter, for suddenly a dozen or more guns were being cocked, making a noise like crickets in July, as those women with weapons all pointed them at One-Eyed Jack McQueen.

The breath left him in a whine through his teeth. Slowly he eased his hand out of his pocket, bringing with it a white square of embroidered linen. "'He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it,'" he said with a bold attempt at his old beguiling smile. "I was only going for my handkerchief, ladies."

For a moment longer the women of Rainbow Springs stood with their weapons trained on the mine owner. Then, as one, they understood the danger had passed and they put their guns up. Those with shovels and muck sticks started pushing mud into the burning pit. They worked in silence, sure and united in their purpose.

Hannah laid her palm on Rafferty's back. "I don't know which one of us the Mick was aiming to shoot," she said with a shaky smile, "but if it was me, I reckon I ought to thank you."

Rafferty said nothing. His intense gaze had locked with Clementine's. He had moved so fast. So fast and so lethally. And now he just stood there looking at her with that gun still hanging from his hand as if it were a part of him, and his eyes on fire and his mouth so... She wanted to kiss that hard mouth until it softened and moaned and surrendered to hers.

Clementine felt a hand on her arm. She looked down into her daughter's serious face. Without a word, Sarah pried her mother's fingers loose from their tight grip on the handle of her own shovel. The tool was nearly as tall as the girl, and she struggled with it a bit. The blade made a loud scraping sound as she pushed it through the rocky mud.

Clementine's gaze was pulled back up to Rafferty's. "You got one of those for me?" he said.

He wasn't smiling at her, and that dun-colored horse was waiting saddled back at Snake-Eye's livery. "Are you asking me for a shovel, Mr. Rafferty?"

"Yeah, a shovel will do... for now," he said. He still wasn't smiling, but the air between them suddenly seemed to be humming with a wondrous and frightening feeling of promise.

Drew Scully and Doc Corbett walked up to the body lying on the ground and looked down at the Mick. "Why, the poor fellow appears to be staring at the sky and seeing nothing," Drew said, shaking his head as if at the wonderment of it all.

The doc sighed deeply. "Another man who's been had for breakfast."

The doc did check, though, to make sure the Mick was dead before he went to join his young bride, who used to be Miss Luly Maine, the schoolmarm, and was now Mrs. Kit Corbett, the doctor's wife. Without a word he took the muck stick from her small lace-gloved hands and began to throw mud into the pit. For a moment longer the rest of the men of Rainbow Springs stood and watched their women shovel. And then they came, one by one crossing that bit of red Montana mud that had separated them, and the murmurs and whispers rose to excited chatter and intermittent bursts of laughter, and it began to sound like a Fourth of July picnic.

"Why aren't you arresting those men, Marshal?"

Drew looked up at the man who sat alone on his fine Peerless buggy. One-Eyed Jack McQueen's one good eye was weeping from the heap fumes, and his face was mottled and sweaty, his voice hoarse and scratchy.

Drew laughed out loud. "Arrest them for doing what, Jack? If there was a law against filling up a hole, I suppose come Saturday night I'd be having to arrest every randy young buck in the RainDance country."

They paused, she and Rafferty, on the rise overlooking the dip in the valley that sheltered the cabin and barn and pastureland of the Rocking R. The timothy grass was coming up green and sweet, thick from such a wet spring. It would make a good hay crop this year.

On the wide horizon the mountains surged black and ominous like swelling waves. Montana. This place, so wild and raw and beautiful, had always seemed able to take her or reject her, never allowing her a say in the choice.

Like him.

She shifted her gaze from the mountains to the buckboard loaded with Saphronie and the children as it rolled down the road and turned into the yard. With every mile she had been waiting for him to say something, anything, until the anticipation was like a scream, a shrill relentless shrieking in her mind.

It had taken them most of three days to bury the copper roasting heap. Now the wind, which had come up at last that morning, blew fresh. The rain clung to the sooty clouds still, so close they could smell it coming.

"It's done now," she said. Not sure if she meant the heap being buried or the terrible certainty she felt that everything was wrong, forever wrong, between them.

She felt him stir beside her, heard him draw in a breath. She thought she could sense his heart beating in syncopation with hers.

He pushed the heels of his hands against his saddle cantle, stretching out the kinks in his arms and shoulders. "You seem mighty pleased with yourself," he said. "Like a hen at roostin' time."

Casual words, empty words. When he could have said that he loved her. That he would stay with her and love her forever. I The sound of the wind through the cottonwoods was like the ebb and rush of her yearning.