Heart of the West (80 page)

"The heap's buried." She fought to hold on to her pride. If he wouldn't say it, then neither would she. "The fire's out, and that's all I wanted. I don't feel pleased with myself, only tired."

"Yeah, well, you better be perking up pretty damn quick, then. Because the revver's still got himself a hired gun left, and odds are he'll be sending him out here quicker'n scat to put out the fire in you."

She swung her head hard around to stare at him. His words might have been empty, but his gaze was focused on her with that darkly intense expression she had learned to love. And fear.

"And what do you think I ought to do about that, Rafferty? You took care of the Mick for me. Perhaps I should hire you and your gun to take care of Mr. Kyle as well."

"I guess you probably figure you've gotten good at taking care of yourself." He looked pointedly from the rifle in the boot behind her saddle to the Colt strapped around her waist, and his voice was hard with a tight anger. "But if you miss, you're dead, and there's no use talking about your lightning-quick draw. The fact is, there's only one sure way to send a man to hell, and that's to dry-gulch him in the back."

She looked into eyes that were now as cold and flat and yellow as brass. Those eyes reminded her of what she'd always known about him: he was a hard and dangerous man, cruel and mean when he had to be.

She swallowed around the sudden dryness in her throat. "So you're suggesting that I lie in ambush and murder your father? A man who, however crafty and full of guile and probably no good at bottom, is still grandfather to my children? 'The land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shedeth it.'"

"You sure are in a bloodthirsty frame of mind, Boston. All

I'm suggesting is that you take precautions. One-Eyed Jack has never played by any rules but his own. And I might not be here—"

He cut himself off abruptly. His gaze shifted off her face and out to the prairie, windswept and empty.

"To protect me," she finished for him. The tight band of misery, which had been wrapped around her chest ever since he'd come home, was twisting now as if it would crack her ribs. "Because you're not staying."

She pulled her horse's head around to ride away from him, but he stopped her, leaning over to grab hold of the shank of the bit. It brought his face so close to hers she could see his nostrils flare with each hard breath, and the faint lines that bracketed his sharply sculpted mouth. She could feel, as if holding her hand to a flame, the heat and intensity in his terrible yellow eyes.

Her gaze was riveted to his mouth, and she saw his lips move before she heard the words. "I haven't said I wasn't staying."

"You haven't said you were."

"Dammit, maybe I'm waiting for you to—" He cut himself off again. He drew in a swift, hard breath. "You always got to be fighting something, Boston. Before, it was my brother and Montana. Now it's the revver and the Four Jacks. And me. Mostly you've always done a lot of fighting against me."

She drew in a deep breath of air that was thick with the smell of the coming rain, and of him. She wanted to drive her fist into that mouth. She wanted to cup his lean, beard-shadowed cheeks in her hands and draw that mouth to hers and kiss it. She wanted to make him suffer, and she wanted to show him that with her to care for him, to love him, he would never know suffering again.

And she wondered: if Gus hadn't found her first, if from the beginning there had been only this man, would there be still all this turmoil and tension between them? All this heady and frightening ecstasy?

"It's either fight or surrender," she said, her voice breaking. "With all of you men, it always comes down to that. Either fight or surrender."

She watched his lips tighten and curve a little, but not in a smile. She had always been able to remember what they felt like. She wanted to know what they felt like now.

"You really do think you're pretty tough, don't you?" he said, that familiar thread of meanness in his voice.

A harsh laugh tore out her throat. "Oh, you bet I'm tough. You men have always got to be holding contests to see who's tougher. Bronco-busting and roping contests and drilling contests and drinking contests. Well, we women
know
who's tougher. It's the mother who buries a beloved child and still finds the will to get up in the morning and see to the cooking of the flapjacks and the milking of the cow and the washing of her man's shirts. It's the sodbuster's wife who somehow keeps her family going through all the die-ups and the droughts and the blizzards and the prairie fires when what she most wants to know is what in God's name they're doing out here in the first place. It's the miner's wife who follows her man from camp to camp while he's searching for that one big strike she knows is never coming.
She, Zach
Rafferty, is tough."

The words had spewed out of her, leaving her feeling seared and empty. For a moment she thought his eyes had flashed with a bright yellow light, but then he tipped his head down so all she could see of his face was his mouth. He said nothing, and she could see by the set of that mouth that he wasn't going to.

She thrust her chin into the air. She felt it quiver, but she didn't care. "So maybe you should just ride on out of here right now, because I don't need you. I don't need any man."

She wheeled her horse around and sent him into a canter down the hill. She didn't look back.

It started to rain. Big drops that made dollar-sized pocks in the mud. She rode straight into the barn.

She unsaddled her horse, ignoring the man who had followed her.

"I'm tired of sleeping out in this barn," he said.

She hung her bridle on a peg and turned to look at him. He leaned against a stall door, his arms folded across his chest, his long legs crossed at the ankles. Rafter shadows lay in bars across his face. His eyes were dark and heavy-lidded. A tautness had come over his mouth. She could feel her heart pounding against her chest.

"Clementine," he said, his voice breaking a little on her name. "I've been wanting you my entire life."

It was raining harder now. It drummed on the roof, and the wind sent it splashing through the half-open doors. It smelled of mud and wet grass.

She knew he was waiting for her to say something, but the words seemed trapped in her chest along with an enormous ache. She wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed, as if she could push it all up out of her, along with her breath.

He snatched off his hat and thrust his fingers through his hair. "Well, damn it all to hell and back!"

It was a gesture so reminiscent of Gus that she almost smiled. She almost stopped aching.

"You're just like your brother," she said. "You even argue like him."

"And damned if he still isn't standing between us, huh, Boston?" He pushed himself off the stall. Something raw blazed in his face. He came at her and she held her ground, although inside she was scared right down to the bone. He'd always held such a power to shatter her heart. To shatter her life.

She watched his mouth move, felt his words come at her. "He'll always have a claim on you."

She wanted to tell him he was wrong about Gus and her and about the claim the past had on her, wrong about so much. But she'd never been good at putting into words what she thought, what she felt.

"Oh, why?" she said softly. "Why is there all this... this anger between us? Is it because, when I didn't ride away with you that day, you decided I didn't love you enough? Because I wouldn't choose you over Gus and my own honor?"

He stopped when he was but a hand's width away from her, and she stared up into yellow eyes that were wild and dangerous. "If I had tried, Boston... really tried, I could have taken you away from my brother, and him and your honor be damned."

The rain suddenly slashed hard against the side of the barn the old wooden walls shivered. "Then why did you come back?"

She thought surely he would say "For you." But he said nothing. And when the silence dragged out to be filled by the
beat of the wind and the drone of the rain, and still he said
nothing, she whirled and ran from him again. By the time she
made it to the house, she was soaking wet.

In the days that followed, it rained every minute of every hour Sometimes a slow, seeping rain and other times a gully washer. It was as if the heavens had gotten on a crying jag and couldn't stop.

The women of Rainbow Springs, with the help of their men
had buried the heap beneath two feet of Montana mud, and it stayed buried. The managers of the Four Jacks met with the town council and agreed to do no more open-hearth smelting But certain other plans that had been set in motion marched forward.

Clementine, Hannah, and Erlan had another whiskey party They talked about babies and the latest fashions pictured in
The Ladies' Home Journal.
They didn't talk about their men. And of the three of them, two were holding to themselves the bittersweet belief that these moments together might well be their last.

The afternoon of the heap pit altercation Pogey and Nash had disappeared off the Yorke House verandah, which had some speculating they'd discovered a rich strike somewhere. A supposition that was pretty much scoffed at until a valley drifter passing through mentioned having seen the two old prospectors at an assayer's office way over in Helena.

The Four Jacks still maintained a logging camp on the disputed land near the madwoman's soddy. A few folk thought it odd that while there was usually somebody around the camp no one was seen to be cutting any more trees. But then it was so damn wet, the consensus was they were waiting for a break in the weather.

The real interest in town anyway—now that heap pit was good and buried and folk had quit choking to death—was the series of meetings the town council was holding to determine what to do about the Yellow Peril. Even so, the town councillors weren't known for leaping to conclusions and making up their minds quickly, even on a good day. Things pretty much chugged along slowly like a locomotive going up a steep grade, mainly because it wasn't precisely clear what sort of peril the Chinese were causing... that is, until the murder happened.

A miner by the name of Paddy O'Rourke had announced to his buddies at the Gandy Dancer one night that he was going to pay a call on the Chinese prostitute Ah Toy. The next morning he was found in the gutter not far from her shack with a hatchet buried in his back. An old vegetable vendor by the name of Ah Foock was arrested for the crime. The town council, full of steam now that the peril had gotten serious, held an emergency session.

The Chinese were always good for rubbing up a sore.

At least, Erlan Woo thought, she had been prepared deep in her heart for the knock on her door when it finally came. In many ways she had been hoping for this moment. It was as if the path of her destiny, which had been running so twisted and crooked of late, now lay straight before her again and with the end in sight.

Still she jumped when the warped boards rattled beneath the heavy fist.
"Hoy mart"
a voice shouted. "Open up!"

She opened the door to Peter Ling, the golden needle man. His face was wet with the rain, his long, wispy white mustache floated up and down with each laborious breath. Already many Chinese clogged the road behind him. Some pulled small donkey carts or pushed wheelbarrows, but most had all their worldly goods rolled up in straw mats, which they carried on their heads or beneath their arms.

"What are all those idiot dogs running from?" Erlan demanded of the golden needle man. She crossed her arms over her chest as the anger and shame burned through her. If her people were going to be chased away, at least they should contrive to leave with some manner of dignity.

Peter Ling said nothing, merely handed her a flyer printed in a form of Chinese shorthand called grass writing. She wondered what traitorous turtle dung of a calligrapher had written this out for the Rainbow Springs Town Council.

"I cannot read it," Erlan said and almost laughed. It suddenly seemed absurd to her that she could read the demon tongue and not her own. In China a girl was never taught to read, for what would be the purpose when her use was only to marry and give birth to sons? In China a girl could be sold as a slave by her father, and no one ever thought to say to her: "'Tes your desire?"

Peter Ling cleared his throat, his mustache quivering. "Oh. So sorry," he said. As he took the flyer back from her, both their hands were trembling. He cleared his throat again and read in Cantonese: "'Notice is hereby given to all those of Oriental blood residing under sufferance in the RainDance country and its environs to leave by midnight on this, the twenty-fifth day of April. Any who fail to comply shall be moved by the force of arms.'" He lifted his thin shoulders in a pathetic little shrug. "That is all it say."

"Isn't that enough?" One did not need to be a Hanlin scholar to know who was in back of this, Erlan thought. One-Eyed Jack McQueen and the Four Jacks Copper Mine. They all should have remembered that wise old Chinese adage: There is no one more treacherous than a cornered foe.

"You can probably stay," the golden needle man was saying. "Your boy, he was born here. That make him American citizen. Yankee-Doodle dandy,
ma?"

Yankee-Doodle dandy... Erlan looked around her, at the shack's single tiny window with its white lace curtains trimmed with crocheted lace. At the bright hooked rug spread over the rough plank floor before the cookstove. At the round oak table covered with shiny white oilcloth. The room smelled, as usual, of starch and soap, and the fried trout coated in cornmeal that she had cooked for dinner. There was little to tell anyone that a Chinese lived here. When, she wondered, had she lost the essence of what she was?

"What's happening, Lily? What's all the commotion about?"

Jere Scully's big body suddenly filled the doorway to the back bedroom. At times he moved about in their tiny shack as quietly as if he had eyes, especially if she and Samuel were careful to leave things where he was used to them being.