Shortgrass Song (68 page)

As they finished one skeleton, she walked a few steps ahead to the next. “What do they do with all these bones?” she asked.

“Fertilizer,” he said, straggling along behind her, dabbing his face with a bandanna. “You may be spreadin' some of it on your farm someday. They also use it to refine sugar with, but damned if I know just how.”

She bent to gather a handful of ribs and heard a short dry sizzle down in the bones. She knew the sound, but it was too late. From under the flaking skull of a long-dead buffalo bull, the huge head of a rattlesnake jabbed her in the shin. It hit so hard that she lost her balance and fell onto the skeleton. She rolled, screaming, out of the way.

Caleb was already sending bullets into the bones. The flat ugly head lunged again, and he blasted it before it could find cover in the shade of the skull. The rattling died, but Tess screamed on.

“I'm killed!” she said, holding her leg and rocking on the ground. “Oh, my God, it's killed me!”

Caleb lifted her hem and checked the wound. “You're not killed,” he said. “He just got you with one tooth.” He put his mouth on the puncture and sucked but could draw nothing out. The wound was a tiny point of blood on Tess's shin.

“I can't feel it!” she screamed. “I can't feel my leg.”

Caleb spit and took the bandanna from his neck. “Well, I can feel it, and it's still there.” He tied the bandanna tight under her knee.

“Ouch!” she cried.

“I thought you couldn't feel it.”

“Go to hell, Caleb Holcomb!” A hateful rattle accompanied her usual coarse tone.

“Now hold still and keep your leg low so the poison won't come up.”

He sprinted for Powder River and rode back. When he knelt over her again, he was chewing furiously on a large quid of tobacco.

“This is a hell of a time for a chew!” she said.

He grinned as he untied the bandanna. He took the moistened wad from his mouth and slapped it firmly on the snake bite, lashing it in place with the bandanna.

“Is that gonna save me?” she said. “What about my leg? Are they gonna cut it off?”

“Of course not. Have you ever heard of a one-legged … farmer?”

“You were gonna say
whore,
weren't you?” Tears were running down her cheeks.

“No, I wasn't gonna say
whore.
Let me show you something.” He pulled his skinning knife from his gun belt and used it to spear the rattler behind the head. He lifted the snake, still writhing in torpid convulsions.

Tess grimaced and turned away.

“My stars, if he ain't a big one!” Caleb declared. “He must go over five and a half feet.”

Powder River held his head high and backed away.

“Well, look at him,” Caleb said. “How am I gonna show you anything, if you won't look at him?”

She risked a glance.

“See how fat he is right here in his neck?”

“Snakes are all neck, stupid,” she said.

“I mean right here behind his head. He just swallowed somethin'. Probably a big ol' rat. Them rats come to chew on these bones, and he was layin' for 'em.”

“I don't care what a snake eats!” she moaned. “You're about to make me sick to my stomach!”

“You'd feel a lot better if you'd listen to me. This snake didn't have hardly no poison in him if he just bit him a big ol' rat.” He pried the bloody mouth open with his pistol barrel. “And look, he ain't got but one fang in his head. Must have broke the other one off in that rat.”

Tess looked cautiously at her leg.

“It ain't stuck in you,” he said. “I already looked.”

“But it hurts!”

“Oh, it'll hurt. Maybe swell up some. But you and your leg will make it all right.”

He stepped on the head of the snake and cut it off. Then he turned it over and began slitting it up the belly in short strokes. The snake, even headless, tried continuously to right itself.

“Let me skin him right quick, and I'll take you back to the wagon,” he said.

Tess moaned and fell back on the ground. “I don't think I can ride.”

“I'll hold you on. The saddle's the best place for you. It'll keep your leg low, keep the poison from comin' up.”

She listened to the knife hack away at the belly of the rattler. “Damn you for bringin' me out here,” she said.

He didn't take it personally. “You better learn to poke around in those skeletons before you go pickin' 'em apart.” He finished slitting the snake's belly and separated the skin from the body around the bloody stub where the head had been. Then he took the body in one hand and the scaly skin in the other and pulled them cleanly apart with a steady motion.

The sound made Tess grimace. The pungent smell of butchered snake almost turned her stomach.

“Yep, it was a big old rat,” Caleb said.

She rolled onto her knees and thought she was going to throw up, but she merely gagged a couple of times.

Powder River remained calm, though he quivered about the nostrils and rolled his white-ringed eyes to follow the folded skin as Caleb put it into his saddle wallet.

He helped Tess into the saddle and rode behind her to the wagon. He made her sit in the saddle until he had taken the snakeskin from his sack, unfolded it, and pressed its sticky inside surface to the seat of the wagon.

“It'll stick there like it was glued,” he said.

“What did you put it there for?”

Caleb shrugged. “To show it off, I guess.”

He helped Tess from the horse to the wagon seat and gave her a canteen. He went to harness the hobbled mules as she stretched out on the fresh skin of the beast that had so recently poisoned her. The load of bones in the wagon bed loomed above her.

The mules smelled snake and showed fight. They went to kicking and biting. The gray busted his rawhide hobbles loose and dragged Caleb about fifty yards.

Her leg hurt bad, but Tess smiled.

EIGHTY-ONE

“Strategy, Shorty.” Angus Mackland struck a match on the checkered stock of the Marlin carbine sticking out of the saddle boot under his left leg. He lit his cigar. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

Shorty looked at him, half cross-eyed, strands of oily hair sticking to his temples. “I guess about a thousand times, ‘cause your strategies don't never make no sense to me. I would have lived to be an old man in Monterrey, and died there happy. Had me a good fat woman and all sorts of stepchildren workin' for me.”

“You might have died, Shorty, but you wouldn't have lived to be an old man. After all these years, I'd think you would learn to trust my higher intellect. As I recall, you didn't want to leave your squaw when I pulled you out of the Territory nine years ago. If I hadn't took you to Mexico then, them marshals would have hung you.”

“So why the hell are we goin' back there now? Headin' north with winter comin' on. It don't make no sense!”

He shifted the cigar in his black beard. “They've forgot who we are in the Territory. It's safe for us there now. Damn sight safer than Mexico. Those
federates
would have splattered our guts against the wall by now if I hadn't gotten us out.”

“If you wouldn't have shot that one in Matamoros, we wouldn't have had to get out.”

“If I hadn't have shot him, he would have sold us to the Texas Rangers.”

Shorty wrinkled his ugly bulbous nose, set like a crooked walnut on his pockmarked face. “Now then, here's where your strategy keeps slippin' by me. If you didn't want the Texas Rangers to get us, why in the hell did we cross over into Texas right after you shot that
federale?
What the hell kind of strategy is that? Your kind of strategy has had the U.S. marshals, the Mexican
federates,
and the Texas Rangers takin' turns doggin' our asses for nine years.”

“Nope,” Angus said. “My kind of strategy has kept 'em from catchin' us.”

“We ain't out of Texas yet,” Shorty said. “The rangers could catch us before we get to the Territory.”

“We've only got the Wichita and the Red left to cross, then we're back in our old stampin' grounds. Trust me, Shorty. Once you bone up on your Injun, we'll round us up a gang of renegade Cheyenne and Comanche and Kiowa and such and go to playin' hell with the damn Texas Rangers.”

Shorty spit. “There ain't no more renegade Indians in the Territory from what I hear. Uncle Sam gave 'em all farms and reservations. I've a good mind to head west right now and hide out in New Mexico.”

Angus reined his horse in. “All right, I guess I might as well tell you,” he said.

Shorty stopped his mustang and turned in the saddle to look at Angus. “Tell me what? For the love of Jesus Christ, what have you got planned now?”

Angus clenched the cigar stub in his teeth and grinned with conceit. “Remember that Kickapoo I told you I met outside of Laredo? The one that spoke English?”

“Yeah. What about him?”

“He told me an old friend of ours was on his way back to the Cheyenne-Arapaho reservation in the Territory.”

“Who's that?”

“Kicking Dog.”

Shorty's mouth dropped open under his wispy mustache. “Oh, no. I thought Kicking Dog was dead.”

“Nope, he never was dead. He joined the Northern Cheyenne and ran with the Sioux for a while way up north, gutted some of Custer's boys at the Little Bighorn. But the Indian Police got after him, so he left, headin' for the Territory. At least that's what that Kickapoo told me.”

“How the hell would a Mexican Kickapoo know what Kicking Dog was up to?”

“The Injun telegraph, Shorty. It ain't got no wires or operators, but it gets the message home. Besides, it makes sense that Kicking Dog would head back to the Cheyenne-Arapaho reservation. He started out a Southern Arapaho.”

“He started out loco,” Shorty said, bug-eyed, “and got worse with every scalp he ever took. That Indian scares the tar out of me, Angus.”

Mackland tapped his horse with his spurs and motioned for Shorty to continue north with him. “That's what you always say, Shorty. You're always scared till we get a posse on our rear ends. Then your face takes on the dangedest expression of happiness I ever saw.”

“That's ‘cause it feels so damn nice and warm in my britches all of a sudden.”

Angus laughed. “I've seen you grin like a possum in a fight. You're like a big ol' boar coon, Shorty. You're a coward till you're cornered, then you turn grizzly and whip ass.”

Angus chuckled as he rode on, and Shorty, honored, quit complaining. He only hoped they could get out of Texas without running into rangers. And, once into the Territory, he hoped they wouldn't find Kicking Dog. He hoped the Indian telegraph had picked up a false rumor. Kicking Dog truly frightened him.

They rode in silence, the dry north wind blowing cool in their faces. September rains had brought the green luster back to the rocky swells. Frost would kill it brown soon, but for now it was a time of rich beauty on the Southern Plains.

As they topped the divide between the Brazos and the Wichita, they held the brims of their hats against the wind whipping over the ridge and scouted for any form of trouble that might lie in their path. All they saw were a few white pyramids rising from the greenery, far scattered across the valley.

“What are them white things?” Shorty asked. He squinted, his eyesight poor. “Tents? Looks like they got flags on top.”

“Those are buffalo bones. Some fool's been gatherin' 'em to sell. They put their name on a sign on top of the pile to stake their claim on it. I saw them doin' it in '74, when the marshals ran me into Colorado. If you didn't have me to take care of you, Shorty, that's the kind of work you'd have to do to make your livin'.”

Shorty snorted. “That's a lie. If I hadn't throwed in with you, I could have been an honest interpreter in the Territory.”

The big outlaw started down into the broad valley of the South Wichita. “That's what you were tryin' to do when I found you starvin', remember? Come on, let's go see if the name on that pile is whose I think it is.”

“What? Whose name? What do you mean?”

“Come on, you'll see.”

They angled a mile to the nearest stack of bones to read the sign. The front of it faced north, so they couldn't see the letters until they got around it. Angus jerked his reins in and squinted. “T. Wiley,” he muttered.

“Never heard of him,” Shorty said. “Come on, let's get down in them trees along the river and make a camp out of this wind. It gives me an earache.”

Angus was laughing; roaring with mirth. “By God, it's her, all right!”

“Who?”

“Tess Wiley. What the hell would she be doin' out here stackin' bones?”

“Who's Tess Wiley? Some whore you knew?”

Angus guffawed and tugged at the long black beard. “Watch what you say, Shorty. Tess Wiley was my wife. Don't you remember the one I brought out of Arkansas?”

“How'd you know she was pickin' bones away out here?”

“I make it my business to know shit like that.”

In reality, Angus had come by the knowledge by pure luck. On the way north from Mexico, he and Shorty had found an old compatriot tending bar at a road ranch outside of Brady City. Hank Gibbitts, who had gone straight except when it came to fencing the occasional stolen horse, mentioned that he had made a trip horseback to Wichita Falls recently and had seen Tess Wiley in a bone camp with some fiddling drifter. Shorty had missed out on the intelligence only because he had been in a drunken stupor.

Now Angus took the cigar butt from his teeth and flicked it at Tess Wiley's carved sign. “Looks like the little bitch has gone and dishonored me by takin' her maiden name back. Seems she needs remindin' of her vows.”

EIGHTY-TWO