The Warriors (54 page)

“That,” she declared, “is because people are not books containing just a single page to be understood in one quick reading.”

He chuckled. “No, I’m certainly discovering that’s true of you.”

“You might think me uninterested in—the topic you brought up. On the contrary, I’m not. At the proper time, in the proper place, my husband won’t find me wanting. He’ll find me inexperienced. But—not without ardor. Not without—oh,
fiddle!”
she cried, utterly flustered.

The exclamation caught Klaus’ attention. “Hannah, I never heard you cuss before.”

“I was not cursing!”

“But you came close.” He was grinning.

“You be still!”
A whisper. “We mustn’t discuss it any further.”

“All right,” he agreed, even though he thought turnabout only fair play. Last evening she’d asked a good many personal questions, for a reason he was just beginning to guess—with considerable discomfort.

Or am I a conceited oaf? Flattering myself?

He thought it wise to try to lighten the conversation. He rolled the tip of his tongue in his cheek. “Actually, you need have no fear about my virtue when I go back to work. I don’t patronize women such as Mr. Brown employs. Nor am I particularly fond of gambling. In fact I have no intention of honoring Brown’s request. I’ll warn my friends about him. No sense in them squandering their wages and betting against a man who wins nine times out of ten. I watched him that night. He lost on an average of once every twenty minutes. For the sake of effect, I don’t doubt.”

“You see? That only proves the railhead’s an ungodly place and will obviously grow worse. There are better and safer places a man could spend his time.”

“What places?”

She didn’t answer.

“What places, Hannah?”

“If it isn’t clear to you by now—”

Her lips pressed together. “Never mind.”

Angry at herself, or him—or both—she pointed east.

“Drive faster.”

He did. His wild suspicions hadn’t been so wild after all.

At first he was astonished. Then he was touched. But that mood quickly vanished. He knew how a forest animal must feel coming across a hunter’s iron trap directly in its path.

He’d have gotten angry all over again if what she wanted hadn’t been so upsetting.

N
EXT MORNING HANNAH LEFT
Klaus asleep and came down from the campsite on the edge of Kearney to see him aboard the westbound supply train.

Full daylight was still a good half hour away. Only two lamps glowed in the improvised huts and unpainted plank buildings that straggled along the north side of the river opposite the old infantry stockade.

The air was chilly. Pungent wood smoke drifted back from the locomotive as Michael approached a stake-sided flatcar loaded with rails tied down with heavy rope. There were four such cars between the tender and two boxcars at the end of the train.

He’d spent the night outside the tent again, wrestling with cold blankets and sleeplessness. He felt edgy and tired as he laid the Spencer and canvas pouch on the stacked rails. When he turned back, Hannah took him by surprise. She leaned forward and gave his cheek a quick, chaste kiss.

He was speechless for several moments. Then all he could do was blurt, “Why—thank you, Hannah Dorn.”

She ignored the forced levity in his voice. “You’ve been very kind, Michael. Despite all you say about being irreligious, you’re a good and compassionate man. I apologize for my temper when we met that Mr. Brown. You’re not like him. It was shameful of me to imply that you are.”

“I appreciate the compliment, but it isn’t necessary.”

“It is. I don’t want you believing I’m nothing but a prude.”

He caught her nervous hands between his palms. “Believe me, Hannah. No one faults you for your principles, least of all me. God—uh, heaven—knows I could use some of my own.”

She glanced toward the locomotive. Sparks rose and vanished above the stack. “I hardly slept last night.” She covered her eyes. “Oh, I’m such a clumsy, graceless person. I don’t know how to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Tell you—” He felt her hands tighten within his. “You’ll laugh.”

“No.”

Her eyes caught starlight. “Last night, I—I prayed for hours. There
is
a purpose for everything. Even for Papa being struck down as he was—Michael,” she interrupted herself, “where will you go when construction’s shut down?”

“I suppose I’ll stay at the winter camp, wherever that may be.”

“Stay with all those sinful people?”

“What else should I do?”

In a quick burst of breath, she said, “Come back to Grand Island. I can make the store succeed if I have a man to help me. I told you I prayed. I repeated the words from Ecclesiastes over and over.”

Her speech grew less breathy, became soft and direct. “I know now Papa’s death came so there’d be room for another man. You were meant to take his place.”

Once again he couldn’t speak. He was shaken to the center of his being. He’d already concluded this might be the reason behind yesterday’s questioning—not to mention her flirtation with the subject of sex.

He tried to pierce her air of certainty with another little laugh.

“Miss Dorn, permit me to say with all politeness, you’re touched in the head.”

“No, I’m not. You’re a man looking for a place, Michael Boyle. God has revealed it.”

Hostile all at once because he felt threatened by her confidence, he exclaimed, “Not to me! My place is up the line, pushing those rails to the meridian. Do you realize I’m thirty-six years old? Before I’m too blasted feeble to do anything but sit in a chair and look back at all my mistakes—all the years I spent taking human life—I want once—
once!
—to know I’ve done something worthwhile.
Something!”

“Do it, then. But start back before the snows are too deep for travel.”

“You’re the damnedest woman I ever met!”

“I would appreciate your not cursing. This is too serious.”

The whistle tooted. One of the train’s two brakemen waved his lantern from beside the last car.

“Come back and help me build a good store. Then another. Those godless people will keep moving west, chasing the easy money. The territory will soon be ready for civilized things. Where we live, we’ll help build a town. A fine, decent one.”

An impulse to say yes swept over him. He fought it.

“No, Hannah.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t, that’s all.”

“
Why not?
Am I unattractive?”

“You’re very attractive. But—”

He was unable to finish. Honesty would only hurt her.

But she’d been hurt already. A tear sparkled on her face. Angrily, she wiped it away.

“You don’t think you could ever love me? I don’t expect you to love me now, Michael.”

“Hannah, stop!”

“You love that other woman.”

“No,” he lied. “But I like you too much to pretend I feel anything more.”

“Love will come. Give it a chance. Give
me
a chance.”

She flung an arm around his neck and kissed him on the mouth with unmistakable passion. He felt the sweet curve of her breasts against his body, then her tears on his face.

With her mouth still close to his, she whispered, “I’ve love enough for both of us. Come back.”

“And if it didn’t work, and I left again? I’d hurt you worse than I’m doing right now.”

“I’ll accept the risk.”

He shook his head. “I would never subject you to that kind of uncertainty, that kind of—”

The whistle howled.

He seized two of the stakes and hauled himself up to the rails. The train lurched forward.

The trucks began to click slowly. Spark-filled smoke gusted around him. Through it, he heard her call, “Before the snow!”

The smoke cleared. As the last car passed she stepped to the center of the track and waved.

Damn!
He didn’t love her. Better to hurt her again, this moment, than subject her to prolonged pain. He shook his head in an exaggerated way. She couldn’t mistake the finality of it. Yet her head remained unbowed and she blew him a kiss, as if she were supremely confident.

He sat down on the stacked rails and watched her figure shrink in the starry dawn. Soon she was a speck against the widening band of red-gold on the eastern horizon. Then she was gone.

He tried to excuse himself for hurting her by summoning anger.

“I’ll be damned and double-damned. That queer, Bible-reading girl
did
bait a trap as if I were some woods animal!”

The anger didn’t help. He almost wished he could have jumped right between the trap’s jaws. She was a fine, handsome woman. But he didn’t love her enough.

Love?

To the best of his recollection, it was the very first time he’d thought the word in connection with his unexpected fondness for her. He
had
lost his heart just a little, without realizing it. But what he felt for her wasn’t enough to make him change his mind about returning to the railhead.

The iron train gathered speed on the Nebraska plain. Far to his right, a herd of shaggy buffalo swept down from a ridge, trampling the earth loudly enough to be heard above the train’s roar. Flickering light from the firebox reddened his cheeks as he stood up and faced west, one hand on a stake, his feet braced wide apart. The change of position didn’t help clear his mind of the confusion.

That woman is mad!

No, in her own way, that woman is as strong as Amanda Kent.

Handsome, too.

And not nearly so pious as she pretends.
He well remembered the fervent feel of her mouth.

He tried contempt.

Outrageous, the way she picked a husband! “God’s made a place!” Fancy such nerve!

She wouldn’t say it’s nerve, she’d say it’s faith.

And would it be so bad a place?

I
cannot
go there under false colors!
About that, he was adamant.

Yet he was beginning to loathe himself for having hurt her so badly.

The buffalo veered off and vanished in the north. The train swayed. He gripped the stake tightly to keep from being hurled off.

The points of his mustache and the ends of his bandana flicked against his face. He peered through the smoke and specks of soot but never saw the vast prairie rushing by.

That’s all I do, hurt or kill others.

That is all I ever do.

Some eight miles further down the track, with the sun clear of the horizon, he was startled from his bleak reverie by a series of piercing blasts from the whistle. He recognized the signal; the train was stopping.

On the roof of the last boxcar, the brakeman who’d been sitting with his legs dangling over the side struggled to turn the horizontal wheel. Its vertical rod applied pressure to the primitive brakes.

Iron squealed back there, then up front, where the other brakie worked the wheel on the first flatcar. He leaped to the second car as the couplers crashed and the cars began to shunt against one another, slowing down with the kind of erratic jerking that frequently caused a break-in-two on a downgrade.

The front brakie pointed to the south. Michael clambered to the top of the rails as the train came to a standstill. Near the river turkey buzzards wheeled and darted at the ground.

A queasy feeling fluttered his stomach. Where the carrion birds swooped, patches of buffalo grass shone bright red.

He jumped down from the flatcar, his Spencer cocked. The fireman had another, the engineer a third. The two brakies—boys working their way up from yard switchman to engineer—were unarmed. They followed the older men, looking as bilious as Michael felt. Suddenly he smelled the blood stench.

“Appears to be a body lyin’ out there,” the fireman said, swallowing. The men started running. The noise sent the buzzards flapping away.

Michael’s mouth was dry as he began to glimpse white and red lumps strewn along the bank. “More than one body.”

“No horses—” the engineer muttered.

“And they’d have been on the other side of the river if they was travelin’ in a settler’s wagon,” the engineer put in. “Buffla hunters, mebbe? Chasing that herd we seen?” They were a quarter mile south of the track now. Michael nearly stumbled on a foot-wide rock all but concealed in the waving grass. He glanced down.

“Oh, Mother of God.”

On the rock lay an ear cut from a human head. Blood was drying brown in the breeze. Beside the ear rested an eyeball, a crushed white globe with a dark spot—the pupil—turned up to the light.

One of the brakies turned around and staggered back toward the tracks, coughing up vomit and slopping his trousers.

They found the remains of what they calculated to be four men. At first Michael thought two of the victims might be the pair he’d seen at the water tank the preceding evening. Then he knew he was wrong. None of the flesh was brown. And he spied no wagon tracks.

There was little doubt the men were hunters, though. Scraps of deerskin shirts and pants were scattered everywhere. Not one body was whole.

A mutilated head rested against another stone. The ears were gone, and the nose. The point of the chin had been worked off with a knife or hatchet. The hair had been lifted, and a pit opened in the top of the skull so the brain—or part of it, slimy gray and fly covered now—could be removed and placed beside it. Michael could barely stand to look.

“Injuns?” the fireman asked.

“Yeah,” the engineer said. “It’s the way they work when their tempers are up. I seen something similar once before.”

Wherever Michael stepped, he found more evidence of the massacre. Amputated feet. Arms chopped at the shoulders. Entrails twining through the grass like lifeless red snakes. Mutilated genitals had been placed on what remained of a torso. One head covered with gashes still had part of an arrow jutting from the mouth. The arrowhead had been driven up behind the upper teeth and the shaft broken at midpoint.

Tears in his eyes, Michael finally lurched away from the carnage. He was trembling.