White Desert (18 page)
Authors: Loren D. Estleman
I reckoned I was
the black jack, because of the bearskin. It gave me leave to open.
the black jack, because of the bearskin. It gave me leave to open.
“You boys should have kept traveling. You're hemmed in tight up here.”
Bliss took two steps my way and swung the rifle, laying the barrel alongside my left temple. I stumbled, but I'd been anticipating something along those lines and was moving in the same direction when the blow came. I kept my feet while the black tide went out.
He was as fast with a rifle as he was said to be with a knife. Vivian's hand was still going down for his side arm when the long gun came back around and Bliss levered a shell into the chamber. As he did so a perfectly good unfired cartridge spat out of the ejector and rolled to a stop in a crevice at his feet. That told me two things about him: 1. He was wasteful; 2. He had a weakness for making dramatic gestures. I banked the information for whatever good it might do me.
“Finish what you started,” he told the inspector. “I been
wanting to find out if you can see blood on them pretty red blouses.”
wanting to find out if you can see blood on them pretty red blouses.”
Vivian spread his arms away from his sides.
Whitelaw said, “If you're going to throw away good ammo, toss me that gun.”
I could see Bliss's face now that he was standing closer. It was all Irish except for the eyes. He had a pug nose and a long upper lip with an oddly delicate dimple, visible through his sparse, sun-bleached moustaches, that would make him appear boyish even in old ageâa waste, considering his chances of getting that far. His eyes were black and Spanish. They were the humorless eyes of his prostitute mother looking out through the holes in a comic mask.
Without hesitating he threw the rifle to Whitelaw, who caught it and pulled down on us before we could react. It was a Henry, the full-length .44 with a brass receiver and a folding sight. In the same movement, Bliss scooped a huge bowie knife from the scabbard on his belt and turned it to catch the light on its oiled blade. I wondered if it was the same one he'd used to cut out a man's heart in a saloon in Wyoming.
Whitelaw said, “Take their weapons.”
With a show of reluctance, Bliss scabbarded the knife and stepped forward to relieve us of our side arms and the sergeant of his saber. He tossed them onto a patch of soft earth hammocked in a hollow at the base of a boulder. When he paused to sneer at my English revolver, I got a strong whiff of sweat and fermented grain. The whiskey seemed to be leaking directly out of his pores, as if his body were saturated with it and could hold no more. For all that he was steady on his feet and there was no slurring in his speech. Men who drink constantly build up an immunity to drunkenness right up until their livers explode.
“Skinny little pistol for a man,” he said. “I bet you squat to make water.”
“I bet you'd watch.”
His grin, split catlike by the deep dimple in his upper lip, fled. He fisted the Deane-Adams and I braced myself for another blow. But Whitelaw barked at him and he spat on the pistol instead and threw it onto the pile, hard enough to nick the metal.
That took the edge off. He stared at me from a distance of two feet, the grin working its way back. He brought up his right hand, slid his index finger across the underside of my jaw in a slow cutting motion, pursed his lips at me, and stepped away.
I stopped worrying then. john Swingtree had told me back in the penitentiary at Deer Lodge that Charlie Whitelaw did all the thinking for the pair, and it had taken me two minutes in their company to confirm that. Bliss was the one to keep an eye onâthere was no connection between his brain and his hands, and even he couldn't predict what he'd do or when he'd do itâbut Whitelaw was the one to outsmart. He'd have everything figured three moves ahead.
They are hell together
, Swingtree had said.
They wasn't nothing till they met, just a couple of bad hats rolling along, waiting for somebody to stomp 'em flat. Split them up and that's what will happen ⦠.
, Swingtree had said.
They wasn't nothing till they met, just a couple of bad hats rolling along, waiting for somebody to stomp 'em flat. Split them up and that's what will happen ⦠.
He also said I'd get myself killed trying to split them up. But you can't believe everything a half-breed tells you, and a convict into the bargain.
“My name is Urban Vivian. I'm an inspector with the NorthWest Mounted Police. I've come to speak with Wolf Shirt, the Sioux chief. Where is he?”
Whitelaw smiled at the Englishman, showing his canines. “I'll introduce you.” He stepped sideways and made a motion with the rifle.
A well-trod path led through a cleft in the rocks into a circular enclosure surrounded by granite, as if an enormous spoon had scooped a piece out of the top of the rock. It was a couple of acres, big enough to erect some lodges and build a community fire, which still crackled inside a circle of stones. There were no lodges, however; a number of distinctive hoop-shaped depressions in the dust showed where some had stood until recently, but there was no other sign of habitation. When we stepped into the area, Bliss and Whitelaw following, we shared it with a dozen white men in overcoats and an Indian woman seated cross-legged on the ground beside something stretched out on a buffalo robe. The woman was wailing softly, a sound that until that moment I had taken for the wind moaning through openings in the rock.
The men were loaded down heavily with cartridge belts, belly guns, and rifles, but I didn't need any of that to conclude that this was the gang that had raped its way across four territories and the Dominion of Canada over a period of eighteen months. Men who had been traveling and living together for a long time tended to look alike, after the fashion of stones rolled along a riverbed or more precisely a pack of mongrels; worn by constant movement and shared instinct to the same shape, color, and texture, gaunt and brown and sandy-looking, slit-eyed and jerk-jointed, with whatever humanity they might have started out with strung out in the bends and snags and cataracts upstream. Two of them were Negroes, and another was twice as old as the average, with a bad eye and dull white moustaches like dirty linen, but for that they might have all belonged to the same unnatural litter. They watched us with the steady naked intensity of scavengers standing around a shared carcass.
The woman on the ground looked sixty. She could as easily have been forty; it was a brutal life, for all the eastern writers
made of its simple nobility. Her hair was unfettered and streaked with broad bands of leaden gray, her doeskin dress torn away from one shoulder, exposing nearly all of one breast. She sat with her palms turned upward on her knees. I took the three diagonal red stripes she wore on each forearm as some kind of tribal marking until I noticed that she was bleeding from them and had been for a long time. Most of the blood had dried brown on her arms, staining her dress and the rock upon which she sat the same rusty color. The keening noise she made was very soft, not because she was trying to be quiet, but because she had been doing it for at least as long as she had been bleeding, and she was exhausted and hoarse. She was mourning.
made of its simple nobility. Her hair was unfettered and streaked with broad bands of leaden gray, her doeskin dress torn away from one shoulder, exposing nearly all of one breast. She sat with her palms turned upward on her knees. I took the three diagonal red stripes she wore on each forearm as some kind of tribal marking until I noticed that she was bleeding from them and had been for a long time. Most of the blood had dried brown on her arms, staining her dress and the rock upon which she sat the same rusty color. The keening noise she made was very soft, not because she was trying to be quiet, but because she had been doing it for at least as long as she had been bleeding, and she was exhausted and hoarse. She was mourning.
The buffalo robe she sat beside had been spread carefully, its wrinkles smoothed out from the center toward the edges. Upon it lay the body of an Indian man of about fifty. His iron-gray hair was braided, the braids socketed in cylinders made of otterskin decorated with porcupine quills dyed red and blue. He wore a headdress of white eagle feathers tipped with black and sewn into a beaded band. An intricate breastplate made of small bones, as flexible as chain mail, covered an outfit of soft white skins, the sleeves and leggings trimmed with long fringe. His winter moccasins, decorated with beading and quillwork, extended to his knees. His hands were folded on his chest, and a longbow and lance made of ironwood and an elaborate quiver filled with arrows lay alongside him; he would need them to sustain himself in the well-stocked hunting fields that awaited him beyond this life.
The face beneath the headdress wore a permanent scowl. The skin was cracked all over like dried mud and the deep lines that framed the corners of the wide mouth might have been scored with a knife. The flesh had already begun to shrink in the intense sunlight.
Corporal Barrymore crossed himself. The sergeant turned his head and spat over his left shoulder. They would belong to different denominations.
Vivian looked down at the corpse without expression. “Wolf Shirt?”
“That's what his woman said.” Whitelaw's canines clenched his lower lip like fangs. “We didn't kill him. He died all on his own before we got here.”
“Where are the others?” I asked.
“Cleared out. The chief was the only thing keeping them from going back south and turning theirselves in to the army.”
“Injuns are dumb as cowflop,” Bliss said.
Whitelaw said, “I'm Indian.”
“You wasn't brought up in a leather house with your ass hanging out of a washrag.”
“Ballocks.” The sergeant wiped the spittle from his moustache with the back of a hand. “They wouldn't run off and leave their chiefs squaw out here in the open without provisions.”
“They would if no one volunteered to take her in,” I said. “Not many do. It's hard enough looking after one's own woman and children with the buffalo gone.”
“Savages,” said the corporal.
I shook my head. “Just different. Forgotten people starve to death in alleys back East every day.”
“They should of held out,” said Bliss. “Life on a rock beats getting hung in Dakota.”
Whitelaw's laugh was a dry cough. “We ought to know.”
“Their old people probably want to be buried back home,” I said. “Wolf Shirt's death helped them make the decision. Some of their young have never seen the places they tell stories about. If the stories die too it's as if they never lived.” I looked at the outlaws. “What I'd like to know is how you got the woman to
tell you anything. They don't stop to talk when they're mourning their dead.”
tell you anything. They don't stop to talk when they're mourning their dead.”
Bliss made that grin that gave out short of his eyes. “It wasn't her first choice. Charlie signed to her I'd cut off her man's business and throw it off the rock if she didn't answer some questions. Injuns got a thing against facing their maker without all the parts he sent them down with in the first place.”
“You should have moved on,” Vivian said. “Now you're trapped.”
Bliss said, “We
was
trapped. Now we got us a Pullman ticket out.”
was
trapped. Now we got us a Pullman ticket out.”
“We're going to play those three red kings, misdeal or no,” Whitelaw said. “You redbirds have got this far without losing too many feathers. I'm thinking your men will clear us a path if they don't want to lose three in one shot.”
“A path to where?” I asked. “You're wanted in two countries now.
The Cherokee turned his round face my direction. “Talk some more.”
“And say what? I'd read the Bible if I had one and I thought it would take.”
“You're American,” he said. “What you doing so far off your range?”
“Chasing you.”
“Law?”
“I'm a deputy U.S. marshal.”
“Well, we can't use you. Stick him, Lolo. Cut his heart out.”
Bliss was moving almost before Whitelaw spoke. He had his bowie in his right hand as he lunged and I turned right to narrow the target, but it was just a feint. He border-shifted the knife to his left and drove in low and hard to come up under my ribcage,
and I wasn't fast enough in this world or the next to protect myself.
and I wasn't fast enough in this world or the next to protect myself.
He was as strong as a bull; I felt the blow to my teeth and my cracked ribs pulled apart and snapped back together, pinching me so that for an instant I thought it was the knife going in. But the buckskin wrap that still encased my torso was as hard as oak. I saw the surprise in his face when the blade struck it. Before he could recover I turned inside him, got both hands on the arm holding the knife, brought up my knee, and broke his arm across my raised thigh as if it were a piece of firewood. The knife dropped from his nerveless hand and I shoved him back and bent to scoop it up. Barbs of granite stung my hand and the knife sped away. I didn't even hear the report of the Henry in Whitelaw's hands. When I straightened, rubbing the back of my hand, smoke was still twisting out the end of the barrel.
“Rock breaks scissors,” he said.
The rest of the gang had their weapons out and trained on me. I worked my fingers to make sure the tendons were still in operation but didn't move apart from that. The back of my hand was flecked with blood as if I'd tangled up with barbed wire.
Bliss was half bent over, holding his broken arm against his side. The pain hadn't started yet. “Son of a bitch is wearing some kind of armor!”
“You must of missed and hit his belt buckle,” Whitelaw said.
“Horseshit! Make him open his damn shirt.”
“I reckon you better open it. Lolo's hard to simmer down once he gets a prickly pear up his ass.”
I'd unbuttoned the bearskin for the climb up the rock. Now I unfastened my shirt and spread it apart. The belt of rawhide looked like a dirty plaster cast. It was looser than it had been when it was fresh. I could have shucked it off over my head if my arms didn't get in the way.
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