Zeke and Ned (44 page)

The tall man strode over and looked down at Billy. Old Mandy began to whimper, afraid the tall man was going to kill Billy for sleeping
too hard. Instead, the man took a whiskey bottle out of his long coat and poured the liquid liberally over Billy's legs.

“This liquor tastes like kerosene. Let's see if it'll burn as good,” he said. “Strike a match to him, Beezle. If he don't wake up, we'll just cook him. He looks like a damn fat sausage anyway.”

“Don't burn Billy,” Old Mandy said, but one of the men backhanded her, and knocked her onto the woodpile. Her head spun, and her lip poured blood. The stubby man named Beezle lit the match. In a second, blue flames shot up from Billy's pants legs. Billy snored on, but then he sat up abruptly, looked down, and realized his legs were on fire.

“I'm afire, boys!” he screamed. “Put me out!”

No one moved to help him, so he jumped up and ran for the horse trough, twenty yards away. Several of the marshals' horses were watering at the trough, but Bill Pigeon shoved right through them and jumped in the water.

“That'll teach the damn sot to snore at me when I'm in a hurry,” the tall man said.

Old Mandy ran over to Billy, who was moaning loudly. His pants had stopped burning, but his legs were badly scorched. As soon as Mandy helped him out of the horse trough, two of the men grabbed him and threw him on a horse. Pieces of his scorched pants were stuck to his legs.

“I'm burnt, Mandy . . . where are they taking me?” Billy asked. He assumed he would soon be murdered.

He started to moan again, but Jerry Ankle rode up to him, cuffing him hard.

“Shut up that whining, we don't want to wake the whole town,” Jerry said.

“Who's that man who burnt me? I swear he's a hard one,” Billy said.

Jerry Ankle was silent.

Soon Billy was gone into the darkness. All Old Mandy could do was cry.

J
EWEL WORKED ALL DAY TO KEEP HER FATHER FROM DYING BEFORE HER
mother could get there. She remembered that when Tuxie Miller's fever was high, Dale had instructed that he be laid in the creek so the chill
water would cool him. She and Ned had done it twice, before Dale got back with Old Turtle Man.

They did not have a creek, and she and Liza could not have carried Zeke to it anyway, but the water from Ned's well was cool enough. Jewel bathed her father in it frequently, and kept the mustard plasters fresh.

“I've smelt so much of this mustard that I doubt I'll ever be able to smell proper again,” Liza complained—but Jewel paid her no mind. She kept working on keeping her father alive. She had observed Dale Miller closely during her five-day struggle to save Tuxie, and was convinced that Dale had saved him mainly by paying attention. Dale had not wandered off, not even to make water—Jewel made Ned fetch her a bucket just for that purpose. She did not sleep, or eat, except to sip a little coffee occasionally. Dale never looked off long enough for Tuxie to slip away from her and die.

Jewel meant to be as careful with her father. She helped him to sit up; he did not cough quite so hard when he was upright. His abdomen was swollen, and he complained that his bowels were stopped up. Jewel remembered a prune syrup that Ned's mother had left with her, in case Ned had such a complaint. Jewel gave a few spoonfuls to Zeke, and the syrup worked; by the middle of the afternoon, Zeke took a turn for the better, enough of a turn that he was able to walk to the outhouse with her and Liza's help. He stayed in there so long that Jewel grew worried—she thought he might have worsened, and died. She was about to go peek in on him, when he opened the door and stumbled out. He was moving slowly, but he no longer looked like a man on the verge of death. When they got back in the house, Zeke sat up on his pallet and asked for his guns and some rags. He began to clean the guns, now and then humming a little tune while he worked. His fever had dropped, and an hour later he announced that he felt his appetite coming back. He asked Jewel to kill a hen, if she could spare one. He took off his filthy clothes and asked Liza to wash them. Jewel gave him one of Ned's nightshirts to put on until his clothes dried.

The hen was promptly killed and plucked, and while Zeke was eating it, Jewel remarked that Ned ought to be back with her mother pretty soon. Zeke, who had been eating with a good appetite, suddenly lost it. It occurred to him that Ned had probably told Becca he was at death's door. When Ned had left to go fetch her, it was quite true—he
had never felt so sick in his life. He had not expected to ever look upon his wife's face again. While he knew he would not be at full strength again for a few days, he was not dying, not with a good bellyful of his daughter's chicken and taters. Becca, who was suspicious by nature, was likely to think she had been chicaned.

“I don't know what your ma's going to think, Jewel,” he said. As soon as he finished his meal, he got back on the pallet and practiced coughing. When Becca walked in, he wanted to look as sick as he could.

“Don't be frettin', Pa,” Jewel said. “When she gets here, me and Liza will tell her how bad you was.”

“I expect I just needed to get out of the wet and see my girls,” Zeke said. “I hope this trouble with the white law blows over. I'm too dern old to go on the scout.”

“You ain't old, Pa,” Liza protested. “I bet you're still the best dancer in the District.”

Zeke nodded. He had always been wild in the dance. In his youth, he could dance down three or four ladies—in plain fact, he had danced down Becca the night he met her.

He decided Liza was right in her opinion: he was not old. Sully Eagle was old, and White Sut Beck, too. He himself was forty years younger than either man, well short of age. But another truth fitted with that one—the truth that he was not young, either. Going on the scout had once been nothing to him; cold or hot had been nothing to him; and likewise wet or dry. He thrived in whatever weather befell him, but that had changed. Now, three weeks in the damp had nearly killed him. Hunted men sometimes had to stay out months until the white law forgot about them, or lost interest in their crimes. Zeke did not believe he could make it for months out in the elements. It was not a prospect he relished. Thinking of it caused his fever to come back a little.

When Becca walked in and took a close look at her husband, she knew immediately that the crisis had passed. But she also knew, from his hollow cheeks and dull eyes, that there had been a crisis—a severe one.

“Hello, Bec. I've been poorly,” Zeke said. “Jewel's fed me up, and I'm gonna live now, I guess.” Pete, who walked a little wobbly after his long ride in front of the saddle, did his best to run up and lick Zeke's face.

Becca saw the fearfulness in Zeke's eyes, and it touched her. She smiled at him, and felt his forehead. It was the first time she had felt like smiling at him since the trouble between them began.

“It's good you're fed up, Zeke,” she said. “We need to be going home as soon as you're able. The garden's weedy, and the livestock are running all over the hills.”

Jewel looked downcast.

“Ma,” Jewel said. “You just got here and you've had a hard ride. You ain't even hugged me, and I'm gonna have a baby.”

With that, Jewel burst into tears at the thought that her mother had only been there a minute and already wanted to leave. She had not seen her mother since Ned came and took her away. Ever since she learned she was pregnant, Jewel had yearned for some time with her mother. Now that she had her here, she wanted a proper visit.

Becca turned quickly, and hugged her daughter, knowing she had been rude to speak of leaving so soon. Jewel seemed more grown—so tall, and womanly—a wife now, and almost a mother. Becca felt she scarcely knew her daughter anymore. She knew she ought to settle in for a spell and counsel Jewel—sit in her house, watch her be a wife, get to know her tall husband a little. That would be the proper thing. Yet she felt distracted from propriety by the need to recover her own husband and get on with her marriage again, and the sooner the better.

“I'm a homebody, Jewel—that's all it is,” Becca told her daughter.

She laughed a little at herself, as she dried Jewel's tears.

“I don't know how to be in nobody's house but my own,” she confessed.

It was true, too. She had not spent a night away from home in the seventeen years she had been with Zeke, not until the trouble came, when she left him to return to her people. She doubted she could sleep in a strange house, although this house was her own daughter's home.

“Pa's a lot better, Ma. We cooked a hen and he et like he always does,” Liza said, just as Ned walked in the door. He had been unsaddling the horses, tired from having ridden seventy miles to fetch a wife to a sick man.

But instead of a sick man, he saw Zeke Proctor sitting by the fireplace with his guns piled around him, a shine in his expression. He did not look sick enough for Ned to have ridden seventy miles for him, or seventy feet, for that matter.

“Why, Zeke . . . you rascal,” Ned said. “When I left, you had one foot in the grave. Now you're up eating cobbler and taters.”

He said it in a testy tone, testy enough to provoke a snappy reply.

“Why, I'm sorry I didn't die, just so you wouldn't waste a ride, Ned,” Zeke said, with a feisty look.

“I didn't want you to die . . . I'm just hungry,” Ned said.

He knew his irritation was unseemly. After all, Zeke had been sick enough to die. It was just that he had been spending his life lately riding between his own place and Zeke's, when he ought to have been getting some useful work accomplished.

There was not much of the chicken left, either, just taters and greens. Jewel saw that her husband was brooding. She offered to cook him some hog back, but Ned was in such a mood, he denied that he was even hungry anymore.

“It's good you're better, Zeke. I expect we'll have to be back on the scout in a day or two,” he said.

Jewel opened her mouth to protest, but her father beat her to it.

“Not me, I'm going home with Bec and try to get my place back under control,” Zeke pronounced. “Bec says I've got livestock running all over the hills. Some damn rustler's liable to drive 'em off if I don't get home and look to them.”

“I feel the same, but it's hard to work a farm with a posse of marshals apt to show up any minute,” Ned said.

“If they show up at my place, they better show up blasting,” Zeke said, looking around at his arsenal. “I've just put my weapons in order. I figure I can hold a posse at bay for a while, if I can just get on home.”

“We'll get home, Zeke,” Becca assured him.

She took her daughter upstairs, sat down on the bed, and had a good, long talk with her. She wanted Jewel to be well informed, when her time came. She also meant to do some sewing for the baby when she got back home. Jewel was grateful her mother took the time to visit, though she was disquieted by this new, distant manner her mother took with her now. She did not know what to say. She was still her mother's child, yet not a child. They were two women now, and their menfolk were in the same predicament.

“Ma, I don't like it when Ned's gone at night,” Jewel admitted. She had to express that fear while her mother was with her.

“I'm afraid men might come . . . I'm afraid of what they might do!” she said.

“You got that from me, I guess,” Becca said. “I've always been afraid some rough men might come while Zeke's gone.”

She looked at her daughter, not knowing what to say. There would always be things to fear, if you lived in a wild place.

“Keep a heavy bar on the door. And be sure you have a gun inside with you, when Ned's away. I don't know what else you can do, Jewel,” she said.

Zeke and Ned were downstairs, smoking. Pete was asleep under a chair. Ned had gotten over his annoyance at Zeke for his quick recovery and was dozing by the fire. Zeke kept looking upstairs. He wanted Becca to come back down. Now that his wife was in a friendly mood with him again, he was jealous of her time. He knew she needed to visit a little with her girls, but he kept looking up the stairs, hoping she would soon be coming down.

When Becca finally did come down, the mood took them both to head on home, though it was nighttime.

“It'll be cooler traveling for the horse,” Zeke said.

The fact was, he and Bec wanted to be to themselves, and there was no place they could be to themselves in Ned's house, not with Ned and both the girls.

“Easier traveling on what horse?” Ned asked, when he got awake enough to realize that Zeke and Becca wanted to set out for home immediately. “I've got Tuxie's horse, and he's rode down. Becca's mare is rode down, too. Your horse is lame. All that leaves is a slow mule.”

“We'll take the slow mule, then, if it ain't too much bother,” Zeke said at once.

“It's a passel of bother,” Ned assured him. “Becca's rode thirty-five miles with no rest. Thirty-five more on that slow mule will take you all night, and most of tomorrow.”

Ned could not believe his ears, or his eyes, either. Only a few days before, he had tried to coax a good word out of Becca Proctor about her husband, but she had looked at him as if he were asking about a stranger. There was such ice in her expression that he had felt tongue-tied, and gave up trying. Now she was sitting by Zeke as if no cloud had ever passed between them. All Zeke had on was a borrowed nightshirt, with a blanket around his middle. How could he be planning to set off on a long ride, at night, no less?

“Zeke, you ain't even dressed,” Ned pointed out. “Why can't you stay with us a day? Becca and the girls can wash your clothes, and we
can send you home clean. Becca's mare will be rested up by then, too.”

“Stay, Ma. You ain't even seen the place in the light,” Jewel urged. She had come as a bride to a rough bachelor house, and had taken pains to clean it up and make it pleasant. She had a good, well-weeded garden, although she did want to ask her mother's advice about planting tomatoes and squash.