Buffalo Girls (31 page)

But by good fortune, Jim had been killed; by even better fortune, the old Indian was gone, too. Pansy hated the old Indian—he had been far too watchful. He was always on deck, smoking; often she caught him watching her. It would have been hard to do much, either with the captain or Bartle, without old No Ears
knowing what she was about. He even stayed on deck most of the night, playing with his ears. Calamity sometimes sat with him, but she was usually dead drunk, and consequently less of a problem.

The dilemma Pansy had to wrestle with, as the boat steamed down the Mississippi, was whether to kill Bartle or merely announce that matters were quits between them, and then leave with the captain.

Her older brother, Ben Clowes, who had brought her to the streets of London and put her to work, had been a firm believer in killing as the most certain means of really terminating involvements of all kinds.

“The dead won't be turning up to make trouble for you,” Ben had put it—advice Pansy always remembered, though she had never acted on it.

Ben had been a robber who aspired to be a murderer. He planned to make a specialty of sneaking into the houses of very old people of some means and snuffing them out, if possible by strangulation. It seemed a good plan, but unfortunately Ben had come to ruin due to the unexpected tenacity of his first victim-to-be, a very old lady. He managed to enter her house; she had looked frail, but when Ben grabbed her by the neck she proved to be too strong for him. She broke free and slammed him twice with a poker; she yelled for her servants, who slammed him several more times and called the police. Because of the age of the intended victim, Ben was hanged.

Ben's unfortunate failure at strangulation made Pansy cautious. It taught her that in killing the essential thing was to make sure of your victim; the question that now faced her was whether there was a means by which she could make absolutely sure of finishing old Bartle, if murder proved to be her choice. Bartle was often drunk but he was not really frail. He was set on teaching her to shoot—a project which held some hope. She could shoot him and pretend an accident. But it was chancy; she was new to
shooting, and might miss the vital spot even from a close distance. Perhaps if he was drunk enough, she could whop him good with the gun some night and push him overboard; the difficulty there was that there was no guarantee he would drown. If an eighty-five-year-old lady wouldn't be strangled, Bartle might well not drown. Worse still, he might manage to cry out and be heard.

Ben's remark about the finality of killing someone who posed a problem was no doubt valid, but it seemed to Pansy it might require an expertise she simply did not have. Ben had been a cold planner, but he had failed. Bartle, accustomed to danger, might prove to be more than she could finish; still, she would have enjoyed finishing him; the old brute was smelly, careless with his tobacco, and far too amorous.

After a day's reflection, Pansy told herself she had to be practical. She had always attempted to be practical; there was no sense taking chances in a new country.

Consequently she began to smile at the captain, who was not slow to notice that he was being smiled at. He soon began to beam in response. Pansy watched his movements and knew when he went off duty. On the second night after No Ear's departure she made herself as prim as possible, even tying her hair with the white ribbon Bartle had given her for their wedding. Then she met the captain outside his cabin door.

“I will be nice, sir, if you like,” Pansy said. She felt quite confident—she had always considered that she enjoyed an advantage over men. After all, she had what they wanted—they could have it, but only if they helped.

“Eh, ma'am?” the captain said. He had observed the young woman watching him; indeed, he was not unaccustomed to such attentions from his female passengers. The authority he wielded as captain gave him a definite advantage with the female sex. Still, in the case of this particular female, he had not expected such a sudden move.

Pansy decided the man was tiresome; few of his sex weren't. Even in the plainest and most obvious situations, they frequently required some leading.

“Nice, sir,” Pansy said, trying not to mock him. “I said I would be nice.”

“Bully, then!” the captain said.

B
ARTLE CAME ON DECK, HOPING THAT THE COLD BREEZE
would sober him enough to enable him to deal with the startling situation he suddenly found himself facing. Oppressed by the sad homecoming, grieving still for his lost friend, Bartle had adopted Calamity's method for aborting dismal thoughts. He had begun to split her bottles with her.

Now, with a dull headache, and a cold wind bringing autumn down the Missouri, he had just been told that his wife meant to leave him. Her notion was to journey downriver to New Orleans accompanied by the Boston captain.

“We just got married—it's only two months now,” Bartle pointed out.

Neither Pansy nor the captain said anything. What seemed cruel to Bartle wasn't that Pansy had decided to leave—drunk or not, he was sharp enough to realize that he had begun to bore her—but that the two of them had decided to leave him at a time when his head felt as if a carpenter had hammered it for a while. His tongue, usually agile, felt thick and slow.

“Well, Pansy, I guess I am surprised that you want to leave,” Bartle said. “Do you have a reason?”

He felt silly even saying it; why ask a woman if she had a reason, when the reason, gruff as ever, stood beside her in his blue coat?

“I've come to love my dear Johnny,” Pansy said crisply, with a modest glance at the captain.

Calamity, propped against a pile of ropes, observed the proceedings without surprise. The little English whore was tired of Bartle; probably she had had no interest in him to begin with other than securing her passage. She felt a little relieved that matters had come to a head so soon. She had not looked forward to traveling upriver with the aloof young girl.

Despite her relief, she hoped for his sake that Bartle would make a stiff response. Since Jim's death, Bartle had gone slack. He rarely looked lively, and Bartle had always been the lively one, a man with enough spark to lift everyone's spirits at times when spirits were leaden.

Bartle knew he ought to shoot the brazen couple, or at least fight the captain, but he did neither—his gun wasn't handy, and neither was his anger. Facing them, he only felt a kind of wistfulness.

Part of it was that he knew he would miss his Pansy; having such a soft girl to warm his nights had been a rare treat. The other part of it was that he had begun to miss himself—the wild mountain man the Buntline types celebrated, half horse and half grizzly, the kind of character who would grab the Boston captain by the neck and shake him like a rat before pitching the little flirt who stood beside him into the river.

Bartle had done such things, but he didn't feel like doing them that morning. Seeing his friend die on a bench in Chicago had convinced him that it was foolish to go out of one's way to seek revenge. Life would deal out revenge enough for whatever wrongs people did. Life would settle with the Boston captain, sooner or later; it would settle, at some point, with pretty Pansy Clowes.

He had ignored the normal codes of behavior all his life—the freedom of the mountains was mostly a freedom to ignore codes of behavior—and he didn't feel like pretending they interested him now. Jim Ragg had been the one who was code-bound. If Jim had been married to Pansy and she had proposed to depart with
the Boston captain, Jim would have immediately shot the captain, and probably Pansy, too. Bartle had often tried to tease Jim about his strict behavior; there was something of the preacher in Jim—his sermon just happened to be beaver.

“If that's your wish, then I guess I'll just tip my hat,” Bartle said. “Me and Calamity have got to catch our steamer.”

Pansy Clowes was slightly affronted. She had married the old brute, after all—a stiffer argument than that would have been in order. Occasionally, in London, there had been contests for her favors; men had become violent over her and flailed at one another with their fists. Pansy enjoyed such occasions; she never felt surer of her power than in those hot moments when men fought over her. It would have been a good test for Johnny, too, to see if he could draw blood from old Bartle.

Though disappointed that Bartle had behaved so coolly, Pansy reminded herself of her resolution to be practical. She was in America, not England. Exciting as it might be to watch Bartle and Johnny battle for her, there was a distinct chance it would end the wrong way. Bartle might be the one to draw blood, and he might draw it in fatal amounts, in which case, since they seemed to be in a naked wilderness, she might have a deuce of a time getting down to New Orleans before the cold set in.

“We'll set you ashore, sir,” the captain said. He had been a bit uneasy about the prospect of conflict himself. He had heard that Bartle Bone was an old Indian fighter—such men were the devil to predict. One had bitten the nose off a friend of his from Providence. His friend had lived to describe the savage attack. A doctor had attempted to sew the nose back in place, but the sutures had become infected and his friend had had to make do without his nose, lack of which was a big disadvantage in New England. He had finally emigrated to Australia, where mutilation was said to be more common.

With that memory fresh in mind, the captain had resolved to protect his nose at all cost. He was relieved that the old trapper was so agreeable about the matter.

Calamity considered raising a ruckus on Bartle's behalf—she had a desire to stir him up, to see if she could get him to behave like himself again. On the other hand, she felt queasy, and was very glad that Pansy was leaving. Much more of Pansy would not have been tolerable. Another reason for restraint was that girls of Pansy's sort were unpredictable. If Calamity roused herself and tore into the captain and knocked one of his ears off with a rifle butt or otherwise bloodied him, the girl might decide her new beau was a coward and choose to stay with Bartle.

“You didn't say much this morning,” Bartle observed, once he and Calamity had settled themselves on the steamer
Yellowstone
and were looking at the muddy Missouri. Pansy and Captain John were by then enjoying a beefsteak in St. Louis, gone forever. Bartle still felt wistful—when would there be another such lithesome girl to warm his bed?

“She was your wife,” Calamity said. “If you didn't care to stop her or stomp that sailor, I didn't consider it my place to interfere.”

Night fell; the plains lay around them. They sat together on the deck of the little steamer, splitting another bottle. Both knew what a long river they had to ride; it edged northward, up the country and across the plains; more than any river it bound their youth to their age. Ghosts of lost enemies and lost companions dwelt by its banks: ghosts of a breed and ghosts of a race. Bartle had never imagined that he would be riding up the Missouri without Jim Ragg. As the prairie moon rose, Calamity mostly thought of Dora.