King of Spades (23 page)

Of a sudden both her eyes wept. Big yellow tears. Her face became a torment of joy and hunger.

He leaned to kiss her closed eyes. The taste of salt burst on his tongue.

“Wan-sum?”

His bobolink speared straight up and its song became a frenzy of sweet desire. It was still pure. As he'd always wanted it.

He moved, and she moved, and there was a sweet sliding of flesh within flesh, and of a sudden there were many bobolinks tumbling about everywhere, and flights of spirits were caroling above tree tips. A routed yearning flowering over.

His eyes parted. Beneath him lay a woman ennobled. She too had heard and seen the bobolinks. Sha.

“Wakan.”

His eyes opened further.

The aspect of the mother had also awakened in her face. Suffering. Understanding. Forgiveness. He remembered having seen it once before, on the face of a female wolf at the moment of giving birth to puppies. Beautiful.

Something snapped in his head. It snapped loud enough to make him blink. Yes. He'd lived this moment before too. Besides the female wolf, some other mother somewhere had also looked exactly like this. But when or where he couldn't remember.

 

After breakfast, Erden spoke of their son to come.

Ransom had popped a ripe plum into his mouth and on the word “son” almost gagged. Words of another time sparked a dazzling green in his head: “And I want children. A son. To start off a new line with. And by new I mean new. I don't know who I am or where I came from. So with me and my son we start fresh.”

“Was it a bad plum, my husband?”

He swallowed the fruit, pit and all. “It was.”

Erden handed him a bladder of spring water. “A drink will help it down.”

He drank. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He thought: “What a holy terror I turned out to be. No-good tramp. First took on a retired whore for a wife. Then practically raped a pure wild girl. What if I have a son by both of them?”

Erden studied him. “Husband?”

He couldn't look her in the eye. “And here I've killed men for less.”

 

“Come.” She tugged at his leather sleeve. “Come.”

Numbly he followed her. Both love and belly made him go.

Several miles down the canyon they came upon the beaver dam he remembered seeing the first time he came up the canyon. It was a wide place and the beaver dam had backed up water and mud into a meadow. Frost had turned all the quaking aspen and white birch into veils of shivering gold. Bushes were lemon-tipped.

She led him directly to a thicket of wild roses on the far
side. She reached into the thorny branches and came up with a handful of wrinlded scarlet hips. She gave him a few, ate some herself.

He savored them. Their taste was like that of dried apples.

“Meat relish.” Again she made a basket out of her skirt held up at the waist.

They picked until they had a couple of quarts of them. Bits of wrinkled red skin caught in their teeth.

He couldn't resist a quick look for colors in the stream splaying out over the wet meadow. And he did it despite her frowning. He poured sand from one hand to the other. There were colors all right. Plenty. Sometimes so many his hand became heavy with them. He found several nuggets the size of cow-pumpkin seeds.

“Husband?”

He stood up. His eyes roved speculative. “Sure. Everything washing down from above gets caught here behind this beaver dam. The meadow's probably loaded with gold. Another place for me to stake out.” He nodded. “I'll placer- mine this. And I'll use a crusher on that rotting quartz above.” He waggled his head from side to side. “Lord, Lord. Right now I'm probably the richest man on earth.”

She nudged him with an elbow. “There is meat,” she whispered low. “Shh.”

His eyes moved.

There it was. A young doe. Not with kid either.

He waited a second to fix it all in place, then drew and fired. He dropped it.

They returned to their cave happily burdened with food.

As he skinned out the doe, knife swift, hands and wrists bloody, he said to himself, “Before the snow catches you in here, you'd better gallop back to Cheyenne and let Katherine know. Break it all off clean.”

He cut them steaks for the day.

“And instead I'll become a man of the country.” He cut flesh deftly. “Marry me this wild one.”

He hung up jerky to cure.

“Someday I'll take Erden into town. Dress her up. Build her a big brick house and give her servants and a carriage.”

 

Ransom was the hunter and provider. Erden was the nest- maker and counselor.

From the meat he brought in and the hips she picked, Erden made several parfleches of pemmican. She caught small fish in the stream, suckers, chub, dace, and after cleaning them, hung them up to be smoked. She dried bullberries. Soon their cave had the smell of a country grocery store.

Ransom kept deferring his trip back to Cheyenne, and instead filled the days with sorties in all directions.

Several times he spoke of going over and having a look at the principal peak in the Black Hills.

Erden forbade him to go. She was emphatic. “The great Hill of Thunder is the Forbidden Hill. Wakantanka is much offended when buckskin two-leggeds ascend it. He is known to have struck down those who have tried this.”

He was half-inclined to believe her.

“There is a place near the Forbidden Hill where white smoke puffs out of the ground. It is the place where a certain Great White Giant once defied the gods. He looked for gold. He was struck down and thrown under the grass and rocks.”

“This is a true thing?”

“The white smoke is the breathing of the Great White Giant buried beneath.”

“It is difficult for a white one to believe this, Little Swallow.”

“Often unnatural noises are heard. These are the moans of the Great White Giant when the rocks press upon him in punishment for entering our country.”

The whites were trespassers all right. Greedy.

“Sometimes the gods feel sorry for him and they let him
up. His tracks have been seen in the snow. They are as long as a good man's arm. He staggers about.” Erden's gray eyes glowed. “When it appears that the Great White Giant will run away, the gods once again hurl him under the grass and rocks.”

“How is it that Little Swallow chooses to live in such an evil country?”

Her eyes opened wide. “The gods have love in their hearts for Psin-psin-cadan. This they have shown.”

He fell silent.

She looked about the cave and their rich store of provender. “They have provided her with a home and with food. They have also provided her”—she looked down demure— “with a noble husband.”

Noble? He squirmed. Katherine had once used the same word.

 

To vary their diet, he decided to go after some fat squirrels he'd spotted in a grove of red pine below the beaver dam.

“Does my husband go?”

“Blue Swallow, I have a great fondness for squirrel soup.”

“You will see the Forbidden Hill?”

He stiffened. “You doubt the word of your husband?”

“It is good. Go.”

“You do not wish to go?”

“It is time to air the bedding.”

He examined her point for point. Was she with child? “I will be back by sundown.”

“Turn and go.”

He saw to his gun and shells, slipped a strip of jerky in a. pocket, clapped on his sombrero, and was off.

A hundred steps below the beaver dam with its wide meadow he spotted fresh boot tracks in the sand along the stream. There were also places where pans of sand had been
newly scooped out of the bottom of the stream. Someone had only yesterday been panning the stream.

“By the Lord! So the Army hasn't been able to keep them out after all. And I hain't got around to setting out my claim stakes yet.”

He forgot all about the squirrel soup.

He hurried back to the beaver dam. With his knife he cut off five stakes, cut his name into each of them, measured off three hundred feet along the gulch from rim to rim just above the beaver dam, and with a rock drove a stake down on each corner and then one in the center of the meadow.

He also hurried to set out stake claims around his white-quartz find higher in the Hills.

His thoughts were in a boil. The moment the Black Hills became United States property, he was a rich man and could put on tails. But, at the same time, the moment the prospectors came streaming in, it would be the end of Erden's paradise.

He said nothing to Erden about the fresh boot tracks.

But Erden sensed something. She mocked him with a child-bride's smile. “I have the pot. Where are the fat squirrels?”

“I did not see them.”

A white man's lie.

 

The next day, very chilly, while both were sunning themselves in the door of their cave, they heard the sound of a great whistling high in the Hills.

Erden's gray eyes became dots of troubled darkness. She turned pale. “Ai. Ai. Wakantanka is greatly offended. What have we done?”

A few minutes later yet another majestic wail rose high over the Hills. Presently the vast wall split up into myriads of echoes, and gradually faded away.

“Quickly. We must take the purification bath,” she cried.

“The man in his hut and the woman in the stream.”

Ransom didn't move. He wasn't about to let himself be stampeded by something he was sure he could explain if given a little time.

“Hurry. Or we shall be struck down.”

He sat his ground.

“Hurry, my husband.”

He thought the idea of a bath all right. “I will wash in the stream in the usual way,” he said. He shivered, thinking of the ice-coated water. “I will purify my skin with many hands of rough sand.”

She clapped a hand to her mouth at his blasphemy, then hurried off to take her bath.

His eyes narrowed as he watched her fly about. He combed his black beard with his fingers. A rush of compassion for her as well as an impulse to hurt her came together in him.

 

A few days later he managed to get away again. He immediately checked his claim stakes around the meadow just above the beaver dam.

The stakes were gone. Even the holes in which the stakes had been driven home were gone.

He stared. It couldn't be true.

Yet, look as he might, there wasn't a sign anywhere that he or anyone else had ever passed through the spot. Even the strange fresh boot tracks he'd found earlier in the sand were gone.

He couldn't cipher it. There had been no rain to erase them.

Then the thought shot through his mind that Erden was the only one who could have erased all sign so thoroughly. She had been Indian trained.

“The little dickens. She really don't want me to have that gold.”

He stared some more. “Well, we'll see about that.”

Grimly he whittled himself new stakes, cut his name on them, hammered them home.

He next checked his white-quartz claim. Damn. The stakes there were gone too. These he also replaced.

He said nothing about what he'd found when he returned to their cave.

Three days later he casually announced he was going to make another try for the fat squirrels.

When he checked his stakes they were gone again. Both claims.

“I'll be goddamned. When in hell did she do it? I've been with her every blessed second day and night.” He clawed at his black beard. “Unless she puts me to sleep with some kind of Indian herb in my meat and then does it.” He scratched some more. “You know, I wouldn't put it past her. She's a stubborn little thing.” Cool smoke coiled in his green eyes. “I'm gonna have to watch her closer.”

He once more put down stakes to his two claims.

And he watched her.

She didn't put anything unusual in his food that he could see. Nor did he sleep any deeper than usual. Nor did she behave as if she were secretly scheming against him.

 

Ransom awoke one morning to a great silence. The air flowing through the cave had turned warm overnight. It was as though someone had lit a stove in the back of the cave. There was even a smell as of wood burning.

He sat up with a start. So did Erden. Their sleeping robe slid to their laps. The warm air was pleasant on their naked backs.

“Something funny out there.”

“Wa.”

He made the sign that he didn't understand.

“Wapa.”

“It is snowing?”

She nodded.

“Snowing? And our ventilation in here suddenly turns warm?”

Another nod.

Snowing? Instantly other thoughts milled in him a mile a minute. What if they became snowbound? Mmm. That would take care of his going back to Cheyenne, wouldn't it, and having to tell Katherine? At least for a while. Snowbound. Locked in the Hills for the winter. Well. Well. So. If that came about, good. Maybe that would also take care of those disappearing claim stakes. A couple of feet of snow and they'd be buried too deep to find. A smile awoke in his belly and moved up and finally emerged on his lips.

There was a new smile on Erden's lips too.

Naked, barefoot, both got up and went to the door of their cave for a look.

They couldn't see across to the other wall of the gulch. Snow was falling in flakes so huge they resembled floating crackers. A white and clotted silence was rapidly filling all the canyons in the Hills.

A fat snowflake floated sideways. It wavered, dipped, sailed. At last it struck Ransom's ear. It melted almost instantly, making a collapsing sound.

“A three-day snow, I betcha.”

“Icamna.”

“Wow. Wait'll the wind gets behind this stuff. What a real old-fashioned snowstorm that'll make.”

He noted that the snow melted in midair where it fell in the wind from the cave. “Sure is funny our cave should suddenly turn so warm in winter.” The smile on his lips grew as he watched the snow come down. “This is gonna be the best yet. Snow heaven.”