Lawless (2 page)

Anger and fear started Jeremiah shivering. Almost without thought, he glanced into the dark where the ponies were tethered. His revolvers were wrapped in oilskin in one of his saddlebags. The same bag carried the last of the money stolen in the ill-conceived payroll train robbery up near North Platte over a year ago. He’d been going by the name Joseph Kingston then.

“Well, it must be a false vision this time. I packed the guns away last winter.”

I killed eight men and one woman before I came to see that always settling things with the guns was a sickness. A sickness that would whip me one day if I couldn’t whip it first.

The faces of the dead whirled through his mind, each vivid and never to be forgotten. Some were faces from the Georgia plantation owned by the man who had been his commanding officer. Before Lieutenant Colonel Rose had died outside Atlanta, he’d begged the young Confederate soldier to leave the beaten army—desert—in order to be of some real use in the last days of the war. He’d implored Jeremiah to head straight for the plantation named Rosewood and help protect it and the colonel’s family from Sherman’s horde.

Jeremiah had done so. Or tried. At Rosewood, one by one, he’d killed Skimmerhorn, a Yankee forager. Price, a troublemaking ex-slave. And Serena, his commanding officer’s daughter. Killing her had given him the greatest pleasure. Hurt him the most, too. Serena had lied to him. Said she loved him when all she really cared about was the Kent money he’d told her about. The money he stood to inherit one day if he went back home, which was impossible after the killings at Rosewood. He fled west.

Some of the faces of the dead were from Fort Worth. A monte dealer who’d tried to cheat him. A law officer who’d tried to arrest him after he used his guns to give the dealer his comeuppance.

There were faces from his prairie wanderings. The busted-luck cattleman, Major Cutright. The major’s hired hand, Darlington. A third belonged to a member of Cutright’s party whom Jeremiah had foolishly spared and released after the major tried to steal a load of freshly shot buffalo. Jeremiah could still see the terrified, furious face of the boy named Timothy who’d promised to remember him. Remember the deaths. Find him one day and repay him.

Finally there were faces from the Union Pacific railhead where he and Kola had sold the buffalo meat. A sharp named Butt Brown and his dim-witted helper. Those two and all the rest were dishonorable people, deserving death.

But in the end, giving them what they deserved created too many problems. So last year he’d set about overcoming his desire to mete out punishment. He’d taught himself not to need the kind of joy that accompanied killing.

With effort he went on. “Why, hell, I haven’t so much as threatened anybody with a gun since we held up the U.P. special in Nebraska and then agreed that kind of thing was too damn dangerous.”

Slowly, Kola nodded. “I hear all you say. Nevertheless, I dreamed I saw you with the guns.”

“That’s
over!”
A bitter smile. “Sometimes I think I’m the only one who believes it. My mother used to talk about a crazy streak in the family. Inherited from someone way back, a grandmother, maybe. Fletcher blood was what she called it. The woman’s name was Fletcher. My mother never came right out and said she saw the streak in me. But I know she did. Else why would she have brought it up? I guess what I did at the end of the war and right afterward proves she was right. But I’ve licked it, Kola. I may have it, but it isn’t going to push me where I don’t want to go.”

He sounded more confident than he felt. Sometimes his mother’s words stole into his thoughts and brought a sad conviction that he was a prisoner of something inescapable. He grew vehement again.

“I’m changed for good. The other way makes a man scared all the time. Scared of arrest, scared of every stranger he meets, scared of answering when somebody says an ordinary hello—”

Kola averted his eyes. That angered Jeremiah all the more. “What the hell’s wrong now? You don’t believe me either?”

“I want to believe you with the fullness of my heart, so you will be free of the hurt those kil—the past has brought you. But—”

“Come on. Say it!”

Kola swallowed, then whispered, “In the dream I also heard a voice.”

Jeremiah’s spine twitched. “One of the holy voices?”

“Yes,
wakan,
holy. When I woke, I was very careful to recall everything it said.” Kola’s eyes focused on the dark beyond the fire and his voice took on a singsong quality. “It said to me, once you take up the guns again, you will never put them down. There will be no end to the killing. The guns will bring great luster to your name for a while, but then it will vanish as swiftly as the light of a winter afternoon. Finally the power of the guns will fade and you will be killed by”—bleak eyes found Jeremiah’s—“one of your own.”

“One of—”
He gaped, torn between fright and an urge to guffaw. “You mean, my family?”

Kola’s tone was normal again. “I suppose. I only heard the voice say exactly what I told you. There is no more.”

Jeremiah wiped his perspiring forehead. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. ’Specially the last part. It couldn’t happen! My mother’s gone and the rest of my family think I’m dead. The only person who knows Jeremiah Kent is still alive is my father’s friend Boyle, the Irishman we ran into at the railhead in sixty-six. But he swore never to say a word about meeting me. I couldn’t stand to have my father or brothers know the things I’ve—well, I don’t plan to look any of them up. Ever! So it couldn’t happen.”

Kola ran a finger through the dirt beside the fire. “I hope that is true. I cannot say whether it is. Nothing was explained to me in the vision.”

“Then it’s a stupid vision! You hear?
Stupid!”

The strident, fever-dry voice hurt the Sioux, who stared down at the cracked toes of his boots.

Jeremiah’s exertions had cost him too much energy. He fell back, dizzy and breathing hard. His voice took on a rambling, sleepy quality.

“I’m through with the guns. People hunt you, put your name up on posters. You’ve seen those, Kola. I’m all through with that kind of life. It”—he coughed—“it costs too much.”

And yet,
a taunting inner voice persisted,
there is that indescribable moment when the hand is fused to the gun and the gun becomes part of you, when the bowel-loosening fright spreads in the eyes of the one facing the gun and you feel so powerful
—

“No,” he said, “I’m through.”

Motionless, Kola contemplated the fire.

Jeremiah’s eyes closed. He welcomed the fluffy black of fever-induced drowsiness. It saved him from thinking about his friend’s words. He
was
set on a different course, for good. No matter how poor the season or how meager the profits at the end of it, hunting buffalo was preferable to running and wondering who was pursuing.

“Dream,” he mumbled, slipping into unconsciousness. “Dream—was wrong.”

He didn’t slip away fast enough. He heard Kola whisper with unmistakable doubt, “Perhaps. Perhaps.”

In another twenty-four hours, the fever still lay on him. Kola woke him gently. A red sunset light was spearing down, fragmenting in the shade of the grove.

Touching his shoulder, Kola said, “This has lasted too long. You cannot eat, everything comes up. I cannot help you. I must find someone who can.”

So dizzy he could barely fight his eyes open, Jeremiah said, “No, that’s not safe.”

Kola acted as if he hadn’t heard. “There is a town nearby. I will find a man who practices white medicine and bring him.”

At that moment Jeremiah felt a surge of emotion—love or something very close to it. He was startled to find he was still capable of feeling affection of the kind he’d once felt for his older brothers. Kola was risking much on his behalf. The other man well knew the dangers of riding into a white settlement, one scruffy Indian in white man’s clothing. It was especially dangerous in this part of Kansas, which had been plagued by raiding Cheyenne and Arapahoe and Kiowa the preceding year.

“Kola, I don’t want you to take a chance and—”

The Sioux pushed him down, interrupting. “I must. I will be safe enough. It will take only an hour or two.”

Apprehensive, Jeremiah watched him ride into the blurred red dusk.

He never came back.

On the following Tuesday evening when Jeremiah rode along the Kansas Pacific rails to the settlement, he was still suffering from a slight fever. Although the gusty wind was cool, perspiration gathered under the brim of his low-crowned plainsman’s hat. He swayed slightly in the saddle, a tall young man of twenty-three who gave the appearance of being much older.

He had his mother’s fair hair and his father’s gaunt cheeks and a weathered, pleasant face spoiled only by his mouth, which was so thin it sometimes took on a cruel cast. His good-weather clothing consisted of a collarless cotton shirt, blue once but now faded to ivory; a dirty gray buckskin vest with pockets; checked wool trousers reinforced with buckskin at the places a saddle tended to chafe the worst—the seat and the insides of the thighs. On his boots he wore plain American-style spurs called OKs. The rounded, filed rowels were easy on the flanks of a horse.

Wind blew dust clouds through the darkness and drove the grit into his eyes, making vision that much more difficult. He passed a siding that led to chutes and pens of unpainted lumber. Perhaps nothing symbolized America’s resurgent postwar economy so well as the huge herds of Southern cattle beginning to reach Northern railheads. In keeping with the mood of optimism sweeping the nation now that Grant had taken charge in the White House, this town had evidently expected to share in the coming livestock boom. But something had gone wrong. The new pens contained only little whirlwinds of dust. There were no cattle, and no sign of any.

Sweat continued to accumulate under the band of his hat. He wanted to take the hat off but he didn’t. It concealed the one mark which made him easy to identify—the streak of white hair starting above his left brow and tapering to a point at the back of his head. The streak had been white since Chickamauga, where a Minié ball had grazed his scalp. He often disguised the streak with a mixture of dirt and boot polish. Tonight he hadn’t troubled; he’d been too preoccupied by worry.

He rode straight up to the tiny frame depot beside the single track. The depot was dark except for an exterior lantern on the far end. A sign was nailed to the roofpeak below the lantern:

ELLSWORTH

Ellsworth, Kansas. Not much of a place from what he could see. A single street with a few pitch-roofed houses and a handful of commercial buildings of unpainted clapboard, strung out to the north of some cottonwoods growing on a bluff along the Smoky Hill River. A rutted trail meandered down to an easy ford.

Only a few lamps glowed in the village. At the far end of the street, music drifted from one of the largest buildings. A polka, played on a twangy, out-of-tune piano. Despite its raw, impoverished look, Ellsworth was civilized enough to possess a dance house where a man could have a rousing gallop around the floor with one of the hostess-whores such places employed, and while dancing complete arrangements for later in the evening. Jeremiah saw six or seven horses in front of the dance house. Trade was light, but then it was a weeknight.

“Giddap, Nat,” he said, barely touching his calico with one spur. He walked the pony through a billowing cloud of dust and then abruptly reined in. Light leaking from a cottage to the line of trees showed him a still form turning slowly in the wind.

His belly began to feel as hot as his forehead. He rode close enough to be sure, and when he was, bowed his head. “Jesus,” he said under his breath. “Oh dear Jesus.”

He could appreciate what Kola must have felt, reaching the end so despicably. He could imagine his rage and humiliation. Except for the meanings of dreams, nothing mattered more to a Sioux than a proper death of which the tribe would be proud to speak for generations. Such a death had to be met bravely, even flamboyantly, in combat with fierce and respected enemies. Instead, Kola had died like a common horse thief.

The anger rising in Jeremiah seemed to banish his fever and clear his head. He scanned the street to be sure he wasn’t being watched. Then he climbed down and tethered the calico on the river side of the trees, where the animal would be hidden from casual observation.

Reaching to his boot, he yanked out a buffalo knife. He scrambled up into the lowest fork of the cottonwood and cut down the hanged Indian.

A sleazy café, the Sunflower, was open, though without customers until he walked in. The old man tending the place regarded him with the familiar suspicion reserved for new arrivals in a small town.

Jeremiah locked a smile on his face. He ordered some food—stew with too little meat and too much chili powder—and a cup of bitter coffee. He sat eating and drinking at one of three rickety tables while the rheumy-eyed, weary old man watched him.

He hated the delay, this pretense. But he needed information. As he lifted the cup to his mouth, his hand was steady despite his sickness. So was his voice when he forced conversation.

“Nice little town you have.”

“Glad somebody thinks so.”

“I can’t be the only one. Someone spent quite a bit on those cattle pens and the spur track.”

“Plenty of fools in this town, mister. They’re the ones who squandered the money. Even persuaded the governor to lay out a special drover’s highway up from Fort Cobb in the Indian Territory. A highway exempted from the quarantine law. We don’t need exemption, you understand. We’re not in the quarantine zone. But the highway’s supposed to show that Ellsworth is interested in Texas trade—”

He wiped his nose. “The Texas boys aren’t interested in Ellsworth, though. They won’t drive their herds this far north. Too much risk of Indians. Fellow who started the local paper last year, he found out. Printed his sheet for exactly three months, then packed up. He came to understand Ellsworth’d blow away if it wasn’t for the soiled doves at the dance house bringing in business. Mostly drunkards from the military reservation.”