Wilderness Double Edition 13 Page 6

  “Then the justice, in fair round belly with good capon lined, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modem instances.”

  “What next? Old age?”

  “We’re not quite there yet. No. The sixth age shifts into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon. With spectacles on nose and pouch on side. His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank. And his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound.”

  “Your Bard could be a depressing gent.”

  “I’m not done.” Shakespeare had stroked his own beard a moment. “The last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

  Nate had glanced sharply at the older man. “Oblivion? Is that what you believe your own self?”

  “No, I must confess. But remember. That is one of old William S.’s characters speaking, not the Bard himself. As for me” – McNair had gazed at the sparkling stars – “we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”

  Nate often wished he could recite from books as readily as his mentor. Shakespeare had a rare gift, the ability to remember, perfectly, everything he ever read. Whether it was the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, the Holy Bible, or a book of verse, Shakespeare never forgot a word.

  Nate never ceased to be amazed by his friend’s brilliance. McNair had missed his calling. A man with his flair for memory should have been a professor at a university. Nate had mentioned it once, and been surprised when Shakespeare agreed with him for once.

  “It’s the only regret I have about my life. When I was your age, I loved books. Could never get enough of them. I would rather read than eat or sleep. And at one point I seriously thought about becoming a teacher and passing on my love to fertile young minds.”

  “But?”

  “But those books had fired my imagination too much. They had filled me with a hankering to see more of the world they painted so vividly. I had to go off and explore it for myself. So I traveled West, where no one had ever gone before. Long before beaver became all the rage. Long before most whites had ever set foot west of the Mississippi.”

  “Even long before Lewis and Clark,” Nate had mentioned.

  “Implying I’m as old as sin?”

  “Not quite. You’ve got more wrinkles than a prune, but you weren’t around at the Garden of Eden.”

  “Damn right I wasn’t! I’d have told Satan to go jump in a creek.” Shakespeare had clapped Nate on the shoulder. “Just think! Adam had everything any man ever wanted. All the food he could want was his for the taking. A beautiful naked woman waited on him hand and foot. He didn’t have to build woodsheds, or mend roofs, or repair bridles. Hell, he didn’t have to do any work at all. And what happened? He got himself kicked out of Paradise because he had the willpower of a chipmunk. He didn’t know how to say no!”

  “But it was Eve who ate of the forbidden fruit first.”

  “Oh, please. Spare me. She was tricked by the liar of all liars, Satan himself. All those who like to blame women for mankind’s fall ought to remember that Eve was pushed.”

  Nate had changed the subject. When it came to debating religion or literature, he was no match for McNair. No one was. Shakespeare could talk rings around a tree, citing chapter and verse to prove his points.

  A wall of brush brought Nate back to the present. The wolf had gone straight on through, but Nate slanted to the right to go around, confident he could pick up the trail again on the other side. By now he was so close to the lake that he could hear tiny waves lapping at the shoreline. As he came to the end of the thicket he heard something else, something that sent a shiver down his spine and galvanized him into racing toward the source.

  It was a scream.

  The scream of a child in mortal terror.

  Five

  Louisa May Clark trained the muzzle of her pistol on the center of the Indian’s forehead and girded herself to squeeze the trigger. She had never killed before, though, and for a fraction of an instant she hesitated, summoning the courage to go through with it. And in that instant, two disturbing revelations gave her further pause. First, she saw that the Indian was not going to attack her; he was just mad. Second, she discovered something she had overlooked before. “Your eyes are green!”

  In his fury Zach did not guess the leap of logic she had made. “Yes? So?”

  “So you must be part white!” Lou knew that Indians always had dark eyes. Or almost always. The Mandans, her pa had revealed, were rumored to have fair-eyed babies now and again. They were exceptions to the rule – the only exceptions, so far as she knew.

  And now that Lou studied her captive closely, she realized his features did indeed have a white cast. His jaw-line, his cheeks, his complexion, all bore the stamp of a white heritage. She had been fooled by the clothes he wore, and by the darkness of his skin. Skin burned brown by daily exposure to the sun, and weathered by the elements. She lowered the flintlock. “You are, aren’t you?”

  “What if I am?” Zach countered. “What difference does it make? You still had no call to treat me as you’ve done.”

  “I thought you were going to harm me,” Lou confessed.

  “White boys!” Zach scoffed. “Always so quick to think all Indians are bloodthirsty killers.” He was so sick and tired of their bigotry, he could scream.

  “Some Indians are killers,” Lou said, but she did not elaborate. She could not bring herself to talk about the tragedy, not yet, not when it was so fresh in her memory, so horribly vivid.

  “And so are some whites!” Zach retorted, pent-up venom gushing from him like steam from a geyser. “I know a trapper who has a tobacco pouch made from the breast of a Blackfoot woman. And another mountaineer who likes to boast of the time he killed and scalped an entire Lakota family. So don’t stand there and try to convince me that whites are any better than Indians!”

  Lou recoiled, stunned by the violence of his outburst. His face was red, his veins bulging, pure hatred in his eyes. For a second she thought he would spring on her, but he trembled slightly, took a deep breath, and regained control.

  Zach regretted his lapse. Now the boy would mistrust him more than ever. To make amends, he said, “I’m a mite touchy about my mixed blood. But I give you my word that I’m no threat to you whatsoever. Cut me loose and I’ll go my own way. You’ll never see me again. I promise.”

  “You really expect me to believe you?” Lou said. How could she? Considering his hatred of whites, she felt safer keeping him bound.

  The venom boiled to the surface again. “Oh. How could I forget? I’m part Indian. That makes me evil, doesn’t it? Everything I say must be an out-and-out lie.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You sure as hell did, boy.”

  “Quit calling me that.”

  “Why? Because I’m not much older than you.”

  No, because I’m a girl! Louisa came close to shouting, but didn’t. “Why don’t you sit back down and calm yourself while I decide what to do.”

  Zach would rather have taken that pistol and crammed it down the white’s throat, but he obliged. Only by proving he was not a menace would he be released. He couldn’t keep himself from glaring, though, so he stared into the distance instead. Gradually, his hot blood cooled. He cleared his throat. “Listen, we don’t have to be enemies. You made a mistake. I made a mistake. Let’s forgive and forget. Go our separate ways. How about it?” Lou remembered how Stalking Coyote had not harmed her when he’d spied on her camp, and she was inclined to do as he wanted. Then she thought of her father. And of how treacherous the red race could be. “Tell me more about yourself.”

  “What in the world for?”

  “It will help me make up my mind.”

  Zach thought he saw why. “Oh. You’re worried I’m a Blackfoot or a Blood. Well, I’m not. My mother is Shoshone; my father is a white m
an.”

  “Shoshone?” Lou repeated. According to a few of the trappers she had jawed with at the last Rendezvous, the Shoshones were the friendliest tribe around. The tribe had never made war on whites, never so much as lifted a hand in anger against them. Why, then, was Stalking Coyote so filled with hate? Could he be lying? “Can you prove you are a Shoshone?”

  “Prove it?” Zach could not believe what he was hearing. “If you weren’t so dumb, you’d know it by the style of my hair and my clothes.” He snorted like a riled bull.

  “How long have you been in the mountains anyway? Two days?”

  Lou stamped a foot. “Why do you persist in making me mad? I should shoot you and be done with it. But I’m too nice a” – she almost said “girl” – “person to kill you without good cause. Just don’t prod me, Indian.”

  Zach had had enough. “Untie me,” he commanded, shoving his forearms toward her. “And be quick a-bout it.”

  If there was one thing Lou despised more than anything else, it was being told to do something against her will. Since she had been old enough to toddle, she had resented being given orders. Her mother had once commented that she was as “contrary as a cat with a thorn in its paw.” If so, she came by her rebellious streak honestly, for her pa had jested on more than one occasion said that her ma was born uppity, but adorable.”

  “No. I will not.”

  “Damn you! Why?”

  “I still don’t trust you,” Louisa confessed.

  Zach yearned to tear the flintlock from the boy’s grasp and beat him over the noggin with it. Only, he had to concede the white youth had a point. He had done nothing to earn the boy’s respect. Quite the opposite. “What, then? I’m to be kept tied until you feel you can?”

  Lou did not see any other way. “I’m sorry. For now, yes.” She shrugged. “Maybe by morning, provided you behave.”

  “Damn!” Zach spat, and slumped to the ground with his back to the log. This was what he got for being reasonable. He should have made his move back up on the ridge.

  “My last name is Clark,” Lou said, to spark conversation. It was nice to have someone to talk to, even if it was someone who looked as if he wanted to tear her limb from limb.

  “Tell it to someone who cares.”

  Lou had never met anyone so blockheaded in all her born days. “You’re doing it again. I’m trying to be polite and you’re throwing it in my face. Can’t you at least pretend to be civil? I’ll be more apt to take you at your word if you weren’t always foaming at the mouth. Instead of Stalking Coyote, they should have named you Rabid Wolf.”

  Despite himself, Zach grinned. “My ornery excuse for a little sister says it should be Stalking Skunk.”

  “Oh! You have a sister?” Lou was glad. Somehow, it made the Indian youth seem more ... human. “What is her name?”

  Zach was slow in answering. To reveal the family’s Christian name might come back to haunt him later, if word got out that he had let himself be taken by surprise by a greenhorn. Some of the mountaineers would rib him without mercy. “Blue Flower.”

  “How do you say it in Shoshone?” Lou listened closely, but she could not pronounce it quite right, which, much to her irritation, amused her prisoner. “What are you smirking at? I’ll bet you didn’t learn the white man’s tongue overnight.”

  “I could speak it and the Shoshone language by my third birthday,” Zach boasted. He had his mother’s aptitude for acquiring new languages. “I also know some Spanish, some Flathead, some Cheyenne, and enough Nez Perce to get by.”

  “Mighty fond of yourself, aren’t you?” Lou said, impressed, but refusing to further inflate his swollen head.

  “I was just stating facts.”

  “Do you think I came down with the last rain?” Lou joked. “I’ve met scoundrels like you before. As high on themselves as a Georgia pine.”

  “Scoundrels?”

  “Just a figure of speech.”

  “Is ‘cute’ a figure of speech, too?”

  Lou had forgotten all about what she had called him. Unless she exercised extreme caution, he might suspect the truth. Laughing as if she did not have a care in creation, she responded, “You thought I said you were cute? Are you addlepated? I said that you looked like a newt. Your chin, your cheeks, they remind me of a slimy, slippery critter.”

  A blatant lie if ever Zach heard one. He didn’t press the issue, but he could not sit there and let it go unchallenged. “If you say so. You have no room to talk, though. Your whole face is smooth enough to pass for a girl’s. Anyone ever tell you that?” Among the Shoshones, to call a boy a girl was like slapping them. He hoped the insult would nettle Clark; it did much more. The white youth became beet red and staggered back as if he had been struck.

  Louisa’s heart fluttered madly. Was he teasing her? Did he know? She looked down at herself, at the baggy buckskins that hid her figure. No, he couldn’t possibly. She relaxed a smidgen.

  What was that all about? Zach wondered. Whites were so strange!

  “I’ll fix supper. You sit there and don’t move,” Lou directed. Anxious to keep busy, she hunkered by the fire and carved the elk meat into smaller pieces, arranging them on her makeshift spit. Partially roasted bits of rabbit lay on a flat piece of bark, where she had left them when she ran off in pursuit of the Shoshone. They would keep for breakfast.

  Her stomach rumbled like a volcano. She was famished. Her appetite had returned with a vengeance. She could probably eat the whole slab by herself. Hungrily, she watched as the flames licked at the tantalizing morsels. She also watched Stalking Coyote, without being obvious. He truly was a handsome devil. And she did not know which amazed her more, that he was, or that she was attracted to him.

  What was the matter with her? Lou chided herself. Just a few days ago Indians had murdered her father. Now here she was, making cow eyes at one! Someone should smack her over the head with a hammer to restore her senses!

  “What are you grinning at?” he demanded.

  Lou had not realized she was. Frowning, she said gruffly, “Just got some smoke in my eyes, is all.”

  Zach had resolved to make the best of a rotten situation. A little friendly talk might go a long way toward getting him cut free. And the sooner he was shed of the greenhorn, the better he would like it. “How long have you been in the mountains?” he inquired.

  “Pretty near a year.”

  “That long?” Zach did not hide his surprise. Whites who had survived a winter in the high country were in a special class by themselves. Hivermen, they were called. Ordinarily, they were much more knowledgeable about wilderness lore than Lou Clark appeared to be.

  “Why do you sound so shocked?” she asked.

  “Do I?” Zach hedged. A whinny by one of the horses reminded him of something else. “Where’s your partner? Off hunting?”

  Lou was about to break a twig and add it to the fire. She paused. “What makes you think I have one?”

  “Do you always answer a question with a question?” Zach rejoined. His mother had the same annoying habit when they were arguing. He nodded at the saddles. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out there are two of you.”

  “Oh.” Lou snapped the dry twig. To deny the evidence of their own eyes was pointless. “Yes, I had a partner. He was killed. By your kind.”

  “Shoshones have never slain a white man.”

  Lou’s eyes moistened. She would not look at him. “You know what I mean. He was rubbed out by Indians. A war party caught us, put an arrow into him.” Her voice broke. Mentally, she cursed all the red men who had ever lived and ever would.

  To be polite Zach said, “I’m sorry, boy.”

  “No, you’re not. You never even met him.”

  “If it’s any consolation, Clark, it happens all the time.

  Out of every hundred baby-faced kids like you who come to these mountains with dreams of making it rich in the beaver trade, maybe ten live to recross the Mississippi.” Zach was quoting his pa. Shakespeare M
cNair was of the opinion the survival rate was much lower.

  Lou was offended. He was treating her father like some kind of statistic! “It’s no consolation at all, Shoshone. My pa was the kindest man who ever donned britches. He always treated me decent. Treated everyone decent. It was wrong for him to meet his end as he did.”

  “It was your father? You didn’t say.”

  “Now you know.”

  “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,” was all Zach could think of to say.

  “What?”

  “From scripture,” Zach said. One of the few passages he remembered, and then only because Shakespeare was so fond of quoting it.

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Louisa said testily. “The Lord had no business taking my pa from me. Why are we born anyway? Why are we given life in the first place? Just to die? To be struck down in our prime at the whim of foul red butchers?”

  “White men kill, too.”

  Lou gripped a stick so hard, her knuckles were white. “So? No one should kill! Ever! Why can’t we all live together in peace and brotherhood? Why is there always so much spite? So much bloodshed?” She rose, rife with indignation. “I used to think the Almighty watched over each and every one of us. Just like he does the sparrows. But now I’ve seen the light. We’re nothing to him. How else could he let us suffer? How else could he let a decent man like my pa die, choking on his own blood?” She fought back tears. “We’re bugs. That’s what we are. Tiny bugs who scurry around our tiny world, no-account ants beneath his notice.”

  The intensity of the youth’s verbal storm jolted Zach. He imagined how he would feel if it had been his pa, and sympathy blossomed.

  Lou tilted her head to the darkening twilight. “Why?” she railed at the heavens. “Why did it have to be him? Why couldn’t you take me instead?” A storm cloud inside her split wide and a torrent gushed forth. Unwilling to let the Indian see her cry, she dashed into the trees, her arms over her face.

  Zach rose, but was at a loss as to what to do. Some things a man had to deal with himself, as his pa would say. Racking sobs came from the brush, high-pitched sobs more becoming of someone Evelyn’s age than his own. He sagged against the log to wait for Clark to come back.