HE AWOKE SUDDENLY and the alarm in his head sounded.
He was instantly wide awake and fully aware. His hand was on the butt of his Remington and his thumb was on the hammer.
A gust of cold air touched his face and knew that the door of the bunkhouse was open. The sound he had heard was the lifting of the latch.
He heard a rustle of movement.
He didn’t challenge whoever was there because that would have given his position away.
‘McAllister.’
It was Mrs. Prescott.
He threw his legs over the side of the bunk.
‘Yes?’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Wait a minute.’
Hastily he pulled pants, shirt and boots on. He walked around the end of the bunk and there was the woman standing just inside the door. She was like a pale ghost, shapeless and undefined.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘I was scared.’
‘What scared you?’
‘Thoughts.’
He didn’t like the idea of being alone in a bunkhouse with Prescott’s wife. The man had offered him friendship. Yes, he reckoned, he had a code. There wasn’t much to it, but he had it just the same.
‘I can’t do much about thoughts,’ he said lightly. ‘You can’t shoot ’em.’
‘I just want somebody to talk to. You don’t know what it’s been like … here all alone …’
My God, he thought, I’m saddled with a lonely wife right in the middle of the night.
‘You’re not alone,’ he said. ‘There’s Joe, your husband. He’ll be—’
‘Husband,’ she said, ‘he’s not my husband.’
That shook McAllister. Right from the start he had seen Joe and Helen Prescott as an ideal couple.
‘Does that make any difference?’ he said. ‘Joe’s your man.’
‘Is he hell?’ she said. ‘He’s nobody’s man but his own.’ She started to speak quickly, breathlessly. ‘McAllister, you aimed to ride out of here in a few days. Make it now. Saddle a couple of horses and let’s get out of here. I’ve got to be gone when Joe gets back. I’ve got to be where he can’t reach me. If I don’t finish it here and now I don’t have any idea where it’ll end.’
‘I’m not sure I understand,’ he said. She was very close to him. One of her hands clutched at his arm. She pushed herself against him and he could feel the heave of her full breasts.
‘Don’t try to understand. Just help a woman who needs help.’ He tried to think. He knew he couldn’t ride out of here now. Not yet. Even if he could …
‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘I owe Prescott ’
‘You don’t owe him a thing. All he did was nearly get you killed. You think I don’t know? You think I haven’t seen it happen a dozen times?’
Suddenly, she was weeping. Nothing made McAllister more helpless than a weeping woman. Instinctively, he put his arms around her. Her head was on his shoulder, she clutched frantically at him. Her hair was against his face and she was murmuring to him. Suddenly her body was cleaving to his. He was sweating—hell, he was human wasn’t he? A woman woke him in the middle of the night in her night-clothes, half-naked and … A man’s code went just so far.
Is it a trick? the cautious part of his mind asked him and he knew it could be. But if it was, the woman was playing her part awfully well.
‘I’m begging you,’ she was saying. ‘Take me out of here. You don’t have to stay with me. Take me anywhere and leave me, but get me away from here.’
‘I can’t do it,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
That was a good question and he knew he couldn’t give her the answer. He knew it, but he couldn’t give it. He tried to take her arms from around his neck, but she clung to him with a desperate strength and he couldn’t free himself without hurting her. Just as desperately, he tried to find a way out of the situation.
Miraculously, it came.
Faintly, he heard a sound.
A horse was approaching on the run. Who would ride at that pace at this time of night?
‘Somebody’s coming,’ he said.
She started back from him and he took the opportunity to free himself of her. He ought to get her back to the house, but when he gave careful ear to the sound of the horse, he knew that there wasn’t time.
‘Stay here,’ he said. He picked up a blanket from the bunk and said: ‘Put this around you.’ She took the blanket from him and he reached for the Henry.
By the time he was outside, the rider was near. McAllister could make out the moving dark patch in the starlight that was horse and rider. The horse started to slow and came down to a trot.
McAllister jacked a round into the breech and called out: ‘Hold hard there.’
The man brought the heaving horse to a halt and said: ‘That Prescott?’
‘No, name’s McAllister.’
‘I heard about you. Riding for Joe?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Name’s McCrae. I’m running cows south of here. I come to give you word I been hit by Indians. Cleaned me out of nigh on every damned horse I own.’
‘Neighborly of you. Thanks.’
‘I’ll get on. I have to warn the Phillips. Say, could you do it for me? I should ought to get back.’
‘Sorry, I’m the only man here. Give you a fresh horse though.’
‘That’ll do.’
The man swung down. McAllister led him over to the western corral and caught him a sturdy little bay. The man put his saddle on the fresh horse and went out of there fast.
McAllister went back to the bunkhouse and found that Mrs. Prescott was gone. He buckled on the Remington and walked up to the house toting the Henry. There was a light burning in the house. He knocked and was bidden to come in. He found Mrs. Prescott playing patience. He was surprised when she looked up and gave him a pleasant smile. She must have washed her face because there wasn’t a trace of tears there.
‘Did you hear what McCrae said?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Poor McAllister—saved from a fate worse than death.’
‘Get some sleep,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay awake. They just might head this way.’
‘If they’re after good horses, they will. They always do.’
‘I’ll be around, any road. Do you have a gun?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s no shortage of guns. Joe has a greener he taught me to use and I have a lady’s Colt.’
‘Good. Bar the door when I go out.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I feel safe with you around. Sorry about tonight.’
‘Think nothing of it.’
He went outside. He wondered what people the Indians belonged to. It wouldn’t have done any good asking McCrae. These ranchers didn’t know one Indian from another. It would be ironic if they were Cheyenne. Maybe somebody he knew.
He fetched the canelo and the dun from the corral near the house and took them to the other corral. He might as well have all the stock under his eye. He fetched a blanket from the bunkhouse and draped it around his shoulders against the cold. Then he settled down in the corner of the corral. The horses were restless at first, but they soon grew accustomed to his being there. The canelo came and kept him company and went to sleep as it had so often done with its head over him.
Again a faint sound woke him.
The canelo jerked up its head and rumbled a whinny. Nothing happened around that horse without it knowing.
McAllister knew that the sound he had heard was the gate-bars being lifted down. A shadow flitted by no more than a half-dozen paces away. McAllister held his breath. Looking at the sky, he knew that dawn was near.
The one thing he was scared of was that the men out there in the darkness were Sioux. If they were, he had a fight on his hands. And he was in the wrong place—he should be in the house.
Suddenly, the horses bunched, startled.
A man called softly. McAllister caught the words. They were Cheyenne. A dark form reared up against the sky and McAllister knew that an Indian had swung up on a horse’s back. The animal pitched a couple of times.
He picked up the Henry.
Movement to his left near the gate brought his head around. Were there only two of them or more?
In Cheyenne, he called: ‘You chose the wrong horses, brothers.’
The silence that followed, showed that the men were startled.
The man by the gate, fooled by the sound of his own language, answered softly: ‘Who is that over there?’ Maybe he was one part of the two raiding parties of Cheyenne had clashed.
‘They called me the Diver,’ McAllister said, using his Cheyenne name.
Both men exclaimed.
The man on the horse asked: ‘Are these horses yours?’
‘They belong to a friend of mine and I have the guardianship of them,’ he said. They had his position now and that was a danger. He gripped the Henry for use.
The man by the gate said: ‘You are one and we are many. Do not be foolish or harm will come to you.’
‘If harm comes to me, it will come to you in the same instant. My rifle is pointed at your brisket. Do not make me shoot, brothers. I have no wish for there to be bad blood between our families.’
That made them debate with themselves. Did a man whose mother had been a Cheyenne really count as one of the people?
‘Why die?’ McAllister said. ‘You have plenty of horses from the ranches.’
‘But these are good horses,’ said the man on the horse, not without humor.
McAllister knew that the man by the gate hadn’t spoken because he was down on his belly making his way snake-like toward McAllister.
‘Not even a good horse,’ McAllister said, ‘is worth dying for.’
‘If you are one of the people as you say,’ the man said, ‘you will not prevent us from taking them. It will be no loss to you. Why, you have said, they are not even yours.’
‘It would make me sad,’ McAllister said, ‘to shoot a brother.’
The man from the gate slithered through the fence. As he came upright, McAllister hit him with the brass-bound butt of the Henry. The man collapsed face-first into the dust with a groan.
The man on the horse kicked the animal into motion. The horse jumped forward and McAllister fired a shot a foot in front of the rider. The man slipped from the horse’s back. McAllister leapt forward as fast as he could move. The Indian had fallen to his hands and knees and turned like a cornered cougar as McAllister came near. McAllister caught him by the hair and tore him aside, throwing him across the dusty ground. As the man started up again, McAllister was closing with him and jerked a knee into his face. The man somersaulted. As he got to his feet, he found the muzzle of the Henry just by his right eye.
In English, McAllister said: ‘That’ll teach yon to get fresh with your betters.’
In the first light of the dawn that was coming, McAllister saw that the man was very young and that he was afraid. He thought he was going to die.
In Cheyenne, McAllister said: ‘Brother does not kill brother. For which you should be duly thankful. You will go away from here and not come back.’
The young man looked amazed. Underneath the paint which covered his face in a vivid and barbaric design, his features worked.
‘Do you belong to the band of Many Horses?’ McAllister asked. The man nodded. ‘You will take my greetings to him. Also,’ and here McAllister grinned, ‘you will take two horses as a gift to prove that I am half-Cheyenne.’ Prescott could spare them. ‘Pick up your weapons.’ He walked over to the other man and saw that this one was no older than the other. They might be two boys on their first raid, It would be a pity to send them back empty-handed. The boy looked dazed and he had a lump on his head like an egg. He got to his feet and there was death in his eyes as there had been in the eyes of the other. He didn’t seem to take it in when McAllister explained the situation to him.
McAllister chose them two young horses without brands on and told them to get aboard. They threw legs across the animals’ backs and looked down at McAllister. The first Indian saw the joke of it then and grinned faintly.
‘Thanks for the gift, brother,’ he said.
‘Next time,’ McAllister said, ‘check first who you’re raiding.’
They lifted their hands to him and sent the horses out of there on the run. They disappeared over the nearest ridge and when they came into sight again, they were going fast into the north. McAllister put the bars back on the fence, grinned and walked up to the house.
Mrs. Prescott was at the open door when he got there. She looked a little mad and he reckoned she had reason to be.
‘You must be crazy,’ she said. ‘I saw that.’
‘Seemed a pity to kill a couple of boys having some harmless fun over a couple of horses,’ he said. ‘I saved the rest.’
‘Joe’s going to have something to say when he hears,’ she retorted.
McAllister said: ‘Aw, Joe’s not going to hear. No more than he’s going to hear about you running away.’
She glared at him for a moment, then softened and said: ‘You’d best come inside while I rustle up some breakfast.’
He followed her into the house.