AS THE SHERIFF could no more put me on the back of his horse than he could bear to have me walk along of him in the frigid cold with his friend’s child growing in my belly, he loaded me into the back of my own cart. He lashed his horse to it as well, climbing up into the driver’s seat where the butcher and I had passed so many months together and leaving me in the back, beneath blankets and among my dwindling supplies.
This was not how I had envisioned my journey ending, and I was not of a mind to allow it to end this way, but Ness shackled my feet as well as my wrists. I could no more entertain ideas of running than I could entertain ideas of rescue. I was too weak to cast a spell to break the mechanisms keeping the shackles closed, or cast a hex to set the sheriff’s brains to boiling. For the moment, I was his prisoner, and though I could no longer see the compass needle pointing the way, I knew in my gut Dalton was not far from us. I do not know how to explain my intuition, and I hope this is nothing you ever learn to recognize. He was near. I know this much.
Ness drove the cart through what was left of the day and into the dusk, stopping only when continuing would have proven too dangerous. Once stopped, he went about setting up camp, building a fire and tending to the horses and dragging me out of the back of the cart to secure me by the warmth of the flames. Though I asked where his deputy was, Ness was not interested in talking until he had cooked supper and sat down by the fire himself.
Were I alone, I might have refused food to prove a point. But I was unable to make use of Eva’s protective herbs while under arrest, and you needed nourishment more than anything else. So I ate and waited for Ness to speak.
“Where’s Hawking?” he asked.
“Dead,” I said.
“How?”
“The Mexican shot him.”
“Where’s the Mexican?”
“Dead. I beat him to death after he shot Hawk. Then I smothered the Irishman.”
“Jesus, Lilian.” I thought that would be the end of the conversation, but he went on, “You’re a goddamned fool. You’re with child. Those men nearly killed you.”
“What do you care?” I asked. “You were going to hang me.”
Ness came over and undid the irons on my hands and feet.
He removed a mass of paper from his pocket and unfolded it before laying it in front of me. I flinched when recognition hit me. He had found the page George Dalton had planted in Aunt Griselda’s mouth.
“I believe you,” Ness said.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“I went to St. Louis to wait for you. Three men matching the description you gave in De Soto arrived just before you did. A Mexican who gave his name as Lorenzo Chavez de la Cruz, an Irishman mad with gangrene, and a blond man dressed in black. I lost track of them, but I figured if I followed you, you would lead me to them. I lost you in the Badlands and picked you up a day back. Now, you’ve got every reason in the world to hate me, and I won’t begrudge you that, but the way I see it, we need each other if we’re going to see the man who killed Matt hang for what he did.”
As I looked at him, I saw the toll the last few months had taken on Ness. Behind his scraggly beard were sunken cheeks and a haunted gaze. Figuring I had nothing left to lose, I decided to trust him.
“He ain’t a man, Hank. I don’t know what he is, but whatever he is ain’t of this world. The Mexican says he’s older than this country, and I found a compass in his hide-out that don’t point north.”
Ness asked, “You expect me to believe George Dalton is some kind of . . . what, devil?”
“Not the way you mean it. But he ain’t a man, neither. Whatever he is, he’s powerful. It’ll take more than a six-shooter to bring him in.”
Though Ness was not exactly picking up what I was putting down, neither did he appear to think I had lost what was left of my mind.
“I seen all manner of Indians called themselves shamans,” Ness said, “and down Mexico way I seen holy men who thought they came from gods. They all bled just the same as me.”
There is more sense in arguing with a wall than there is in arguing with a man, but I wonder now that I know the ending of the story if I ought not have argued with him harder. If my hands will feel clean after all that they have done, if my eyes will ever shine blue again, or if I will walk the earth with black eyes and veins, the mark of devilry in me not from chance but from my own damned choices.
I do not know what Henry Ness thought he was chasing. But when I awoke the next morning, he was gone, as was the compass.