Bullet for a Half-Breed

A mountain-sized giant slammed the anvil he held clenched in his wagon-sized fist deep into Yakima’s rib cage, and the half-breed snapped his eyes open as he sat up in bed suddenly, groaning. He reached for his ribs with both hands, and that reignited the fire in his upper right arm.

He tipped his head back on his shoulders, and his painful grimace opened a cavern in his face. He tried to suck a breath, but that increased the pain in his ribs even more, and then he vaguely realized that wide bandage had been wrapped taught around his torso. His right arm was in a cotton sling.

“Oh, Yakima, easy!” said a female voice. “Rest back, now ... gently. I know it hurts. Shall I call the doctor?”

Yakima opened his eyes. His brows knitted curiously. Beth Seagraves stood crouched before him, her hands on his shoulders, gently pushing him down. In her left hand she held a cool, damp cloth. A ladder-back, hide-bottom chair was angled beside the bed, and on the chair was an enamel basin of water.

The woman’s blond hair was entwined in a thick bun atop her head. She wore a plain cream dress with tan squares and lace seams, and it was buttoned all the way to her neck, the collar held fast with a cameo pin. It was pulled taut across her breasts that were rising and falling heavily as she breathed.

Yakima relented to the pressure of her hands, and slowly lowered his head to the pillow. He glanced around the room as he drew shallow draughts of air into his chest. He was no longer in the examination room. This room was small, but he was in a real bed, and there was a dresser in a corner with chipped red paint and a cracked, rust-spotted mirror. Shabby blue curtains were drawn over a four-paned window. Behind them was a watery wash of afternoon light.

As the pain slowly gave some ground, Yakima opened his fists and sucked a little more air into his lungs.

“You’ve several cracked ribs,” Beth said. “The doctor’s been keeping you on pain medication—laudanum, mostly. He said I could give another spoonful if you woke.”

Yakima stared up at her questioningly, unable not to admire the creaminess of her skin that seemed lit from inside, and the glow of her hazel eyes in the soft light angling against her from the window. She canted her head to one side, and her red lips lifted a gentle smile. “I’m working for the doctor as of yesterday. Don’t worry—I may not have any formal training, but I know what I’m doing. I worked part-time for a doctor back in Iowa.”

“Good to know.” Yakima frowned. He reached up with his left hand and traced with his middle finger a slightly swollen, half-inch cut on her upper lip, on the far right side of her mouth. She lowered her eyes, color rising in her cheeks, and she raised her hand to Yakima’s, closing her smaller one over his broad, thick, rope-scarred paw.

Her eyes found his, and a boldness blazed there. “I’ve left him. I’ve moved into a room with Mrs. Purdy—Calvin and I. I intend to work long enough for a stake, and then I’ll leave.”

Yakima lowered his hand, felt a tenderness for the woman rise up above his own throbbing aches. “Where?”

“I don’t know. Back to Grand Island, I suppose. It’s home. I’ll find something there.” She turned and walked over to the window and slid the curtain aside with one hand. “This is such a lonely, dusty place. A savage place. No place to raise a boy. He doesn’t like school here. He refused to call Mr. Seagraves ‘sir.’ Thus, he’s sporting a black eye.”

Beth let the curtain fall back into place and turned toward Yakima. “Would you like some laudanum?”

“Not just yet.” Yakima looked around the room, saw his clothes and hat hanging from a spike in the wall near the curtained doorway. His gun and shell belt hung from a spike, as well. His Yellowboy stood in the corner near the dresser.

He squirmed around, feeling a heaviness under the pain in all his limbs and the sluggishness of pent-up blood. “How long have I been here, anyway?”

“This is your third day. The doctor kept you out, when he saw how bad off your were. That must have been a terrible tumble you took.”

“I’ve ached before,” he groaned, shifting his weight around, trying to relieve some of the soreness in his rump. “But not like this.”

Beth walked over to Yakima’s shell belt, reached up, removed the keeper thong from over his Colt’s hammer, and slid the gun from the holster. She carried it over to the bed and handed it to him.

“One of the sheriff’s deputies has been hanging around outside the doctor’s office. He wanted to pay you a visit yesterday, but the doctor wouldn’t let him.”

“I believe that’s his name. The big man.” Beth soaked the cloth in the basin atop the chair and dabbed at Yakima’s hot forehead. “I heard about what happened in the Queen of Hearts, between you and him. You’d best be careful.”

“Yesterday. A nice funeral for a black man. The Romans are even having a chiseled stone set at the head of his grave.” Beth glanced down at him, amused, then continued dabbing at his brow.

She glanced at him again, faintly curious, then nodded. “He sent a posse out to look for the men who ran the stage off the cliff.” She shook her head grimly and wrung the cloth out in the basin once more. “They came back empty-handed. The long riders are probably way up high in the Coronados by now. I suspect they’ll be back, though, after another strongbox. A filled one, this time.”

Beth lifted the cloth from his swollen left cheek and frowned down at him. He realized then that he’d been staring hard at the ceiling, and that his expression must have been hard, cold, grave. He’d been imagining how he was going to settle his and Derks’s debt with Rathbone.

He feigned a quizzical smile. “Quarrel? I don’t have any quarrel with the man at all.”

He winced as an Apache war lance rammed through his left side and out the right. “You know, I think I’ll take a sip of that laudanum now.”

Yakima slept until later that night, when Beth came in with a bowl of soup. He was weak from both physical pain and the laudanum, so she tied a bib around his neck and fed him. It made him feel like a child or an old man, but there wasn’t much he could do about that. He needed food to get healthy again.

Besides, in spite of the mental anguish she caused him, bringing up memories of another pretty blonde who was now dead and buried north of here, he enjoyed her company. The way she looked in her tight dress, the clarity of her eyes, the sureness of her slender hands, the sound of her breathing. She smelled of rosewater and talcum—a distinctly female smell.

He wondered, as she spooned soup into his mouth and he ate past his point of being full, if he would ever fall as deeply in love again as he’d fallen for Faith. If he’d ever go to bed with a woman, wake up with her, work with her, share with her the joys and sorrows of daily living, and watch the days roll away together like waves beating against a sandy beach.

No. They said that for every man there was really only one woman. Well, he’d had his. The woman before him now resembled Faith in many ways, and she was lovely, to be sure. And the man in him yearned to lie with her again and enjoy her body writhing with his. But he could never love her the way he’d loved Faith.

Yakima opened his eyes. She studied him, saw the brightness there in his narrowed eyes that stared across the room, unseeing but glistening like rain-washed chunks of jade. Slowly, she lowered the spoon.

“Whoever she was,” she said softly, dropping the spoon into the bowl, “she was a very lucky woman.”

She rose and started walking to the door. She stopped suddenly, set the bowl on the dresser, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Slowly, she leaned toward him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him softly on the lips, moving her lips tenderly, lovingly against his while caressing his cheeks with her fingers.

Later, Mangan came in, removed the bandage on his arm, and inspected the wound carefully, muttering to himself in a satisfied manner before swabbing the wound with alcohol that burned like hellfires, and re-wrapped the bullet holes with gauze and a length of clean linen, then returned the limb to the sling.

“How long before you think I’ll be able to walk out of here?” Yakima asked him as Mangan washed his hands with alcohol.

“When you feel good enough. A couple of days, probably. With those ribs and the amount of blood you lost, you’re probably going to feel like holing up in bed for a while, taking it easy.” Mangan glanced over his shoulder and shifted his eyes to Yakima’s pillow. “What’s the gun for?”

Yakima turned his head slightly, saw the horn-gripped handle protruding slightly from beneath the pillow. He reached up with his left hand and poked the gun out of sight. “What’s a gun usually for?”

Mangan was still looking at him over his shoulder as he rubbed his hands down with alcohol. “Don’t give me any trouble, Yakima.”

“A man like you.” Mangan shook his head. “They always bring trouble. Don’t take this the wrong way, son, but I’ll be glad when you’re gone.”

“You’re getting owly in your old age, Doc.” Yakima waggled his head around, stretching the kinks out of his neck. “Or maybe you’ve seen Deputy Stall hanging around outside your office.”

Mangan lowered his shirtsleeves and began buttoning the cuffs. “You and Stall save whatever you have between you for after you leave here.”

Later, when Mangan had gone home after dark, Beth returned to keep an eye on Yakima, to swab his face when the fever returned and to help him with the chamber pot. She cooked him a savory stew and served it to him with bread that her landlady, Mrs. Purdy, had baked. He was able to feed himself while she sat near the bed, knitting a sweater for Calvin.

They talked for a time about the boy and Mrs. Purdy and the landlady’s garden, which she’d gotten Calvin to help the woman weed. She said nothing about Seagraves but only that she hoped to be leaving soon, that she missed Nebraska and the family she had left there—a sister, some cousins, and a couple of aunts. Her husband’s parents were still there, and she thought she could live with them for a time, until she could get back on her feet again.

After Yakima had finished the stew, he slept but was awakened by the rumble of thunder. Rain pelted the roof and battered his window. Silver water cascaded off the porch overhang, dropping into darkness. He listened for a time before the somnolent sounds lulled him to sleep. He woke again to a male voice raised in anger, and jerked his right hand up without thinking.

He groaned as an iron crab chewed into his arm, then half turned and pulled the gun out from beneath the pillow with his other hand.

“I told you, Sylvus,” he heard Beth say in the doctor’s main office, above the rattle of rain against his window and the frequent thunder rumbles, “I’ve changed my mind. I will not be the wife of a man who can never love me, can never love my son!”

“Your son,” Seagraves said in a tight voice that trembled with barely controlled rage, “has shown no respect but only disdain for me. You’ve set a right bad example for him, Beth, right away telling him that he could sleep downstairs after I’d told him that he’d have his own room upstairs in the attic!”

Yakima hadn’t been out of bed except to use the chamber pot and to shuffle over to the window a few times, and he felt as though his muscles had atrophied. He grunted and groaned as he heaved himself to his feet, keeping his right arm in the sling, then shuffled over to the spike where his clothes had been hung. He was naked save for the bandage around his torso, and now as he walked across the wooden floor, he realized that even his feet hurt.

In the outer office, he could hear Beth and Seagraves continue to argue over the boy, Beth explaining that Calvin had been afraid to sleep on a separate floor from his mother since his father’s death, and that a little boy couldn’t be expected to work nearly full-time in Seagraves’s store when he was also attending class at the Red Hill school every day.

“And he certainly shouldn’t be expected to start working such a schedule the very day after his arrival in Red Hill and his mother’s marriage to a man neither she nor her boy had ever even met!”

“And why not, pray tell!” Seagraves demanded as Yakima pulled on his threadbare long-handles as quickly as he could in his condition.

“You don’t want a son or a wife,” Beth retorted, her voice rising sharply. “What you want, Mr. Seagraves, is a pair of slaves!”

“You don’t deserve any respect. Now go on and get the hell out of here. I’ve an appointment with an attorney in the morning, and I fully intend to have the marriage annulled as soon as possible.”

“Oh, no, you don’t. You will not make a laughing-stock of me here in my own town! No more than you already have, damn you!”

Beth gave a pained yelp, and Yakima, his long-handles unbuttoned, pushed through the curtained doorway, tramped down a short hall and into the main office. On the office’s far side, the door was open, showing lightning flashes and the rain that was hammering the outside staircase, the bullet-sized drops splashing silver in the lantern light. Wet footprints shone on the thick rug fronting the door and beyond it, tracing an arc.

Seagraves, clad in a yellow India rubber rain slicker and sodden high-crowned felt hat, was crouched over Beth, whom he had down on her knees, near the doctor’s rolltop desk. Seagraves had his hand wrapped around her right wrist and was twisting her arm around.

Beth sobbed and stretched her lips back from her teeth in misery, her hair tumbling down from the neat bun atop her head. Tears washed down her cheeks and over her chin to join the raindrops that had dribbled off the brim of Seagraves’s hat to the floor at his rubber boots.

“You can’t!” Beth cried. “You can’t make me come back. I’m taking my money out of the bank, and Calvin and I are leaving!”

Seagraves laughed and twisted Beth’s wrist harder, evoking a louder, shriller cry from the woman. “You just try it! That money is mine for all the work I did in preparing the house—”

Seagraves stopped when he heard the loud, ratcheting click, then turned sharply to see Yakima’s cocked Colt aimed in Yakima’s extended left hand at a spot between the man’s two predatory, yellow-gray eyes.

The eyes snapped even wider as Seagraves barked, “How dare you aim a gun at me, you half-breed heathen!”

Yakima kept the gun aimed at the mercantiler’s forehead, his nostrils flared with fury. He looked down at Seagraves’s hand that was still wrapped taut around Beth’s wrist, and the man suddenly let her go. His face paled slightly, and the fear in his eyes turned instantly to apprehension.

Seagraves jerked back suddenly, as though he’d been slapped. Yakima tracked him with the cocked revolver.

The mercantiler backed to the door, his wet boots squeaking on the floor, and cast another searing glare at his mail-order bride. “Why ... I wouldn’t have you back now if you begged me. You’re nothing but a trollop !”

Seagraves wheeled and fairly ran through the open door, and turned sharply to his left. He bolted down the steps, angling down beyond the sashed window left of the door, making the stair rail leap and jerk as a witch’s finger of lightning flashed over the next roof-top, and a peal of thunder made the room shake. Yakima shuffled over and closed the door.

Beth was on the floor, knees raised to her chin, her face in her hands. Her shoulders jerked as she sobbed.

He held her for a long time as she cried not only over Seagraves’s assault, Yakima knew, but also over the general lousy course her and her son’s lives had taken. Yakima wished there was something he could do for her.

For her and the boy. Something to make them happy and feel that the world wasn’t so cold and dark.

But all he could do was hold her and let her cry while the rain beat down and the thunder rumbled like cannons.