Looking back, wasn’t any of it their fault. Not really. I knew as well as anybody else you could only push a man so far before he got to pushing back, even if he was tiny and the one he was pushing was ten feet tall and as big around as a barrel. Did a great bunch of those Plains Indians commit depredations the likes of which curled the short hairs of every man jack reading about them back East? Well, surely. But none so grim as what was done to them, year after year, generation after generation. In those days, it was mostly about the buffalo, near as I could tell. Whites just about wiped them out, never a care that so many of the people that already lived around there depended on them for pert near everything in their lives. You take everything a man’s got, he’s liable to take something from you, just to get by. And you get to pushing him around on account of that, well, we’ve been over this already. Things got hairy. There was plenty of hate to go around. And sometimes, if you were on the unlucky side of the fence, you ended up pinned down in a grove of cottonwoods somewhere along the Caprock with half a dozen Kiowa raiders moving in for the kill.
The times were just like that. But I can’t say as any of the three of us—me, Boon, or Marshal Tom Willocks—was pondering the finer intricacies of politics there in that copse, surrounded by Indians and Willocks’ dead men.
“I should rather not kill if it can be avoided,” Boon said, narrowing her eyes to slits at the darkness.
“That’s a hell of a laugh coming from you,” said Willocks.
“Po-Lanh-Yope,” she said.
“That Siamese?”
“Kiowa. Little Rabbits. Warrior society for boys before they are men. They are only trying to prove themselves.”
I listened to her intently, amazed that she held this kind of information in her head. Sometimes Boon just knew things. Her brain was like a sponge.
“You will hack off a man’s head,” Willocks said, “but you will not kill redskin pups.”
“That’s about the size of it,” she said.
“She got a moral code all her own, Marshal,” I said. “You come to get acquainted with it.”
“Even if it’s them what killed those hunters you saw?” he said.
“Even if,” said Boon. “Didn’t know them. Not my business.”
“Well,” he said, “it is my business. This may not be my jurisdiction, but I still stand for law and order, by God.”
“That’s what Judge Dejasu thought, too,” she said, and she gave the marshal a cool stare. She only broke it when one of the Little Rabbits emitted a high yelp and the horses got to stamping their hooves. Willocks swung around, leading with the repeater, and squeezed off a shot as Boon reached out and knocked the barrel upward with her wrist. The shot went wild, the marshal aired his lungs with a volley of foul curses, and the Little Rabbits responded in kind with shouts and gunfire. We all three hit the dirt.
From where I lay, I could see that the shot was not as wild as I’d thought. The poor, scrawny nag I had been assigned at the jail in Revelation was on the ground, still breathing but getting badly trampled by the other horses. Willocks had shot the suffering beast in the ribs.
I also saw a colorful and beautiful array of armaments among the tramping hooves and scrabbling moccasins; long lances and war-clubs, a pair of shields made from the hides of buffalos and stretched taut over those beast’s massive skulls. Furs and feathers and bird’s claws adorned everything, a wild display of reds and browns and yellows that lent a decidedly ritual bent to the entire proceedings. These boys were going all out, and the ceremonial aspect to their gear drove into my mind a rare notion.
“This ain’t got nothing to do with killing,” I said. My voice was low and soft, and I wasn’t sure they heard any of it, so I pushed myself up to my knees and got unsteadily to my feet. The boys cried out some more and the horses continued to trample that unfortunate nag and strings were thrown to collect those that were doing the trampling. “I said this ain’t for killing, y’all. It’s what Boon said. Proving theyselves.”
“Get your head down, you God damn fool,” Willocks barked.
“You wouldn’t want to lose the privilege of killing me yourself,” I said, and with that, I set my .44-40 on the ground, let my hands dangle free at my sides, and walked slowly out of the grove toward the remuda.
“He has gone loco,” said Willocks.
Boon snorted.
“Sometimes he is more clever than I give him credit for,” Boon said. “Not often, but sometimes.”
The shadows grew thicker the farther from the fire I walked, but the silvery moonlight gave something of a path once my eyes started to get used to the difference. One of the mounts—I couldn’t tell which one—reared back on its haunches and kicked its forelegs up into the air. A Kiowa boy had a string around its massive neck and spoke quietly in his own tongue to calm the horse he was aiming to steal. Another boy, one of the two with the extraordinary shields, went ramrod-straight at sight of my advance and called out to his comrades, wide-eyed and dumbfounded. He wore breechclouts with leather leggings, his torso bare, and his raven-wing black hair hung long and loose on his shoulders. I thought he was the handsomest lad I was like to ever see in all my days, like a brown Adonis cut from stone. I also thought there was a chance, however insignificant, that I was making a terribly stupid mistake that would end with metal in my heart and my scalp on a lance.
I showed him my palms, then reconsidered and let my hands drop again. I slowed to a stop, about twenty feet away from him. Two of his friends stopped what they were doing, having taken notice, and gathered on either side of the handsome lad. They all beheld me with wonder for a heavy minute before erupting into peals of throaty laughter. I didn’t know what in particular was so funny about me, but I got laughed down often enough that I wasn’t too surprised about it. I might have chuckled a little, my own self.
From where I stood in the moonlight at the edge of the grove, I concluded that Boon had been right the first time. There were five of these Little Rabbits, two of them sitting on paint horses and the three laughing boys afoot. In short order, one by one, their laughter simmered down and died out. Then it was just me and them, all regarding one another as seriously as though the mirth never started at all.
I heard a scuffle behind me, in the cottonwoods, and fought the urge to turn and see. Boon surely had it in hand. I did not want to ruin whatever it was I was doing, the specifics of which seemed so clear moments ago but were murky as cowboy coffee now.
One of the handsome boy’s friends absquatulated his flank and leapt gingerly into the saddle of the dead Brute’s gelding. He raised his lance at the moon and spoke in words I could not understand, stern and serious and directed at me. He talked for a short while, a little speech, I guessed. Whether he assumed I could not make any of it out or not, I couldn’t say. But I paid rapt attention and listened as if I could.
When he was done speaking, the Little Rabbit on the gelding wheeled the horse around in a circle and gestured at the handsome boy and the other Kiowa afoot. Shoulders slumped, they went like they were bored back to the remuda and climbed on horses, a paint and the marshal’s piebald, and the handsome boy took up the string slung ’round the Irish deputy’s mount. Between the five of them they took four mounts and left the nag dying in the dirt. Only one of the original remuda remained, along with the pack mule. They would not leave us with nothing, which I respected a very great deal.
The Little Rabbit with the lance gigged the gelding and took off at a trot, riding a length away before turning about and loping right back at me. I dug my heels into the loam and set my jaw, watching that lance go up, the feathers at its tip shaking gorgeously in the sparse, silver light, and then swing down when he reined in of a sudden and touched the end of the lance to my left shoulder. He held it there and I did not move an inch. We met one another’s gaze for what was probably a few seconds but felt like ages and ages. The Little Rabbit’s considerable eyebrows drew together into a tight knit and he pressed on the lance just enough to put a little pressure on my shoulder. I resisted, stayed on my feet. The Little Rabbit relented, raised the lance, and turned his mouth down at the corners with a sharp nod.
He cried out; a war whoop, I guessed.
He had counted his coup.
One of his brethren whooped loudly, too, as the others pulled into a cluster of horseflesh and stamping hooves, preparing to take their bounty and light out, away from our little camp. I stepped back, slowly, three or four paces, keeping my eyes trained on the Kiowa who’d counted coup on me. He opened his mouth to speak, tilting his head back slightly, when a gun boomed behind me and the young man’s nose exploded in smoky cloud of blood and bone and skin. His left eye went wide as the right one sank into its cavity, and the Little Rabbit dropped away, off the left flank of his stolen pony, dead when he hit the ground.
Boon yelled, “No!”
I think I may have, too, but all the world was spinning by then, my skull a hazy puzzlement of shock and confusion. One thing and one thing only rang clear and true in my mind: Tom Willocks had killed that boy in cold blood.
And, in what can only be understood as a reasonable response to such an atrocity, the dead boy’s compadres drew down on us all, rifle barrels glinting in the meager moonlight, while they shouted and raged. I could not blame them one whit. It was what anyone would have done, white, Indian, or Siamese.
Which is not to say I was prepared to die that night. Rather, I dove for cover, away from the gunfire and into the brush. At my age and size, grace was long behind me if ever I knew her at all, so my move was clumsy and painful, and in the end, I slammed my spine on a series of sharp rocks jutting up from the cottonwood roots. I felt blood welling up on my back and I could hear the Kiowa shouting as they fired their rifles again and again into the copse. My anger at Willocks trumped my fear of the Little Rabbits. I had no doubt that once they were close enough to determine that we were not the buffalo hunters they sought, they had no intention to harm us unless absolutely necessary. As was so commonly the case with white men in those parts, Willocks made it necessary. It was to my amazement that I could hate him still more than I did already.
“Red fucking devils,” Willocks hollered, and his boots tramped past my head, through the brush and to the edge of the grove. More gunfire, his and theirs. Boon was not with him. I belly-crawled away from the fracas, back toward the guttering fire, and that was where she was, crouched and weeping.
She had found what remained of Franklin Merrick’s skull, burned black as pitch among the rocks and cinders. Had it been me, I might not have deduced it was him, but it wasn’t me. It was Boon. And Boon knew.
Her cry of no had nothing to do with the murderous shot Willocks fired into that Kiowa boy’s face. She was insensate, elsewhere, drowned in grief for the loss of man I’d never heard her mention in nigh three years before the moment I met him. Funny old world.
Terrible old world.
I stayed low to the ground and scurried up to her, caking my breeches and shirtfront and beard with dirt. Boon turned her head slowly to flash her huge, shimmering eyes at me. Eyes that fairly danced in the dying firelight. Sorrow and rage. I’d seen it before, and it both frightened me and tore at my heart.
I said, “Boon.”
“Franklin,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “The ball went up. Willocks killed one of them boys.”
“They try to kill you?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “It was all right. This is murder.”
“Okay,” said Boon. “All right, then.”
She sniffled and breathed in deep through a wide-open mouth, her wide brown eyes leaking tears in runnels before the skull in the fire pit. Gunfire continued the pop beyond the grove, complimented by shouts and cries. The heat from the fire dried the tears on Boon’s face and the lizard in her crept back to the fore as I studied her. She unleathered her Colt as she rose to her feet and said, “I am sorry I walked out on you, Edward.”
It was not what I might have expected in that particular moment, but I offered a sharp nod in response.
That said and done, she pivoted and went quickly toward the gunfire. I seized a carbine from the dead Brute on the ground, checked the chamber, found it empty, levered in a cartridge and followed Boon.