Chapter 11 #2
“I was inside. I had the shotgun, but I am to use it only when it is necessary to kill. Smith says it is better to stay out of sight. He doesn’t want anyone knowing I am here.”
“Could you hear what they wanted?”
“The men wanted to know where they could find the nearest doctor. My husband told them Elkhorn was the only place.”
“Either of them wounded?”
“No. They sat straight in their saddles.”
Caleb considered. However many road agents were in this gang, they only sent two to get help.
These fellas had to be the same ones who’d been spotted waiting for Doc and Smith at the edge of town.
The rest of the gang, or at least some of them, had taken the wounded passenger somewhere else.
Possibly to a hideout up past Devil’s Claw, as the judge said.
They must have been concerned about being caught here, so close to the holdup.
“Why did your husband go with them?”
“He had no choice. He was in the army in Wyoming, but he was no killer. He had his pistol, but it did not frighten them. They drew their guns and made him drop his in the dirt. Then they told him to fetch his horse.”
They were in a hurry, Caleb thought.
“I think they are the kind who fear nothing, Marlowe.”
Caleb knew men like that. The frontier was full of them. Men who had endured the hardships that this life threw at them and came to believe they were invincible. Tough, hard, clever. Many were just lucky. Until they weren’t.
Gunslicks were the worst of the breed. Always thinking they had the fastest draw, the steadiest hand, the best shot.
Always striving to prove it. Always looking to build their reputation by gunning down some other gunslinger who’d been around longer, whose fame had spread wider.
And then, eventually, their luck ran dry, and they called out the wrong man.
He knew exactly the kind of men Imala was talking about. He’d had to kill more than a few.
And he was tired of being the wrong man.
“That’s the last time you saw him?”
“The last.” She stood and went to the stove, busying herself there.
Caleb figured that come daylight, he’d search the tracks along the trail and see if there was anything distinctive about the horses those men rode in on.
“Anything else you can tell me about them? Anything that stood out with you?”
“One was called Dodger,” she said. “He was young, big, angry. He drew his pistol first. I think the other one thought he would kill my husband. I heard him say, ‘Easy, Dodger. Let the man get his horse.’”
“What were they wearing?”
“They both wore dark coats, not dusters. The young one wore a dark bandana. One wore a stovepipe hat and the other’s hat had a wide brim, like yours. I could not see their faces clearly.”
She went on to describe the horses they were riding.
Caleb decided this was the most anyone seemed to know about the members of this outlaw gang. He had a name. Dodger.
“Are you the sheriff in Elkhorn?” she asked, startling him.
She was looking at his chest. He’d pinned the tin star the judge had given him to his brown wool shirt. It was showing from under his leather vest.
“No. A special deputy, I guess. Only wearing this thing till I find Doc and your husband and the outlaws who took them.”
“You’re doing it alone?”
“That’s my way.”
“I know you are a tracker.”
“Spent a few years working at it.”
“When my husband was in the army, before we were together, he worked with the Indian scouts. That was long before we came here.”
“You’ve known him a long time?” As he asked it, Caleb realized he was prying. But this claim and the cabin were not a situation he ran into every day, and she seemed to want to talk.
“When I was young and still living among my people, I had a husband. We lived east of here on the plains near the river you call the Arkansas. We lived in peace and followed the buffalo. It was a good life.”
Imala looked at the door, and Caleb knew her mind was far away.
The Arapaho lived the life of nomads, traveling where the food was plentiful.
With the Lakota keeping to the lands farther north and the Cheyenne to the west, her people found themselves facing the hard push of settlers sooner than those other tribes. And they paid a heavy price.
“My family was all killed at Sand Creek. My parents and grandparents. My husband.”
Damn. Everyone knew about Sand Creek. When it happened, most folks back East at the time were sick of bloodshed.
The soldiers of the Union and the Confederacy had gone home, bone-tired from fighting.
Lincoln was dead. The rebel states were still smoldering, and everywhere, mothers were still grieving.
And then word spread of the massacre of women and children and old people out here.
The army said what happened was a disgrace. The colonel—a dog named Chivington—was relieved of his duties. He’d led his troops against a camp of friendly Arapaho and Cheyenne people down by Fort Lyons. Cannon fire and a cavalry charge. The butchery that followed was sheer madness.
There were stories Caleb wished were lies. This was one of them.
“Soon after the attack started, our chief, Left Hand, sent me and some others off with as many horses as we could drive away. If not, I would be dead too. Many times at night, I think of everyone that I left behind, of all those people who were left behind.”
Her face was grim. She was trying to keep her emotions in check, but he saw her clenched fist pressing hard against the tabletop.
“The soldiers attacking our camp were pure evil.” Her voice was strained.
“Afterward, I went back and saw what they did. The whites call us savages, but what they did was true savagery. Old women and men. Young women with their babies beside them. Children scalped. Mutilated. Cut to pieces. No one was left. All dead and left in their blood.”
Her eyes flashed at him, and she pounded her fist once on the table.
“The white man is my enemy. I will never forget what they did to my people.”
Fourteen years had not eased the memory or the burning emotion. How could it, Caleb thought. The pain of that loss had carved great slashes deep into Imala’s heart, into her soul. A hundred years would not erase it.
He understood exactly why Smith kept her from town. It was not so much to protect her as to protect some fool who thought the color of his skin made him better.
Caleb knew he was very fortunate he hadn’t taken both barrels of that Greener the moment he pushed that door open.
And he knew better than to offer her easy words. Some wrongs were too deep for comfort handed across a table by a stranger.
They sat in silence for a while as she made a visible effort to compose herself. Finally, she turned her dark eyes to him.
“But you asked about me and Smith.”
Just saying her husband’s name had a gentling effect on her. Softness replaced the tension of her jaw.
“We have been together almost ten years. I went to Wyoming with the survivors of my people. A few years later, when the prospectors came for gold, Smith was among them. He was finished with the army and went to the gold fields but lost his claim when he became sick.”
“What was wrong with him?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes, bad things in life drive out a person’s spirit. The two of us were very much the same.”
She took his cup and went for more coffee.
“I helped him. I made him think he needed to take care of me. In truth, I took care of him. Each of us needed a purpose. Someone else to worry about.”
She brought the cup back and put it in front of him.
War left too many damaged people in its wake. Like Imala. Like Smith. Like Doc Burnett.
Like himself, maybe, though he’d be damned before saying so aloud.
“We married. And when silver was discovered in Colorado, we came. For two years, we have been in this place.”
Caleb gestured to the cabin. “You’ve made a fine home here.”
Imala looked around her. “It pleases him. I still find it strange to stay in one place. There is very little silver, but I don’t think he minds. I work the garden, he works the claim, and we hunt together. It is a different life, but a good one.”
Caleb finished his coffee and thanked her for his supper.
“I’ll take my horse down by the creek there and camp for the night. But tomorrow I’ll go and find him.”
Her gaze was steady when she replied, “When he rode out with them, he did not look back. Smith always worried about me.”
“He sounds like a good man.”
She got up, took his cup, and went to the wash bucket without another word.
Caleb went out and led his mount to the creek where he could keep an eye on the cabin.
When he was settled for the night, he leaned back against his saddle and listened to the running water.
In the distance, a pack of coyotes were talking over their hunting plans, and an owl occasionally put in his two cents.
As Caleb watched the moon crouch on a peak to the west and then drop behind it, he had a bad feeling that Smith was never coming back here.
He hoped he was wrong. For Imala. For Doc. And maybe because he was beginning to understand that some homes were built quietly, one meal and one day and one person at a time.