The Tall Men (The Classic Film Collection) Page 5

  A man could see all that in the one glance he had time to throw across the fire to where they were fussing with Clint and Stark.

  There were just seven of them, all told. Four men, three women, not counting the girl. Naturally, she made eight. But she didn’t belong and you counted her out, right off. The others were all older people, tired and gray looking, without children or the hope of children, and mean poor. Their three slatbed wagons and half-dozen ribsprung mules weren’t fit for a Sunday drive around the settlements, let alone for bucking out across the open prairies to God knew where.

  But by the time you got to that point, the girl was back with your coffee and you were thinking about nothing else but getting it past your frost-cracked lips and down into your solid-ice belly.

  After it was down there you’d have a better head for asking questions.

  Ben seized the steaming tin, not feeling the sear of it on his numbed fingers. He fumbled it, almost dropping it, and the girl took it away from him.

  “I’ll pour, you drink,” she ordered softly.

  Before he could move to object, she had an arm behind him and the cup to his lips, was pressing that close to him that no amount of snow and cold could keep the fragrant, heated perfume of her body away.

  “Damn it all, ma’am, I kin feed my ownse’f—!”

  He straightened awkwardly, shouldering her away, reaching for the coffee tin. She shrugged, laughed, low and bubbly like slowing mountain water, handed him the tin. “Don’t be bashful, boy,” she murmured. “I won’t bite. At least,” she paused, eying him, “not till you’re better.”

  He took the coffee, needing both hands to get it to his mouth. When it was drained, he handed the tin back, caught her level stare and held it. “All right, ma’am, let’s have it. Who’re these folks and what’re you all doin’ here?”

  “Back where I come from,” said the girl, “strangers don’t ask questions.”

  “Back where I come from,” echoed Ben slowly, “strangers don’t ask questions less’n they’re aimin’ to git answers.”

  “So what?”

  “So I got a big nose for trouble, girl—” She didn’t miss the omission of the previous “ma’am,” nonetheless gave no sign of it, sat waiting through the little pause ahead of his conclusion. “Right now,” Ben grunted, “I’m smellin’ bad news, back to back, hunkered tight down on this camp.”

  The girl looked at him, nodding slowly.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your nose, mister. We’ve got hard luck till hell won’t have it. Question still is,” she added expressionlessly, “so what?”

  Ben returned the look, feeling the hardness of the girl and the bitter strength of her. “So nothin’, ma’am.” His own face was without expression now. “We owe you and your folks one, that’s all.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meanin’ we aim to pay off, likely.”

  “With what?” she shrugged caustically.

  Ben saw how it was with her, then. Three shrunken-bellied men, unfed and provisionless, had stumbled into a winter-bound camp where there wasn’t enough food for the eight souls already starving to death in it. He found the girl’s eyes again, his voice softening.

  “That bad?” he said quietly.

  “That bad,” she nodded. “The coffee you just had was it.”

  “No fatback? No beans?”

  “No saltpork for three weeks. Beans gave out three days ago. There was a little parched corn for the mules. We boiled it day before yesterday. Last of it went last night.” She stopped, then nodded with a sudden, strangely bright smile. “I’ve been eying that damn lead mule all day!”

  Ben nodded, came stiffly to his feet.

  “Well, keep eying him,” he said, wide mouth spreading to the first of the quick grins. “And learn yourse’f suthin.” He fumbled the cavalry coat open, slid out from its hidden neck-thonged sheath the eight-inch blade of the Kwahadi skinning knife.

  “Up-comin’, ma’am, you got one damn fast, free and firsthand lesson on how they dress out Missouri Elk along the bonnie Arkansas—”

  The girl rose lithely, stood facing him, her upturned face white against the storm darkness pressing in on the fire’s thin glow. The taunting, cynical smile was swiftly gone from the parted lips, their full warmth framing itself heatedly behind the low words. “You speak my language, mister. My name’s Nella Torneau.”

  It was a whisper meant just for him, coming deliberately back-turned to the fire and to the others beyond its light. Ben checked to its soft challenge, stood towering over her, silent now and suddenly narrow-eyed.

  “Mine’s Ben Allison,” he said at last. “Likely we’ll git on, you and me.”

  He wheeled away with the words, all at once awkward and angry with having said them, and with the way he had said them. He strode quickly toward the picketline, not looking back, not wanting to look back. He had said enough already. It was time to get away from her, far away from her, before he said too much. Women like that were not for him. He had little way with the best of them, none whatever with her kind.

  The girl watched him until his lean form was only a shadow, lost beyond the picketline and the nightfall gloom of the eddying snow gusts. When she moved at last toward the fire and the huddled group around it, the haunting half curve of the wanton smile was back in cynical place.

  Ben Allison had not turned away quickly enough.

  He had already said too much.

  Clint and Stark, recovering from their ordeal more slowly than Ben, did not see Nella Torneau until she returned to the fire after watching the latter start for the picketed mules. At this late point Clint had only time to stumble to his feet and breathe his standard, “Good Gawd Amighty!” when Ben was calling over to him to come help with the butchering.

  Turning to go, Clint took another long look at the girl, noting a few things his less worldly brother had not. Like the winter-pelt glossiness of her hair. And how blue-black and luxuriant as any Indian woman’s it was beneath the fox fur hood of her parka. But also how deep-curly and soft it was, like no Indian woman’s that ever lived. Then, too, the full, long grace of her figure, hardly complimented by the formless bulk of the old wolfskin trapper’s coat she had wrapped around it. Still, to an eye as young in ideas and old in practice as Clint’s, no set of pelts could hide the thrust of those deep breasts, nor the wicked mold and movement of those curving buttocks. Then, lastly, it wasn’t just having those things under that coat, but the way she stared back at you when she caught you noticing them that told you she was not only all the woman she looked, but more than likely not too dead set against proving it to you.

  Ben, whether noting his hesitation and its reason or merely anxious to get on with the skinning-out, called again and irritably now, and Clint grinned. To Nathan Stark, gaping openmouthed at the girl as though he had never seen a set of breasts before—not even under a winter coat—he drawled broadly. “Lay off. You hear me, little man? I seen ’em first.”

  He said it deliberately loud, so that the girl would not miss it.

  She didn’t.

  “Run along, junior,” she said unsmilingly. “Go help daddy cut up the nice mule. Mother’s hungry.”

  Clint laughed.

  He threw back his head and really let it come out in that sudden crazy way of his. Then, just as quickly, his voice was back in its old appealing drawl. “Mama,” he grinned loosely, “you ain’t one half so hungry as little Clinton Allison! Age, twenty-three, ma’am,” he said soberly. “Free, three quarters white, and single as a skunk at a Sunday school picnic.”

  With that and a second quick laugh, he was gone, striding free and long across the snow toward the picketline, whistling and swinging his wide shoulders as though starvation, south plains blizzards and slaughtering mules were all in the average day’s work.

  Nella looked after him as she had Ben before him, but with one difference.

  For Clint there was no curving smile, there was only the trace of tightness around
the long-lashed eyes, the hint of uneasiness in the straightened set of the soft lips. This one would make trouble. All women were alike to his kind. You could see his play coming a mile across the table, and you knew there was no least chance of bluffing him out of it.

  She shrugged, turning her cool stare on the last man.

  Nathan Stark blushed, lowered his eyes, got suddenly busy with his empty coffee cup.

  “It’s all gone, mister,” she said to him sarcastically. “You can suck on that tin till spring and you won’t get another drop.”

  This third stranger was not her kind. Maybe he was big and maybe he was all the man he looked. But he was too square and heavy through the body, too dully straight and blankfaced as well, and too dead set and bulldoggy looking around the jaw. That kind got ahold of a woman and never let her go. And never gave themselves, or her, an inch of love or fun in the bargain.

  With the dismissal she turned away from him to the emigrant menfolk of her own party. Rousing them from the apathetic regard of the fire, into which they had sunk back following the resuscitation of the frozen newcomers, she began rattling orders with all the feminine delicacy of an outpost drill sergeant.

  “You, Jed Bates, leave off your mooning and stir up the fire. Tom, you haven’t had any tobacco in that pipe for three days. Now quit sucking on it like a damn lost calf and get out and rustle in some more wood. Mr. Johnson, you chop up what he lugs in. Todd Bliss, rig up a spit. Best make a rack for the pot, too. Miz Bates—!” She called toward the wagons, one of the grayfaced women peering out beneath the canvas in dull-eyed answer. “Bring the big kettle. Scoop it full of snow on your way. The boys are killing a mule. We’ll boil a mess for tomorrow the same time we’re roasting that for tonight.

  “You, stranger—” She turned on Stark, her short words giving no lie to the dislike of him already forming in her. “Get off your dead end and go help Tom tote in some limbs. Don’t strain your milk now. Let him heft the heavy ones.”

  Fascinated, Nathan Stark followed Tom out into the trees. He could not get his eyes or his mind off the strange, tall girl who talked like a logging camp bully, yet moved about with a sinuous, she-wolf voluptuousness more wantonly female than any woman he had ever seen.

  Long after Ben and Clint had lost themselves in the blood and sweating blasphemy of the mule butchering, and Nella Torneau had forgotten him in the work of preparing the fireside against the rewards of that butchering, his eyes continued to follow the girl. He had never been this close to her kind before, nor in fact close to any woman before. Nathan Stark was twenty-eight and had never had a woman of any kind. There had been no time for one in his grubbing, heavy-handed quest to make of himself a rich and powerful man.

  Now, suddenly, he wanted Nella Torneau more than all the gold in Alder Gulch—or as close as he could come to wanting anything more than gold.

  And he decided as quickly, and in his blunt-jawed, inexorable way, that he would have her. Peculiar to that willful, blind way, and to his seeing in it only the purposes and ends of his own insatiable hunger for self and success, the decision itself was tantamount to possession.

  The girl was his.

  No one else should ever have her.

  Chapter Seven

  The ravenous disappearance of the first fifteen pounds of half-roasted mule tenderloin, plus a stout, bitter brew of willowbark tea concocted by the wilderness-wise Ben, brought the lowered spirits of the starving emigrant party back to the halfmast of rearoused hope. The presence of the two tall Texans, both clearly born to and masters of the heartless country surrounding them, worked an additional palliative of its own. Confidence and good humor alike returned, and within the hour the full story of the camp’s desperate plight was out.

  They were Kansans, as Ben had suspected. Their goal had been Oregon but owing to the risk of late winter storms inherent in the calculated gamble of a February start from the settlements, they had taken the southern route of the Smokey Hill Stageline. They had planned to leave it and turn north along the Rockies, hoping an early spring would catch up with them en route. Nella Torneau had joined them at the last stage station on the Smokey Hill run, before that road turned south. She had left the stage for reasons of her own, neither asked nor offered. She had simply sought and paid well for passage north. And she had proved the sole stroke of good fortune encountered on the journey. There was no mistaking the sober respect with which the emigrant men acknowledged the fact, nor the grateful nods with which their womenfolk agreed to it.

  But the luck of Nella Torneau was not enough.

  The expected spring weather failed to match miles with their weary progress. The feared late winter storms closed the Denver and old Fort St. Vrain wagonroads, driving them back south and forcing them to seek refuge at the nearest known outpost—Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas. They had missed the Bent’s trail somewhere south of the Smokey Hill road, had wound up four days ago at Ludlow’s Bend and Timpas Creek.

  To Ben’s mind, the story left but one clear course: get the party back into its wagons, guide them on into the fort as soon as the snow melted off. There was plenty of mulemeat and no question of anybody going hungry short of that melt-off.

  Nathan Stark at once objected.

  “We’ve got to get on, Ben,” he insisted with patent seriousness. “Why, it may be days after the weather breaks before the snow goes out to where wagons and weak mules can get through.”

  “No matter,” said Ben flatly. “We ain’t leavin’ these folks.”

  “Nothing,” added Clint, eying Nella, “could persuade us to such purfidjous ideas.”

  “Don’t be damn fools,” said Stark angrily. “I’m not suggesting we abandon these people. We can send a pack outfit to bring them in. They can be safe in the fort twenty-four hours after we get there.”

  There was no denying that, and Ben knew it. Knew, too, that he would have thought of it himself had his mind not been so full of that slinky girl. “It figgers,” he admitted. “We’ll head out soon’s the snow lets up.”

  “Which won’t be long,” added Nathan Stark tersely.

  Ben caught his glance, followed it up through the naked blackness of the willow and cottonwood branches.

  The twisted limbs still bent and writhed to the wind’s lashing violence. But beyond their tortured web, above the thinning drive of the snow, high and clear and black over the brooding stillness of Timpas Creek Grove, a narrow window of clean sky opened briefly.

  The angry wind gathered in a bellyful of flying snow and instantly and howlingly slammed that window shut. But Ben had seen the distant, lightquick dance of the stars. Stark was right. The blizzard had blown its guts out, would bleed itself to death sometime during the night.

  “We’ll go with first light,” he said to Clint and Nathan Stark. Then, turning to the waiting, hopeful members of the little emigrant band, he nodded softly. “Folks, you kin turn in and sleep easy. The wind’s about done. Come mornin’ she’ll be bell clear and lamb quiet, fur as you kin see up or down the Arkansaw. We’ll make the fort ’fore noon. Your troubles will be plumb past, come sundown tomorrow night.”

  With the reassurance, the camp was soon asleep, the emigrants in their covered slatbed wagons, Ben and his companions rolled in their blankets by the fire. The minds of the former were at rest with the clearing weather and Ben’s guarantee of their troubles being over by nightfall of the following day.

  Their sleep might well have been less sound had they known how eternally right was the tall Texan’s prediction. For the troubles of the gauntfaced Kansas pilgrims would indeed be over with sundown of the next day—and over for all the sundowns that would ever follow.

  The buffalo skull is the signpost of the prairie.

  Upon it the prowling wolf and the skulking coyote void their spattered stain, leaving yellowed word of warning to their next of passing kin that the territory is already preempted. Trotting sorefooted in their wake, the sad-eared settlement hound hangs back behind the dust of the last wagon
to scar the prairie sod with stiff thrusted scratches of his hind feet and to void, in disdainful turn, his leg-hoisted contempt of the wild brother’s warning. The twelve-year-old boy, out-riding the head of the next train with his watchful father, tarries a moment to dig in homespun trousers’ pocket for precious bit of charcoal, and to scrawl upon the whitened bone his own small footnote to a larger history.

  Lastly, there are others of the wasteland’s wanderers to whom the whited skull is both signpost and signal station. It was of these last two-footed nomads Ben Allison was thinking as he sat his lathered black ten miles east of Timpas Creek Grove.

  “What you think, Clint?” He broke his eyes from the buffalo skull with the question, sweeping the empty stillnesses of the valley, east and west.

  Clint studied the skull. About it were the freshly manured tracks of many unshod ponies. From around it to the level of the brown earth upon which it rested, the burying snows had been carefully banked and pushed back. Above the right eye socket a crude human hand, palm down and fingers pointing to the ground, had been daubed in gaudy vermilion. Above the left eye, starkly drawn in black charcoal grease-paste, was a Sharps buffalo rifle, the barrel broken away from the stock at the point of the breech, and pointing abruptly earthward. Below the eye sockets, across the bridge of the foreface, was what appeared to be two human ears connected by a straight, slashing line in garish ocher yellow.

  Clint shook his head. There was no grin lighting his handsome features, no customary easy softness in his tightlipped drawl. “By Gawd, I dunno, Ben. The hand and the busted gun read clear enough. They couldn’t mean but one thing, no matter the tribe that drawed them. But son of a bitch if I kin figger the yeller scrawl.”

  “Nor me,” said Ben. “But likely we’d better figger it. It’s their road brand, that’s certain. Jest as certain, we’d best know what herd they’re cut out’n.”

  “Well, I kin tell you two things,” nodded Clint. “It ain’t from no Kiowa nor no Comanche herd.”