Disclaimer: The characters used herein, with the exception of original characters (please don't borrow) are the property of MGM and Trilogy. No profit sought or accepted.
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Language, violence
Notes: Yakoke, Adrian, for a heart deep and true; words cannot say how much you mean to me, and to my writing. And to my new friend, Lynne Smith for beta-reading and valuable suggestions.
Bibliography:
The buffalo had grazed here and the women were glad to have the buffalo chips to burn, no smoke and good heat. The night was blessedly clear, but also very cold.
Elizabeth walked Vin over to the fire Josiah had laid near the bottom of a soft-sloping gully trying not to show her worry over his hesitant unsteadiness, and sat him down beside Chris. It was a long and painstaking process to get there, her hands passing over him in no-nonsense grips and him using Chris' hard-boned shoulder without apology, ignoring the critically appraising look the gunslinger gave him. Once down, he found he couldn't lean back on the saddle behind him without aggravating his ribs, so he folded his legs and leaned his elbows on his knees, feeling like an old rickety codger. He wanted to sigh but knew that would hurt and stifled it with a breathy grunt. His hands were shaking. Lord in heaven, it felt good to be still.
"Jules will be over soon with some supper," Elizabeth said, already turning back toward the shelter created from several nearly horizontal lodge-poles, their tips elevated about the height of a man across the low fork of a branch set into the soil. Several hides were being drawn over the wide-spread ends to create a shelter, and Nathan's tall dark form moved among the injured as they were carried inside, stooped close in answer to a faint cry of distress.
A quick rap of the back of the gunslinger's hand on Vin's knee brought his troubled attention from Elizabeth and that make-shift infirmary and he slanted a quick, uneasy glance Chris' way.
Too quick for Chris' liking, a dark flicker in the blue of Vin's eyes that he once might not've noticed or just chalked up to Vin being Vin. Now he knew better; the tracker was thinking about doing something he knew Chris wouldn't like. Chris' first reaction was anger, his mouth opened on hot words that fell still on his tongue with sudden insight; his eyes narrowed on Vin's lowered head and his mouth pursed tight, then released. There'd been times in Four Corners when his memories had become too much, times he'd sat in the saloon with a bottle and a glass and a mean black feeling thinking of laying waste to himself or anything stupid enough to get in front of him. Times when no one could've cajoled or reasoned him out of it, but Vin was the only one who'd never tried. Time and again the tracker had just sat down beside him and waited. Just there, like he'd be there forever if it'd keep Chris from killing himself or someone else. Josiah said Vin was a force on the side of the angels as far as Chris was concerned ...
Most of the time, Chris' urge to do mayhem subsided in the unjudging quiet of Vin's presence, and eventually, given enough whiskey, it'd bubble up in words he seldom knew he had, hard to say, hard on his heart. Vin would listen without offering advice, knowing a man had his own answers if he could find his way to them and willing to help him get there. Holding that way open for him. Though he knew destruction wasn't what was on Vin's mind now, he also knew the tracker needed another voice more often than he admitted. Things were black and white to Vin, he didn't see grays most of the time, couldn't hedge on his principles and his archaic ideas of duty and honor like a man needed to sometimes to do what was right.
So Chris swallowed his frustrated temper and found a smile that managed to be both patient and threatening at the same time. Vin's mouth twitched to see it out of the corner of his eye so Chris thought he'd made his point; when Vin looked at him straight on, he knew he had. A look that was as good as a promise not to act on whatever was chewing at him before he'd let a friend have his say.
"Supper!" Vin turned to see Jules coming, grinning right at him with that light in her eyes that she seemed to reserve just for him. It warmed him with an attendant pang of longing he couldn't face right then, not with her Uncle in such a bad way and a parting that would be hard on them both around the corner. Was it because he didn't want to lose her that he was considering ... his brain felt like pudding and he was so tired he was nearly seeing double, so he just stopped thinking altogether before he got thought himself into a corner he couldn't get out of.
Tin plates and spoons were cradled against Jules' chest in one arm, and she leaned hard against the weight of a heavy kettle in the other, and it was the first time Vin had felt hungry for ... well, he didn't rightly know how long. Buck and J.D. came after her like winter-thinned wolves head up after the smell of food, and Josiah ambled over from the shelter beyond with his arm loosely over Nathan's broad-yoked shoulders. Gently insisting, it looked like, that Nathan leave the injured for awhile and eat with them. Ezra followed behind them, his face obscured by the flat curl-edged brim of his woefully dusty hat.
Vin watched them gather as if they'd been drawn, feeling that himself, like threads being pulled back into a pattern they'd strayed from. Battered and exhausted as he was without a hint of giving up or giving in. Their eyes met, one by one, with nods and quick smiles of greeting and a shared sense of something that had been uncomfortably fluid becoming solid again. Vin steadied inside, surprised to feel what usually only came from being alone in the wild. The sense that things were right and in balance ... all he needed in the world within reach. He looked at Chris, his friend and meaning to stay that way, and that, too, moved him onto safer ground. Chris was taken off-guard by the sudden affectionate smile that creased Vin's face, but Vin didn't try to explain it. Duley would've liked Chris Larabee. Not would've - she did, she liked them all, because sure as the sun rose she'd entrusted him to them. She was always better at knowin' folks than he was.
They arranged themselves around the small fire with a chorus of groans and winces that, but for Ezra, who couldn't be sanguine about the injury he'd sustained, turned into the wry laughter of men familiar with the aches and injuries of a dangerous life. Under that weary humor, though, and the mocking realization that they were all still alive despite the odds, they scrutinized one another to assess injuries that had to be adjusted for among them. They weren't done in these mountains yet, not by a long haul.
Ezra's right hand was tucked into his vest, his coatsleeve bloody and the white cuff of his shirt showing through a wide tear, torn off and wrapped around his forearm. His foxy face was pale and unhappy, his elegance disheveled and unwashed and obviously deeply annoying to him. Nathan looked grey and heartsick, and the understanding of James' dire condition went around the small circle like a regretful weight. Buck, for all his determined good spirits, still looked to have taken some damage to his chest on the left that he was being careful of and trying to hide from Nathan. Chris seemed to be holding his own, pale and thin as a wraith but his eyes and his smile full of sharp ready teeth. J.D., though, had the constant ghost of a grin on his elven face like he was entirely enjoying being dirty and hard-run and embattled. Only Josiah looked as he always did, solid and calm and sure as a rock in a rushing river, and Vin wasn't the only one to take comfort there.
Jules served them a rabbit stew with spring greens and turnips, nearly bursting with restrained gladness to be among the seven again, an answer to prayers, and to have them together again, like they should be. They were quieter than they usually were, and some looked pale and had hurts both obvious and hidden, but that feeling was back among them, that invisible force they created among them that nothing could ever defeat. It made her feel safe and hopeful again. By the time she sat down beside Vin with her own plate, the pot was empty and the night closed around the glowing heart of their fire, a high spangled quiet threaded through with faint voices from the scattered camps and horses tucked here and there among the low hills. Spoons on tin and everyone too hungry for serious talk, although all knew there was such talking to do, and plans to be made.
"J.D., is that paint on your face, there?" Buck rocked his shoulder into J.D. beside him, nearly making the stew slop out of the kid's plate. J.D. saved his dinner first and then scowled at Buck.
"Yeah, it is. War paint, y'know?" Defiantly, even proudly, and in reaction to Buck's mocking eyebrows, he blurted, "And I got an Indian name, too." Now that was stupid! Buck latched onto it like a cat on a mouse and J.D. wished he'd kept his big mouth shut. Sometimes Buck hunted for reasons to make fun of him like it was his job or something, and the worse things were, the more likely he was to do it.
"Is that so!" Buck said with a gleam in his eye, prompting the kid when it seemed he wasn't going to say anything more. "Well, come on, what is it?"
"Hohahe iye Tashunke-ki" J.D. replied reluctantly, the Lakota words awkwardly precise and the tops of his cheekbones as red as fire. He glanced at Vin to see his reaction, but the tracker was mopping up stew with a soda biscuit and seemed not to have heard any of it.
Buck shook his head in exaggerated admiration, looking around the fire to include them all and hungrier for some fun than for food; things had been grim and grimmer for way too long. "Well, now," He said, showing a lot of very white teeth in his scraped and grimy face, "Ain't that just fine! Makin' new friends n' all ... why, we'll have t'get you a new sign for over the Sheriff's Office!" He nodded in all apparent satisfaction, "Yep, that's mighty fine." And just when J.D.'s shoulders began to lower in relief, just when the kid thought he was home free, Buck pounced.
"So ..." Dragging the word out with a wicked glee that made Josiah and Chris, even Nathan, smile and shake their heads, knowing where he was headed just as well as J.D. did. "What does that mean, anyway?" Having guessed by J.D.'s over-careful pronunciation and subsequent focus on his plate that he had no idea. This suspicion was verified by the kid's immediate and deeply wary flush, and he filled his mouth so he wouldn't have to answer right away, chewing slowly in excuse as he wracked his brain trying to think of a way out of this.
Catch the Bird had given him the name, and Catch the Bird had a sense of humor J.D. didn't get half of. The young warrior hadn't been able to translate the words into English for J.D. - or so he'd indicated - so J.D. had no idea what it meant and wasn't sure that there hadn't been laughter in the dark eyes. Always wary of being the butt of even well-meaning jokes, he'd meant to ask Vin about it and mentally kicked himself for saying anything about it before then.
"Well ..." He said, swallowing nervously and knowing it was too late to take it back and that Buck sure wasn't going to let it go ... He shot a pleading look at the tracker; if it was something foolish, maybe Vin wouldn't let on ... he'd never hear the end of it if it was, Buck would have a sign put up over the door of the Sheriff's Office, oh, Buck could take a joke way too far ...
"The Horses Welcome Him." Vin said offhandedly into his plate, but when he picked up his head and cocked it toward J.D. there was a tired admiration in his eyes that made J.D.'s chest swell with pride - and no little relief. He turned and grinned at Buck triumphantly, and with a loose gesture of invitation very like Buck's own, said, "Well, I guess you can just go right ahead and make that sign, Buck!"
"Just the mares, or the stallions too?" Buck asked innocently, and J.D.'s barked an incredulous laugh, free to enjoy the fun himself now that he wasn't the target.
"Yeah, I'd like to hear what they call you, Mr. Maggotism!" Which Buck had wondered himself a time or two - whatever it was made the women laugh, and for all their smiling looks not one had let him ...
Buck figured it was wisest to let this go just now, since Josiah's peaked eyebrows were obviously inviting J.D. to ask him about that name and, by the wicked glint in his eyes, it wasn't something Buck wanted repeated. He elbowed the kid again and his endangered dinner was distraction enough.
Josiah eased over onto one hip, propping himself up on his elbow as he put his empty plate on the ground in front of him. Nathan got up before the preacher could stop him and excused himself to return to his patients, and Josiah watched him go with a sorrowful scowl on his hard-boned face. Then he looked over at Vin and asked the question that all of them had wondered how to ask;
"We goin' all the way to the Rosebud with the Lakota, Vin?"
Vin set his plate down, too, shaking his head; "Josiah, I been workin' too hard just to stay on my horse to think about it."
Which wasn't in the least true, and Josiah's faint smile said he knew it. In fact, Vin had been thinking about little else, caught once again in conflicting responsibilities to Monroes. What he had to do for Duley would come first, had to, he couldn't leave the people without attending to the sacred duty Chased By Water had been keeping for him for too long. But after ... hell. He caught another sigh before it expanded beneath broken rib-ends; for an orphan, he was having a damned hard time handling all his familial obligations. The irony of it made him smile in spite of himself, shaking his head.
Silence fell, cohesive, but not entirely comfortable in having no answer to Josiah's question, and no idea what their next move would be.
Ezra, however, wasn't feeling particularly patient, and he was damned tired of wild cards popping out of figurative sleeves at the worst possible moment. Vin was a thoughtful man, and he planned every hunt he undertook in layers of contingencies, so Ezra didn't believe he hadn't thought now beyond his next breath no matter what condition he was in. For once in his life, Ezra wanted every card face-up on the damned table, because anyone who interfered with him getting back to civilization via the shortest possible route was going to find out they'd bitten off more than they could chew. Maybe they'd had a legitimate cause to begin with, but with war coming down on their heads and Gerald Monroe dead - which rather obviated their whole reason for being here - it was long past time to get the hell out of these mountains before they all ended up dead and everything they'd been through went for nothing. Jade eyes held on Vin across the fire, though the tracker wasn't looking at anyone, seemingly attentive to some private thought.
"It hardly seems prudent for us to continue in this company, Vin, nor is there much point to it. We have no place in the Indian's war-camp with every soldier west of the Mississippi coming after them, we're useless and worse - a liability to them. James is injured, the ladies should be taken out of danger - which is increasing exponentially, by the way - and I am sure I'm not the only one who is more than ready to return to the amenities, crude as they are, of Four Corners."
He flexed the fingers of his injured hand with a grimace, looking down at it almost accusingly, and when he looked up he found Vin's eyes on that very hand with a badly hidden worry. Ezra couldn't seem to close his fingers all the way, which caused him no end of anxiety, but pity and guilt from Vin Tanner were the last things Ezra wanted, and his jaw jumped.
"This is no longer the venue where we can be most effective." He said stubbornly, but Vin said nothing.
"Oh, c'mon, Ezra ... " Buck drawled, laying back on his saddle with a hand surreptitiously pressed to the top of his chest where he suspected a broken collarbone; "I'll let you win some money off me and exercise that hand of yours." The gambler's green eyes sparked hotly from under the brim of his hat, anger quickening to imagine such insufferable mercies all the remainder of his days.
"Mr. Wilmington, your poker skills are so abysmal that I would win every penny in your pocket playing with the toes of my feet ... " Ezra said with a stout edge of temper, but his eyes narrowed shrewdly. "And I do not intend to be distracted off the subject. Whether or not I can shuffle a deck with my customary alacrity will not matter a whit if I am dead in this wilderness for no reason but indecision. By now we all know it's goin' t'hell in a hand-basket, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. I do not believe I'm being overly selfish to want to Go. Home." Emphasizing those words with real fire and probably not realizing what everyone else around the fire did - Ezra had referred to Four Corners as 'home', a place he had never hesitated to denigrate in floridly scornful terms.
"Our reasons for being here have been rendered moot by recent events, we can do nothing without access to the Judge's allies or any resource whatever - Gerald wasn't the only one involved, need I remind you? The Judge agrees that we need to return to civilization as quickly as possible to effect what justice we can."
"That's true, Ezra." Their heads rose as Travis emerged from the darkness, walking slowly, his hands deep in his pockets and a thoughtful frown carving heavy creases alongside his mouth. Mary, who had been walking with him, handed Josiah the coffee pot and tin cups she'd been carrying, her unabashedly anxious look taking in their rough and battered state. They appeared to be lounging comfortably and they seemed at ease, but Mary was too familiar with them not to see their endurance was flagging, injury and exhaustion taking it's toll. Her eyes caught on Chris, as every look from him in the past few days seemed to catch her, the thoughtful focus in his regard that had never been there before. That made her nervous and flushed and ... nebulously hopeful. And terrified. That she had no time now to indulge.
His smile was lazy and slow and sweet and she felt it all the way to her toes, felt it in her face as that smile got an answer Chris obviously liked. Eyebrows rose around the coals, quizzical looks at how open the flirtation was, and how serious after all this time.
Well, Buck thought with a sweet hidden quirk of his mobile mouth, now hadn't she just found that particular smile he'd never seen on her cool elegant face before, and Larabee was watching her walk off with an intensity usually reserved for someone who was trying to kill him. Buck was almost afraid to hope those two would finally do one thing or the other and quit dancin' around what everybody with eyes could see was between them. Yessir, life might get right interesting once they were all back in Four Corners. Buck never doubted a minute they'd all get there, didn't do a man any good not to hope for the best when there was damn-all else he could do.
Travis declined a seat, standing idly behind Josiah smoking a cigar in apparent deep reflection as the rest finished their meal and Jules gathered the plates and spoons. In fact, he was observing them all with a mixture of guilty trepidation and enormous pride, seeing every bruise and wince and awkward hitch of injury in their movements, dismayed by how hard-run and ragged they looked, and yet still heartened by the calm accommodation of that condition among them. Not run to ground yet, no, and maybe never would be. Like a deep-hearted horse answering every need, they'd just drop dead, no middle ground. He'd seen that look between his daughter-in-law and Chris, of course, but Orrin had long since refused to speculate or worry or hope in that direction. Some things it was better to keep a distance of - particularly with a pair so unpredictably volatile.
He shook his head, amazed anew at the twist of fate that had brought these seven disparate characters together, forging a force of will and character and action that was helping shape the future of this nation. They neither knew it nor would likely believe it if he said so, and he turned the moistened end of the cigar between his pursed lips and looked out at the moon-struck undulations of the plains. Like a dream, and he realized with a deep melancholy that it would, indeed, be only a dream to future generations. Everything he looked upon, this land, these men, the Indian nations - all of it would be gone, America would continue to expand in an outward rush that was too fast, too single-minded, to see what was being lost in their short-sighted haste. It would be a violent conquering without sympathy or comprehension, and in the end, his daughter-in-law would probably have a more profound role than he ever could. One day her passionate words would be read by enlightened minds. Perhaps one day, all the terrible, cruel mistakes he knew were coming hard on their heels might be understood in the perspective of history. If it wasn't too late, if the Indian nations could find a way to preserve their wisdoms, their cultures ... it was not a good feeling to have to hand his hope over to a distant, unknowable future.
He sighed, surprised to have it break in his throat with emotion, and waited until Julianna had dropped the plates into the empty pot and taken them away, making sure she was out of earshot. Then he said,
"Ezra is right. We need to contact our allies in Washington, we need to get the Justice Department on these matters with all possible haste."
"We'll need to set safeguards in place, your Honor ..." Ezra insisted, "Against being taken out one by one in our beds, we need evidence in secure locations and we need to make that as public as possible. I do not intend to spend the remainder of my days lookin' over my shoulder."
Travis looked down at him with a jump of jaw-muscles, rocking heel to toe, but Ezra did not demure. "Yes, Ezra ... we will have to do that, indeed. We will not be able to stop this war ..." Obviously a bitter pill he could barely swallow, it crimped his mouth and made him clench his teeth a moment, "But we can still upset some of it, bring some of those who planned it to justice if we move before they have time to cover their tracks, slip back into the woodwork and leave us no trail to the ones we don't yet know about."
They listened, and he was grateful. "I propose we leave the Lakota in a few days when we come near to Fort Kearney, pick up the train there."
Chris, looking down at the coffee cup he was turning slowly between his palms, said, "You sure Monroe doesn't have friends there? Maybe on the lookout for us?" He raised his eyes slowly to Judge Travis, sharp as a hawk, "Maybe on the lookout for them land grants?"
Ezra watched them both carefully over the rim of his own cup, hearing his own questions to the Judge of an hour ago being reiterated. Ezra considered them imperiled no matter what they did, what direction they took. They had soldiers hunting for them as well as the Indians they were in the company of - which could too easily be construed as treason - surely the survivors of Gerald's troop had made it back to Fetterman carrying tales of the seven gunman fighting alongside the Indians. Worse, Monroe's cohorts might, indeed, have been alerted to the ... complication of Travis' party, a Judge rather than an Indian Agent and with an agenda that promised ruin for them all. If they knew that, they'd be keen as cats to kill every one of them long before they had the opportunity to carry the sordid tale out of the wilderness. Ezra was in no way confident that they knew all of Gerald's allies, and those they didn't know would be far more dangerous than those they did. As soon as their accusations were proffered into a public venue, those unknown allies would be alerted and have the advantage of anonymity to ensure that none of them ever made it to a wider hearing. Ezra did not like being ignorant of his enemies.
Travis' heavy eyebrows dropped low as stormclouds over his piercing eyes and his cleft chin rode forward as he considered Chris' question, and the implications that had remained unasked. A dark glance toward Ezra forstalled a repetition of arguments the gambler had made earlier in private, but Ezra's return look warned Orrin that he would not stand by for any obfuscation now, not with these men's lives on the line. Obviously he was willing to scrap publically with Orrin about it, which persuaded the Judge of his sincerity. He would need Ezra's paranoid precautions in the months ahead, and so would his daughter-in-law and Elizabeth Monroe; Ezra's suggestions for self-preservation thus far had been wily as a spider spinning an impenetrable web.
"I think at most there have been some reports about an Indian Agent and a band of desperados ..." One of those dark eyebrows lofted, the humor dark, but there. "But I doubt Gerald will have shared his suspicions, or what he eventually found out about us - he brought us into it, after all. The Monroes were far too smart not to be as wary of their allies as they were of us, there's very little honor among thieves of the caliber we're faced with here. The soldiers at Fort Kearney will have neither the time nor the inclination, considering the impending outbreak of hostilities, to wonder at a federal judge and his daughter who have chosen an inopportune time to go adventuring. As to Monroe allies ... " He spread his hands helplessly, but the determination on his face was not in the least helpless. "Obviously we don't know all of them, and Ezra has already raised the possibility that Gerald might have engaged those in Washington and elsewhere against us. I, however, do not think that too likely."
Ezra frowned, and Travis faced him with a vague gesture that encompassed the earlier concerns he'd rather heatedly expressed. "It is my considered opinion that Gerald would not render himself vulnerable by sharing any hint of trouble in his own back yard ... he was a pivotal player, but not indispensable. Men like this ... " A disgusted sound escaped him, a flip of his hand as if throwing away something repulsive, "Will savage each other the instant a weakness makes it advantageous to do so. I believe he was quite cognizant of this, and also confident that he could remove us without ever alerting his allies. In any case, we can arrive in small parties; Elizabeth and Julianna can take James, perhaps pretending to be the family of an Officer going east for medical care and safety - they probably won't be the only ones."
"That's a big chance you're willin' t'take for them." Vin said, his voice dry and light as tinder and the cock of his head aggressively disbelieving, "You could be puttin' 'em in a nasty fix."
Travis nodded in acceptance of his concern. "Those that know of the land grants are few, Vin, and I believe we can get in and out of Kearney without drawing too much attention. There have to be supply trains coming and going, troop movements ... James needs a doctor, we can't keep dragging the poor man around on a travois. Several of you can ride with them as hired protection, it wouldn't be out of the ordinary."
He paused, and his dark eyes were urgently serious; "We have to get them - and our information - into the right hands as soon as possible."
Vin didn't say that James would likely not make it out of these mountains alive, which already weighed heavily on him. And he didn't say that he wouldn't be returning to Four Corners with them if they parted from the Lakota before they reached the Rosebud. He had that duty that he wouldn't be able to undertake short of that great camp, it wouldn't be safe to stop now. But even that wasn't the all of it. He just couldn't deny the need that was almost desperately strong to see that great convocation, unprecedented, historic. It was important to him to stand witness for the people, to be among them in their glory and strength, to hear the drums and the songs one more time before ... He turned his head sharply and closed his eyes, but the scene was inside him and couldn't be so easily denied. For a moment it was hard to breathe.
At the same time, it was a panicky feeling to think of being parted from Jules or Elizabeth so soon, he hadn't figured out yet what he was supposed to do there, where his duty truly lay. Every time he thought he'd made up his mind, his heart overset the decision and spilled out all his careful logic and reason like so many apples out of an overturned cart.
But these were his personal concerns, and his personal concerns had already cost his friends more than he liked to consider. He dropped his head without agreeing or disagreeing, simply backed out of the conversation entirely. It was time to let the boys make their own decisions about where they'd go and what they'd do. He felt Chris' eyes on the side of his face and knew he couldn't wait long to talk to him. This time, he had to explain himself, hiding nothing, Chris had earned that trust. Something occurred to him then that he hadn't thought of before and he looked at the narrow gunman before he could stop himself. Chris' eyes flickered suspiciously at his expression, his mouth opened, but Vin wasn't ready to say yet what he'd thought. It was an idea fraught with complications for them both, yet ... Chris was the only one who might understand. And he might finally be doing Chris the favor he'd been looking for since they'd met. Not that he'd thank him for it, but ...
Travis looked at the exhausted set of Vin's shoulders, the distempered burn of Chris' eyes on Vin, and then on him, at the bruises and pallor and deeply curved backs. "We don't have to decide this now, gentlemen. Think on it and we'll discuss it further tomorrow, alright? We've got a few days."
Ezra threw his uninjured hand into the air with a bitterly frustrated sound, but the rest were content to let it lie. They weren't men who liked to leave important matters unresolved, but none of them could think straight just now, and full stomachs were making them all acutely aware of the need to sleep.
Vin watched the Judge walk away, Ezra in animated argument beside him and the old man's shoulders bowed by what he would surely view as the failure of his mission. No one man could've stopped this war, Vin knew that, and he figured Travis had to know it, too. He might've thought at the outset that he could do something, but by now he had to accept, as Vin did, that it would have come sooner or later no matter what plots were being hatched by whom or which could be stopped. The bitter truth was that there were simply too many white people and not enough Indians. What a terrible simplicity that was to encompass the extinction of a people and a way of life, ironically inexorable as nature itself. As inevitable as the extinction of those big lizards Ezra insisted had once roamed the earth before there were any people at all. But the world didn't need big lizards like it needed the wisdom of the Lakota, of all the nations who had lived here since time began and knew the secrets of the earth and how to prosper in harmony with her mysteries. What would happen when the whites had conquered every corner? Subjugated every natural force and commodity? How could the world survive if every harmonious balance was disrupted willy-nilly, disregarding the natural safeguards that had always protected the land? It made his head hurt to even imagine it, it made his heart ache like he would die and he just couldn't ... he was so tired, and it was so hard to hold any hope for anything.
"Ma'am? Miz Monroe?" Nathan's soft voice roused Elizabeth from exhausted sleep. With a jerk of alarm she flung the blankets aside, her heart in her throat, but Nathan's face was calmly reassuring so she knew James had not died alone in the night without her. The healer's dark eyes, however, were still grave.
"He's callin' for you, Ma'am." He said, and she immediately stood up, struggling to untangle the blankets from around her legs and fumbling into her coat, her eyes searching his face, "Is he feverish?" Whispering so as not to wake Mary, noticing then that her niece was no longer beside her but guessing where she was and knowing it was the safest place she could probably be. Julianna had spent an hour gathering grasses to lay under Vin's bedroll, and thoughtful as it was, Julianna wasn't one to lay on the hard ground herself when Vin could so easily be convinced to share. What would she do when it came time to part from him? How would be keep Julianna by her side, content in Virginia ... these were questions for another time.
"No, no, he ain't fevered ..." Nathan said, wishing he could take some sort of comfort from that. "But I want him t'rest 'n he won't." Confused and frustrated, as he always was when injured men just wouldn't do what was sensible; "He wants t'talk to you and nothin'll do but that, he won't wait, says it has t'be right now."
The night was so quiet that the sounds of her clothing as she moved seemed loud. She nodded at J.D. sitting watch on the swelling rise above one of the camps as she passed, long shapes still as death under robes around it, and one of Julianna's booted feet sticking out from under the heavy buffalo hide over Vin.
Nathan stopped at the edge of the firelight and touched her arm, handing her a few blank pages that must have come from Mary's journal, and one of the two pencils Mary had managed to hold onto. She looked quizzically at him, hesitating, but he just nudged her forward, no answers in the ancient sympathy of his eyes.
For a moment she thought her brother actually looked a little better, a bit of color in his cheeks and a certainty of eye and movement, but she quickly realized how false that impression was. She opened her mouth to insist he rest and conserve his energy, but that set of his chin hadn't changed since he'd been a boy. His hand was hot on her wrist, pulling her close.
"It is my life, sister, and I will choose how to spend what's left of it. Don't scorn it, please don't let it be in vain ..." She couldn't bear the knowledge in his eyes that she'd refused so steadfastly, but nor could she fail to honor his wish. His dying wish. Bleakness spread in her heart, but she sat by him, and she accepted the bitter gift of his final hours.
It took two hours, the pace of James' voice quickening near the end as his strength flagged, desperate to get it all into her hands, into her memory, which he knew to be as keen as his own, and onto the paper he'd begged Nathan to get so she could record some of the details of secret accounts and safe combinations and convoluted interrelationships of business and politics and crime. Her face, increasingly pinched with disappointment and shock at the breadth and reach of her brothers' calumny, hurt him deeply, but he had to face it, had to do what he could to earn forgiveness. It cost him dearly, the talking and remembering, fighting to remain lucid, not to forget anything, but he'd known that price before he began. Without this information, these secrets, his sister would never be able to stand against the enemies she would face, would not even know who some of them were who could work behind the scenes against her and imperil everything she possessed, even her life.
When she began to ask questions, James didn't bother to disguise his relief at how cogent and incisive they were; he'd always known his sister had a quick mind, but now he realized that she was also far more sophisticated than he'd ever guessed. All these years she'd hidden that from him, and from his brothers, more cunning than he'd suspected to never show any capability she didn't have to. She already knew a good deal of the nefarious businesses he and his brothers had conducted, many of the names he recited to her did not even raise an eyebrow. Shame burned in him to realize how much she had known, for how long, accepting his lies and knowing them for lies all along.
In the fireplace wall of his bedchamber in town was a safe no one, not even his trusted housekeepers, knew of. Gerald, also, had a safe in his home separate from that his family knew of. Bit by bit the history spun out in the names of Senators and Congressmen, Bishops and Judges, officials elected and appointed. Layer upon layer of intrigue and double-dealing and clandestine bargains and where she could find documentations that would be irrefutable in any court of law. How it hurt to see the sense of betrayal in her face, but she grasped the complexities with grim realism, and as he watched her, James realized with a conflicted jolt of pride and horror that although justice was her first instinct, it was not the only avenue she intended to explore. He should have known.
Alone, she had maneuvered her way around every trap Gerald had ever laid to take the farm and her profitable businesses from her, had thwarted every attempt to use them as fronts for his own illicit dealings. It had become a hobby of sorts for him, and she had deterred him every time with seemingly naïve luck and a cadre of attorneys she kept on retainer. Luck! Attorneys! Those attorneys they'd always thought she'd relied on were following her orders all along, it was she who unerringlt divined the worm at the heart of every apple Gerald had ever offered! Oh, what would Gerald have thought to realize how much savvy this seemingly innocent sister possessed, how much she'd known of their businesses and never used against them. And why hadn't she? Gerald and Stephen would never have hesitated to use any means possible against her, and yet she, for all these years, had the means to destroy them and never had ... he wondered, now, at the end of his hours, how many of the plots they'd laid that had failed could be attributed to her.
Finally James lay back, spent as he could never remember being before, grey inside and his skin cold, watching her face as everything he'd said settled into order. The fire that lit in her eyes as she began to consider possibilities he could only guess at. With a wan smile that could not express the full sweeping rush of his pleasure, he took comfort in knowing that his sister was capable of doing far greater things with the wealth and influence inherited from her brothers than he had known. Not that she would use it to increase her own wealth, and not that she had ever had any interest in power, political or otherwise ... she looked down at him and laid her warm hand along his cheek, and he saw in her eyes the determination he might have had himself if he could have lived a little longer. She would carry it on for him, her eyes said so, her tender touch. He was too weak to hold that hand to him as he wished to, all he could do was turn his cheek into it and close his eyes, a tear slipping down the white flesh of his face. Praying, thanking God for a gift he had never expected and could never have imagined.
Elizabeth would find ways to repay what had been stolen from the innocent, rebuild what had been destroyed, safeguard what her brothers and his cohorts had rendered vulnerable to their predation. He had no idea that tears were running a stream down his temples, no impression of anything more than her face and a gratitude he could only convey through his eyes. With those resources and the clandestine information she now possessed, Elizabeth could undo a legacy that should have damned him to Hell ... he could have no more worthy heir than this sister, whether she realized it herself yet or not. More of the wolf in her than he suspected she knew, and though he regretted being the catalyst of that discovery, he could not regret the good she would make of his lifelong wickedness.
Elizabeth sat vigil beside her brother, patient as a graveyard angel and love a quiet light in her eyes. She held his hand in both of hers and caressed the backs of his fingers, had sung a quiet lullaby from when he was a boy and feared the dark. Praying every moment that he would breathe again, and again, and live through this night, and come home with them and be with them and find forgiveness and redemption. She had no doubt he could, having always had a nobility more stubborn than his sinning ways. They were his brothers and he had always gone where they led even when his conscience weighed on him for it. He was better than that, Elizabeth knew that, and perhaps James did as well, now.
His amber lashes lay unmoving on his skin, which was so pale it seemed translucent, his hand cool and damp despite the warmth of several small fires banked within the shelter. He looked so young, and so inexpressibly tired.
Still and quiet she sat, seeming at peace and full of hope in case he should open his eyes, but inside her mind raced and stumbled through the labyrinthine machineries of wealth and industry and political power that James had given her. Every morally-outraged fiber cried out to sell everything her brothers had ever amassed in their cold-hearted greed and give it, with every cent of every account in their names, to some charity. Every righteous and honorable bone in her body ached to expose the cancerous heart of this cadre of influential men who occupied honored places in government and society, force them to face justice and pay for the damage they'd done. If only it could be so simple to rid herself of this awful legacy in discreet anonymity. Once, it would have been. Not because Elizabeth wasn't capable of cunning and ruthless instinct, but because she'd been content with the farm, Julianna, her charities and good works. Now her brother's kingdom was all in her hands and she could not pretend not to know what she knew, nor fail to honor the unasked responsibility.
She was finding out that the woman who had left Virginia, who'd looked back in fearful longing to those well-tamed fields and woods, to the bustling commerce and society of the cities where she was so at home, would not be the one who returned there. This woman under the endless stars of a sky that stretched from horizon to horizon, on the vast rolling plains of the frontier, was not the same one who had departed so many months ago. Oh, it would be a difficult life, dangerous and trying ....
But somehow in this wilderness, among these people, the fundamental truths of actions and emotions rose like gracious bones out of so much superfluous flesh. Honor and dignity and humor, courage and faith the likes of which she'd never experienced and still did not understand.
Elizabeth lifted her head with a deep breath that opened her into the cold scatter of breezes against her skin, she closed her eyes, tasting the difference in the wild playful winds of the plains. Her eyes fell closed, feeling the roughness of her own hands and the fragility of James', the solid earth beneath her and the enormity of what would be destroyed. Of what she was considering.
This wilderness, the Lakota and Cheyenne and Arapaho she had met and lived with, who had welcomed her and defended her and provided for her ... Little Eagle, Two Badgers. Mary Travis and her father-in-law, Chris and the rest, vividly mythic, saw-toothed mountains and sighing forests and rolling waters. Grinding exhaustion and the exultant joy Vin was, and would always be ... all of these things had changed her, abraded away blind civility and tidy manners and life by protocol. Her teeth felt sharper in her mouth. She had gone so far beyond the boundaries that had comfortably circumscribed her former existence that she would never find her way back, nor ever be content with any boundaries again.
She'd been terrified of leaving that good order and the responsibilities that shaped it, the life she understood, just as her mother had been. And now she had learned from her own brothers how false all of it was. She hadn't been part of their machinations, and she hadn't known how far-reaching their wickedness was, but she could not pretend total innocence. She knew who they were. So.
It would only serve the monsters who had helped build it for her to quietly dismantle the dark kingdom her brothers had built, few of those conspirators would ever face justice even with proof laid plain against them, she was no fool. The nation wanted heroes and an excuse to take what they needed to rebuild after the war, to make them a world power and ensure their survival and prosperity. Her lips pressed thinly together, her eyes turned flinty. God would treat with those men in heaven, but while they walked this earth, Elizabeth would use them as best she could. James had given her all the leverage she needed to force them to serve the people they defrauded and dispossessed and murdered.
Her father had always said that nothing in life was pure coincidence or accident, that every action had consequences for good or evil. Life, death, love, hate, the thousand petty wounds people visited upon one another and the thousand kindnesses that smoothed their paths ... her expression softened and she nearly smiled. It was like looking at her father to look out at the moonlit plain, like seeing Duley standing small and straight and true. And even though they'd left her and the hurt of missing them would never wholly die, she had come to understand why. Vin had taught her that, as he and Duley had taught her what love could be, as James had done her the merciless mercy of tearing away all her false contentments to show her the bitterest reality.
She could change the Monroe legacy for her father and for Duley and Vin. For James - surely that was his intent in telling her all of this now. A cold electric shiver went through her as she began to consider in earnest how to best spend the capital of wealth and information her brother had bequeathed to her. She would not shrink from it. Indeed, there was a ruthlessness to her thoughts she believed even Chris Larabee would approve. She must be wise, now. She must be ruthlessly, mercilessly, wise.
There is a suspended hour in the heart of the night when the light of day is a memory. Sometimes only a hope. Vin woke into that hour without knowing why, Jules pressing the curve of her back closer in somnolent protest of his movement, her head pillowed on his numb bicep. He lay in cold timelessness with the stars filling his eyes to overflowing, drifting, and then he heard it. Elizabeth weeping softly. The sound of dreaded grief realized.
James was dead.
Everything in him contracted into utter stillness, everything disappeared but the stars and that small heart-broken sound. Knowing it was inevitable didn't lessen the ache in his heart; sister bereft of brothers, brother of his hope to right a lifetime's wrongs. James would have made a good run at it, Vin knew. He hadn't been a hard man to forgive.
There was nothing he could do for her, no comfort he could offer, and this time was for James alone. Vin heard the faint broken rhythm of a sister's loving words, and he knew she was touching the stillness of James' empty face, and how tenderly, without having to see her.
So he did nothing, he lay warm under his robes with the niece he and James shared and said a simple prayer for the man's soul that came from the deepest part of his own.
Elizabeth could not leave James there, though they'd buried Gerald on a gentle slope where he could look out at all he would never, after all, own. Vin wasn't sure even Elizabeth thought that was a kindness, but it wasn't his to decide.
They stood with their hats off, James' white face pale as a beacon in the dawn. Vin held Jules against his side and she kept her arms loosely wrapped around his narrow hips, fingers caught in his gunbelt and her cheek pressed against his hip, more child-like than Vin had yet seen. James' dying was real to her, more than her father's, or Stephen's. James had been real to her, as they had not. Vin thought that spoke well of James, that she had loved him despite his villainy, perhaps seeing what her Aunt had known to be true in him. Weak, but repentant in the small ways a child recognized.
"'He will not always chide: neither will he keep His anger forever. He hath not dealt with us after our sins: nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.'" The Psalms were songs, Josiah said, and his voice was a deep-cadenced music in the vast silence of the plains.
"'For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward them that fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us.'" (Psalm 103:9-12)
Little Eagle and Two Badger's wife, Mary and Elizabeth, wrapped James' body closely in an elkhide so soft and thin that the contours of his frame were nearly visible. They bound it round with plaits of rawhide, Vin's own and given to Little Eagle without a word. Elizabeth stood straight and wan, her eyes ringed in dark circles and her mouth pinched against trembling, managing with a inborn grace to nod her thanks to those who tucked things she didn't wholly understand into the folds of the elkhide.
Little Eagle laid a small store of her best pemmican in a beautifully beaded packet, and small skin of water, fanning fragrant sweet-grass smoke over James from head to toe with an eagle-feather fan. To the accompaniment of her soft nasal song as she did so, Two Badgers placed a bundle of dried sage and sweet-grass under the lip of the hide, Josiah a twist of tobacco, and Jules came forward with Vin to lay a handful of dew-heavy meadow flowers on the outline of her Uncle's folded hands. She stared, wide-eyed, at his graven profile, as if he were an apparition she didn't entirely believe. Then Vin, with clumsy ceremony, mixed a bit of white paint in the cup of his hand, and with his finger drew a cross on James' breast with a solemn and thoughtful face as if he were telling James what it was, an honor due a man who had saved a friend in battle. When he was finished, he laid his hand on the still chest and Elizabeth's tears flowed freely. So simply he revealed how great his gratitude was that James had shared the burden of Gerald's death.
He couldn't remain after that, another farewell coming that he couldn't stand to think of yet, though it was constant in his mind and heart. He left Jules there with a little push toward her Aunt, and with a new maturity she looked up at his face and read the strain, and made no objection. Elizabeth welcomed her embrace and held her close, stroking her bright head.
Little Eagle told Elizabeth, through Two Badgers, that James had done a very difficult thing bravely and with honor, and Two Badgers had added his own agreement. She was so proud of James in their admiration, and she took even more comfort that her brother had known he was doing the right thing, impossible as it was, horrible as it must have been for him to take his own brother's life. It was the only honorable thing he could have done, saving the life of Duley's husband. She would always be grateful to James for Vin's life.
Then they wrapped James again in a buffalo robe painted inside with scenes of hunts and joyous life, and Elizabeth decided in the moment he was snugly within it that although he would have a fine coffin and a fine service said for him in Virginia, he would lie in his grave still wrapped in that robe. His home was Virginia and he would become part of it again, but he had become a man in the wilderness.
Chris felt a jar run through his mount and caught himself as it took a jerking side side-step away from Peso announcing his presence with a rude bump. Vin couldn't stop without a fight that'd likely hurt more than it was worth, but he said something that both of Peso's ears snapped back to hear. He settled, and Vin kept pace alongside.
Vin didn't say anything despite Chris' expectant look, his eyes ticking a scrupulous circuit over the deceptively placid landscape around them. Chris returned to doing the same himself, uneasy out in the open like this, a target that got bigger all the time as bands joined them from the west and east. But patience was easy now that the time had come to know what was gnawing on Vin. He waited and let himself feel the great magnificent sweep of the plains and the knowledge of history upon all that moved here now.
"Don't know what having a place to be is." Vin finally said, mystification in one small shrug. His voice was so soft Chris had to strain to hear him, not sure he was even really talking to him. "One place more'n any other ..." An abstract he'd never entirely get hold of. "Duley was it for me." A quick sly grin and dart of eyes, both unexpectedly sharp; "An' she moved 'round much as I did."
A place to belong, something Chris remembered like a golden dream, that one place that had been home. But Vin ... a man with no roots to anyplace or anyone but that one woman, lacking even the experience to comprehend it. A man who loved nothing more than whatever was over the next rise. Chris wondered what Vin was working toward; his spine was prickling.
Vin cast him a sidelong look, never finding words easily and particularly when trying to explain feelings he hardly knew what to make of himself. He hesitated; Chris' face was carefully blank. Chris wasn't going to take any of this well and Vin still wasn't sure how quick to measure it all out to him. Felt like walking through a thorny thicket that had a clear path through it if he could just find it.
"But I know I've got one now. That town. The boys ..." You, went unsaid, knowing Chris would read in his glance everything else that was too deep and wide for any words Vin could ever have.
"Never cottoned t'ownin' the land ..." Still didn't understand that, either, struggling with concepts of belonging and possession that were foreign to him, "But damned if it ain't turnin' out t'be the only way to protect it. Never thought I'd live t'see the day. Never wanted to." He shook his head with a slow dark smile that had no humor in it, only resignation. "World's changin', Chris. We're near about the last of our kind."
Chris looked away, knowing how true that was and just as unwilling to go into tameness quietly ... and around him a whole nation facing that with far more immediacy. It was so - their time was passing, they were becoming an anachronism right along with the Lakota and the wilderness Vin loved so much that were also destined to disappear. The times that were coming would be tame. Where there were too many people, the weak emasculated the strong, feared ferocity like a dog of war that had served its purpose and become dangerous. He'd known it for a long time. Josiah had said it in so many words many times. He'd seen it shadowing Judge Travis' admiration, respect as to a legend passing out of existence.
There'd be no room for wolves among the sheep coming out of the eastern cities and southern poverty, men less bold or capable following safe in the wake of the teeth and fists and blood of truly dangerous men. They'd survived impossible odds and yet wouldn't survive placidity. None of those folks would look out on the land with the love that shone in Vin's eyes, like it was family, and his. They'd have no understanding of the curl of a leaf or the taste of the wind or the spoors of beasts and men that were wordless conversation in this tracker's eyes. They'd take what they'd never earned and subjugate it to their own comfort and need.
For the first time Chris actually hoped Vin would be dead before he ran out of far places to roam. Then he realized that none of them would fit the pallid folks who were coming, they were already wolves guarding sheep, and the sheep would never be easy about it until only sheep were left.
"I can't imagine it ..." Vin said, his eyes on the distance disbelieving anything could overcome or corrupt or destroy what was so vast and eternal. But his posture, his expression, admitted the terrible truth. "But I dream it."
"Cch ... sounds like a nightmare t'me." Chris said, his voice rough and trying to nudge Vin off these bleak thoughts even as they yawned wide in his own heart. He didn't want to hear Vin say he was leaving. Vin's eyes caught quick on him, knowing what he doing, and allowing it.
For awhile they rode in silence as they once had in easy habit, comforted by it, but Chris knew Vin hadn't come to what was bothering him. After awhile he'd seen enough to know how truly uneasy Vin was. The silence wasn't comfort for him, but not knowing how to broach a subject with a man he'd never been shy of saying his piece to when he'd decided on it. Chris' eyebrows tweaked as he studied the side of Vin's sharp-angled face, not accustomed to Vin being in any way leery of him and not liking it at all.
The little hairs on the back of his neck rose when Vin looked over and found him already watching him. Peso tossed his head and jerked Vin's arms forward unexpectedly, jolting his ribs so he lost his breath in a stricken grunt and his body bowed forward over the pommel. Chris reached out toward the black's headstall, but Vin's near hand detached toward him in warding, knowing how Peso would likely react to that. He caught his breath as quickly as he could.
"Damn horse ..." He muttered at last, catching the flash of wolfish teeth from Chris.
"Vin, much fun as I'm havin' watchin' that hammer-headed nag try t'kill you bit by little bit, I wish you'd just get to what's on your mind." He shook his head ruefully, jade eyes cool. "I thought I could wait you out, but damn ... I'll be an old man with a beard down to my knees ..."
That made Vin huff a little breathless laugh, that Chris had cared to try to wait. Vin's shoulders eased down and he let rise the words he'd been groping after.
"Th'Judge is right - n' Ezra's even righter - we've got to get these folks out of here directly, n' Fort Kearney is the best place. We'll be in range tomorrow." Obviously the idea caused him some hurt, and Chris peered intently at him, half afraid to wonder why but hurtling toward the answer anyway. Vin saw anger light in his friend's eyes and got to it.
"I can't go."
"You can't go?" Chris repeated in a voice dry as sand, fingers going white-knuckled on the reins and his horse skittering under the sudden unexpected tightening of his legs, "You can't go? Vin, if you think you're gonna to make war on the army with the Lakota, I'm here t'tell you I won't ..."
Vin was shaking his head, reaching across the small distance between them for Chris' arm, meeting Chris' angry eyes with a plea in his own. Unhappy and not hiding it, he stilled. Let Vin explain, then he'd see if he was gonna have to knock the damned tracker unconscious and take him back to Four Corners trussed up like a chicken.
With a grateful nod and a dropping away of his eyes, Vin retreated, knowing he had no more time. This was a man who'd held a straight razor to Buck's throat when he'd dared mention Sarah and his son to Mary, and Buck had not disbelieved the threat. And now here he was about to ask Chris to help him do something that couldn't help but grind his face into that terrible loss, and he reconsidered it yet again. Yet again.
Even if Chris tolerated what he was going to ask of him, there were other considerations Vin couldn't mention now, things he had to talk to Elizabeth about first that Chris wouldn't tolerate. He hoped to hell Larabee didn't ask him about after just now ... hell ... likely what he was going to ask him would pretty much take care of that. He took a breath and started working his way around to it, keeping Chris in the corner of his eye to gauge his reaction.
"Chris, I know why me not tellin' you about Duley made you so mad."
Chris had to listen closely, a forboding on the weight of Vin's words and his obvious reluctance to venture onto uncertain ground. There was only one place a man could try to go with Chris Larabee that pretty much guaranteed he'd want to kill you, and it felt to Chris like every joint in his spine notched upright one by one.
"You figured I'd found a way t'live with it and hadn't told you. I understand that. Would've made me mad, too, I reckon. Fact is, I never did find any way t'live with it. Never did." His words were awkward, obviously having some trouble getting them in order in his mind, but being honest as Chris hadn't ever known him to be with matters of his reclusive and secretive heart. That was never something Vin talked about; his heart spoke in his eyes, in his actions, and having him put it to words now pulled Chris right into memory whether he was ready for it or not. "I was just waitin' t'die and be with her. Just ... waiting." Where Chris had gone out looking for it, challenged it, hunted for it, and Vin clearly knew that about his friend.
"I never looked at Duley's goin' ... dying ... square on. Never accepted it nor grieved ... never finished ... " God, he didn't want to say this, could see the fire rising in Chris' eyes as he grasped the inevitable parallels, feel it in the air between them like claws coming out, teeth being bared. Never let her go, as Chris had never let his wife and son go, and they were a wildfire in his heart, Vin never knew which way he might flare and burn when they were the subject. But there was no other way; he had to have the courage to let Duley go at last, and he couldn't face it alone. He just ... couldn't. He'd slip off and never do it and live ashamed and in hiding all his life. He had to have someone at his side and he wanted it to be Chris. No one else would understand. And maybe ... maybe he'd give Chris the answers he'd been looking to Vin for all this time. Wasn't always easy to give a man what he needed, and sometimes it could be dangerous. But though Chris' eyes burned like embers and his face was graven in the shadows of his hatbrim, he was listening.
"I didn't have any answers n' I still don't, but I'm bound t'do what's right for her now. Can't take no credit for that, neither - Duley let me go out here so she can move on t'where it's her right t'be. Where it's proper for her t'be. Not held here to the breathin' world just because I can't let her go."
Chris' heart blazed in his chest as if Vin were accusing him of something, though he knew that wasn't so, the tracker was hedging around a reaction he'd expected, but he wasn't dissuaded by it. It was all Chris could do to stay still, to listen, to watch Vin's wary face and ty to remember he was a friend and not anyone who blamed him for his family's deaths or his own refusal to ever be at peace with it.
Vin appreciated that effort more than he could say, knowing the high cost of the favor he would ask of Chris that he couldn't ask of anyone else. "All I could ever do was share the lonesome, Chris, that's all ... what could I've said t'you that would've helped? I don't understand any more n' you do how a man goes on ..." He glanced toward Mary riding ahead of them and Chris followed that look, held on her slim back. Vin saw that and found the courage to finish the sentence,
"Livin'. Bein' really alive without bein' so afraid it'll get taken away that y'just can't ... I never wanted to, never even wanted to try. I was satisfied t'be alone the rest of my days so I'd never have to feel ..." His voice broke, his head dropped.
Chris knew very well what it was Vin never wanted to feel again, what he, himself, ran into fist-fights and gun-fights and tempted death to avoid. He knew it just as well as Vin, as well as any man who'd once felt it and spent the rest of his days hiding from any risk of feeling it again. Loss that evacuated a man's insides and left him hollow, empty, a husk going through the motions. When all hopes and dreams were taken away and life became just a chain of meaningless days before the release of death. Something Vin waited for with fatalistic patience. Something Chris kept riding out to meet, an enemy he poked and prodded and teased and hoped would kill him quick even when his instincts made him fight to live.
For a good long while there was silence between them. Vin did know what was in Chris that burned to die and hungered to live, because it was in the tracker, too. The wilderness was Vin's vent, while Chris took his fury out on the world that dared to go on without her. It was the first time he'd admitted it so plainly. They looked at each other in the same moment and neither flinched from what they recognized between them. Safe enough in the connection of that common unfaced loss to consider those losses honestly - probably for the first time for either of them. Funny, Chris thought, that what he'd always been wanting from Vin came to him only when Vin asked for it from him.
"Ain't no accidents in matters such as this." Vin finally ventured ... God, this was dangerous - Chris must've looked to Buck in that barber shop mirror just as he looked right now. Hewn out of ice and his eyes hot as stars, a warning clear as a drawn gun of limits reached, sacrosanct ground trod on. But Vin took the risk as Chris had taken risks aplenty for him of late. He might never have the chance again, Vin just didn't know where he'd be when he'd laid Duley to rest in his own heart, where he'd be bound to go whether he willed it or not. Chris was a friend worth taking risks for.
Vin said quietly, "I know it's been longer for me, n' maybe you think I got a lot of nerve on account of that ... " He looked toward Mary again as if he couldn't help it, closed his eyes a second and then opened them again on Chris and took the last step. "You got a chance a man'd be three kinds of fool to turn from."
Meaning Mary, Chris knew he meant Mary. There was only one thing that made Chris irrational and he could feel his face go brittle and sharp, knowing where Vin was going; now that he was talking, Chris wanted him to shut up. Black panic leapt, ever ready, in his chest, the first instinct, always, and one he seldom got beyond.
He wanted to throw every word back at Vin, draw blood with them ... but he couldn't. He damned well couldn't, not with the direction his own mind had been going lately. Toward her, intending to have her, knowing the having couldn't be temporary or casual, not with such a woman as that. Never consciously considering what he'd have to leave behind. His eyes were wide and dark and held in hard restraint as these things occurred to him, moved and trembled in him like the earth shifting underfoot.
Vin broke his eyes away at last and sighed, pressing the heel of his hand to his injured ribs regretfully when he did.
"There's a ceremony among the Lakota, Chris ... somethin' I've been puttin' off for way too long. If I don't do it now, I'll never have the chance to again, and she's due the honor. Believe me, she's due." Something he had to do for her, and for himself, Chris could see it plain as day.
Vin was helpless to blunt the pain Chris tried to hide to even imagine doing himself what Vin was set on, his heels set against it, all of him laying back stubborn and hard.
"A man's friends usually take a part ... " Vin hesitated, but his eyes didn't, they were wide and clear and fully aware of what he was asking of Chris. Something he needed that bad. Chris felt strange, the usual clarity of his anger watery and dim.
"I know I'll always have a place among the people, Chris ... but they ... I'm not wholly a white man in my heart, but I'm not Lakota." Orphaned again, looking to Chris and asking not to be. "It'd be my honor t'have you stand with me." He said, formal in a way beyond Vin's natural old-world manners. His eyes were anxious and more vulnerable than Chris ever wanted to see.
A brother's instinct answered what the eyes asked past the words. Vin needed him, and Vin Tanner wasn't a man who needed anyone much less ever said so. Wild horses couldn't have kept Chris from his side no matter what he had to do for it. His nod of assent was casual, but his eyes weren't, between them the serious weight of a new pact reached between men who never entered such things lightly.
Blue eyes searched Chris' face critically, pleading for patience from a man who had precious little of it, and none at all where the memories of his wife and child were concerned.
Finally he said, "I'll stand with you, Vin, I said I would n' I will. Don't push me past that."
To which Vin nodded, his expression a complicated amalgam of sorrow and determination and stubborn will, and he turned back to the trail and spoke no more the remainder of the day.
He waited for Elizabeth beside a small smokeless fire between the sloping shoulders of a broad gulley where they'd decided to bed down. She'd said she needed to talk to him, her eyes distracted and her color high despite obvious exhaustion. He needed to talk to her, too, couldn't put it off any longer. Tomorrow would bring a parting of ways. His heart felt like a gritty rock in his chest.
He hadn't told them, neither Elizabeth nor Jules, but a somber look from the Judge as they'd pulled up for the night said it was time, and he'd nodded imperceptibly at the old man trying not to let his throat close up at the sympathy in the Judge's dark eyes. The Judge understood more about Vin than the tracker was wholly comfortable with.
He took a breath when he heard her approaching behind him, trying to quell the sudden nervous race of his blood and find a calm face for her so she wouldn't know ... so she wouldn't be influenced by his wants or fears or confusion and decide for herself honestly. What she wanted, or needed, from him. He would give it, whatever it was, and know he'd done right.
Wordlessly she handed him a tin cup of coffee and sank to her knees beside him with her own, her face gilded in dim gold sunset and her eyes beyond the plains. She sank back onto her heels with a grace that took no notice of her rough circumstances or unwashed state, her free hand resting loosely on her thighs.
"How are you feeling, Vin?" Turning to him at last, her heart warming at the sight of him as it always would. She examined him closely, so spare and economical of design, but his bones now too significant. He had a trapped look, a hesitant confusion about him that she didn't know what to make of.
"I'll do." He said, his reassurance in no way reassuring to her.
She didn't understand the little frisson of alarm that rose in her.
"There's just somethin' I got t'talk t'you about."
She waited, too tired to be patient, too bruised inside, and her stolid attention prodded him on.
"Elizabeth, it weighs on me to think of you and Jules alone, it ain't right." His eyes slipped down to his hands as he took a breath he tried to hide. She read the curve of his shoulders, the uneasy but determined set of him. Like a condemned man surrendering to his fate with as much grace as he could. She realized with a quick flood of tears, always so near the surface now, what he was going to say and couldn't bear to hear the words.
Her hand settled over his in a quick soft dart of motion, bent low over her folded legs to look up into his face, astonished by the enormity of the offer he intended to make and moved to unexpectedly profound tears.
"I won't have it, Vin." She said, grateful wonder in her face but steel in her voice, her answer needing no consideration.
"Elizabeth, a man has a duty to his family ..."
She interrupted him sharply, truly incredulous that he couldn't know how repugnant the very idea was to her, "Why on earth would I want to watch you pine for the wilds like my father did? Watch you die by degrees, suffer ..." Horrified to even imagine it, looking at the stoic face he put on it that he would wear every day of his life thereafter if she allowed him to make this foolishly noble gesture. God, she didn't think she could love him more, and then he went and did something like this.
"Ccch!" The sound unladylike and honest, slapping his hand in mocking reprove and shaking her head. She rocked back, a streak of tears down her face that caught on a tender smile, "You are the most impossibly endearing man I've ever met, Vin Tanner, and your sense of duty is truly Biblical. Misguided, but Biblical." An ironic smile; "You don't know what a struggle it was ... " Her eyes shone with that dream she had put aside, "Is - to leave you. Not take advantage of your honorable morals, and you keep testing me, I swear! You offer me what I thought I wanted more than anything not long ago - but what happened to my brothers doeesn't change what's right, Vin. I'm not going to take you home with me and I won't marry you and deny us both any possible happiness with others."
She stopped talking, then, because his face was flushed and she couldn't decipher the look on his downturned face, his eyebrows in a knot.
Vin had offered because it was right, and he knew she was refusing him for the same reason. Doing what acknowledged the natural order of things without imposing her own desires on it. Generous of heart as he'd never in his life known but for Duley and he couldn't look at her and let her see the relief that swept through him like a breath he didn't know he'd been holding.
Elizabeth felt it, though, sensitive to him as one had to be to know what he was thinking, and it made her smile, then grew too big for just that and she threw her arms around his shoulders and hugged him hard. A chiding shake and a wry laugh and her eyes were friendly and loved him, and lit a warmth in Vin he'd cherish for a long while.
"You'll always have a welcome in Virginia, Vin. A home if you ever need it - " A quick laugh at his expression, which doubted he could ever need anything of cities or farms, "You know, in your dotage. And we will always want to know what you're doing out here and how you fare. I imagine we'll have cause enough to visit to deal with the land grants. I'm keeping them."
It was almost sad that he didn't recoil from the idea, but of course he would understand by now. Trackers were long-thinking men, Buck had said, and Vin was too insightful not to have seen what the future was, and the only way her brother's crimes could be turned to good.
"My head," Her fingertips spread across her forehead as if to contain the information so recently bestowed, expressing wonder and amazement and trepidation in that simple gesture, "Is spinning - Vin, I could change the course of history with what I know now, I've been wanting to tell you ... James gave it all to me before he died."
Now it was Vin who rocked back, almost afraid to consider what that meant and yet his heart leaping at the fierce clench of her hands around the cup, the fire that suddenly burst excitedly in her eyes.
"All of it, every sordid detail, every name and account, everything I need." He looked into her face, imagining this woman at the helm of that dark kingdom redirecting all the resources and power - a woman smart enough to draw and use the weapon her brothers had created, just as the seven's own nefarious skills had been brought to a righteous cause. But denial rose up just as quickly at the danger she'd be exposing herself to, the filth and corruption she'd have to step into in order to use it - even the crimes she might have to commit, blackmail and bribery that he had no doubt she could, but he didn't want her to have to, it wasn't a life he wished for her.
She smiled, proud of both his high regard and his immediate instinct to protect her, pleased by the logical run of his mind that meant she wouldn't have to explain it to him. There would be things she would do that she wouldn't be proud of, but she was resolved to do them wherever she had to.
"When I can return the land to the Lakota, Vin, I swear I will." She vowed, "When it will be safe from their own inexperience and the tricks of corrupt politicians and businessmen. I will hold it, Monroes will hold it after me, if necessary, as sacred. In Duley's honor, and yours. One day the Lakota will have at least those places back, I promise you, as unspoiled as I can manage. I'll have to work them to some degree, it's a condition of the grants, but any profit will be used to buy the land around the grants as far as I can, and I won't let the land be destroyed."
He listened intently, his head risen and his eyes searching her face, and Vin understood, then, that she'd considered this carefully, her eye on the distant future as keen as his had ever been to a trail. As he was at home in the wilds and knew where both pitfalls and abundance lay, so she was at home in the society she'd been raised in, knowing how to manipulate it, what to avoid, what to seek.
"You didn't bring my brothers here, Vin. You didn't have anything to do with their crimes, you owe me nothing. You did what was right every step of the way, all you could, all of it. And anyway ..." A twist of her mouth, a flicker of irony in her eyes that was a cunning she'd never yet revealed to him, "They'll be heroes, you know. I'll have every ear, I'll be a famous object of commiseration. The tragic loss of my brothers will give me a great deal of notoriety as well a public forum." Ruefully, admitting that her life would never be the same but not stepping back from it. "I can use that, I imagine." A shrug, a spark of exhausted valor and honest humor. "I look splendid in black." The laugh escaped him before he knew it was there, his face feeling strange in that configuration but his relief bone deep. She would be an advocate unlike any other, a champion who would use her position and her sophistication and her social connections. The people needed every such ally.
"You can't help me with this campaign, Vin, unless you want to stand beside me in your buckskins and play the part of the noble frontiersman." Her eyebrows quirked at the look he shot her. "I'll need you to be here, on the frontier, to tell me how the people fare, what they need, what help I can be. A liaison, if you will. I do need you, Vin, but I need you here. A lifetime's work - "
"Thankless and dangerous, Elizabeth." He said in warning, but she knew that, and it didn't deter her - indeed, Vin got the distinct impression that she was looking forward to it.
"I won't need thanks with all that money, believe me, and I'll have evidence secreted to shield me and mine from reprisals or assassination. Publically, they'll oppose me, and I'll allow it because politically they can do nothing else. But in private - " A grimness in her expression, a strength like iron sharpened to a razored edge.
"It's a massive conspiracy of public blindness, Vin, even if I tried to bring them to justice, the people wouldn't allow it - they want the west, the gold, everything else, and the only way to take it and retain their illusions is to vilify the victims. I'll be ridiculed and made to look as ridiculous as they can manage, but I'll also have the influence of great wealth, and I'll have those men who tried to steal it all for themselves by the short-hairs, if you will forgive the crudity." Vin was seeing more of Duley in Elizabeth than he'd realized - stubborn and clever and even vindictive - imaginatively so.
"This is a cause I gladly take up, Vin, because they won't be punished any other way. After all this ..." A gentle and delicate gesture that encompassed all the time since she'd left Virginia and all the things that had happened since, "I wouldn't be satisfied just to go home and farm again. I couldn't do that. No." Pausing, as if looking again at the enormous change in direction her life would take, and a short nod solidified her decision, her eyes rose to him with a light that made her beautiful. "I never expected to have so meaningful a life, Vin. You and Duley have given me that. I have the means by which I can honor the Lakota, and my sister, my father. Every frontiersmen who lies unmarked and unknown in the wilderness. I can be a voice ... I can publish Mary's work, she'll never have to grovel or compromise to do it. I can establish educational and cultural endowments, public trusts to protect land, provide some public scrutiny for the Lakota to protect them from predation by unscrupulous government officials ... "
Vin saw the joy of purpose that had been ignited in her with a more fundamental joy of his own. She could do these things, she could marshall an army of lawyers and publishers and lobbyists, she had the presence and charisma to rally like-minded people to her cause. Though it would probably never be enough, it would be something, and those who'd tried to steal the land and murder the people would never be able to work in complete secrecy again, never be able to attempt anything in the shadows with Elizabeth Monroe shining a light on them. It was more than he could do, and he was humbled and grateful.
She laid her hand over his again, friendly now, at ease and glad of it.
"The only thing I'll ask of you is that you never tell Julianna you offered to come back with us to Virginia and I refused you. She's young, yet, and wouldn't understand why it wasn't right, all she would know is her own disappointment."
Vin smiled, but it was strained, and she peered at him, wondering what else there might be that so concerned him. He didn't make her wait,
"You'll be leavin' the Lakota tomorrow mornin', Elizabeth, goin' to Fort Kearney and the train back to Four Corners."
"What?" Grasping in dismayed increments what that meant, and what he'd said: 'you'll be leaving', not 'we'll be leaving'.
"I'm goin' on with the Lakota to the Rosebud."
"Oh, you can't! Alone? Vin, it's far too dangerous!" He turned his hand under her grasping fingers and enfolded them gently, shaking his head.
"Chris is comin' with me. There's somethin' I got t'do for Duley, n' you've got to get out of these mountains."
"But tomorrow? So soon?"
"What's tomorrow?" Julianna did not hesitate, alarm rising at the surprise on their faces to see her - the guilt.
"Tell me, what is tomorrow?" She repeated, demanding an answer and not giving either of them time to make up stories to pacify her.
Vin couldn't say the words, looking at her face so expecting betrayal, knowing she'd hold their parting as just that and nothing he could do about it, though he loved her with every bone and every drop of blood in him. Elizabeth stood up and bent her head toward her niece, reproving a child making demands of her elders but sympathetic to how she would react to this news. Hoping she could understand without making Vin feel worse than he already did.
"It's impolite to interrupt adult conversation, Julianna, and even more so to demand to be told the subject of a private conversation." She was satisfied when her tone and bearing were noted by her niece, who subsided into a wary glower that Elizabeth figured was the best she could do.
"We'll be leaving the Lakota tomorrow morning to catch the train. We need to take Uncle James home, and war is coming here."
Jules cocked her head suspiciously, wanting to protest leaving but having known the time would come. Why were they still looking at her like she was a stick of dynamite they expected to blow apart any second?
They could've left it at that, not told her until morning when it would be too late, but Vin couldn't do that to her. He stood up himself, wincing and stiff. Jules was afraid of the look on his face.
"I ain't goin' with you, Jules, I got somethin' t'do at the Rosebud."
Her eyes got wide as plates, her mouth opened and her face first washed pale and then flushed hot with a hurt Vin felt washing through him like a flood. But when he expected her to burst into argument, instead she burst into flight away from them both and he started after her in alarm.
"Vin!" Elizabeth's hand on his arm stopped him, her eyes tender with understanding for them both. "Let me, she doesn't understand." And he would not be able to explain it to her.
Author's Note: Special thanks to Lynne for Josiah's choice of scripture.
Elizabeth didn't have to go far to find her niece. Julianna was making no more than a half-hearted attempt to hide, and her Aunt, with a stifled sigh and a slowing of her steps, knew what that meant. There was no giving up in Julianna where this Uncle was concerned, and the girl had obviously thought of a way to get what she wanted. Far too bright and observant not to know Elizabeth wanted the same thing in her heart, her niece had probably even worked her way around to thinking she was doing her Aunt a favor, since Elizabeth wasn't bold enough to go after Vin herself. Elizabeth pressed her lips flat, a bit annoyed that Julianna was set on such a manipulation, but her own heart was bruised too tender for anger and Julianna was a child. There was as much desperation as defiance in her niece's hunched posture as she looked down at her Aunt from a seat near the top of the hillock. Children wanted what they wanted with a passionate disregard for realities, Julianna would try anything and everything. Elizabeth couldn't blame her one bit. Suppressing a pang of regret at the naked plea under her niece's bravado, Elizabeth climbed the gentle slope toward her.
"You could ask him to come with us, he'd do it if we both asked!" Julianna said, request and accusation both, her voice and eyes almost feral. Grimy hands fisted on her knees tightened when Elizabeth lowered herself down onto the rocks beside her with a deep and sorry sigh, shaking her head and marshalling her patience.
When her aunt looked up at her, Julianna's heart fell into her battered boots. Kindness, soft with that wise focused love that always unraveled every argument she could make. It was decided already. Her life, decided without even a word to her and it didn't matter what she wanted, wasn't important that leaving Uncle Vin and the wilderness she hungered to know tore a bloody wound in her heart. Frustration boiled up, plots too ridiculous for possibility, but how could she not fight? It was so unfair! Her mouth opened, but her Aunt's eyes held her with firm affection and an unexpected shimmer of tears.
"Much as I would like to, Julianna - how could I?" Her voice fervent and pained; "How could you, and say you love him?"
Jules shrank back, bristling against this dreadful truth she'd refused to let cloud her dreaming.
"He would leave the wilderness for us, and he'd wither up and die in Virginia. You don't want to take him there." Knowing the fallback plan her niece would certainly have, Elizabeth's hand darted out, her fingertips brushed against Julianna's mouth before that argument could be voiced. She leaned toward her, sternly demanding reason but aware of the hurt, because she felt it, too. "And no, you can't stay here with him, it's far too dangerous for you both. I have a responsibility for you, and he would get himself killed trying to protect you - war is upon this wilderness whether we like it or not. He has things to do before he can go back to Four Corners. But we have things to do for him, and for the Lakota, that no one else can do."
Jules gave an indelicately skeptical huff, but there was also a spark of curiosity. Something they could do for them? She would do anything for him, for them, and Jules realized in the moment of stopping and looking hard into her Aunt's face that her Aunt would, too. Moreover, by the gleam in Elizabeth's eye, her Aunt had a definite purpose in mind, a clever woman who could also be bold and even sneaky for the right cause ...
Elizabeth relaxed as soon as the excitement expressed itself on Julianna's face.
"But to do it, we have to leave the wilderness, and him. For now."
For a tremulous moment the Monroe women looked at each other, Jules with passionately frustrated denial and Elizabeth with patient promise.
"Uncle Vin would want me to stay ..." Jules tried it, last-ditch, but her Aunt only smiled with gentle indulgence of her testing.
"He would, more than anything. He loves you like a wild thing loves freedom. But your Uncle Vin agrees with me."
So Jules knew he'd already said his piece on the subject, which he wouldn't say unless he'd thought it through past any hope of changing his mind.
Because there was nothing else left to do in the face of the destruction of all her fantastic dreams, Jules couldn't help bursting into sudden tears.
Elizabeth gathered her into her arms with a murmur of true sympathy; "Yes, I know ... I shall miss him too, darling, so much ..." Laying her cheek on top of Julianna's gleaming head, Elizabeth rocked and took as much comfort as she gave. When the storm had subsided into sobbing hiccups, she offered the appeasements she'd already offered to herself, and to Vin.
"We'll see him again, Julianna, we will. He's our family, that never changes. I know you want to stay, I know you do, and he wants that, too ..." Knowing how much, what he'd offered that had laid him open to having his honor used against him. "Any other time. If you were a few years older and the land was at peace ... but you're a smart girl, and you know it just isn't possible."
Her niece's weepy response was muffled against her side, her hitching breath punctuating the damp heat of her tears, but Elizabeth only smoothed her hair and kept rocking, wishing she could cry herself with a dangerous weakening of the edges of her resolve. There was no other way, all three of them had run down every avenue of possibility in their minds and every one led to this inevitable parting. She'd known it would come from the first, of course, even yesterday she'd thought herself reconciled ... but foreknowledge did not make this reality any easier. As she comforted the girl she'd raised and loved like her own child, a girl who could love the frontier as much as the Aunt she'd never known, Elizabeth realized with a sense of quiet astonishment that she would miss the velvet undulations of prairie, the endless swath of sky, the mountains and meadows and forests, only a little less than she would miss her sister's exceptional husband. It was strange that this unbroken vastness that made her feel so insignificant and weak could also stop her, breathless, at some grand vantage that lifted her spirits with unnamable joy. Right wasn't always easy, but she took a breath and squeezed back sadness for a smile; the task would help fill that emptiness, and she'd learned here how quickly the course of life could change.
"I tell you, Jules ..." She said with a tight little squeeze, and the use of the nick-name for the first time brought her niece's head up, a picture of misery.
Elizabeth took her wet, red, scrunched up face between her hands for a resounding kiss.
"We will be able to do so much for them."
Something worthy and important in this declaration, it thrummed in her Aunt's touch and fired her eyes - and she'd said 'we'. 'We' can do so much, she would be a full partner in her Uncle Vin's cause, and her Aunt's portentious nod confirmed this.
"There will be railroad spurs into the Black Hills by the end of the year, I'm quite sure." Julianna's eyes darkened just as Vin's had, how sadly his understanding had been. "We've inherited significant properties in the Black Hills ..."
"But the land can't be owned, Uncle Vin would never!" Jules objected, and Elizabeth nodded wistful agreement.
"I know that, dear, but in the world as it is today we own it by law, and owning it is all that will save it."
That wasn't enough by half for Julianna and she cocked her head suspiciously.
"Does Uncle Vin agree with that, too?" Certain he would not.
Elizabeth nodded and waited, expecting her to come to the right realization, and rewarding her with a caress on the cheek when she did.
"He shakes his head and sighs, you know. He doesn't like it any more than you or I - but if we're lucky, what modest mining we will have to allow in order to keep the land will give us the means to buy as much further land as we can and hold that, too, for the Lakota until it's safe for them to return. You do understand me, don't you?" Jules nodded, and Elizabeth did too, glad they were finally in agreement and talking about things they could do.
"We'll need to keep a close eye on it, won't we? So we'll have to make trips to manage our holdings, right?" Her heart lightening by degrees in her niece's rising hopes.
"I'm thinking that spring would be the best time for us to make an annual pilgrimage - what do you think?"
Next spring, so far away she could hardly imagine it, but annual - every year they'd come! "Oh yes!" Jules said, and her arms became fierce with a gratitude too big to express any other way. Elizabeth grunted and her eyebrows rose, but her smile was finally relaxed and contented. She would not deny this child her Uncle, the Uncle his niece, or herself either one of them.
Jules understood, after a little while of discussing it, sitting close to her Aunt like they did on the porch in Virginia and being truthful and blunt, conversation as much of eyes as words. She understood. Maybe she was even excited a little bit by the prospect of defending the Lakota as her Aunt was thinking. It made her love her Uncle James for giving them the means, and her Aunt for knowing the way.
But she didn't know how to hide how awful it felt to look at Uncle Vin in the firelight that evening, alone, his forearms across his knees and his head low with some dark thought that made his face look graven and stark. To love him so much, with such a possessiveness, and know that tomorrow ... She was so unready for all of this to become only a memory, to fade away herself from where she'd felt really alive for the first time in her life. It was too soon! How could she sit in the parlor with tutors when the wind blew hints of far places in over the mountains? How could she shove her feet back into shiny heeled shoes or her spirit back into the stifling rigor of manners and propriety?
Nor did she know how to keep the tears from falling as she stood in the farthest reach of the light yearning for him, and the secrets of the wilderness in his eyes that she didn't know half as much about as she wanted to. She'd been quiet coming, soft on the ground like he'd taught her and trying not to let him see, but he looked up unerringly and winced with true pain to find her crying. Small and desolate. A single gliding motion and he was on his feet, hesitating in a breakable moment for them both as she just stood and looked at him, her heart achingly plain in every trembling line, every quivering pinch of her expression.
So magnificent, her Uncle Vin, true as the frontier itself, enduring and simple and gracious. Strong like men weren't where she came from, like all the seven, classics, bigger than life - but part of her life, now. They were the world she'd come to love more than her own, a frontier that would be destroyed no matter how stubbornly they fought, how cunning or vicious or what sacrifices they made - like tearing apart from a niece who meant more to him than his own life ... Jules saw it in his face, that sacrifice clear in his wide blue eyes that hid nothing from her anymore.
Just when she broke in a soft sob, as if it was a signal he'd been waiting for, he stepped around the fire and came, reaching for her, being reached for, and their arms enclosed one another fiercely. Jules' fingers dug into the small of his back under his coat, her cheek pressed into his ribs and the hammer of his heart with a hard ache in her own.
Vin bent over her, one hand cupping the back of her head and cherishing the shape of it, the other spread wide on her back, treasuring her small vibrant body in his arms with a pain too visceral to breathe through. She was his as only Duley had ever been his, so real that the rest of the world dulled without her. His heart fisted and twisted as she wept, the sound raw and soul-deep and echoing in his silence. Her sly slanted smile when she was out to get her own way, the passionate too-loud voice and foolishly indomitable courage ... knowing he belonged to her, too.
His eyes burned and he closed them hard, lost for a panicked moment in an enormity of feelings he didn't know. There had to be some words, something he could say that would make it alright, that would reassure them both, bind them inextricably together, something ... but he had nothing to offer but his embrace. Hearts could break, and be felt in the breaking. She needed him strong, she needed him sure.
A long shadow detached from the greater darknesses between the scattered campfires, the tails of his duster wafting out rhythmically behind him as he came. All that could be seen was his pale face like a silver coin in the furtive night, his pale deadly hands. Angled in black and white and a grimness as he got close enough that brought their attention, following him as he gingerly lowered himself onto the ground beside Buck. His eyes flickered over to Mary, a wild and strange reluctance in them that she didn't understand, and he took a short bitter-sounding breath.
"Vin ain't goin' with us." He said, eyes and voice and expression flat as a snake and meeting every dismayed eye to state his own opinion. He'd accepted it, and wasn't mad about it, Buck knew that much, but J.D. ... kid showed his heart like a fire in the dark and he was talking before Chris' words died fully away.
"Then we'll all stay, right?" Hazel eyes ticking across their faces, confused by their silence. So often they didn't do what seemed perfectly logical and natural to J.D., didn't react like he did, and they never explained nor had patience with being asked, just left him on his own, outside some unseen circle of consideration among them. "We can't leave Vin out here alone, that wouldn't be right, we oughta ..."
"I'm stayin' with him." Chris interrupted, quiet, but riding over J.D.'s protests.
For a moment nothing moved but Ezra's slender fingers on the sand-filled hide bag Little Eagle had given him to repair the strength of his injured arm. Squeezing, flexing, turning in an orderly repetition he'd hardly stopped since she'd plopped it into his hand, his attention fixed there with a thoughtful frown.
Chris was acutely aware of Buck's quizzical blue eyes on the side of his face, of Nathan worrying the cup in his hand and Josiah's deeply tilted hat-brim, his face hidden and very still. The Judge's chin was tucked back hard into his chest as he studied his own knees, carefully avoiding looking at Mary, who had gasped to hear Chris' declaration.
No one looked at anyone, but their private thoughts shared a common theme and they all knew it - this could be last time they were gathered together. J.D., frustrated that no one would meet his eyes, looked to Buck, his face an open plea. Buck only shook his head with that quick crooked smile of his that said J.D. wasn't understanding things right. No one even asked why Vin was staying, or for how long. No one asked why Chris had agreed to remain with him, either, when he'd made no bones about being uneasy among the Lakota, his instincts too hair-trigger to let him be anything but brittle where he understood nothing and couldn't get his balance. J.D. knew that was why the young warriors gave him a wide berth, they said he was like a cougar with thorns in all four paws.
Without looking at him, Buck pressed back against J.D. to still the kid's urge to argue, a casual insistence of touch that J.D. had learned to heed where Chris was concerned. Argument wouldn't change anything and Chris had a slow simmer on that hadn't altogether quit since they'd left Four Corners; J.D. subsided with a sidelong glare, unhappy at the thought of splitting off from each other this way.
"We'll be along after you." Chris said, rubbing absently at his chest with a somber and thoughtful distance to his eyes. "Not sure how long this is gonna take. You boys get the Judge and everybody back to Four Corners in one piece."
It was done, decided, and J.D. rolled his eyes and shook his head with an impatient huff of breath that no one seemed to even notice.
"I'll travel on with the Monroes east." The Judge said, certain Mary did not realize how much she was revealing in her wide-eyed dismay. After so long rejecting and resisting it, something in this journey had stirred up signs of something finally happening between them, and Orrin wasn't sure how he felt about that. It could as easily prove extraordinarily destructive as a saving grace for them both, he just didn't know, and Mary had always felt the risk was too great. She needed a certain stability that no one thought Chris could ever provide ... but something had happened that had them both reconsidering the matter, and Orrin didn't know what to hope for. He shook his head. This unexpected parting would delay things, and who knew what decisions either would reach during the separation.
"I need to get to Washington as quickly as possible. Ezra, I'd like you to accompany me." He would need someone to watch his back and Ezra, aside from being quick and deadly with his guns, also had the requisite experience and intuitions to do so in the in the dangerous tangle of politics and criminality Orrin knew he would have to navigate. Time was truly of the essence, now.
Ezra's head turned to him, faint surprise in the arch of one elegant eyebrow but not the slightest hint of disagreement, knowing his own capabilities and gratified, perhaps, that Judge Travis appreciated them as well. Their eyes met, his and Judge Travis', Orrin's reasons intuited and accepted in the moment, and the gambler agreed with a terse nod.
Buck grinned and shook his head; oil and water, but weren't they just flowing side by side these days. It'd be interesting to see how that went once they were all home again. Buck wasn't easy about separating, either, but if they were meant to be seven in Four Corners, they would all find their roads back to it. Damn if he wasn't starting to sound like Josiah.
The camps were quiet that night, wasichu and Lakota both, though there was a lot of visiting between them as new-made friends bid farewell, knowing they would never meet again. It was hard to leave the Lakota in their bright laughing excitement of the glorious battles to come, knowing that many would not see another spring. Their time, their way of life, was passing away, and the Lakota were not ignorant of this, but Two Badgers had admitted to the Judge and Josiah the power in having no choice but to fight. It was all they had left to do. By now they knew even the nations in all their combined strength could not stand against the whites in their lust for gold, but they would not take that gold nor dishonor the sacred places of the Lakota without paying dearly for it. If the blood of miners and soldiers and settlers could sanctify the lands that drank it in, the Black Hills would be sacred to the whites, too, when this was done.
But the Lakota could not imagine the brutality the whites among them knew too well, they couldn't accept that their women and children, the buffalo they depended on, would be targets more than the warriors who stood ready to do battle. Vin had tried to tell them, Josiah and Orrin had, but the Lakota could hardly believe such tactics would be used against them, too far outside the realm of what honorable men could do.
Vin kept Jules with him that night and no one intruded on their little camp. Their hushed voices wove in tones of love and loss and determination in the dark like a tapestry of memory and promises that would bide them both while they were apart. Some wept to hear Julianna's muffled sobbing now and then, and some looked down at their hands at the soft timbre of Vin's voice as he soothed her, hearing an equal grief there. The girl slept when her heart's exhaustion insisted on it, intermittently, waking again and again with the terrible dread sour in her stomach, time slipping away. Vin slept not at all, reclining against his saddle with Jules curled close beside him as he drank cup after cup of coffee from his tin pot without tasting it at all. His mind ranged far and wide, into familiar places and strange. He would leave this mountain without Duley, no longer able to count on her voice in desperate times, her touch when he was at his loneliest. But she had given him this girl, and Elizabeth, she'd given him a family, something she'd longed to do ... so many years gone out of the living world, and yet she was still giving him what he needed, taking care of him right to the end.
"How will I ever find you?" Jules' voice startled him and he looked down to find her eyes grave and unblinking as an owl on him. Obviously this was her biggest worry, that he would do as his kind were so wont to do and simply vanish one day out of everyone's reach, slip into the vastness of the wilderness, disappear and be content never to be heard from again. As if he could do that, now, knowing this girl was in the world looking for him. Vin was surprised that the answer came without hesitation, his gently bemused smile progressed to a soft laugh. He shook his head, his hand a consoling pressure on her back as she leaned into him, holding him prisoner with her purposeful gaze, all stubborn refusal and will.
"I reckon you c'n always find me in Four Corners, Jules."
She snorted, afraid to hope that and far too certain he would never just settle into some house in town and stay there. His mouth quirked at both the sound and how well she knew him. "If I ain't there, somebody'll know where I'm at roundabout, and when I'm expected back. Word'll get t'me one way or t'other."
And so home was defined to Vin at last, a place with people he cared about who cared about him. Somewhere word could be left for him in all confidence that he would, eventually, get it. Not home as most folks thought of it - that would never be where he couldn't lie flat on his back in the grass and see only wilderness under the whole wide sky. But an anchor into the living world that would hold no matter how far he drifted, or for how long. It felt like a gift he'd never expected to have, like this girl beside him. Maybe there were other things he'd never expected to have that would come one day.
She snuffled wetly and laid her cheek against his side with a pitiful sigh.
"It'll be so long until I see you again." Too long, by the sound, and he knew that feeling very well. Visits weren't the same as being able to see her face every day, to holler her up out of the meadows and forests, or to hold her like this, and talk like they did, like Vin really didn't talk to anyone else. This time they'd had together on the frontier, and among the Lakota, would never come again, which made it all the more precious to them both.
"I reckon I could mosey back Virginia way sometime, too ... "
The whipping tips of her hair stung his face as she spun around, and he swore her grin would've lit a city block. For the first time, the iron grip on his heart eased a little.
Mary packed with ill humor, arguing in ferocious whispers with her father-in-law; "I have to stay! That war camp - how many journalists have an opportunity like this? Who else will report it from the Lakota viewpoint? How will anyone know the truth?" Her desire to witness that camp was almost a fever in her, but the Judge was intractable. His cleft chin set hard as an iron plowshare.
"I won't have it, Mary." The flare of obstinate fury in her crystalline eyes was expected, he was trying so hard, tired and worried about so many things already, to be patient.
"Someone has to write it as it is rather than as a tool for the military or the politicians to inflame public sentiment! You know as well as I do what the eastern press will be reporting, you know the majority of their articles from the frontier will be skewed to whip up support against the Indians! If I don't write the truth, who will? I know it's dangerous, but someone has to!"
Orrin spread his hands and played out his last card, the ace, the trump ... "Do you think Chris Larabee is just going to let you ride along with him and Vin?" Feeling like a coward for shifting Mary's blame to Chris, but he just couldn't stand there and argue with her another minute, and if he didn't make her see the sense of leaving these mountains now, he'd end up in a face-off with Chris himself. Better Mary arguing with Chris than him, and the result would be the same. This battle neither he or Mary would win, Orrin had no doubt.
Her spine snapped straight, her full mouth compressed on itself against the furious answer she wanted to give, but for some unfathomable reason did not. He'd thrown her right into the brick wall that was Chris Larabee, a wall she'd once been very good at going around. But now ... she knew good and well what Chris would say, especially now when it seemed he ... Mary veered hard off that thought, panic flickering in the way of silvery fish under murky waters at the intentions she thought she saw in his eyes. She still hadn't wholly determined whether she should hope or be in dread of it - was she was ready, could she ever be ready, to risk her heart to such a volatile and headstrong man? She didn't like uncertainty in herself, she was a woman of confident convictions, yet Chris Larabee was making her feel ... skittish and giddy, it was absurd.
Orrin laid his big square hands over hers as she jammed a skirt into her bag with frustrated force, stilling her helpless fury with grave affection.
"Mary ... ask Vin to tell you about it when he comes back ..." He expected the fleeting fear in her face that the tracker might not come back and knew it encompassed Larabee now, as well, so his dark liquid eyes did not waver. That stubborn faith in both men reassured her a little, though she knew very well not even her implacable father-in-law could make promises in times such as these when death came so easily, from so many directions.
"What memories Vin makes there will never leave him." Orrin said with grim empathy, and Mary knew he was right. Vin would remember every face and word, and he would know the purpose and meaning of things she would be risking her life, and theirs, to see without understanding. And Mary also knew Vin would be a more eloquent witness than her father-in-law probably understood. Under all his rough and uneducated ways, stand-offish and taciturn, Vin Tanner had a poet's heart, and a poet's eye, and a simple elegance of expression that had often moved her to tears.
Orrin offered a small smile when her shoulders slumped, more relieved than he could afford to show without inciting her ire. God, she was a stubborn woman, but she was also an honest one, even with herself. She had no place in what Vin and Chris would do that they'd chosen not to say anything about, and those two men meant more to her than she'd ever admitted out loud.
She sighed helplessly, she who hated helplessness with a passion that bordered on obsession, but he was right. Vin would be the one to tell her what that camp had been, and that would be a story more powerful than any she could write on her own.
Little Eagle, on a brown pony with the fanciest rig J.D. had ever seen, beautifully painted cruppers and skirts and a beaded head-stall, led the little band out into the barely risen morning, and stopped when she drew abreast of him like a bird on a bear, smiling. Buck touched his hat-brim, but she ignored him, extending a little moccasined foot with a cocky laugh as if she meant to tap J.D. with it, always poking and grasping at him to move him to her bidding. But this time, quicker than he'd been a few weeks ago, J.D. had that foot trapped against his chest, bringing her up short, and they both laughed. Many of the people looked incredulously at the familiarity as they passed - Little Eagle's favor was not easily earned, and even Buck's eyebrows climbed.
Little Eagle waited for Two Badgers to catch up to her before addressing J.D.; "You have done well among the people." She said, affection like low music that J.D. understood even before Two Badgers translated. "We wish your visit could be longer, and in better times." She laughed again, seeing his reluctance to be parted from them, so opposite from his attitude when he'd first come. One gesture brought all the living land and every creature upon it to herself, and when she spoke, Two Badger's voice was like an echo. Nearby, Ezra stopped what he was doing, his attention attracted by her strangely joyous gravity.
"When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. When we dig roots, we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pine nuts. We use only dead wood. But the white people plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything ... The White people pay no attention. How can the spirit of the earth like the White men? Everywhere the White man has touched, it is sore."*
She grinned unexpectedly, dark eyes pinpoints glittering in deep wrinkles. She thought it was significant, their pangs of guilty grief, white men grieving for the Lakota as for their own. "The earth belongs to itself," She said, as if offering comfort to children, rendering all men insignificantly finite upon the world, which was eternal. "Even White men will learn this one day."
Not a sign in J.D.'s face betrayed any disbelief, but Buck saw by the darkening of his hazel eyes how it hurt him to have this fierce little bird of a woman, all the Lakota, so threatened by wickedness they couldn't conceive of. J.D. stepped close to her horse and looked up at her, touching her knee and unable to say the things he wanted to say: If every white had spent the time with the people he had spent, they would understand how wrong this annihilation was, they might recognize how much was being lost before it was even known. She patted his hand, silvery strands of hair lifting into the wind, her faith in the eternal nature of grandmother earth and her people firm in her smile.
Catch-the-Bird swept up behind her in an exuberant rush that he checked immediately upon seeing Little Eagle engaged with J.D., and she spared him a quick chiding glance before inclining her head to indicate she was finished speaking. One smile more and a gnarled hand raised in farewell, and J.D. watched her go trying not to show his heart in his eyes. He was grateful when Catch-the-Bird jumped down off his horse in front of him, leading a brown and white spotted pony with a golden mane and tail. He handed the hackamore lead to J.D. with a somber and meaningful face.
Again, Buck was surprised that J.D. not only recognized the significance of the gift, but knew how to accept it and was also prepared to reciprocate.
J.D. took the reins of the pony and looked the animal over with obvious approval, then stooped and picked up a bundle wrapped in buckskins that lay at his feet, handing it with equal ceremony to the young Lakota warrior.
Catch-the-Bird looked sharply at him as he felt the heft and shape of J.D.'s farrier tools, a line appearing between his black eyebrows, obviously moved. He reached out to clasp J.D's forearm strongly and call him brother, his eyes eloquent and intent as if he knew J.D. would be the last white man he would ever feel friendship toward. He secured the bundle carefully in one of the parfleches on his horse before mounting again, looking somberly at J.D., and moved off without another word after the remuda, into a war that quickened every young warrior's heart.
One by one the Wasichu separated out of the Lakota they had so peaceably lived among as the Indians moved into traveling order, coming together in a silence no one broke. Nathan and Josiah walked up out of the empty hollow talking quietly together, leading the four remaining pack-mules and turning often to watch the departing band. Mary and Elizabeth, also leading their horses, James' mount dragging the travois that bore his body behind. The Lakota women had unwrapped the hide during the night without any indication of distress at the smell, and had laid fragrant sage in a thick layer between it and the buckskin before re-wrapping the corpse. They did not understand dragging a dead person down out of the mountains, but the white woman was determined to do so, and they knew she would not be dissuaded.
All that morning, every homey act of packing and saddling had been conducted in a quiet that respected the significance of this leave-taking for them all. Chris stood beside his horse, still and narrow in the morning wind that fluttered and nipped at his coat-tails. He talked with the Judge a little while, and with Ezra when he joined them, their faces serious and edged with anxiety. Again and again his eyes found Mary as if looking for reassurance of her safety, and of things unspoken but known between them.
Elizabeth paced at a little distance from the gathering of their horses and mules, becoming worried that Jules had run off, and maybe Vin with her, but then the tardy pair appeared, leading their respective horses. They walked side by side without touching, without speaking, as if preparing for the distance that would soon be between them. Each being brave for the other. They came directly toward her and she steeled her heart, composing her face by biting the soft inside of her cheek and breathing slow and shallow to stop the shaken tears that wanted to come. Walking, each of them, as if they were alone, but together so solidly it was almost a tangible and visible connection. Pieces of the same soul, she thought.
They stopped in front of her seeming faintly like prisoners presenting themselves for execution, Julianna sullenly sorrowful, and Vin's poor battered face boyishly helpless and newly shy.
He didn't know how to say good-bye to her. He knew he should have some good words, something memorable and meaningful for this woman who meant so much to him, but he didn't. For a long minute he and Elizabeth just looked at one another, his wide wild eyes searching her face in apologetic silence and hers mapping his for memory, both remembering their first meeting so long ago in Potter's store, and every step they'd taken together since. A night that would never be spoken of, but of which neither were anything but glad.
Finally she managed a smile and reached for his hand, gripping with a private fervency that his fingers answered at once. Tendrils of sandy brown hair drifted across his throat in the breeze, the open sky behind his head framing him like a hawk and his scarred and indomitable heart so plain in his eyes. Once he had seldom looked at her, knowing his eyes revealed him to her, and now she understood with a surge of affection that he was counting on that. Gratitude, worry, longing, and a resigned shadow for the task ahead of him that she finally understood. He would leave Duley here, finally let her go, and now he knew he could. Because of her, and Jules and a dusty little town in the middle of nowhere. Duley had woven a world of family and friends around her solitary man, and Duley had given her sister an emancipating purpose she'd hardly dared dream of, and so much more. Elizabeth had felt Duley's heart, and Vin's, and now understood possibilities she'd given up on years ago.
Jules stood beside them feeling numb already, a terrible sense of being removed from everything before she'd even left. She realized distantly that something had happened between her Aunt Elizabeth and her Uncle Vin, there was a kind of love between them that she'd prayed for, once. And her Uncle Vin loved her, he'd said so gently, and for once without searching out his words, and had put an ember in her heart that would ever be her source of strength and courage and cunning. But wanting something didn't make it right to have it, he'd said, or hold it when it needed to fly, and she knew he was right.
Her arms were around them both before she knew she'd moved, tears silent and hot coursing down her face as she hugged them fiercely. Their hands overlapped on her back and a fine tremble went through her Uncle Vin so she let his shirt wick away her tears and took a bracing breath. This was so hard for him, even when he'd been patiently convincing her it was the only way, she'd known it hurt him. Her love had put an ember in his heart, too, and she meant his last sight of her to be a damned brave one. She picked up her head and felt him relax, though his hand remained on her shoulder when she let them go.
"Send a telegram when you get back to Four Corners, Vin." Elizabeth said, gathering Jules to her side as if assuming tender custody of Vin's heart. "We'll need to know you're home safely. And we'll send word to you in Four Corners so you'll know all is well in Virginia when you get back." So few words to say so much, her heart so plain that Vin wanted to look away. It was strange having anyone worry about him, to require word from him, and for a moment old instincts to be unfettered rebelled ... but the comfort of it was far stronger. He could sleep each night and wake each morning knowing this woman and this girl were thinking about him and marking time by him, as he would by them. Knowing the welcome he would always find with them. A hunter knew how to be patient, and he would have to be. He nodded, swallowing hard and not trusting his voice.
"Ma'am ..." Nathan's soft voice interrupted the moment that was growing too emotional and their eyes broke away from one another to Nathan gratefully. "We've got to get goin' now, it's a long way to Fort Kearney."
And there it was, the dreaded moment come and gone with no indication of the milestone it was for these three people who had been strangers a few months ago and now were a family bonded by blood and love. Surely there should be something more than good-bye smiles and wishes for safe journey, the promise of seeing one another in spring shaded by inescapable uncertainty. But it was what it was, and Vin set his fingertips to his hatbrim and let Elizabeth's hand go, a nod and a look rich with respect and affection. Then he turned away for Jules, and the two of them set off walking their horses down the incline toward the others. Elizabeth followed them, her eyes tracing the lines of Vin's shoulders and the predatory grace of his walk with a longing Nathan pretended not to notice.
After a moment and a hard shake of his head, Nathan followed, worried about leaving Vin and Chris on their own, the shape they were in, and not withholding that opinion around the others, either. Neither one of them looked like he'd stand up to a strong wind, but nobody seemed inclined to try to talk them out of it. He puffed out an aggravated breath and a few exasperated expletives, but he'd long since learned the futility of arguing with either of them.
Orrin looked around at them once they were all gathered, hard-run and beaten up and still ready to go, and swung up onto his horse with a creak of shifting leather. One by one they all followed suit, gathering reins and settling into their saddles, turning their animals toward the south. Vin came down the hill and Mary came forward to bid him good-bye with an affectionate kiss on his scruffy cheek and a moment eye to eye wishing his safe return.
Mary meant to embrace Chris that way as well, a parting of friends in dangerous times, well within the bounds of propriety.
But the moment her hands were on his shoulders, the moment her face lifted to him and her eyes met his, his free arm swept around her and drew her in one quick smooth sweep against him. Her soft sound of surprise was taken from her mouth by his, and her ability to refuse, indeed any urge to do so, abandoned her in an instant as he took delicate liberties with his tongue that jolted her down to her toes. Distantly she thought she heard Buck whoop, laughing. Dimly she felt the shock of those around them, but it hardly seemed to matter just now.
The hand holding the reins of his horse whitened, as much a part of that kiss as everything in Chris was, he wasn't fooling around here.
Buck threw his leg over the pommel of his leggy gray and grinned at the openly shocked expressions around him, everyone suddenly finding some small detail to focus their attention on, studiously not looking at Chris and Mary - even the Judge, once he'd gotten his eyebrows down out of his hairline. Vin was the only one who grinned along with him, catching his eye, and it'd been too long since Buck had seen Vin glad of anything. Buck's eye narrowed on the tracker as he turned to check Peso's rig, still wondering what Vin had to do among the Lakota that Chris was staying behind to help him with. He'd guessed that Josiah knew, though, and he planned to grill him once they were on the road and figure out then if he should go with the rest or turn back to watch Vin and Chris' backs.
Finally Chris let her lips go, though he kept his arm around her slender waist and kept her intimately tight against him, a wicked glint of purely male pride in his jade eyes at having so completely disarmed her. Her eyes popped open wide, her mouth rounded so beautifully that he was tempted to kiss her again.
Flustered, she patted his shoulders awkwardly, the air between them seeming to crackle. So ridiculous not to be able to draw a full breath with him looking at her that way, studying her so intently. Daring her, reading every fear and every instinct to turn from this dangerous beginning.
"Well ... " She said, a touch breathlessly, wry fire rising to throw his dare back at him, "I expect you won't be away long, then."
His eyes widened at this unexpected boldness, his mouth quirked into a crooked chevron with glad surprise and his hand on her back spread and tightened possessively. She made no objection, gazing up at him clear-eyed and curiously unafraid now that the moment was upon her. He searched her face, and she let him see her heart.
It would have to be all or nothing, neither of them lived their lives in half-measures. Mary knew from long consideration the odds against them, what complications there would be between them that neither were blind to. There were many good reasons that had kept them from this for so long, and neither knew why, now, they found themselves willing to risk it. Nothing would ever be easy between them, nothing placid or predictable ...
Chris touched her face, then, watching his fingertips as they drifted down the porcelain smoothness of her skin and ran a tendril of white-blond hair between them with a look of faint disbelief gentling the harsh angles of his face. In the unaccustomed intimacy of that touch Mary felt a tenderness she'd never seen in him before. His eyes, when they returned to hers, acknowledged the gauntlet she'd picked up that made him vulnerable now, to her, as to nothing else that could come at him. It changed him forever in her eyes and for the first time she let her desire for him, for what they might make together, loose in herself. Though neither of them knew if they could overcome the formidable obstacles against them, Mary understood that Chris would not hesitate to finish what he'd started here the moment he came back to Four Corners. That was as clear as words in his eyes, she could expect him to come to her still covered in trail-dust and sweat. She smiled, and he knew she'd be waiting.
Both of them mounted in a bit of a daze, finding it hard to look anywhere but at each other.
Neither Vin nor Jules gave false smiles or words to each other in parting, neither made light of it, or hid their sorrow. When he finally swung her into her saddle, she caught his hands before they left her, her small fingers laying precisely over each of his. It might be the last touch, the last sight. They acknowledged that pragmatic reality in silent communion, held and looked and hoarded each other a long moment. Finally his hands slipped down and away, as empty as he could ever remember them being.
Jules turned in her saddle and looked back at the Lakota as they wound their way across the plain, her mind and heart overflowing with memory, her eye greedy for the last sight of fringes and glossy hair and fluttering feathers, the rhythms of their movement sanctifying the earth as much as the flow of river or wind. She set her jaw, and a determined light began to burn in her eyes; she intended to make sure there would always be places the white man did not touch.
She turned back to her Uncle, her face seeming to glow in the thin silvery morning light, and he knew he would never forget the sight of her in that moment.
"In spring." She said, blue eyes coursing over his face, and he nodded, knowing he would forever anticipate that season, now, for more than the welcome warmth and new life.
"In spring, Jules." Vow, hope and will.
Halfway between Chris and the trailhead, Vin watched the little party going south as if nothing else existed. Standing in his stirrups, gliding on his knees like Peso's restive movements beneath him were storm-winds and he a starving eagle fixed on prey upon it. His face was quiet, he seemed almost unnaturally calm, but he was holding the black's head close and tight as the horse stepped and half-turned, tonguing the bit, showing the agitation Vin wasn't. Chris could feel it pure as a shout.
Chris studied him thoughtfully as he waited. He'd never seen that look in Vin's eyes before - at least never for another human being. That was his look out into the wilderness when town and people got to be too much. Chris never knew what Vin would do at such times except be gone the next time he turned around. Nobody would say it, but everybody would wonder if, this time, he wouldn't come back. He knew Vin would see through whatever it was he was going to do among the Lakota, but looking at him now, Chris didn't know about after. He didn't think Vin knew, either.
Then he noticed Josiah a few yards to his right, the only one who had yet to move and who, he realized as the moments passed, had no intention of moving. His head cocked curiously at the Preacher.
Josiah let him wait awhile, giving Vin time, too, before he returned Chris' look, his wrist relaxed on the broad pommel of his Mexican saddle and his big calloused fingers working lightly at the reins loose between them. Going nowhere.
"Nathan's been complaining about men looking like a breeze could blow them over haring off into the winds of war." He said mildly, one grizzled eyebrow expressing how significant those complaints had been and Chris' mouth twitched. Then Josiah squinted thoughtfully back at Vin, a black silhouette in the thin fringe of trees against the rising morning beyond. One of Josiah's beefy shoulders rolled and he explained his presence by saying simply,
"It's either stay here to look out for the two of you or listen to him rail about men with no sense all the way home."
Chris barked a laugh that became a crooked slant of a true smile. He shook his head, having no inclination to argue with half his mind still on Mary's mouth. His blood still raced with the possibilities that daring kiss had raised. He'd wanted to do that since the day he'd met her, and he'd known there would be fire in it, in her. Maybe not how much, though. For all his brotherly affection toward Vin, he hoped this duty wouldn't take too long.
"Suit yourself." He said in abstract welcome, and Josiah nodded. The Preacher had a good idea of what Vin was going to do, and why he'd chosen Chris to stand by him. If he was right ... well, a man couldn't have too many friends at such a time, and Chris might need someone standing for him as much as Vin. Josiah aimed to make sure they got to that ceremony, and through it, winds of war be damned. His massive shoulders rose and fell, he looked around him knowing there was nothing he could see to explain the forboding he couldn't shake - the true reason he'd remained. There was a way the world felt, a portentious gathering sort of sensation, and Vin was right in the middle of it - which, he'd realized awhile ago, the Lakota had known from the first sight of him above Fort Laramie bringing those pack mules heavy with armament. He flexed his legs against the stirrups and took a deep breath, sensitive to the touch of the wind at his back but settling into whatever would come.
Some of the somberness left his expression when he glanced at Chris and found the gunslinger's eyes fixed on Mary's slim straight back, and she turned as if she felt it, her eyes bright as stars over her shoulder. God willing, there'd be fireworks when Chris got back to Four Corners now that those two had finally taken the step they'd been dancing around for so long. It could be a lively courtship. God willing.
As they watched, Elizabeth Monroe reined to one side of the trail and raised her hand, the distance now too great to see her expression but her attention to Vin clear, and his to her, as he lifted one hand in reply.
"That woman loves Vin with her whole heart." Josiah said, feeling Chris' attention quick upon him and turning his head to meet him, a significance in his eyes that Chris mistook for scolding his poor judgment of Elizabeth for so long.
"We both know how easy it would've been for her to take him back to Virginia with her. He would've gone for his honor, and for love of the both of them."
Chris couldn't deny that, it'd been a worm of fear in his gut to know how easily Vin could've been stolen out of the wild life by his affection for that woman, and for Jules even more. That girl had hugged Chris before she'd left, surprised him dumb by coming right up and hugging him, laying her bright head tight against his sternum and even squeezing him, careful of his injury, like he was someone she cared about. Even though he'd never given her a kind word.
Straight in the eye she'd looked at him when she stepped back, her chin cocked and set; "You'll take care of my Uncle Vin." Confidence and demand and plea all at once, and absolutely certain of his capabilities, if not his heart. Reminded of that, he shifted uncomfortably and said nothing, eyeing Josiah as the preacher looked back toward Elizabeth.
"She let him go." Josiah said, and then Chris knew there was more to the bend of this conversation than the Preacher would say outright, Josiah believed in letting men find their own road to the mountaintop. Chris narrowed his eyes hard at the side of the Preacher's face, but Josiah wasn't showing any tells, just sitting there quiet and calm as a dozing summer day. Chris swallowed an irritated sigh and then let it go when Mary turned around again.
Vin saw Buck's grey sidle up and bump friendly haunches against Jules' pony, the lanky rider tilted toward her, curved low to look into her down-turned face, and he wasn't surprised when Buck's arm reached across and settled on Jules' bowed back. He knew Buck was smiling that sweet heartful smile, that his eyes were tender and sympathetic and offered comfort. Before they'd gone on too much further, Buck swept her out of her saddle and up in front of him across his lap. She kept her reins in her hand and the pony trotted alongside, but Jules disappeared into the shelter of Buck's coat and the shelter of Buck's arms and Vin's throat closed with frustrated and envious gratitude.
That was when he finally broke his eyes away from them, and it was all he could do to keep private the enormity of his own feelings.
He didn't know how long he sat there staring at the grimy lines of his own knuckles, Peso finally settling into a stolid stand under him, ears flicking forward and back.
"Vin?" Soft, deliberately casual, and Vin looked up, remembering only then that Chris was still there. More surprised to find Josiah beside him, a presence mighty as an oak with roots in the center of the earth. All he had thought for was a numb gladness of the Preacher's company for Chris, because he had to get off on his own just now, things were moving in him that needed room and solitude. The two men looking back at him gave him leave to go by simply turning to follow the People, knowing he'd be along when he could.
With a tightening of his knees, Vin let the wind push him in a broad scouting arc east of the column.
They traveled on the steep eastern flank of the Big Horns to avoid regiments moving on the grasslands in roughly the same direction, glimpsing the dust of Three Stars' column now and then behind them and hurrying along switch-backs into higher elevations until it fell away. These mountains were familiar and offered many swift trails and short-cuts to a reverent people. The Lakota went with a fierce swiftness, eager to join the big camp on the Rosebud. It had been a long time since the seven families of the Lakota people had camped together.
Vin went his own way for a few days, his heart surging and falling until he had to stop in the black heart of the third night and just let it hurt as badly as it did. Not since Duley died had he felt such a visceral loneliness, his heart knotted tight as a fist around the emptiness of a precious thing lost. Apart, alone, strange on the world, like he'd felt back then ... but then he'd had no choice, no chance of changing it, Duley never could've been with him again in the flesh and that refused reality had been a wound opened every day. But Jules ... longing complicated the heart that had finally come to the right decision, loving that girl gave him no peace with the choice he had made. A year older when he saw her again, if he lived that long, a year of her life he wouldn't be part of ... he couldn't make sense of himself when he imagined living in Virginia without shuddering, that he could even contemplate something so wrong ... Emotions he had no experience of kept driving him off the centered calm he needed for the Keeping ceremony, which was all the purpose he had left in this country now.
Then the weather turned darkly uncertain, forces moving in chaotic turmoil as if echoing some source inside him, calling his scattered attentions into necessary survival instincts. He was grateful for that, grandmother earth giving him other uses for eyes that wanted to weep and ears that longed for a girlish voice, senses that kept scattering. Stubborn, the instinct to run from this duty laid deep in him by many years of doing just that. Maybe this storm would blow it all out into the open where it had to be.
Capriciously shifting winds caught at him from unexpected directions in flurries and bursts, the pines and spruce and grassy meadows alive with restless movement and sussurant sound, grass and trees and birds bursting for cover in a riot of confusion that mirrored his own state.
A slow roll of silver clouds came to meet him in stately progress over the peaks from the northwest, glimpses of black bellies under the high billowing reach of pale froth and the air growing increasingly heavy and cool. He glanced at the trees, eyes drawn to the shivering look of a few where the leaves were twisting their pale bellies skyward in anticipation of rain. He felt himself moving in pace with it, saw lightening in the very far distance and a mutter of thunder agreeing, outside and inside a harmony grew that was violent and volatile and inescapable.
It broke overhead two hours later, a pattering rain that became waves of deluge and swirling wind between breaks of heavy dripping quiet, the noise of the storm stunning, and the quiet even more so. The ground became muddy and would be more so in the valley, he thought dimly, seeing the signs that this storm would move slowly and remain with them for days. Soldiers would stop to wait it out, but the People would take the escape Creation provided. Vin criss-crossed their backtrail, and the wind shifted suddenly to his back where it should not be, the trees reversed their lean and the power was upon him before he could take another breath.
Snow instead of rain, a cold rushing whisper instead of the liquid roar of water, but he recognized the storm with a breathless gripped stillness in the center of him. Wind pressing insistent as a hand at his back, tearing at every loose fluttering bit of his clothes, taking his hat off his head with a jerk. He made no attempt to catch it, it was too small a thing.
I go, he said to the storm, the thought raised like a hand against scolding inevitability. He'd closed this circle himself in letting Jules go, in not following after her, and it was the very circle he'd broken the moment he refused to surrender Duley. The right choice, now, and the wrong choice, then, the child and the woman, overlapping. And in the moment of that knowing, he was moving with the world again, part of the great flow running toward the river valley and the massed people of the seven councilfires.
All this time avoiding it, all those miles between, and he was right back where he was supposed to be ... he started to laugh, shaking his head and his slumped shoulders rocking as Peso walked on, rain-slicked ears angled curiously back at him. A thin and bitter sound in the wind, a small voice mocking itself in its rediscovered smallness. The world was. Just ... was. Ran so hard for so long and so far, burying everything he knew to be true and pretending not to know ... only to discover that everything in his life since then had been leading him right back to it. Still walking the circle, what was already lost was not finally being pried from his blindly tenacious clutches and it was as fresh, that long-buried grief now rising from the grave, as it had been that night with her blood all over him. He had avoided nothing.
No blame, no changing, no choices, only the force of life that turned the wheeling stars and lifted the tides and brought the seasons in their order, neither good nor bad, and the only evil ever to come of it was in refusing that ancient and immutable logic. Death was part of that great teaching, and holding on to ignorance did not stop the lesson. Things were born and they died. The Nations of the Bible and of history - and the nations of the People (oh, that was lightening searing all hope to blackness) lived and perished. The plant people gave their lives to sustain the foragers, the foragers to the hunters, and all gave their spirits back to the earth and the stars and Creation, to whom they always belonged. All. Men, women, children, forests, river and mountains, all in the time Creation made. He had not let Duley's spirit go where it was called, he had denied nature and reason and logic, and it had spared him nothing.
Duley would die in his arms again, he would have to see it and hear it and smell it, break apart the iron fist knotted around all those horrendous memories, tear open the wound that had never healed, but only festered in blind unacknowledged silence like a secret he was ashamed of. How could he be ashamed of anything that bore her name, even her death? The shame was his, not hers! This time he had to wash the blood from her sweet body and wrap her, wrap his child's ... body. Accepting this, after so long, was like a hammer hitting his chest dead center and he cried out, his hand flying there, hunching over with the weight and boneless curl and slick coldness of that tiny naked form so plain in every sense he possessed. Peso threw his head up with a throaty grunt against the sudden yank, and Vin gripped the pommel with his fingers tangled in the reins and held them there, rain slicing at his face and the wind wailing.
Whether he lived or died made no more difference than his running away ever had, a man must go with arms outspread and hands open wide and a brave heart. A grave stillness came on him, he stopped to feel the rain beat on his body and the wind fingering through every opening in his clothes to his skin, and to pray for the strength to do this well.
The rain continued in fits and bursts as they came down from the mountains where the range curved west near the ruins of Fort Smith, part of a series of forts that had protected the Bozeman trail before the territory was given by treaty to the Lakota. Less than seven years ago - the whites had honored that treaty longer than many others that had been signed in good faith, but in the end, none of them were worth anything. The People sang as they passed the burnt-out fort, hearts gladdened by the gift of that reminder even though the trail was far west of where they'd wanted to down onto the prairie. It was good for the young warriors to see such proof of Indian victories, and they swooped through the burnt wreckage with war in their voices, their blood high for the victories to come. The People struck out confidently through the steep folds of the foothills onto the rippled and undulant hills of the grasslands, following the Big-Horn river north. The scouts said the soldiers were at least a week behind them, now, and the people laughed and shook the rain in silvery sparks off their hair and robes.
Two days out upon the great river valley the rain finally stopped, though storm lingered, sullen as a bruise on the northern skies, and columns of dark rain slanted down in the distance as if washing the way ahead of them.
Vin had not been back to camp since the first day, though he'd let himself be seen at a distance now and then so word would get to Chris and Josiah that he was alive, and still riding. The People naturally let him go his own way toward this sacred thing he had to do, and though no one had spoken to him, it was enough for those who cared for him to know he was doing right at last. Holding the balance was important for everyone now, for all the nations gathered to stand between grandmother earth and all who would destroy her, and break all wholeness, forever.
That morning, steam rising from Peso's wet coat as they rode wide east of the moving camp, Vin dismounted to check sign on the ground that was too faint for his comfort. He squatted carefully, fingertips brushing the hoofprint to see how set the print was, how long it had been there. The sharp horseshoe-cut edge crumbled away easily, and those before and behind had been obscured; it was fresh, and it was careful, which meant at least one Crow scout for the army had passed this way. It was good the Lakota had chosen route further west, this Crow was looking north on the easier trail. Suddenly his head lifted and his eyes drifted off the sign to blind space as his focus went into the earth beneath him, a faint rumble, eyes and nostrils widening and every sense flinging outward after it.
From the far side of a rolling ravine a mile away to the west, Two Badgers also felt it and glanced skyward to assess the stalled edge of the departing storm that might still be blown back on them. There would be time. He grinned and moved on, leading his horse through the narrow, brush-choked pass. He had killed a Crow scout this morning, shot him from a distance that would have raised Tanner's eyebrows, and there was a ferocious exultation in the warrior's soul. Still, he wanted the young men away from the temptation of premature battles, this was the job the experienced warriors had taken, and one that Tashunke Witco said would be crucial in the days ahead.
Vin, small as a speck under the bisected swirl of grey and pale blue sky, faced like a pointing hound to the southeast, his eyes bright and lively. A speck, perhaps, but a speck among other specks too numerous to count, every rock and tree and thing that breathed pricking up its ears. His heart opened wide as a summer sky.
Buffalo.
They had seen none yet on the plains east where they should have been running thick, once many herds of buffalo ranged along the dropping plains that skirted the whole northeastern face of the range, but they had seen none. Now they were coming, bringing meat to the nations that would need all their strength, offering their lives to the struggle the nations would fight for them.
It was far away, that sound, yet it stitched together every moment that followed it in a sudden new direction. He closed his eyes and let it slip into his blood, that sound that was in the bones and flesh, memory and reality of the earth thundering under cloven hooves, the bobbing flow of enormously powerful shoulders and broad black horns, wide black eyes. The dust-choked air of their passage had sung with the thrum of bows and the glad cries of the people who honored their sacrifice. Not yet had they all been slaughtered, not yet had the circle of Lakota and buffalo been broken.
He gathered Peso's reins and swung up into the saddle, counting the pains all the way, where they came, testing them. Ribs the most serious, still, he'd been struck breathless more than once in the last few days. His hands shook with exhaustion and he hadn't eaten much, hadn't thought of it, damp and cold and pale. But he was grinning when he turned Peso's head toward the traveling camp.
"What's goin' on?" Chris asked Josiah, sharp eyes suspicious on the men and women ahead who rode and walked and led ponies pulling travois. Josiah rocked back a little in his saddle, his eyes crawling the side of Chris' face, deeply surprised that Chris had felt the shift so quickly; the gunslinger had the chain of messengers fixed in his wide eyes, riders moving back through the camp from somewhere ahead.
"I expect we'll know directly; it doesn't appear to be anything worrisome." Josiah said, the people were not behaving defensively so he wasn't worried about attack being the cause.
Chris coughed, a liquid rattle Josiah was glad Nathan couldn't hear, but it sounded better than it had a few days ago. Little Eagle was forcing one of her medicinal brews on him under guise of it being a test of his manhood to bear it, saying he accepted it so he could ride fast back to that beautiful woman she called Tells Her People. Chris said he took it because he'd promised Vin not to kill any old women this trip, and their sparring, she in Lakota and he in English with no one volunteering to translate, made him a friendlier presence among them.
"Is that Vin?" Josiah twisted in his saddle, his mount hesitating, then turning back and stopping. Chris pulled around beside him, squinting into the distance at the rider coming at a purposeful pace. A tightness in his gut loosened for the first time in days. They had hadn't seen hide nor hair of Tanner for days, and as he got closer, Chris saw the tracker looking as pale and bony and gaunt as he'd ever seen him, dark with damp on that muddy black horse, muddy himself and disheveled. But Peso was moving briskly and Vin's seat was smooth and easy, and when he got close enough to see his face and the feral and forward-searching look in his eyes, Chris held his tongue.
Battered and bruised and hard-used, grim as a crow, but Vin was still ready for anything. What had been teetering in him for too long had fallen into balance again, and both Chris and Josiah settled back in their saddles at how solid his presence was.
Just as Vin reined up in front of them, before any words could be exchanged, Catch-the-Bird came dashing from the main body of the moving camp, spinning his pony on its heels back in the direction he'd come as soon as he reached them.
"Buffalo!" He cried, the pony dancing on tucked haunches like a bird restrained from flight, "The scouts have seen buffalo!" With that, pony and young man leapt away as if of one body, one mind, desperate not to miss the hunt.
Vin drew his Sharpes with an expression Chris couldn't identify, the long barrel skimming out into the day with a dull glint and coming to rest across his lap. But then he stopped and looked down at it, fingers gliding over the plain and workmanlike length like a blind man feeling words he couldn't see.
"Old habits?" Chris asked, unable to see Vin's face under the brim of his hat, but the tracker's fingers stilled, all of him, and he rode Peso's shift as if he was in water. Josiah bracketed him on the other side, calm and stolid.
"No." Vin said finally, slipping the weapon back into the sheath as if he'd been wrong to draw it in the first place. "Just something I have to do this one more time." He looked up then and Chris was surprised by the emotion on his face. "This one last time."
Then he leaned hard forward and sent Peso in a dead run to catch up with the camp, leaving Chris and Josiah looking after him and both wondering where either horse or man was dredging up the strength they were spending so profligately.
The People assumed a slightly quickened pace and song could be heard among the women, thankful and full of joy, their heads high and their progress a prayerful rhythm across the ground. As they walked beside the travois, they freed the drying racks, gathering their aprons and knives, their animation making even the eldest beautiful as young girls.
Chased By Water came back to the camp and directed them toward a river-side clearing between the hills to the near side of a broad ravine on the north of the sloping bowl of land the buffalo approached, the terrain sharp-rippled like a restless sea. Little Eagle, who had been on this hunting ground many times before, took them in the cover of those many hills to keep from spooking the approaching herd. The hunt would cross their path with the river to the west and the rough mountain-ward terrain to the south, so the herd would turn northeast along the river valley.
It would be a good thing to go into the camp of the Oceti Sakowin bearing the blessing of the Great Spirit in buffalo meat and hides, a glad omen to carry into the fight they would all wage in the days ahead. All felt the presence of the Wakan, the sacred ones, walking with them, beings of thunder and lightening, of sky and earth and water and rock, moving among their People and greeting them with this plenty to fortify their spirits and bodies and hearts for the fight.
As Josiah and Chris emerged onto a slumped ridge above the main body of the camp, which was moving hastily to their left behind a series of small hills, Chris spotted Vin riding toward a broad coulee in the opposite direction where warriors were gathering. Women on ponies broke back from the camp bringing rifles and bows and ammunition, draglines and hackamores for the fresh ponies the boys were driving toward them from the remuda. Josiah pointed out the deeply notched ears of these fresh animals and said, "Hunting ponies." His tone giving them great respect.
But Chris, who had been so guarded among the Lakota thus far, surprised him with the level of worry his pale eyes betrayed as he said,"Doesn't seem like a good time to go off hunting, Josiah."
Not just Vin, but that old woman he glanced at over his shoulder, and the warriors below, taking in with quick turns of his head a territory that had suddenly become much more significant than a place to simply pass through.
Josiah slanted him an enigmatic look, "No time better, Chris. These buffalo are a gift no Lakota will refuse, especially now. I don't think you understand how many mouths there are to feed at that camp we're heading into, the seven councilfires of the Lakota, many camps of the Arapaho and Cheyenne, probably the largest gathering of the nations in recent memory. Buffalo meat will be welcomed in more ways than to fill bellies." It was a thought, Chris saw, that satisfied Josiah even as a quiver of nerves went up his own spine.
Vin had laid his coat and shirt across his saddle and stripped off his faded blue thermal shirt as they watched, his long pale back bruised and scored but moving as if he'd found a way to accommodate injury and fatigue. Around him the warriors were also disrobing down to leggings and breech-cloths.
"Damn fool ..." Chris murmured, knowing what shape he had to be in and not wholly reassured by the twinge of doubt in Josiah's face when he focused on the tracker.
But Vin had no misgivings, folding his shirt with a formality he found curious in himself and stowing it in his saddlebags, listening to the ground as much as to Bear Tooth saying where the buffalo were headed, seeing what lay ahead of them and what ground they would hunt. No one interrupted Bear Tooth or did anything but hear what he said, the old warrior had power with the buffalo people and had called them many times here. As Vin took off his boots and tucked his socks into the sagging tops, his eyes flicked under the swell of Peso's belly to the wash just ahead, the walls scored and hollowed out from young bulls polishing their horns.
In this season, there would be few mature bulls, the patriarchs wintering apart in small groups, so this herd would be mostly cows, young bulls up to four or five years old and calves born in April, called the Little Yellow Buffalo. Dust came drifting along the bottom of the draw in silent herald, and he could taste the musk of brute strength coming.
The younger hunters looked oddly at Vin as he flexed and strung his bow, the rifle being far more efficient and accurate, and they hesitated to see some of the elder warriors doing the same.
To Vin, this was the last such hunt he would ever make, and he would do homage in the old ways. Two Badgers was not the only one to have approved this attitude and favor traditional weapons, and there was a high shine in the eyes of those who strung bows to be traveling the same wider space together. They sang quietly, addressing the buffalo who had come to give their lives and carry the People's prayers up to the Great Spirit, praising these mighty animals who were life and sacrament. Vin sang with them, the sound and cadence a unifying force with one another, with the buffalo that came and the rough earth they would ride and the broad sky that had stood witness all the days of the world.
There was no need to decide who would ride where or do what, many had hunted together in the past and the youngest shadowed them for the advantage of their experience. Singly or in pairs they mounted, mostly bareback with a simple hackamore around the pony's lower jaw, drifting out from the cluster of warriors like petals falling off a flower and vanishing in the rambling series of cuts that would allow them to flank the herd without being noticed.
Vin's spirit settled into a peculiar stillness at odds with the swift rush of heart and breath into the rhythm of the hunt, and with that stillness, everything distilled in eloquent simplicity. A distant part of him ran with the herd coming, followed the curves of the earth and every breath of wind, scent and sight and taste and hearing spread over an enormous distance, an endless embrace. Once the hugeness of this sensation, this great communion, had knocked him down, more than once it had scared him into refusing it. But there had been the first and greatest peace he'd ever found, and he went to it now in relief and pride without needing to consider what might be in the next minute, the next hour, or any of the days to come.
"We'll have a better view from up there." Josiah offered, tipping his chin toward a slope above the coulee where the hunters were already mounting.
The hunt had begun before Chris realized it, distracted by the bobbing front of massive skulls and horns that breached the deep-cut trails of generations in narrow streams. Over the hills and threading through the little valleys like black water flowing toward low ground, spreading as they poured into the broad sloped bowl thick with grass, the thunder of their passage creating a vibration he could feel even mounted. Chris got down to feel it in the earth and Josiah followed suit with a thoughtful look. Though the herd was a fraction of the size of those that had once blanketed this prairie, several thousand animals still made a powerful impression. Their momentum slowed as the last cleared the many avenues of their entry, they spread across the grass under a back-whirled cloud of dust and a chorus of bawling calves and cows sorting themselves out. Gradually, massive heads began dropping.
One by one, single riders in seemingly random patterns, the hunters disappeared into the maze of lowland hills to flank the herd. The hunt would drive them toward the wide western mouth of the bowl and the river beyond.
Josiah kept an eye on Chris without seeming to, and for a long breathless moment the two men stood, reins in their hands, watching the hand signals that passed all along that flank. Only a few horned heads rose here and there as the hunters began to move, laid low on their mounts and at an easy pace so the near-sighted buffalo hardly noted them. A restive churning of split hooves lifted a veil of uneasy dust into the air, but it was the sudden swirl of buffalo away from two fallen cows that made Chris realize the hunt had begun. From their vantage they could see the pattern of the herd as it lumbered into movement following the slopes of the land, the cows taking the lead and the calves, abandoned, keeping up as best they could.
"Damn fool's gonna kill himself." Chris muttered darkly as he spotted Vin, pale and narrow and wrapped around a brown pony like he was grafted onto it down to the bone. Busted up as he was, bareback and guiding the pony with his knees alone, the bow in his hand and two arrows ready under the finger curled around the wood, a quiver at a hard slant so the fletched ends of the arrows were just behind his right ear. He'd seen Vin ride plenty of times through all kinds of terrain, but he'd never seen him ride like that, like he'd caught a swift current right into the avalanche of churning hooves and wicked horns. Man and horse disappeared at an oblique angle into the melee of dusty sound and motion.
In fact, Vin no longer felt any of the injuries that should have slowed or stopped him, he felt only the earth his mount traversed as if his own legs were running it, the dangerous dips and sudden surges that the pony flew over, a freedom known and relished.
Because his eyes had suddenly focused into the flow of animals out of the ravines, he followed the yellow bull, his hands set the arrow and flexed the bow as the pony took him unerringly where he needed to go. Big and fast, its first mating season only months away, and the white-rimmed roll of his dark eye finding Vin and marking him as he approached.
It lunged away, but the pony followed and drew close to the heaving side of the buffalo. Dust lined Vin's nose and mouth and covered him from head to toe, wild and soft, the bow was drawn and the pull gradually hardened. The smooth arrow-head bobbed and jerked and then came into rhythm with the buffalo as the pony did so, knowing the killing distance as well as its rider and daring it just as defiantly. A bow-length, one bow length, any more was too far for true accuracy and any less put horse and rider within range of horns that could hook back and disembowel one or both in the blink of an eye.
Vin barely breathed, hips and legs perfectly synchronized with his mount as he sighted on the sweat-dark triangle of golden hide behind the elbow, that place that killed quickly but was vulnerable only in certain instants as the buffalo kicked out its forelegs to run.
Fast, the wind tearing at black beards and shaggy humps and the upraised flags of tufted tails, at him, the same wind, tasting of buffalo and freedom. Unasked, the pony matched the young bull's spurt of speed pace for pace, the rhythm becoming a singular sound out of the thousands of hooves, a drumbeat that connected every hunter and every buffalo running now with the memory of every hunt since the first. Vin felt them all there with him, centered his target with many ancient eyes and felt the blood pump hot through his body from many ancient hearts. The hunt a communion between God and men as fundamental as waking each morning, and that holy circle could not be destroyed without destroying the whole world.
Foam from the bull's muzzle slapped wetly against Vin's leg as it hooked its head toward them with a furious grunt, and the arrow flew with a prayer of thanksgiving.
He had another nocked and ready, but the bull fell away and crashed to the earth in a ground-shaking thump, raising a whirlwind of dust and grass. Its bearded chin buckled to its chest and scored the earth as its haunches tumbled over the heaviness of hump and neck. The herd ran on in a rolling tide and Vin ran on with them, as much dust and pony and blood and buffalo as man.
The Nagi Gluhapi is the Keeping Ceremony
There was no signal Chris could see that the hunt had ended, but the foremost hunters began to turn back to finish off wounded animals and allowed the remainder of the herd to sweep past. They ran on, bumping and grunting and bobbing like a tossing black ocean under dusty foam to the riverbank, where they curved northeast onto the plains.
The shallow bowl between the hills was thick with swirling dust, slow to settle with horses still running and women coming on foot and on horseback dragging empty travois. Chris started, startling his horse, too, at the sudden shout of song from a nearby hill and when he turned he found Chased By Water standing on the crest with his arms widespread, face and palms and voice turned to the sky. Gradually the dark humps of fallen buffalo shouldered up out of the pale dust as it drifted back to earth, and in the receding thunder of the escaping herd in his bones with the piercing ululation of the hunter's offering, Chris was caught as in a dream.
Thrashing bellows drew swift attention from the hunters, and now they could see flickers of fires past the mouth of the bowl near the river, women setting as many smoke-racks as they could while others scattered into the surrounding landscape for fuel. There would be no time to cure meat or hides, but a night's smoking would keep them until they joined the nations. Faintly Chris heard their song threading light and bright into all the rest, strangely comforting. Since they'd set off on this trail toward the Rosebud it seemed to him that they were always singing, his nerves always buzzing with that oddly portentious sound.
Chris legged his horse down the slope and Josiah trailed on behind him toward Vin, a pale streak in the distance dismounting at the carcass of a yellow bull. The Preacher thought about warning him, but then sat back in his saddle; Chris Larabee's instincts in the last week were drawing him into the forces converging on these plains in ways that frankly astounded Josiah - and he thought Chris would be astonished as well, if he ever realized it. This had to play out the way it would without interference from him, and maybe he would be wiser to find his own place in it than worrying about Chris doing the same.
The yellow bull lay as if resting, upright on his belly with his off legs tucked under and his bearded chin resting on the ground. Two Badgers stopped a few yards away as Tanner walked to it, his dusty hand rising from his side and coming to rest on the pale hair between the great arc of black horns. Under the lilting rise of Chased By Water's song over the hunting ground, within the song's praise of their brothers and the telling of why they had given their lives, Two Badgers heard Tanner speak quietly to the bull. He waited, having known this animal was significant the moment he saw Tanner and the brown pony slip into the wild tide of the herd after him. He had watched the tracker hunt, losing his own first opportunities to take buffalo to do so, but it had been a thing to see.
Like a fish in current, a bird in a flock knowing every ripple and turn in a seamless net of common intuition, Tanner had threaded through the grunting thunder of buffalo, headlong, answering every move the running pony made on the earth as unerringly as the pony flew to the target. A thing to see, yes. Everywhere the people stepped, now, was sacred, no man could look on this hunting ground and fail to see that buffalo scattered in the verdant bowl of Grandmother earth before them were given as at Creation's hospitable table, the strength of these buffalo a gift of great favor.
If he looked from the corner of his eyes at the dust drifting above the carcass of the yellow bull, he could almost see the shape of that bull's spirit facing the man who stood before him, exhausted and battered but balanced on both his feet and increasingly deliberate of motion and word. For Vin, this hunt marked the formal beginning of his Nagi Gluhapi, and all he did would flow there now that he had come back to himself.
Then the wind shifted and carried to Two Badgers some of Tanner's words, enough that made his eyebrows leap and his hand jerk on the rein, startling his pony into several backward steps away from the grief and guilt in those words and the disconcerting glint of tears in the dust of the tracker's face. Two Badgers did not want to know what apology his friend had to make to the buffalo people that hurt him that way to say, a man who did not weep or show his heart easily. If he did not hear all of what crime Tanner confessed to, he would not have to hate him for it. Still, those few words shivered through Two Badgers like stones into the bottom of a grain basket; it had been a long time since he'd been reminded of Tanner's whiteness, and his dark eyes narrowed against a distant bitterness.
Little Eagle said Tanner had been crazy once, and now Two Badgers knew for himself it was so. Crazy he must have been, too, and the burden of that crime a torment to a man of deep spirits like him once it had been realized. But he asked forgiveness today, and he stood upright in the asking. It was for the buffalo people to give it or not, Two Badgers made no judgments of his own, knowing as he did this man who was his friend.
He watched Tanner's fingers trace the sweeping arc of horn from tip to tip, a glance of light striking a shiver of amber along it from the small movement his touch created. Then those fingers sank into the thick hair of the neck and gripped so his arm trembled with it, all of him taut and trembling and utterly silent, connected to the buffalo under his touch and the distance he looked out over, and the sense of powerful medicine being done very strong around him. Two Badgers was grateful that such power had been brought among them, this forgiveness that freed both the dead and the living. That it was forgiveness sought by a white man in the Lakota way lent a mystery many now contemplated.
He turned, introspection turning outward to the sound of approaching hoofbeats, intending to warn away anyone who would interrupt the sacred space created here. When he saw it was the white men, however, he made no sign, only waited.
"Chris ..." Two Badgers heard the preacher's soft warning, but the gunman had already slowed and now came to a stop abreast of him, his attention fixed on Tanner with an intensity of understanding that surprised Two Badgers profoundly. Did those strange pale eyes see the buffalo spirit and Tanner making a peace with it? Did he truly know to respect the space and honor it? It seemed he did ... things white men were usually blind to, and this stubbornly aloof white man more than most. Well. It was unexpected, and interesting.
The preacher met Two Badgers' eyes briefly as he joined them, obviously curious about the gunman's reaction himself, and as the big man stopped on the far side of the gunman, Two Badgers saw a flicker go between them, yellow and thin as a thread but winding from one to the other and to the other. A flicker only, but these days a wise man paid attention to everything. Creation was moving so enormously that Two Badgers felt as if he had a thousand eyes and ears seeing and hearing everywhere at once, the earth and everything on it his ally and talking to him in constant murmurs and shouts.
He closed his mouth, no doubt in him as to what he'd seen. He swallowed, looking at the three of them, focusing on Vin, remembering the skittishly starved and brazen boy his Uncle had plucked out of the frozen carcass of a buffalo cow and all the years of their friendship since then. It was good that Vin had forged such bonds as had been shown to him in that thread, because the time when white men could live among the people was at an end. He had worried about that, because Tanner would always be wild even as the world was tamed.
Little Eagle, who was listened to respectfully in councils, had said that Vin and his six friends, the writing woman and that bright girl and her Aunt, all the whites who had traveled with them - even the wicked ones who'd set the great fire of war - had a place in what was happening. She had also told him not many days ago, with a wry wrinkled wink, that the big holy man would stay even though they were watching him pack to go with the rest. There would be three wasichu among them, she had said, and this almost to herself as her face went hawkishly still, visions older than memory in her fathomless eyes. When she had looked at him again, Two Badgers had understood that the ceremony Vin would carry out when the camp on the Rosebud was reached was more than one man and one wife, and had been intended for more than the years it had taken to get there. Many of the elders agreed.
Two Badgers lifted his face to the sky and breathed in deeply, the sun on his face beautiful. Clouds broke and light danced in slanted swirls across the hunting ground, thunder muttered far north, a calling voice, and the sense of Creation running in him grew stronger, circling through the earth under his feet and the wheeling sky above and the hearts of all the people - and of these three white men, allies against their own, on the brink of war.
Vin stood a while before lifting his head and cocking it toward them, a squinted look allowing them to come, and Two Badgers' laugh broke the silent space around them along with the sudden dusty thunder of young warriors and ponies rushing past. The white men's horses startled into dancing and Two Badgers' heart danced as well, watching the young men of the Lakota, young men who would soon be warriors, as they wheeled around the buffalo in a deep music of hooves and earth and voices like bright colors in the air.
Tanner stood at the bull's head looking up at flying hair and twisting feathers and chattering noise as if a flock of bright birds had burst up around his head, a slightly dazed look on his face that Two Badgers knew. Power, and Tanner moved in it like a determined dreamer. So did the whole world move now toward an end no one knew and no one dwelt upon. They had done all they could to keep from war, as Tanner had done all he could to keep his wife with him, very different things except in the fact that the time for keeping was past.
Catch-The-Bird and his friends, wanting to see the yellow bull before going to guard the camp, swirled a loose tangle in and out among each other, exclaiming at its size and beauty, its highly polished black horns. A shout went up and the young warrior leapt down from his pony pointing at the last stiff fletch of Vin's arrow protruding beneath the buffalo's tufted elbow. It would have killed at once, the deep angle straight to the heart, done with strength and accuracy.
Two of the riders, with the vague permission of the tracker so they knew the spirit was, indeed, gone, looped ropes around the bull's hooves and pulled the massive carcass over onto its side with a dull thud, jostling against each other like colts in a herd.
Tanner seemed to gather himself, drawing his big Bowie knife and dropping down into a deep squat where he proceeded to draw swift sure strokes through the hide up the front of the shoulder to the base of the neck. From there he began cutting an arrow-straight line from chest to tail, and it was as if the sight of him and the buffalo mesmerized everyone watching, even the horses standing with their ears set forward. No one was sure if he wanted help, his medicine with this bull was considerable, until he glanced up as he worked around the hind leg in quick loops, a brief look inviting help with a little bit of exasperation.
Two Badgers smiled and drew his own elk-horned knife; "Wahi." (I am coming). He rounded the great head with a whispered word of respect before bending over the steep slope of golden neck to continue the cuts Vin had begun, drawing the line through the thick hair of the neck to the highest crest of vertebra under the hump. The young warriors seemed content to watch, none really wanting to risk the bad luck of harming the skin in any way, sensitive to its importance.
"Wanji wacin ..." Vin said quietly, catching Two Badgers eye, wanting it in one piece rather than split down the back into two as was usually done.
"Ai," Two Badgers nodded once, having assumed that, "Hecheto welo ..." (It is done well/it is good). It was a beautiful hide, the hair silky and deep and the color extraordinary. Chased By Water would be proud to receive such an extraordinary gift. There, too, was a balance Two Badgers had known when he saw Tanner sight in on this bull, knowing his reasons as if they were Two Badgers' own. Chased By Water and his wife had extended an extraordinary courtesy to Keep Tanner's wife so long past the time she should have been on the star road.
Vin left the underlying muscle and membrane in the paunch intact to restrain the viscera from spilling onto the dusty ground. Two Badgers saw his wife's brown pony heading toward them and Vin saw her as well, following the tip of the warrior's chin that directed him. Little Eagle came right behind her, and Vin nodded with a satisfied look. No matter how swiftly the camp had to work or how much else would be necessarily wasted, nothing of this yellow buffalo would be left, Little Eagle would make sure of that.
Then, to Two Badgers' surprise, a pale narrow form folded down into an angular squat between them, long pale hands getting an experienced grip on the hide, rolling it up and tugging it out following the sweeps of the tracker's knife to ease the next pass that separated it from the muscle. Stripped down to his narrow black pants, boots and bandages, his skin white as snow but nothing soft about the pantherish sinews and bones beneath. Two Badgers accommodated him with a wordless glance, and the three worked together, a word murmured now and then, gradually rising off their heels as the skin was cleared from the carcass.
Josiah watched with guiltless gladness, enjoying the thrumming vitality of the young men around him and the beauty of the busy hunting ground.
Vin never looked away from his work, fingers skimming reverently across the vast red-striated weave of muscle after his knife, it seemed to be all he saw, all he knew, and no one interrupted. By the time they reached the tall crest of backbone and stopped, though, Chris was arched over the broad curve of ribs on his toes and his chest had just given him a twinge he regretted in every bone. The tracker caught at the high notched waist at the back of Chris' pants with brotherly inattention, a momentary pull easing the effort of rising, and at the same time he spoke to the young warriors and asked them to turn the carcass over so the other side could be skinned.
As they moved to do so he knuckled his back as if it ached, breathing hard but with an odd smile on his face as if some deep pleasure was at work in him, and when he turned and looked at Chris, it was same way he'd looked at him across that turbulent street in Four Corners so long ago, straight and true and right to the bone. Trust between two men who hadn't been strangers even in the first instant and everything in Chris settled, just as it had back then. Vin's smile followed, a quick crooked flash of white in his gaunt and dirty face, sky-blue eyes an almost startling flash of color and he back-handed the gunslinger's arm with a poignantly affectionate look.
Chris had no idea how he was managing to do just what Vin needed him to, and Vin barked a dry chuff of a laugh at the sardonic edge on Chris' smile that admitted it. Didn't matter to Chris that his laughter had a touch of knowing something Chris didn't, and it didn't matter that he wouldn't explain it, or even that Vin was set on a course that hurt him to walk no matter how right it was. It was just good to hear Vin laugh and see in his face, in the set of his body and the ready turn of his head, that keenness and balance Chris had always counted on. All sins were forgiven in that moment eye to eye, and there would be never be another such sin between them.
Before the young men turned the buffalo over, Vin went back down onto his heels and sliced through the muscle under the ribs, hands and knife going deep and emerging with the black-crimson bulk of the liver. He stood up with that dark clot of meat in his bloody hands and watched Two Badgers use the same opening to dissect out the little yellow bag of the gall bladder, which the warrior pierced with his knife-tip and sprinkled over the liver.
Vin gestured with the meat in a slight offering circle, his eyes shining, gesture and expression encompassing the bull and the sky and the earth and every person gathered here. The young warriors fell still and quiet.
"Mitakuye Oyasin." He said in a softly meaningful tone, and Two Badgers felt a humming tremor to watch Tanner meet the eyes in each face, Lakota and Wasichu, being the one who had brought them together and held them together still, even with a war between their people on the horizon.
"All my relations." Josiah murmured at Chris' shoulder in a voice Chris felt more than heard, but Chris already understood the words. He felt Two Badger's eyes and met them for the first time without wariness, and Two Badgers smiled at him as if it were a great gift.
Vin sliced a good-sized piece of liver off against his thumb with his Bowie and tucked it into his mouth, dark blood running down his forearms and dripping off his elbows. As he chewed with focused appreciation, he sliced another piece for Two Badgers, who accepted it happily, and then he offered the next to Chris on the point of his knife.
Aware of nudges and bright eyes among the young warriors, Chris plucked the chunk off the tip of the knife with a nod and popped it into his mouth, teeth sinking into the spongy and flavorful meat. He flashed a bit of a sharp and scarlet-toothed smile at the doubters and they laughed good-naturedly and jostled close to share the feast, spirits high.
It was a picture Josiah, still standing just a bit apart, would not soon forget, so poignantly did it distill so many lost chances. In another time, perhaps, between men such as these, a way could have been found to live in peace. But there were not enough men like Vin and Chris and Orrin Travis, true explorers, and they were being destroyed as truly as the nations were. The old guard, Josiah thought, counting himself and all the boys, even J.D., in that number, frontiersmen and hunters and wanderers and adventurers misfitting the civilization that came spreading east into every corner. They could no more surrender meekly to oblivion than the nations. He'd wondered how Vin would manage when the people no longer roamed their hunting grounds, when they disappeared onto reservations and the land came under fence and cattle and towns beyond imagining. Despite being one of the strongest men he'd ever met, Vin's heart was fragile and hard to settle into trust. Chris would stand with him, though, just as he was now. He'd come all this long hard road to do it, and he'd come to understandings that could have come no other way. It was good to be among warriors in days such as these.
Josiah stepped forward, then, gladly going into the circle and accepting a share and a long open look with Vin. They all ate together and took into themselves the warm vibrant strength of the buffalo. When the liver of the yellow bull was entirely consumed, and with much smacking of lips and high-spirited compliments, the young warriors swung up onto their ponies and scattered in a quick flurry into the surrounding countryside to guard the camp.
Two Badgers wife came behind Little Eagle with a travois and she positioned her horse between the yellow bull and a cow, where the two women set to work with efficient haste. A sharp-gestured word from the old woman reminded the men, who seemed to be standing idly about, that there was a great deal of hurried work to do. Two Badgers waved his hand at her and said, "Ai, Unci, ai ..." Vin laughed softly and gave her a chastened expression, and a smile that she grinned to see.
Chris walked to his horse and went into his saddlebag for a hand-axe, and by the time he turned back, Two Badgers had gone to help others, leaving the three wasichu to their own mystery.
The three of them worked in companionable silence, and Chris watched Vin on and off, no longer wary of the distant but everpresent ferocity that he'd never understood before. Among the Lakota, as Chris came to know them himself, many things that had once seemed strange about Vin were no longer so, things he'd figured for a frontiersman's eccentricities that were turning out to be much more. Yes, Vin was fiddle-footed and relentlessly independent and deeply suspicious, but his ferocity was not the barely restrained capacity for violence that Chris harbored. It was a fierce and defensive attachment to the wild land he would always understand better than he could understand men. But Chris was surprised to realize that solitude wasn't what Vin wanted and never had been. Tanner didn't resent being caught up in Four Corners the way Chris sometimes thought he did, just the opposite - he'd been doing something Chris hadn't thought he was capable of. That Tanner could put down deep roots had been proven among these wandering people, which forced Chris to realize how much Vin loved his wife to have torn himself from them just to keep her. That deep did Tanner's loyalties go, and now Chris knew where those loyalties were once this ceremony was done and they made it out of these mountains and back to Four Corners. Vin didn't intend to disappear, and that gnawing worry finally left him. Vin had made a choice, and it moved Chris like he'd forgotten he could be.
Still, he was not a man ever easy in seeming coincidence, and something continued to nag at him. Why had the Monroes come now, and why had Vin chosen now to do this ceremony he'd been avoiding for so long? Why not last year, or next? Why in the middle of an Indian war Chris knew in the bleakest heart of him was the end of the Indian nations, and of so much more he couldn't even imagine? And why did he get the feeling that was the heart of what Vin knew, what Josiah and all these Lakota knew, that he was still missing?
He bristled a little at Josiah's vaguely approving smile when he caught his eye, as if the Preacher knew he was working something in his mind and was glad of it, which both pleased Chris and annoyed him. Vin passed him a pale thin sliver of yellow fat from the hump and Chris took it with his teeth, neither stopping their work, pressing it against the roof of his mouth with his tongue thoughtfully, wondering for awhile at a gunslinger butchering buffalo with the Lakota on the edge of war.
Josiah walked to the travois with a forequarter gripped in either hand, shoulders and arms bunched under the weight but his stride long and light. He was smiling, the vivid taste of the buffalo liver in his mouth whetting his appetite for the great planks of ribs already roasting over low fires, big bones tossed into the coals to be cracked for their rich marrow. This had been a good day in so many respects, and it wasn't over yet. Now was not the time to think of what it would mean when such things no longer were, now he was only inexpressibly grateful to be where he was.
He wondered whether Chris realized his ease was now complete among the people who were Vin's, and that was a wonder in itself. Josiah was struck with awe at the pattern being woven all around them, the tug of certain moments like desperately beautiful beads being strung. Creation moving, God working, there had never been any disagreement with the Word and any native practice that Josiah had noticed. All he knew was that he felt the holiness of everything around him that he was bound to honor as fully as he could.
Two Badgers and Chased By Water, many of the elders, had expressed doubts about Vin's choice for the Nagi Gluhapi, doubting the gunslinger would be able to come to it with the understanding and reverence required. Bear Tooth had even made a wager Josiah had stepped right up to. Though they admired his tenacity and strength and skill, they thought Chris would spoil the ceremony with his stubborn whiteness, knowing nothing of what must be done, or how, or why, and seemingly not caring to know. But Josiah had fought beside Chris and gotten blind drunk with him and talked over many a thing, sober and not, he'd seen him careless and careful, murderous and kind. Chris was hard, yes, and stubborn in the way of men who blinded themselves to what made them that way, but his profession required intuition and his life depended on instinct, and both were formidable forces once set on course. And some force no man could see with his eyes had done just that, unerring as a hand setting a stone on a slope knowing which way it would roll. Chris was moving naturally into what was needed, being drawn earnestly into the spirit of the ceremony this hunt had already begun for Vin. Vin wanted him to stand with him and Josiah trusted Vin's judgments of character, he'd never been wrong in Josiah's experience. And today Two Badgers was obviously satisfied with Vin's choice as well, so Josiah anticipated collecting on wagers from all three. His grin became toothy and satisfied. Yes, it was a very good day to be precisely where he was.
The men not needed otherwise joined in dressing the buffalo where they lay. It was hard work and they were scattered widely, but their voices circled within the bowl as if a conversation were going on between them all at once, their gladness a warm force. Sweating in their hide aprons, they skinned and jointed and harvested with swift efficiency from nose to tail, snacking on bits of raw meat as they went.
When all the meat of the yellow bull was piled on the travois and the hide was carefully rolled beside it, Little Eagle came and sent them on to dress another. She noticed, as she came to do honor to the yellow bull, that Tanner had stripped the sinew from the backbone and each leg and had it reeled around his knife hand, but he had taken nothing else for himself. On the hide where most of the organs lay was a round wet nest of buffalo hair from the bull's fourth stomach, the collection of swallowed lickings, dark honey gold. It would be golden when it was clean and dry, and it was a sacred thing from this sacred animal that he had given to her. Her eyes twinkled as she settled with her knife and her axe to take from this bull everything a Lakota would normally take, which was everything, to honor what had to be left behind from the others that they had not enough time to take or ponies to carry. She sang as she worked, her voice bright and high as a girl.
At sunset, with the smell of roasting meat luxurious on the air and the first stars white points in the deepest blue ribbon of sunset, Vin, Two Badgers, Chased By Water and Bear Tooth, hair still wet from bathing in the river, carried a heavy-laden skin out onto the center of the hunting ground, coyotes and buzzards scattering into the dusk before them. Chris walked out of the firelight to see where they went, staying well back but watching them lay it down and spread it out.
"Tongues." Josiah's soft baritone at his shoulder made him jump, shooting an irritated look at the Preacher that was just as irritated at himself for not having heard him. For a big man, Josiah could be awfully quiet. Plus he was getting tired of Josiah knowing things he didn't, though there was an understanding in the shadows of his thoughts he hadn't yet reached.
"The best meat of a buffalo given in offering to the Great Spirit." Since Josiah had been at Chris' elbow most of the day, Chris had pretty well figured out that there was more to his helpful dialogues than just that. Josiah had a lot of experience in common with Vin, and Chris knew him well enough to know when he was laying groundwork. He also trusted him enough to pay him mind. Until today, Vin hadn't been much more than a ghost around the column since they'd left the others, and Chris was all too aware that he knew nothing about what was coming. He didn't like stepping blind into things and Josiah knew that as well as anyone.
"Come on." Josiah said, nudging the small of his back, and after a second's indecision, Chris followed him warily, unsure of their welcome as Josiah did not seem to be. As they reached the hide, the four men already there were sitting down on the east side of the meat, and there were spaces left open on either side of Vin that made Chris' eyebrows rise. It was an unexpected consideration, but he couldn't doubt, by the glances turned their way, that the spaces were meant for he and Josiah. The Preacher laid a small pouch of tobacco on the edge of the hide, and turned a grin toward the warriors when Chris, hesitating only a moment, rummaged in one of the inner pockets of his duster coat and then laid a cheroot beside the pouch. A glitter of a grin briefly crossed his face as well, and then they joined in the small circle, the rising wind of evening a clean taste after the hunt.
In the red-gold glow of twilight, the warriors, Wasichu and Lakota, shared the pipe ceremony together, and walked together back to the camp.
To be continued...
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