Hogans bluff, p.7
Hogan's Bluff, page 7
He’d seen dead men before, those who had been shot, but never in all his born days had Andrew McDonald seen a man who had been knifed to death. He would not have conceived it possible that one body could contain so much blood. Chris Rigby lay in an enormous pool of his own blood, but that was not the limit of it, for this puddle or pool had run along the uneven, clay floor, until it reached the nearest wall. It put McDonald in mind of a large pot of paint that might have been tipped out. Gingerly, tiptoeing delicately through the gore, Andrew McDonald made his way to where his trail boss lay. It was clear that there was nothing to be done for the man; he lay there stone dead, with his eyes wide open and staring sightlessly at the grimy ceiling. From behind him, McDonald’s wife said in an urgent and panic-stricken voice, ‘Where’s that child?’
Josephine’s words recalled McDonald to life and he spun around, scanning the room closely to see if little Elizabeth Hogan was hiding in some corner. She wasn’t. He said, ‘You take the bunkhouses, I’ll search the yard.’
‘You think she might have done this?’ asked Josephine in a horrified tone, ‘What’s happened?’
‘No child did this thing. There’s evil at work here.’
The man and woman raced off to try and find where the little girl might be. It was to no avail; there was not the slightest trace of Elizabeth and no sign to indicate where she gone or been taken. The death of Chris Rigby had shaken them both, but the realization that a child in their safekeeping had somehow been lost was of far greater import. It is to the credit of both Andrew and Josephine McDonald that in their anxiety about the girl’s disappearance they had both forgotten entirely that she meant the saving of their livelihood and home.
‘What’s become of her, Andrew?’ asked Josephine, when they had looked all around their property, ‘Has she run off or what?’
‘Damned if I know. I’ll ride out, look about a bit. She can’t have got far, how long since you saw her head off to the canteen with Rigby?’
‘It can’t be above ten minutes at most. Find her, Andrew. That poor little thing. What were we about, taking her from her home like that?’
Andrew McDonald looked at his wife and said shortly, ‘You’ll recollect that it was your idea.’ Then he went off to saddle up and go off to hunt for the missing child.
Although she had despatched her son to seek help from her Indian kin, Melanie did not really believe that Elizabeth would have come to harm. Andrew McDonald might be a greedy and unscrupulous landowner, but from all that she was able to collect, neither he nor his wife were killers. True, they were connected in some fashion with the death of her husband, but shooting a grown man was in a different class to hurting a little girl. After thinking the matter over carefully, she had come to the conclusion that taking her daughter was only a gambit to increase their bargaining power, Melanie did not really apprehend any danger for the girl. She was, for all that, mightily aggrieved about the whole thing and was determined to show the McDonalds just how ticked off she was.
When Melanie had lived for those two years in the village of the Santee Sioux, she acquired a powerfully strong reputation for two things. One was a violent and intractable disposition, which manifested itself in a fiery temper and willingness to fight any comer if she felt herself wronged or cheated. Although the Indians had no sort of race prejudice against white people and would later be quite content for Melanie’s half-breed uncle to lead the tribe, they found the behaviour of the little white girl faintly shocking. She romped with the boys, fought them, competed in their games on equal terms and was even better than any of them at some of their favoured pastimes. All of which led naturally to the other thing for which the young girl became renowned: skill with a bow and arrow.
While the other girls her age were fooling around with looms or learning to cook, Melanie was out with the boys; first playing at hunting and then, when she had the skill, actually tracking down and killing game. Once they realized that here was a girl who could hold her own, the boys stopped trying to drive the white girl from their activities and grudgingly accepted her into their world. At first, the bows they used were no more than springy saplings, but later they began to make more reliable weapons under the guidance of older men of the tribe. The old men too tolerated Melanie’s presence and allowed her to learn the craft of bow-making, a very rare thing for any female to study.
Melanie Hogan picked up the bow that she had fashioned when she had been just eleven years of age. It was a composite of buffalo horn and leather. The string had perished; it was originally made from the innards of the same buffalo whose horn had been used. Although a little smaller than the bows carried by grown-up warriors, it was perfectly adequate for the use of a woman or child. She hunted around for some twine, which she soon unearthed. It would hardly matter if the string was of hemp rather than animal guts.
After restringing the bow, Melanie Hogan went outside and loosed off a few of the shafts that she had stored away during her married life. Her aim was as unerring as ever it had been. She used as a target the nearest fencepost and found that after adjusting for the differing tension that a length of cord gave, as opposed to a narrow strip of intestine, she was as accurate with the bow as she had been as a child. Going back into the house, she threaded the sheath of her knife through one of Caleb’s belts and fastened it around her waist. The bow she slung across her back and the half dozen flint-tipped arrows she carried in her hand. Thus prepared, she set off on foot for the McDonald ranch, where she confidently expected to find her daughter. Sending Zachariah off to fetch aid from her people had been, as much as anything, a device to put the boy out of reach of harm. Not but that it would be handy to have a little help in this present endeavour. Melanie doubted though that she would need it. She felt that cold, burning rage that she had spent so much of her adult life suppressing. She guessed that she would have settled matters before any of the Santee Sioux arrived on the scene.
After having hoisted her onto the saddle in front of him, Dave Jackson said to the little girl in a low and menacing voice, ‘You cause me a speck o’ trouble and I’ll cut your throat, you hear what I tell you?’
Elizabeth nodded dumbly, so terrified that she could scarcely breathe. She whispered, ‘Don’t hurt me, sir.’
‘Nobody goin’ to get hurt, not so long as you do as I bid you.’
Once he was safely in the saddle himself, Jackson set his mount cantering off, heading east. He meant to put as much distance between him and the McDonald ranch as ever he could. As he rode along, he gloated over the agony that he would be causing the McDonalds by taking away this child and selling her into a life of prostitution. He expected to raise a tidy sum from the projected transaction in the Indian Nations, but it was relishing the harm that he was doing to another that sustained Dave Jackson.
Elizabeth said, ‘Please sir, where are we going?’
‘Don’t you trouble your head about that. Just you make sure to do as I say and things’ll turn out a sight easier.’
After they had been cantering for fifteen or twenty minutes, Jackson thought that it would do no harm to ease up the pace a little. He allowed the horse to slow down to a trot for a while. He said to the child, ‘We’ll not be stopping for aught until late afternoon, so if you’re minded to tell me that you’re hungry, thirsty, sore, tired or I don’t know what-all else, then you needn’t trouble to speak. Is that plain?’
‘Yes sir.’
Something about the girl’s meekness irritated Dave Jackson and he said, ‘You’ve no need to call me “sir”. Dave’s my name or Jackson, if you’d rather.’
There was no answer and so he gave up and focused his mind once more on having got one over on Andrew McDonald for having given him his marching orders.
Elizabeth Hogan might have been just eleven years old and exceedingly young for her age, but she was no fool. She possessed a kind of extra sense when it came to people, one that enabled her to feel almost immediately if the person she was with was decent and good or not to be trusted. This was odd, because her life had been pretty sheltered and she had hardly had much opportunity for meeting bad men and women. Nevertheless, just as she had felt instinctively that the McDonalds and their trail boss were essentially kind and right-thinking individuals, so too did she somehow realize that the man upon whose horse she was now travelling was of an altogether different stamp. The ill nature of the man radiated off him and little Elizabeth could almost feel it. She knew that she was in mortal peril from this man and his plans and that if she did not find a way of escaping from his clutches, then something terrible was going to happen to her. Howsoever, there seemed to be no present prospect of removing herself from him and so, at least for the moment, all she could do was watch and wait.
It had now been well over twelve hours since Elizabeth had eaten and she was beginning to feel distinctly hungry. She had, after all, not had a morsel of food since supper at seven the previous evening. She dared not ask though when they might be stopping for food. Had she but known it, her captor was in far worse case than she. He had not had a bite to eat since the previous morning’s breakfast, having spent the whole of the last twenty-four hours crouched in that copse that overlooked the McDonalds’ ranch.
After they had been riding for what seemed to Elizabeth ages, but was in fact only about an hour and a half, Jackson reined in as they came upon an isolated farmhouse. It was a cheerful-looking place, white-painted and with green window frames. He said, ‘I’m going to have words with whosoever lives here. You sit tight and don’t even think of running.’ He trotted the horse on until they were only a dozen yards from the door of the house.
Jumping down nimbly, Dave Jackson strode up to the farmhouse door and rapped smartly upon it with his knuckles. After a space, a pleasant-looking woman of about thirty-five or forty years of age opened the door. She smiled and said, ‘A very good morning to you, sir. How may I help you?’
‘Truth to tell, ma’am, I was hoping to beg the favour of a word with your husband.’
‘I’m afraid that won’t answer. He’s away over yonder in town. Can I help at all?’
‘Why, it may be so,’ said Jackson in an agreeable tone of voice, ‘Are you alone here?’
‘That I am.’
‘Thank you.’ Without any further ado, Dave Jackson swung a punch at the woman’s face. This had the effect of making her stagger back and clutch at the doorpost. He followed this first assault up with a flurry of further blows to her face and head. Then, when she collapsed to the ground, he commenced to kick her a few times, to ensure that she stayed down. Then, satisfied presumably that she was quite out of the reckoning, Jackson stepped over her prone body and entered the house.
The sight of such sudden and wholly unprovoked violence caused Elizabeth’s heart to pound and for a moment or two she found that she had forgotten to breathe. Her immediate impulse was to flee such a terrible scene, but she knew that a man on horseback would have no difficulty in running her to ground, were she to do so. The only option seemed to be to sit there on the horse and see what next developed. She hadn’t long to wait.
After no more than a minute or two, the man who had taken her prisoner came out of the farmhouse, carrying a pink and white gingham tablecloth that was being used to hold a number of bulky items. As he passed the woman whom he had knocked to the ground, she made as if to rise and the man lashed out at her savagely with his boot, sending her sprawling again. Then he marched up to the horse and handed Elizabeth the tablecloth and its contents, saying, ‘Here, take a hold of this. And mind you don’t let it fall, or it’ll be the worse for you!’
As soon as he was in the saddle, Dave Jackson spurred his mount into a canter and they swept away from the house he had lately raided for provisions. Elizabeth clutched the front of the saddle and shrank in horror from the hand that held her safe and steady. The evil that earlier, in her imagination, had come off the man behind her like a mist, now seemed a positive force, as though she were burning in the rays of another sun. She did not know what was to become of her and wondered if she would be able to hold back from screaming in terror or going mad.
They travelled on at a fair speed for twenty minutes or half an hour, before Jackson slowed the horse to a trot and then a walk. He said, ‘Well child, I can’t speak for you, but I’m fair famished. What say we halt for a picnic meal and eat up some them vittles as I acquired back there?’
‘That lady never did you any harm,’ said Elizabeth, ‘How could you use her so?’
‘She never did me no good as I know of neither,’ replied Jackson, giving a snort of amusement at his wit, ‘but that’s nothing to the purpose. You hungry or what?’
‘I guess.’
They ate by the side of the track, with Jackson keeping a wary eye out, all around him. He introduced himself again to the frightened girl, telling her that she could just call him ‘Dave’ and enquiring her own name. She said, ‘I’m called Elizabeth Hogan.’ On hearing the name, he gave a start, realizing all of a sudden that this was most probably the daughter of the man he had accidentally killed a short while ago. It felt strange to be breaking bread with her now. Like many bad men, Jackson had a strong streak of superstition running through him and when he found out who it was he was carrying off to a life of degradation and near-slavery, he was seized by a dread fear. To cover up his anxiety, he said gruffly, ‘You do just as I bid you, then you and me’ll get along just fine. But I tell you straight, I’m the very devil if I’m crossed. You understand that?’
‘I understand,’ said the girl softly, ‘I know what you’re like.’
Jackson shot her a look, to see if she was sassing him, but the child’s face was perfectly respectful and serious. He saw that she had hardly touched the bread, cheese and cold meat that he had stolen from the kitchen of the farmhouse he had looted. He said, ‘What’s the matter with you? Why aren’t you eating?’
‘It don’t seem right, somehow. Not after what you did that lady.’
This criticism enraged Jackson and he said harshly, ‘Let’s you and me rightly understand each other. I’ll do whatever’s needful to survive and if that means taking food without the owner’s leave, then so be it. I don’t look for a child to catch me up on it neither. Just you eat up, now. I don’t aim to arrive where we’re going with you looking as thin as a rake and pale as a hant. That won’t do.’
‘Where are we going?’ asked Elizabeth, taking a small piece of cheese and placing it in her mouth to placate him. ‘I don’t mind that you tell me why you’ve took me.’
‘Well, that’s by way of being a long tale and I don’t see a need to tell it now. Let’s just say that I mistook you for another. Not that it matters none. We’ll be on the road for three or four days and then we’ll get where we’re headin’. There, that enough information for you?’
Elizabeth Hogan shrugged. What was plain as the nose on her face was that she had become entangled with a very bad man, one who might not even shrink from murder. Innocent and young she might be, but she knew that it wouldn’t do to get cross-wise to this fellow. Equally, nothing pleasant was likely to be awaiting her at journey’s end. There was nothing for it but to keep quiet for the time being and then see if any opportunity presented itself along the way, either to escape from ‘Dave’ or, if necessary to do him some mischief. Gentle as she was, there were times when the use of violence was justified and Elizabeth had an idea that this was one of those rare occasions.
Chapter 6
The troop of riders flowed down from the higher ground as smoothly as a stream of water and then circled Zachariah, watching him the while. He observed that they appeared to be armed not with guns, but more traditional weapons, such as lances and bows. Without a word of command, all the warriors reined in their mounts and stood round him, presumably waiting for Zachariah to say or do something. He supposed on one level that he might be in some kind of danger, but the chief emotion he felt was embarrassment; fifteen or so young men, all staring at him and expecting him to do the Lord knows what. One of the riders lowered his lance until the point was aiming straight at Zachariah’s breast and then walked his horse forward, not halting until the sharp tip of the spear was no more than a foot from Zac.
It was obvious that something would have to be said and so the awkward white youth cleared his throat and announced, ‘I don’t know how far I am from the Santee Sioux village, but I’m looking for them. I’ve kin there, a man called Tamela Pashme.’ He wondered if he was pronouncing the name correctly, for the expressionless men surrounding him gave no indication that his words conveyed anything in particular to them. Feeling a little desperate now and keenly aware of the passage of time and the need to fetch aid for his sister as soon as might be, Zachariah continued, addressing his question directly to the rider who had his lance only a few inches from his heart, ‘Are you folk Isanyathi?’
‘Isanyathi,’ said the rider in front of Zac, altering the stress of the syllables slightly.
‘Is that how you say it?’ asked Zac. ‘Well then, that’s who I’m a-looking for. An uncle o’ mine is in charge of ’em, seemingly. Fellow by the name of Tamela Pashme. Happen you know him?’
The young man in front of him stared for a moment and then, to Zachariah’s great surprise and immense relief, his immobile face split into a wide smile. The rider said something to the other men, who also appeared to relax a little and also started to exchange comments among themselves. The man who had the lance pointing at Zac’s chest raised it and secured it to his saddle somehow. Then he dismounted and walked up to Zachariah, his white teeth signalling nothing but goodwill. He said, ‘We’re kin, you and me. You must be my cousin.’
This was such a surprising turn of events that Zachariah simply stood gaping at the man, who could have been no more than four or five years older than he. He said, ‘Cousins? How come?’
