The Last Ride

‘Put those damn guns down,’ Baldwin snapped.

Baldwin watched to see where the old man carried the little pistol, but Jones turned away and slipped it into hiding without Baldwin ever spotting where. He was slick. ‘Mannito – leave us alone.’

‘Mucho mierda,’ the Mexican called back over his shoulder.

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t give a damn what it means.’ Baldwin paused. ‘Who are you to my wife?’

The old man ignored him, squatting and repacking the belongings Mannito had pulled from the saddlepack, his backbone and shoulder blades sticking painfully through his shirt, his neck thin and leatherlike. There was a raw dignity to him, and Baldwin felt sorry for him. He didn’t know why. He knew he wasn’t going to tell him anything about Maggie. And for some reason, Baldwin liked that about him.

‘You can stay a day or two – just keep away from my family.’

Somewhere in the darkness outside, a horse whinnied. Baldwin cut the lantern flame and stepped into the night, wondering at his own sense of misgiving. Something he couldn’t describe was triggering a nagging thing in his brain. He heard a hammer cock behind him. Jones had slipped out of the barn, staying back in the deeper shadows of the doorway where he couldn’t be seen. Nobody’s fool, Baldwin thought. The battered Sharps was resting in the crook of the man’s arm, natural like.

Mannito came next, shotgun at the ready, stepping close beside the towering old giant, sharing the shadow. Whatever was bothering him, was nibbling at these two as well, he figured. They looked crazy side by side: ill-matched and ancient warriors – pointedly ignoring one another. The old giant’s countenance was as fierce looking as any Baldwin had ever seen. Standing there watching him, Baldwin wondered again if he was just show. He turned back to the darkened pasture.

The big bay had her ears cocked forward, staring out intently toward the night. Her foal was looking in the same direction. Baldwin couldn’t see anything, but he was fairly certain there was a strange horse out there somewhere.

‘Hello?’ he called into the darkness.

Silence.

‘Come in and have a hot meal,’ Baldwin hollered into the night. No reply. But he sensed something out beyond his vision. Maybe a rider, he figured, or maybe just a wild horse.

‘They’re out there,’ the old man said, the words sounding ominous.

Mannito nodded.

‘Something, anyway,’ Baldwin said.

The front door to the house opened and Maggie came out carrying her medicine bag. She looked tired and that bothered him, because she rarely got sick or worn out. She seemed to hesitate in the light that spilled from the house windows, then stepped off the porch and walked slowly through the shadows toward the one-room adobe sitting some fifty yards behind the big house. To folks in these parts the little building was known as Baldwin’s sickroom. Old man Jones turned where he stood and followed her with his eyes. Baldwin couldn’t figure him. Or Maggie.

Mannito moved off in the direction of the adobe, and Baldwin knew the little man would wait until Maggie was safely back in the house before he turned in. Jones drifted after him. Baldwin got his rifle, and went for a walk through the darkness. He found nothing.

Maggie had spent the night in the sickroom and she was kneeling beside the bed of the Mexican woman, trying to get her to take some broth, the woman refusing and turning her head weakly away on the pillow. The morning sun flooded through the door and windows of the adobe, making the room bright and clean looking, and reflecting off the rows of medicine bottles on the table.

Maggie mopped the woman’s brow, stroking her long damp hair for a moment, then moved to the children’s beds. A boy and girl, six or seven years old. They were thin and haggard, burning hot, their ragged clothes drenched with perspiration. She wiped each small face with a damp cloth. None of the three was conscious. That frightened her. She had no idea what to do. They wouldn’t last long this way, burning with fever. She had seen small children go quickly in this condition.

She fought the panic rising in her breast. She had tried to sweat the illness out of them, starting the small stove in the adobe and closing the windows, but the fever hadn’t broken, and their temperatures soared. She had administered laudanum and acetate of lead and bismuth, because, with the diarrhoea and the dehydration, the illness had the symptoms of cholera. But there was no relief. And rarely did cholera victims linger, usually dying in a day or two at most. She closed her eyes and rubbed her face, and felt helpless.

Maggie took her Bible and knelt beside the children’s bed and read the Twenty-third Psalm out loud, then recited the Lord’s Prayer. Exhausted from three days of hard nursing, she slumped into the rocker in the center of the room and fell into a troubled sleep, dreaming of her mother and sister. Drifting until she felt something wrong.

She woke with a start. The clutch of wild desert lilies was standing in a coffee can on the medicine table. Maggie’s eyes darted to the bed where the little Mexican boy lay. There was a toy bow decorated with feathers and beads and three small arrows leaning against it. She could tell from the whittle marks on the wood that it was freshly cut. Maggie tensed, sensing someone else in the room with her, and turned toward the little girl’s bed. Samuel Jones was bending over the child.

‘What are you doing?’

He straightened and held up a little wooden doll for her to see. It was painted in reds and greens and blues. He smiled at her and bent once more over the child. ‘Hopi Tihus,’ he said, placing the small wooden figure in the child’s hands.

‘You don’t have any right being in here,’ Maggie said.

Jones walked over and arranged the lilies in the tin can. He looked almost comical trying to position the delicate stems with his massive hands. Finished, he turned and glanced around the infirmary. ‘It’s nice.’

‘Please leave.’

Dressed in his Indian clout and wearing his blue medicine shirt and strings of beads, he looked wild. He nodded and held his hand out toward her. Mannito was standing behind him in the doorway.

‘Boil and give the liquid to them, Ama.’ He was holding a small leather poke.

She tensed at the sound of the name. ‘Please don’t call me that.’ She waited a moment. ‘And I don’t trust things from you.’

He turned and handed the bag to Mannito and left. The little Mexican stepped inside, looking at the contents of the small poke.

‘What is it?’

‘Cannot tell,’ he said, pouring some into the palm of his hand. ‘Dried plants.’ He squinched his face. ‘Insecto things.’

Mannito looked at the children. ‘Pobre hijos,’ he said sadly, handing her the small bag. ‘Poor children.’

‘You don’t think I should give this to them?’

‘No harm, señora,’ he said, turning and leaving.

Outside, Maggie could hear Jones beginning to chant, ‘Hey-a-a-hey! Hey-a-a-hey!’ She looked through the doorway, and saw him sitting cross-legged on the ground smoking a long Indian pipe, looking very solemn. She closed her eyes and shook her head, and clutched her Bible closer to her as if it were a talisman against the heathen chanting.

Samuel Jones returned to the barn, staying there through the afternoon and into the dusk of evening. During this time, he worked on his leather, spreading out his saddle, bridle, the mule’s pack equipment, boots, gloves, holster and cartridge belts, and cleaning them with rags and small brushes, then rubbing them carefully with saddle oil.

Dot was lying on her belly on top of a bale of oat hay reading a book, and watching him. She had never seen anyone work over equipment with such tedious care and detail, picking the edges and seams clean of dirt with a little pocket blade, massaging the oil deep into the leathers. She was solemnly impressed. Mannito offered him some Mexican oil. Jones shook his head and looked angry. Dot could tell most of the equipment was old, but the care given it had obviously been painstaking and it had weathered the years well, patched and restrung periodically with new rawhide, each piece dark and pliant, like aged objects of art.

When the leather was done, he laid his weapons out on a piece of canvas and began to work on them in the same careful, exacting way – oiling, checking springs and tightening screws, stropping the blades of his various knives, war axes and arrow heads. For a reason she couldn’t explain, Dot enjoyed being around him, watching him work. Chaco stayed close to him, leaving him only to visit the old Mexican periodically, but always returning promptly. The pony and the mule stayed close as well – looking like house pets – an oddly loyal bunch of animals.

Dot liked the old horse, a grulla – mouse gray they called her kind of coloring in these parts. Though worn-out, pigeon-toed and scrawny, the little animal was a scrapper; the child figured she had to be to tote the tall old man and his heavy silver saddle over these dry lands. And there was something else about her, something like pride, that the child saw deep in the milky pools of her eyes. No crockheaded nag, not in Dot’s opinion. Others might jest, but the gray, she thought, was a mighty fine animal. As for Alice the jenny, she was simply divine sweetness; as easygoing and happy a beast as Dot had ever seen, never devious or ornery. But when it came to the little ratter, the girl just calculated he was of no account. Selfish, full of himself and nasty mean.

Dot watched the old man working on his rifle. His rough face still scared her some; but she was getting used to his long silences and took no offense, even when he refused to answer her questions. She hated the hacking coughs that choked his breath off, making him gasp for air in a strangling way; it was the only time he looked out of control, but she was growing accustomed to these spells. He never commented on them, still, she figured, he had something decidedly wrong.

So mesmerized was Dot by the old man, that she left the barn only after her mother had clanged the dinner bell impatiently for the third time. Then she rushed her eating until her father told her to slow down. She didn’t like the silence at the table. They had always had lively conversations. She wondered how this old man had the power to change the way they talked to one another. It was odd. He was no ordinary person, she decided. She liked that.

Back in the barn, she leaned against a bale of hay, studying him for a while, then started reading her book again. Mannito and her father had begun shoeing horses in the lantern light, the hearth fired and glowing, the barn smelling of burning wood, stock, and feeds. It was her favorite place. She loved the sounds, the smells, the activity.

When he had finished putting his weapons away, Jones did something that shocked her; he went to the stall her father had told him he could stay in, and returned with a book in one hand and his tiny glasses in the other. Dot guessed the book surprised them all, since Mannito and her father stood holding the hoof of a big roan horse up in the air, staring at the old man so long that the animal almost fell over. Jones ignored them, pulling his spectacles onto his harsh face and sitting on a hay bale, soon engrossed in the volume. The longer she watched him, his eyes concentrating behind the little glasses, the more curious she became. He looked strange in his wild Indian outfit studying the pages of the book as though he was sitting in the Santa Fe public library. Finally, the curiosity became too much.

‘What you reading?’

Jones didn’t look up from his page. ‘A book.’

She turned red and started to say something smart about his rudeness, then saw her father smiling at her, and the anger passed. As Mannito went outside into the dark, Baldwin saw him look at the old giant and mutter, ‘Mucho mierda,’ again. If Jones heard the words he didn’t let on.

‘Tie that colt up,’ Baldwin called after him. ‘He’ll get himself burned in here.’