dead. Just let him be until then.”
“But . . . but that’s inhuman,” Jen protested, her blazing eyes searching my face.
I nodded. “Maybe so, ma’am, but this is a hard, unforgiving land and you do whatever it takes to survive.” As the rain lashed down around me, I nodded toward the fallen Apache, looking into his wild, hate-filled eyes. “That warrior is like Comanche I’ve known, only a whole sight worse. You can’t buy his friendship with kindness because he’ll take that as a sign of weakness and he’ll think you are afraid of him. Sure, you can carry him back to your cabin, nurse him back to health, but he’ll reward you for it by killing you the very worst way he can.” I looked at Jen, matching her anger with rising anger of my own. “You let him be,” I said, “or kill him.”
Jacob looked at me, a question in his eyes, as though trying to figure me out. ‘Y’know,’ he said finally, a smile touching his lips, “for a young feller, you talk old.”
“I guess I’ve had some growing up to do in recent times,” I said, matching his smile with one of my own. “Around these parts, just surviving makes a man grow old mighty fast.”
Jacob turned to his wife, his voice making it clear that he’d brook no argument. “You heard what Mr. Hannah said, Jen. Leave this Apache be.” Then, to take the sting out of it, he added: “Wife, he isn’t one of those wounded little animals you’re always finding. This is a fighting man and he’s dangerous.”
The woman looked at her husband, then at me, lifted her nose in the air and turned on her heel and stomped back to the cabin.
Jacob placed a big hand on my shoulder. “She’ll calm down in a few minutes and realize that you have the right of it. Now please let me offer you the hospitality of our cabin. We don’t have much, but what we have you can share.”
My first instinct was to refuse and get back on the trail, but my growling stomach thought otherwise and I found myself nodding. “I’d be obliged,” I said.
I glanced down at the wounded Apache and met his burning eyes. Summoning up the Spanish I could remember, I said:
The Mescalero glared at me for a few moments, then gathered what saliva he could find in his dry mouth and spat contemptuously in my direction.
“Hell, what did you tell him?” Jacob asked.
“I told him to lay still, that his friends would be back for him.” I shrugged. “He didn’t take kindly to it.”
The Lawson cabin was clean but not well-appointed, though it had a wood floor, unusual for soddies at that time when most settlers made do with hard-packed dirt, occasionally whitewashed, but usually not.
I took off my hat and shrugged out of my wet slicker and Jacob directed me to a bench drawn up to a roughly made table. An Apache bullet had gouged a foot-long scar on the table’s pine top and another had taken a chunk out of the arm of a rocking chair that stood by the fireplace.
As Jen, her back stiff, worked at the stove, Jacob opened the wood shutters and shook his head, his face gloomy, as he surveyed the broken glass panes in the windows.
Glass was hard to come by in the West, and until the panes could be replaced, he’d have to cover them over with wood, making the interior of the cabin even darker than it was now.
Despite the fact that it was still full daylight, Jacob lit the oil lamp that hung above the table and a pale orange glow spread through the small room, making the place seem less bleak. The wonderful smell of frying meat and boiling coffee wafted from the stove and I found my mouth watering, even as my empty stomach growled at me.
For a while no one spoke, my disagreement with Jen over the wounded Apache still frosting the air between us. Outside the rain continued to fall, hammering on the roof of the cabin, drops occasionally gusting through the broken windows. The wind was rising, whispering notions around the walls of the cabin, setting the lamp flame to dancing.
Jen finally turned from the stove, heaped platters in her hands, and laid them on the table with more of a thump than their weight merited. She returned with plates, silverware and chunks of cornbread, sniffed, then slammed each item on the table with not so much as a howdy-do.
Jacob gave his wife a long, warning glare, then turned to me and said: “Dig in, Mr. Hannah.”
“Call me Dusty,” I said without looking at him, all my attention riveted on the food.
Annoyed with me she might be, but Jen Lawson had set a handsome table.
One platter was piled high with fried antelope steaks, the other with boiled potatoes, and I helped myself liberally from both. Jen returned to the table and poured coffee for me and Jacob, then sat herself. Their daughter snuggled close beside Jen, who gave the child a small steak to chew on.
We ate hungrily, each pretending to be too busy with the food to notice the awkward silence stretching between us. But then I happened to turn my head to the left, my attention caught by a log crackling in the stove, and Jen exclaimed: “Why, Mr. Hannah, you’re wounded!”
Absently my fingers went to my head, where Lafe Wingo’s bullet had grazed me. I felt crusted blood, though the wound wasn’t near as tender as it had been even a few days before.
“It’s an old injury,” I said, trying to make light of it. “I stepped into a stray bullet back to the Gypsum Hills country.”
The woman’s face was full of concern. “After you eat, I’m going to clean that wound for you.” Her eyes softened as she touched the back of my hand. “You poor thing.”
Embarrassed, I gave all my attention to my plate and Jacob laughed. “Dusty, better let Jen do as she pleases. She’s forever nursing wounded critters back to health.”
The air had cleared between us and Jen watched me with growing concern until I’d eaten my fill, sighed and pushed away from the table.
“That was an elegant meal, ma’am,” I told her. “The first woman’s cooking I’ve tasted in many a month.”
Jen was looking at my wound intently, and to head her off, I dug into my shirt pocket, found my makings and asked: “May I beg your indulgence, ma’am?”
The woman nodded. “Please do. Jacob smokes a pipe and I’m well used to men and their need for tobacco.”
Jacob stepped to the wood mantel above the fireplace and returned with a charred, battered pipe, which he proceeded to light.
I’d hoped our smoking would forestall his wife’s attentions, but it was not to be. Jen left the table and came back with a pan of water and a cloth and began to bathe my wound.
Only now, as his wife fussed and fretted over me, did I mention to Jacob Lawson that I’d first taken Jen and him for Indians.
The big bearded man took that in stride. “Jen and me, our plan is to follow the way of the Indian and live as he does. That is why we dress as we do. Eventually, we hope to attract others to our valley who feel the same as we do.”
As Jen dabbed at my head, she said: “We wish to put away our guns and live as a community in perfect peace, love and harmony. When the Apaches came, Jacob tried to speak to them in friendship, but their only reply was a volley of gunfire that drove us into the cabin.”
“They nearly done for us,” Jacob said. “It was that close.”
I nodded. “When the Apaches are on the war trail, as a general rule they ain’t long on polite conversation.”
“But even this won’t deter us,” Jen said, dabbing at my head with something that stung. “Our vision is to see this valley populated by hundreds of kindred spirits who wish to live as nature intended, close to the earth in the way of the native Red Man.”
“It’s a good way, Jen,” I said, “but mighty hard. In the old days when an Indian ate, he filled his belly to bursting because he had no way of knowing when he’d eat again. In winter, when game and fuel were scarce, all the tribes suffered from hunger and cold. Even in good years a lot of them died, especially the old and the younkers like your little girl there.
“Now the buffalo are gone, things are even worse. To survive a bad winter, the Indian needs fat. The buffalo had plenty of fat, especially in his hump where he stored it, and in good years when the herds didn’t drift too far south, that rich hump meat was easy to come by. Now the Sioux and the Cheyenne and the others must depend on
