“Don’t get all prickly.”
“Then don’t call me dumb. Besides, what do you know about rhymes. You told me your ma walked out on your pa when you were two.”
“My aunt raised me, after. She read to me some when I was little.”
Harris glanced at Fargo. “What do you say? You ever read the Bible? Is there a dog in there or not?”
“Can’t say as I’ve heard there is, no.”
“Well, if the dog ain’t in there, it’s somewhere, and if there is a dog, then it won’t let ghosts come floating up here to spook us.”
“You have it all figured out.”
Harris nodded. “I’ve thought about where we go after we die, sure. Who doesn’t? I think on it most when I’m drunk because when I’m not drunk I don’t have a lot of thoughts in my head.”
“I wouldn’t mind being drunk right now,” Fargo said.
Clymer responded with, “Me either. It’s hard not being allowed to take a nip now and then. I hate milk. And beer just doesn’t taste the same. What else is there?”
“I get by with water when I have to.”
“I wonder if ghosts drink,” Harris said.
“Use your head,” Clymer told him. “Ghosts walk through walls and such. They couldn’t drink no more than they could eat.”
Fargo had an inspiration. “Has this ghost walked through any trees?”
“How’s that?”
“This ghost of yours. Does it walk through the trees or around them?”
Clymer scratched his stubble. “You know, I don’t rightly know.”
“It just sort of glides around all spooky-looking,” Harris said. “Sort of like a butterfly only without the wings.”
Fargo scanned the woods but there was nothing. “Maybe it’s gone back to the ghost world.”
“Could be,” Harris agreed. “Ghosts don’t stick around very long. I heard of a haunted house once where the ghost only acted up for a few minutes each night but that was enough to scare the people who live there half out of their hides.”
“I just thought of something,” Clymer said. “If ghosts are real, does this mean those other things are, too? Fairies and whatnot?”
Harris snorted. “You mean those little people with wings that flit about like hummingbirds? They ain’t real. Leprechauns, neither. Although I met an Irishman once who swore he’d seen one.”
Just when Fargo thought their talk couldn’t get any more ridiculous, it did.
“What about those ladies with fish tails that live in the sea? And those hairy critters some Injuns says live deep in the mountains?”
“I ain’t never been to the ocean so I can’t say about those fish women. Although I met me a river rat once who had been on a ship and he told me those fish gals are as real as you and me. They sit on rocks and wriggle their tails to lure sailors into the sea so they can drown them.”
“It sure is a strange world,” Clymer said.
For Fargo it got a lot stranger as just then a pale—
“I told you!” Clymer exclaimed. “And you were thinking we were simpletons, I bet.”
“Keep your voice down,” Harris cautioned. “Ghosts don’t like loud noises.”
“Says who?” Clymer demanded.
“Why, just about everybody. Yell at a ghost and it ske daddles. The same as if you throw water that those Catholics wash their feet in.”
“Hush,” Fargo said. He heard an odd lilting cry.
“The ghost keeps doing that,” Harris whispered. “If it was closer I’d chuck a rock at it.”
“Let’s go see what it is,” Fargo said, and started into the trees. He had gone half a dozen steps when he realized neither man was following him. “What are you waiting for?”
“I ain’t hankering to talk to no ghost,” Harris said. “It might get in my head and make me growl like a dog and spit on people.”
“You’re thinking of demons,” Clymer said.
“Oh. That’s right. I get them confused. I never did believe in demons much but now that ghosts are real, demons must be, too.”
“I’d sure like to meet one of those fish gals. I wonder if she’d be good to eat? I’m powerful fond of cooked fish.”
Fargo made a mental note to look these two up the next time he was sitting around camp bored. Drawing his Colt, he moved deeper into the trees. The pale figure was still moving about. It was definitely on two legs, not four. It was weaving among the trees at a peculiar shuffling gait. He slowed and crept quietly forward. Suddenly a twig crunched under his boot.
The thing turned in his direction.
Fargo’s skin crawled. It was coming toward him. He raised the Colt but he didn’t shoot. Not yet. Not until he knew what it was and if it was a threat. The lilting cry began again, only it wasn’t a cry at all.
The thing was singing.
Fargo lowered the Colt as the figure shuffled to within a dozen steps. That close, he could see it was a woman. An old woman with a wild mane of hair as gray as smoke, wearing a doeskin dress so worn and faded it was ready to fall apart.
She was singing in Lakota in a voice that cracked and rasped as if there was something wrong with her throat.
“I will not harm you,” Fargo said in her tongue.
The woman came closer, moving with that odd shuffling way she had.
It wasn’t until he could practically reach out and touch her that Fargo realized why. Her left foot, and probably her whole left leg judging by how her dress clung to it, was withered and deformed. So was her left arm and hand. She stopped and he saw her face clearly, and understood.
Someone, somewhere, had struck the woman a brutal blow. The left half of her forehead had caved in, and the left half of her face resembled a withered fig. Her left eye was white and sightless.
Fargo suspected a tomahawk or war club was to blame, that perhaps the woman’s village had been raided and she had done as any Lakota woman would do and defended her loved ones and her band, and been struck.
The woman stopped singing and crooked a gnarled finger at him. “Have you seen her, white-eye?”
“Seen who?”
“My girl. I cannot find her. She was with me when they attacked but now she is gone.”
“How are you known?”
The woman tilted her head. “I am half a woman. Once I was a whole woman but those days are gone.”
Fargo looked into her good eye. It held a gleam that wasn’t normal, a bright, sparkling glint that hinted at madness, or a mental state close to it.
“I gave up my name when I lost my daughter. What good was it? A name is a flower that does not last the winter. A name dies when we die.” She tittered in that raspy voice of hers. “I have no need of a name now. I am not here and will not be here until I find her.”
“Where is your man?”
The right half of her face became etched in sorrow. “I lost him when I lost my little girl. They killed him. A lance through the chest. I tried to pull it out but I was not strong enough.” She pressed her good hand to her withered hand and rubbed them. “So much blood. Blood on my hands, blood on my arms, blood on my face, blood on my dress.”
“Try not to think of it,” Fargo said softly.
She tittered, then touched the withered side of her face. “That is when I got this. I took my husband’s knife and tried to stab one of them and he hit me. They thought I was dead but I came back to life, and now I look for my girl. My sweet, precious girl.”
Fargo had been right. Her village had been raided, her husband slain, her child taken or killed, and she had
