Mart woke up in the blackness before the winter dawn. He pulled on his pants, and started up the fire in the wood range before he finished dressing. As he took down his ragged laundry from behind the stove, he was of a mind to leave Amos’ stuff hanging there, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to it. He made a bundle of Amos’ things, and tossed it into their room. By the time he had wolfed a chunk of bread and some leavings of cold meat, Tobe and Abner were up.
“I got to fetch that stuff Amos wants,” he said, “from over—over at his house. You want to show me what team?”
“Better wait while we hot up some breakfast, hadn’t you?”
“I et already.”
They didn’t question it. “Take them little fat bays, there, in the nigh corral—the one with the shelter shed.”
“I want you take notice of what a pretty match they be,” said Tobe with shining pride. “We call ’em Sis and Bud. And pull? They’ll outlug teams twice their heft.”
“Sis is about the only filly we ever did bust around here,” Abner said. “But they balanced so nice, we just couldn’t pass her by. Oh, she might cow-kick a little—”
“A little? She hung Ab on the top bar so clean he just lay there flappin’.”
“Feller doesn’t mind a bust in the pants from Sis, once he knows her.”
“I won’t leave nothing happen to ’em,” Mart promised.
He took the team shelled corn, and brushed them down while they fed. He limbered the frosty straps of the harness with his gloved hands, and managed to be hooked and out of there before Amos was up.
Even from a distance the Edwards place looked strangely barren. Hard to think why, at first, until you remembered that the house now stood alone, without its barn, sheds, and haystacks. The snow hid the black char and the ash of the burned stuff, as if it never had been. Up on the hill, where Martha, and Henry, and the boys were, the snow had covered even the crosses he had carved.
Up close, as Mart neared the back gallery, the effect of desolation was even worse. You wouldn’t think much could happen to a sturdy house like that in just a few months, but it already looked as if it had been unlived in for a hundred years. Snow was drifted on the porch, and slanted deep against the door itself, unbroken by any tracks. In the dust-glazed windows Laurie’s wreaths were ghostly against empty black.
When he had forced the door free of the iced sill, he found a still cold inside, more chilling in its way than the searing wind of the prairie. A thin high music that went on forever in the empty house was the keening of the wind in the chimneys. Almost everything he remembered was repaired and in place, but a gray film of dust lay evenly, in spite of Laurie’s Christmas dusting. Her cake plate was crum-bless, centering a pattern of innumerable pocket-mouse tracks in the dust upon the table.
He remembered something about that homemade table. Underneath it, an inch or so below the top, a random structural member made a little hidden shelf. Once when he and Laurie had been five or six, the Mathisons had come over for a taffy pull. He showed Laurie the secret shelf under the table, and they stored away some little square-cut pieces of taffy there. Afterward, one piece of taffy seemed to be stuck down; he wore out his fingers for months trying to break it loose. Years later he found out that the stubbornly stuck taffy was really the ironhead of a lag screw that you couldn’t see where it was, but only feel with your fingers.
He found some winter clothes he sure could use, including some heavy socks Martha and Lucy had knitted for him. Nothing that had belonged to Martha and the girls was in the closets. He supposed some shut trunks standing around held what ever of their stuff the Comanches had left. He went to a little chest that had been Debbie’s, with some idea of taking something of hers with him, as if for company; but he stopped himself before he opened the chest. I got these hands she used to hang onto, he told himself. I don’t need nothing more. Except to find her.
He was in no hurry to get back. He wanted to miss supper at the Mathisons for fear he would lash out at Amos in front of the others; so, taking his time about everything he did, he managed to fool away most of the day.
A red glow from the embers in the stove was the only light in the Mathison house as he put away the good little team, but a lamp went up in the kitchen before he went in. Laurie was waiting up, and she was put out with him.
“Who gave you the right to lag out till all hours, scaring the range stock?”
“Amos and me always night on the prairie,” he reminded her. “It’s where we live.”
“Not when I’m waiting up for you.” She was wrapped twice around in a trade-blanket robe cinched up with a leather belt. Only the little high collar of her flannel nightgown showed, and a bit of blue-veined instep between her moccasins and the hem. Actually she had no more clothes than he had ever seen her wear in her life; there was no reason for the rig to seem as intimate as it somehow did.
He mumbled, “Didn’t go to make work,” and went to throw his rag-pickings in the grandmother room.
Amos was not in his bunk; his saddle and everything he had was gone.
“Amos rode on,” Laurie said unnecessarily.
“Didn’t he leave no word for me?”
“Any word,” she corrected him. She shook down the grate and dropped fresh wood in the firebox. “He just said, tell you he had to get on.” She pushed him gently backward against a bench, so that he sat down. “I mended your stuff,” she said. “Such as could be saved.”
He thought of the saddle-worn holes in the thighs of his other drawers. “Goddle mightly,” he whispered.
“Don’t know what your purpose is,” she said, “getting so red in the face. I have brothers, haven’t I?”
“I know, but—”
“I’m a woman, Martie.” He had supposed that was the very point. “We wash and mend your dirty old stuff for you all our lives. When you’re little, we even wash you. How a man can make out to get bashful in front of a woman, I’ll never know.”
He couldn’t make any sense out of it. “You talk like a feller might just as leave run around stark nekkid.”
“Wouldn’t bother me. I wouldn’t try it in front of Pa, was I you, so long as you’re staying on.” She went to the stove to fix his supper.
“I’m not staying, Laurie. I got to catch up with Amos.”
She turned to see if he meant it. “Pa was counting on you. He’s running your cattle now, you know, along with his own—”
“Amos’ cattle.”
“He let both winter riders go, thinking you and Amos would be back. Of course, riders aren’t too hard to come by. Charlie MacCorry put in for a job.”
“MacCorry’s a good fast hand,” was all he said.
“I don’t know what you think you can do about finding Debbie that Amos can’t do.” She turned to face him solemnly, her eyes very dark in the uneven light. “He’ll find her now, Mart. Please believe me. I know.”
He waited, but she went back to the skillet without explanation. So now he took a chance and told her the truth. “That’s what scares me, Laurie.”
“If you’re thinking of the property,” she said, “the land, the cattle—”
“It isn’t that,” he told her. “No, no. It isn’t that.”
“I know Debbie’s the heir. And Amos has never had anything in his life. But if you think he’d let harm come to one hair of that child’s head on account of all that, then I know you’re a fool.”
He shook his head. “It’s his black fits,” he said; and wondered how he could make a mortal danger sound so idiotic.
“What?”
“Laurie, I swear to you, I’ve seen all the fires of hell come up in his eyes, when he so much as thinks about getting a Comanche in his rifle sights. You haven’t seen him like I’ve seen him. I’ve known him to take his knife …” He let that drop. He didn’t want to tell Laurie some of the things he had seen Amos do. “Lord knows I hate Comanches. I hate ’em like I never knew a man could hate nothin’. But you slam into a bunch of ’em, and kill some—you know what happens to any little white captives they got hold of, then? They get their brains knocked out. It’s happened over and over again.”
He felt she didn’t take any stock in what he was saying. He tried again, speaking earnestly to her back. “Amos is a man can go crazy wild. It might come on him when it was the worst thing could be. What I counted on, I hoped I’d be there to stop him, if such thing come.”
She said faintly, “You’d have to kill him.”
He let that go without answer. “Let’s have it now. Where’s he gone, where you’re so sure he’ll find her?”
She became perfectly still for a moment. When she moved again, one hand stirred the skillet, while the other brought a torn-open letter out of the breast of her robe, and held it out to him. He recognized the letter that had been left with Aaron Mathison for Amos. His eyes were on her face, questioning, as he took it.
“We hoped you’d want to stay on,” she said. All the liveliness was gone from her voice. “But I guess I knew. Seems to be only one thing in the world you care about any more. So I stole it for you.”
He spread out the single sheet of ruled tablet paper the torn envelope contained. It carried a brief scrawl in soft pencil, well smeared.
Laurie said, “Do you believe in second sight? No, of course you don’t. There’s something I dread about this, Martie.”
The message was from a trader Mart knew about, over on the Salt Fork of the Brazos. He called himself Jerem (for Jeremiah) Futterman—an improbable name at best, and not his own. He wasn’t supposed to trade with Indians there any more, but he did, covering up by claiming that his real place of business was far to the west in the Arroyo Blanco, outside of Texas. The note said:
I bougt a small size dress off a Injun. If this here is a peece of yr chiles dress bring reward, I know where they gone.
Pinned to the bottom of the sheet with a horse -shoe nail was a two-inch square of calico. The dirt that grayed it was worn evenly into the cloth, as if it had been unwashed for a long time. The little flowers on it didn’t stand out much now, but they were there. Laurie was leaning over his shoulder as he held the sample to the light. A strand of her hair was tickling his neck, and her breath was on his cheek, but he didn’t even know.
“Is it hers?”
He nodded.
“Poor little dirty dress …”
He couldn’t look at her. “I’ve got to get hold of a horse. I just got to get me a horse.”
“Is that all that’s stopping you?”
“It isn’t stopping me. I’ll catch up to him. I got to.”
“You’ve got horses, Martie.”
“I—what?”
“You’ve got Brad’s horses. Pa said so. He means it, Martie. Amos told us what happened at the Warrior. A lot of things you left out.”
Mart couldn’t speak for a minute, and when he could he didn’t know what to say. The skillet started to smoke, and Laurie went to set it to the back of the range.
“Most of Brad’s ponies are turned out. But the Fort Worth stud is up. He’s coming twelve, but he’ll outgame anything there is. And the good light gelding—the fast one, with the blaze.”
“Why, that’s Sweet-face,” he said. He remembered Laurie naming that colt herself, when she was thirteen years old. “Laurie, that’s your own good horse.”
“Let’s not get choosey, Bub. Those two are the ones Amos wanted to trade for and take. But Pa held them back for you.”
“I’ll turn Sweet-face loose to come home,” he promised, “this side Fiddler’s Crick. I ought to cross soon after daylight.”
“Soon after—By starting when?”
“Now,” he told her.
He was already in the saddle when she ran out through the snow, and lifted her face to be kissed. She ran back into the house abruptly, and the door closed behind her. He jabbed the Fort Worth stud, hard, with one spur. Very promptly he was bucked back to his senses, and all but thrown. The stallion conveyed a hard, unyielding shock like no horse Mart had ever ridden, as if he were made all of rocks and iron bands. Ten seconds of squealing contention cleared Mart’s head, though he thought his teeth might be loosened a little; and he was on his way.