Robert B. Anderson

The horseman came over the hill spurring a bay gelding in an unsteady walk, past smoke-gray bundles of cactus and shrubby pines. He rode with slack hands and dull eyes, watching the ground as the horse picked its way through shelves of rock. From time to time he looked east for signs of pursuit. He had seen nothing, but they would be coming. They would not give up the trail if he grew wings and flew away.

He looked east and around him and into the soft open spaces of the sky. He looked everywhere but at his leg: when he glanced at his leg the pain leapt at him, driving away even his fear. The blood from his wound and the horse's lather had blackened the stirrup and tacked his trousers to the skirts with a resinous tar.

It was an honest horse, and he had broken it. He had pressed it for seven hours, as he bled into his boot and the urgency of escape crowded instincts of care or pity from his mind. The gelding's pace had run down like a clock. Its breathing had decayed into raking gasps and explosions that decorated the stones in traceries of bloody spume. He could not dismount to lead or rest the animal; he could only drive it on.

A voice seated far down in his pain cried, Run. They would be coming for him. The bay heaved to the crest and stood in sunlight that struck level at the horseman's eyes and threw long shadows from the trees. The country ahead was a waste of stone and scrubby forest, scored and rising in swells and faces of stacked rock into the shadows of mountains. How unlike the landscape of my childhood, he thought. How raw and unfinished, with no hope of paint or a decent rail fence, no trace of a comforting clapboard steeple rising beyond a hedge of moist green forest. The country around him lay uncovered under the sun, still bleeding from the scars and tailings of its volcanic foundation.

Behind him the land rolled out to a smudge that was the gallery forest of the river. Beyond, a screen of mountains glowed red in the full light of the falling sun and the moon was rising into pearl-gray dusk. The disc was eroded on one side and pitted with craters the color of the sky.

A dog began to bark, without urgency, with the measured self-assurance of a church bell. The horseman set his teeth and retied the cloth around his wound. As he did, the pain swarmed up his leg like fire, drawing him into darkness, plucking at him until he snatched at the saddle and winched himself upright.

At his feet, a shallow canyon gathered the shadows and spilled them along a stream-bed necklace of trees and open water. A settler's cabin stood by a gallery of willow and alder trees. What he could make out against the sun and the pain was a one-room building of mud bricks, its flat roof covered with turf and sprouting grass. A horse grazed along the river; another stood in a pole corral, tasting the wind. Next to the cabin a garden had been roughed out. Here and there he could see the simple proofs of immigrant industry: a privy, a wagon, a shed of unpeeled posts and a yard of weeds and packed earth.

The horseman kicked his good leg free and let his spur fall on the bay's shoulder. As he did he threw the reins forward toward the animal's ears as if the leather straps might carry them both away. The horse slumped forward, descending toward an outcrop of broken cliff the height of a man. At the cliff's edge they stopped.

*

He had the sense of time and story passing, and lost: when he came to himself again he lay sprawled on the ground under the stars. The bay gelding had vanished and the inconsequential cliff that had defeated his descent brooded above him. He had fallen or flown or climbed down, but the memory of it had deserted him. He tightened the cloth around his wound, beat back the pain, and pushed himself onto his feet. At once his leg give way and he sank back to the ground. Below him a patch of yellow light glowed in the wash of the moon. He set out on his elbows and arms, pulling himself through the rocks and grass, until he blundered onto a mound of turned earth. The soft ground comforted him, and he lay against it with his mouth full of the scents of dust and decay. The mud cabin stood in outline against the stars. He crept to it, struggled to his feet, felt his way to the door. A dog was barking. He pushed against the boards, saw the door swing away, closed his eyes against the light, and fell heavily into the frame.

Through his confusion an urgent voice cried, Be afraid.

A woman in a cotton dress was aiming a rifle at his head. The thick antique muzzle floated between them in the light of a kerosene lantern. “You won't need your pistol here,” she said. He looked curiously at his hand. There was a pistol in it, but he no longer had the strength to raise it. His leg was giving way again and he was sinking towards the floor. The pistol tumbled from his fingers and fell onto the boards.

“Coe,” the woman said evenly, “bring me the gun.” Through the fog of gathering unconsciousness the horseman watched as a child of three or four years snatched up the pistol and hurried across the room, carrying the weapon by the barrel, to hide in his mother's skirts. The rider's eyes lost focus; his mind released itself from the dim room and the rifle and the fear that had driven him. He felt the comforting rough texture of the board beneath his cheek. He looked again at the woman's face, lit by the thin light of the kerosene, and sank into darkness.

“Is he awake?” a child's voice asked.

“He'll wake before long,” the woman's voice answered. His consciousness unfolded a little and attached itself to the voices. He was in pain. His leg between the knee and the hip burned.

“He's stopped bleeding.”

“He didn't have much blood left to bleed.”

“Will he die?” the child asked.

“Go see to the horses,” his mother said. “Your supper's almost ready.” Who? the urgent voice cried, Who's dying? His arm and shoulder ached. When he drew breath the pain hammered at his ribcage. Where's the horse?

He opened his eyes. The room was filled with light from a small window of paper greased and rubbed to translucence. Across the room, a slender figure bent like a flower over a stove, lifting the iron covers with a clatter to prod at the wood in the firebox below. “How long have I been sleeping?” he asked.

She turned. “I wouldn't call it sleeping, exactly. You've been lying there since night before last.” Two days. Perhaps, then, they'd lost the trail. It was unlikely; it was more likely they were still coming, or waiting out of sight until dark.

He looked at himself. He lay on an iron cot, on a scrap of tent canvas and a nest of bloody rags. His trousers had been cut up the seam to the thigh and a clean bandage laid over the wound. His hand lay limp on his chest. He tested it. It rose and floated for a moment above his face, but slid away, to bump weakly against the wall. He willed movement in his good leg: it would not stir. He groaned. He could not stand, run, ride -- he could do nothing to protect himself. Make her like you.

She hovered over the stove in a rattle of pots. A large gray dog lay in ambush at her feet, dangling a tongue like a canoe paddle from a misshapen mouth. The teeth of the undershot jaw pointed crookedly forward, so that when the great mouth closed the teeth jutted and lapped upwards towards the nose. The accident that had broken the animal's jaw had left a scar on one eyebrow and carried away an ear, leaving behind a pink stub and a descending canal of delicate, waxy extrusions. The dog seemed convinced that its prospects were improved if it stayed underfoot. It turned and followed in the little space as the woman stepped from cabinet to table to stove. The horseman waited until the dog tangled itself in her skirts. The woman recovered and chased the dog under the table with a cry of annoyance. “That dog,” the horseman said, “likes to help.”

She rewarded him with a smile and a glimpse of small, even teeth. “Poor old Sam,” she said. “He misses Kansas.”

“Thanks for looking after me,” he said to her back. It was a handsome back, loosely gathered by the corset and narrowing from the shoulders to the apron-strings. She had swept her hair into a thick sorrel braid that fell down to her waist. “Thanks for not killing me outright.”

“You weren't much of a danger to us,” she said.

“I didn't know. There was the dog --” Somewhere far away he felt the rattle of an alarm.

“Where's my horse?” he asked.

“You left him in the canyon,” she said. “At the top of the little bluff.”

She spooned beans and potatoes from a pot into blue enamel bowls and set them on the table. “Did you bring him in?” he asked.

“I did.”

“Where is he now?”

“He was ruined. I put him down.” She stopped and held his eyes with a boldness that unsettled him. She said, “He's out of the way, if that's what you're asking. I took him downstream and away from the house. Your saddle's in the shed and your saddlebags are under the cot.”

“He was a good honest horse.” He felt a flush of shame and affection. He'd killed it. All he could do for the horse now was rise to its defense. It was as if the bay were on trial and he'd been called on to bear witness.

“I suppose he was,” she said, “but you ruined him.”

“I'm going to need a horse.”

“Not for a week or two, you're not.”

“I can pay.”

“When the time comes, you can pay.” She walked to the door and called, “Coe!”

*

The horseman struggled to get onto his feet, but could not, and fell angrily back into his pain and the tangle of rags. The woman brought him a bowl and a spoon, and sat at the table with the child. When they'd eaten she sent the boy outside and sat beside the cot. With a seamstress's care, she tore strips from the remains of a stained sheet and cut through his bandage with a scissors.

She was not so young as he'd thought. Her green eyes carried a sadness and a net of fine lines spread away from their corners. At rest, her mouth shaped itself to the firmness that he associated with mothers and surgeons, who probed beyond the groomed surfaces of human nature and into its flawed architecture.

Under the bandage his wound was scaly and discolored. At its center, the bullet-hole still wept. “The bullet passed through,” she said.

He probed at the edge of the wound with a finger and strained for a glimpse of the back of his leg, but the bruised limb could not bear the pressure of his hands. “How does it look on the other side?” he asked.

“Not so large,” she said, “but swollen.”

“Infected?”

“Yes.” They sat together in silence for a moment. Outside, the child talked to himself in birdlike chatter. Presently she said, for both of them, “If it goes over to blood poisoning you'll need an amputation.”

“There's no doctor, is there?”

He studied her as she dipped a cloth in a shallow pan and lay it over the wound. “I'll try to cauterize it, if you can stand it,” she said.

She went out. When she returned, she carried a thin rod of black iron to the stove and pushed it into the firebox. The leather glove she offered tasted of salt and wood smoke in his mouth. “Shall I tie you down?” she asked. He shook his head. She walked to the door again. “Coe,” she called, “you go down to the stream now.” She closed the door and drew in the latchstring.

She wrapped the rod in a dishcloth and lifted it from the fire. As she approached the orange color was fading and a residue of ash was forming at the tip. She sat on the edge of the cot at his waist, turned her back to him, and leaned over her work like a cobbler. A more acute pain drove through the ache of his leg. He tried to fold himself over it or throw her off, but she lay on him and he was weak. The room filled with smoke and the bitter scents of metal and burnt meat. His last conscious impression was the pliant fabric of her dress against his face, the salt taste of the glove, and a long sorrel braid that smelled of agave.

*

The morning sunlight fell fully on the paper window. It did not penetrate, but lit it to incandescence, so that the square of paper floated in its own yellow light. Above him the ceiling was a lattice of sticks on twisted beams. “How long have I been here?” he asked.

“You asked me that two days ago,” she said.

“What did you say, two days ago?”

“I said two nights and a day.” He grappled with the problem. His mind was clearing, but this seemed beyond his competence, a subtle mathematical equation for which he had not prepared. Presently she asked, “Do you have a name, then?”

“Compton.”

“Is that all?”

“That's all.”

“Where are you from, Mr. Compton?”

“Has no one come?” he asked.

She poured a cup of coffee and carried it to him. “A man passed by on the ridge.”

He felt the pulse of alarm again. “What sort of man?”

“He was too far away to tell.” She turned away and sat at the table. “What does it matter?” she asked. “Is he a friend?”

“What kind of horse was he riding?”

“A gray.” She closed her eyes and pressed her lips together to remember. “He had a flat saddle horn, as big as a plate. He rode back on the cantle with his feet forward in the stirrups.” After a moment she asked, “This man is not your friend, is he?”

Tell her nothing. Run. But how could he run? He was too weak to stand on his feet.
“Are we in danger?” she asked.

“I'm afraid so.”

“What have you done? Have you killed someone?”

“Someone is dead.”

“A bad man?”

“A very bad man.” His own certainty surprised him. They had been fellow travelers; they had suffered together; they had shared bitter water and women and guilt.

“You're a good man, then.”

“No,” he said quickly. “One bad man may kill another.”

“The man on the gray horse is looking for you, isn't he?”

“The man on the gray horse is the brother of the dead man.” He turned his face to the wall and struggled to set the story in order. It no longer held together. All he could do with it was look at one piece after another. It was like a broken pot.

“Why should they hurt me?” she asked.

“Because that's the sort of men they are.”

“How do you know this?”

Because you have been one of them. He raised himself on the cot and looked about the cabin for his pistol. “My revolver --” he said to the woman. “If they come I may be able to frighten them away.”

“If they come, we'll see. I have the rifle.”

He thought of the men following him and the ancient breechloader she had waved at him in the lamplight. Her childish self-confidence and her innocence of men like Littlejohn and Tinker chafed him. He said angrily, “You will be easy.”

She turned her startling green eyes on him. “I've never been easy,” she said.
At the edge of his consciousness he was brushed by a sensation he imagined he had buried forever. He tried to fix a name to it, but it eluded him. “What's your name?” he asked.

“Maggie,” she said.

“An Irish name.”

She drew the sorrel braid over her shoulder and stroked it. “My mother brought me across when I was two.”

“How did you come to be here?” His hand swept through the air to suggest the wilderness that crowded up around them.

“I came west to teach school. I married. We saved a little money,” she said with sudden pride. “We wanted a country that wasn't settled yet.” Her pioneer recklessness was written on her face.

“Where's the child's father?”

“You didn't see the grave?” He remembered moonlight, loose earth, stones and traces of decay. She laughed flatly and looked away. “Well, it isn't much of a grave, but it's the best I could do. That's him,” Maggie said, and pointed to the facing wall. A muddy image of a boy and a girl in wedding clothes hung in a heavy silver frame. In it Compton could make out the features of the woman who sat beside him. The boy stood stiffly, his shoulders and face already weary with responsibilities.

Compton liked the woman. She'd cared for him and she'd had compassion for the animal he'd broken, but beyond that he was drawn by her spirit and her indifference to the world that warred outside her door. He remembered the strength in her back as he doubled himself against her, and the scent of agave in her hair.

A mild cry of distress floated to them from the yard. The woman cocked her head. When the cry came again she rose from the table and vanished. Outside Compton heard murmurs of complaint and comfort. His eye fell on the photograph of the dead boy, grim and muscular in his high collar and cutaway coat. It came to Compton at last, that the unfamiliar, forgotten wind that was stirring in him was the thing he had once called duty. It never releases us, he thought. It's like gravity: it does not release us even after we've fallen.

*

He said to her, “You must imagine what men might do to you here.”

“Men might do those things to me anywhere,” she said, with a promptness that rankled him. He had no doubt. Men would. Her independence excited an impulse, a habit of taking, that in a man hardened by rough living was joined to violence. The part of his mind that imagined such things threw up pictures of the woman, struggling and pinioned, of unblemished legs, ruddy nipples on a pale field, defiance and terror in her sea-green eyes. When the images passed, another vision came to him, of Tinker and Littlejohn and Post resting in the forest, waiting for dusk.

He would make her understand. “Don't imagine you can appeal to them. They're deserters and butchers; they have nothing to lose. They take the women and children to Mexico. They take Apache ears when they can, for the bounties. They cross the border with their saddlebags full of ears.”

“I know about them,” she said. “I know about the ears.”

“If these men come, you won't be able to defend yourself. They'll kill me. They'll take the boy and sell him in Mexico. They may kill you. They may take you with them. Whatever they do, they will --” he searched for words -- “they will do what men do.”

“As bad as that,” she said without irony.

“I'll take you away as soon as I can travel.”

“I'm not leaving,” she said. “This is our home.”

“Then I'll go. At least you won't have me to answer for.”

“I would answer willingly enough,” she said. “And with a clear conscience.”

He could not move her; she had a strength far beyond his own. “There's a man called Post,” he said without hope. “If they come, ask for Post. Offer yourself to him.” Again it came to him: a vision of pale legs, her breast taken in Post's rough hand, the taste of agave. “Let him take you and make him keep the others away.”

“Perhaps they'll go another way.”

Compton would not let her slip away as easily as that. “The man on the gray horse is called Littlejohn,” he said. “If they come, hide the child: keep him away from Littlejohn. Talk to Post.” Always Post. It was like a charm: talk to Post, his friend Post, who had led him in battle and mutiny and crime. Post would see the right thing done if he could.

“Is there no hope for us, then?” she asked with a small smile. If he had shaken her, she had recovered.

She had reawakened in him some feeble, unexercised sense of obligation, and by its unwelcome force he was bound to her. It had given her the power to vex him. He lifted his hand in an impatient gesture of surrender. “There's hope,” he said. “There are only three of them now; they'll have their hands full. They may go on to the border.”

“Then I will think of them at the border,” she said as she stood, “and not here.”
*

As the nights passed, the fevers that fastened on Compton shook him with less violence. When he was clear-headed and strong enough to manage a chamberpot, Maggie stripped him and bathed him, cutting away the stained bandages and covering with a cloth the part of him that might violate the conventions of sickroom propriety. When she was done she folded the clotted rags in two yards of tent canvas and carried them outside to burn. She made up the cot with fresh linen as Coe watched and Compton sat dizzily at one corner. Then she searched her steamer trunk and brought him clothes soft with washing.

He propped himself against the wall with a pan of water in his lap and held her mirror to his face. The image that appeared shocked him, and he knew it was his only because it could not be otherwise. His ruddy, half-burnt coloring had been whitened by bleeding and days indoors; the beard had grown grizzled and tangled over his jaws. He wet his face, soaped the brush, and scraped with the dead man's razor until it was dull. When his cheeks were smooth to his fingers, he set the mirror and the pan on the floor and called Maggie to witness his resurrection. She came, clapping her hands in astonishment, and brought Coe to see what sort of man Compton had become.

*

“Hide me,” he urged her. “If they find me they'll punish you.”

“Will they come at night?” she asked.

“Probably. They're not brave men.”

They waited until last light, when the sky above the mountains was going from silver to indigo. Maggie lifted his arm and lay it over her shoulder, helping to support him as he limped beside her. With the child following, they made a way to the door and into the yard. In the east the stars were appearing like children coming to the scene of a sudden tragedy. He saw the grave, too shallow to be beyond the reach of wolves.

The dead pioneer had built his shed by the corral, beyond the garden and the patch of ground where his widow and his child had buried him. The shaggy, irregular posts stood upright and side by side, making a palisade covered with canvas and finished with a door of burlap. Inside, at one end, a platform of planks had been set up to keep grain and harness beyond the reach of rodents. Encroaching poverty hung around the place like an odor: the grain that was left did not fill half a burlap bag.

A dozen sacks lay empty and scattered over the platform. Maggie made a bed of them, shaking them out in flurries of chaff and spinning dust, and spread a blanket. Before she left he asked, “Can I have a gun?”

“I think not,” she said. “Not yet.”

“I'm not much use without a gun.”

“Coe and I will think it over,” she said. “Good night.”

*

He woke before daylight and sat at the door as the moon backed into the rising light and the birds in the streamside forest began to chatter. Across an expanse of packed earth and garden, the cabin window kindled and a thin smoke drifted upwards from the stovepipe. He looked out where the grave lay in the moonlight and was swept by envy and longing. He coveted the homestead, the child, the woman and the brittle promise of a settled life. He coveted even the responsibility that was impressed on the young face in the photograph, that grew heavier with every season, and for which there was no relief but death.

He watched the smoke and thought of how he had come to such a pass: how after so much warring, and so little pleasure, he had betrayed himself and so many others. The war had hardened him; he had been a conscientious officer, but the faces of the sacrificed had roughened his sensibility, until he could step over the dead and dying with no more interest or compassion than he'd have felt if they'd been stones.

There had been Post, glorious Post, who could do no wrong, who he followed from their upstate college classrooms to Manassas and beyond. Brave Post, they called him in the officers' mess, as though he had no other name or rank, and toasted his adventures on the battlefield in bumpers of New York champagne. Compton had followed Brave Post even into disgrace, riding west until there was no rumor of war, until nothing lay between them and Mexico but a land of black mountains and bleached stone. They'd fallen in with Littlejohn and his brother, with Tinker and the others, deserters and shirkers who brought war silver out of Mexico and took back whatever could walk or be driven or carried on the back of a mule. There had been no election. Post was the leader. Compton had done what Post had done. After a time Compton had done what Tinker had done, until the line between him and Tinker and the others was thin as a wire.

Then there was the girl who looked into Compton's face as they carried her into the house, who did not struggle or cry out but simply searched him with her eyes. Something in him that had been straining broke away. Not this one, Compton said, not this one. Tinker and the others had a laugh, until they saw how he meant it. Post would have settled it; he'd have stood with Compton; he'd have found a way. But Post rode out to drive off the boy who was hanging around the place like a calf, calling the girl's name and firing at them with a handgun over an impossible range. The others laughed at Compton until he wouldn't be laughed at. Littlejohn's brother came at him and now Littlejohn's brother was dead. Compton hadn't saved the girl, but no one was laughing.
*

For five days he lay on the sacking and waited for his wound to mend. Twice a day Maggie brought him a plate of beans, an odd bit of rabbit or a quail, a tortilla or a square of cornbread. He made himself a crutch, and walked the circuit of the corral until his arm ached, and after sunset ventured as far as the garden. There, by the scarecrow, the air carried the scent of the dead bay to him, submerged in a fragrance of pines and the damp of the canyon night.
He watched the house, the coming and going, the woman's visits to the privy and the child's unselfconscious pissing in the garden. The wind scattered the scarecrow's ragged clothes. Laundry went up and came down, the frail undergarments billowing and waving on the line. Sam came around from time to time, snuffling for rabbit scent and grinning foolishly with crooked teeth. Coe came around, too, although they both understood he was not supposed to. The shed was out of bounds. Compton made little figures of sticks and string for him, and showed him the cat's cradle, and made a great thing of the crude toys that the child presented solemnly for approval.

Maggie and Coe thought it over, and after three anxious days decided that Compton could have a gun. The relief that flooded him when she lifted his revolver from a deep apron pocket swept aside his annoyance. He said only, “Keep it. Let me have the rifle.” And when she took the pistol away and brought the rifle, he cleaned it and polished the barrel to a pewter gloss.
Maggie was drawing her little herd of cattle down from the hills with handfuls of salt. She would ride off with the child on her saddle, returning late in the day behind two or three slabby cows and their calves. At dusk she would take the boy to the stream, pull his smock over his head, and wash him with a rag. When the boy was scrubbed, she would set him in the shallows to play, gather her skirt, and wade behind a thicket of willows. The horseman lay in the shed and watched. Once, he saw her, framed between two trees in a flat silver pool that rose to her knees. Her unbound hair spilled over her shoulders and down her back. She shone white as the moon in the ebbing light, and when at last she turned toward him his longing caught at his breath and stopped it in his throat.

*

On the sixth day, the soldiers came. From the shed, he heard voices and the rattle of bits. His fear leapt at him; he lay with the rifle on top of the blanket, the muzzle toward the house. Between strings of ragged bark he saw the door of the cabin, a panel of blue sky, a bit of gray and white cloud, and men on horseback. They were not the men he feared most. But he feared all men, and these, too, a white sergeant and four black soldiers. They rode without haste and stopped at the cabin. The soldiers pulled their caps from their heads and held them with their reins on their saddles. The woman stood in the doorway, shading her eyes with her hand.
Compton did not mean to be taken. He would not crouch in a filthy cage while a gang of self-righteous men in cravat ties judged him, or stood at the foot of the gallows as his breath was strangled out of him and the burden of his gut ran down into his boots. He let the muzzle of the old rifle rest on the sergeant's face, and waited.

The sergeant's hair sprang from his head in full, wild tangles of copper and blonde. The sun had burnt his face and ears red, chapped his lips, covered him with bits of flake and scale. An Irishman, Compton thought, and when he glanced again at the woman there was a flush of alliance on her face.

The voice of the sergeant rumbled. In the moving gravel of his words he heard his own name. Not said first: first was Post, then Tinker and Littlejohn. Spoken with the gravity of authority, couched among their crimes, the long unfamiliar names fell strangely on his ears. Ulysses Tinker, the gravel voice pronounced, desertion and murder. John Robert Utton, desertion and murder and other crimes. Compton started in surprise. Who would guess that among the scalps and dried ears and skinning knives, Tinker or Littlejohn might possess a thing as common as a name?

Last of all Compton's own name, and the crimes for which they would hang him. Desertion. Of that he was guilty, and not so much committed as embraced with his whole heart, sick as he had been of slaughter. Robbery. That too he had embraced, but without devotion. The women and children they had carried away had been as faceless as the horses and other plunder. He had followed them into Mexico as water flows downhill. It had been a living, a means to a cot and shelter, women mounted in the stupor of drink, and something that passed as fellowship.
The crime against women, the urgent voice charged him. That too, at first, before the coarseness of war began to ebb. But no such crimes against children: he had none of Littlejohn's filthy vices. Murder. Yes. The old irony struck him. To kill in the uniform of one's country was a noble adventure; to kill on one's own account a vile crime. “Well, there it is,” Post would have said, “I'm stumped.” Well there it is.

The Irish sergeant sat easily on his horse and described something. A crime. A girl was taken into the house; her boy was fired on and driven away. One thief lay dead in the yard, killed by another renegade (the boy said) in a storm of gunfire. The bandits fired the house and barn as they left, and took the girl and two horses with them. Compton lay on his rifle in the shed and remembered the smudgy, acrid stink of the smoke. He had tried to stop them: wearied by the hollowness of his own frayed heart, at last he had raised a hand. If he runs far enough, a man will reach the end of something.

Compton watched Maggie's face for signs. His memory was unsteady and even in his fever he had liked her; he had said too much. The sergeant asked something. “Some days ago ,” she replied, and the breeze and the distance carried her words away from him. “A Mexican saddle.” She had caught the man's brogue: he could hear the Irish song in her voice now, the descending vowels.

The sergeant stepped down and stood with her over the grave as they talked in hushed voices. Once the sergeant reached across the loose soil for her hand -- a gesture of support, or possession -- but she drew the hand away and held it lightly above her eyes, looking through the sunlight towards the stream. She pointed to a place where the stones gave way to cottonwoods.
The sergeant spoke to the soldiers. One dismounted and collected two shovels that propped the scarecrow at the end of the garden. The horseman watched as the little party went together to the trees. The woman led the child by the hand, and sat on a root as the soldiers opened a grave in the shade. The soldiers stripped to their gray long-sleeved undershirts and worked back to back, spilling shovelsful of dark soil onto a growing pile until they stood chest-deep in the earth. Even at a distance, their faces shone blue as anthracite. They knew the work: they had been born slaves, and they had learned to bury dead boys on the battlefields of Virginia.
When time came to move the corpse the woman carried the child into the cabin and stayed hidden. The dead man came out of the ground wrapped in the ruins of an oilskin tarp, his discolored feet hanging from the bundle at one end. A hand fell from under the cover and hung in the air, the fingers cramped, the skin the color and texture of clay. In such a climate decomposition advanced unpredictably; once, at a country fair in Mexico, Compton had seen the mummified remains of a woman tucked up like a newborn in a basket and buried for hundreds of years. Time and drought had warped her lips away from her eroded teeth and drawn her skin until it stretched, tough as parchment, over the fleshless long bones. But the callers who paid a few centavos to view her felt the shock of kinship as the sacking was drawn away. One could have no doubt: she was a woman, huddled in an attitude of pathetic defense behind her crossed hands and folded limbs.

The soldiers tied their neckerchiefs around their faces; even from the shed the horseman could smell the decay. They carried the corpse to the trees and buried it, piling stones from the river onto the little barrow of soft earth. Last of all they drove a cross of boards into the ground. When it was done they brought the woman and the child from the cabin, and stood over the grave as the sergeant took a book from his saddlebags and read. Then the soldiers and the sergeant mounted their horses and crossed the stream into the trees, reappearing for a time as they climbed the facing wall and dropping by degrees over the high ridge to the south.
When she came to the shed again he said, “He told you who I am.”

“I knew who you were.”

“I haven't used the name he said for fifteen years.”

“You're all alike,” she said. “One name is as good as another.” She stood at the door of the shed, resting.

“But now you know about me.”

“You are all alike,” she repeated, and his anger rose again. She would deny him even the singular distinction of his cruelty. How easy it would be to hurt her, he thought. There were so many ways.
*

Two days later the soldiers returned, stopping in midstream to let the horses water until they were sated and began to paw, raising glittering fans of spray against the dark scrub beyond. The black men rode to the bank and dismounted; the sergeant rode on alone to the house and called the woman's name. She came to the door, blinking against the light. The sergeant stepped down, tied his horse, and followed the woman into the cabin. Presently there was smoke from the stovepipe.

Compton lay on the rifle and watched the door. The child came out, sat in the dust, played, stood to run to the side of the cabin, sat again under the paper window, played again. The smoke from the pipe grew thin and passed away altogether. Over the mountains a column of cloud spread towards him, swelling heavily into the sky, piling on itself in reefs of pearl and white.

Voices drifted up to him from the stream. The cavalrymen had stripped to their underwear and lay awash in the shallows. He watched the child in the cabin yard and let his vision of the woman reassemble. The part of his mind that pictured such things pushed ugly images at him. He pictured her on the cot, her pale legs coiled around the sergeant's back, groaning in an agony of rising want. She was rolling in the sergeant's arms. He was sure of it. He imagined the quick soft cries of her release.

Compton let his head rest on the sacking, closed his eyes, and smelled the dust. He burned. The burden of obligation he'd felt dropped away. A woman who would give herself so easily would do anything. Such a woman deserved whatever a man might do with her; deserved -- he balked for a moment, and plunged on -- deserved what the men who were searching for him would do. She would betray anyone. She would betray him; had already uttered the fatal words. In a moment the sergeant would call his men and they would have him.

If it came to a fight, he thought angrily, he would have revenge. She would come from the house to fetch the child. Even under fire she would come. He studied the child. He could take the child and let her live, but he'd never had the callousness of heart for that sort of murder. He was not much, but he had not fallen as low as Littlejohn. He had tried to save the girl: that was something. He could hold on to that. It was a talisman against the fact of his crimes.
The cloud in the west built to the top of the sky, breaking free from the mountain and advancing over the valley in battlements of white and gray. Presently the sergeant came from the cabin, swung into the saddle, and rode away towards the stream. In a moment he led his soldiers away, crossing into a forest of bending cottonwoods and disappearing behind a screen of trees.
Maggie appeared with a plate and a pitcher, found the child, stooped and spoke softly. Then she came on towards the shed. When she pushed aside the burlap and entered he rolled onto his elbow. “It was a long visit,” he said experimentally.

“He was my husband's friend.” She gave him the plate and pitcher, looked around the shed, and found a keg to sit on. The muted light falling between the posts suggested bars.
“Have you known him long?”

“Three years.”

“He seemed at home,” Compton said.

“He comes by when he can. He wants me to move away.” With him? the horseman wondered. Of course. An Irish wife for an Irish cavalryman.

“You feed him?” he asked aloud.

“I feed him when he'll let me. He knows how little we have.”

“I know his kind. He's the kind of man who pushes himself on a woman.”

“He never has,” she said.

“Well he will. You're alone here now. He'll take advantage.”

“He's a friend; he misses his wife. We're all lonely here.”

“That's no reason to give yourself to him,” he said. He was not able to keep the contempt from his voice.

She stood and rounded on him with her schoolteacher's eyes. “No,” she agreed hotly, “it's no reason. Nor did I. But if I had wanted to, that would have been reason enough. I'm a widow now. I have nothing to lose but my name.”

“A name is worth having,” he mumbled. He had reason to know. But her offense was not that she might make herself a point of barracks gossip.

Compton turned on the shelf and reached for her, snatching at her arm, and drew her awkwardly toward him. For a moment his mouth pressed on hers; he smelt the fragrance of agave and felt the coarseness of his beard against her face. Her breast lay against his arm. Then she pulled away, making a fist with her free hand, and struck him once on his wound. The fresh wave of pain folded him like a puppet over his plate. The woman turned, and left him alone with the roaring in his leg and his unfinished supper.

*

In the morning she saddled a horse for him. She said nothing about his offenses, but appeared with a pouch of meal and his pistol. “This horse cost us eighty dollars in Kansas,” she told him. “Not that you would know anything about buying a horse. Coe and I can't afford to give it away.” He opened his saddlebags and pressed five twenty-dollar gold pieces into her hand. “Stay in the canyon as long as you can,” she said. “Ride right up the stream to the box. Climb south to the ridge, and stay on it.”

“I want to stay. I want to be here when Post comes.”

She turned, took Coe by the hand, and walked to the cabin with the rifle under her arm. The door closed and the latchstring slid in after.

Compton pulled himself into the saddle and dragged his wounded leg after him. When he was mounted he rode to the door and called her name. The cabin was silent, and in the silence he began to explain himself. “I'm not much, Maggie,” he began. “I'm not much,” he said again. He did not know how to say that there were pieces of him worth saving, or that if she held her arm around him, he believed he could start over. Nothing but the clatter of the stream came back to him. He turned the horse towards the willows. “You do what that Irish sergeant tells you,” he called. “You get the hell out of here.”

He came to the box and turned up the canyon wall, climbing. At the ridge he stopped to let the horse blow. It was like looking through a telescope the wrong way: the cabin with its stovepipe and smudge of smoke, the shed he'd slept in, the indistinct lumps at the door that were Coe and Sam. The dog moved towards the stream, and the slow tolling of its barking drifted to him across the morning. His eye wandered on. In the meadow beyond the homestead the swollen belly of the bay gelding lay like half a melon. Two men on horseback were leading strings of horses and mules past it, slouching towards the cabin. Women and children sat on the mules, their hands tied to their saddles. On the ridge above them Littlejohn was following on his gray.