Gunsights

Moon-he was saying something in a strange tongue and the Apaches, with whitewash smeared over their bare skin, were laughing. She had never heard an Apache laugh, nor had even thought of them laughing before this. Coming here was like visiting a strange land.

One of the Apaches saw her and said something to Moon. He turned from his painting and came down from the porch as the Apaches watched. He looked strange himself: suspenders over his bare, hairy chest, his body pure white but his forearms weathered brown, like he was wearing long gloves. He was looking at her leg, her thigh beneath the skirt, as he approached.

She expected him to pat the mare and pretend to be interested in her, saying how's Goldie. But he didn't. He looked from her leg up to her face, squinting in the sun, and said, “You getting anxious?”

“It's been seven months,” Katy McKean said. “If you've changed your mind I want to know.”

“I've been building our house,” Moon said.

The McKean girl looked at the whitewashed adobe, and the stock pens, the outpost on the barren flats, dressed with a flagpole flying the stars and stripes. Like a model post office.

“That?” she said.

“Christ, no,” Moon said. “That's not a house, that's a symbol. Our house is seven miles up the draw, made of 'dobe plaster and stone. Front porch is finished and a mud fence is being put up now.”

“You like front porches,” the McKean girl said. “Well, they must've given you what you wanted. What do you do in return?”

“Keep the peace. Count heads. I'm a high-paid tally hand is what I am.”

“Tell them jokes, like you were doing?”

“See eye to eye,” Moon said. “A man catches his wife in the bushes with some other fella-you know what he does? He cuts the end of her nose off. The wife's mother gets upset and tells the police to arrest the husband and punish him and the police dump it in my lap.”

“And what do you do?”

“Tell the woman she looks better with a short nose-I don't know what I do,” Moon said. “I live near them-not with them-and try not to change their customs too much.”

“Like moving to a strange heathen land,” the McKean girl said, unconsciously touching her nose.

“Well, Christian people, they caught a woman in adultery they used to stone her to death. Customs change in time.”

“But they never do anything to the man,” the McKean girl said.

“Ask your dad, the old philosopher, about that one,” Moon said. “Ask him if it's all right for you to come live among the heathens.”

“When?”

“Next fall sometime,” Moon said. “October.”

“Next month,” the McKean girl said, “the third Saturday in June at St.John the Apostle's, ten A.M. Who's go

The wedding took place the fourth Saturday in June and the best man was Brendan Early: Bren looking at the bride in church, looking at her in the dining room of the Charles Crooker Hotel where the reception was held, still not believing she had chosen quiet Dana Moon. It wasn't that Bren had sought her hand and been rejected. He had not gotten around to asking her; though it had always been in the back of his mind he might easily marry her someday. Right now, as Dana's wife, she was the best-looking girl he had ever seen, and the cleanest-looking, dressed in white with her blonde hair showing. And now it was too late. Amazing. Like he'd blinked his eyes and two years had passed. They asked him what he was doing these days and he said, well (not about to tell these industrious people he was making a living as a minecamp cardplayer), he was looking into a mining deal at the present time-saying it because he had in his pocket the title to a staked-out claim he'd won in a $2,000-call poker game. Yes, he was in mining now.

And told others on the Helvetia stage-pushed by a nagging conscience or some curious urge, having seen his old chum settling down with a wife he thought he would someday have. Time was passing him by and it wasn't the ticket for a gentleman graduate of the U.S. Military Academy to be making a living dealing faro or peaking at hole cards. Why not look into this claim he now owned? He had title and a signed assay report that indicated a pocket of high-yield gold ore if not a lode.

Starting out on that return trip to nowhere he was in mining. Before the stage had reached its destination Bren Early was in an altogether different situation.

2

The Benson-Helvetia Stage: June, 1889

Three very plain-looking ladies who had got off the train from an Eastern trip had so much baggage, inside and out, there was only room for Bren Early and one other passenger: a fifty-year-old dandy who wore a cavalry mustache, his hat brim curved up on one side, and carried a cane with a silver knob.

Bren Early and the Dandy sat next to each other facing the plain-looking, chattering ladies who seemed excitable and nervous and were probably sweating to death in their buttoned-up velvet travel outfits. Facing them wasn't so bad; Bren could look out the window at the countryside moving past in the rickety, rattling pounding of the stagecoach; but the Dandy, with his leather hatbox and travel bag, lounged in a way that took up more than half the seat, sticking his leg out at an angle and forcing Bren Early to sit against the sideboards. Bren nudged the Dandy's leg to acquire more room and the Dandy said, “If you don't mind, sir,” sticking his leg out again.

“I do,” Bren Early said, “since I paid for half this bench.”

“And I paid in receiving a wound to this leg in the war,” the Dandy said. “So, if you don't mind.”

The ladies gave him sympathetic looks and one of them arranged her travel case so the Dandy could prop his leg on it. The Dandy had a cane, yes, but Bren Early had seen the man walk out of the Benson station to the coach without a limp or faltering gait. Then one of the ladies asked him whom he had served with.

The Dandy said, “I had the honor of serving with the Texas Brigade, Madam, attached to General Longstreet's command, and received my wound at the Battle of the Wilderness, May 6, 1864. Exactly twenty-five years ago last month.”

Bren Early listened, thinking, Ask him a question, he gives you plenty of answer. One of the ladies said it must have been horrible being wounded in battle and said she was so thankful she was a woman.

“It was ill fate,” the Dandy said, “to be wounded in victory while giving the enemy cold steel, routing them, putting to flight some of the most highly regarded regiments in Yankeedom. But I have no regrets. The fortunes of war sent a minié ball through my leg and an Army wagon delivered me to the hospital at Belle Plain.”

“Whose wagon?” Bren Early said.

The Dandy gave him a superior look and said, “Sir?”

“You are only half right in what you tell these ladies,” Bren Early said. “You did meet six of the most respected regiments in the Union Army: the Second, Sixth and Seventh Wisconsin, the Nineteenth Indiana and the Twenty-fourth Michigan. You met the men of the Iron Brigade and if you ever meet one again, take off your hat and buy him a drink, for you're lucky to be alive.”

“You couldn't have been there,” the Dandy said, still with the superior look.

“No,” Bren Early said, “but I've studied the action up and down the Orange Plank Road and through the woods set afire by artillery. The Iron Brigade, outnumbered, fought Longstreet to a standstill and you, if you were taken to Belle Plain then you went as a prisoner because the Confederate line never reached that far east.”

The Dandy looked at the ladies and shrugged with a weary sigh. See what a wounded veteran has to put up with?

Bren Early had to hold on from grabbing the mincing son of a bitch and throwing him out the window. With the ladies giving him cold-fish looks he pulled his new Stetson down over his eyes and made up his mind to sleep.