Sacrifice – Chapter 3

Prologue — 3. Trackings

Horace rose bleary-eyed the next day, and sat a long while on the side of the bed he had hired, clutching his aching skull in his hands and swaying slowly in his yellowed longjohns. He departed the saloon inn at midmorning after a breakfast of eggs and bacon and buttermilk biscuits which he in his state could but eat but a portion of, and set out with the world still hanging uncertain, turning sometimes wildly around him as though the linchpin had fallen out and everything was riding topsy-turvy in preparation to unhinge finally.

It was no trouble for them to track him then at a safe distance, pursuing his sluggish tiny figure as it rambled like an insect in and out of view amidst the pine trees and the oak trees and the aspen trees and the bouldered gulches, swallowed now and anon by the greening moss or vanishing behind some hill still cusped with the morning frost on its shadow side. Then they would hasten on recklessly until he came back into view. They said nothing to one another, having forsworn themselves to silence for the course of that hunt, for the quarry they pursued was far more elusive and precious than deer or elk and they would not let it slip their grasp for anything. And though now and then Frog would emit a strange burbling noise common to him, it seemed so much a part of the wood that no man would have thought for a moment that it had been a human being to form it up and drop it to the air. Frog was agitated on his horse and shifted about distractedly within the spaces of his oversized dust jacket, craning forward and backward and working his squashed jaw. But Jim’s cold sapphire eyes did not fall from the figure of the man ahead of them, even when it vanished behind some obstruction, but followed it like a flower to the sun, as though no mere substance could stand between that hard gaze and its target.

Come noontide they reached a creek winding through the forest, and the Easterner pulled up shortly and unsteadily departed his saddle, and sank beside it to plash its water on his face, to wake him the better and clear his head of the venom; and he squatted there for a long moment just staring down into those transparencies, lost in some reverie, prodding the stream bed meditatively with his finger. Jim and Frog far distant sat silent, craning upon their horses, and watched him, the very breath held in them.

But then he rose and painfully renewed his horse and rode out, following the stream against its current, up toward the mountains that fed it—toward the elevated land there where the sky seemed to stoop down and kiss the stone and the whole of the world unfurled as though it had been but a map scrawled by some giant, in mere shorthand indication of true continents with true dimensions, landscapes and geographies that could not be but suggested upon so weak a paper as that.

It was days hence that they, having some time kept a careful watch on Horace and his camp, broke their ambush. They came upon him there in the stream bed, him stooped and red-handed in the very act. He was squatting near the river’s edge, his dark oiled Wellingtons shearing the water about his ankles. He held a horn spoon in glistening hands and was slowly swirling it with a strange rhythm, intent upon it as though he would scry the future from its augurs like some haruspex above the godsign. His absorption cost him their distance, for when at last he heard them approach and tore his gaze up it was already too late; there they loomed upon their horses, peering down at him, and the sun at their backs so that he had to squint and lift a hand before his eyes and even then could not make out but the category of them. He rose at once, but said not a word, and it was Jim to speak first.

“Well, I’ll be damned if it ain’t our new friend, Frog. You ’member? Why, it’s Horace from the saloon. Fancy that! Out here in the wilds like, and takin’ himself a bath no less from the looks of it.”

“Fancy that, Jimmy!” echoed the other excitedly.

“Goodday to you, gentlemen,” nodded Horace noncommittally.

“You ’member us?”

“That I cannot make out, as I have you between me and the sun...” And so saying he sidestepped from their shadows and looked them over, and all at once the recognition of them appeared on his features. The color seemed thin upon his face as his hand fell from above his eyes. “Ah, yes, excuse me. Of course I recollect you gentlemen. Frog and…”

“Jim. Jim’s the name, stranger. Well, now, that’s jes’ swell. I was worried maybe the memory had got washed down with that fine whiskey of yourn.” Jim smiled a cold smile and looked around him in mock of pleasantry, at the canvas tent that stood erected there, its frame built of the trunks of young trees, the firepit blackened with long use; the firewood stacked neatly at hand. The many signs that proved this was no temporary encampment. “Jes’ swell...” he repeated softly. Then his eyes flitted back to Horace. “Say, what is it you was doin’ down there in that there creekbed, stranger? You wasn’t trappin’ no beaver down there, now was you?”

“I was but washing the grease from my spoon here.”

Jim clucked his tongue and shook his head scoldingly, and lay a wrist upon the pommel of his saddle, leaning forward. He spat to the side of his horse into the water and chuckled. “That there ain’t no grease drippin’ from yon spoon, friend.”

Horace swallowed and nodded. “And so it isn’t. The sand is good to break up the grease with.”

Jim’s eyes grew hard. “Don’t you bullshit me, now, stranger. Jim Crow weren’t born no Goddamn fool. Why, that there spoon don’t even got no ladle.”

Horace fretted with the horn in his hands and glanced nervously toward his tent; there upon one of the oblique beams that sustained its walls a nubbin from a cut branch served as a peg, and from the peg hung his saddle bags, the worn butt of his rifle sticking out vertically from them. Twixt him and it, the two men swayed on their skiddish horses, the one intent and the other staring with his wild eyes. Horace glanced at them, and looked bleakly out to the tree-cropped horizon there at world’s end and swallowed.

“It’s about just as I figured, Frog. Our friend here don’t care much for company. Well, friend, times is a changin’, and a sharp man will keep abreast. That’s what they call progress.” Jim was looking down at him carefully in the tin-silver light of the mountain afternoon. Such breeze as was made the curled strands of his unruly hair twitch like so many snakes beneath his wide-brimmed sweat-stained hat. “Tell you how this is bound to proceed, friend. Me’n Frog here are throwin’ in with you, even split, three ways.”

Horace looked up sharply at him. The horn trembled slightly in his hand. “This is my claim,” he said.

Jim chuckled, but there was no mirth in it. “Claim, hell. Ain’t you seen where you’re standin’? This here’s the wilds, friend. There ain’t no lawman anywhere ’twixt you and Walla Walla. You gonna call on one of them redskins to hold court for you? You reckon they got a judge and jury stowed up somewheres in one of them tepees? Maybe a Goddamn surveyor! Look around you, man. Sure you ken count?”

Horace clutched the spoon in both his hands before him as though it had been the brim of some exotic hat he was holding before him from out of modesty or courtesy, but looked up with a sudden pride, his jaw set and his mouth small and hard. “I found this place, the claim is mine.” Despite his posture, he repeated the words but blandly, his hands clenching on the horn and his eyes shying about.

Jim squinted hard at him, some final calculus running through his head and the weight of ends and beginnings upon him. “Tell you what, friend,” he said at last. “Frog’n I’re prepared to allow to a concession. Thirty thirty forty, to your favor, in view o’the finder’s fee. After all, fair’s fair, ain’t it, Frog?”

“Fair’s fair,” nodded Frog, licking his thin lips.

“And if I refuse?”

Jim took off his hat and scratched his head and replaced it, and looked about him at the empty land. He chuckled again and shook his beard. “Why, we’ll just go on down the stream a ways and see if we cain’t rustle up a claim of our own. This valley might could be rotten with it, for all I know. But supposin’ it ain’t… why, just supposin’… Well! Be kindly advised, stranger. Accidents can happen out here. Men’ve been known to just up’n disappear in these here hills. Whoo-ee, have I heard stories...! You heard them stories, Frog? Course you have. E’eryone’s heard ’em. There’s Injuns here, and they don’t take kindly to trespassers. You should see the sorta things a Injun can do to a Christian! Injuns, and God knows what else. Bears. Wolves. Avalanches. Lightning bolts. Hell, it’s parlous territory for a lonesome man. Ain’t nobody as misses nobody out here.” He paused, leaned over and spat into the river, a white splotch that was carried on and roweled into the stream unto its vanishing. “You followin’ me, stranger?”

And smiling tightly he looked with drear intensity into the eyes of the man below him. They stared into one another, measuring out the substance that they found there. High above them a hawk wheeled in the sightless fabric of the sky.

You have just read a chapter of the serial novel SACRIFICE, by John Bruce Leonard. A new chapter will be published each week. Subscribe below to receive new chapters directly in your email.