Butchery of the Mountain Man

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Old Main Building

“Do you need to listen to where we left off yesterday?” Professor Armbruster asked Smoke the next morning when he showed up at the Old Main building to continue with the narrative.

“No, that won’t be necessary,” Smoke said. “I know exactly where I left off, and I know where it’s going next.”

Smoke was silent for a long moment.

“Is something wrong?”

“The part that is coming up isn’t going to be easy,” Smoke said.

“Do you want to take a few moments to compose yourself before we begin?” Professor Armbruster asked.

“I’ve had all night to compose myself, Professor. A few more minutes won’t make any difference.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Tell Wes I’m ready.”

Professor Armbruster reached down to click the toggle switch. “We’re ready, Wes,” he said.

Through the window Smoke saw Wes nod, then bring his hand down. Smoke resumed the story.

John’s cabin

Whips His Horses held his hand up as a signal for the others to be quiet. He didn’t have to say anything, though, because they were all good warriors, and they well knew the value of stealth. Then, they saw the woman come from the house with a basket. She walked into the garden and began picking vegetables.

Whips His Horses signaled to three who were armed with bows and arrows. All three fired, and Whips His Horses watched the rapid and graceful flight of the arrows. All three arrows struck the woman and she dropped the basket, took a couple of stumbling steps, then fell.

“Ayiee!” Whips His Horses shouted, hoping the shout would bring out the man who had killed his brother.

But no one came from the white man’s house.

They waited for a few moments, then they heard a baby crying. The baby cried for several minutes without letup.

“I think the man is not here,” one of the others said. “He would not let the baby cry for so long. He would come for the woman, but nobody has come for the woman.”

“We will see,” Whips His Horses said.

There were six others with him. Eight had started in pursuit of the man and his woman when they left the village, but two were killed in the pass. Then, the rocks fell, and it took a long time to move the rocks so they could continue. Now they were here, and Whips His Horses did not think the man they had followed was here.

He started toward the cabin, moving in a crouch, and on the balls of his feet, ready to run if need be.

But the man did not appear.

One of the other Indians in the party darted quickly up to the cabin, stood with his back to the wall near the door, then, cautiously, looked inside.

“Only the baby is here!” he called back to the others.

“Bring the baby out,” Whips His Horses said.

The Indian by the door went into the cabin, then came out again, carrying the baby upside down, holding him by his foot. The baby was still crying.

“What shall we do with the baby?” the man holding it asked.

“Throw it on the ground by the woman.”

With a huge smile, the Indian holding the child swung his arm back and forth a few times to get the momentum he needed, then he let the baby go. It flew through the air, then landed, hard, on the ground, next to its mother. There it lay quiet and still.

“Shall we burn the house?” one of the other Indians asked.

“Yes,” Whips His Horses said, then he changed his mind. “No. Leave the house as it is. When the man returns, I want him not to know what has happened until he sees the woman and the baby.”

“Will we wait for him?”

“No,” Whips His Horses said. “If we wait for him, we will kill him, but he will die only one time. When he sees his woman and his baby dead, he will die two times. Then, we will kill him a third time.”

“Yes, he will die three times. That is very good,” one of the other Indians said.

“Let us return to the village now. It will be good to let him find his dead woman and child and weep over them.”

It was dark by the time John returned to his cabin. All the way home he had been thinking about the soup Claire had promised him, and he thought it would be very good, with the vegetables grown in his own garden. He even thought he might be able to smell it when he got close enough.

He smelled nothing and was disappointed. Then, when he got to the little clearing where he had built a home for himself, Claire, and the baby, he was surprised to see no light shining through the window. Instead the cabin sat there, gleaming silver under the full, bright moon.

Why could he see no light from within the house?

Then he thought of what a hard ride it had been for Claire and the baby, and with a smile, he realized they must already be in bed.

That was all right. The soup could wait until tomorrow. He was tired too, and it would be good to climb into bed beside his wife. And if she wasn’t too tired . . . he smiled at the implications of that.

He took his horse around to the lean-to attached to the back of the house, unsaddled him, then tied him to the hitching rail alongside Claire’s horse. The watering trough had water, and he pitched some hay into the feeding trough, then he went inside.

“Claire, I’m home,” he said, speaking just loudly enough for Claire to hear, but not to wake the baby.

“Claire?”

John went over to the baby’s crib and felt down inside. The baby wasn’t there, and he realized that he must be in bed with Claire. He lit a candle. If he was going to move the baby back to his crib, he didn’t want to trip over something.

“Claire, I’m going to put the baby back . . .” He stopped in mid-sentence. There was nobody in the bed, and in fact, the bed was still made.

“What?” he asked aloud.

She couldn’t have gone anywhere, her horse was still in the lean-to.

John stepped outside. “Claire?” he called. “Claire, are you out here?”

John heard something from the garden, low and guttural, like the sound of wolves, feeding.

“Get the hell out of my garden!” he shouted loudly, and, with yelps, the animals ran.

John started out to the garden to see what kind of damage the wolves might have done. That was when he saw the two bodies . . . one large, and one small. Or at least, what was left of the bodies.

“NO!!!!!” The agonizing cry of horror and despair rolled back from the walls of the little canyon. “God in heaven . . . no!!!”

John fell to his knees in the garden beside the bodies of his wife and baby, and wept aloud as he hadn’t done so since he was a small boy.

Old Main Building

“Please, stop the recording,” Smoke said.

Professor Armbruster waved at Wes, who stopped the session.

Smoke sat there for a long moment, his eyes closed as he pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Are you all right, Smoke?” Professor Armbruster asked.

“I need to walk around a bit if you don’t mind,” Smoke said.

“No, I don’t mind at all. Go ahead, walk around the campus all you want. I’ll be in my office when you are ready to resume recording. You do intend to continue, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Smoke said. “This has become . . . difficult,” he said. “Much more difficult than I ever imagined it could be.”

“I understand.”

Smoke forced a smile. “I’m glad you understand, because I’m not sure that I do. In the first place, this happened many years ago. And in the second place, I’ve told this story before without it affecting me as it is now.”

“But the way you are telling it now is different,” Professor Armbruster said. “You have never before been as powerfully absorbed in the story as you are now. This intense immersion has heightened your reaction to the events so that you are, in effect, reliving, rather than merely retelling the details. There is a psychological explanation for this. It is called ‘cognitive context-dependent memory.’ You see, you lost your own wife and child by an act of violence, much in the same way as John Jackson lost his. And now, in the retelling of this story you are, in effect, redoubling and experiencing again, your own trauma.”

Smoke smiled, wanly. “Yeah,” he said. “Something like that.”

As Smoke walked around the campus he heard the sound of an engine from above, and looked up to see an airplane passing overhead. Across a landscape covered with fallen leaves, and under a tree he saw a group of college students. They were listening to music on the radio, and two young girls, wearing bobbed hair and short skirts, were doing some sort of dance that seemed to require a lot of kicking.

He couldn’t help but think what drastic changes there had been within his lifetime, and as he looked at the students, he wondered how many of them could have stood up to the ordeal of a two-month-long wagon train trip, or a winter in the mountains with nothing but their own wits for survival.

But even as he contemplated such patronizing thoughts, he recalled the Great War so recently concluded, and he realized that despite the outside trappings, nothing had really changed. The principles of courage, honor, and self-reliance were still present, and he was satisfied that these young men and women would be able to rise to whatever challenges they might meet in the future.

He wished he could go into Longmont’s Saloon for a beer, but knew that, even if he were back in Big Rock, that option wouldn’t be open to him. He wondered if the country would ever come to its senses and repeal the idiotic amendment that was prohibition.

Finally, the melancholy he had been experiencing since the moment he told of John finding the half-eaten bodies of Claire and Kirby passed. He turned and started back toward the Old Main building, the fallen leaves crackling under his feet.

When he returned to the recording room, he saw a glass of amber liquid sitting by the microphone, and he smiled.

“Something tells me this isn’t tea,” he said.

“I thought you might need a little . . . what is it you men called it in the old days? Snort?”

“Snort, yes,” Smoke said. He picked it up. “And, yes, I do need a drink right now.”

He tossed the drink down, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and nodded.

“I’m ready when you are,” he said.

On the other side of the window, Wes brought his hand down, and Smoke resumed talking.