Last One Standing Read online

  Her smile looked sad to me. I could understand that. Inside I was sad, too, and I’m sure I looked that way on the outside. I could still picture the tears on Grey Fox’s cheeks.

  ‘Yuánfèn?’ I said.

  ‘Fate,’ she said. ‘It was yuánfèn that we found each other.’

  But I knew that it wasn’t quite like that. We hadn’t casually chanced upon each other.

  ‘You found me,’ I said, and she nodded as if the real meaning of yuánfèn was indeed something else.

  Much later we came upon the old surveyors’ huts again. We could have pushed on to St Mary’s Gap but we were tired, and the darkness pressed heavily upon us. It was cold, too, and the horses were exhausted even though we had ridden slowly. My leg was hurting and we were both hungry.

  The huts looked inviting enough that we stayed. We made a fire and we cooked the food we had bought in Green Springs and we boiled water and drank tea. Jia cleaned my bullet wound again, and though it was still painful, there was no sign of any infection. The bullet had gone through flesh and muscle, tearing me up a little, but not hitting and smashing any bones.

  We lay our blankets on the floor of one of the huts, and the moon, just beyond full, cast a silver light across those blankets. Outside, we had talked a lot, but now we were quiet. My arm was around Jia and her head was resting on my chest. I could hear the slowness of her breathing. My heartbeat seemed to adjust itself to match with her rhythms. I kissed her hair and she murmured something. Her hand was resting on my stomach and she slipped it beneath my undershirt and laid it on my skin. She moved her fingers gently and I felt our matched rhythms started to change. She turned her head upwards and in that silver moonlight she was beautiful and young, flawless and yet somehow so heart-breakingly sad. We kissed and her lips were soft and moist and her hand pressed harder against me.

  It was the most natural thing in the world to make love. It was different to the first time. Then it had been an affirmation that we were still alive. It had been a release from the fear and the closeness of death, both our own and One Leg’s. This time it was much more about each other, about knowing each other, discovering each other. We weren’t shy and we weren’t rushed and it was the most physically wonderful thing that had happened to me in my life. But underneath it all, even as it felt as good as I could imagine anything in this world could ever feel – and I knew Jia was experiencing that wonder, too – there was something else.

  It felt like the end of something, not the beginning.

  We had known each other for less than a week, although unbeknownst to us our lives had been entwined long before that, through Moose Schmidt. But in that week we had lived a lifetime, a whole story, and this moment, making love, with the moonlight casting a silver sheet over us, felt like the culmination of all that had gone before. It felt like the end of the story, and that was why it was so powerful, and so good. The sadness would come later.

  Afterwards we lay in each other’s arms and a while later I felt Jia drift on into sleep. The moonlight shifted across our bodies and worked its way very slowly over the floor of the hut.

  I closed my eyes, not worrying about sleep. Sleep would come or it wouldn’t. I was happy in the moment, although somewhere inside I was anxious, too. Anxious about what Moose Schmidt had said when he thought we were going to die. The more I thought about it, the more I felt Jia was right – it had simply been Schmidt enjoying some extra cruelty, trying to eke every last ounce of suffering from the trap he had led us into. I thought of One Leg, too. He believed he may have killed Schmidt. One Leg had already taken on a kind of supernatural status in my and Jia’s minds. We had spoken about him outside earlier. The way he had lived for so long after taking a bullet that would have killed most men – any man – instantly. The way he had been able to ride a horse so easily again after not being able to ride for years – although I insisted that was down to Jia and her needles, not to some mystical Indian ability. Then there was the smoke he had raised during his war dance. It had told him something and that something had been the truth. If a man like that believed he had killed Moose, then surely he had? Although the more I thought about it, the more I thought that if that been the case then wouldn’t One Leg’s last words have been more definitive?

  So I was a little anxious, but the wonder of my time with Jia over-rode it all.

  Then something made me open my eyes, and as they adjusted to the darkness, I saw a face looking in the hut window.

  It took me a moment or two to realize what I was seeing. By the time the image made sense, the face was gone. It had been a man, a young man, I was sure of that, even though the face had been silhouetted. Had he seen us? He must have done, although the beam of moonlight had cycled across the hut floor and was no longer resting on Jia and me.

  I wanted to jump up and rush outside, but I was naked. My gun was somewhere on the floor.

  It took me a minute to slip out of Jia’s arms without waking her, to pull on my breeches, grab my gun, and get outside. The door hinges squeaked and I glanced back but Jia never woke.

  There was no one within the square made by the huts.

  I ran around to the back of the hut where the window was, ratcheting the hammer of my gun with my thumb as I went. Stones cut into the soles of my bare feet. The cold night air raised goose bumps on my naked chest.

  There was no one there.

  I moved left and right, looking at the angles beyond the huts. No one.

  However, it seemed to me that there was dust hanging in the still air, just about visible in the moonlight, raised by something or someone that had passed through. It may, of course, have been my own feet kicking up that dust. Or it may have been imagination.

  But there was something else, too.

  A smell of smoke. The same smell of smoke that had permeated my hair and my skin and my clothes until I had cleaned up in Green Springs.

  The smell hung in the air, very faint, but very real.

  I wondered, for a brief moment, if it had been One Leg. Maybe he was still looking over us and his very soul was forever tainted with smoke.

  But no, such thoughts were just a reaction to the conversation that Jia and I had had earlier, when we had made One Leg out to be some kind of mystic.

  This smoke was real.

  I walked to the edge of the huts and looked out towards the south where we were heading. There were low hills and distant rises. There were silhouettes of trees and the sky was heavy with clouds that took just that moment to obscure the moon. I couldn’t see anyone.

  It didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  I circled the camp and looked in all directions.

  No one.

  By the time I got back to our hut the smell of smoke had vanished from the air, carried away by the cool night breeze. If, I thought, it had ever been there.

  But I didn’t get to sleep that night.

  Chapter 13

  I saw the ghost of my father once when I was fifteen. Or rather, I heard my father’s ghost. I was hunting up in the Blue Hills with that old musket. It was slow to load, like my pistol had been before I started using the paper cartridges, and so I tried really hard to kill whatever it was I was hunting with my first shot. That day I’d hit a small white-tailed deer and I knew it was a killing shot. The deer was less than a fifty yards away and went down instantly. It wasn’t big, which meant I would easily be able to carry it home. Our neighbour Mr Young had a smoke house and Emmett Thackeray just a little further along the street always salted his venison. My ma would cook some as soon as we had butchered the animal, and so between us all, that little deer might last a while. Even if it never lasted, a few people in St Mary’s would eat well for several days. Hell, I’d probably make a few dollars, too.

  I was about to stand up from my hiding spot and go and check the kill when I heard my father’s voice, as clear as if he was standing right next to me, saying ‘Don’t move, Cal.’

  I went cold. The voice was so clear, and so close, and with
out a shadow of doubt it was my father. The breath caught in my throat and my heart paused, and then raced forwards. I froze, and it was a moment before I could physically turn towards the voice.

  I don’t know what I expected to see. We had buried my father the year before. I’d seen his body, cold and pale and thin, looking much older than he had been in life. He had appeared smaller too and although one of the bullets had hit him in the eye, it had left most of his rugged and handsome features intact. There was no case of mistaken identity. But that voice behind me had been as real as the musket that I still held in my rigid grip.

  So I turned really slowly and, of course, I was alone.

  I had positioned myself inside the shadows and cover made by a boxwood bush, some wild ivy, and the trunk of a cedar tree. The deer hadn’t been able to see me, but I could see out all right. I could see the ground all around me, the trees, the leaves, the red dirt track that the deer had walked along just moments before.

  My father was not there.

  Yet the voice had been real. At the time I had no doubt about it.

  I recall breathing through my mouth. I remember trying to calm myself, trying to understand what had just happened.

  Most of all I recall not moving. My father’s instructions had been clear. Don’t move. So I didn’t. As I tried to understand what had just happened, I also kept looking, checking every inch of the landscape all around me. I could see the deer’s carcass, lying on the ground, that white tail still visible. My gunshot had caused a few birds to erupt from the trees. Any, and all, other creatures in the area had frozen or darted into hiding places. Nothing moved, including me.

  How long did I wait? It felt like forever. I started to get cramp in my legs and my arms and in the end I did have to relent and very, very slowly adjust my position. Clouds moved across the sky.

  The light changed. Birds returned and started chattering again. I saw a red squirrel scramble up a tree.

  And after forever two men emerged onto the track.

  I didn’t recognize them, but they had revolvers drawn and they were hunkered down as if they were expecting another gunshot. They were both quartering the landscape, looking every which way.

  ‘Reckon he’s gone,’ one of them said, his voice carrying on the gentlest of breezes. He was dressed in a long dark coat and a matching hat. He had a beard.

  ‘Why would you shoot a deer and then go?’ The other said. His hair was long, over his collar, and he wore a yellow hat.

  ‘He ain’t waiting. Nobody can wait that long.’

  Beardy kicked the deer carcass. Yellow Hat was turning, still quartering the ground. At one point he looked directly at me, and as he did so he paused. I held my breath and after a moment his gaze moved on.

  ‘Let’s take the meat and go,’ Beardy said. ‘Least we eat tonight.’

  Yellow Hat nodded, but continued nervously looking around. Still holding his gun at the ready, he waited whilst Beardy hoisted the small deer over his shoulders and together they walked off down the trail and disappeared.

  I have no idea who they were or what would have happened had they seen me. The fact they waited for so long before breaking cover suggested that they were waiting to surprise whoever had shot the deer. I can’t imagine they had been planning on a friendly surprise.

  As the years went by I wondered if maybe I had heard the men, even subconsciously, and generated the warning myself.

  But I could never convince myself of that explanation. My father’s voice had been as real as the last time he had said goodbye to Ma and me and headed off to Fort Smith.

  The reason I tell the story of my father’s ghost is that he never gave me a warning as Jia and I rode into St Mary’s Gap that morning. Maybe he had been dead too long, but a warning would have been nice.

  Chapter 14

  The early afternoon sun blazed down upon us from a cloudless sky. There was little breeze and the dust our horses raised made my throat and my eyes gritty. I was thirsty and I was tired. We hadn’t tried to avoid the heat today. The ground was hard and as my horse trotted forwards each step vibrated up into my own body and in my weariness I started to worry that when I had last loaded Jia’s gun I had forgotten to leave an empty chamber. Had I mistakenly counted and loaded five – as it would have been on my gun – and inadvertently not left a safe chamber? I knew it was nonsense, of course. I had revolved the cylinder afterwards, as I always did, and left the gun safe. I was worrying over nothing. It was just exhaustion and a worrying kind of day.

  There were two horses tethered on the rail just along from Ma’s boarding house. That wasn’t unusual and in itself it wasn’t worrying. The riders may have been talking to Ma about rooms, or they may have been in the feed store just down the road. Or in the saloon across and down a little.

  But I kept seeing that face looking in the hut window at me. I kept feeling the dust hanging in the air, smelling the smoke.

  I had pushed a little harder this morning and Jia had asked why. Just keen to get home, I’d told her, but it was clear that she sensed how uneasy I was. We were close enough now, had learned enough about each other, to know such things.

  We looped our own horses’ reins over the rail and we went into the house.

  Ma’s front door opened into a small hallway. The hallway ran down to the kitchen at the far end, with a door on the right into a parlour and living room. The stairs to the first and second floors went up to the left. The kitchen was where Ma spent a lot of her time when she wasn’t tidying up after her boarders.

  The front door squeaked as I opened it but the house was quiet inside. Too quiet, I thought, as if the house had heard that squeak and was now holding its breath.

  I couldn’t help but think of that house in Mustang.

  I slipped my Colt from its holster.

  I looked at Jia and I raised a fingertip to my lips. We could be quiet too.

  She drew her revolver, too.

  We walked slowly down to the kitchen, treading softly so our hard heels didn’t click on the wooden floor. If my mother was sitting at the kitchen table reading a book then our entrance with guns in our hands might prove a little dramatic, even embarrassing. But there was something about the stillness of the house that warranted the drawn weapons.

  In the kitchen there was a big iron pot of soup bubbling gently on the stove. It smelled good – potatoes and onions, I figured. The back door was open and the breeze felt stronger and cooler here in town than it had felt on the ride in.

  Nash Lane was dead on the floor.

  His throat had been cut and his eyes were wide open in surprise, as if he hadn’t believed whoever had done this to him was capable of such an act. Knowing Nash, I wondered if he may have been trying to create a reason for a fight the way he had with me. Maybe whilst he had been waiting for their reaction to his provocation they had simply stepped forward and run a blade across his neck. Nash had slid down the wall, knocking over a chair as he died. Blood had soaked his shirt front, and his trousers, and had started pooling around the floor where he lay half propped against the wall.

  I didn’t have to get too close to see that the blood was still wet. It glistened in the summer sunlight coming through my mother’s kitchen window.

  I heard something creak in the room above. Ma’s room.

  I heard footsteps up there.

  Despite all that we had been through, I think this was the worst, most frightening, moment. Not for me, not that I was scared for myself, but this was my mother’s house. I was suddenly terrified of what I would find upstairs. I now understood why Jia had not hesitated when she thought the man lying on the bed in that house back in Mustang had been the man that had shot her mother in the back.

  Jia was staring at Nash Lane.

  I gently placed my hand on her cheek and I turned her head away from him and towards me.

  I’ll go first, I mouthed, and I stepped around her and went back along the hallway, still treading quietly. I climbed the stairs as softly as I c
ould. Jia was behind me. I could hear her breathing.

  The door to my mother’s room was shut.

  The door to Amos Bowler’s room was open.

  Amos lay half in and half out of his room. The hat that gave him his name was across the other side of the landing. It didn’t take a genius to picture the hat rolling over there after they had killed him. Amos, like Nash Lane, had a look of surprise in his dead eyes. His shirt front was drenched in blood too. His throat was intact, but the very quick glance I gave him suggested he might have been stabbed in the heart, or belly. Or both.

  Jesus, I whispered, not sure if it was a prayer or blasphemy.

  I stood still and listened.

  I fancied I could hear someone breathing in my mother’s room, but it may have been the wind through the boughs of the oak tree out back. It may have been Jia behind me. It may even have been me. I wasn’t sure.

  What I was sure of was that I had to open my mother’s door.

  My mother had a simple iron latch on her room door, but she had a bolt on the inside. I reached out and raised the latch slowly with my left hand – I still had my Colt in the other – knowing that lifting the latch on the outside was mirrored by the matching latch on the inside. If anyone was watching, they would see the movement.

  Once the latch was raised I pushed the door as softly as I could, testing to see if it was bolted.

  It was.

  I took a deep breath.

  I let the latch back down and I stepped backwards.

  I looked at Jia, held her gaze for a moment, then I kicked the door with the flat of my boot so hard that the wood shattered and the door flew open and hit the inside wall with a sound like a gunshot.

  Then I was in the room, gun raised, instantly seeing the awful scene in front of me, raising my gun and ratcheting back the hammer.

  Moose Schmidt was over by the window, grinning. He had a gun in his hand. His stick was resting against the wall. My mother was on her bed, and I saw ropes knotted around her wrists and then tied to the top of the bedstead. She had been stripped to her underclothes and one of her eyes was already swelling and colouring where someone had punched her.