The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard - Elmore Leonard [51]
Street rubbed the stock of the Winchester idly.
IN THE DUSK Amelia Darck watched the Apache. He crouched over the slab of red horsemeat, sitting on his heels, and hacked at the meat with his skinning knife. He cut off a chunk and stuffed it into his mouth, but the cold blood-taste of the raw meat tightened his throat muscles and he swallowed hard to get it down. He would wait.
He cut the slab of meat into thin strips and spread them out separately on a flat shelf of rock. When he had more time he would jerk the meat properly and have plenty to eat.
He looked toward the white woman and saw her staring at him. Always she stared, and always with the same fixed, strange look on her face. The eyes of the Apache and the white woman met, and Mata Lobo turned his attention back to the meat. The woman continued to stare at the Apache.
She sat on the ground with her arms extended behind her, full weight on her arms, propping her body in a rigid position, unmoving. Her legs extended straight out before her, the ankles lashed together with a strip of rawhide. And she continued to watch the Apache.
Amelia Darck saw an Apache for the first time when she was six years old. His face was vivid in her memory. She remembered once somebody had said, “…like glistening bacon rind.” And always a dirty cloth headband.
Yuma, Whipple Barracks, Fort Apache, and Thomas. Officers’ row on a sun-baked parade. Chiricahua, White Mountain, Mescalero, and Tonto. Thigh-high moccasins and a rusted Spencer. Tizwin drunk, then war drums. And only the red sun-slash in the sky after the patrol had faded into the glare three miles west of Thomas. Shapeless ponchos that used to be men. The old story. And she continued to watch the Apache.
Mata Lobo glanced at the woman, then stood up abruptly and walked toward her. He stooped at her feet, hesitated, then placed the blade of the knife between her ankles and jerked up with the blade, severing the rawhide string.
His face was expressionless, smooth and impassive, as he eased his body to the ground. A face that in the dimness was shadow on stone. His hands pushed against her shoulders until her arms bent slowly and her back was flat against the short, sparse grass.
The hands moved from her shoulder and touched her face gently, the fingers moving on her cheeks like a blind man’s identifying an object, and his body eased toward hers.
Her face was the same. The eyes open, infrequently blinking. She smelled the sour dirt-smell of the Apache’s body. Then she opened her arms and pulled him to her.
SIMON STREET was up before dawn. He gave his tightening stomach the last of the cold, stale coffee while he waited for the sun to peel back another layer of the morning darkness. It was cold and damp for that time of the year, and when he again started down the trail, a gray mist hung from the lower branches of the trees and lay softly against the grotesque rock lines.
More often now, the ground fell away to the left, the trail hugging the side of the hill in its diagonal descent; and in the distance was a sheet of milky smoke where the mist clung softly to the flats. The trail was narrow and rocky and lined with dense brush most of the way down.
Less than a mile ahead the grade dropped again steeply to the left of the trail, bare of tree or rock, cutting a smooth swatch twenty yards wide through the pines. The mist had evaporated considerably by then and Street could see almost to the bottom of the slide.
First, it was the faintest blur of motion. And then the sound. A sound that could be human.
Simon Street had been riding half tensed for the past dozen years. There was no abrupt stop. He reined in gently with a soothing murmur into the mare’s ear, and slid from the saddle, whispering again