The Bold Frontier Read online

“What is it, boy?” he asked.

  “Mr. Wyman’s in the street, asking for you.”

  Bodie swung his legs off the bed, laughed, and lit the lamp. The holster hung on the bedpost, with the Colt in it.

  “What time is it?” Bodie wanted to know.

  “Quarter of twelve. Mr. Wyman hasn’t got his shotgun. Said he wanted to talk to you about something.”

  Bodie frowned. “What sort of an hombre is this Mr. Wyman? Would he be hiding a gun on him?”

  The boy shook his head. “He belongs to the Methodist Church. Everybody says he’s real honest,” the boy answered, pronouncing the last word with faint suspicion.

  Bodie’s eyes slitted down in the lamplight. Then he stood, scratched his belly and laughed. “I imagine it wouldn’t do no harm to talk to the marshal. And let him know what’s going to happen to him.”

  Bodie drew on his shirt, pants, and boots. He pointed to the holster on the bedpost. “I’ll come back for that, if this marshal still wants to hold me to the midnight deadline. Thanks for telling me, boy.”

  He went out of the room and down the stairs, a smile of anticipation on his face.

  The house was strangely quiet. No one was in the parlor. But Bodie had a good idea that Maebelle, and others, would be watching from half a dozen darkened windows. Bodie put his hand on the doorknob, pulled, and stepped out into the biting air.

  Wyman stood three feet from the hitchrack.

  He had both hands raised to his face, one holding a flaring match, the other shielding it from the wind as he lit his pipe. Bodie recognized the gesture for what it was: a means of showing that the town marshal kept his word. Wyman flicked the match away and the bowl of the pipe glowed.

  Bodie walked forward and leaned on the hitchrack, grinning. The cold air stung his cheeks. Across the way, at Aunt Gert’s, a girl in a spangled green dress drank from a whiskey bottle behind a window.

  “You Wyman?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I’m Bodie. Speak your piece.”

  Bodie saw a slender man, thirty, with a high-crowned hat, fur-collared coat, and drooping mustache. His face was pale in the starlight.

  “I started out to see if I could talk you into leaving town,” Wyman said slowly. “I figure I don’t want to kill anybody in my job if I don’t have to.”

  “I’ll say you got a nerve, marshal,” Bodie said, laughter in his words. “Ain’t you scared? I got me my dozenth man tonight.”

  “I know.”

  “You still want to talk me into riding without a fight?”

  Wyman shook his head. “I said that’s why I came, why I started out. On the way I heard about the killing. Hiram Riggs ran through the streets yelling his head off about it. I can’t let you go now. But I can ask you to come along without a fight. Otherwise you might wind up dead, Bodie.”

  “I doubt it, marshal. I just purely doubt that.”

  Bodie scratched the growth of whiskers along the line of his jaw. He lounged easily, but he saw Wyman shift his feet as the rasp-rasp of the scratching sounded loudly in the night street.

  “You know, you didn’t answer my question about being scared.”

  “Of course I am, if that makes you feel better,” Wyman said, without malice.

  “Nobody ever told me that before, marshal. Of course most didn’t have time.”

  “Why should I lie? I’m not a professional.”

  “Then why are you in the job, marshal? I’m sort of curious.”

  “I don’t know. People figured I’d try, I imagine.” Sharply he raised his heel and knocked glimmering sparks from his pipe. “Hell, I’m not here to explain to you why I don’t want to fight. I’m telling you I will, if you won’t come with me.”

  Bodie hesitated, tasting the moment like good liquor. “Now, marshal, did you honestly think when you walked over here that you’d get me to give up?”

  Starlight shone in Wyman’s bleak eyes for a moment.

  “No.”

  “Then why don’t you go on home to bed? You haven’t got a chance.”

  In a way Bodie admired the marshal’s cheek, fool though he was.

  Wyman turned his head slightly, indicating the opposite side of the street. For the first time Bodie noticed a shadowy rider on one of the horses at Aunt Gert’s rack.

  “When I come, Bodie, I’ll have my deputy. He carries a shotgun too.”

  Bodie scowled into the night, then stepped down off the sidewalk, trembling with anger.

  “That’s not a very square shake, marshal.”

  “Don’t talk to me about square shakes. I knew that cowboy you shot. He couldn’t have matched you with a gun. And there’ve been others. If you’re trying to tell me two against one isn’t fair, all I’ve got to say is, if I had a big cat killing my beef, I wouldn’t worry whether I had two or twenty men after him.” Hardness edged Wyman’s words now. “I don’t worry about how I kill an animal, Bodie. If you’d given that cowboy a chance, maybe I’d feel different. But I’ve got to take you one way or another. You wrecked the square shake, not me.”

  Bodie’s fingers crawled along the hip of his jeans.

  “Can’t do it by yourself?” he said contemptuously.

  “I won’t do it by myself.”

  “Why not? You can’t trust your own gun?”

  “Maybe that’s where you made your mistake, Bodie. I’d rather trust another man than a gun.”

  “I don’t need nobody or nothing but my gun. I never have,” Bodie said softly. “Where’s your shotgun, marshal?”

  Wyman nodded toward the silent deputy on the horse.

  “He’s got it.”

  “I’ll put my gun up against you two,” Bodie said with seething savagery. “You just wait.”

  Bodie started back for the entrance, and from the shadows before Aunt Gert’s came a sharp voice calling:

  “He might run out the back, Dale.”

  And Wyman’s answer, “No, he won’t …” was cut off by Bodie’s vicious slam of the door.

  Maebelle stuck her head out of the parlor as he bounded up the stairs, his teeth tight together and a thick angry knot in his belly. He had murder on his face.

  He stomped into the bedroom, was halfway across, when the sight of the bedpost in the lamplight registered on his mind.

  His holster—and the Navy—were gone.

  Bodie crashed back against the wall, a strangled cry choking up out of his throat, his eyes frantically searching the room.

  He lunged forward and ripped away the bedclothes. He pulled the scarred chest from the wall, threw the empty drawers on the floor, then overturned the chest with a curse and a crash. He raised the window, and the glass whined faintly.

  He stood staring out for a moment at the collection of star-washed shanties stretching down the hill behind the house. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed, laced his fingers together. His shoulders began to tremble.

  He let out a string of obscenities like whimpers, his eyes wide. He jumped to his feet and began to tear at the mattress cover. Then he stopped again, shaking.

  He felt Wyman laughing at him, and he heard Wyman’s words once more. Black unreason boiled up through him, making him tremble all the harder. With an animal growl he ran out of the room, stopped in the hall, and looked frantically up and down.

  He kicked in the door across the room. The girl shrieked softly, her hand darting for the coverlet.

  “What the hell, amigo …” began the man, half-timidly.

  Like an animal in a trap, Bodie scanned the room, turned and went racing down the staircase. He breathed hard. His chest hurt. He felt a sick cold in his stomach like he’d never known before. Hearing his heavy tread, Maebelle came out of the parlor. Before she could speak, he threw her against the wall and held her. Words caught in her throat when she saw his face.

  “Where is it?” he yelled. “Where’s my Navy?” His voice went keening up on a shrill note. “Tell me where it is, Maebelle, or I’ll kill you!”


  “George, George … Lord, I don’t know,” she protested, frightened, writhing under his hands.

  He hit her, slamming her head against the wall, turning her face toward the top of the stairs. She choked. The fingers of one hand twitched feebly against the wall, the nails pecking a signal on the wallpaper.

  “Emma …,” she said.

  She sagged as he released her. He cleared the stairs in threes to where the round-eyed, curious little girl stood at the landing in her nightdress, shuffling slowly forward as if to find the commotion, and holding the Navy in one hand, upside-down, by the grip, while her other finger ran along the barrel, feeling the metal. Bodie tore it away from her and struck her across the face with the barrel.

  Then he turned, lunging down the stairs again, muttering and cursing and smiling, past Maebelle. She watched him with a look of madness creeping across her face.

  At the top of the staircase, the girl Emma, as if accustomed to such treatment, picked herself up and started down, dragging the leather holster she had picked up near the baseboard. She came down a step at a time, the welt on her cheek angry red but her eyes still childish and round…

  Bodie peered through the curtains.

  He could see Wyman and his deputy in the center of the street, waiting, their shotguns shiny in the starlight. He had never wanted to kill any men so badly before.

  He snatched the door open, slipped through, and flattened his back against the wall, the Navy rising with its old, smooth feel, and a hot red laugh on his lips as he squeezed.

  Wyman stepped forward, feet planted wide, and the shotgun flowered red in the night.

  Then the deputy fired. Bodie felt a murderous weight against his chest.

  The Navy clattered on the plank sidewalk, unfired.

  Bodie fell across the hitchrack, his stomach warm and bleeding, the shape of Wyman coming toward him but growing dimmer each second. Bodie felt for the Navy as he slipped to a prone position, and one short shriek of betrayal came tearing off his lips.

  Wyman pushed back his hat and cradled the shotgun in the crook of his arm.

  Across the street window blinds flew up, and then the windows themselves, clattering.

  Maebelle stuck her head out the front door.

  Lu came down the stairs, crying and hugging a shabby dressing gown to her breasts, bumping the girl Emma.

  With round, curious eyes, Emma righted herself, drawn by the sound of the shots.

  She started down more rapidly, one step at a time, toward the voices there on the wintry porch, and as she hurried, first the holster slipped from her fingers and then the bright shells from the other tiny, white, curious hand. They fell, and Emma worked her way purposefully down to the next step, leaving the playthings forgotten on the garish, somewhat faded carpet.

  Dutchman

  “WILLI, SOMEONE’S OUT THERE,” his wife whispered, in German. “Willi?”

  “Nah, nobody,” he said, half awake in the dark of the cramped bedroom. “Go back to sleep.” He grumbled it, in English, because he resented her clinging to the old ways; he was an American, born and bred.

  He pounded the starched bolster to make a better nook for his head. With his back to Elsa he heard her tense raspy breathing, and then he heard their oldest daughter, Annemarie, sixteen, and subject to nervous spells, ask something of her sister Trudi in a high anxious voice.

  And then he heard the front gate squeak.

  “There, there,” Elsa said, pummeling his shoulder, to be sure he was awake and responsive. Willi rolled onto his back with a groan, a sudden dryness coating the inside of his mouth. He heard them, definitely, in the dark outside the open window. Several men; boots grinding on his carefully raked gravel walk.

  “Must be somebody got the wrong house,” he whispered.

  “Wrong house? That many? You know why they’re here. Do something, Willi.”

  He was a peaceful man. What he wanted to do was stay in bed. Of course he couldn’t, and for more reasons than the immediate one. When Elsa urged him to do something, a familiar thought flashed into his head. A thought mingling defiance and family loyalty. My father didn’t run. I must not run, ever. …

  For years after the great Civil War, when the reputation of the Eleventh Corps was still clouded, his father had insisted, in long harangues in the native tongue, that it was calumny; that only a few of the troops scornfully called Dutchmen by their fellows had run when Stonewall struck his surprise hammer-blow at the Union flank at Chancellorsville. “They were brave men. They bled like others. The majority did not run. I did not run!”

  “Aalen?” a voice called from the yard. Annemarie heard it and began to cry hysterically; her younger sister calmly comforted her. “Aalen, you got company out here.”

  Willi bit down on his lower lip. He was almost certain he knew the voice. It belonged to the lout who swamped floors for his biggest customer. So some of the best people in town condoned this. The realization was depressing.

  Elsa clutched his arm. He shook her off. He swung his legs out of bed, stood, and tightened the drawstring of his homemade flannel sleeping drawers. He crept barefoot to the window and knelt there.

  The bedroom was located on the north side of the house. The window opened on the yard. He saw shadow figures in the yard, against the distant twinkle of lanterns on the oil derricks. Three, four—no, five men. He saw a gun barrel gleam.

  “What do you want with me?” he called. “Don’t come around here bothering my family at night.”

  “We’ll come anytime we please, you goddamn traitor,” another man said, the voice issuing from the blackness under the broad brim of his hat. “You better pack up your brood and haul out. President Wilson declared war day before yesterday, your kind ain’t welcome around here any more.”

  Willi grabbed the sill with both hands and leaned out, and the starlight fell pale on his broad brow and fair hair. He was forty-two, lean from constant hard work, with bright blue eyes and a striking mustache and goatee on an otherwise unremarkable face.

  “You get out of here and leave us alone. I’m a good American. Mein vater—” In his nervous excitement he erred into German but quickly corrected. “—he fought for the liberty of this land not six months after he stepped off the boat. He was one of the first recruits in Blenker’s Eighth New York. He campaigned with General Fremont in western Virginia. He was with fighting Joe Hooker, and General Sigel, in the Army of the Potomac …”

  “Who the fuck cares about any of that?” the first voice, the familiar one, interrupted. Willi pointed angrily.

  “I know you, Moss Eames. I know you.”

  His customer’s swamper, biggest of the shadow-figures, told him to do something filthy. Willi heard the others talking, joshing—and then he heard liquid slosh in a container. Someone was spilling liquid all over the neat picket fence he’d built by hand. They were pouring kerosene on his fence, and his bougainvillea. “Damn you, stop,” he shouted, dimly aware of Annemarie wailing in her bedroom. Then came the spurt of a match.

  Willi watched it sail in a low arc and ignite the bougainvillea with a noisy explosion. Elsa burrowed in bed and covered her head. Annemarie shrieked like a mad person, and he heard Trudi—”Oh, papa, I can’t stop her”—and then the other, younger ones in their rooms, calling out, frightened …

  My father did not run. I will not run. … Willi bruised his shins getting out the window. A rock in the lawn gouged his bare sole. He charged them with fists up, cursing them—German again. Moss Eames pushed down a part of the fence and ran and the others followed, scattering to the nearby alleys because some lights were already being turned on by alarmed neighbors.

  Bare-chested and sweating, Willi watched his precious vines blaze, and the flames leaping along the fence. In the distance, the bell of the Planet Volunteer Fire Brigade began to ring, but they would be too late. He dashed back into the house. He ignored Elsa, who was asking questions, because Annemarie, big and buxom as a grown woman, was wailing like a lost infant, clut
ching to the bosom of her nightdress her little volume of Goethe, as though it had some holy power to save her. Willi cradled his poor unnerved daughter in his arms and soothed her with wordless syllables while the other five children crowded around, wide-eyed. He heard the fire engine horses approach at the gallop, and smelled the burning fence. He had not run, but it struck him that standing fast had done little good.

  In fact, none.

  No one had appetite for breakfast, and usually breakfast in the household of Wilhelm Karl Aalen was a gastronomic event—in quantity if not quality.

  This morning the quantity was there, but no heartiness. Elsa looked wan as she served him his usual plate of crisply fried mush, hard fried eggs, homemade wurst, fried potatoes, biscuits, and a tall stein of dark beer. This morning, the pleasures of a solid nourishing breakfast were worlds away from Willi’s thoughts.

  He fiddled with his fork, pushing a piece of mush back and forth on his plate; back and forth. Elsa shooed the children out—Annemarie’s hair was still uncombed and tangly, and she had a vague glassy look in her bright blue eyes. She was a disturbed young woman; very fragile. He could get no useful advice from the family doctor, and he feared for Annemarie’s later life.

  Elsa sat with her cup of coffee untouched. She clasped her hands, rubbing them together, a papery sound. Willi flung her a look.

  “Say it.” His English was fine; no trace of accent.

  “You know why they came, Willi. It’s bound to get worse. Day before yesterday, at the market, I heard people discussing the feeling about Germans. Margaret Polhaus told me she and Heinz will put their house up for sale this week.”

  “Elsa,” he said, straining for patience, “let me explain something. I am American, you are American— this is April, 1917, and not the dark ages. The United States Congress declared war on Germany and Kaiser Bill, not other Americans. Planet is our home. Nobody is going to push us out. Nobody is going to make me ashamed of what I am.”

  “But feeling is running so high—”

  And so it was, all over the country. It was blind emotion, and cruel. Over in Bakersfield, Heini Holstmann’s little dachshund, Fritzi, had been stolen out of Heini’s side yard by four small boys. The dog was repeatedly cut with pocket knives, then tied to a tree with wire, doused with kerosene, and burned to death.