Chapter Text
1. On the Road Again
“You still admiring the view?”
The breeze took hold of Chenery’s words and sent them tumbling through the air for the river to catch. The distant grumble of the waterfall slapped our conversations away with the ferocious strength of a territorial bear: knowing my voice far softer than Chenery’s, I waited until he joined me on the bank to reply.
“It’s a handsome view. Sit your ass down and watch.”
Chenery did. The currents whirled by in front of us, cascading from rock to rock in a splendid crescendo of roaring water which culminated in the lascivious arch of the waterfall, perhaps a hundred feet from us. The sloshing waves sent prisms dancing on the rays of golden sunlight flowing down the mountains. I buried my fingers in the humid earth, feeling dirt sneak beneath my fingernails. Chenery pressed his chin to the top of his knee.
“I can’t quite believe the old man passed.” The river was kind despite its fury: it let his whisper float over to me.
I peered over my shoulder at the little house sitting snugly between forest and riverside. Beside it, flanked by two grazing horses: a jaunty wagon painted in florid colors. Behind them: a fresh tomb. Little’s Library of Need, read the first; Cecil Little, 1821–1886, read the second.
“What I can’t believe is that there’s still work to be done,” I murmured. The next breath hurt like a vice as I forced it out of me. “That time itself is not grieving.”
“Write that down,” Chenery retorted, mechanically. “It’ll sell.”
The mindless joke, an inevitable answer to any words of poetry that left my mouth ever since we had been boys, constricted my heart even more. I lay a hand on Chenery’s shoulder and pressed. The sun blinked one last goodbye and fluttered out over the mountains, abandoning us to darkness, just like my uncle had. He was dead to the world, if not to us, who could not accept it; in order to live, we needed to kill him. The work of a peddler could not wait: on the morrow, we would be on the road again.
2. Greener Pastures
The town of Laggan greeted us with a broken wheel and a raised gun. I had led Chenery further west than our usual route meant to take us, hoping to find greener pastures in this land of raw life and fresh need: what goods we might bring, they would buy; what possessions they had to offer, we would take. A small town like this—no more than a cluster of houses around a smug saloon, the bare necessities embodied by a handful of stores, and the seemingly infinite stretch of fields—should have welcomed us with open arms. Instead the air tasted of wariness, Chenery swore loudly as the wheel crumbled under the weight of our wagon, and we rode into the main street to find the mouth of the sheriff’s revolver trained on us.
“State your name and business,” ordered the man. His voice boomed over the quiet street. Gazes turned to us. Beside me, Chenery tensed. I caught his eyes darting to the gun at my side.
“Chenery, traveling salesman, and this is my associate Little. Our wagon broke down half a mile from here. We thought a kind soul might find us a new wheel, in exchange for some good liquor and a taste of whatever they might need.”
The sheriff slowly lowered his gun, although tension still weighed on the curve of his shoulders. There was an air of power about him, with his broad frame and quiet authority. He had eyes like steel and a smile like misery.
“Please excuse our excessive caution; we have been plagued, these past few months, by fearsome criminals. Travelers are not the pleasing sight we have known them to be.”
“You might as well be one of ‘em outlaws for all we know,” spat a man approaching with great, pugnacious strides. Remarkably tall, he bore the sun’s imprecation on his crimson-tinted cheeks and a deputy’s star on his worn green shirt. His expression was not one of friendliness. “Laurence, we can’t know for sure that they don’t mean no harm. I say we take them back to that wagon of theirs and take a look round, just to make sure they ain’t hiding something.”
“Of course,” replied Chenery with easy affability, before Sheriff Laurence could even agree.
Together we led the sheriff and his deputy upon the winding road to our wagon, waiting patiently where we had left it. Abandoning it without a guard, even in such deserted country, had been a foolish decision: now that the word criminals had been uttered, my blood thrummed between my ears, and I could not hide my relief upon finding it unharmed. Suspicion darkened the deputy’s brow as he lay eyes on me.
“May I?” the sheriff asked, already climbing into the wagon. Chenery turned to me; I nodded slightly; Chenery waved his approval.
They went through the entirety of our stocks, the both of them, checking for hidden delinquents as well as illicit merchandise. Chenery and I stood by meekly as they rummaged through our livelihood, occasionally answering a few questions thrown our way. Despite the weariness of his superior, the deputy retained his fiercely protective demeanor until the very last second of this examination: at last he stepped back, ran a tired hand over his tired face, and extended it for Chenery to shake.
“Welcome to Laggan—I’m John Granby, deputy to Sheriff Will Laurence here. I can’t deny I’ve offered better greetings in my lifetime, but I hope that won’t deter you from staying in our town: your kind’s damned welcome around these parts, especially in a time like this.”
“What happened to you lot, that you won’t even trust a salesman coming your way?” Chenery retorted—his cheerful grip on the deputy’s hand belied the slightly accusatory question.
Laurence sighed. “Let us repair that wheel of yours—I feel we owe you this much—and we shall narrate it all over a drink.”
3. Break Away from the Herd
We sat at the saloon, where a broad-shouldered, scar-bearing woman poured us generous measures of whiskey. Deputy Granby downed his cheerfully and claimed another with a flick of a coin.
“The coach goes through our here town, d’you know—hard to defend, easy to catch, if you’re steadfast enough an outlaw and willing to whip out a bullet or two. Our man, the one been bugging us all year long, he’s both, and he’s proved it time and time again.”
“And he’s got a name, that devil of yours?” Chenery prompted.
Laurence shrugged, a one-shoulder movement that brought out the dark bags under his eyes. “More than one. We’ve been calling him Hawkeye. He’s been calling himself God knows what.”
“And what does that Hawkeye do?”
“He steals,” the bartender retorted, sliding a glass over to Granby and leaning forward across the counter in one singularly masculine motion. Her grin held the glint of whisky reflecting a blaze of gunpowder. “He kills. He takes money and he takes lives: sometimes both, never none.”
The story they told us was as follows: many a different start, but only the one ending. The stagecoach would trundle through the plain, crossing bridges and whisking its passengers across the West towards the reassuring, jagged horizon of civilization. Rich men and women, they were, full of contempt for the serrated lines of distant mountains and the crooked roads weaving through unmarred land: and as they entered this perimeter of doom that surrounded Laggan, the attacks fell quick as lightning and twice as precise.
The chorus chants about tragedy just as the final act falls into place: that of a gun to the passengers’ heads, of a masked face calmly ordering them about, of gloved hands relieving them of their riches. Only the one ending, yes, and no deus ex machina for those innocent folks, who reached Laggan with light pockets and choked throats.
“No one’s ever seen the fellow’s face,” explained Granby.
“They know him by his horse: vicious little creature,” added the bartender.
“He rides to the sound of an eagle’s cry, and his bird once gouged a man’s eyes straight out of his skull,” yelped a delighted teenager who was evidently her daughter.
“The coach company has taken to sending riflemen to guard the vehicles,” the sheriff concluded somberly, “—entirely in vain. He takes them out, one by one, and leaves them hogtied in dark places. Breaking away from the herd means signing your own death warrant, in these parts; you two are lucky you made it out unscathed.”
Following Chenery’s lead, always both more intuitive and befitting than mine during social encounters, I nodded gravely—but my attention was not on the cluster of townspeople around us, eager to share their troubles with new attentive ears. Rather, I had turned my eyes to the remarkably clean window overlooking the porch, and from there to our wagon, waiting peacefully in the main street with its brand-new wheel and its gentle horses drinking their fill from the trough. There, stretched along the wooden underside of the vehicle, his gnarled body hidden almost to perfection by the shadows of the wide wheels, a man returned my gaze, the lower half of his face obscured by a crimson kerchief.