Longspur: Stonebrook and the Judge, #2

1

West­—past the mountains and on the far side of the great and lazy river—the prairie began. It was so vast that it took the wind months to get across it. Early travelers from the east, when confronted by this endless sea of grass likened it to the ocean their grandfathers had crossed. There were no roads across this land. Maps were hand-drawn and jealously guarded. There were no mountains to guide weary travelers. There was only the grass and the wind.

Some thought to follow the river, but it went north, as if it was frightened to strike out across the flat prairie. It did turn north eventually, but trappers and explorers told stories of impossible canyons and impassable forests. No, the way west was across the prairie, in much the same way that their grandfathers had set their prows to chase the sun. West, west, always west. Eventually, they had to reach the other side.

At night, alone upon the plains, you rode under the gravid belly of the night, bloated with stars. At night, the grass sighed and whispered. Other sounds—your plaintive cries, the blowing of your horse, the creak of wagon wheels—were swallowed by the prairie.

At night, the grasslands gave birth to strange things . . .

He started awake, and his desperate chest-heaving gasp broke the delirium blooming in his brain. He came rushing back from a place that he thought he should know, but which he could not place. His heart pounded in his chest, a thunderous rhythm like a thousand hooves, and his face and arms were covered in sweat. He tried to speak, but his tongue knew no words, and the only sound he could manage was a strangled murmur.

The stars winked at him. There is no sun, they whispered. There is only us and the shadows. But such comfort was no comfort at all, and he wanted to turn away from their false light. His limbs were heavy, and he struggled to move. He was not bound. It was only a camp blanket tangled around his legs. He fought his way free, and the uneven ground banged against his elbows and shoulders.

The dying embers of a fire lay on his left, and he found solace in the fading glow of the coals. Beyond the fire, he sensed the presence of several horses—he couldn’t remember how many they had. Two or three, at least. Regardless of their number, they were reminders of who he was and where he was.

There was a shape beside the fire, an outline that wasn’t as dark as the night. A shape he did not know, and as he became aware of it, it looked at him. He caught sight of a tiny gleam that might have been starlight reflected from watchful eyes. He thought he heard the sound of someone crying, but when he sat up and leaned forward, the shape vanished.

All that was left was a whisper. What falls, rises. The voice sounded like the speaker was standing right behind him, but when he whirled around, there was nothing there but darkness.

What dies will live again. The voice fled as he struggled to stand, as he struggled to wake up.

This wasn’t the first time he had been visited like this in a dream. Other dreams frightened him more: dreams of ghastly battlefields, littered with hundreds of dead—blue and gray, alike; dreams where he had seen the faces of those he had killed; dreams where he had returned to Silverglen and found nothing but broken and gnawed bones. This dream always left him unsettled, as if there was something inside him that could not scrubbed away. A stain. A blemish. A mark that would always come back.

When he woke again, coffee was bubbling in the cast iron pot balanced on a pair of rocks next to the fire. The dark drape of night had been replaced by a rippling sheet of pale blue cloth, streaked with gossamer strands of white clouds. A pair of birds called to one another nearby, and he heard the soft noise of a horse blowing out through its nose as it ate.

Elm sat up slowly, his body stiff from a night of sleeping on the hard ground. His ribs ached­—a memory of a recent injury —and when he ran a hand across his face, he encountered the bristly touch of a week or so’s worth of stubble. He kept rubbing—using both hands now—and the rough scrape of his beard invigorated both his face and his hands.

Rock crunched beneath a booted foot, and he looked to his right, squinting into the glare of the morning sun.

The man was a black shape, outlined by the sun, and it was only when he reached the fire and crouched by the bubbling pot, that his features became visible. He had the eyes of a hawk and the face of a woolly sheep who was overdue for a shearing. He was a lanky fellow, unbent by his apparent age, and his rough fingers were nimble as they pulled the cast iron pot away from the fire.

The man deftly poured coffee into a pair of tin mugs. He set one mug down and raised the other to his own lips. He sipped noisily, as if he could not readily measure the distance between his lip and the rim of the cup through his thick beard. His eyes were hard—they had seen too much to be any other way—but there was still compassion in that face—mostly in the wrinkles and lines across his forehead and cheeks.

He had been a federal judge once—a respected keeper of the law in Baton Rouge—but his court was now encompassed by the open sky and the endless prairie.

Civility should not be expected nor given until a man has had coffee or whiskey, the Judge said. He tilted his cup toward the sky. And we’re out of whiskey.

We had some last night, Elm said.

That was before you started thrashing and moaning, the Judge replied. Kept me up half the night.

And the other half?

The Judge shrugged. Coffee is all that is left.

How far are we from a soft bed and a feather pillow? Elm asked. He reached for the mug and found the coffee hot and strong. The last threads of the dream fled after the first sip.

Too far, the Judge groused.

They were, by Elm’s reckoning, still in Kansas. They had passed through Independence several days prior. The name of the town had soured the Judge. He had not been particularly keen on the disheveled appearance of the buildings that leaned against one another, and the locals were—in his words—an uncivil and unkempt lot prone to knifing one another as readily as they spit. Beyond Independence lay the great grass sea that stretched God knows how far to the west. Here Be Monsters would be how cartographers marked these blank spots, but there were no true monsters. There was only immense herds of shaggy buffalo that ranged freely and widely across the grass sea, and following behind them were a countless number of native tribes.

When the tribes came into contact with the new settlers and farmers who were trying to shape the earth to their own futile designs, there was, more often than not, bloodshed. There was always a border to protect: the Great Plains, Texas, Mexico. After the War, there were men who still wanted to fight for their country, and the West embraced those men with open arms.

They decided to avoid the well-traveled route taken by settlers, and for awhile, they followed the Santa Fe railroad as it coursed south and west. Eventually, they lost track of the rails and neither felt any urge to find them again. The landscape was uneventful—miles and miles of buffalo grass, the occasional stand of beaverwood and dogwood, tiny streams which the horses had splashed through without any effort, and the infrequent rocky outcropping from which they could survey the endless grass.

At night, there were so many stars that they made a river coursing across Heaven. Many times, when he dreamed, Elm imagined himself on that river, starlight flowing beneath the hull of his boat. Often there was someone in the boat with him, but he could never see their face. It wasn’t always the same person, though it was never the Judge. That much he knew.

The Judge had opened his eyes to how truly strange the world was. It was as if Elm had lived his entire life believing that the world was flat—like a coin—and when the Judge plucked it from his hand and spun it, he realized it was more like an apple. While such knowledge broadened Elm’s mind, with that knowledge came an awareness of darker things. Things which neither he nor the Judge could explain. All things have a shadow, the Judge would say, just as all shadows come from something real.

This wasn’t as comforting as the Judge made it out to be.

Laelaps came over and licked Elm’s hand. He was a black mutt with white spots on his muzzle and left ear. The dog had followed him out of Thrush, and he had spent several days telling it to go home, but the dog hadn’t listened. Finally, Elm had crouched down to the dog’s level and stared the mutt in the face. You can stay, Elm had said, but you have to have a name.

The dog wagged his tail so enthusiastically his entire body shook.

That night, Elm saw a shooting star. It passed through a constellation he had learned from Bostán, a young Romani boy whose curiosity was as boundless as the dog’s earnestness. That is Canis Major, he said to the dog who was curled up next to him. Zeus gave Europa a gift, a hound that never failed to catch its prey. He called the dog ‘Laelaps.’

It’s a good name, the Judge had said. And that was that.

Another constellation that Bostán had pointed out to him was Canis Minor—the little hound. In some of the stories, this wasn’t a hound, but a fox, Orchilí—Bostán’s aunt and guardian—had told him. It was called the Teumessian fox and it couldn’t be caught.

But if the hound always catches its prey? Elm’s confusion made her laugh.

It is a paradox, she explained. Two separate things that are both true, even though they can’t be true at the same time.

She hadn’t stayed, but he could still hear her voice in his head. The world was a paradox; all things were true and eternal, yet nothing lasted forever.

Elm offered some of his coffee to the dog. Laelaps ignored the cup and licked the back of Elm’s hand. Only the left. Never the right. Never the hand that pulled the trigger, as if he knew what Elm had done during the War.

2

The trading post was a pair of weather-stained buildings braced by a ragged band of cottonwoods. A crooked finger of smoke rose from an equally crooked chimney, and a half dozen chickens pecked nonchalantly across the dry ground in front of the house, as if they knew they weren’t going to find any food but—being chickens—didn’t have anything better to do. A paddock, designated by a series of posts more ancient than the Judge, constrained a sway-backed donkey who also appeared to have little else to do but stand near a scrub of pale grass. Maybe it was going to eat; maybe it wasn’t. There was no rush.

Laelaps barked at the chickens, and when they didn’t react with feather-flinging panic, he charged. They scattered in an cacophony of outraged clucking, and the dog gave a happy bark, delighted to have disturbed the bucolic setting. He wandered over to the house and raised a leg.

Well done, dog, the Judge said. Elm wasn’t sure which of the dog’s actions the Judge was admiring. A conundrum, don’t you think? the Judge offered. Can a business be partially abandoned and still be a going concern?

The porch leaned to the left, canted by time and indifference. Two posts at the front flanked a series of three steps. A stack of buffalo hides spread like moss on tree bark across a crooked railing. They were growing across the porch, and some had leapt from the railing and were attempting to escape across the yard. They hadn’t gotten very far.

Elm let his gaze wander around the rest of the property. A small shed peeked around the corner of the house. It wasn’t large enough to be a barn for horses; more likely, it was used to store dry goods. A slopping overhang on the far side sheltered poorly stacked firewood. Finally, there was a narrow privy that looked like someone had stood a coffin on end.

Laelaps barked, and Elm’s hand dropped to the butt of his revolver.

The house groaned as if it was giving birth, and the front door creaked open. A bear—no, it was a man wrapped in bearskins—stumbled out. It was hard to tell where the hair on his head ended and his beard began—it would take at least an hour with a stiff brush to be sure.

Good day and good travels to you, dusty men of the road, the bearded bear-skinned man shouted. A bone-rattling cough followed his greeting, and Elm thought the man’s coughing fit was going to send him tumbling face-first off the porch, but the trader survived both his phlegmatic obstruction and the short descent with a loose-limbed familiarity. The chickens darted out of his way as he stumbled across the yard. Well met, he said. Well met, indeed.

He thrust out a hand, but since Elm and the Judge were both astride their horses, he turned the gesture into a loose wave that encompassed the property.

The Judge’s mustache twitched as he got a whiff of the man. I always like a man who offers pleasantries to strangers, he said.

The fat man’s beard rippled, and Elm caught a brief glimpse of ragged teeth. No one is a stranger here, he said.

And where might ‘here’ be, friend? the Judge asked.

Twenty miles this side of the asscrack of the world, the man said. He brayed with laughter, delighted at the opportunity to indulge in what was undoubtedly a regular witticism.

The Judge looked at Elm. I told you we should have taken that left at the river.

Elm shrugged. You wanted to see the sights.

Ah, wandering spirits. The trader nodded sagely as if he privy to a great secret.

The Judge brightened. Speaking of spirits, he started.

The man clapped his hands together, and a puff of dust rose from the impact. You are in luck, my friend, the man said. I have whiskey. He clucked his tongue and let his gaze roam between Elm and the Judge. Reasonably priced too, he added, a sudden—but not altogether surprising—shrewdness developing in his tone. For gentlemen such as yourselves.

Ah, a trader with a nose for bargaining. One of the oldest—and surest—signs of civilization. The Judge smiled. My companion here worried we had forsaken it entirely.

Have no fear, good sirs. The trader bowed in Elm’s direction. My humble store has everything you could possibly want. He gestured toward the house. Perhaps more. He waggled his eyebrows. Reasonably priced.

As Elm and the Judge dismounted, the bear-skinned man started to point at the trough, but his fingers thought better of the motion and danced in the air instead. There’s, ah, I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting visitors today. The trader laughed apologetically. His eyes were large and round, like a pair of bird eggs in a nest of twigs. There’s a well. Behind the house.

I’ll find it, Elm said.

As the trader and the Judge went into the house, Elm brought both horses over to the hitching rail. Both horses spared the brackish water in the trough barely a glance and turned to nosing for clumps of grass at the base of the porch.

I don’t blame you, Elm said, patting the flank of his horse.

He wandered around the side of the house and paused near the shed. He thought he had seen a flicker of movement through the partially open door. When the movement wasn’t repeated, he walked cautiously to the shed and pushed the door open with his foot.

Shelves. And more buffalo hides. Elm examined the disarray, which was even more chaotic than the mess on the porch. He caught sight of a pale shape protruding from beneath one of the hides. It wasn’t as dirty as the hides, nor as hairy. Elm eyed the foot for a moment, and then decided to leave it alone. He shut the shed door, but he didn’t drop the latch. Whoever was hiding under the hides was small—either a woman or a child—and he wasn’t going to lock them in.

As he drew a pail of water from the rock-lined well behind the house, Elm wondered why a man as gregarious as the trader would need to hide someone in his shed. Unless the trader didn’t know about the person in the shed, but Elm discarded that possibility as unlikely. As he carried water to the trough, he let his gaze roam around the property again. Behind the house was a stand of cottonwood and a few pine trees. Beyond the yard was the dusty suggestion of a trail that had brought him and the Judge to the trading post. There was another clump of trees about a hundred yards away from the house. The rest of the terrain was open and exposed.

Beyond the cottonwoods, the ground rose to a narrow ridge, but it wasn’t much of a bump in the landscape. A storm would barely have to lift its skirts as it crested the ridge. Along the top, there were a few rocks and a thin cleft where a pair of stones leaned toward one another.

A nagging thought tickled at the back of his head—a prickling sensation he hadn’t been able to shake all morning. It wasn’t the dream—he could barely remember, anyway—it was the stillness of the landscape. They had seen little in the way of game and heard less from birds. There were many stories about the great grass sea that stretched from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, but the stories failed to encompass the desolate nature of the land. It had its own beauty—he was not blind to the majesty of watching a storm roll across a sea of undulating grass—but he was not accustomed to such . . . emptiness.

It was a rare man who could face such emptiness and not be inclined to fill it with something. The Judge talked—that was his way of dealing with all the open space—and Elm grew thoughtful. Did that make them a perfect complement for each other as they road west? Elm wasn’t convinced, but the Judge’s chatter kept him from getting too lost in his own thoughts, which had been troubling of late.

He glanced at the ridge again, mentally grasping at the frayed strands of his dream. What shadow lay in that darkness?

The Judge couldn’t decide if the torpid effluvium around the trader came from the bearskins or from the man’s own unwashed state. The man talked incessantly, but the Judge had long since stopped listening, in much the same way he had mentally distanced himself from the olfactory delight clinging to the trader like a dank fog. How long had it been since this man has had a decent bath? the Judge wondered, and then he considered his own remove from a tub of heated water. Not quite a week, he decided, which was socially outstanding in comparison to the hygienic distress suffered by the trader.

The Judge followed the trader into the crooked house, albeit with a twinge of reluctance. Inside, there would be no place for that smell to go, and when the door swung shut, the Judge suffered a spasm of panic. A grime-encrusted window allowed some light, offering a sliver of solace for his apprehension.

Where did you say you was headed?

The trader’s words pulled the Judge away from the window. I didn’t say, the Judge said as he peered around for the trader.

There were shelves along one wall, piled with a haphazard assortments of dry goods and mining supplies. Shovels and picks leaned drunkenly against the wall. A trunk overflowed with fancy dresses more suited to plantation dinner parties or going to the theater in Chicago or New York. A nearby table was covered with an assortment of knives, revolvers, and rifles. There were buffalo hides everywhere. They were piled beneath the window. They were piled under the table. They were piled in stacks tall enough to hide behind.

There was movement in the gloom. Where are you headed?

West, the Judge said, opting to give the man some kind of answer, in the hope that it might shut him up.

Lot of ground to cover, the trader said. He made it sound like a question.

It is, the Judge said.

A shape staggered around a pile of buffalo hides. You Pinkertons?

What? The Judge was taken aback by the question.

Out of Chicago, the trader said. That detective agency?

The Judge frowned. It was difficult to get a sense of the trader’s mood, and the way the man kept disappearing wasn’t helping. You get many Pinkertons out here? he asked.

The trader appeared again. The Judge was reminded of the ground rodent who would dart in and out of their holes in the ground. Why would we? the trader asked suspiciously.

The Judge shrugged. You’re the one who asked, he said.

The trader bobbed up and down. I did, he said, and as if embarrassed by this admission, he disappeared behind a stack of buffalo hides. He reappeared a few moments later, several feet to the left. Heading west, are you? he said, as if the previous minute of conversation hadn’t happened.

Aye, the Judge said. We are.

You’ll need provisions. Supplies. I got what you need, the trader said. Coffee. Tea. Whiskey. Bullets. Blankets. I got it all.

Just need enough for a week or so. the Judge said.

Just a week or so, the man echoed. The Judge heard noises like a badger rummaging in a tangle of brush.

How about biscuits? The question came from the Judge’s right. I got corn. And flour. Got a recipe here. Straight out of a fancy cookbook. How about preserves? Got a few jars. Canned last year. A pause, followed by a fumbling sound and a sucking noise. Yep. Still good.

Let’s start with some whiskey, the Judge said, pushing aside the mental image created by those noises.

The Judge idly inspected a stack of books on the counter. Most were family Bibles, sold off when homesteaders found themselves caught between starvation and the comforting word of God. Halfway down, he found a small book made from cheap paper. A dime novel, one of those tawdry twaddles meant to entertain the unread and uneducated. He angled the book toward the window to get a better glimpse at the nonsensical illustration that undoubtedly graced the novel’s cover. Ferret Finnegan, he read. Finnegan was a trapper of some renown, and this volume purported to be the certainly tall tale of Finnegan’s encounter with the Black Bear of Mishkewanke. Twice the height of a man and three times as fierce as an entire regiment! the cover copy exclaimed.

He noticed the author’s name and snorted loudly.

Ah, a man of discerning taste and education. The trader put a pair of glasses on the counter and uncorked a dark brown bottle. You familiar with that? he asked as he poured a measure of whiskey into each glass.

What? The Bible? The Judge picked up the closest tumbler of whiskey.

No. Vance. The guy who wrote Ferret Finnegan. Meriweather Vance.

The Judge drank the measure of whiskey in one swallow. He put the glass down and picked up the other one as if it was meant for him as well. I’m not familiar with his work, he said, his tone brusque.

He can spin quite the story, the trader said. He frowned as the Judge raised the second glass. I met him once, he said.

Who? Finnegan?

No, the writer. The man nudged the book with this thumb. This is a true story, he said.

Do tell, the Judge said. He tapped the now-empty glass in his hand against the counter, signaling its dismal state.

Well, Ferret’s not a real person, mind you, the trader said, oblivious to the Judge’s hint. But the writer fellow based him on a real person. He’s Irish—like me, in fact—but more like that Scrumpo fellow. You know the one? He could shoot the eye out of a rabbit at a hundred paces. You know, he was—

Bumppo, the Judge said. Natty Bumppo.

The trader shook his head. No, no. That’s not it. Scrumpo? Scrabumpo? Something like that. Anyway, I told Vance about the bear—his fingers plucked at the heavy bearskin covering his rotund frame—this one. Black bear. Shot it myself. A head taller than me. Teeth longer than my fingers.

Is that so?

The trader poured a measure of whiskey into the glass nearest to him, and he kept his hand on the glass as he poured. Course, Vance makes the story better, which you’d expect, seeing as he’s this famous writer and all.

One would hope so, the Judge said. He sighed loudly, but his theatrical expression wasn’t convincing enough for the trader to pour him another glass.

You sure you’re heading west? the trader asked.

That’s the way the sun goes, isn’t it?

Not much out that way until you reach Denver. The trader narrowed his eyes. Take you more than a week.

A week’s worth of supplies is all we can carry, the Judge said, getting ahead of the trader’s urge to sell more goods.

The trader nodded. Wichita’s only a couple of days, he said. I hear there’s a decent revue going on. Some bird who can really sing. Quite the looker too.

Well, there you go, the Judge said. "We’re looking to hear a decent songbird