“Once we get the tin – Case and Hathaway go in the ground,” said Dunne. “No loose ends.”
“Of course.” Collins smiled. “I met Case once. No love lost between us. I punched him in the face at a New Year’s Eve celebration.”
“Good for you.” Dunne shifted his shoulder off the doorframe. “Once you get them men, send me a letter to the Helena Post Office. I’ll need warning of their arrival.” And with that, he departed.
As Dunne had waited for his interview with the General, he now waits for Mrs. Tarr’s return telegram. If she sends it, too bad for Collins, too bad for O’Neill. If she doesn’t, too bad for Case. He sits on the horsehair sofa in Mrs. Henderson’s parlour, anticipating the knock of the telegraph delivery boy. At night he lies on his bed hoping to be solaced by a figure emerging from a multitude of white flecks, the shape of a skirt slowly taking form, Mrs. Tarr’s face revealing itself as she joyfully hurries towards him.
Instead, all he sees is a vague shape swarmed by a dark cloud of locusts, hears the whir of their leathery wings, loud as a train rushing through a tunnel.
For ten days Dunne waits for Mrs. Tarr’s reply. Finally, he realizes that Case somehow has dissuaded or prevented her from contacting him. He leaves for Helena. There, he moves into Gobbler Johnson’s cabin, pulls up the floorboards, and begins digging the cellar that will hold his prisoner.
TWENTY
SEPTEMBER ARRIVES AND
Ada is back in school, throwing herself into her teaching with even greater fervour. This may be, she thinks, her last chance to take her pupils by the hand and walk them out into the wider world, to awaken them to its possibilities and wonders. She thinks of them as her children. When she moves about the classroom, she cannot keep from touching them. She rests a hand on the shoulders of the older boys when she checks their calculations; she guides the hands of the smallest children as they form the letters of the alphabet on their slates; she smoothes down cowlicks and mends unravelling braids like a doting mother. When they need to be corrected she does so in a soft and gentle voice, and when she commends them she spreads the butter of praise thickly, without stint. They bask in her attention, wriggle and beam when she pays them compliments.
Ada has struck a pact with her pupils. If they are diligent, if they strive, if they learn as she knows they can learn, they will be rewarded during the last hour of the school day. When the weather is fine she turns them loose to play rounders, to skip, to toss quoits, to play hopscotch, or simply to wander about, drink the sunshine of the last warm days before cold weather descends while merchants look out their windows, shake their heads, and wonder what education is coming to.
On inclement days she encourages her students to decorate the covers of their readers however they like, or entertains them by describing the golden pagodas and clever elephants of Siam, the wandering life of the Bedouin of Arabia Deserta, recounts to them how the intrepid explorer Richard Burton penetrated Mecca disguised as a Mussulman, a city forbidden to infidels, on pain of death. She speaks of long-ago Byzantium, holding the big boys entranced with tales of plotters and traitors strangled by the Emperor’s guard with bowstrings. The girls hear of Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, and the great actress Charlotte Cushman, whom Ada had once seen play Lady Macbeth, a glorious moment still alive in her mind. When her inspiration flags, she reads to them from
The Water-Babies
and
The Golden Key
and
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, her abolitionist mother’s favourite novel. She wants to make them
feel
the world.
Walking home one afternoon, Ada senses autumn lodging wistfully in her, a sadness that looks back on the passing of things, the death of the very grass she walks on, the leaves withered on the bushes or tumbling along the ground in the breeze, all of it reminding her that the summer of Ada’s wager is drawing to an end. But then she gives herself a shake and puts on a proper face, because Wesley is bringing Joe to supper that night.
McMullen is a frequent guest. On his visits, he plays feckless, older bachelor brother to Wesley, full of jokes and japes and outrageous stories, his way of conveying his affection for both of them. If one could choose a brother-in-law, one couldn’t do better than McMullen, a man who would cut off his right hand for either one of them.
She pauses on the path. At her feet, clusters of scarlet mallow lie in the yellow dust like dying embers. Summer isn’t done, she tells herself, not yet. Not for a while.
Three days later, Wesley leaves her house in the darkness of a Saturday morning. He explains he has work to finish on a horse corral, and wants to get started early Sheluxuriates in bed until the sun rises and then goes downstairs to check on the weather, to see what kind of day she can expect. When she steps out the front door, there is evidence that a hard freeze occurred during the night; the planks of the porch are carpeted in rime, the grass is furred in frost. The entire prairie sparkles white except for one dark spot twenty-five yards in front of her house – Dunne in his black frock coat and derby.
She seizes the porch railing to steady herself; the cold sap of it climbs into her veins as he looks fixedly at her. Dunne doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. His face wears the expression of a blind man listening to a far-off sound.
Gathering herself, she calls out to him, “Mr. Dunne, there is nothing here for you! You have misunderstood! You must go away!”
He makes no answer.
“If I did anything to mislead you, I am most heartily sorry! But you need to go away and never come back!”
His queer silence, his queer look unnerves her. Ada backs away from the railing, her hand fumbling for the doorknob. She pushes open the door and eases herself over the threshold, then claps the door shut.
She stands, breath coming quick and short, then goes to the parlour window, parts the curtains, and looks out. Dunne is exactly where he was before, frozen in place like a block of black ice. But now his eyes are turned up the path that leads to Wesley’s ranch.
That sight turns her cold. It is time Wesley was warned of the man’s obsessions. Ada takes Dunne’s letter from a drawer. She glances out the window once more; he is still in place. Clutching the letter in her hand, she slips out the kitchen door and starts for the ranch.
Case is nailing a plank to the corral when he sees Ada stride into the yard, halt by the well, and cast him an anxious look. Tossing down the hammer, he hurries over to her. “Ada,” he says, “has something happened?”
“Yes, something has happened. Some time ago,” she says, speaking urgently, “I should have mentioned it to you before but I did not. Just now I left Dunne standing outside my house. The man is mad. He has professed warm feelings for me and believes I return them. He is convinced you have stolen me away from him, and has gone to great lengths to attempt to discredit you in my eyes. He wrote me a letter some weeks ago.” She thrusts an envelope at him. “Read it for yourself, but be prepared, you will not be pleased. I came as quickly as I could because I thought he may have intentions of coming here –” She hesitates. “You should be warned. He is full of malice towards you.”
As Case dips his head to the letter, McMullen comes up leading a horse. “Hello, darling,” he says. “What brings you out on such a cold morning?”
Ada holds up her hand to stop him.
Wesley has finished reading the letter. Jaws working, he crushes it in his hand and then flings it down the well. “That son of a bitch,” he says.
“Who?” demands Joe.
“Dunne. He’s been bothering Ada.”
“Not bothering. Not really. Making a nuisance of himself perhaps – if that,” she amends, hoping to mollify him. When he turns to go, she snatches at his arm. “Wesley, what do you mean to do?”
“I mean to have a word with him.” He pulls away from her and starts down the path.
“Stop him,” Ada says quietly to McMullen. “Bring him back.” There’s no mistaking it’s an order.
McMullen knots his hand in the mane of the horse and springs up on it bareback. The horse gives a skittish dance of surprise, which Joe checks with a tug to the halter shank. “You believe Wesley means to tackle him?” Ada gives a curt nod, sending Joe off at a trot, legs dangling and bouncing. He overtakes Case soon enough, but Case doesn’t give him a glance; he ploughs along holding his head as if he’s afflicted with a stiff neck and can’t turn it either right or left to look at his friend. Joe walks his horse alongside him. Considerable ground is covered without the two men exchanging a word.
Finally Joe says, “She asked me to bring you back.”
“Not until I settle this,” Case says, tight-lipped.
“You mean to fight him?”
Case is silent.
“I don’t recommend it. That Dunne puts me in mind of one of them tremendous big monkeys. I don’t recollect the name.”
“Gorilla.”
“That’s it. Gorilla. Wesley, you are a damned dictionary of knowledge. Now me, I don’t know much. I’m a practical man. I got a different vantage point than you. Right now, that vantage point is sitting up high on a horse and from where I sit I can see farther than you down this trail, and I don’t see no sign of Dunne. I believe he’s done a skedaddle. I’d say with Dunne gone, there’s no point to whatever you got in mind to do. We might just as well turn back and put Ada’s mind at ease.”
“If he’s skedaddled, he’s skedaddled to town. I’ll find him there.”
Soon Ada’s place is in sight and McMullen is proved right. Dunne is nowhere to be seen. Case insists they go inside and search the premises. The house is empty. When they come out, Case trudges stubbornly towards Fort Benton. Joe remounts his horse, catches him up, and asks, “You ever consider that Dunne might be carrying a pistol?”
“No.”
“You carrying a pistol?”
“You know for a fact I’m not. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Don’t you be ridiculous. If Dunne don’t have a pistol and you fly at him, the size and looks of him, I prospect he’d tear you up like soggy newspaper. If he does have a pistol he might just plink you like an empty can. Just a thought.”
Case stops short. “I’m warning you, Joe! Make yourself scarce!”
McMullen’s horse shies at the outburst. He turns it in a circle, pats it, makes soothing, clucking noises. Gradually, the horse quiets, but little shivers still run up and down its neck. Joe says sharply, “This here is a public thoroughfare. I reckon I have a right to pass down it.”
“Not in my company,” says Case and marches away.
Joe turns his horse in directly behind him, and this is the manner they enter Benton some time later, McMullen hard on Case’s heels. Onlookers stop in their tracks to construe the strange scene, Case walking pell-mell, wrath written all over his face, a horse’s nose at his back.
Joe sits his mount at the bottom of the stairs that lead to the one room that Dink Dooley rents above the Stubhorn. Case hammers up the steps to Dunne’s door, bangs on it, and, getting no answer, storms back down them. When he barrels around to the front of the saloon and lunges through the doors, McMullen rides his horse up on the boardwalk, peers over the top of the batwing doors, and watches Case interrogate Dink Dooley.
In moments, Case is back outside, looking angrier than ever, so angry he forgets he had intended to maintain a chilly silence, and announces, “Dooley says Dunne isn’t his lodger any longer. He cleared out weeks ago and took everything with him.”
“Well, there’s an end to it.”
Case gives an obstinate shake of the head. “He’s got to be somewhere here in town,” he says, and pitches back into the street.
But no one can recall seeing Dunne that day, no one can recall seeing him for weeks. All inquiries about him prove fruitless.
TWENTY-ONE
EVER SINCE WESLEY
read the letter, his behaviour had undergone a great change. At times he carried himself with a prickly pride and reserve, at others he had the guilty man’s watchful, guarded manner, as if judgment would be levelled any minute. Ada felt herself kept at a painful distance. She said nothing for several days, thinking that he would soon speak about the incident, but when he didn’t, she told him that she thought that whatever was bothering him needed an airing. “I take it Dunne was accusing you of some youthful peccadillo with a woman. There is no need to go about looking shamefaced. I am not an innocent. Young men are often imprudent.” She hesitated. “But I do wonder what dealings you had with him in the past. I am curious how it is he claims to know so much about you.”
“A word never passed between us until a year ago,” Case said. “Whatever he claims to know about me he never learned from my lips. But he may have heard talk about me from others – nothing, I assure you, that could be construed as licentiousness.”
“Wne caort of talk?”
“That I had been derelict in my duty as an officer.” His brow furrowed. “There were whispers – no charge was ever brought.”
“Derelict in your duty,” she said. “That is a very vague term.”
“That is the way the military prefers to frame things – with ample latitude.”
“I see,” said Ada carefully.
“No,” he said with great finality, “I don’t think you do.”
His unwillingness to confide in her was exasperating. She presumed he dared not admit to her that at some time in the past his courage had failed him. If that failure had saved his life, she was glad of it. What was it about gentle men that made them disdain their gentleness? She had always believed that her brother Tom’s desire to prove he wasn’t a coward had led to the death of the mildest, sweetest boy God ever made. She didn’t give a fig for Wesley’s valour, or lack of it. It wounded her that he did not understand her better than that. She waited for him to come to his senses.
And as she did, events overtook them. The Nez Perce came down into Montana and apprehension and terror spread as it had the previous year in the days after the Little Bighorn. People began to evacuate farms and ranches to huddle in the towns. The citizens of Fort Benton could talk of nothing else. Wesley began to pay frequent visits to Major Ilges for updates on what the Nez Perce were up to. He often spoke admiringly of the Indians’ pluck and daring, the speed with which they were covering ground in the race to Canada. The Army could not seem to keep pace with them. One day they were reported to be in the Yellowstone country; it was said they had relieved a party of English tourists of their elephant gun. What the Englishmen were doing with an elephant gun, Ada couldn’t fathom, but Wesley had delighted in dwelling on that incongruous detail. And then in the next twenty-four hours there were contradictory claims. Wesley said the Major had received news of four different sightings separated by hundreds of miles. It was Wesley’s opinion that either the Mongol Golden Horde had been mistaken for the Nez Perce, or the Indians could fly.