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  His head came up at the mention of this name. He blinked and pushed himself to his feet, swaying like a slender reed. His body was like cindered sticks and shirred meat loosely packed together. If he moved, or tried to walk, he would surely disassemble into separate shards, like brittle glass shattering under the impact of an axe.

  White Sky Heart lifted the scalping knife to the sunlight streaming through the smoke hole. He prayed aloud, invoking his gods. When the prayer ended he pinched the muscle of Marwood’s right breast and passed the knife cleanly through. Blood ran. One of the attendants pushed a wooden skewer under the dense breast muscle. Marwood’s breath whistled through his gritted teeth. The incredible pain brought his senses to a pitch. His mind throbbed like a taut wire, and the world was filled with whorls of red pain.

  Another attendant attached one of the ceiling cords to the skewer. White Sky Heart performed the same operation on Marwood’s left breast. More wooden skewers and wide bone splints were attached below his shoulders, elbows, and knees. The last two splints entered his thighs.

  Blood poured from the multiple wounds. Marwood’s whole world pounded between agonized shards of flashing light and darkness.

  The attendants hauled on the ends of the leather cords. Marwood was wrenched into the air. His head fell back and his eyes bulged from their sockets. The light from the square smoke hole bathed his face and naked, straining body. Blood dripped from his trembling feet, hands, and elbows.

  He swung free of the ground. The attendants tied off the ends of the cords; they were not done torturing him. They attached buffalo and human skulls to the splints and skewers embedded in his jerking body.

  Marwood felt himself drawn between sky and ground, air and bone. Blood and death. One of the weights, a human skull with a bullet hole in the cranium, brushed the ground. The attendants loosened one cord and pulled Marwood up until the skull swung free. They tied the cord off and carefully watched his dangling body.

  There were drums beating outside the lodge. Marwood’s thundering heart pounded in time to their murderous rhythm. His mind fragmented into sections, flying apart like a murder of crows.

  “Hax,” he said. It was but his breath trying to suck life into his torn body. Brutal exhale: “San.”

  White Sky Heart advanced carrying a long hickory pole. He touched the end of the pole to Marwood’s bloody back, and spun him around in the light and smoke.

  “For what is man’s mind but a caution of madness?”

  Marwood recalled his father upon seeing the city of his childhood.

  The desert city of his birth, with stone ramparts and black stone towers. He and his father hunting a lion. A sister—older than him, with children of her own. His mother, his mother.

  The men of the city. Their tattooed faces, speaking in a tongue lost to time. His tongue. The Eternals themselves riding pale horses. They came to take him from the only place he called home, and sent him into a world where he was made to stand against that which must be faced.

  They took him because in his heart he alone carried a wintry thing with a maw that could swallow worlds. But his strength lay in the fact it was more afraid of him than he was of it.

  So he travelled through amaranthine seas. To places that might never be, or could not become until something was set right.

  These were the people Eternals looked for. People destined to travel forever.

  Abaddon. Bilgames. Many more lost to time and dust. Some of which could not be pronounced with the simple mechanics of a human tongue.

  He was one of them. It never ended because it was the storm itself, the unending conflict that made the world a reality.

  There would be one last place where he would stand, and die.

  “Hax.” Breath rasped inward. Final exhale. “San.”

  Darkness closed around him like claws.

  **********

  Marwood opened his eyes. He was lying on a soft mule deer robe. The slanting rays of the afternoon sun streamed through a smoke hole.

  They were in White Sky Heart’s private lodge. Attending women removed the bloody skewers and splints from Marwood’s body. They laved his wounds with cold water and applied medicinal salve with the tips of their slender fingers. One of the women sprinkled his body with crushed sage leaves, which she rubbed gently into his skin.

  Marwood raised his aching left hand. He tried to focus his eyes. The first joint of his little finger was chopped off. He let his hand fall to his side and groaned.

  That’s when they knew he was awake, was alive. Would live.

  William Red Corn pressed the bone nipple of a water pouch to Marwood’s dry lips. He sucked the water and took a long, shuddering breath. He drank again.

  White Sky Heart sat across from them, eating handfuls of jerked meat and hominy. He did not appear overly concerned with the events surrounding him, or the speed and method of Marwood’s recovery. He spoke to William Red Corn and returned to his meal.

  The boy crouched beside Marwood. His young face was grave, his eyes full of tears.

  “Now you can sleep,” he told him, “and my grandfather will die in peace.”

  Part VI

  The Sunset of Destruction . . .

  CHAPTER 26

  Carlene wept when she saw his scars.

  “Do you think you’re an Indian?” she cried.

  “I don’t know what I am,” he said, and it was true. He was no longer the same man. As a spear point hardened by fire, so he now was.

  He had never been a warm man. But now he was more distant, more alone, than ever before. Carlene saw it right off. Everyone who knew him in Tomah did.

  She shook her head in defiance. “I don’t understand you,” she said. “You’ve been gone three months. We thought you died out there on the Three Forks.”

  “No,” Marwood said, “I did not die. But I see things that were once hidden to me, and I will not turn back to the man I was.”

  “You were supposed to go after Clete and bring him in,” she said in an accusatory tone.

  Marwood stared out their window at the tents and clapboard shacks below. “Yes,” he said, “but when I got there I decided to do something for myself instead.”

  He left the window and faced her. “I can’t go back to everything I once was,” he said. “I don’t know who I am, but I know who I’m not.”

  Later that day, Judge Creighton and he talked about his experience. They met that night over supper, in the very saloon where Marwood had killed the Ketchum twins, and Henry Pickett, for lynching a Lakota Indian chief.

  “Are you all right, John?” Creighton asked halfway through the fried chicken and greens.

  “Yes, sir,” Marwood replied. “I think I am now.”

  Creighton eyed him across the table. “What happened to you out there among the Mandans?”

  Marwood pressed his lips together and leaned back in his chair. “It’s like what happened on the Llano Estacado,” he said. “Or Sand Creek. You can’t explain it to another man who wasn’t there. Not because you don’t want to, but because you know you yourself will never fully understand it.”

  “Can you work?”

  “Yes, sir. I am ready for work.”

  Marwood lawed out most of that remaining year in Tomah, seeing Carlene sporadically. They continued to share a room at the hotel, but Carlene had taken another across town. When Marwood got word of Clete Stride once again moving through the territory, he went back to Carlene and told her how it must be.

  “I am going after your husband,” he said.

  She let out a shuddering breath. “I guess I know what for.” Her face was white as sacking flour. The only other time he saw her this upset was when he came back from the Mandans, broken and carved up.

  “He will kill you,” she warned.

  “Or I, him.” Marwood stood in the dull light of their bedroo
m window. Across the street were the charred timbers of a saloon. The fire had trapped twenty people inside. Sometimes, after a hard rain, their white bones were seen poking up through the black ashes.

  It was not the first time Stride had visited Tomah before his warrant. In the past, before Marwood visited the Mandan village, Carlene had gone to live with Clete for the month or two he remained in town. He was, after all, her lawful husband. When Clete left again for the killing fields, she moved back to the hotel room she shared with Marwood.

  In truth Marwood did not care at the time. He had no real call on Carlene, or she him. Having Stride visit his wife a few months out of the year worked no great hardship on Marwood, and he welcomed the arrangement. Carlene could be a catawhomper at times. He didn’t mind the breathing space.

  This time, however, it was different. Since his return Marwood had strong evidence Stride tried to murder a man on the high prairie, and had stolen his hides. As far as Judge Creighton was concerned, when Marwood first presented the case to him it was enough to hang the turd.

  “I can’t have him in my backbearing the rest of my life, Carlene,” Marwood told her. “Not if you and I are going to be together.”

  Carlene had a bowl of cotton on the table in her room. She kept it there to remind her where she came from, and where she never wanted to return.

  “I’m afraid what might happen to you,” she told him.

  “I’ve tracked and brought in men before.”

  “Not like Clete, you haven’t.” She stopped picking at the cotton bolls and swallowed her fear. “Is that what you want? For us to be together?”

  “I think so. Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do. But I’m not convinced it’s what you need right now. I don’t know if I am what you need right now.”

  “After I bring Stride in I want you to move back to my hotel room,” he told her.

  “All right,” her voice was meek. “I’ll do that, John.”

  That afternoon he packed his war bag and had the livery stable saddle his horse and bring it around to the hotel.

  Carlene stood on the wooden boardwalk with a purple parasol. She had been crying. He kissed her.

  “I will be back when I can,” he promised.

  “You are never coming back.” She looked into his flint-grey eyes. “We both know it.”

  “I want you to have something.” He took the locket Quillen had given him and pressed it into her gloved hand. “I picked it up a long time ago, before I did any real lawing. Been waiting to give it to the right girl.”

  She closed her hand tight, held it to her breast. Her nose was red from the tears. “Where can I reach you?” she asked.

  “I will let you know where I land.” He took the reins of his horse, a flaxen gelding with a dark mane, and mounted.

  Carlene put her hand on his left arm. “Be careful. The snows fall heavily in the passes this time of year.”

  He squeezed her fingers. “Goodbye, Carlene.”

  “Goodbye, John.”

  He pulled out of Tomah leading a packhorse. When he got halfway down the uneven dirt lane he looked back. Carlene waved. He lifted his hand in return.

  That night he made camp in the foothills of the Boulder Mountains. He crouched beside an outlaw’s fire drinking black coffee. Night sounds filled the cold, frosty country. The stars were thick dust on crushed black.

  He felt civilization slough off his shoulders.

  In the morning he broke camp, kicked out the fire, and rode. When he reached Platte Bridge Station he learned he had missed Clete Stride by a week.

  “He pushed south,” one of the soldiers said. “Killed a whiskey drummer before he left. They say he’s got a Mexican woman down in Nogales he cut up pretty bad. But she stays with her sister now.”

  Marwood sent a telegram to the sheriff in Nogales and rode off.

  In Laramie he saw churches, schools, and neat painted houses. At the terminal of the Union Pacific Railroad he found another telegram waiting for him. It was from Nogales. Clete had a small estancia used to run cold brands on stolen Mexican cattle. The sheriff down there was keeping an eye on the woman spoken of. Marwood replied that he was on his way.

  During the first week of February, 1874, he was riding along the Cache La Poudre River, watching white water spill over black rock, when he came round a wooded bend and caught three men killing Cheyennes.

  He rode up on them out of a tree break. The trees were leafed out and he remained hidden. He watched as they were cutting up the last woman—she was very pregnant. One of the men ripped her swollen belly open with a hog knife. He pulled out a wobbling fetus by one leg. It was pink-purple in the high morning light. The wrinkled umbilical cord stretched to the girl lying on the ground.

  She was alive—barely—and begged for her baby. The man, little more than a thirteen-year-old with bowl-cut hair and the sloe eyes of a cretin, laid the baby on the ground. He stomped its head with his hobnailed boot.

  The woman screamed. Another man cut her throat to shut her up. The cretin carried the baby toward an iron spit on the campfire.

  All this happened in the fifteen seconds it took Marwood to ride clear of the slender trees. He turned his horse broadside. It nickered and whisked its tail.

  The men were so busy debauching and killing they hadn’t seen him until he halted his horse.

  “What are you boys doing?” he called.

  They froze, looked at one another in confusion. One spat between his feet. “Killing these here Cheyennes for their horse.”

  Marwood looked at the five dead bodies in the grass, and the sleek pony staked out and grazing five rods away.

  “You boys jumped them from this same break I rode out of,” Marwood said.

  “You take it right,” the first man replied. He had long hair, and white knife scars webbed his arms. His teeth were gone; he gummed his words when he spoke. “They was so busy resting they horse, they didn’t see us steal up in their shadow.”

  “It was a regular hog killing,” the second man said. He bent down and cut away a scalp from an old dead man. The scalp dripped from his hand. “They’s plenty here, if’n you want,” he called.

  The first man pointed a knobbed stick he used as a shillelagh at Marwood. He had a pocket revolver in a Mexican carry, tucked up front in his waistband. “Mayhap you come down off that big horse,” he said. “I don’t like the way you rode up on us like a bandit.”

  The second man squinted. “Hey, that’s right. You acting all high hat like you law, or something.”

  “I was badged in Montana Territory.”

  The first man laughed. “You are out of your corral.”

  “I am a federal marshal, and you boys done ran out your string.”

  Marwood shot the leader with the knobbed stick and gun. The other two scattered like frightened quail.

  Marwood lung-shot the second man through his back. The killer crawled the short grass thirty feet until blood filled his air pipe and he drowned.

  At the first sign of trouble, the small cretin took off like a roadrunner across the flat prairie. He clutched the hog knife in his fist like a totem.

  Marwood chucked his horse forward into a canter. The little boy was running flat out. Marwood’s horse caught him, paced him.

  The boy looked through his sweaty blond hair. He was smart enough to run, but too ignorant to jink under Marwood’s horse and buy himself more time.

  Marwood thumbed the hammer back on his pistol and shot him through the head.

  He pulled up and stepped off his horse, took the boy’s scalp. Then he mounted up, brought the horse around, and walked it back to where the dead Cheyenne Indians lay.

  He picked up and put the family side by side. He took the baby and placed it in the dead mother’s arms. Their belongings had been strewn over the prairie. He found blanket
s and covered them.

  When he finished, he cut the scalps from the other two murderers, and hanged them, dripping, off his saddlebow.

  In Pueblo he rented a room for the night. He had a hot bath, and while sitting in the soapy tub he examined the white Mandan scars on his body.

  The next morning he walked from the posada to the town marshal’s office.

  “Stride? That son of a bitch is dead,” the marshal said. He was a lean man with short black hair and a walrus moustache. He carried a ten-gauge shotgun and wore a purple paisley vest, blue twill jacket, rumpled trousers, and a wide-awake hat.

  “Where is he?”

  “Buried out on Chicken Hill, back of the sawmill.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Smallpox. Caught it from the Pawnee while riding through Wyoming Territory. Two antelope hunters brought his body in from Fountain Creek way.”

  “Show me.”

  They walked down the long street and ducked between a row of buildings to reach a back pasture choked with scrub and bloodweed.

  “Where have you been lawing, mister?” the town marshal asked.

  “Tomah.”

  “Where?”

  “Tomah. Montana Territory.”

  “Where the hell is Tomah?”

  “It’s off the Prickly Pear valley,” Marwood explained.

  “You mean Helena, don’t you?”

  “It was called Tomah while I was there,” Marwood said.

  “Mister, it ain’t never been called Tomah.”

  The town marshal led him up a bare slope of loose shale. They stopped at a grave with an iron bedstead for a marker.

  “There he lies.”

  “Dig him up,” Marwood said.

  The town marshal choked back a snort. “Like hell I will. He can rot.”

  “I am a federal officer. I order you to dig up this body so I can identify it. Otherwise, I will submit your name to Judge Creighton for blocking an official investigation.”