Except for one thing. A couple of them swings was movin’ back and forth like they was bein’ moved by the wind. ‘Cept there was no wind, not a breath of ‘er.

  We never stopped and when I asked Teacher if he’d heard ‘em or seen that little gal he didn’t answer me, just looked at me with a little smile that was on his mouth but not in his eyes. And I noticed he removed his hat while we rode by that place. I did the same.

  The actual killin’ of Hillier and Cox didn’t amount to that much after all the excitement of just catchin ‘em. We rode into the town of Fort Macleod and stopped at the fort there. Teacher talked to a couple of army fellas and we rode right off headin’ north.

  “They’re trying to make a place maybe sixty, seventy miles north of here called The Crossing, on the Highwood River.” Teacher said. “But the sergeant said they weren’t going all that fast anymore. We should catch them well before that.”

  He was right. For the first time in all our dealin’s with Hillier and Cox, we saw them before they saw us. They was camped by a place called Mosquito Creek Crossing. Turns out Hillier’d eaten somethin’ in Fort Macleod and had a bad case of the diarrhea. Ridin’ horseback ain’t no treat when you got the runs so I couldn’t blame them for stoppin’.

  They didn’t appear to be expectin’ us at all. We left the horses and walked the last few hundred yards on foot. We looked in on them from behind some tree cover. One of them was bent over with his britches down around his ankles. Teacher whispered to me that was Hillier. Cox was laid out on a blanket. He looked like he was sleepin’, though there was still a couple of hours of daylight left.

  I figured Teacher would wait until Hillier finished up and at least had his trousers back in place. But he didn’t. Motioned to me to stay behind the trees and then he stood up and walked in there with that .44 in his hand.

  “Afternoon boys,” he said. “You never should’ve shot at me. Not the first time, nor the second nor the third.”

  Then he shot Hillier who’d made the mistake of tryin’ to reach for a rifle that was propped up against a log right next to where he was ... well, you know.

  Cox jumped up and looked around like he wasn’t sure where he was. He had a gun on his hip but had the good sense to leave it there for the moment. Teacher was talkin’ real quiet so I couldn’t hear what he was saying. But he was talkin’ and walkin’ toward Cox at the same time. I could see Cox shaking his head and motionin’ with his hands like he was wantin’ Teacher to go away and leave him alone.

  Eventually he went for that gun on his hip. Desperate thinkin’, I guess. Maybe he figured Teacher would kill him anyway. Or maybe that’s what Teacher was tellin’ him. I don’t know which it was to this day.

  Of course, when his hand went to his hip, Teacher shot him. Gut shot. A lot worse than mine because his was smack in the middle, where mine was just a twitch in the side. Cox fell on his back and went to makin’ awful noises. Sort of like a cow bellerin’ when her calf won’t come. It must’ve been real awful for him because he didn’t die right away. Which lookin’ back on it, is how I figure Teacher had it planned.

  I stayed back and Teacher walked up and kneeled down alongside Cox who was still bellerin’. I could see them talkin’. Cox kept shakin’ his head, but finally he stopped and said some things I couldn’t hear. After a while the bellerin’ dropped down to more like a whimper and then he stopped movin’ or makin’ any noise at all. I figure that’s when he died. Teacher stood up and holstered his gun and started walkin’ back toward me. I stepped out from behind the trees.

  “Want me to get started buryin’ ‘em?” I said.

  “No,” he shook his head. “They can stay where they are. The coyotes and crows can have them. We’re leaving.”

  I didn’t feel good about leavin’ those men there even though I knew they’d’ve done the same thing if they’d gunned us first. But I also knew there was no point in debatin’ the topic with Teacher.

  “What was you talkin’ about with that man while he was dyin’?” I asked him.

  “He told me what I wanted to know.”

  That’s all he said and then we mounted up and rode back to Kecking Horse without another incident worth the tellin’. Except that we stopped at Fort Macleod on the way back so Teacher could pay his respects at the grave of a scout named Jerry Potts who’d died a few months earlier. Potts scouted with my father years before but I didn’t know him. I was in somethin’ of a hurry to get home, but Teacher said we had to stop at that grave. So, we did.

  Oh, and we cooked up them trout later that night. They was special after days of dried meat and cheese.

  (That ends Cal Chapin’s part of the story. To tell the truth, I was a little disappointed with the way he decided to end it off, just stopping all of a sudden like that. But that’s the way Cal is, if you know him. Still I hope I’ll be able to write a better finish to my part of this.)

  Chapter Twelve

  After what you just read, my guess is you’d be thinking all Hell was about to break loose when Teacher got back to Kecking Horse. He’d just killed off two of Mr. J. Emerson Keymore’s hired men. And according to Cal Chapin, Teacher had his suspicions, whatever they were, pretty much confirmed during his talk with Cox as he was dying.

  But when he got back, Teacher didn’t do anything. Not a thing. He was idler than Cooper Raine in summer heat. Didn’t go back to teaching. Didn’t shoot anybody. He was just there. I’d see him around town a lot. He’d come into the store often and we’d talk some, but he wouldn’t stay long. I noticed he didn’t joke or smile as much as he used to.

  He went back to staying out by the new school at night, even though he didn’t have anything to do with it anymore. I didn’t go out there to visit him. He didn’t invite me, and I didn’t feel right about stopping by uninvited. Mind you, I did occasionally get out to the school during the day. That’s because I rode out there at the end of classes a couple of times to visit Miss Lyla Case. I guess you might say that after that night of the dance when I won the bet and danced with Sarah-Beth and the other ladies, I got some confidence in myself as far as with women and such.

  On one of those occasions that I visited with Miss Lyla Case at the school and rode back to town with her — that was my excuse for going out there in the first place — I asked her if she’d like to go for a buggy ride and picnic the following Sunday after church. She accepted the invitation. If she hadn’t done that and if we hadn’t been out buggy riding that day, I guess this account of what happened never would have come to pass seeing as I wouldn’t have been there.

  Sunday came along and after church was out of the way, I went and got Mr. Westover’s buckboard and Miss Lyla Case and I headed out south into the Indian Head Valley. It seemed like winter had forgotten us and the weather was almost spring-like. We’d been jogging along for a couple of hours and talking like we were brother and sister. We talked about a lot of things, but we spent quite a bit of time discussing horses. Miss Lyla Case, it turned out was very interested in horses, mostly because she hadn’t been around them much. She asked me about breaking them and I yammered on like Virgil Watts on the subject of breaking and training horses.

  Then I asked her if she’d like to take the reins for a while and she said she would. The horse was a quiet old thing, so Miss Lyla Case was pretty soon taking us down that road like an experienced teamster. I figured with her driving and me sitting there with nothing to do, it was the perfect opportunity to read a poem I’d copied out of a book with the idea of reading it to her at just such an appropriate moment.

  It was a love poem from the sixteenth century. A guy named Edmund Spenser wrote it and I figured he must really have been in love with the lady in the poem because he wrote more than one hundred poems for her altogether. I’ll put it down here so that you’ll know what it was I was reading to Miss Lyla Case that afternoon.

  Happy ye leaves, when as those lilly hands,

  Which hold my life in their dead doing might,

  Shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands,

  Like captives trembling at the victors sight.

  And happy lines, on which with starry light,

  Those lamping eyes will deign sometimes to look,

  And read the sorrows of my dying spright,

  Written with tears in harts close bleeding book.

  And happy rhymes, bathed in the sacred brook,

  Of Helicon where she derived is,

  When ye behold that Angels blessed look,

  My soul’s long lacked food, my heavens bliss,

  Leaves, lines, and rhymes, seek her to please alone,

  Whom if ye please, I care for other none.

  I read it to her, and it was a long time before she said anything.

  “It’s a beautiful poem,” is what she finally said.

  “Yes’m, it is that,” I said.

  “Were you intending that the poem should express your feelings for me?” She looked over at me.

  Well, I figured the combination of my new woman-confidence since the dance and the sentiments of Edmund Spenser was pretty much overpowering, so I looked right back at her.

  “Yes, Miss Lyla Case, that is what I was intending.”

  “I see,” she said.

  As soon as she said, ‘I see,’ I knew Miss Lyla Case was, for good and all, not interested in being any more than brother and sister close, you remember I mentioned that earlier. I’d suspected it before, of course, but that moment pretty much convinced me that my first inclination had been correct.

  “What about you and Sarah-Beth?” she asked me. “I thought you two were ...”

  She never got the chance to finish that thought and I never got the chance to answer because a bullet whistled over us and dug itself into a mound of dirt to our left. Now I did say that the horse was quiet, but he wasn’t so quiet that he took pleasure in being shot at. The next thing I knew we were racing down the road as fast as that old gelding’s legs could make it happen. Somehow Miss Lyla Case got the reins back into my hands and her arms around my waist, tighter than a four-strand wire fence, and we covered ground; her, I think, hoping the experience would end soon and me kind of wishing it might last a few hours, more or less to establish the mood I wanted for the picnic. I don’t really think she was hanging on because she was scared. I think it was more so she wouldn’t get thrown out of the buckboard. But I liked it all the same. I guess I was still thinking that with some luck and a few more poems, I could overcome her romantic reluctance as it related to me. Of course, there was the matter of the bullet but just at that moment, it was secondary in my mind to having Miss Lyla Case attached to me like a sucker to stream scum.

  My attention got diverted then due to the fact that there were more shots. We could hear them up ahead maybe a mile or so and beyond some low hills off to our right a ways. I got the old gelding slowed down, probably because he realized if he kept running that hard, he’d end up dead in a heap right there on that road before we went much further.

  “Stray bullet,” I told Miss Lyla Case. “I doubt if it was intended for us. Probably hunters.”

  That’s what I said to her, but, of course, I was thinking hard about how this was the same territory where both Virgil Watts and I were jumped. The good thing was, I didn’t totally succeed in quieting Miss Lyla Case’s nerves and she was still wrapped around me and sitting so close I could almost feel her face against mine.

  Actually, what we’d ridden into was both gunfight and ambush, but it was a little while before we found that out.

  “Maybe we better take a look,” I said and even though Miss Lyla Case was a mite nervous, she didn’t say no to the idea.

  We drove off the road into a field of prairie wool to our right. We came up over a rise and what we saw untangled Miss Lyla Case’s arms from me in a hurry. I have to admit I was forced to focus my thoughts, and other energies in another direction, that being straight ahead.

  “They’re shooting at the school!” Miss Lyla Case yelled in a voice I’d never heard from her before.

  She was right. A bunch of riders were spread out over a few hundred yards maybe a half mile from the new schoolhouse and they were filling it full of gunfire. We watched for a minute or two, I suppose more stunned than anything else at what we were seeing. I’ll have to be honest and tell you that at first, I couldn’t understand why men would want to spend a Sunday afternoon firing into an empty building.

  It was a couple of minutes of non-stop gunfire before I realized the schoolhouse wasn’t empty. What drew that to my attention was a number of puffs of smoke at a couple of windows of the school. That, and the fact the men who were shooting at the school seemed to be getting more and more uncomfortable as a result of whoever it was that was shooting from the school.

  “We’ve got to stop them,” Miss Lyla Case said in a way that left no doubt that she meant it. “What should we do?”

  She turned to me as she asked the question. I looked as sage as it’s possible for someone with a nose like mine to look and shaded my eyes with one hand as I regarded the situation.

  “We’d best go for help,” I said, although the way I said it, you might have thought I was asking as opposed to answering.

  “No,” said Miss Lyla Case, “that’s not it.”

  I shook my head vigorously to indicate I agreed that that was not it.

  “Whoever’s in the school could be dead by the time we got back,” she said.

  And with that declaration having been made, Miss Lyla Case grabbed the reins — you will recall that she had only moments before completed her first driving lesson — and whipped the gelding into a high lope. Both the gelding and I were taken very much by surprise by this turn of events, me to the point that I sat silent as we raced across the prairie straight at the school.

  Apparently, the horse and I were not alone in our reaction to Miss Lyla Case’s course of action. As we ran straight at the left flank of the attackers, the two southernmost riders backed their horses up to let us through and the rest of the shooters’ guns fell silent. Miss Lyla Case, however, was not silent. She was “Yah”ing as loud as any teamster had ever “Yah”ed.

  While we were moving quite fast, there’s no doubt we could have got to the school quicker if we’d travelled in a straight line. That was the one thing we were definitely not doing. Now I have never sailed the high seas, in fact, I’ve never even seen a sea, high or otherwise, but I know people who have been on large sailing ships and they have referred to something called tacking. As I understand it, tacking is a method of getting somewhere straight ahead by steering first to the left and then to the right of the place you’re trying to go. This is so you can gain maximum benefit from the wind is how these friends of mine have explained it. Though there was no hint of a breeze blowing that Sunday afternoon, Miss Lyla Case and I were tacking our way toward the school.

  Of course, we didn’t know who was inside shooting back at the men on the outside. It was certainly possible it was Teacher who was in there, but it was just as possible that it wasn’t. And with the buggy zig-zagging back and forth over a chunk of prairie that was plumb full of gopher and badger holes, I hadn’t had much opportunity to get a look at the people who were pumping lead into the school. Or at least had been. They weren’t shooting now, and it occurred to me the reason for the break in the gunfire might have been that watching our buggy ride might have been more entertaining than shooting at a schoolhouse. I was aware they could have killed us both without a whole lot of effort but chose not to, partly, I’m guessing, because one of us was a woman, and partly because they knew they could kill us later if need be.

  I also have no idea what Miss Lyla Case thought we might accomplish once we reached the school. Assuming the people inside were the good guys, Miss Lyla Case and I could hardly be considered desirable reinforcements. An unarmed store clerk and a woman school teacher weren’t likely to strike fear into the bad guys, assuming of course, that the men on the outside of the school were the bad guys. I had no opportunity to discuss any of this with Miss Lyla Case as we jounced our way across that piece of prairie ground. Eventually we arrived at the school and I helped Miss Lyla Case get the gelding stopped, which wasn’t all that difficult in that he was showing signs of being near the point of collapse.

  “We made it,” Miss Lyla Case looked at me and nodded a satisfied nod.

  “That’s true,” I said. “We’re here all right.”

  “What do you think we should do now?” she asked me.

  The last time she’d asked me that, Miss Lyla Case had ignored my suggestion, so I thought hard this time before answering.

  “Best put the horse and buggy around back of the school,” I said. “They could shoot him if we leave him here.” I nodded in the direction of the gelding who was busy gulping in air and shaking foam off himself.

  “I mean, that is if we’re planning to stay.” I threw that in as an afterthought, although if we’d wanted to leave at that point, we’d have had to do it on foot. I wasn’t sure the gelding could make it to the back of the school let alone back over the ground we’d just travelled.

  “Of course, we’re staying,” Miss Lyla Case clucked at the gelding who gathered himself and shuffled around the corner of the school. “We’re going to help defend the school.”

  I was beginning to feel very tired. I wasn’t sure if it was from watching that horse twitch and sputter, or if it was from knowing that our situation was not at all good. Or maybe it was the two together.

  When we got to the back of the school, Teacher ran around the side of the building. He crouched low to the ground as he came to the wagon.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he said as he took hold the gelding’s cheek piece and led us behind the outhouse.

  “We came when we saw the shooting,” Miss Lyla Case told him.

  “Wonderful,” Teacher said. “That’s just damn wonderful. Well, you can keep on going. Get out of here before you get yourselves killed.”

 

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