Wilding In The West 9

The Indian tossed his lance aside. Chad dropped his rifle to the ground. The wind picked up, stirred by the rising sun. It whispered into the turns the rock took. Somewhere a scorpion picked its way over the gritty ground; it was quiet enough to hear it.

Fiery Cloud’s hands came up. First the empty one—a half second later, his gunhand. “Wait. There is no need for this contest. You may have the white man.” His head turned to the other Indians. “What is one round eye more or less?”

Chad made a show of relaxing. “Alright then. Be about your business.”

“Let us both go to where we belong.” He went for his gun.

Chad’s was already in his hand, speaking a word that was heard between Fiery Cloud’s ears.

The recoil soaked into his palm and just like the gun kicked and Fiery Cloud jerked away, Blue Foot whooped forward, knife in hand. Chad whipped about to put his next four shots into the Indian, ripping away his momentum until he was as forceful as a broadsheet blown by the wind, landing at Chad's feet. 

The third Indian had a tomahawk in hand and leaving his hand. Chad heard it just before he felt it dislocate his shoulder. He went to the ground, but not in pain. He landed on all fours, the rifle under his hands, and just like that he was back up with the trigger bending his way. The last Indian flew back , the jagged new end of his spine wiggling between his shoulder blades like an earthworm after rain.

Chad slung the rifle on the shoulder still in its place and picked his sixgun up off the ground. “You in the cave, hope you aren't the suicidal type. I think you're going to live.”

The man emerged. He was not a Mexican. He had the look of a new immigrant, an unaccountably European cast to him rather than someone who had evolved to the New World. He was bald, with a hat small enough to show it, and a thick but neat beard. His clothes were city slicker wear. This seemed like the first time they'd been mistreated. And he held onto his gun like a child would a teddy bear. 

“I am… I am Dr. Jurgen Solheim. I thank you, sir. Are you injured?” He spoke with a German accent, the usual harshness of it evaporated by how his words shook.

Chad rubbed his sore shoulder. “I met a tomahawk on the road and it wasn't going my way.”

“Ah.” Solheim sounded more confident. “I can attend to that, if you'd like.”

“Oh, no, I've always felt like I had one arm too many,” Chad muttered bitterly. “I'd appreciate it,” he said louder.

He sat heavily on a boulder, breathing in as much courage as he could. He had a feeling the fix would hurt as much as the damage.

Solheim examined his shoulder. He ran a finger across the distended bone like a butler checking for dust. “Ah. A textbook case. Please be relaxed, this will end in a moment.”

It was as fast as Chad had seen a dentist work on a rotten tooth. Solheim stretched out Chad's arm, satisfied himself with the alignment, then a sharp tug and Chad's discomfort was done, rapidly fading from the mind.

“Thanks, doc.”

“It was the least I could do. I will not even send you a bill.”

Chad stood and put his arm through a few circles. “Good as new… I wouldn't worry about bills, doc. A little more work like that and you'll have plenty of money coming your way. Were there any others on the stage?”

“No, just the drivers and I, but I saw them die.”

“ Don't suppose you saw what became of the horses?”

“The drivers cut them loose once it was clear they couldn't pull the stage out. I don't know where they are now.”

Chad waved him off. “They'll make their way back to their stables most likely. I'll give you a ride over to the next way station.”

“That's not my destination,” the doc said crisply. “That is, I was to meet someone there who would take me to the Callahan ranch. They must have stopped waiting by now. But if you could take me there, I'm sure they'd make it worth your while, if that's the saying. Especially when I tell them of how you saved me.”

Chad held up his hands. “Easy now, easy. Let's see if we can find one of those Inun’s horses. I don't want you sharing my saddle all the way to this Callahan place.”

The Indian ponies were ground-hitched not too far away. Chad roped all three to his saddle horn before letting Solheim take his pick, assuming the man was none too used to forking a horse at all. He promised himself he'd send the extra to the waystation to make up for the nag he had yet to return.

***

The sun wasn’t hot. The air was. Or so it seemed, after the coolness of the water and the rock. At the time, they’d struck Chad as unbearably cold. Now he thought that with the right attire to balance out the chill, it would be the most temperate clime he’d ever known. A lucky middle between the extremes of summer and winter.

Solheim said that he was an aesthetic surgeon out of some place called Königsberg, which Chad took to be either German or a kissing cousin to it. He’d been offered an exorbitant sum of money via telegram to sail to America and attempt his radical surgery on a man who’d been heavily scarred.

He was a wealthy man, a rancher. The way Solheim described him, Chad took the man—Arthur Steinfeld, Solheim recalled his name—to be an old-fashioned cattle baron along the lines of the King Ranch, Four Sixes, or XIT. And fortunately for the doc, Steinfeld’s daughter had included a map of his destination in the eventuality that her men were unable to meet Solheim for the last leg of his journey.

Solheim could not say what deformity the man possessed, only that his daughter was paying a small fortune for the good doctor merely to come and do whatever he might to assuage the poor wretch’s lonely suffering. The thought of it was enough to have Chad building a quirly for himself. All the fortune in the world, save for a face that a woman could stand. It struck him as a singular bit of misfortune; a piece of curiosity that was worth the detour to satisfy.

Put simply, he had to see how ugly a cuss was for the ugly to need doctoring.

As they went, desert dirt under their hooves became grass, beaten down by the sun into an insensate shade of yellow. Then, birdsong found a home in the empty air and Chad felt the sweet breeze that was perfumed with flowing water. The grass began to stand, turn green, and in the distance, they caught sight of steers, fat and satiated, enjoying having the dumbness of their existence relieved by man’s tending.

Soon, they were treated to the sight of a log bunkhouse, a horse pen, and a wooden fence to secure the homestead from whatever depravations might be roaming the Texan landscape. Suppertime it must be, for a bell was ringing and men were in motion, kicking up dirt as they coaxed one last bit of work from their steeds before water and rest.

Chad heard a sharp whistle and one of the horses, a buckskin, broke off from the general migration towards the bunkhouse and rode towards them, two other cowpunchers joining the trek. The others assembled by the bunkhouse, but stayed mounted, watching as their fellows rode out to challenge the newcomers.

“Ahoy the ranch!” Chad called as they came within sight, holding his reins high so it was clear his hands were not straying to any holster. The lead rider—who wore a blue shirt within a fringed vest—did not do him the same courtesy, but didn’t move his pistol from where it was skinned either.

“Ain’t no call for you to pay a visit,” were the first words Chad got from the One Eye brand. “We got no need for saddle tramps; bossman’s hired up plenty of hands and we don’t plan on losing any.”

Chad smiled readily at the orneriness he was greeted with. “I’m not here to hire on,” he said. “This sawbones here was bound for your doorstep. I helped him make his way here. If I could wash off the trail and help myself to whatever your bean master’s made up, I’d consider us even.”

The Segundo—for that’s what he was, as Chad rightly took him for—grinned in a way that was more hostile than a scowl. “Shit. Now I’ll have to send a boy to the waystation, tell ‘em the doc found his way here without them.”

His hand did not come off his revolver.