Black falcon 11 a whip-round for Nathaniel part 2

 

11 A whip-round for Nathaniel part 2

 

The train journey to Cheyenne was smooth enough. Ida was back in a checked shirt and calf-length divided skirt to disembark, and ready to mount Goldmoon, now bearing the Cyrillic ‘L’ or Л for ‘Levchenko’ brand. He took Ida’s slight weight on his back very easily, and happily now.

“They should be coming out of church when we get to the townstead that is nearest to Nathaniel’s spread,” said Luke.  “I assume you want to humiliate him in public.”

“Yes,” said Ida. “He humiliated me, and I think he made Emma do things she hated, too.”

 

oOoOo

 

Luke’s timing was spot on. The congregation was just issuing forth from the service.

Ida saw Nathaniel Pepper and stepped forward the moment he was out of the church grounds and on the road.

“Nathaniel Pepper!  I’ve come for vengeance for your lewd and vicious usage of me!” she cried. Pepper stopped, and stared at her.  Luke suddenly realised that the colourless, ill-looking woman trailing behind him was the once-pretty Emma.

Pepper gave a shriek of rage.

“You think you can come back, slinking around me, relying on the pity of your sister, you harlot? You left the protection of my house, and you ain’t comin’ back!”

“Do you seriously expect me to want to return to someone who likes seeing little girls naked and spoiling their skin with your belt because you want to touch it?” snarled Ida. “I’ve come to whip you, and take my sister to safety.”

“Oh, Ida, please don’t!” moaned Emma.

“Shut your mouth, woman!” said Pepper. “You raised that girl to be all wrong, we’ll talk about what you did wrong later!”

Emma collapsed to her knees with a moan.

“You bastard!” cried Ida. “You’ve been taking out your anger at me escaping you on my sister! Well, I’m going to take her away.”

“What, to be a whore like you?  And with that pimp of yours?” Pepper gestured to Luke.

“Now that’s fighting talk,” said Luke. “I went along with the brides for sale as a hired gun, and as a hired gun, Miss Ida appealed for my help. So I took her to my mother. She has consented to be my wife, and I object to the filthy names you give my betrothed bride. I suggest you apologise right now.”

“In your dreams, pimp, I’ll kill you!” snarled Pepper. He drew a gun, rather awkwardly.

Luke’s hand barely seemed to twitch, and Pepper cried out, and clutched his hand protectively as Luke shot his gun out of his grasp.

“You can fight me later; the lady has prior claim,” said Luke, folding his arms, and propping himself up against the rail fence outside the church.

Ida loosed her arapnik.

“You enjoy whipping people, Nathaniel; do you like being whipped?” she said.

Emma stumbled forward and clutched Luke’s arm.

“Stop her, oh, pray, stop her!” she moaned. “It’ll only make things worse.”

“When she’s finished, if he doesn’t apologise, you’ll be a widow,” said Luke. “I won’t have him call me a pimp or Ida a whore; don’t you care? You with your fine high-minded sentiments that you had to look after her?”

Emma burst into tears.

The pastor came over.

“My son, my daughter! You cannot be thinking of violence on the Lord’s day?” he said.

“It was on a Sunday that this monster whipped a child so savagely on her bare buttocks that he made her bleed,” said Luke.  “And all the time doubtless fondling himself in the lascivious desires his disgusting acts aroused in him. She seeks retribution.”

“’Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord, I will repay...’” stuttered the pastor.

“All very well, but it doesn’t bring healing to a hurt little girl,” said Luke. “For goodness sake! He calls her a whore, and she might have blossomed with some good food, but she was definitely no woman then. You must see what sort of man he is by the way his bright, merry wife has become old and worn in the last five months!”

“Brother Pepper is a hard man, but he is most Godly...”

Luke sneered.

“Godly? Jesus said, ‘suffer the little children to come unto me,’ but he did not add, ‘so I can break the flesh on their bodies to remind me not to desire it,’ which is what that whipping was really about. He wanted her dressed ugly so as not to be tempted, but he could not overcome his unnatural lusts, whatever.”

Luke cared little whether he had guessed the correct reason for Pepper’s harshness or not; he planned to spoil any shred of reputation the man had left after his sabotage of it the previous year.

Meanwhile, Nathaniel Pepper took off his belt.

“You need to be chastised, wench,” he said, to Ida.

“We’ll see who is chastised,” said Ida. She permitted the man one swipe at her with his belt. Then the arapnik switched out, wrapping around his wrist, painfully.

Pepper dropped the belt with a yell. He glowered; it was a fluke. He bent down for his belt.

The arapnik landed beside it in the dirt and flicked it away; and returned to strike his bending buttocks. Nathaniel Pepper howled.

There were several laughs from the crowd; the harsh man had not made himself popular, and was known for being free with his hands to messengers, but nobody had dared stand against him.

And this chit of a girl was coolly plying a blacksnake whip to toss his belt ever further, and to sting his buttocks every time he reached for it.   After three attempts, Pepper howled, and launched himself at Ida.

She was able to step back and tangle his legs to pull him off-balance, so he sprawled in the dust.

Ida pulled back her arapnik, coiling it.

“I think you owe me, and Luke, an apology,” she said.

Pepper’s hand went to his other belt, his gunbelt.

“I can whip that out of your hand, too,” said Ida. “I’m not a helpless child anymore.”

Pepper turned, picking up his belt, his hat, and his gun, as if walking away.

Then he spun round, firing deliberately at Ida.

One long leg belonging to Luke kicked her feet out from under her as the older man took up the slack on the trigger, and the bullet flew past her, close enough to feel the wind of its passing on her face as she fell. Pepper went to fan the pistol.

“You do it like this,” said Luke. His pistol appeared in his hand, and he fanned it rapidly.

Nathaniel Pepper went down.

The townsfolk noted that there were five puncture wounds in his forehead within an inch of each other.

They strategically drifted away.

“I’m going to need a statement,” said the man with the star.

“Statement, yes, when I’ve seen my bride treated for shock at being shot at,” said Luke. “If you want to press charges, you’d better hope to be quicker on the draw than me; I’m as good with my left. And I don’t plan to be arrested for killing vermin.”

“He... he fired first,” said the sheriff, unhappily. “But not at you....”

“At a girl not carrying a firearm,” said Luke. “And under my protection.  Are you going to let any man shoot at your wife, tinhorn? Because I don’t. Shucks, you were here; you can write out what happened. I’m taking my sister-in-law elect back to her farm, and you can send someone to organise the sale of it on her behalf because I’m taking her back to my mother too, for healing after this farcical period of unholy matrimony; and if you call a man like Nathaniel Pepper ‘Godly’ I fancy you’ve a damned strange idea of what the Bible is about.”

Emma had collapsed to the ground in a heap, moaning, and Ida went to her.

“What has he done to my merry sister?” she cried. “All of you here, you are to blame, too!  I complained in church that he was harsh, and what did you do, Reverend Green? Did you tell him? It was that afternoon he beat me so hard I passed out, and I don’t know if he did anything to my naked unconscious body.  And he beat Emma, too, I know, and she would cry in pain in the night when they were together. You all know what he’s like, and you are all culpable. And now you slink away in shame because you know it’s true.”

“I could not believe the story you told, child!” said the pastor. “Why, what man would make a child sit on a saddle with tacks through it?”

“A man like Nathaniel Pepper,” said Emma, coming to. “I saw it, Pastor Green! But did you verify it? No! You let him pass it off as exaggeration of slight chastisement! I’ve been praying every Sunday that I might die, and maybe someone would investigate.”

“Dear God!” said the pastor.

“You should be on your face in front of the altar praying to him for forgiveness in failing your pastoral care,” said Luke. “You’re as much transgressors the lot of you as the town who let a single bank robber use children as hostages, and called down their teacher as ‘used’ when he raped her. I hope you all burn in Hell. You deserve it. And you’re lucky I don’t have time to make my disapproval felt, as I have my womenfolk to care for.”

“Are you making threats?” demanded the sheriff.

Luke poked an offensive finger into his face, stopping just short of touching the man.

“I said, I don’t have time,” he growled. “You’ll have whatever passes for a lawyer out on my sister’s farm first thing in the morning to see about selling up, and you’ll write up this filth as he is, or I’ll take your badge from you, and make the lot of you suffer, all within the absolute letter of the law, by demanding fire drills of the fire brigade with a loud bell to call them, every four hours round the clock. Ida will spell me in that.  And every regulation on the books, I will make you all follow to the letter. And I will audit every man’s books to see that they are correct, and measure everything that can be measured, and if it is half an inch outside of a regulation size, that will be a fine or time in jail.  You know how much can be done to make a town miserable, sheriff.  And as I’m a deputy sheriff in the town I call home, and I read every damn statute book there was during the winter blizzards, I know every pettifogging annoyance there is.”

The sheriff paled.

“The lawyer will be with you first thing,” he said. “I... I don’t know who inherits....”

“Was the marriage not legal, then?” asked Luke. “It is a point of law that, as the marriage service says, ‘With all my worldly goods, I thee endow,’ and a wife is the immediate heir. If she is with child, then her child is the heir, and as its mother, she is to administer the properties. I’m not an unlettered, uncouth barbarian like Nathaniel Pepper, and I know my law.”

“I, er, yes, of course, the marriage was legal,” said the sheriff.

“And so is the widowing, and don’t forget that either,” growled Luke.

 

oOoOo

 

Emma remained quiet and chastened, despite that one burst of spirit; but Luke had no doubt that his mother would heal her.

“Did you mean it, about marrying me?” asked Ida.

“I’d be honoured, but not until you’re a year or two older,” said Luke. “And used to being in the saddle all day.”

Ida nodded.

“I’m not ready, either,” she said.

He kissed her cheek.

“I’ve not been celibate,” he said.

“Oh, I never supposed you would be,” said Ida. “But if you catch anything I will not be pleased.”

“Oh, I’m careful,” said Luke. “And don’t you go thinking that anything that fellow did to your sister is necessarily normal.”

“Oh, I assumed it wasn’t,” said Ida. “I expect Mama Jane will explain things more fully to me if she thinks you’re planning on covering me at any point.”

“I don’t think it’s called ‘covering’ for any but stallions and bulls,” said Luke, cautiously.

“Well, you knew what I meant,” said Ida, and then blushed.

“I did,” said Luke, also blushing.

 

oOoOo

 

The farm was on the market, and a man engaged to see to the animals in the meanwhile; and Luke sighed in relief that the whole of that business had only taken three days. Gradually, he found out from Emma that Pepper had been married before, and his first wife had died in childbed. The boy had been mentally defective, and had died one day, having got himself locked in the woodstore.

“And if you ask me, that man damaged his own seed in the womb, and as good as killed his wife,” said Luke to Ida. “And then doubtless beat the boy and flung him into the woodstore, and at some point hit him on the head, maybe hit him about the head and face the way he did to you, but harder, for some failure to understand, and the poor brat died of bleeding on the brain.  And he should have been taken up and questioned about it; but people don’t take much notice of children who die at the hands of their parents.”

“I wouldn’t say you’re wrong,” said Ida. “I am looking forward to being away from here.”

“And as well Blackwind will accept being harnessed to a buckboard, for your sister is too weak to ride,” said Luke, grimly. “We’ll have to take the extra quilts as luggage on the train, to pad up the buckboard for her, and a hay palliasse; we can buy another buckboard, and a tick to fill with hay at Burlington.”

 

Emma recovered some of her colour and spirit carried in the lap of luxury in the Pullman coaches, and if the last part of the journey, in a makeshift bed on a new buckboard purchased in Burlington tried her somewhat, the thought that she was free of her husband buoyed up her spirits. 

Luke took her directly to the hospital, and left her in the charge of his mother and her nurses, a mix of European and Cherokee girls.

“I am surprised Two-Moons did not come,” said Luke.

“Oh, Emma told me he did, and Nathaniel threatened to shoot him,” said Ida. “She did not want to go off with an Indian, anyway.”

“More fool her,” said Luke.

Ida sighed.

“I fear so,” she said. “I did sound her out about running away with me, but she said she had made her bed and must lie on it.”

Luke manfully suppressed a snort.

“Well, you will see her healed in spirit as well as body, here,” he said.

“Yes, and though I want to come with you, I also want to help her,” said Ida.

“You’ll learn a lot about nursing, which will do you no harm,” said Luke. “I will go back to Eastbend for a while; and then, I think I’ll go wandering again, pick up some bounty, help out here and there. I don’t want to settle yet; there’s so much of this big country to explore.”

“And later, I will join you,” said Ida.

“If you still want to,” said Luke.

She stood on tiptoes to kiss him; and then whirled away.

Luke raised his fingers to his lips as if to capture the kiss.

It was a kiss which Luke was amazed to feel burning many times, long after he had returned to Eastbend, and even after he moved out on other adventure bent.

 

The end of the beginning.