Child looked out the window at the Columbia River. There was a small boat on the river. Two people were sitting in the boat. She couldn’t tell what they were doing. One of the people was holding an umbrella, though it wasn’t raining and the sun wasn’t shining either.
Greer and Cameron gave up trying to find out what they were supposed to do but they were curious about Magic Child. They had been surprised by her voice because she didn’t sound like an Indian. She sounded like an Eastern woman who’d had a lot of booklearning.
They’d also taken a closer look at her and had seen that she wasn’t an Indian.
They didn’t say anything about it. They had the money and that’s what counted for them. They figured if she wanted to be an Indian that was her business.
· Gompville ·
The train only went as far as Gompville, which was the county seat of Morning County and fifty miles away by stagecoach to Billy. It was a cold clear dawn with half-a-dozen sleepy dogs standing there barking at the train engine.
“Gompville,” Cameron said.
Gompville was the headquarters of the Morning County Sheepshooters Association that had a president, a vice-president, a secretary, a sergeant at arms and bylaws that said it was all right to shoot sheep.
The people who owned the sheep didn’t particularly care for that, so both sides had brought in gunmen from Portland and the attitude toward killings had become very casual in those parts.
“We’re running it tight,” Greer said to Magic Child as they walked over to the stagecoach line. The stage to Billy left in just a few moments.
Cameron was carrying a long narrow trunk over his shoulder. The trunk contained a sawed-off twelve-gauge pump shotgun, a 25:35 Winchester rifle, a 30:40 Krag, two .38 caliber revolvers and an automatic .38 caliber pistol that Cameron had bought from a soldier in Hawaii who was just back from the Philippines where he had been fighting the rebels for two years.
“What kind of pistol is that?” Cameron had asked the soldier. They had been in a bar having some drinks in Honolulu.
“This gun is for killing Filipino motherfuckers,” the soldier had said. “It kills one of those bastards so dead that you need two graves to bury him in.”
After a bottle of whiskey and a lot of talk about women, Cameron had bought the gun from the soldier who was very glad to be on his way home to America and not have to use that gun any more.
· Central County Ways ·
Central County was a big rangy county with mountains to the north and mountains to the south and a vast loneliness in between. The mountains were filled with trees and creeks.
The loneliness was called the Dead Hills.
They were thirty miles wide. There were thousands of hills out there: yellow and barren in the summer with lots of juniper brush in the draws and a few pine trees here and there, acting as if they had wandered away like stray sheep from the mountains and out into the Dead Hills and had gotten lost and had never been able to find their way back.
. . . poor trees . . .
The population of Central County was around eleven hundred people: give or take a death here and a birth there or a few strangers deciding to make a new life or old-time residents to move away and never to return or come back soon because they were homesick.
Just like a short history of man, there were two towns in the county.
One of the towns was close to the northern range of mountains. That town was called Brooks. The other town was close to the southern range of mountains. It was called Billy.
The towns were named for Billy and Brooks Paterson: two brothers who had pioneered the county forty years before and had killed each other in a gunfight one September afternoon over the ownership of five chickens.
That fatal chicken argument occurred in 1881 but there was still a lot of strong feeling in the county in 1902 over who those chickens belonged to and who was to fault for the gunfight that killed both brothers and left two widows and nine fatherless children.
Brooks was the county seat but the people who lived in Billy always said, “Fuck Brooks.”
· In the Early Winds of Morning ·
Just outside of Gompville a man was hanging from the bridge across the river. There was a look of disbelief on his face as if he still couldn’t believe that he was dead. He just refused to believe that he was dead. He wouldn’t believe · he was dead until they buried him. His body swayed gently in the early winds of morning.
There was a barbed-wire drummer riding in the stagecoach with Greer and Cameron and Magic Child. The drummer looked like a fifty-year-old child ·with long skinny fingers and cold-white nails. He was going to Billy, then onto Brooks to sell barbed wire.
Business was good.
“There’s a lot of that going on around here now,” he said, pointing at the body. “It’s those gunmen from Portland. It’s their work.”
He was the only one talking. Nobody else had anything to say out loud. Greer and Cameron said what they had to say inside their minds.
Magic Child looked so calm you would have thought that she had been raised in a land where bodies hung everywhere like flowers.
The stagecoach drove across the bridge without stopping. It sounded like a minor thunderstorm on the bridge. The wind turned the body, so that it was watching the stagecoach drive up the road along the river and then disappear into a turn of dusty green trees.
· “Coffee” with the Widow ·
A couple of hours later, the stagecoach stopped at Widow Jane’s house. The driver always liked to have a cup of “coffee” with the widow on his way to Billy.
What he meant by a cup of coffee wasn’t really a cup of coffee. He had a romance going with the widow and he’d stop the stagecoach at her house and just parade all the passengers in. The widow would give everybody a cup of coffee and there was always a big platter of homemade doughnuts on the kitchen table.
Widow Jane was a very thin but jolly woman in her early fifties.
Then the driver, carrying a ceremonial cup of coffee in his hand, and the widow would go upstairs. All the passengers would sit downstairs in the kitchen, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts while the driver would be upstairs with the widow in her bedroom having his “coffee.”
The squeaking of the bedsprings shook the house like mechanical rain.
· Cora ·
Cameron had brought the trunk full of guns into the house with him. He didn’t want to leave the guns unattended in the stagecoach. Greer and Cameron never carried guns on their persons not unless they intended to kill somebody. Then they carried guns. The rest of the time the guns stayed in the trunk.
The
