Shaman by Robert Shea (nice books to read TXT) 📖

Black Salmon, of the Potawatomi who raped and murdered Helene. His men had killed two Indians today, but there was a third waiting in that mine, and Raoul de Marion meant to be the death of him.

Ignoring Eli's warnings, he moved toward the black square of the mine entrance.

He walked slowly, pistol at waist level. He needed his knife out, too, he decided. Even though he was right-handed, it would be better to have a second weapon ready than have his left hand empty. He drew his knife, taking heart from its well-balanced feel.

He stepped under the logs he'd set last fall to brace the entrance. Should he light a candle? No, that would make him an even better target. He tried to pierce the blackness with his eyes; it was thick as a wool curtain.

This was foolish, he thought. If they all went in together, the way Eli said, a couple of men could carry candles, and they could flush out the Indian in no time. This way, he was going to get himself killed. If the Indian had a rifle, Raoul was dead for sure. He felt an urge to back out and call the others to help him. He stood there a moment, legs trembling.

No. He had to kill his Indian by himself. He had to show Eli and the rest.

He forced his feet to slide forward as silently as he could manage. His hesitation had given his eyes a chance to get used to the dark. He tried to remember the layout of the mine. In the dim light from the entrance he made out the downward slope of the long tunnel. About twenty feet in, another tunnel branched off to his left. His eyes ached as they tried to find the enemy hiding somewhere ahead of him.

He could see nothing but black walls lined with logs to brace the ceiling, a floor littered with chunks of rock. As he moved forward,[60] the tunnel got narrower, the ceiling lower. He could almost feel the weight of the rock and earth above him; these logs could suddenly give way and the prairie come down on him like a boot on a bug. He began to be more afraid of the mine than he was of the hidden Indian.

He came to the branch tunnel and peered into it.

With a high-pitched shriek the Indian sprang at him.

Raoul glimpsed a steel tomahawk edge coming at his head. He jerked the pistol's trigger and jabbed with the knife in his left hand to parry the axe blade.

The blast of the pistol deafened Raoul, and in the momentary blaze of light he saw the face of a young Indian, distorted with anger and fear.

It was a face he hated on sight—dark skin, narrow black eyes, flat but for a beak of a nose, shaven skull. A face like those in his nightmares. It stayed vivid in his mind's eye when the flash of light was gone.

The Indian's war whoop ended in a cry of pain.

Got the sonofabitch! Raoul exulted. He'd been holding his pistol low, must have hit the Indian in the gut.

The flash had temporarily blinded him, but reflexes honed in dozens of riverfront brawls took over. He jammed his pistol into its holster and switched the knife to his right hand. Every fiber of him hungered to kill. He lunged forward, knife straight out in front of him. He could feel his lips stretching in a grin.

The knife hit something solid, yet yielding. With a yell of triumph he drove the point in, was rewarded with a scream of agony. He was beginning to see again. The shadow facing him lifted the tomahawk. Raoul jerked the knife free and swung; it chunked into the Indian's arm like a meat cleaver. He heard the tomahawk clang on the rock floor.

Raoul threw himself on the Indian, stabbing, stabbing. His enemy's body, smaller and lighter than his, crumpled under his weight. The fingers of his left hand dug into smooth skin and hard muscle. He felt hands pushing against him, but their efforts were weak, the struggles of a dying creature. The cries and groans of pain made him eager to hurt the Indian more. It was too dark to see where his knife was going in, but he brought it down again and again. His hands felt wet. Some of his thrusts sank deep, others were stopped by bone.[61]

A pulse pounded in his brain. It did not matter that he was fighting in the dark; fury blinded him anyway. He forgot everything but the knife in his hand and the soft, bloody body under him. He screamed with rage and triumph, drowning out the agonized shrieks of his enemy.

After a while, no more cries. The body under him did not move. Raoul lay on top of the Indian, panting.

He began to think again. Carefully he slid his hand over the Indian's chest, the buckskin shirt slippery with warm blood. No heartbeat, no lifting of lungs.

By God, I did it, I killed him! He felt as if rockets were going off in his head, and he laughed aloud. He'd fought for his mine and spilled his enemy's blood to make it his own.

No goddamned Indian is ever going to steal what belongs to me.

He climbed to his feet. His knees were shaking violently under him.

His head ached so badly he felt as if his eyes were being pushed out of his skull. He realized that in the fight he'd completely lost control of himself. He'd become a wild thing, a creature without a mind. It had happened to him several times before, in fights that had ended with his killing a man.

Thoughts of triumph that he had killed his enemy, of terror at the realization that this fight could have gone the other way, chased each other around in his brain, but he felt even more alive and happier than he had last night with Clarissa.

Sudden light dazzled him. An arrow of fear shot through him. More Indians?

"Raoul!" It was Eli Greenglove's voice.

His eyes adjusted, and he could see Eli, Hodge Hode and Levi Pope standing at the entrance to the side tunnel. They looked at the body at his feet and the bloody knife in his hand, and then up at him and their eyes were wide and their lips parted.

Those looks are worth as much to me as this whole mine.

"You really chopped him into mincemeat," Eli said. "I'll have to get me one of them Arkansas toothpicks."

"Get the other two bodies in here," Raoul said, making an effort to keep his voice steady. "We'll find some place to bury them."

"Better search the whole mine, make sure there's no more redskins," said Eli.

Raoul agreed, but he felt certain this one he'd killed was the[62] only one in the mine. He looked down at the dead face. The Indian wasn't much more than fifteen or sixteen years old. Good, he thought. Hadn't had long enough to do much harm.

But why, Raoul wondered, had this young buck thrown his life away attacking him near the entrance to the mine? He'd have had more of a chance of escaping if he'd hidden deeper.

Maybe he'd figured there was at least a little light to see and fight by near the entrance. If he'd gotten Raoul, then somehow managed to get away, he'd probably have claimed the right to wear a brave's feather.

The thought of himself lying dead in the dark and his scalp hanging on a pole in front of a lodge down at Saukenuk made Raoul shudder.

But it was Raoul who'd won his feather. No Indian would ever kill Raoul de Marion.

And any redskin sluts, and any mongrel bastards, that showed their face around Victoire would have to deal with a man who killed Indians as easily as he killed any other sort of vermin.

Time to have it out with Pierre.

Pierre wanted to weep as he saw what was about to happen. He rushed forward and thrust out his hand to stop Raoul.

"Not the vase!" he cried. Maman had loved it so.

Raoul was too close to the mantel for Pierre to reach him in time. He got to it in two strides and, just as Pierre had expected, seized the vase that had been in the family for four generations, had stood on the mantel ever since they built this château.

"Raoul!" Papa cried. "Think what you are doing!"

Raoul turned, holding the vase high over his head. He fixed Pierre with the wide-eyed stare of a madman. His teeth flashed under his black mustache in a grimace of fury.

He dashed the vase to the flagstone floor. The white egg shape vanished with a hollow crack, and shards scattered, some hitting Raoul's boots, others flying into the huge stone hearth.

A sudden silence filled the great hall of Victoire. Pierre felt as if his heart had broken with the vase.

You killed Maman, he wanted to cry out, now you would kill the memory of her.[63]

But he held his tongue and hated himself for even thinking what he had almost said. What an evil thought! How could he blame Raoul because Maman died giving birth to him?

Think what you are doing! Papa had cried. That was precisely what Raoul never did. Thought was for afterward, for escaping the consequences of his actions. Now he had worked himself into a rage, lost all governing of himself, because, somehow, he had heard about Sun Woman and Gray Cloud.

Pierre had to try to win Raoul over, to find a way to break through the anger that divided him from his younger brother. Raoul had to be persuaded that it was only right that Sun Woman and the boy be brought here to Victoire. If Raoul did not accept that, his rage would tear their family apart.

But how, in one afternoon, batter down a wall that had been building over the past dozen years?

Pierre realized that he was still standing with his hand held out to Raoul. He lowered it slowly, feeling his shoulders slump at the same time. He had been reading with Papa when Raoul came in. Now he took off his spectacles, put them in the silver case that hung from his neck by a velvet cord and dropped the case in his vest pocket.

Elysée de Marion clutched the arms of his leather wing chair with clawlike hands, half rising from it. Raoul stood staring at the two of them, panting and trembling.

Elysée said quietly, "Why did you do that, Raoul?"

"To make you listen." Raoul's voice was deep and strong, and it resounded powerfully against the beamed ceiling and stone walls of the great hall. But in its tones Pierre heard the screams of that hysterical boy whose tantrums and nightmares, after they'd finally succeeded in ransoming him from the Potawatomi, had wrenched the hearts of the whole household and renewed their grief over the loss of Helene.

But now that painfully thin, frightened child was a broad-shouldered man over six feet tall with a knife as big as a broadsword and a pistol strapped to his waist. A very dangerous man. A man who, they said, had killed half a dozen or more opponents in fights up and down the Mississippi.

"We have been listening," Elysée said.

"Pierre hasn't," Raoul said resentfully. "You tell him, Papa. Tell[64] him he'd better leave his damned squaw in the woods where she belongs."

Damned squaw. The words pierced Pierre's chest like arrows.

Elysée sat back down in his wing chair and stroked his jaw. He looked like an old turkey cock, with fierce eyes, a hooked nose and a long, wrinkled neck. The leather-bound copy of Montaigne's essays that had been lying in his lap had slipped to the floor to join newspapers piled around his feet like autumn leaves, a mixture of local papers like Frank Hopkins's Victor Visitor, and the Galena Miners Journal, months-old papers from the East—the New York Evening Post, the Boston Evening Transcript, the National Intelligencer from Washington City, the even older copies of Mercure de France from Paris.

"Come here, both of you," Elysée sighed.

Hoping his father could reconcile them where he had failed so dismally, Pierre went to stand before Elysée's chair. After a moment's hesitation Raoul approached too. But Pierre saw that he was pointedly keeping more than an arm's-length distance between the two of them.

Elysée said, "That's better. I can't see you when you stand far from me. These eyes are good for very little but reading, and when I can no longer read, I will shoot myself. And if I cannot see well enough to load the pistol, one of you must do it for me."

As he often did, Elysée was attempting to use humor to put out the fire. Pierre glanced at Raoul to see