Days Without End (Days Without End #1) - Sebastian Barry Page 0,28
fort and even the sergeant has an old nag of a wife for his sins, but she ain’t like that. There’s leagues for everything, doubtless.
It’s strange how close I watch her. But I want to find out something. I want to see how she wears her arms, how she moves her legs, little things no one else gives a damn about maybe. Guess I was fascinated by her. How she held her chin up when she talked. How she flashed her eyes without knowing maybe. Like she had candles in them. She has a bosom like a small earthworks. Smooth, defensive. Them Mexican jackets was stiff with stitchings all across it. Made her look like something soft and good was being armoured up. I had in my days of being a girl considered the phrase ‘feminine mystery’ because I had been obliged to try to turn my hand to it. Here was the sockdolager of goddamned feminine mystery.
Goddamned lady, says John Cole. Guess she is.
Caught-His-Horse-First must of gone down into Mexico or Texas raiding because we don’t hear nothing about him for a long time. Things just go on. Lot of life is just like that. I look back over fifty years of life and I wonder where the years went. I guess they went like that, without me noticing much. A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards. I ain’t got no argument with it, just saying it is so. Two years, three pass by, and only change I can put a clock on in my head is the major’s two girls. Babies that Mrs Neale pushed out. She pushed them out and then was going about the fort as usual just a day after like she was a squaw with work to do. Twin girls but they didn’t look just alike because one had black hair and other sand-yellow like the major’s. I can’t even recall this moment what they called them, they was only little anyhow. The black-haired one was nicknamed Jackdaw later on account she liked to steal shiny things. No, I do recall their names of course I do. Hephzibah was the black-haired girl and the fair one was Angel. I couldn’t forget Angel. Major would be on his porch cooing at them in the cot. Why shouldn’t he, they was his.
Then news came in from our new scouts which was a good set of Crow Indians from over Yellowstone direction that Caught-His-Horse-First was seen riding north-west of Laramie. So they follow him up there and after a day’s riding he enters all unknowing he is being watched into a new village, about thirty wigwams the Crows counted. Sergeant must of been waiting for that because he has a requisition order for a field gun already dated back a year so he furnishes this to the ordnance quartermaster who is a man more placid than Caesar without needing to bother the major and by dawn of the following day we are setting out in good heart to see if we can locate the village, the svelte gun making a sort of merry rattle along the way.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE BOW IS DRAWN BACK and the bowman tries to hold it as taut as he can and then when he is satisfied with the position of his prey he can let the arrow loose. There is a fierce strange moment when the arm can no longer hold the pulled string, and nothing will do but to let it fly, so the bowman must know all the staging posts of his task, or make a bloody hames of it. I was just pondering along these lines as we went in fairly good order in the hoofprints of our Crow scouts. That Caught-His-Horse-First was a wily man and it would not be any picnic to find him and bring revenge to his soul. The sergeant thought it only right that as many of the old section who had found the killed men so many seasons before should go that day to find the village. Caleb Booth was there as the Jesus among us risen again. In the meanwhile Caleb had grown a big moustache and had a little baby son by a pretty Sioux woman, Oglala Sioux too, so I guess that was strange. I guess love laughs at history a little.