Two in the Field Read online

  “I’ll be his father,” Linc said grimly. “Talk to me.”

  Dyson looked up in surprise, then sneered. “No surprise he’s got a nig—”

  We were on him then. Linc seized Dyson’s left forearm in a vise-like grip that froze the big man.

  “I’m his dad, too,” I said, crushing the fingers of Dyson’s other hand as I pumped it in what looked like a good-sport handshake. “Glad you’re taking an interest in our boy.”

  Together we walked Dyson off the field. Several of the Argonauts sensed that something was wrong and started for us.

  “Don’t,” Dyson told them, his voice strained as we upped the pressure a notch. “Go on ahead.” We released him and watched until he was out of sight.

  “Hope that’s the end of it,” I said.

  “Doubt it,” Linc muttered, and moved off to ensure that the other Argonauts remained peaceful.

  Tim still stood where Dyson had left him, a stricken look on his face. “He shouldn’t have said that about my father,” he told me softly as I put my arm around his shoulders.

  “No, he shouldn’t.” I tried to talk him out of feeling so bad, arguing that Dyson was a monumental jerk, that it was a case of sour grapes over Tim having beaten him. The boy seemed to cheer up a bit, but I couldn’t erase what had happened: In one of the great moments of his life, he’d been hurt.

  At that evening’s banquet, lionized as “Captain Sam,” I tried to pass off credit to the whole team. Tip McKee recounted highlights to all who would listen. Linc was his usual taciturn self, as if nothing unusual had happened. John O’Neill positively glowed with good cheer until he informed me privately that he hadn’t told Cait of the wager until after the game. “She said it was reckless of me to risk the colony’s welfare that way.”

  “But we won!”

  “I think she resents your part in the victory,” he said with a shrug.

  Well, some people you just can’t please.

  Tim looked down in the dumps again. “Why the long face?” I asked. “Dyson?”

  He shook his head. “I had a fight with Ma,” he said. “She says I can’t play ball again so long as I live here.”

  My heart went out to him; his big day had become a mess. “I’m mostly the reason, Tim,” I said. “Once she stops being mad at me, she won’t take it out on you.”

  He shook his head. “I’m leaving.”

  I tried to think quickly. “Maybe we could do something besides baseball.”

  “What?”

  “You taught me about fishing,” I told him. “Maybe I could show you how to box.”

  “You’d do that?” he said, brightening.

  But he ate quickly and disappeared shortly afterward. I felt sorry for him. It’s not easy being fourteen. Especially with no dad.

  After the meal there was a songfest at Grand Central, the music supplied by fiddle, banjo and spoons. We all sang “Nebraska Land” and “Lottie Lee.” Then Tip McKee displayed a beautiful tenor on “An Irish Rebel’s Grave.”

  Not a sound was to be heard,

  But the cry of the wild bird,

  As it fluttered o’er a dying rebel’s head.

  If you live to see my home,

  ’Tell mother I’m alone,

  And I’m buried in an Irish rebel’s grave.’

  A hush followed the final words. I glanced across the room at Cait, who looked both moved by the lyrics and distracted. Probably wondering why her son couldn’t commit to the cause of Erin instead of baseball.

  “The next one is dedicated to Caitlin O’Neill,” Tip announced, his brogue more pronounced than ever. “It’s called ‘This Place Called County Cavan.’ ” Jealousy licked inside me as he sang,

  I have heard of all its beauties

  since a child on mother’s knee,

  It’s a little bit of heaven

  on that isle across the sea.…

  Christ, how was I supposed to compete with this stuff?

  My frustration intensified when McKee concluded the song and broke into a neat Irish jig. Finally he gave up the limelight and couples took the floor to dance to “Skip to My Lou” and “Dina Had a Wooden Leg.” Men far outnumbered women, so Cait and Kaija and the rest were kept busy. Most of the dancing was not hold-her-in-your-arms style (or “waist swinging,” as it was called; even waltzes were regarded with suspicion here) but rather reels and square dances. When a sort of polka played and couples did dance in tandem, I figured it was time. I cut in on McKee, and suddenly Cait was in my arms.

  “No, I—” she began, leaning back, resisting—I was holding her more closely than was customary—but then we were swirling around, and though she felt rigid to my guiding hand, she moved easily with me. Hitting the long homer had been glorious satisfying. But it couldn’t begin to touch this.

  The song ended too soon.

  “Thank you.” I held on to her hand as she started to say something, then stopped. Her fingers were trembling. Not meeting my eyes, she pulled away.

  Then everything changed.

  A muffled shout came from the doorway and I saw a congestion there. Suddenly Dyson barged inside, pushing Tim before him, half a dozen prospectors behind them. Dyson was yelling something, spit spraying from his mouth. I couldn’t hear his words—the fiddle and banjo were still going—but I doubted it was good news. One of his hands held Tim by the scruff of his neck. The other clutched a huge revolver.

  Tim looked scared. What the hell was going on? I was at the far end of the room. The music sputtered to a halt and the place grew ominously still. Men were moving toward Dyson and he knew it, for he put the barrel of the gun to Tim’s head and roared for them to stay away. Cait made a shrill noise and started forward, but Kaija caught and held her. Everybody looked stunned, a normal reaction—but somebody had to do something. I moved surreptitiously, keeping behind others, aware of Linc doing the same along the far wall.

  It didn’t work.

  “Come ahead, Fowler!” Dyson brandished the pistol. “Got bullets here for you and the nigger!”

  Linc and I looked at each other. A molten mass was building in my chest and threatening to engulf me. I needed to stay cool. At least until I figured out what to do.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” John O’Neill stepped forward with his most dignified bearing. “Why do you have my grandnephew in hand?”

  “Oh, he’s grand,” Dyson said sarcastically. “A grand thief. This bastard whelp”—he thrust Tim forward, then wrenched him back with such force that the boy’s head whipped sharply—“was stealin’ from us.”

  Gasps sounded from settlers.

  “I don’t believe it,” O’Neill said calmly.

  “Caught him redhanded,” Dyson asserted; several of his men nodded in agreement. “Sneaking out of a tent in our camp, a pouch of dust in his pants.”

  “Is it true?” O’Neill asked the boy.

  Tim raised his head, then lowered it abjectly.

  “Oh God,” Cait said.

  The only sense I could make of it was that he’d been serious about running off—and tried to gather a stake for it.

  “Some of the boys wanted to fix him on the spot,” Dyson said, almost cheerily. “But I says no, let’s swap him back for what he swindled us out of, in cahoots with that pet professional of yours.” He jabbed his gun in my direction. “We want our five hundred. When we get it, you can have your little shitbird bastard back, and welcome to—”

  That was as far as Dyson got with the thought, for on hearing “bastard” again, Tim spun violently. With a ripping noise his shirt tore and he was free. Cursing, Dyson raised his weapon.

  “Stop!” Moving with surprising speed, John O’Neill tried to interpose himself between Dyson and the boy. With no hesitation Dyson hit him in the face with the gun barrel and sent him staggering backward. Cait let out a shriek and tried again to break loose from Kaija, who was yelling too. Tip McKee stood near them, seemingly rooted to the floor. I was moving.

  Tim made a break for the
door, but Dyson threw him to the floor and raised his arm to pistol-whip the boy.

  “Samuel!” Cait’s high-pitched keening wail wrenched at my heart and guts.

  I was flying forward.

  SIXTEEN

  Everybody saw at least a part of what happened. Some saw a lot of it. I didn’t. As I charged at Dyson there was a rushing sensation inside me, and it seemed that everything got blurry. Beyond that, I don’t remember closing the distance between us. I must have swept people aside, or maybe they got out of my way—later I was told that I was bellowing—but however it happened, I was suddenly face to face with Dyson. And what happened next really freaked people.

  He shot me. Twice.

  Each time, there was a barking explosion, a muzzle flash, a fiery streak. Tim saw it. John O’Neill saw it. Dyson saw it. The streaks went into my chest and belly, the first when I was still a few feet away, the second so close that it left a powder burn on my shirt.

  I think I remember those streaks, but mostly I was focused on Dyson, whose eyes widened in disbelief when I kept coming. He raised the pistol as a club, but it was too late. I was on him, snapping his head back with a hard blow and trying to wrench the gun from him. As we struggled, it fell to the floor. A prospector reached for it, but Linc barrelled into him and sent him sprawling back into his friends. Dyson got his fingers on my face, clawing for my eyes. I knocked his hands away and slammed my fists into his face and belly, the force of my rage intensifying the blows. He doubled up and slowly went over sideways and lay inert. It wasn’t enough. I jerked him halfway up and slammed him down again so hard that he bounced, then reached to do it again.

  “Sam!” Linc was trying to hold me back. “Stop!” Even with his strength, it took others helping to do it. Finally I felt the fury draining away. I stood there panting, glaring down at Dyson, whose face was a mask of blood.

  “Christ, you were gonna kill him,” Linc said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “Get those wounds examined,” John O’Neill said, pointing at me, not Dyson. “And escort these blackguards from our town!” Herded by angry settlers, the prospectors dragged Dyson out.

  The most bizarre thing proved to be that although there was a smoldering bullet hole in my shirt, there was no entry wound there. Nor anywhere else on me.

  “Must’ve been blanks,” somebody said, and bent down to search for wax-impregnated cardboard slugs. None were found.

  “Shoot the gun and see,” another said.

  Linc fired Dyson’s revolver into the hard-packed dirt floor. A bullet dug into the earth.

  “Look up there!” somebody exclaimed.

  In the ceiling, directly above where I had been when Dyson fired, two bullets were lodged. Not too deep. As if deflected there.

  The colonists exchanged apprehensive glances as if Superman had landed in their midst. I tried to play it off by saying Dyson was as bad a shot as he was a ballplayer, but nobody who’d been close enough to witness it believed that those bullets had missed me—certainly not by enough to have gone straight up.

  Somehow they had bounced off me.

  Neither Tim nor John O’Neill was injured, though Tim’s neck was sore from being wrenched. Kaija brought the woman who served the colony as midwife and practical nurse. She opened my shirt to reveal a tiny bruise near one pectoral, another on my solar plexus; her fingers felt cool on those places, but I felt no pain.

  I glanced up and saw Cait staring at the marks. I spread my hands dismissively, trying to convey that it was no big deal. Her troubled eyes rose to mine. They seemed to say, Who are you?

  John O’Neill assigned guards through the night and told us to keep our weapons at hand. He ordered Tim home with his mother; the boy, shame-faced, made no objection. People stood around for a while, then began to drift off.

  The Old Glory Blowout had blown out.

  “How’d you pull off that bullet-bouncing?” Linc demanded, back in our soddy. “I’ve seen my share of close-up shooting, but never the like of that.”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I mean, I knew he was shooting at me, but all I could think of was getting my hands on him.”

  “You did that, sure enough,” he said. “They’re already commencing to call you ‘Iron Sam.’ ”

  “I’m not bulletproof,” I protested. “I’ve been shot before.” I pulled up my shirt and displayed the puckered scar over my right hip. “Tonight must have been some kind of optical illusion.”

  He grunted sardonically.

  I lay awake thinking of Colm and trying to recall if during the encounter with Dyson there had been a shadowy figure or the sensation of drumming wings, as when O’Donovan had shot me point-blank. I didn’t think so. Nonetheless, I suspected that somehow Colm had deflected the bullets tonight so that I could rescue his son. But if so, why had he allowed McDermott and LeCaron to shoot me before? Why hadn’t he shown up to deflect that bullet? Maybe, I reasoned, because I hadn’t yet met Cait. Maybe Colm hadn’t been sure of me at that point. Or, conversely, maybe he had deflected it—kept it from hitting some vital spot.

  Would he go on using me to protect his loved ones?

  Did I really want this involuntary role? The prospectors pulled out late the next day, one of their wagons bearing the sentiment, O’NEILL CITY: SWINDLERS’ ROOST. It didn’t please John O’Neill, but everybody was glad to see them go. Linc and I had just finished cleaning up after our evening meal when Tim showed up and said that Cait wanted to talk to me.

  Tension began to radiate from my solar plexus.

  “You could go over now,” he said, “if it suits you.”

  I thought I detected a note of triumph. What was going on? I shaved and patted my hair down with water. As I strode toward Cait’s, a rider with a sack of mail pulled up at Grand Central. People immediately streamed toward him. Mail delivery was the settlement’s single most exciting event.

  With an eye educated from my time in the colony, I couldn’t help but notice the convenience features of Cait’s soddy. While Linc and I had to fetch our water a quarter-mile from the river, Cait had her own well with a hollowed-out log as a trough. Pegs driven into the soddy walls supported gourds of rice, corn and dried berries. Tripods beneath them held kettles for cooking and soap-making and washing. Most opulent of all: oiled-paper windows to let in light through the open shutters. It was no secret that Tip McKee’s labor had provided these things.

  But I was the one Cait had called out for.

  She must have been watching, for she appeared in her kitchen doorway, stepped back for me to enter, and beckoned me to a plank table draped with a lace cloth. Steam issued from a pot on a stove, above which hung copper and iron cooking pans.

  “Will you have some chokecherry tea?” she asked. “It’s said to be soothing.”

  “After last night I could stand some soothing.”

  She set china cups before us, definitely a step up from the tin-ware I was used to, and sat down opposite me. Sunlight filtering through the paper muted the stress lines on her face and gave it the soft cast of a Vermeer painting. Proximity to her seemed to charge everything with some hyper-real quality. I wanted to reach across the table and touch her.

  “Thank you for what you did last night.” She paused as if seeking words. Despite her evident weariness, or maybe because of it, she seemed to have reached some inner calmness that up to now I hadn’t seen. “This seems to be our pattern, does it not? My thanking you for helping with my family?”

  “Well, one of our patterns,” I said, “along with you keeping me at a distance.”

  She flushed and lowered her eyes. “It wasn’t always so,” she said quietly, filling our cups with pinkish liquid.

  A silence lengthened. Cait’s plain frock yielded few clues as to the rounded contours beneath it. Images of our night at Gasthaus zur Rose unspooled in my memory, her lovely arms around my neck, our legs intertwined.…

  “I was wondering,” I said. “Did you use the money I left in Cincinnati?” Gr
ipped by a sense of foreboding before departing with the team, I had deposited twenty-five hundred dollars in a bank with instructions that it should go to Cait if I didn’t return.

  “Yes.” A hint of defensiveness in her tone. “I used it to travel to San Francisco with Tim.”

  My jaw dropped. “You did?”

  She nodded. “I talked to the police there and hired an agent to help me visit hotels and boardinghouses.” A small line appeared between her eyebrows. “We found the house where you stayed—and learned you hadn’t been there since the day Fearghus died.”

  “What about Johnny? Did you find him?”

  A quizzical smile flickered as she shook her head. “If, as you say, he was on that hillside when Fearghus fell to his death, Samuel, do you think it likely he would stay around? Especially after you’d vanished so mysteriously?”

  I hadn’t thought it through. She was right.

  “We used more of your money to visit Andy in Washington, hoping for information from your teammates. Finally I gave it up. But you see?” She spread her hands. “Your money was put to good use.”

  “I’m sorry it happened like that, Cait, but I came back as soon as I could. And I’m here now.”

  “I’m very aware of that,” she said calmly. “Everyone sees how you look at me.” She dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “They can guess exactly why you are here.”

  “And Tip …?” It was out of my mouth before I could check it.

  “Tip?” She sipped at her tea. “He’s talking of putting in stone floors for us and planting evergreens as a windbreak, though I don’t know that they’ll survive here.”

  “I mean … oh hell, Cait, you know what I mean.”

  Her jade eyes held mine. “Tip realizes that I once cared for you.”

  Once … It hung in the air between us.

  The tea tasted bitter. I followed her example and added sugar. After half a cup, I didn’t feel particularly soothed.

  “Did you call me over,” I said, “just to tell me to go away?”

  “Have I not done that very thing?” she countered. “More than once?”