As Long as Grass Shall Grow
Mercedes Lackey
They called this part of Oklahoma Territory the “Cherokee Outlet,” because it was supposed to give the Cherokee, whose tribal reservation lay to the east of it, a way to get to their traditional hunting grounds. Andy Falk figured they probably did use it for that, but they also leased it to cattle ranchers for grazing and, normally in April, that would be all you would see out here—cattle and whatever wild critters shared the land with them.
But this was not a normal April, and the cattle had been forced to share the southern boundary of the Outlet with a strange and motley assortment of human beings, riding and driving beasts and contraptions that stretched for miles along the northern border of what was called the “Unassigned Lands”—a parcel of territory that had not been assigned to any particular tribe when so many thousands of unfortunate Indians had been ripped from their homelands and sent marching out here to be “resettled.” In Andy’s opinion, that was a far-too polite word for what it had been, which was unvarnished theft. Members of what were called the “Five Civilized Tribes” in particular had “assimilated” in the East on their ancestral homelands, made farms and prospered in the image of whites, in the belief—as white men had assured them—that if they imitated white men, they should have the same privileges and protection of the law as white men.
That had been a lie, of course. As soon as white men wanted those lands, white men got them, and Five Civilized Tribes got rounded up and marched westward, with only as much as they could carry in their wagons or on their backs.
Andy sighed, looking eastward, and thought about those promises.
Andy had no intention of joining in any successive land thefts after this one. In fact, he wouldn’t be here now if it hadn’t been for an accident and a promise of his own.
A promise that had been made two weeks ago, when he had been in the town of Caldwell in Kansas, with no more intention of participating in this venture than he had of flying.
* * *
Andy Falk of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, would still have been at home in Wisconsin instead of this—at least to him—unseasonable heat of Kansas, if he had not been sent to find someone.
The love of his life, the clever and witty Elsa Baumgartner (she of the flaxen hair, merry blue eyes, and rosy cheeks) and her family had not heard from her father, Heinrich, for weeks, and they were worried. He was a land surveyor, and like dozens of others, he’d taken work with the federal government to survey and lay out 160-acre parcels in the Unassigned Lands of Indian Territory in advance of the Land Run that was to take place in April. The work should have been done; Heinrich Baumgartner should have been home, or at least have sent a letter if he’d been delayed. And Andy reckoned that volunteering to find the head of the household would put him farther up in the list of potential suitors in Elsa’s eyes than he was now, which was just short of the middle. So he saddled his horse, Prinz, and headed south.
To be sure, Andy had never been further south than Chicago, but he considered that he was well prepared for Kansas, having read several stories for boys about the Wild West by Karl May in Der Gute Kammerad.
Andy, and Elsa, and all of Elsa’s family were, of course, German, and had immigrated to Milwaukee and the colony of Germans there. But no one ever took Andy for anything but an American, because Andy had a secret.
Andy Falk—born Andreas—was an Elemental Master, a master of Earth Magic and its Elementals and, as an Elemental Master, he could summon a local Elemental to teach him any local language overnight. The Elemental he had summoned his first night in New York City had not only taught him American English, but taught it to him with the local accent, a fact that always made him chuckle.
But he very quickly discovered that Karl May’s stories had left him woefully unprepared for Kansas and his “eastern” accent made him a target for sharpsters, at least until he bought himself a revolver and wore it openly.
Fortunately, he knew how to use it.
Andy was a stubborn fellow, and his dogged persistence paid off. He traced Baumgartner like a hunting hound until he came to the border town of Caldwell, a town that had swelled to some fifty thousand people in anticipation of the Land Run. And that was where he found the surveyor, exhausted from lack of sleep, in an army-issue two-man tent at the edge of town, tending to a fellow surveyor who was deathly sick with cholera. He had not contacted his family because he had not dared leave his partner’s side long enough to send a wire or a letter. No one here wanted to help him. Their minds were fixed on Harrison’s Hoss Race.
* * *
“Get some sleep,” Andy said, forcefully. Heinrich was too exhausted and grateful to argue. He stumbled to the other side of the sheet dividing the tent into two living spaces, fell onto the cot and was snoring in less than a minute. Andy turned his attention to the cholera-stricken surveyor.
Outside the tent, the air was so thick with the dust churned up by the fifty thousand or so people that had taken over this town that it was impossible to keep anything clean. There wasn’t enough food or water, and Baumgartner must have used his connections with the Army to get both, though the food was hard biscuit and the water looked like sludge.
First, he called on his powers to purify the bucket of water beside the bed; like much of the water in this town, it was more mud than water. He made the silt in it gather all the contamination, then solidified the particles of tainted earth into a rock-hard ball that he lifted out and rolled out the door of the tent. Getting a dipper full of the now sparkling water, he held up the stricken man’s head and put it to his lips while he assessed the man’s condition.
Earth Masters were often doctors, but Andy was no physician, and to his dismay he quickly realized there was nothing much he could do to help the poor man, even with his powers. He could try and strengthen the surveyor, but in the condition the he was in now, that would be of limited help. Andy himself just didn’t know enough about medicine and the human body to purge the disease out of the poor man.
So once he had lent all the strength the man could take in, all he could do was what Heinrich had been doing. Apply damp cloths to the man’s forehead, give him water and watch over him as the daylight faded and sunset turned to night. Just before it got too dark to see, he lit the lamp sitting on a small crate next to the man’s cot, and turned to see that the fellow was awake, his eyes, bright with fever, fixed on Andy.
He expected the man to ask who he was, or where Heinrich had gone. But instead, the cracked lips parted, and what issued from them, in a harsh whisper, were the words, “You are an Elemental Master.”
Andy started. “Yes—” he blurted. “But—”
“I am—an Earth Master.” The man gripped his wrist with surprising strength. “Listen. This is important. You must—go on the Land Run. Go for me.”
“I can’t—” Andy began.
“You must. There is a section—must be protected—” The man shook with the effort of speaking. “Notebook. In vest.”
Andy extracted the notebook from the man’s vest pocket. Written down were explicit instructions on how to find a particular section in the eastern panhandle of the Unassigned Lands. “Go there—claim it—protect it. Promise!”
Andy feared what would happen if he didn’t promise, and so he gave his word, and the surveyor settled back satisfied, and soon drifted back into feverish sleep. Andy tucked the notebook in his own vest pocket and thought nothing more of it. Instead, he again did what little he could to bolster the surveyor’s strength in hopes the fellow would manage to fight off the disease himself with support. In the morning, refreshed by a good twelve hours of rest, Heinrich took over, and it was Andy’s turn to bolt some of his provisions, and fall into the cot.
But by the time he awoke, the poor fellow was dead. Heinrich was just overseeing the undertaker as the body was removed. “A gut fellow you are, Andy,” Heinrich said sadly. “I vill vire my vife, den I must see Hardesty’s vife in Chicago and bring her der sad news und her husband’s body. I vill see you in Milwaukee.” And Andy could only nod, knowing that if he did get back to Milwaukee, it would be long after Heinrich returned.
* * *
Andy pondered all this as he readied Prinz for the dash. He’d done what he could to prepare; Heinrich had left behind the bulk of the dead surveyor’s goods and gear, telling him to take what he needed, so he had appropriated the clean cotton shirt and canvas trousers as being much more appropriate for the conditions than his woolen suit. There had still been army biscuits enough for several days, which Heinrich evidently had been subsisting on since his friend fell ill; Andy had taken this, the man’s two canteens, a canvas shelter, a couple blankets, and his long rifle and ammunition. The rest he had packed up and left in the care of the owner of the General Store, with the understanding that he was to hold it until Andy or Heinrich came to claim it.
Four days before the Run, the soldiers guarding the Unassigned Lands had allowed those waiting on the Kansas border to cross the Cherokee Outlet and assemble on the northern border. Following the instructions in the notebook, Andy had worked his way to the eastern panhandle of the area, until he was due north of the section he was supposed to find, a spot divided into two equal halves, north and south, by a waterway the surveyor had noted as “Lagoon Creek.” There he planted Prinz right on the line being maintained by the soldiers, and waited with the rest.
To stake a claim, he, like all the others, had a two-foot-long wooden stake carved with his initials and entry on it. He had to get to the center of the section he was looking for, find the surveyor’s stake and land description, replace it with his own, return to the land office with it, and register his claim.
This was the only part of the mission he was certain of; as long as a “sooner” hadn’t snuck in ahead of the appointed time and claimed the prize, Prinz could, and would, outrun and outlast every other horse he could see from where he sat. Not only was Prinz from a long line of hardy warhorses, able to carry a man in heavy armor all day, he came from a long line of fleet hunters. He had the speed, strength and stamina most of these other horses lacked.
And he had Andy’s Earth Magic to replenish his energy and keep him fortified.
“President Harrison’s Hoss Race” was what they were calling it, although besides horses, there was every sort of vehicle imaginable here, wagons, buggies, carts, and every sort of animal and none. Some hardy individuals evidently intended to make a run for their stake on foot. There were even a couple of high-wheeler bicycles, although Andy could not imagine how they thought they were going to negotiate the land he sensed in front of him now, crossed with hidden ravines and other obstacles.
That was another advantage he had as an Earth Master. Every inch of the land in front of him was as clear to him as if he himself had surveyed it. He knew were the ravines were that could break a horse’s neck—where creeks of slippery stones were hidden—where there were gopher burrows that would break a horse’s leg. Many horses would probably die or be hurt in this race. Prinz would not be one of them.
“It’s going to be a beautiful day, isn’t it, Earth Master?”
Andy jumped, as startled by the melodious feminine voice at his stirrup as he was by being addressed for the second time as an Earth Master. He looked down.
And Elsa fled from his mind as quickly as if she had never existed at all.
The woman at his stirrup had straight, brown hair done in a practical knot at the nape of her neck, not Elsa’s flowing golden curls. She had brown eyes, not Elsa’s cornflower blue. Her face was thin and a little sunburned, and another man might have called it “plain.” She held the reins of a rangy roan mare, her tack was worn, and her faded calico dress and white bonnet looked to have plenty of wear on them. But Andy thought he had never seen a woman so alive, her eyes dancing with good humor, her mouth curved in a slight smile, as if she knew amusing secrets. Beside her, Elsa was just a china doll.
He had heard of love at first sight, especially among Elemental Masters, but he had never believed in it.
Until now. He felt terrified and elated, all at the same time. Every nerve in his body tingled, as if he was about to be struck by lightning. His mind was incredibly clear, and yet he could not get a single word out. He stared, and tried to breathe.
“Alice Brown, Air Master,” she said, with a tiny bob of a curtsey, just enough to make a joke of the gesture.
“Andy Falk,” he replied, managing to get his wits about him.
“You do know,” she continued, as if they had known each other for years, “that only a head of a household can stake a claim.”
His heart plummeted. He had not known that! What—
“If you get your claim, I’ll marry you,” she continued, electrifying him all over again. She patted the shoulder of the mare next to her. “If you want. Daisy and I may not be able to outrun most of these nags, but we can follow you, and I can guard the claim while you make the run to the registry.”
“Why would you do that?” he asked, after gulping down astonishment. This was surely too good to be true. There had to be a catch. Had she enchanted him somehow?
And yet, he could not detect any deceit in her, and he was usually good at picking out the sharpsters, even when they were women.
“Because I haven’t a cent to my name that’s not with me, and that purse is too thin to live on for very long,” she said frankly. “My folks are both dead of fever. My brother got married and his wife made his life hell until he sent me packing with a lot less than the half of the inheritance my parents left me. I need a place to live and food to eat, and I ain’t afraid of hard work. We’re both Elemental Masters, so we ought to get along all right, and if we don’t, well, a hundred sixty acres can make two farms, easy.” She had gone pale while she talked, as if she was now afraid of her boldness, afraid he’d think badly of her, afraid he’d think of her as some kind of hussy, or that she meant to cheat him somehow. “I may be no prize, but where else are you going to find a wife who’s another Master?”
Now, he could have said he didn’t need a wife, but that would have been a lie, and it wasn’t a good idea for magicians to lie, as their lies all too often came true in the worst way. He could have said that he had a girl, but that would have been a half lie, for he was only one of half a dozen suitors, and anyway, after one look at Alice, Elsa had been driven clean out of his head. He could have said he didn’t want a wife, but that was as big a lie as the first two. And anyway, his mouth blurted, “Done!” before his head had gotten through half of those thoughts.
But then he added, for the sake of getting everything out in the open, “I’ve made a promise to a dead Master. I’ve got a map to a stake, but it’s on land he pledged me to protect, and I don’t know why. It may be worthless. It may be dangerous. But a promise is a promise, and I aim to keep it.”
“Then I’ll help you,” said Alice, and then there was nothing more to say, because it was coming on noon, and it was time to fill Prinz full of as much sustaining magic as the horse could hold. Prinz was used to this, and held rock steady while Andy reached deep into the earth, brought up its power, and passed it into his mount. He just finished as the nearest trooper began riding his horse back and forth, restlessly, peering to the west, where presumably the signal to let the race begin would come from. Alice mounted Daisy and backed her a little way out of the line; wisely, he thought, because when the shot came to send them on their way, the front of the line was going to be a dangerous place. She wasn’t the only person to do so; the cautious and those who intended to remain behind were doing the same, and the wavering line on the border separated into two.
Andy bent down over Prinz’s neck. Prinz, the veteran of many a race, knew what this meant, and Andy felt the stallion gathering himself for a racing start.
Andy felt, rather than saw, the line at the very limit of his vision jerk forward, and at that moment, the trooper in front of them shot his pistol straight up in the air.
Prinz threw himself forward with a tremendous leap, trusting to Andy to feel out the ground in front of them, and getting himself a nose length in front of any other horse in their part of the line. Around him, behind him, it was utter chaos, the thunder of horses’ hooves on the ground, the clatter of wheels and the clashing of wagon chains. The horses all surged forward, some of them already tangling with others and going down with screams of fear and pain, taking their riders with them. Wagons careened wildly forward, and some were wrecked immediately. Behind them, the screams of horses and men and women pierced the cloud of dust that arose. But Andy could take no thought for them. He extended his senses, into the ground before him, and into Prinz, warning him of gopher holes, hidden rocks, uneven ground. Prinz surged into the lead with Andy’s help and guidance and, in fifteen minutes, they were far ahead of the pack.
But Andy didn’t rein him in. He could run for hours like this, with his strength bolstered, and he would have to. The claim Andy had been told to make was a good hour from the border at Prinz’s top speed. He kept feeding Prinz with energy, and kept a lookout for the landmarks the surveyor had left in his notebook. Here a dry creek bed. There a creek with a trickle of water in it. There a particular clump of three trees. There weren’t a lot of such landmarks; this was not the fertile land of Wisconsin. This was a harder soil, and his Earth senses told him it didn’t see water nearly as often. It would take a special sort of farming, and even then, there would always be danger of losing everything to drought. Drought came often here, the land told him. That was why the trees here had deep taproots, and only grew where water flowed all year long.
He felt the claim before he saw it, which he had not expected. His Earth sense stretched nearly a mile in front of him, and the difference, the specialness spoke to him. At that point the trees of the bottomlands of Lagoon Creek were little more than a dark mist on the horizon. And then he knew why had to protect it.
It was sacred land, deep in the heart of that section. Land where once gods had walked, and might walk still.
Andy was a Christian, but he was also no fool. He knew very well that there were other gods, and that they still had power. Why else would the God of Moses have said, “Thou shalt not have other gods before me”? To his mind, that implied there were plenty of other gods, and that it was perfectly all right to give them honor in their own place, as long as Jehovah took precedence.
He didn’t have long to think about this, however, as his final landmark, a lightning-blasted tree that had been drawn with exquisite detail in the notebook came into view. He aimed Prinz for it. If a sooner hadn’t managed to hide out here and run in to claim it, he was far enough ahead of the pack it should be his.
And his heart leapt as his Earth senses coursed ahead of him, and he realized this was some of the best land he had felt yet on his ride. If he could stake it, claim it, and protect it—he could also farm it.
Prinz plunged through the woods—and these actually were woods, more trees than he was used to seeing here—and he wrenched his attention away from his Earth senses and to his ordinary ones. The section marker should be down here, in this rich bottom land, just before the creek itself.
There! He spotted the two-foot-tall stake, surveyor’s papers fluttering at the top. It hadn’t been claimed yet!
He pulled Prinz to a sudden stop, the stallion’s feet slipping and skidding on the lush prairie grass beneath the trees, tumbled from his saddle, and seized the stake with both hands. He wrenched it out of the earth, ignoring the splinters in his palms, pulled his own stake out of his saddlebag and—grabbing a hand-sized stone from beside the hole where it had been—hammered it home. And only when the claiming stake and the papers attached to it were safely in his saddlebag did he breathe again.
And then he lost his breath all over again, as an Indian rose up out of the grass, long rifle trained on his head.
He was an old man, but Andy didn’t doubt for a moment that his hand was steady and sight keen. His head had been shaved except for a stiff crest of hair, like the crest on a roman helmet, to which an eagle feather had been attached. His chest and arms were bare, his neck adorned with strings of beads and a round pearl-shell ornament. He wore a breechcloth and leggings of deerskin. And Andy had no idea which of several tribes hereabouts he could have come from—but he had no doubt that the man was here to protect this land.
Last night he’d done his best to commune with the elementals of this place, asking them to give him all the human languages hereabouts that they knew. So he took a deep breath, held up his hands to show they were empty of weapons, and tried Cherokee.
“I am here to protect this place, not claim it,” he said.
Nothing.
He tried Caddo. Then Sac and Fox. Then Osage. Then Kaw. Still no reaction. And he began to grow desperate.
And then, suddenly, as he groped for the words from yet another tribe, the old man—laughed.
“I wish that you could see your own face, white-skin,” the old man said around laughter, in perfect English. “I thought I had better ease your mind before you pissed yourself.”
Andy nearly fainted with relief.
“Where is Hardesty?” the Indian asked, moving forward through the waist-high grass with an ease and grace that belied his age. “I was expecting him, not you.”
“Dead. He got cholera from bad water on the other side of the border, and I got there too late to save him,” Andy replied sadly. “I’m very sorry.”
The old man grounded the stock of his rifle and sighed. “I’m sorry too, and for his wife. He was a good man. I did not know him long, but everything I learned of him told me he was a very good man, as well as a fine Medicine Chief of Earth, as you are.”
“And you are also a Medicine Chief.” This much Andy was sure of; he felt the power radiating from the man.
“The last of my band,” he replied. “And the last to guard their resting place and the dancing floor of our gods. Hardesty pledged he would do the same.”
“And he sent me in his place.” Andy fished the notebook out of his vest and handed it to the old man who looked through it. “I’m Andy Falk, and I promised to claim this land and protect your sacred ground.”
“I am Red Hawk.” The old man held out his hand to Andy, who shook it, not at all surprised to discover the man had a powerful grip. “We now have a problem before us. There are those coming who will try to steal this place from us before we can register the claim.”
Andy felt his insides clench up. He had been hoping that with all the troopers out here claim jumpers would be taken care of. But he had no doubt that Red Hawk was right. “Then we will—” he began, and then heard the galloping sound of hooves.
Before he could react with alarm, though, he saw the sort of Air Elementals he was used to—three little half-naked girls with butterfly wings—come zipping toward him through the treetops. That would be Alice, he thought, and turned to see Red Hawk staring at the Sylphs with his eyes wide and jaw slightly dropped.
Alice came trotting toward them through the trees on her horse—spotted Red Hawk, and pulled up her mare short.
Red Hawk recovered himself before she could bolt or reach for a weapon, as the three Sylphs hovered above her, looking from him to her and back again, uncertainly. “Do you know this woman, Earth Chief?” he asked.
Andy shook off his own bemusement. “Alice Brown, this is Red Hawk. He is the local equivalent of a Master. Red Hawk, this is Alice Brown, another kind of Medicine Chief.”
“Ah.” Red Hawk eyed the Sylphs again. “These—flying maidens are not something I have seen.”
“They came with my mother’s mother when she came from across the ocean,” Alice told him, losing her wariness. Then she turned to Andy. “The rest aren’t far behind me. They spread out quite a bit, and I am sure many of them stopped at the first unclaimed stake they found, but it won’t be long before you—”
“—we,” he said firmly.
The tense anxiety faded a little and she smiled. “We have to fight off the claim jumpers.”
“No,” Red Hawk said firmly. “You are not fighting off claim jumpers. This man and I will. You are going to take his horse, which is faster than yours, and ride to the place where claims are made.”
“Registration office,” said Andy, nodding, although his qualms assailed him. What if she registered the claim in her own name? What if she sold it to someone else? His heart said to trust her, but his mind—
“You think I’m not as good a fighter as you?” Alice shot back, her eyes flashing.
Red Hawk raised an eyebrow. “I think nothing of the kind. I think that I would be shot trying to register a claim. I think that you are the smaller of the two pale-skins, and the horse will carry you faster. And I think before you go, I should bind you as mates so that you may truly say that you are registering for him.”
Alice flushed a bright crimson, but Andy couldn’t tell if it was from embarrassment at her mistake, or because Red Hawk had said he was going to marry them.
All he could think was that he was having a little trouble breathing now.
“Come down,” Red Hawk commanded. “This will take little time.”
Alice dismounted and held the reins of her horse in her left hand. Red Hawk took her right, Andy’s right, and bound them together with a rawhide thong he took from the belt holding his breechcloth, chanting something in his own language as he did so. Andy’s flesh tingled where it touched hers, and he couldn’t look away from her eyes.
Then, on the last word, something flashed between them. It was definitely magic, but more than that. It was as if the world turned inside out for a moment, and when it settled again, everything settled into a pattern that felt absolutely right in some indefinable way.
“There,” Red Hawk said, matter-of-factly, when he was done. “You are mated.” He unbound their hands and tucked the thong away. “Now, woman, go. The sooner you arrive, the better.”
“Leave everything but one of the canteens,” Andy said as she handed him the reins of her mare and mounted Prinz. “The lighter you travel, the better. Water Prinz, but not too much.”
She nodded, tossed down the saddlebags and one of the canteens and trotted the stallion to the creek. She let him drink almost exactly as much as Andy would have, then pulled his head up, turned it in the direction of the registry office, and urged him into a canter. In moments, she was gone.
“What weapons have we?” Red Hawk asked, practically.
“Your rifle and mine. My revolver.” He checked Daisy’s saddlebags. “Alice’s revolver.” He pulled out a holstered Colt and an ammunition belt. While neither were new, they looked significantly newer than Daisy’s tack. He checked to make sure it was unloaded, spun the cylinder, checked the action. All in good working order and recently cleaned. Satisfied, he loaded it and handed it and the belt to Red Hawk.
Then he got his own rifle and revolver, loaded both, and looked to the Indian expectantly. Red Hawk made a careful survey of the area around them with narrowed eyes. “I knew whoever was in the race would have to be coming from the north,” he said, finally. “Claim jumpers could be coming from anywhere.”
“That’s true,” Andy replied. “But they’ll have to come here, looking for the survey stake, and to stake their own claim.” He looked around as well. “I’ll stay out in the open, at the stake. You go into hiding. They’ll concentrate on me, and if they won’t see reason—”
Red Hawk nodded. He faded back into the undergrowth, and in a moment, was gone.
Andy cleared ground near the stake and made a small fire. While he waited, he finally got a chance to look over this land he had claimed.
The first thing he noticed was that the trees were not going to be good enough to make a conventional wooden house out of. Many were cottonwood, which was notoriously poor for almost every purpose except kindling and shade, and his Earth senses told him the others were mostly of a sort of oak that was full of knots and twisted grain. Clearly, he would need to find some other way to build a house.
But there was water here, and decent land for growing things. He thought he remembered something about the natives here making large, multifamily lodges, somehow—
Then he heard the sound of a horse’s hooves, coming out of the west. He stood up, rifle held down at his side, but ready to be brought up at a moment’s notice, and waited.
At the sight of him, the rider abruptly pulled up his horse. They stared at each other for a long moment. Andy didn’t like what he saw. He brought the rifle up, just a little more.
“This’s my claim,” the man stated.
“My stake says otherwise,” Andy replied, as the man took his right hand off the reins, and held it near his holstered revolver.
“Reckon you can get a shot off afore I can?” Beneath his bowler, the man had hard eyes in a face that seemed set in a perpetual snarl. Andy lifted the rifle enough to take a shot.
“Reckon I can,” he stated. “And I reckon I’ll kill your horse with it. You’ll have a hard time aiming with your nag going down under you. Then if I feel kindly, I’ll let you walk out, if you can walk. And if I don’t, the second shot will be at close range between your eyes.”
Could he do that? He didn’t know, actually. He’d never shot anything bigger than a jackrabbit.
But this man didn’t know that, and Andy hoped that the calm way he stated his position would convince him that Andy could, and would.
The man’s eyes widened with shock, then narrowed with anger. Without another word, he reined his horse around and galloped off, spurring it roughly.
“He’ll be back,” came Red Hawk’s voice drifting out of the trees. “And he will bring more.”
Andy sighed. “I was afraid of that. Maybe if I find a good tree to—”
“Lend me your power,” Red Hawk demanded. “We are not far from the gods’ dancing ground. There may be something I can do.”
If Andy knew which direction the claim jumpers would be coming from, he could soften the earth enough to turn it into something like quicksand—
“Let me do something else first,” he said, and backed away from the stake, putting his back to a grove of trees. Kneeling down, he put one hand on the ground and let his power flow into it, until the entire area around the stake was as soft as waterlogged mud. He’d positioned himself so the claim jumpers would have to cross that stretch in order to get to him, no matter which direction they came from.
“Good! Good!” Red Hawk exclaimed, at his elbow. “Very good! If you have power left—”
He held out his hand to the native, who clasped his wrist; he did the same, and he let the remainder of his magic flow into the old man. It was not an inconsiderable amount. “You are the Master here,” he said, simply. “Tell me what to do.”
“Wait for them, as you planned,” Red Hawk said. “And fear nothing. I will take the mare to safety.”
With his back to the grove of trees, he set his rifle within reach and unholstered his Colt, and waited.
He wondered where Alice was. He wondered how long she would have to wait in line. Those who had decided to grab the first available parcels, no matter how poor, would be at the office first, but surely she would be in the pack of those who—
He heard hoofbeats again, but just a single horse. Too fast to be Alice, who could not have gotten registered this quickly. He waited. Through the trees came a Federal Trooper, who, on seeing him, pulled up his horse short of the danger zone.
“That your claim stake?” he called, tugging on his hat by way of a neutral “hello” and to show his gun hand was empty.
“Yes, sir, it is. Sent my wife to the registry office with the survey stake.” Those words, “my wife,” put an electric thrill up his spine. “Just had one claim jumper I ran off, and I’m expecting more.”
The trooper looked around. “Not surprised. Good land.” He looked back at Andy. “We’re spread mighty thin out here, and things are known to happen. You do what you have to do, son. I’ll check back on you soon as I can. Just make sure I don’t have to tell your wife she’s a widow. If you disappear and someone else is holding your stake, that’ll be all I can do.” And with that, he turned and rode off again.
Well, that gave him tacit permission to do more than shoot a warning bullet. He just hoped it wouldn’t come to that—hoped Red Hawk had something up his nonexistent sleeve.
More time passed. The shadows cast by the trees moved slowly across the open stretch in front of him. He took time for a sip of water from his canteen; his stomach was too knotted to try gnawing on one of those ration biscuits. “You need water, Red Hawk?” he called.
“I am well,” came the reply, although he could not have told where it came from for the life of him.
Then, finally, the sound he was waiting for carried over the buzz and whirs of insects and the different calls of unfamiliar birds. Hoofbeats. Many.
He braced himself. And through the brush they came. Seven of them, all of them armed, all of them with guns in their hands, and all at the canter. “There he is!” shouted one, and they all spurred their tired horses into a gallop, clearly intending to rush him and cut him down in the proverbial hail of bullets.
And that was when their horses hit the softened earth.
He’d basically turned it to powder to a depth of about four feet in a stretch twenty feet long and six feet wide. As he’d expected, when the horses hit it, the powdered earth erupted in a cloud of blinding, choking dust. What he hadn’t expected was that the front halves of the horses would plunge in while the rear remained on solid ground.
With screams of fear and pain, the horses somersaulted into the trench, sending their riders flying.
A couple of guns went off, and he ducked, but none of the whizzing bullets came near him. The dust rose in a great cloud as horses continued to flail and scream and choke in the trench. He heard at least one man’s screams that were suddenly cut off. And coughing. He felt a little sick, yet filled with relief—
But the relief vanished, as he heard more hoofbeats coming from his right. He turned, and saw a dozen more men also with guns out, who reigned in their horses and stopped short of danger.
The leader—the man he had first run off—narrowed his eyes and lifted his lip. “That’s a mighty slick trick you pulled there, stranger,” he snarled. “Too bad you ain’t gonna live to appreciate how clever you was.”
“This is just one stake,” he said, knowing that there wasn’t anything more in his budget of magic, and that not even he and Red Hawk together could win against a dozen men. “There’s plenty more unclaimed land up and down this creek. Why contest me for this piece?”
The man sat back in his saddle, smirking, sure now that he had the upper hand. “I already got the rest of this creek staked, and I aim to have all of it. This’s the best land nearest where the railroad’s coming. Creek never runs dry. I’ll be gettin’ top dollar for this land, and I aim to ride out of here a rich man. Now, if you’ve got two hundred dollars in gold on ya, I might forgive ya for killin’ my boys, and sell an acre or two back to ya.”
Andy had heard plenty about men like this one—speculators who had bribed the surveyors to show them the best stakes. And even if Andy had money, he had no doubt the man would just kill him and rob him. There was nothing to stop him. The trooper had warned him of just that.
“No gold?” The leader laughed. “Well, that’s too bad. I’d have been inclined to let you start running, but not after you ambushed my men. Now yer just a bug, and I aim to squash ya.”
Half of the men raised their guns and sighted on him.
And that was when the giant spider rose up from behind the trees to his left, a strange, sharp odor wafting from it.
The horses whipped their heads around, caught sight of it, reared, and tried to bolt. Seven escaped, their horses running with such terror that not all the sawing at their bits in the world was going to keep them from running until they either stopped out of exhaustion or killed themselves and their riders. Four of the men were thrown, one hitting the ground headfirst with a crack that told Andy he wasn’t getting up again. The leader kept his seat, but looked up at the giant spider head gazing down at him and screamed.
And then the spider’s whole body dipped, seizing the claim jumper in mandibles the size of its arm and bit. The leader went limp. As Andy watched in horrified fascination, the body suddenly bloated until all the seams on the man’s clothing popped. And then, just as suddenly, it shrunk to skin and bones.
The spider dropped the dry carcass into Andy’s dust trench, then dipped and picked up the first man that had been thrown but was still alive, and repeated her actions. She did this two more times. The dead man she unceremoniously nudged into the trench with the end of one leg.
Then she looked down at Andy.
Fear nothing, Red Hawk had said. So Andy stood his ground, though he shook like a leaf in the wind, and looked up into those strange eyes.
“You have chosen the guardian well, my son,” said an odd, sweet, gentle voice that came from that head.
“Thank you, Grandmother Spider,” replied Red Hawk, who had suddenly appeared at Andy’s side. “He was not my first choice, but I think he is the better of the two.”
“Please make the land solid again, Guardian,” said Grandmother Spider, and to Andy’s astonishment, she shrank, and power flowed from her into him. He knelt and touched his hand to the ground, asking all the dust to settle back down and become solid earth again. The air cleared, and the screaming of the injured beasts stopped, and there was nothing but silence.
And the spider was now roughly his height, and they stood eye to eye. “I am Grandmother Spider,” she repeated. “All things come to my web, and break their necks therein. You will be the land’s Guardian when Red Hawk walks the paths of his ancestors. But before he does, he will teach you of us, of Bear and Cougar, of Beaver and Hawk, of Eagle and of me. And you and your children, and your children’s children will keep our dancing ground safe, as long as grass shall grow. You may call on us at need.”
“Yes, Grandmother Spider. As long as grass shall grow,” he said, a little breathless, understanding now that these were the American equivalent of the Greater Elementals he knew, but had never actually seen. Grandmother Spider was obviously Earth, Beaver—water, Eagle and Hawk—air…
His head spun a little. You did not summon the Greater Elementals. They were, in effect, gods. The ones that you could honor, as long as you kept Jehovah first. And this one had come to help Red Hawk.
And him.
“The honor is too great, Grandmother Spider,” he stammered.
A silvery laugh came from the creature. “I will determine whether or not it is an honor, child.” And then, she shrank and shrank until she was the size of a silver dollar, and ran off into the grass.
* * *
Alice returned at midday the next day, looking tired, but satisfied. Clearly she had gotten Prinz fed and watered somehow, as he looked in fine fettle and ready for another run. As they ran to meet her, she swung herself off Prinz and pulled papers out of her dress pocket. “Here are—” she began, when Andy enveloped her in his arms and kissed her.
When they were both breathless, he finally broke it off. She could only look up at him, unable to speak for a moment.
“There is a lot to tell you,” he said. “But the most important is—welcome home, wife.”