The Beetle Leg Read Online Free PDF Page B

scuffle, emerged from the alleys between the main buildings of Clare and quietly, whispering, crept to the front of the wagon to hold a bag of gray kernels under the strange horse’s nose. Suddenly it thrashed its tail and ate.
    The women of the tribe were waiting. Just beyond range of a sooted and yellow lantern that had been lighted, fanned, and set crookedly near the pair of weathered steps dropped on hinges from the back of the wagon, they bundled together and their brown skeletal cheekbones now and then twitched with pain. Their blank eyes turned upwards to the low but thick red door.
    The wagon consisted of four rear wheels, extra high, and a little two windowed hut daubed with one barn color coat of paint. A tin chimney, that could be removed and wired to the side, stuck abruptly from the center of the sharp pointed roof and poured a fresh, foreign smelling smoke into the hot night air. It mixed with whiffs of gunpowder. Large, outsized shutters, stolen from a Victorian estate and thick enough to be bulletproof, were nailed across the windows. The house wagon was rough, gaudy, a small fortress of unmatched parts,with an air about it of harsh and lonely ill-repute. It was a cramped and wandering hovel. Yet high over the horse’s sloping rump, the driver’s seat was draped with a soft silk-haired sheepskin. The dirty but comfortable curls hung to the floorboards and over the rusty springs.
    Fat, hands in pockets, grinning, Wade worked his way down the street, careful to keep in shadow. He knew the Indians could see him, the wet shirt and trousers white. He stayed in the dark. For a time he sat, a drunk rolled in a corner, on an empty porch of the provisional store, resting. He saw a tin can blown suddenly into the air. The sharp-mouthed Indians leapt across the street to the sound of beating drums. He chuckled quietly from deep beneath his leather belt, watched them burn down, tormented by the moon.
    Wade again crept lumbering toward the hut on wheels. The thin stick of the chimney turned a spotted orange. In a row of gray false fronts, among a few gilt lettered windows—a town laid out and staged with a few hundred people on the plains—the red wagon took its crooked place like a bloody thorn, an impudent shambles in the midst of cattle houses. It had not been driven to the side but blocked the road.
    Wade, abstractly picking a tooth, saw the squaws clustered about the doll size steps. They looked darkly or, a few old and with toothless gums, happily, up to the bright light burning through splits and knotholes in the rain warped door. In the pack he saw one, two, that were maidens in unbelted dresses. The paralytic old chief’s sparkler flashed on their tightly drawn black hair. It was a circle he could not enter, never touch those with woodsmoke under their fingernails. The months of the maiden Indians came with the tearing of young dogs; Wade scratched his neck and looked at the gently stooping shoulders.
    Suddenly, as bright lips parted, the stolid door flew open. In the heat of the boiling pot stove Cap Leech stood above them, holding by the throat a brown chested boy, the other hand dripping an instrument of metal.
    Cap Leech dropped him. The boy—until that one moment the men outside had cried in his stead, he had curled his tongue and perspired—fell in pain from the platform. But Wade, as well as the audience of women, saw that he had jumped. And when he hit the ground he glanced quickly at foster mothers, sisters, clutched his jaw and screamed. The women babbled and turned away. Cap Leech raised the metal, flicked it, and the small skin wrapped molar landed among them. Dismayed, they fought for it, picked it up.
    The street was empty except for the fiery Cap Leech still framed in the midget doorway and Wade trembling at his feet. A last string of firecrackers rattled and died. The little man with bare arms did not move.
    “What do you want?”
    His voice was hoarse from long speechless months. He wore