Two hours after John disappeared through the curtained door at the rear of the gaming room in The Hole World Hotel, Edward was still at the stud table. He had won $122, most of it in gold and silver specie, some of it in the paper issue of various states and of doubtful value except to whichever parties agreed to transact with it. He’d won too a silver pocketwatch and chain, a gold-capped incisor, and a finely honed bowie knife a filibuster down on his luck had put up in lieu of a five-dollar raise after running out of money.
And he had won a packet of five daguerreotypes. A buckskinned graybeard with a fierce consumptive cough had put up the packet as the equivalent of Edward’s one-dollar raise. The pot held over twenty dollars and Edward and the graybeard were the only ones left in the hand but the old man was out of money and desperate to make the call.
“What’s this?” Edward said when the graybeard tossed the packet in the pot. The old man told him to open it up and have a look. Edward untied the ribbon and opened the flap and his breath caught at the sight of the top photograph, grimy and much smudged, which showed a wholly naked young woman lying on her side with her back to the camera and smiling over her shoulder. Edward looked and looked at her full round buttocks.
The graybeard laughed and had a coughing fit, then managed to get out, “It aint no drawings, boy. That there’s the real thing, by Jesus.”
Edward had never before laid eye on a photograph. The reality of the girl was stunning. He cleared his throat and swallowed hard and looked at the rest of the pictures. He saw the same smiling woman reclining on her back with legs apart and knees raised and one hand between her legs on her great hairy nexus and the other over a breast. Saw another completely naked young woman of fairer face and lighter hair recumbent on her left side and with her right leg raised straight up in the air as gracefully as a gymnast’s to expose her vulva fully to the camera’s infallible memory. Saw a side view of this same woman kneeling and grinning into the camera as she gripped the erect phallus of a standing man visible but from the shoulders downward. And this same woman kneeling before perhaps the same man with her eyes closed and both hands around his erection and her mouth over its glans.
“Yeeow! It’s one a them Frenchy picture cards!” the man to Edward’s right said, leaning over in his chair to have a look.
The graybeard leaned over the table and snatched the photographs from Edward. “I said have a look, boy, not do no memorizing!” He coughed harshly and pimpled the tabletop with pink spittle. “They worth plenty more than a damn dollar. Twenty dollars be more like it. But I aint looking to let ye buy the pot by raising ye and letting ye raise me right back again. I’ll say them pitures are worth a dollar and call ye right here and now.”
The other men at the table clamored to have a look but the graybeard told them to go to hell as he carefully replaced the photographs in the packet.
Edward yearned for the pictures but affected only the barest interest. He pursed his lips and shrugged indifferently and said all right, he’d allow them as a dollar. The graybeard grinned and tossed the packet in the pot and called him and turned up a ten as his hole card to go with the two tens he had showing. But Edward showed three jacks and the old lunger had such a violent fit of coughing his face turned purple and it seemed the veins in his forehead might burst. Edward took the photographs off the table and put them inside his shirt.
Keeler had lost all his money in the first twenty minutes of play and had since been standing at the bar, drinking and half-listening to Allenbeck belabor the details of his episode with the redhead whore upstairs. Allenbeck was directing his narrative as much to the barkeep across the counter, but the barkeep’s trade had over the years made him privy to more tales of erotica than he cared to listen to anymore, and he barely attended the riverman’s account as he cursorily rinsed beer mugs. Keeler kept a close eye on the game’s progress and smiled broadly every time Edward pulled in a pot, since by agreement he was entitled to half of Edward’s winnings. No other player now at the table had been there when Edward joined the game.
The din of conversation and laughter now dipped noticeably and much of the room’s attention turned toward the front of the room. Edward looked to the doors and saw a band of a half-dozen men who stood there and glanced about the big room with expressions of amused disdain. Two of the men were uniformed U.S. Army officers but the unmistakable leader of the group was a man with an imperial beard and black hair to his shoulders, resplendent in a suit of green broadcloth and matching cape, a wide-brimmed hat with a gray plume, a white stock around his throat, a lace handkerchief dangling from his sleeve. His gloved hand held a silver flask and now he took a drink from it but made no offer to his fellows. The other three were all young men in identical black jackets, white silk shirts, red scarves that hung to their knees, and high boots shined to gloss. They wore rapiers and flintlock pistols on their belts. The man in the green suit said something sidelong to the others and they all laughed loudly, and then he turned and went out and they followed after.
“Who was that?” Edward asked the player to his right, a sallow ragged man named Desmond whose bearing and diction bespoke a past in which he had occupied higher station than his present.
“That, my boy,” Desmond said, “was Marcel DeQuince, one of the city’s supreme maitres d’armes. Perhaps the great Pépé Lulla is more adept with a broadsword, but not even Gilbert Rosiere himself is his equal with a rapier. They are rather a rogue royalty in this town, the maîtres d’armes.”
“What’s a matter darms?” Edward asked.
“Maitre d’armes, young man, maitre d’armes. A master of arms. Rapier, dirk, broadsword, pistol, any weapon meant for the hand of man. DeQuince has killed some six or seven men in duels these past two years. So they say. Say he’s making a fortune teaching American officers to fence with sabers. I expect they’re set on giving a heroic account of themselves dueling the Mexicans in Montezuma’s fabled halls. Those other fellows were his students as well. You can always tell them by those red scarves.”
Edward wanted to ask who Montezuma was but he was smarting from Desmond’s correction of his pronunciation and did not want to further display his ignorance.
He folded after the third card on the next two hands, then got into a betting war with Desmond and a paddlewheeler cook after the last faceup card was dealt. The pot swelled to thirty-seven dollars before the cook called and Edward showed a full house of nines over deuces to take the hand. “Kee-rist!” the cook said, and shoved his cards away. Desmond sighed and gently threw in his cards.
Edward had been sipping beer since sitting down to the game and now told the table he was going to take a piss and to not let anybody fill his chair while he was gone.
“Hell, boy, why bother to go outside?” said a man with raw sores on his face who’d been in the game for over an hour and had been losing steadily. “You kindly been pissin on us all night.”
Edward laughed and slipped the sheathless bowie into his belt, marveling at the huge weapon’s balance, at its comforting heft. He put the folding money in his shirt pocket and scooped up the specie and the gold tooth and the pocketwatch and stuffed it all in his purse, then took his beer bucket to the bar and told the barkeep to fill it.
Keeler was grinning crookedly. “We doing real good, eh?”
Edward gave him a look and smiled. “Yeah, we doin just fine.” He looked around as he handed Keeler the purse and said, “Hold this while I go out and water the flowers. Where’s Johnny at?”
“Aint seed hair of him since he went up to sample the fillies. Probly still at it. Wish this one here was still up there too so I wouldn’t have to keep hearing about how he did this and that and the other with some gleety redhead. He’s bout paralyzed my ears with his bullshit.”
Allenbeck made a rude hand gesture at Keeler. “Aint bullshit and she aint gleety. You just too old to cut into the hair pie but once a week anymore, grandpa.”
Keeler put his face up close to Allenbeck’s and scrutinized his features intently. “You know, I just might be your grandpa. I believe I knew your grandma real well.”
“You gutterborn bastard,” Allenbeck said. “Everbody on the river knows your momma”
The friends exchanged such dire insults regularly and were still at it as Edward went out the front doors. Lightning quivered to the south and thunder rolled lowly from the Gulf. The sky was crowded with heavy cloud. In the dim light of the streetlamp a pair of oxcarts loaded with cypress planks was rumbling past, one behind the other. From the other side of the wagons came voices and a staccato metallic clash but Edward’s straining bladder would brook no further delay and he hastened around the corner of the building, unbuttoning as he went. The jakes stood in the alley but only a man desperate in his bowels would do his business in the dark and miasmic foetor of its rotted and ratcrawling confines. The pissers simply let fly against the side of the building as Edward now did, being careful how he set his feet in the slickness of the urine-sopped mud.
Emerging from the alleyway he saw a small crowd looking on as DeQuince’s two officer students crossed sabers in the street, shuffling to and fro, thrusting and parrying as the master stood by and observed them, sipping from his flask. Abruptly he barked, “Non!” and the swordsmen stepped back from each other and gave him full attention.
DeQuince handed the flask to a red-scarved student and gestured for one of the officers to come to him. He took the soldier’s saber and softly discussed with him some point of technique and then he stepped out to face the other officer and said, “En garde.”
The officer saluted with his blade and assumed the ready position. The maitre d’armes’ own garde posture was languid, the saber drooping loosely in his upraised right hand, his left hand on his hip almost girlishly. He seemed bored. He showed a small smile and asked something and the officer nodded curtly and worked his fingers tightly on the hilt and his aspect was utterly serious. Thus poised, the officer began circling DeQuince slowly. The master moved with him as smoothly as if the ground itself were revolving under him, smiling easily. And then he yawned hugely and the onlookers laughed. Even in the streetlight’s weak illumination Edward could see the flush on the officer’s face and the angry tightening of his lips. The officer thrust and DeQuince parried with the barest flick of wrist and no change of posture or expression whatever. He made a remark in French that drew laughter from the other students and the officer flushed more deeply still. Another intent thrust glanced off another casual parry.
The officer feinted and DeQuince laughed aloud and the soldier’s face clenched in fury. He lunged in a thrust meant to skewer DeQuince’s heart but the master sidestepped easily and his brightly blurred blade entwined itself around the officer’s saber and snatched it from his hand and sent it arcing through the air, turning end over end. The spectators were applauding as the sword clattered to the ground at Edward’s feet.
As the officer stalked over to retrieve his weapon Edward bent to pick it up with the intention of handing it to him but before his fingers touched the hilt the soldier roughly shoved him aside and snarled, “Get away, you damned river trash,” and stooped for the saber himself.
Reacting without thought Edward backhanded him in the side of the head with the heel of his fist. The officer staggered sidewise and fell to all fours and Edward kicked him in the stomach, knocking him onto his side, and then kicked him in the head, spinning him over on his face. The officer lay still and breathed wetly against the cobblestones.
The crowd stared at Edward in slackjawed silence. He cursed himself for his stupidity as he stood facing them. It’s a bunch a them and you got no gun, you damn fool! His only arms were his knives—the bootknife, the snaphandle in his pocket, the big bowie flat against his belly.
Now the other officer said, “You snipjack bastard,” and went for his pistol but DeQuince slapped his blade against the man’s belted flintlock to stay his hand. The officer stared at the maitre d’armes in confusion. DeQuince shook his head and then advanced on Edward with an air of indolence, smiling easily, the saber dangling at his side.
The fallen soldier lay on his pistol and Edward sensed that if he tried for it the maitre d’armes would run him through on the instant. DeQuince closed to within easy sword thrust and there paused, his smile remote, his eyes as devoid of malice as of warmth, bored eyes, indifferent to whether they looked upon rain or blood or sparkling wine. Edward had not seen eyes like them before.
DeQuince addressed him softly in French. Edward shrugged. The master at arms smiled and tilted his head and looked at him with slitted eyes as if trying to see him in clearer focus, then spoke again, more loudly, and the onlookers all laughed.
“He had no call to put hand to me,” Edward said. He did not know if the maitre d’armes spoke English. The bowie in his belt felt far from his hand.
DeQuince again spoke in French and the rising inflection of his words suggested he was making inquiry. Edward shrugged and said, “Shit, I don’t talk Frenchman.” The master of arms pulled a mock-serious face and shrugged hugely in exaggerated mimicry and the spectators laughed. A rush of anger burned Edward’s ears. He turned his head and spat and in the same moment DeQuince’s saber flashed up and flicked away the top button of his shirt. The crowd laughed more loudly yet. Edward backed up a step and without seeming to move at all DeQuince kept the same distance between them. The saber tip rested lightly on Edward’s chest just under the second button.
Edward raised his hand to push the saber away and in a move faster than the eye DeQuince slapped his wrist with the flat of the blade and with a backhand flick took away the second button and the sword tip now dimpled the cloth under the third. Again Edward backed up a step and DeQuince moved with him as effortless as shadow. The crowd applauded.
“You son of a bitch,” Edward said through his teeth. With the barest sidelong turn of his head DeQuince said something loudly and pricked the crowd to laughter again. He flicked away the third button and the saber tip dropped to the fourth.
Something batted the plume in DeQuince’s hat as it sailed past his head and shattered on a wall. A bottle flung by Keeler who stood drunkenly grinning from the entrance of The Hole World Hotel with Allenbeck swaying alongside him and yelling, “Hey, you fucken monsewer bastard, try that on me why doncha!”
In the instant DeQuince’s eyes cut to the saloon doors Edward snatched the saber blade tightly with his left hand and ignored its burning incision into his palm as DeQuince’s hold on the hilt tightened reflexively and Edward yanked the blade sidewise and pulled him off balance and the bowie was now in Edward’s right hand and he thrust it to the hilt in DeQuince’s belly.
The master of arms’ eyes went very wide and white and were not at all bored now and his lips puckered as if for a kiss. Blood gloved Edward’s hand as he shoved down hard on the haft and the razorous blade slid easily through gut and organs and gristle and struck bone and he leaned harder into the knife to cut through it and the blade sliced through DeQuince’s crotch and came free in a great hot rush of entrails. He released the saber and jumped back and DeQuince stood wavering and staring down horrified at his viscera unraveling to his feet with a soft hiss and he sank to his knees and fell forward into the spilled ruin of his life.
For an instant everyone stood in mute tableau—and then Edward turned and ran. He heard behind him Allenbeck’s shrill battle cry and then a pistolshot and a yelp and he turned the corner as more shots cracked one behind the other and a round ricocheted off a wall behind him. He ran the length of several dimly-lighted blocks as people jumped aside of his headlong flight. He turned into an alley and in the blackness crashed into a pile of broken crates and fell and scrambled up again and dashed out onto a high-curbed cobbled street and recognized it and knew now where he was and where the river lay and he headed that way but not directly, instead threading his way through alleys and narrow back lanes, not running now but moving fast along the shadows close to the walls, hearing no sounds of pursuit. He rounded yet another corner and a knot of men on the walkway before him was passing a bottle among themselves and they saw him coming and broke clear of his way and he realized that he still had the bowie in his bloodstained hand and his pants were sopped with DeQuince’s blood and his left hand was dripping red from the gash opened by the saber blade and his aspect was surely demonic.
By this roundabout route he arrived at Tchoupitoulas Street and made directly for the dark end of the block and the livery where they’d housed their outfits. The bowie was now under his coat and his bleeding hand balled tight in his coat pocket. He attempted an air of casualness wholly unnecessary on that roistering street where he was twice obliged to step over men on the sidewalk who lay dead or insensible with drink, who could say which, to the utter disregard of the passing world.
The livery boy went bigeyed at the sight of him but hastened to follow orders and saddled his mount while Edward checked the loads in his rifle and pistol and then bound his hand tightly and scribbled a note to John saying he’d wait on him at Mrs. Bannion’s house in Nacogdoches. He pondered a moment, then thoroughly blacked over the names of both town and madam and wrote “at Aunt Flora’s in N.” There was no telling who might get a gander at the note. He slipped it in with John’s possibles and gave the boy two bits to tell John the same message if he happened to see him.
The boy gave him directions for the quickest route to the western road and Edward thanked him and rode off into the night as the sky lit white with lightning as thunder blasted and the rain came crashing down.
Two days west of Dixie City there struck a hard norther. The trees and bushes shook in the icy wind and then frosted white. The land went hazy and blue with cold. Breath plumed palely from horse and rider. Edward’s thin jacket and slicker were of little effect. His ears rang with the cold, his fingers cramped, his feet ached to the marrow. He draped the reins loosely round the saddlehorn and hugged himself tightly and let the horse follow the trail.
He made camp early that evening and built two large fires and though he’d not eaten since morning when he’d killed a rabbit for breakfast his appetite was blunted by the cold. He let the lee fire die out and spread a layer of dirt over the smoldering ground and there made his bed. He recharged the other fire and with the heat of it wafting over him he wrapped himself in his blanket and went to sleep. Two hours later he woke in frozen darkness with all muscles stiff against the icy night. He blew on the coals and fed them kindling and revived the flames and huddled so near to them that next thing he knew he was afire.
He jumped up yelling and beating at his smoking coat with both hands and so frighted his horse it pulled free of its loose tether and bolted away into the dark. He finally thought to take off the coat and beat it on the ground to extinguish it. A large charred patch on its left flap was burned through in spots about the size of silver dollars. His shirt had burned too and he was blistered at midchest. He scraped frost from a willow branch with the edge of his hand and pressed it to the burn and flinched and muttered curses the while.
He put the coat back on and buttoned it to the neck and turned up the collar and put on the slicker and wrapped a bandanna round his head so that it covered his ears. Then pulled his hat low and picked up his rifle and set out in search of the horse. He gave up after an hour of calling into the freezing nightwind. He’d lost all feeling in fingers and nose. He went back to the fire and built it up again and kept a careful distance from the windtossed flames and popping sparks. After warming his hands and feet somewhat he again wrapped himself in the blanket and slept fitfully the short rest of the night. When he awoke just before dawn the wind had abated and the horse stood at the campfire embers with its head lowered to the last of their heat.
The sun of the following days was dull and tepid, the cold air sharp but fairly still. He passed fields where isolate Negroes or meager families of them walked astoop and picked the scattered remains in cotton fields long since picked nearly bare. He spied no game, fed on green tomatoes he found growing alongside an abandoned and roofless shack, a small turtle he shot off a creekside log. The main road lay west-northwest through the pinelands, skirting vast swamps to the south and winding about large and small bodies of water rimmed with high reeds. One late forenoon he hove within sight of a small farm where a family was at work slaughtering hogs. He reined his horse toward the farm and hallooed the folk and was invited to come ahead and rest himself and take dinner with them.
They ate at a roughhewn outdoor table set near a blazing firepit, gorging on fried ham and chitlins, roast ears of corn, huge slabs of sweet potato pie. The patriarch was a broad baggy-eyed man named Ansel Welch who had sired four surviving sons with his first wife before she died of brain fever. Three of those boys had since come of age and moved off and started their own families and only seventeen-year-old Benson was still with him. His second wife was twenty-one years his junior. She was quiet and thin and weathered beyond her thirty-three years but hard muscle stood on her arms. She’d been sixteen when they wed and had borne him seven children, only four of whom were yet alive—two more sons and the only two daughters Ansel Welch had ever fathered. He was vastly proud that he had a grandson sixteen years of age as well as a daughter not yet two, and that his wife’s belly now bulged with a child due at the end of winter. The elder daughter was called Sharon. She was just turned sixteen and Edward’s heart quickened at the sight of her. She was tall and lean and well-breasted. Her freckled cheekbones went rosy under his gaze but she met his eyes boldly.
On learning that Edward was bound for Nacogdoches the farmer claimed he was a friend of Sam Houston. “I’m damn proud to say I know the man. He done more than anybody to make Texas a republic the last ten years and I figure he’ll easy be elected governor or leastways a senator now the Texians are finally joined the Union. Course now, they sayin the damned Mexicans don’t like it a bit, seein as they aint never quit believin Texas still belongs to them. They say it’s lots of war talk in Mexico and Washington both, lots of it.”
A little over thirty years ago, the farmer said, he and Sam Houston had fought together under Andy Jackson at the battle of Horseshoe Bend. “I was twenty-three-year old and part of Andy’s militia and Sam was a youngster lieutenant in the regular army outfit that joined us for the fight against the renegade Creeks. Red Sticks. Meanest red niggers east of the Mississippi. Just six months previous they murdered five hundred white folk at Fort Mims. Defiled them in ways I can’t say in front of my wife and girls, but I mean to tell ye, we were hankerin after them devils bad. I know for a fact it was a thousand of them at Horseshoe Bend cause after it was over Andy had us cut the nose off ever dead Injun and count them out in a pile. We tried to feed them noses to the dogs but the curs just turned away and wouldnt eat of that Injun meat, not even that we roasted. We anyhow made the south of Alabama safe for Christian folk is what we did.”
He brandished a hand on which the two fingers next the pinky were but stubs. “It’s some of us paid a price for it. Arrows hissin through the air thick as bats lettin out of a cave at dusk and one a them took both these fingers neat as you please. Didn’t hardly bleed much. I was luckiern Sam. He took a arrow in the balls and they just poured blood. But he got somebody to yank it out and doctorfy him and he went right back to the fightin. Got hisself shot all to hell. He was so bad off we laid him out with the dead to be buried next day but damn if he still wasn’t breathin in the morning. Old Hickory hisself had a look at him and couldn’t believe he was still alive. Bedamn if that hardbarked sumbuck didn’t pull through and end up President of Texas.”
When dinner was done the family went back to work. Edward had been taught the ways of hog killing by Daddyjack, and Welch accepted his offer to lend a hand. While the two younger boys busied themselves washing out hog guts to be used for sausage casing, Edward and the Benson boy threw slops in a trough and when the pigs lined up to feed at it Welch stepped up behind each one in turn and struck it square between the eyes with the flat of an ax, dropping each pig dead with one expert swing. Edward slashed the felled pigs’ throats with the bowie to bleed them and the blood gushed out and made red mud of the ground. Benson jabbed strong sharp-pointed sticks through the pigs’ heel strings and they dragged the animals by these sticks to big tubs of water seething over fires set in holes so that the tub rims were about even with the ground. They shoved the pigs into the tubs and scalded them till the hides could easily be scraped clean of all bristle. Then they hung the carcasses from a tree branch by the heels and gutted them. They washed each carcass out good and scraped it of fat and butchered it and hung the hams and middlings in the smokehouse. The mother and elder daughter would fry most of the fat into crisp cracklins to be mixed with compone and what they didn’t fry they would render into lard or boil into soap.
At the end of the day the men’s clothes were stiff with gore and the chilly air was ripe with pig blood. They washed up at the creek and Benson traded Edward a clean pair of pants and shirt for his bloody ones. They were a fair fit but for being a tad short at the wrists and ankles. They supped on pork ribs and baked yams and corn and the Sharon girl’s peach cobbler. Every time Edward and the girl looked each other’s way she flushed and he felt heat in his own face. Her eyes were green and bright with mischief. The mother caught their looks and scowled darkly and the girl gave back a tight-lipped look of defiance. The farmer seemed entirely oblivious to all the ocular byplay. Edward deftly avoided the mother’s scolding stares by ducking his head to his cobbler and coffee. He wondered at the girl’s boldness and tried to imagine what she looked like without her clothes.
The temperature had dropped with the sun and the night was near freezing. Welch offered to have his wife lay out a pallet for him on the floor next the fireplace but Edward declined with the explanation that he would be riding out well before first light and did not want to disturb the house with his stirrings. The farmer remonstrated mildly and the woman packed a bundle of food for him to take. Welch escorted him out to the barn with lantern in hand and stood by while Edward made a comfortable bed of straw next to the stall that held his horse.
“When you get acrost the Sabine into Texas,” he advised Edward, “keep to the northwest trace. It’ll carry you direct to a spur of the Nacogdoches Road.”
Edward thanked him for his hospitality and the farmer thanked him for his help. They bid one another goodnight and farewell and Welch left the lantern with him and headed back to the house.
In his dream he saw himself shivering in his sleep in a vast and rocky wasteland under a sunless sky red as blood. Beside him lay the skeletal remains of a horse and in his sleep he could hear the cold wind whistling through the pale ribcradle. And now the whistling came from Daddyjack who hove up from behind a low sandrise and came shuffling toward him with tattered clothes aflutter and eyesocket gaping and blackrimmed with blood. Edward now woke inside the dream and watched his cadaverous father’s advance and shivered as much with fear as with the cold. Daddyjack squatted beside him and showed a yellow grin. He smelled powerfully of horseshit. His single eye roved over Edward’s face like some fierce animal pacing in a cage Then he replaced his hat and stood up and walked off whistling into the emptiness and sank from sight into the next depression.
He was truly awake now and heard the wind whistling in the cracks of the walls. A bright narrow strip of moonlight showed where the barn door was open slightly and the lower end of that strip was dark where somebody stood.
“Are ye woke?” the Sharon girl whispered.
The door opened wider and she slipped inside and shut it behind her. In the weak light admitted by the single small window on the far wall he could make out her shadowy form. He heard her stamp her feet against the cold.
“I brung you a blanket,” she said softly. “It’s so cold.”
He sat up and took a box of matches from his jacket and broke one off the block and struck it against the stall post. In the sudden sulfurous flare of blue-yellow light he saw a steaming pile of horse droppings at the edge of the stall and then saw her standing just inside the door with the cowl of her cloak pulled over her head. She was hugging a folded blanket to her chest and in the glow of the matchfire her eyes widened and she hissed, “No light!” and he snuffed the lucifer between his fingers.
For a moment there was only the sound of their breathing. His heart thumped in his throat. Her boldness at once alarmed and excited him. He heard her feet moving through the straw and the blanket she brought fell open with a soft sound. She spread it over his own blanket that yet covered his legs. He felt her weight settle beside him and her seated silhouette was clearer now but he could not distinguish her features.
“Hardly nobody ever comes by here,” she said, her voice so low he could barely make out her words. She appeared to remove the cloak and now was doing something with the front of her dress. “The world’s way out yonder and I aint never gonna see a bit of it nor get to know anybody much in it. I know I aint. Momma was the age I am now when she married and I don’t reckon she saw much before she said ‘I do,’ but I know for a fact she aint seen much but a day’s work ever since.” She seemed to shrug and her form became somehow paler and he suddenly realized she had made herself naked to the waist. She stood now and fumbled with the dress bunched at her hips.
She continued in her whispered plaint as she undressed but he wasn’t listening. He was thinking of tales he’d heard in the Pearl River timbercamp about how fathers looking to marry off a daughter sometimes arranged for just such a situation as this. As soon as the unsuspecting fellow and the sweet thing got their clothes off, the father would barge in with a shotgun and give the jughead no choice but to marry the girl or get his useless brains blown out. But even if this one wasn’t up to any such trick, her father might wake anyway to find her absent from her bed in the dark of the night and the first place he’d look for her would surely be in the barn where the passing stranger lay. And he’d as likely come with a gun and not be of a mind to offer him any choice at all. But he remembered too Daddyjack’s adage that life’s truest pleasures were full of risk and that’s what made them special. Watching her vague silhouette step out of the dress and drape it over a stall rail, he reached out and pulled his rifle closer and then slipped his hand under his saddle that he was using for a pillow and withdrew his pistol and bowie and set them readier to hand.
She knelt beside him and he could sense she was shivering and could smell her warm nakedness on the cold air. He reached out and touched her hair. She brought her hand up to his and squeezed it. His other hand went to her breast and she gasped and flinched at his cold fingers and brought them to her mouth and exhaled forcefully on them several times and then placed them back on her breast and whispered, “That’s some better.” The nipple against his thumb was thick and erect. His night vision had sharpened now and he could vaguely distinguish the freckles on her pale breasts. He stood and quickly shed his pants and they scrambled under the blankets and smothered their yelps and giggles as they laid cold touches to each other. Soon enough their hands were well warmed and they groped and probed and lapped at one another with lickerish delight.
And then they were coupled and rocking together in the most ancient of human rhythms—but still he kept an ear cocked for the approach of Farmer Welch’s paternal wrath. His pleasure was the greater for the danger of possible discovery, though he knew now she was up to no trick. She was but a pretty girl aching with loneliness, feeling her youth and beauty wasting in this backwood as far removed from the city life she pined for as from the moon, distant beyond reckoning from the sights and music and streetlights and throngs of exciting strangers she imagined to bepopulate the metropolis. He suddenly envisioned his sister Maggie slouched on the porch rocker in Florida with her eyes closed and her heels hooked over the railing and him and his brother sitting on the lower steps and looking up the exposed backs of her legs to her white cotton drawers. He was shocked to feel himself harden the more at the memory and he thrust with even greater urgency into the gasping girl.
A moment later he thought he heard something and abruptly ceased his rocking and braced himself on one hand and grabbed up the pistol with the other and listened intently even as he remained embedded in the girl. She listened with him and then clucked her tongue impatiently and whispered, “Aint nobody! They all them sleep like rocks.”
“Then how come we whisperin?” he asked, smiling, feeling himself throbbing inside her. He heard the sound again and realized it was a shrub slapping softly on itself in a changed wind.
She locked her hands behind his neck and pulled herself up so her mouth was at his ear and said, “Cause I guess you caint never know for absolute sure.” She giggled and stuck her tongue in his ear and worked her pelvis hard against him. He growled happily and fell to his rhythm again and ducked his face to her breasts.
At the false dawn some time later she got up and began to dress, slapping Edward’s fondling hands from her as she did. Edward grinned in the dark and thought he must be crazy. Her daddy might yet come through those doors with a gun in his hand. Might yet shoot him dead. Unless of course he managed to shoot Welch first. The idea of being forced to shoot Welch slowed his gropings for a moment. He was for a fact violating the daughter of a man who’d done him kindness—and what father wouldn’t be obliged to do something about it if he knew? But now the girl was done with the buttons on her dress and gone to the door to open it slightly and put her eye to the gap, and he shrugged off his guilty musings and went to her.
She turned to him and took his face in her hands and kissed him hard and deep, then broke the kiss and took his hands off her hips and held them tightly and smiled at him. “It aint no need to look like somebody’s choking you,” she said. “You aint beholden.”
He opened his mouth without any idea of what he was about to say but she put her hand to his lips to shush him and then quickly kissed him again. “I’ll think on you, boy. Now go on, get gone.” And with that, she was out the door and vanished in the shadows.
A few minutes later he led his saddled horse out of the barn and mounted up. He glanced toward the house and saw the dark windows and wondered if she was at one of them and watching him. He waved goodbye in case she was. The taste of her stayed on his tongue and the smell of her on his skin well into the next afternoon.
The days continued cold but mostly bright and windless, the nights sharp with frost and blasting with stars. He rode slowly, shawled in both his own blanket and the one the Sharon girl had brought to him in the barn and which the mother would surely miss and then figure what became of it and how. He had several times wondered if the woman would let on to Welch, and if she did, if the farmer would hang the girl naked by the wrists from a tree limb and whip her bloody for a whore. The idea angered him sufficiently that he muttered curses and several times considered going back. But each impulse to rein about was followed by the question of what he would do then. Ask her to come with him? The notion was pure-dee loony. Come with him where? And do what? Start a farm? Spend the rest of his days grubbing in the dirt for a living? Her maybe going crazy someday? His daughter maybe taking to lay with passing strangers or to run off with his best horse? His sons maybe one day taking to raise hand to him? Maybe killing him? He spat. Better to burn in lonely hell. Whereupon he thought: You likely. And smiled wryly. And hupped the horse on.
The country once more rose to timber. The trees drew closer together and stood higher and layers of pine needle softened the fall of the mare’s hooves. He’d long since finished the food the woman had given him. He had not eaten in nearly a day when on a high noon gray with mist he hove onto a rise overlooking a booming river. A short distance northward on the near bank a ferry swayed and tossed at moor on its pulley rope. A sagging cabin on short thick pilings stood close by the landing with smoke winding from its narrow chimney. Edward heeled the mare down the slope.
A freshly painted wooden sign at the ferry landing read: TEXES FERRY 1 DOLLER. The ferryman sat whittling on the porch in a straightback chair tipped back against the wall. Beside him leaned a rusty Kentucky rifle. He was gaptoothed and near bald, shirtless and his longjohn top was grayish black with filth. Even from where he sat the horse at the bottom of the steps Edward could smell him. An odor even more rancid wafted from the house.
“Got a possum stew on the pot,” the ferryman said. “If you of a mind for a bowl it’s two bits. Want a drink of shine it’s nother two bits. Want acrost the river it’s like the sign says, a dollar. In coin. Don’t take no scrip.”
“Mister, I wouldnt pay a dollar to have the Angel Gabriel fly me and my horse across.”
The ferryman showed a black-yellow grin. “Thats all right. But you aint findin no ford upstream or down for miles, not with her runnin like she be.”
Edward studied the swift river and the densely timbered shore of Texas on the other side. He drank from his canteen and sat the mare and watched the river pass by while the ferryman sat on the porch and watched him. He’d been hungry until he caught the stink of the ferryman’s stew.
He heard a horse blow and he looked over toward the woods where a rider was emerging from the trees. The horse was a black of good size but seemed diminished by its rider, a huge blackbearded man holding a shortbarreled rifle across the pommel of a saddle with a horn as wide as a pie plate. He wore a flatbrimmed hat and an open frock coat under which a pair of pistols hung in simple sling holsters. As the rider drew nearer Edward recognized the pistols as revolvers, a type of firearm he’d heard described but never seen until now. Texas Colts they were called, though they were made in the distant land of New Jersey. They lacked trigger guards and carried five rounds and a man might fire them all before having to reload. He had heard tales of frontier rangers killing red savages by the quick dozen in an open country fight with such pistols.
The big man reined up at the sign stating the cost of a ferry ride and appeared to consider it. He chucked his horse over to the cabin and there regarded Edward for a long moment without expression, his eyes touching on Edward’s empty hands, on the flintlock pistol and bowie in his belt, the Kentucky longarm in the makeshift saddle scabbard. He turned his attention to the house and looked hard at the dark door and window, then looked at last on the ferryman, who on spying him come out of the woods had picked up his rifle and laid it across his lap and now licked his lips nervously under the big man’s gaze.
“Anybody inside?” the big man said. The ferryman shook his head and Edward could see he was too scared to be lying. The huge muzzle of the blackbeard’s rifle swiveled slightly and pointed squarely at the ferryman’s chest. “Toss it,” the big man said as offhandedly as one might tell another the hour of day.
The ferryman pushed the rifle off his lap and it clattered to his feet. The big man looked at it and then back at the ferryman and his eyes narrowed and so the ferryman shoved the rifle hard with his foot and sent it skidding off the porch.
Wielding the short heavy-looking rifle as easily as a pistol the blackbeard brought the barrel up to rest on his shoulder. He peered toward the cabin door and made a face of distaste. “Good Christ. You aiming to eat what’s making that smell?” The ferryman shrugged and seemed offended despite the circumstances.
The blackbeard looked at Edward again, jutted his chin toward the sign and said, “A dollar for a damned ferry ride seems just about ninety cents too much, wouldn’t you say so, boy?”
Edward said he believed the toll was just about a dollar too much and the big man laughed.
“Well, they say generosity is balm for the soul,” the big man said. “I believe this feller’s greedy soul might be soothed by the generous act of giving us a free crossing.”
And thus the ferryman did, politely requesting that the two men walk their horses to the outer end of the ferry in order to ease the weight of the inner end and let it float free. He hauled powerfully on the pulley rope stretching across to the opposite bank and the craft lurched into the river.
It was a heady crossing. The swift current pressed against the ferry’s side and bowed the pulley line and the ferry bobbed on the rope like a toy. The horses were white-eyed and stamping and Edward and the blackbeard dismounted and strained against the reins with one hand as they clung tight to the rail with the other and gritted their teeth against the icy riverspray. The ferryman stood easy as a cat. He jabbed a long pole into the river bottom and pulled hard on it hand over hand and propelled the craft along on the pulley ropes. By this laborious process he carried them over the Sabine River and landed them in Texas.
Once ashore and again in the saddle the blackbeard inquired of the ferryman if he didn’t feel somewhat atoned for his extortions of the past. The ferryman shrugged and said yes, he guessed he did. The blackbeard shook his head with a rueful sigh and said he didn’t believe the man’s repentance was sincere. “Maybe a little hardship will help you see the error of your ways. Get off there.” The ferryman disembarked warily. From under his coat the blackbeard withdrew a bowie even larger than Edward’s and leaned out in the saddle and slashed through the thick pulley rope. The ferryman sprang to the edge of the bank with a stricken look and watched the craft whirl away on the current. Now the big man put his horse forward and the animal forced the ferryman off the bank and into the rushing water and only a desperate grab of a root jutting from the muddy bankwall kept him from being swept downriver.
“You just hang there awhile and let it wash some of that stink off you,” the blackbeard called down to him, and laughed. He winked at Edward and reined his horse about and into the woods.
Edward hupped the sorrel mare forward through the trees and into a small clearing where the man sat his horse and said, “Look here, boy. At this sign here.” He gestured for Edward to come up alongside and pointed at the ground next his horse. “What you make of it?”
As Edward drew up beside him and leaned out of the saddle to peer down, the big man’s horse sidled and in that instant Edward knew the blow was on its way but felt himself held fast in the moment and then light burst behind his eyes and he did not even feel himself fall.
He heard low chuckling and woke to cold darkness and the sensation of his skull being prized apart. He slowly came to perceive that he was on his back, that the moving shadows he looked upon were topmost tree branches rocking in the wind, that the steady chuckling was the run of the river through the reeds. He tried to sit up and heard himself groan at the shuddering blaze of pain in his head and he fell back. When next he opened his eyes the sky was gray above him and he knew he’d again been unconscious for a time. With moaning effort he managed to roll onto his belly and then raised himself on all fours and vomited. After a time he sat back on his heels and put his fingers to the back of his head and gingerly fingered the swelling under his hair and the thick coagulating blood. He felt a rank fool. The only reason he could think of why the man hadn’t simply shot him dead was he didn’t want to chance scaring off the mare.
He made it to his feet and held tight and gasping to a tree until the quivering in his knees subsided. He was in his stocking feet. He looked about and spied a boot beside a tree trunk and a moment later the top of the other in the weeds. The man had pulled them off to search them. Son of a bitch for damn sure was not new to the trade. At least he’d left the boots. And his coat. Likely figured them too worn to be of worth to anybody with anything to trade. But he’d made off with the knives as well as the firearms and the Janey mare. Edward checked his shirt pocket and was surprised to find the daguerreotypes still there. The bastard must’ve been too busy checking hiding spots like his boots to search the obvious places. He wished he’d thought to keep his money in his shirt. He pulled on the boots and then spotted his hat askew on a bush. And close by was his extra shirt with the sleeve ripped to the shoulder. And there a spare sock. There the small frypan. But blankets and slicker were gone, the wad of scrip, even the box of matches. He took off his coat and put the torn shirt on over the one he was wearing and then put the coat back on, put the sock into his pocket and went to the bush and retrieved his hat.
He stumbled through the brush to the riverbank and found a smooth slope where he could stretch out on his belly and duck his head in the river. The cold water’s first touch on the wound made him yell out in shock, but repeated duckings gradually eased the pain to a partially numbed and dully throbbing ache. He drank his fill and felt the better for it. He looked across the river at the ferryman’s cabin but saw no sign of anyone there and no smoke from the chimney. He wondered if the man had been carried off by the current or managed to extricate himself.
After a time he stood up and gently put on his hat, tilting it well forward and away from the wound. The morning was hazed and frosty cold and the high pines swayed and hissed in the breeze. He balled his hands in the side pockets of his coat and made his way through the trees and found the trail and set out with his head down against the wind.
There followed now days of wandering through piney woodlands and cypress swamps, hungry, unarmed, horseless. Cold fireless nights of dozing with an ear cocked for footfall or approach of shuffling beast. Some days were warm enough he didn’t shiver in his bones. Somewhere early on he took a wrong fork and the trace grew wilder as he proceeded and he knew none had passed by here in a long time. Then he was in dense brush thickets, in grass to his thighs. He found a deer trail and followed it through shadowy forest of mossy oak and pine and stagnant bogs and sloughs. He bore north by west and came at last to a road that took him to an inn at a ford. He bartered one of the daguerreotypes for a full meal and then another for three mugs of beer. The proprietor kept glancing nervously over his shoulder while they bargained, keeping watch for approach of his wife.
At a crossroads one gray evening he was accosted by a pair of highwaymen not much older than himself. The taller one held a large-bored flintlock pistol on him while the other searched his person and found naught but the packet with the remaining three daguerreotypes. His mouth fell open when he saw them. He gave Edward a quick look and kept his back to his partner as he slipped the pictures out of the packet and into his shirt. The robber with the gun asked what he’d found and he said, “Nothin but this here empty paperholder,” and turned and showed it to his partner and tossed it aside. He squatted and looked close at Edward’s boots which were worn even worse than their own and he laughed and told his partner they’d been fools for calling for this one to stand and deliver. They shared with him the last of their meager ration of jerky and spared him a few matches. But when Edward asked if he might have a look at their pistol the taller one stepped back in quick suspicion and pointed the gun at him from his hip and said he could have all the look he wanted right from where he stood. Edward cursed himself for lack of guile. The highwaymen started down the south trace, warning him over their shoulder that if he tried to follow they’d lay for him and kill him.
He pushed on. Found occasional work at farms in exchange for a meal and a warm place to sleep the night. Split wood, mended fences, dug privy holes. He shoveled manure and fired stumps. He was set on thieving the first gun he saw unattended but every farmer kept his rifle close to hand and there were no pistols to be seen.
At a weed-grown farm where tools were rusting on a sagging cabin porch and there was no sign of any man about, a leanly strong and handsome Negro woman the color of caramel fed him a rabbit stew so savory he nearly moaned aloud on the porch steps where he ate. She stood at the door and watched him the while and her children gaped from behind her skirts. Even through the aroma of the stew he could smell the muskiness of her and he would have liked to put a hand to her to test her inclinations but the cool steadfastness of her eyes made him feel callow and unsure. As he headed back toward the trace he looked to the side of the house and spied a quilted blanket drying on a line strung between a pair of young pines and he trotted over and took it and raced away even though no one called after him.
Wagons passed his quilt-shawled figure on the road in either direction but mostly to the west, travelers who sometimes fed him, sometimes warned him off at gunpoint, sometimes carried him a ways. A rotund Dutchman invited him to take supper with the family at their camp under a creekside oak. Midway through the meal this sharpeyed father caught the look between this tatterdemalion with feral eyes and a man’s hands and the thirteen-year-old daughter who was rarely other than sullen toward her daddy. He lunged and swiped her a backhand that unseated her off a stump and sent her supper plate twirling. The mother swooped to the bloodymouthed girl and the Dutchman’s longarm muzzle appeared in Edward’s face like a magic feat, so fast did the man move. His face brimmed with murder but the woman beseeched him not to shoot the boy as she held the daughter to her bosom. The man let a hissing breath through his teeth and told Edward he had to the count of ten to disappear. Which he did, nearly choking on his rage as he went, striding quickly but refusing to run, his clenched fists aching. He considered circling around and coming up behind the bastard and breaking his head open with a rock or a tree limb but chose not to widow the woman who’d saved his life. Without the Dutchman she and the girl might fare still worse.
His anger writhed in his chest. Bedamn if he would anymore depend on Good Samaritans for his sustenance. He reconnoitered farms from a hidden distance, noted if there were dogs about or anyone with a gun, marked the nearest shrubbery to the chicken coops. He pilfered from cornfields and gardens. Stole a peach pie from the kitchen window where it cooled and gulped the entire thing in an oak grove and burned his mouth and suffered a bellyache for an hour after. Made off with a skinning knife left carelessly on a chopping block. Raced for cover of the woods with a clamorous hen in his grip flailing and shedding feathers as rifle report and curses echoed behind him from the violated coop. He was miles removed from the scene of the crime when he dressed the bird and roasted it on a stick and ate it to the bones.
On frosty nights he built large fires and sat beside them with the blanket over his shoulders and watched the wavering flames under the rising moon and thought about things. He supposed John had already arrived in Nacogdoches and was waiting for him. He smiled at the thought of how his brother would laugh on hearing of his travails. He was sure Johnny loved this country. Texas was everything they’d been told. The pines were tall and thick and plentiful beyond reckoning. Johnny would surely want to get a section of timberland hard by a river and waste no time settling into a life of hewing and sawing and selling. He would likely be quick about building a house and taking a wife and siring sons, Johnny would. Such was the natural yearning of a normal soul. His own lack of such inclination Edward had long accepted as a fault of restless character that might never be remedied. Each evening his gaze did fix on the wide sky to the west burning red as blood.
He entered the venerable town of Nacogdoches on a graying afternoon turning chill. Through this Texas gateway passed all manner of desperate men. Here had conspiracies and filibustering expeditions and rebellions been formed. Here had the Republic of Fredonia blazed brief and bright.
He came a shambling specter of ill fortune, his clothes ragged and foul, his boots red with dried mud and coming undone at the soles. He was footsore. His hair hung in tangles under his tattered hat. He carried his blanket rolled under his arm and the skinning knife in his boot top. Yet his spirits were high in anticipation of finding John and his ample poke at Flora Bannion’s house and soon enough being clean and newly clothed and washing down a beefsteak with a mug of beer.
He passed by an neat oak-shaded cemetery where a gravedigger left off his labor to regard him. Only his upper torso was visible aboveground and his eyes were hidden in the shadow of his hat. Edward tried to stare him down but the digger leaned on his spade and showed yellow teeth and continued to look after him till he was well down the road.
La Calle del Norte was chock-a-block with wagon traffic and horsemen and people afoot. He was obliged to step nimbly. A dogfight broke out in the middle of the street and a frighted mule kicked at the combatants and sent one yowling away on three legs. A banjo twanged in the darkness of a saloon and a fiddle followed its lead. He stared longingly at the dark door and yearned for a drink. He spied a man reading a newspaper in a chair tilted back against the front of a dry goods store and went over and peered at the front page. The headline was of Mexico and President Polk, the date the seventeenth of January, 1846. He’d been afoot more than a month.
Something about the date nagged at him a moment and then he recalled it as his birthday. He was seventeen years old this day.
He inquired of a clerk sweeping the sidewalk the location of Flora Bannion’s house and was directed to turn right at the next street and look for the pink two-story building with a flower garden in front of the porch. “But that old cat can be awful damned particular who she lets in,” the clerk said, scanning Edward’s tattered aspect. “You’d be better welcome at Sally Longacre’s the next block over.”
The western sky was afire now and gleamed redly along the rippled clouds. An orange lantern by Flora Bannion’s front door was already lighted when Edward arrived at the gate. A pair of laughing men in suits were being admitted and then the door closed behind them. He went up the walkway and onto the wide porch and worked the knocker, an iron cast of a cat in repose. A neatly aproned young Negress opened the door but slightly and looked him over and wrinkled her nose against the smell of him. She said if he was wanting something to eat he could go around to the kitchen door. He said he wanted to speak with John Little if he was on the premises. The black girl said the only man on the premises was Bruno the caretaker who could sure take care of any smelly tramp troublemaker. Edward wanted to slap the cheeky bitch. Well then, he said, he’d like to talk to Flora Bannion. The girl said Miss Flora didn’t talk to strangers, least of all tramps and she started to close the door on him and he quickly said he had a message for Flora from her sister Molly in Biloxi. The Negress looked at him suspiciously and then told him to go wait at the kitchen door.
The woman who appeared there was fleshy and pouch-eyed and wore a shiny green dress. Her mouth turned down at the sight of him. She asked what message he’d brought from Molly and he said just that she hoped Flora was doing well and to let her know she was thinking of her. The woman’s lips tightened in irritation and she said, “Molly never said no such thing in her life. You’re just another damned liar looking to be given more than you deserve.” She made to shut the door and he hastened to say that he truly had been to Mrs. Clark’s house within sight of the beach at Biloxi. He quickly described it and said Mrs. Clark had recommended that he and his brother pay a visit to her sister Flora Bannion’s place in Nacogdoches and he had lied about the message because he thought she’d be pleased to hear it and be more likely to talk to him and answer him a question.
She stayed the door and eyed him closely and her expression softened somewhat. “All right, sonny,” she said. “Ask.”
“I just want to know if my brother’s here or been here, is all.” He explained that they had got separated in New Orleans but were agreed to meet here and he wondered if John had already showed up in search of him. He described him in detail but the woman shook her head and said no, he hadn’t been there, she would have remembered if he had, she had an excellent memory for faces. “But now listen, honey,” she said, “you get yourself washed up and burn them awful clothes and dress up clean and come on back, you here?”
He went across the street and ducked his head in a water trough and scratched his festering scalp through his sopping hair and ducked his head again and scrubbed his face with his hands and shook the water off them and put his hat back on. He sat on the edge of the trough and regarded the pink house. If John had been there he would have asked after him and Miss Flora would have remembered. Maybe the stable boy in Dixie City didn’t give him the message. Maybe the boy or somebody else stole his possibles and the note secreted among them. Why else wouldn’t he be here? Maybe he had some kind of trouble back in New Orleans. Or maybe he ran into trouble after leaving town. There was no way to know. But if he wasn’t in trouble and even if he hadn’t gotten the message, wouldn’t he come looking for him in Nacogdoches? John had been standing right there beside him when Mrs. Clark told about this place.
There was nothing to do but to stay put till John showed up or he didn’t.
And if he don’t show?
He’ll show.
Sure he will. But what if he don’t?
Then he guessed he’s have to go back and try to find him.
Back was a long way in the other direction.
He envisioned DeQuince lying in his own guts in the sickly yellow light of the streetlamp.
He’d find a rope round his neck back there is what he’d find.
And now he thought that Johnny might likely have found himself a generous girl back in Dixie City or somewhere along the way and was getting topped three times a day and twice that much at night and who could blame him if he wasnt in a hurry to leave off the pleasure? Hell, he likely hadnt had a full sober minute since they last saw each other. There Johhny was, having himself a time and here he was, looking like rotten possum on a stick and with no gun nor horse to call his own. He was a damn fool to be worrying about John when he had plenty enough to do just tending to himself.
But there was no denying that not even at any time in the past weeks of wandering alone in the woodlands had he felt as alone as he did at the moment.
After a while he went walking the streets and peered over fences and kept a sharp eye for unlighted open windows but this was not a town to be careless about invitations to theft. He wandered about and studied the houses and slowed his pace as he went by a prosperous-looking whitewashed home with huge brick chimneys at either end and fronted by a deep verandah. A pair of mastiffs on long leather leashes fastened to the step railing showed their teeth in the twilight and growled lowly as he passed.
He took a turn by the old stone fort where a man in manacles was being led inside by two men in uniform. Other heavily armed men stood smoking on the lower gallery and ceased their conversation to watch him go by. He felt their eyes on him until he was to the corner of the street and around it.
At the second livery where he made inquiry he struck a bargain and spent the next two hours shoveling out the stalls and forking fresh hay, freshening water troughs, straightening tack on the walls. He was paid a silver half-dollar for his labor and then made his way to a brightly lighted tavern at the end of the street where the stablebuck had told him he could get a good meal for two bits and a fairsized glass of whiskey could be had for the same price.
A half-dozen horses stood at the hitching rails in front of the tavern and as he approached the doors he glanced at the animals and stopped short. Then stepped down off the sidewalk to more closely examine the sorrel mare and saw in the cast of light from within the room that it was the Janey horse all right, though she now carried a good saddle furnished with bedroll and wallets and hung with a canteen and lariat. She twitched her ears and he patted her and said, “Hey girl.”
He quickly scanned the other mounts at the rails but none was a black stallion. He eased up to the doors and peeked over them and saw in the well-lighted interior a pair of men conversing with the barkeep at the counter and another man drinking by himself at the far end of the bar. Five men played cards at a table toward the rear of the room. Just inside the door sat a solitary drinker with his head on the table and a glass and half-full bottle in front of him. He did not see the giant blackbeard anywhere in the room.
One of the card players stood up and bid the table goodnight. Edward stepped down beside the mare and when the man came out and mounted a tall blaze he said, “Pardon me, mister, I wonder can you tell me whose horse this is?”
The man settled into the saddle and looked down at him.
“Like to make the owner a offer on her,” Edward said.
The man wore a saddlecoat of good cut and a spotless white hat. His horse tossed its head and he settled it with a pat on the neck. “No offense, boy,” he said, “but you don’t look like you could make the price of a day-old glass of beer. I think you ought know that around here they will hang a horsethief quicker than you can say Sweet Jesus.”
“I aint no damn horsethief.”
“Course not. But now we’re on the subject, there’s nobody I’d rather see get his horse stolen than Marcus Loom. If I had an hour to spare I could begin to tell you my low opinion of the son of a bitch.”
“Is Marcus Loom whose horse this is? Is he inside there?”
“He is. The rascal with the red necktie and the long mustaches on his liar’s face. Luck to ye, lad.” He reined the blaze around and hupped it down the street.
Edward took another look into the room and picked out Marcus Loom easily. He wore a thin red necktie and a dark suit and a widebrimmed gambler’s hat. He sat with his back to the rear wall and laughed as he dealt out a hand.
Edward looked about and spied a crate leaned against the corner of the building. He stove it with his foot and wrenched free a pine scantling three feet long and over two inches square. He propped it against the wall just outside the entrance and lay his blanket roll beside it and then pushed through the doors. The men at the bar watched him advance directly on the back table and then stand there looking at Marcus Loom while the gambler considered his cards. The other three players looked up at Edward and appeared more curious than disturbed by his looming presence. Only one of them wore a pistol on his hip that he could see.
Marcus Loom tossed out a discard and said, “Dealer takes one,” and dealt himself a card. He picked it up and looked at it and carefully fit it into his hand. Then he gently lay the cards face down on the felt and leaned back with one hand under the table and looked up at Edward.
“Sorry to bother you at your game,” Edward said, “but I been told it’s you been ridin my horse.”
Marcus Loom stared at him for a moment as though he’d been addressed in a foreign tongue. Then smiled and said, “Beg pardon, sonny?” He looked at the others and winked. One of them chuckled.
“That sorrel mare out there’s mine. She was stole off me back at the Sabine ferry. I been huntin her all over and now I found her and just want you to know I’m takin her back. I reckon the saddle’s yours so I’ll leave it on the porch.”
He turned and headed for the doors and was halfway to them when Marcus Loom said, “Lay hand to that horse, boy, and I’ll have you for breakfast.” As he went past the drunk asleep at the table he snatched up the whiskey bottle and slipped it into his coat pocket.
He stepped outside and glanced back and saw Marcus Loom coming for the doors with his face clenched tight and a pepperbox pistol in his hand. He picked up the scantling and gripped it tightly in both hands and set himself beside the doors. They flew open and Marcus Loom stepped out with the pistol before him and his eyes on the mare and Edward swung and hit him in the face and the thonk! likely carried to the next street. The gambler fell against the door jamb as the pepperbox discharged with a flaring yellow blast and the horses shied against their reins looped on the hitch rail. Marcus Loom sat down hard with his hat askew and his nose pouring blood and Edward brought the scantling down on the crown of his head like he was malleting a stake and the gambler folded over on his side and lay still.
Edward scooped up the heavy-barreled pepperbox and his rolled blanket and took up the mare’s reins and quickly stood up into the saddle as the others came spilling through the doors. One of them knelt to see about Marcus Loom and the rest stood looking at Edward sitting the mare with the reins in one hand and the pistol in the other. None brandished a weapon but the barkeep who was holding a short musket and Edward pointed the pepperbox at him and told him to let it fall and he did.
“Damn, Jeff, look there at your horse it’s been shot!”
The horse at the mare’s right side stood with its head lowered and snuffled wetly and a lanky man who’d been at the card table cursed and glanced up at Edward and then glared down at the unconscious form of Marcus Loom.
The man checking the gambler said, “He’ll live. Nose is broke and he’s got a knot the size of a apple on his head but he’ll live a while yet.” He stood and looked at Edward. “Boy, you give him a thumpin.”
“He damn well had it comin,” Edward said. “You all know he meant to shoot me without another word on the matter.”
“You say that there’s your horse?” someone said.
“Sumbitch who stole her took my whole outfit, down to my bootknife. Big rascal with a beard. Rode a black. Had him a pair of Texas revolvers.”
“That’s the fella Marcus bought the horse from, right enough,” one of the gamblers said. “Just last week over at Dean’s Livery. Seen him myself. Bearded and outsized, he was, and rode a black like the boy says.” Another man nodded in verification.
“I was gonna leave him the saddle,” Edward said, “but since he come for me with a gun I reckon he owes me proper satisfaction. I figure the saddle and this here pistol about makes us even. Tell him if he wants to discuss it he can find me in New Orleans. Tell him ask around for Bill Turner.”
He walked the mare backward so as not to turn his back to them and then reined the horse about and put heels to her flanks and lit out down the street and into the night.
Horsed and pistoled he felt reprieved. He struck the main road and let the Janey horse have her head till he could no longer see the lights of the town behind him. The waxing half-moon was near its meridian and high over his shoulder and they rode through its ghostly light hard on the heels of their own shadow. He thought then to get off the main road and turned the mare into the high grass and brush and shortly came onto a weedy wagon trace that ran north and south and he rode south for another two hours before at last halting at a cottonwood copse cut through by a swift shallow creek. He loosened the cinch on the mare and let her blow and patted her and whispered to her what a good horse she was. He checked the wallets and found some bundled strips of jerked beef, a rolled clean shirt and a pair of socks, a box of matches, a sheathed Green River knife which he slipped into his boottop. He took the lariat off the saddle and put the horse on a long tether to a tree and let her drink. He got down on his belly on the bank and ducked his head in the chill water and gasped with pleasure. He pulled off his malodorous boots and soaked his feet a while and then put the boots back on. He made no fire and sat leaning against a tree and ate some of the jerky and drank from the whiskey bottle and listened hard but heard only the soft cropping of the mare and a solitary frog croaking in the creek. He’d never tasted better jerky and the whiskey warmed him wonderfully. He laid out his bed under the tree and slept with the pistol in hand. Sometime in the night he was startled awake by the mare’s warm breath on his face and he stroked her muzzle and told her she had nothing to fret about.
In the morning light he saw that the pepperbox was a six-barreled .36 caliber Darling and the only uncharged barrel was the one Marcus Loom had fired as he’d fallen. He wanted to shoot the piece for the feel of it but without powder and shot for reloading he decided not to waste a round. He refilled the canteen at the creek and tightened the saddle on the mare and tied down the bedroll behind the cantle and then mounted and hupped the horse southward.
Near noon he came upon a small ranch where the foreman invited him to join him and the hands to dinner. He ate his fill of beefsteak and beans and offered to work the afternoon in exchange for the meal but the foreman wouldn’t hear of it. He informed Edward that San Antonio de Bexar lay three days south on the Camino Real. The ride was a little longer, the foreman added, if a man preferred to follow the side trails. But he did not ask why Edward had been traveling off the main road nor did he even ask his name.
He rode the day without seeing another soul until the trees flamed in the evening sun and rang riotous with roosting birds and he spied a campfire in an oak grove just ahead. A chill wind rustled the trees. A pair of oxen grazed on a grassy rise and a covered wagon stood under a high wide oak. A woman worked at a smoking pot hung over the fire and a tall man in black came forward and raised a hand in greeting and Edward hallooed him. The man called out, “Come rest a spell, brother, and take some supper with us.”
The man introduced himself as the Reverend Leonard Richardson, founder of the Church of the Blood of Jesus. He bade Edward to set by the fire and take a cup of tea while his wife finished preparing the supper. Edward loosened the cinch on the mare and dropped the reins and let her graze where she stood. The reverend poured tea from a kettle. The woman was thin and angular. Her back was to them as she ladled from the pot into three bowls.
“Smells mighty good,” Edward said.
“Turtle stew,” the reverend said. “She makes it real fine.”
Now the woman turned with a bowl in each hand and in the dim light of the fire Edward thought that she was wearing a mask. But when she came closer to hand him a bowl he saw that she wore a sort of bridle fashioned of thin metal straps tight around her head and fitted with an iron bit that pulled hard into her mouth between her teeth and held the tongue fast. The corners of her mouth had blackened against the chafing bit. The whole thing was fastened with a small lock behind her neck. Her eyes were red and wet in the firelight. After serving them she sat apart and fed herself by spooning broth carefully into her mouth and then tipping her head far back to let it run down her throat in the manner of a drinking bird.
Edward turned to the preacher and saw the man smiling at him as he ate. “Never seen one a them before, eh?” the reverend said, nodding toward the woman. “Called a brank. Scold’s bridle. Come by it a few months ago in Galveston. From a German fella who’d got it from his daddy back in the old country. Fella’s wife had just recent died with the cholera and he was sworn not to marry again and so he didn’t have need of it no more. Said it to be a right common means in the old days for punishin a scold. Course now”—he paused to give the woman a hard look—”it’ll do just as well for ary woman don’t know to keep a proper tongue in her head.” He spooned up the last of his stew and whistled to attract the woman’s attention and beckoned her. She set down her supper bowl and hastened to replenish his. As she handed the refilled bowl to the preacher she looked at Edward with her pained wet eyes and he gestured that he wanted nothing more and she went back to the other side of the fire and resumed her awkward feeding.
“They got the serpent’s tongue, boy,” Richardson said, nodding toward his wife. “I mean ever one of them. Had it since the Garden. ‘The serpent beguiled me and I did eat.’ That’s was Eve’s side of the matter. Tryin to pass the blame, sayin the devil made her to do it and she couldnt resist him noway. ‘The serpent beguiled me and I did eat.’ And what’s the first thing she done after? Why, turned right around and beguiled old Adam into eatin of the forbidden fruit too.
“He aint nary fool, the Devil. He always known which is the weaker spirit and which the weaker flesh. Knowed the way to get at Adam was through the woman. Knowed he could seduce her and she’d do the deed for him and pull down Adam to perdition right along with her and that’s exactly what she done. Eve is the bitch mother of all of man’s misfortunes, and ever woman since is got the same treacherous bitch blood as her. She damned ever one a us to a life of toil and sweat and fruitless effort. Made us to do disloyal to the Lord and turned His loving face from us and they been doin evil with they tongue ever since. When they aint scoldin or complainin, they tellin lies or gossip or speakin some other kind of evil meanness.” He paused to spit off to the side and glare at the woman who did not look their way.
“‘All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman,”’ the preacher declaimed. “Ecclesiasticus, twenty-five, nineteen. Mark me, boy, if ye pay heed to the words of a woman ye be lettin the serpent’s tongue lick in you ear. The Good Lord put His faith in us and we broke that faith because of a woman and we been breakin the faith with Him and with our brothermen ever since. Ours not to question His ways, but if He’d seen fit to put a brank on that bitch Eve just as quick as he was done shapin her from Old Adam’s rib we’d all be the better for it, you mark me. We’d right now be sippin the milk of Paradise at Old Adam’s elbow and laughin for no damn reason a-tall except we didn’t have a worry in the damn world.”
He accepted the reverend’s invitation to bed down in his camp for the night and rolled himself in his blanket beside the fire to keep warm against the encroaching cold. The reverend climbed into the covered wagon to sleep but the woman stayed outside and settled herself on the other side of the fire. Edward watched her through the yellow cast of wavering flames for a time and then turned over to put his back to her.
But he could not sleep. He could not rid himself of the vision of the brank in her mouth, the red pain in her eyes. He told himself it was none of his concern, that for all he knew the woman had it coming. Maybe she’d deserved to have her tongue cut out and the preacher had shown mercy by putting the brank on her instead. But still he saw her red eyes and ruined mouth. And he remembered now the damned Dutchman who’d bloodied his own daughter’s mouth and run him off at gunpoint.
After an hour he got up and put on his boots and rolled his blanket. He saw the woman watching him, her eyes shining in the ruby glow of the low fire. The mare whickered softly as he saddled her. The half-moon was high overhead and bright white through the trees rustling in the cold wind and swirling their shadows on the ground. When he was ready to ride he went to the woman and she sat up quickly with the blanket drawn close about her and her eyes on him were red and frightened. He drew his bootknife and whispered, “Ye aint got to wear that goddamned thing.” But as he made to cut it free of her face she whimpered and tried to ward away his hand.
“What the devil, woman!” he hissed. “I aint gone hurt ye. I’m tryin to help ye, dammit.”
The woman shook her head like a dog shaking off water and her refusal enraged him the more. “Ye stupid damn woman!” She tried to scrabble away from him but he grabbed her by the hair and held her fast as he deftly slipped the knife under one of the metal straps behind her head and twisted the blade to get the keen edge on the strap and as he did so the top edge of the knifeblade dug into her scalp. She began shrilling through her teeth and struggling to get free of him and Edward could feel that the bit was digging into her mouth even harder now and the knife could not sever the metal. He cursed and she screeched louder and suddenly the Reverend Richardson’s voice came from the wagon: “What in thunder are you doing to her?”
“Damn you!” Edward shouted, and shoved away the woman as the reverend clambered down from the wagon with a long rifle in his hand.
He ran to the mare and swung himself to the saddle and dug his heels into her and she bolted for the road just as the rifle cracked and the ball hissed past his shoulder. He heard the woman wailing as though lamenting the newly dead.
He cursed himself as he rode under the white moon.
Fool! It’s all you can do to look out for yourself in this world. Damn the fools around ye. They got to watch out for theirselfe.
Fool!
An hour later he came to a willow grove hard by a creek and there reined up and put down for the rest of the night without a fire. He dreamt again of a barren waste laid red as blood in the setting sun. And again saw Daddyjack, this time squatting before a shadowed figure, doing something to it, grunting with effort and muttering curses. And now Daddyjack stood and backed away from the other figure and turned and looked at Edward with his one becrazed eye. And now Edward saw that the other figure was his mother, sitting on the ground with her hands in her lap and a breast exposed and its nipple a hard twist of scarred flesh. She had a brank strapped around her head. The bit cut deep in her mouth and blood ran down her chin. She looked at Edward with eyes like burning oil and showed a horrible red smile through the brank. And her laughter rang like a madhouse bell.
He woke gasping and sopped with sweat in the cold night air.
The pinewoods fell behind and the sky widened and the country opened up and assumed a gentle roll. He rode through bunch grass and along bottoms lined with hardwoods, passed through pecan groves and stands of oak. In time he came upon the first rocky outcroppings and cedar brakes at the edge of the hill country and saw farther to the west a low line of whiterock palisades shaped like wide steps leading to the high plains. There appeared now among the hardwoods scatterings of mesquite and occasional clumps of prickly pear. The west wind carried the scent of cedar and the sunsets seemed a deeper and brighter red, as if painted in fresher blood. The clouds were quicker to shape themselves and to change direction, to dissolve to pale wisps. A hard hailstorm drove him to cover in an oak grove and frighted the Janey mare.
He arrived at Bexar on a February morning bright with sunlight. He rode up over a grassy rise and there the town was. A clangor of bells carried faintly on the cool air and among the mission steeples stood a church dome shaped like a vision from an Arabian tale. The whitewashed buildings shone in the sun. Cottonwoods lined the banks of the river winding through town, their leaves shimmering in each huff of breeze. He spied the flag of the United States waving gently in the wind and beside it the Lone Star banner of the state of Texas. He hupped the mare down the rise and onto a loose sand road and headed in.
Despite the Stars and Stripes the place seemed a foreign estate. The public squares clamored with Spanish and the music of hurdy-gurdy and guitarron and castanets. The people were dark and toothy and dressed in white cotton. The air was piquant with cooking spices and the droppings of stock. Lavishly saddled stallions carried mustached horsemen glowering under sombreros of enormous brim, bedecked in black jackets and tight pants seamed with silver conchos, their spurs huge and spike-roweled. The wide main plaza was abustle with rattling wagons and clunking oxcarts and bunches of clattering longhorns being driven to the butcheries by vaqueros hardly more than children. Burros laden with all manner of commodities. Coaches packed with passengers and heaps of topside luggage. Mangy curs everywhere. Beggars blind or maimed. Strolling vendors with trays strapped round their necks. On the wide steps of a municipal building women in black rebozos sat on blankets arrayed with foodstuffs and confectioneries, religious gewgaws, medicinal compounds of sundry sorts. Scribes at their tables with inkpots and sandbowls penned letters of declaration in behalf of illiterate lovesick clients. Garrison soldiers lounged on benches and ogled the passing girls behind the dueñas’ backs. Men of business came and went from the courthouse. The high walls round the plaza were topped with shards of colored glass.
He watered the mare at a plaza well and then walked the horse down a narrow sidestreet that took him past stalls and shops where harness-makers and tinkers and seamstresses and cobblers of boots worked busily at their trades. He came upon a small plaza clustered with cafes and cantinas. He hitched the mare and went into an eatery and had a platter of roast kid in a chile sauce so potent he was obliged to mop steadily at his nose and eyes with his napkin as he ate. He was exhaling chile fumes when he came out but still had some coins in his pocket and so went next door into a cantina for a drink.
The barroom was dim and cool and had a high beamed ceiling and a polished clay floor. The floor gleamed in the slant of light from the entranceway. A half-dozen men stood grouped at the far end of the bar, all of them intent on something on the counter. Most of them looked Mexican and the talk was fast loud Spanish. But two were Americans speaking pidgin Spanish and using broad sign language. Both looked but a few years older than Edward. Their clothes were filthy with grease and dried blood. They wore slouch hats and each carried a brace of caplocks on his belt and a bowie on his hip and a knife in each boot-top.
Suddenly the talk subsided and the men drew closer about the bar and for a moment no one moved. Then abruptly one of the Mexicans jerked back from the bar and the other men shouted in chorus and some laughed and the man who’d flinched cursed loudly and spat on the floor. Now Edward saw that on the bartop was a large jar of clear glass containing a coiled rattlesnake.
A grinning Mexican in a rancher’s coat and leg chaps collected money off the counter. He dropped the specie into his poke and bobbed the bag in his palm to test its heft and looked pleased with himself. He glanced about at the others and said, “Pues, quién más?”
Edward bellied up to the bar and rapped hard on the counter to catch the Mexican barkeeper’s attention over the loud talk and laughter. The man came over and said, “Qué tomeis?”
He shrugged and said, “I don’t talk but American. Give me a drink. Whiskey.”
“Wickskey,” the barkeep said with a nod. He poured a drink and picked out a dime from the coins Edward laid on the counter. Edward tossed off the drink and blew out a breath and felt his eyes fill. The stuff was vile but its hot rush down his gullet and warm burst in his belly were pure pleasure. He pushed the other dime across the counter and the barkeep refilled his glass and then went back down the bar to rejoin the others.
The two Americans were conferring with each other and then one loudly said, “Goddamnit, I’m gonna try er again! I know I can beat er!” He was short and broad, cleanshaved and drunk.
The other American was bearded and his sparse mustache was gapped under his nose by a bare pink harelip. His speech was thick and gluey. “Shit, Easton, you done lost five dollars to the sumbitch already. You aint gone have penny one left you keep on with that snake.”
The Easton one waved him off and turned to the rancher. He nodded at the jar and jabbed himself in the chest with his finger and said, “Yo. Me. Again.” The rancher grinned and rubbed his thumb over the first two fingers of his hand. The Easton fellow dug out a silver dollar and slapped it on the bartop and the rancher put his own dollar on top of it. Now the other Mexicans began jabbering excitedly and placing their own bets.
The American set himself directly in front of the glass jar like a man readying to jump into icy water. He took several deep breaths as the others gathered close about on either side of him. Edward leaned over the bar for a better look. He saw that the jar lid had holes in it and the glass was too thick for the rattler to break. The snake was drawn up into a tight coil, its thin black tongue flickering, its tail tip up and chattering in a blur. Now the Easton one laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles and then dried his palms on his thighs. “Qué esperas, hombre?” the rancher said and gestured impatiently.
The American put a finger to the jar and the snake struck at it and he jerked his finger away. Everybody laughed and shouted and bets were paid off. The rancher gathered his winnings off the bar and added them to his poke.
“I done tole you!” the harelip said to the muttering Easton fellow. “Didn’t I tell you?”
Edward tossed off the rest of his drink and picked up his half-dime and walked over to the group and said to the rancher, “I can keep my finger on that glass.” He held up the silver half-dime.
The rancher looked at him and at the half-dime and then grinned at the others and said, “Mira éste con su monedita. Qué gran apuesta, eh?” and everyone laughed.
He felt a rush of anger and turned to the two Americans. “What’s so damn funny?”
“They aint too awful impressed with the size a your bet,” the Easton fellow said.
Edward glared around at them all and pulled out the pepperbox and laid it on the bar. “I’ll bet that.”
The rancher picked up the pistol and examined it. “Mira pues,” he said, looking amused. “Y cuanto vale esta cosa tan buena pa nada?”
Edward looked at the Americans. “How much he got to put up against the pistol?” the harelip said.
“Hell, I don’t care.” He looked at the rancher and held up a finger. “A dollar.”
“Un dollar,” the rancher said. He set the pistol on the bar and laid a silver dollar beside it.
Nobody bet on Edward’s success. He set himself before the jar. The rattler coiled up tight. He knew it was impossible for the snake to hit him through the glass, impossible, and he put his finger to the jar.
The rattler struck and he yanked his hand away before he knew he’d done it. The Mexicans roared with laughter. The rancher grinned and slipped the pepperbox into a side pocket of his coat.
He was furious at himself and called for another try and this time lost his saddle. Then tried again and lost his horse. The Mexicans were tearful with laughter. The rancher slid a half-dollar across to him and made a drinking gesture with his thumb and little finger jutting from his fist. He was a good winner who would not leave a man without drinking money.
Edward sat at a table against the wall and drank in sullen anger while the Easton fellow lost yet another dollar against the snake and then another pair of Mexicans came in and wanted to try their hand at the game too. The Americans brought their drinks over and sat with him. The harelip introduced himself as Dick Foote and said the other was Easton Burchard. He told Edward not to fault himself too hard about drawing his hand away. “Aint a man here been able to keep from pullin back when that snake hits,” the harelip said. “Couldn’t do it myself. Don’t believe it can be done.”
“Just like a Mexican to think up a game nobody can win at,” Easton Burchard said.
Dick the harelip said they were from just north of the Red River and were headed for Corpus Christi to join the Texas volunteers. “They sayin we gonna go to war with Mexico for damn sure and General Taylor’s gonna be needin ever man he can get. We heard tell they’s a bunch a rangers waitin on the Nueces right now and we aim to join it, by God. They sayin Old Rough and Ready be movin south real soon.”
“I’m pretty damn rough and ready my ownself, by Jesus,” Burchard said.
“They say Mexico’s just fulla gold for the takin,” the harelip said in his glutinous voice. “Say they’s rich people’s houses and churches just full of sacks of gold and gold crosses and drinkin cups and the like. Damn near everything you caint eat’s made of gold down there. And like they say, to the victor go the spoils.”
“Aint no question we got the spoils comin too,” Burchard said, glowering drunkenly. “We aint near forgot what them beaneaters did but ten years ago right out there at the Alamo. Nor what they done in Goliad. Half-breed bastards. Me and Dick weren’t but stripling boys back then and couldnt do nothin but cuss about it when we heard, but we sure’s hell can do something about it now.”
“We aint forgettin neither what they done to them Texian boys a coupla three years ago just the other side of the Rio Grande there at Mier,” Dick the harelip said. Edward had heard about that business. A filibustering bunch of Texians had been captured at Mier by the Mexicans and each of the 176 prisoners was made to draw a bean from a clay jar holding all white beans but for seventeen black ones. The men who drew the black beans were blindfolded and stood against a wall and shot dead.
“Only some Mexican son of a bitch would think up a thing like drawin for them black beans,” Burchard said. He drained off his drink and fixed his angry stare on the Mexicans gathered about the rattlesnake on the bar. “Damn half-breeds act like they still in Mexico, like this aint been Texas for ten damn years. If they aint gonna learn to talk American and start actin American they best get they asses down to Mexico where they belong. Greaser bastards. All the time talkin Mexican and laughin and actin polite and showin they teeth and they just as soon cut you throat as shake you hand. Winnin all you damn money from you with a goddamn sidewinder in a jar.”
“I caint hardly wait to get down there and start killin the sonofabitches and gettin me some of that gold,” Dick the harelip said.
Easton Burchard suddenly thumped the table with his fist and his face brightened. “Shitfire, I know how to beat that game!”
“No, goddamnit, not again,” the harelip said as Burchard stood up. “We aint got but a coupla dollars left, bud.”
“It just come to me how to do it,” Burchard said. “You watch.”
He went up to the bar and conveyed to the rancher that he wanted another try. The rancher smiled and shrugged and made the money gesture with his fingers. Burchard put his dollar on the bar and the rancher covered it. The other Mexicans were grinning wide and nudging each other.
“I don’t even want to see it,” the harelip said and kept his back to the bar. The crowd at the counter blocked Edward’s view but he did not leave his chair either.
Suddenly the talk fell off and he knew Easton Burchard was set and ready. Then there was a chorus of shouts and Burchard let a loud whoop and the bartender yelled something and then everybody at the bar was yelling at once.
“La apuesta no vale!” the rancher said angrily to Easton Burchard. He pointed at the bartender and said, “Éste te vió con los ojos cerrados, cabrón!”
“Oh shit,” Dick the harelip said, turning around in his chair to look upon the commotion.
The bartender was nodding and jabbering at all the others and gesturing at Easton Burchard. “No vale!” said another Mexican. “No vale!”
“No valley, my ass,” Easton Burchard said. “I don’t care the sonofabitch saw me close my eyes. Didn’t nobody say it was a rule against it. Only thing matters is I kept my hand on the glass and that means I won and that’s my two dollars there.”
He reached for the money but the rancher shoved him back and Easton Burchard said “God damn you!” and pulled both caplocks from his belt and discharged one squarely into the rancher’s chest.
The rancher fell back against the bar and his legs gave way and he grabbed wildly at the counter to try to keep his feet and his arm knocked the jar off the bartop. It crashed on the floor and the rattler lunged from the broken glass and struck one of the men just below the knee. The man shrieked and kicked wildly at the snake and fell hard as the others all yipped and jumped away from the sidewinding snake and a man fixed eyes of horror on it as it slithered past his boots and he fired at it and shot himself in the toes in the same instant that Easton Burchard shot a Mexican not two feet from him and the man’s brains flew from his head in a crimson streak. Edward dove to the floor as the harelip fired from one knee and a Mexican clutched at his face with both hands and fell. Several guns blasted at once and Easton Burchard yelped and dropped down beside the rancher who was struggling to pull the pepperbox from his jacket pocket. Burchard elbowed him in the face and took the weapon from him as the harelip fired his second pistol and put a ball through a Mexican’s neck and Burchard cried out again and cocked and fired the pepperbox twice in fast order and a Mexican crashed against a table and crumpled to the floor. The last of the Mexicans dashed out the back door and the shooting was done.
Not a man in the room was standing and the air was an acrid haze.
The harelip got up and went to Easton Burchard and helped him to his feet. There was a thick patch of blood on Burchard’s left side just below his ribs and another high on his thigh. “God damn it,” he said, “didn’t nobody miss me?” He tested the leg and it bore his weight and he said he could get along all right.
There was a clamor of excited voices in the street. The rancher lay on his back with a leg folded awkwardly under him and both hands over his chest wound. His breath came fast and shallow and wet and he seemed agape with wonder at some profound and private revelation as his life drained onto the clay floor. The foot-shot Mexican sat up and shoved his discharged pistol from him and showed the harelip his empty hands. The snakebit man clutched his shin and stared at the Americans without expression. His pistol was still on his belt and the harelip went to him and stripped him of it. The barkeep rose from behind the counter and the harelip pointed a finger at him and the man dropped from sight again.
Casting glances at the front door as he worked, the harelip swiftly went through the fallen men’s pokes and took their money and their discharged pistols and powder flasks and shot pouches. Easton Burchard set the pepperbox on the bartop and gingerly examined his wounds. Edward went over and picked up the pistol and checked the remaining three loads. Burchard looked at him without smiling and said, “You lookin to buy that rotary pistola of mine?”
“Quit joshin the boy, we got to git,” the harelip said, stepping between them and hurriedly sticking two of the pistols into Burchard’s belt and hanging the shot pouches around his neck. The voices outside were louder now, their timbre more urgent. “Take a look and see is there any laws out there,” the harelip said to Edward.
He eased up to the edge of the door and peeked around the jamb into the bright sunlight and saw a crowd of people lined across the street and looking and pointing his way. He turned around and saw the harelip helping Easton Burchard out the back door.
Amid the carnage on the floor the rancher let a last rattling breath. Five men lay dead. He spied the two dollars still lying on the bar and he went over and put them in his pocket. The crouching bartender glanced up at him and quickly dropped his eyes back to the floor. His bootsoles sucked through blood as he crossed the room. He went out the back door into the alleyway. Some Mexican boys stood by and looked curious. There was no sign of the two Americans. He walked to the end of the alley and emerged in a small plaza where people were haggling with street vendors and shopkeepers, shouting and laughing happily, a trio of fiddlers playing beside a splashing fountain. He circled back around to the street fronting the cantina and saw a crowd of people at the door. Soldiers with bayoneted rifles and several men brandishing pistols were pushing through the babbling throng. He waited till they’d gone inside and then strolled toward the cantina and begged pardon as he made his way through to the Janey horse. He mounted up and reined the mare carefully out of the crowd and hupped her down the street and through the plaza and rode on out of Bexar.
He bore south on the Camino Real for a few miles before abandoning the main road and once again taking up the less-traveled trails. Though he had not joined in the fray at Bexar he thought one of the survived Mexicans might have cause to identify him as in league with Dick Foote and Easton Burchard.
As he pushed deeper into brush country the land paled and flattened and thickened with chaparral. Grass gave over to prickly pear and scrub brush and rampant mesquite of bony thorned branches and niggardly shade. The air went dry and dusty, the noon sun white as a soda wafer. Sundown skies proffered visions of biblical firestorms. The air of the evenings was hazed red. He rode without hurry or destination through this alien wildland. He shot jackrabbit and rattler to roast for his suppers, put down early camps and regarded the setting sun at leisure. He felt swallowed by the immensity of the night skies, the riot of glimmering starlight from origins beyond ken. Firetailed comets streaked from pole to pole, plunging to infinity in the bare instant beheld.
He came one sunny afternoon to a village fronting a river running low and lined with scrub brush and scrawny dwarf oak. The place looked to be inhabited wholly by Mexicans. Dogs ran out with teeth bared and napes raised or slank away craven with tucked tails, depending on their blood. He walked the mare down the dusty street to the river followed by a small troop of yammering boys. After watering the horse he reined around and went to a small café whose front door showed a rough charcoal drawing of a bowl and spoon and he dismounted and went inside and sat at a table. The old proprietor came out of the back room bearing a clay cup of cool water which he set before him as he said, “A sus órdenes, caballero.” Edward gulped down the water which tasted slightly of mud. He made gestures of eating and the old man said, “Si, señor, inmediatamente,” and went through a door in the rear of the room and returned with another cup of water and a small plate of warm tortillas and a wooden spoon wrapped in a white cotton napkin. He next brought out a steaming bowl of some sort of meat in a dark chile sauce and a smaller bowl with beans.
The old man sat at another table and watched him eat. “El hambre es la mejor salsa, no es verdad?” he said with an avuncular smile. Edward ate and smiled back and said, “Whatever you sayin, mister, you probly right.” When he had done with the meal he gave the homunculus a dollar and received in turn three two-bit silverpieces.
Outside he found a pair of boys patting the Janey mare and talking to her. They continued stroking the horse as they scrutinized Edward from tattered hat to disintegrating boots.
“I don’t reckon she speaks Mexican,” he said.
“Jes,” the larger of the boys said. “She comprende what we talk her.”
Edward smiled and stroked the mare’s muzzle. “That a fact? Well, it could be she met her a Mex stallion in a corral somewheres. Tell me, what river’s that?”
“Ribber? Is el Rio Nueces.”
“No lie, the damn Nueces?” He looked about at the sandy brushland stretching to the horizon in every direction. “They’s supposed to be a army readyin on the Nueces. At Corpus Christi. Where’s Corpus Christi at?”
“Corpos Chrissie?” the boy said. He looked all around as if he might descry where it lay, then looked back at Edward and shrugged.
“How bout the rangers? You know where they’re at, the Texas Rangers?”
“Los rinches!” the smaller boy said, and made an obscene gesture with his little arm.
“Well hell,” Edward said. He looked off across the river and recalled the harelip’s claim about gold for the taking. He doubted it, but why not have a look anyhow? He could not raise a single objection. Seek and ye may or may not find, but don’t seek and you’re even less likely to find a damn thing. He pointed downcountry. “Mexico. How far?”
The boys exchanged puzzled looks. The larger one looked at Edward and shrugged and pointed to the ground at his feet and said, “Mexico.”
Edward laughed. “That so? Well, I hear tell they’s a bunch of rough old boys fixin to change that.” He pointed south again. “What lies yonderway?”
The two boys peered toward the hazy horizon with great concentration. Then the larger boy looked at Edward and said, “Bandidos. Much bad mens.”
“Hell, there’s them all over. What else is there? What towns?”
“Town? Is Laredo.”
“How far’s that?”
The boy swept his arm to the south in a gesture of much distance.
“I’m obliged for the information.” He took up the reins and stepped up into the saddle and raised his hand to the boys in farewell.
At the end of the street he paused before a store along the front wall of which were hung a few plucked chicken carcasses and dark strings of jerky. On small wooden stands just below them were arrayed packets of parched corn and small sacks of dry beans and ground maize, woolen blankets and colorful sarapes, a variety of earthenware and goathide canteens. He bought beans and jerky and a small copper pot with a green-crusted bottom and an extra canteen, which the store’s dueña promptly charged a small boy with filling at the river. He offered payment of six bits silver and the woman snatched the coins from his hand as though he might yet change his mind. Thus provisioned he tipped his hat to the dueña and hupped the Janey mare to the shallows and made a splashing ford.
He encountered few wayfarers on these trails so far removed from the main road and those few he came upon were not inclined toward amenities and vanished into the chaparral immediately on catching sight of him. Their wariness put him in mind of a biblical line his mother had ofttimes read to them in Georgia: “The wicked flee where no man pursueth.” If that was true, he now thought, then she was likely fleeing every minute of the day and night. He looked about at the surrounding barrenness and smiled grimly and tugged down his hat and thought: Like some other damned people we could name.
Another week farther south he came upon a dead horse beside the trail. It was bloated hugely under the white sun and its mouth and eyesockets boiled with maggots. The foreleg break was evident and on closer look he saw where the animal had received a large-caliber coup de grâce directly behind an eye. The following day he hove over a low sand rise and saw a Mexican but thirty yards down the trail sitting under a mesquite on his horseless saddle with a rifle across his knees. The man stood and grinned widely and raised a hand in greeting. “Amigo! Qué tal!”
All in the instant of the man’s salutation Edward noted his good clothes and boots and saw the two white-gripped pistols on his hips and another holstered under his arm and he knew the Mexican was either a bandit or a lawman and in either case he wanted a horse and here was the Janey mare.
He reined the mare hard left and dug his heels into her flanks and put her toward a thicket of mesquite fifteen yards distant. The Mexican threw the rifle up to his shoulder and fired and Edward heard the bullet crackle through the thick tangle of brittle branches. He held hard to the pommel and hung low on the mare’s left side, using her for a shield, hoping the Mexican would not shoot the horse rather than chance losing her. And then he was in the thicket and thorns were tearing at his clothes and he slid from the saddle and let the mare go on. He ducked low and ran through loose sand along a dense line of brush, doubling back parallel to the way he’d come. He found a break in the thicket and went through it and paused at the edge of a clearing to check his bearings and yes, there was the trail up ahead and there, just a few yards farther on, the man’s saddle lying under the mesquite.
He heard the Mexican call cajolingly, “Yegua! Ven aquí, mi hijita. Aquí, yegüita, aquí.”
The mare came trotting into the clearing with the reins dangling and here came the Mexican behind, walking up swiftly but trying not to spook the horse, talking soothingly, saying, “Ay, que preciosa yegüita. Sí, de veras, que hermosa yegüita.” And then he had hold of the reins and the horse tried to pull away and the Mexican was having trouble holding to both the rifle and the mare and so let the rifle drop and grabbed the reins with both hands and jerked the mare’s head down and slapped her on the muzzle. She tried to pull away but he caught her by the ear and twisted hard and she quit struggling.
Edward came out of the thicket moving low and fast with the pepperbox straight out in front of him. The Mexican heard his boots scuffing through the sand and held the reins with one hand as he turned and grabbed for a pistol on his hip. Edward fired as he came and missed with the first shot and then with the second and the Mexican raised a revolver and fired and the round ripped through Edward’s shirt under his arm and Edward’s next shot hit him in the stomach from a distance of five yards and the Mexican discharged a wild shot as he sat down hard and the mare broke away. Edward clubbed the man in the face with the heavy pepperbox barrels and felt bone crunch and the Mexican fell back. Edward threw himself on the man’s gun hand and wrested the revolver from him and scrabbled backwards and cocked the piece. The Mexican started to sit up and Edward shot him in the chin and the man fell back writhing with his lower jaw destroyed and Edward cocked again and shot him in the red gape of his mouth and the Mexican’s writhing ceased.
He remained sitting on the ground for a time and let his breath and heartbeat slowly ease. The tips of the Mexican’s long mustaches quivered in a frail breeze. His upper jaw showed a neat curve of bright white teeth and his lower was a bloody ruin of broken bone and molars. His tongue hung lank and purple against his neck. Already the ants and flies were converging onto the feast of his face, attending to an instinctual duty as old as the earth itself.
The pistol in his hand was a Texas Colt, a .36 caliber five-shooter. He now discovered that the longarm too was a Colt, a smoothbore ring lever carbine whose .525 caliber muzzle gaped hugely. The other two handguns were .44 caplocks. The Mexican had no badge about him but among his possibles Edward found a poke containing more than forty dollars in gold and silver.
He chased down the mare and calmed her and led her back to where the dead man lay and hitched her to a shrub. Shortly thereafter he was wearing the bandit’s trousers and snakeskin belt and his pistol holsters and his leather boots, which were newly made and fit him only a little big. The man’s bloodsoaked shirt was useless. The hugely brimmed sombrero was an excellent shield against the sun but felt alien on his head and so Edward kept to his own tattered hat. He put the Mexican’s saddle on the mare. It was finely crafted with a great round pommel and in the wallets behind the cantle he found pouches of .36 and .44 caliber balls and two full flasks of powder.
He was glad of the lack of a shovel so that he need not debate whether to bury the corpse. Already the buzzards were spiraling overhead.
On a chilly night of rising wind he came into Laredo, but six years removed from its tenure as capital of the erstwhile and tumultuous Republic of the Rio Grande. The half-moon was brightly silver and lit the street white. Blown sand stung his eyes as the mare clopped through the streets faced by mostly darkened windows at this late hour. A guitar strummed in a sidestreet. In the weak cast of light from a small balcony on which sat a shawled young woman he saw the suitor standing below in the shadow of his sombrero and heard the soft croon of his serenade. This tableau of courtly love as alien to him as the language of the love song.
The street led him to a ferry landing from which could be seen a row of brightly lighted cantinas on the other side of the running river. There carried on the air the music of piano and barrel organ and guitar. He walked the mare onto the ferry and the clomping of her hooves brought forth the ferryman who said something in Spanish. Edward extracted a half-dollar and the ferryman took it eagerly and set to the pulley rope.
When they bumped against the other bank Edward hupped the mare off the deck and up to the nearest cantina in the row and there dismounted and hitched the horse and patted her and whispered in her ear and then went inside. The room was well lighted and a half-dozen men stood at the bar, a handful of others sat at the few tables. They gave him cursory attention and then turned back to their drink and talk. In a far corner sat a man picking a guitar. Edward ordered whiskey but the barman shook his head. He pointed at the drink of the man beside him and the barman said, “Tequila,” and poured a cup for him. Edward drank it down, gestured for another.
As he sipped at the second cup he became aware of someone standing very close behind him and turned to face a husky hatless Mexican with an abnormally large head and webs of spittle clinging to the corners of his gaped and awkwardly set mouth. The idiot’s black eyes bulged upon him and looked to be full of mute shrieking. He put his face forth to within inches of Edward’s. His breath was rancid.
“Get away from me,” Edward said, and put his back to him.
The idiot mouthed a sound between growl and groan and prodded Edward in the back with his fingers. Edward whirled and slapped away his hand. “I said get the hell away, you damn softbrain.”
He was aware of the sudden cessation of music and talk. The idiot’s eyes were the wilder now and Edward could not bear the terrible silent shrieking he saw therein. The fool put his hand out supplicatingly once again and Edward knocked it aside and said, “Go bother somebody else, goddamn you. I aint givin you a damn thing but my fist you don’t leave off me.” He made a quick scan of the bar and tables, saw hard looks fixed upon him, said, “Some one of you best get this fool away from me quick.”
The idiot brayed and reached with both hands as if he would embrace him. Edward punched him in the mouth and felt like he’d struck a tree. The fool stepped back and blinked and ran his tongue over his bloody lips and reached for him again and Edward pulled the Colt and hit him on the head with it and the idiot reeled on wobbly legs and fell to his hands and knees and began wailing like a frightened child.
A pistol muzzle pressed against his temple and its holder said, “Si te mueves te mato, chingado.” Cocked pistols pointed at him from all sides. He let the Colt dangle against his leg and a man on his right cautiously took it from him. Then a fist crunched into his ear and he fell against someone who struck him in the forehead with a pistol barrel and he would have fallen had not someone else grabbed him and held him. He was again punched in the face and then hard in the stomach. As he spewed he was let to fall to all fours in his own vomit. Then he was hauled back up to his feet and held from behind with an arm twisted up high against his back.
His head rang and his vision was askew and mucus ran thickly from his nose. He felt hands disarming him. Now his sight cleared and he saw a man with a tarnished badge pinned to his coat standing before him. A pair of men were helping the idiot out the front door. Edward’s ear felt the size of a potato, his cheekbone throbbed, blood ran into one eye. He tried to pull free and the man holding him from behind twisted his arm up higher and pain shot through his shoulder and someone began punching him in the ribs and belly. The man with the badge spoke sharply and the punching stopped.
The badged man scowled and said something to Edward in Spanish and then gave an order and Edward was conveyed out of the cantina and into the street and he saw that the Janey horse was gone. They took him up the street and around to the rear of what looked like a municipal building of some sort and up to a low whitewashed structure of stone fronted by a heavy wooden door and showing in the moonlight two small windows covered with iron bars. The guard at the door rattled a set of keys on the ring at his waist and worked one into the doorlock and pulled the door open just wide enough for them to shove Edward through. He sprawled face-first onto a stone floor thinly layered with straw and the door closed behind him.
The room was dark but for the glimmering of a few scattered candle stubs. The stench of the place seemed to rise off the straw in his face. He heard low voices all about. He pushed up on his elbows and made out the forms of men sitting against the walls, others lying about the floor. Now the smell was worse yet and he spied a slop bucket but a few feet from him. He crawled away from it and sat up.
And there in the sputtering light of a candle stub, sitting with his back against the wall, was the large blackbearded man who had robbed him at the Sabine ferry.
The blackbeard was watching him and grinning whitely in the dim light. “How do, friend,” he said.
Edward jumped up and rushed at him and tried to kick him. But the blackbeard deftly dodged and rolled to his feet and absorbed most of Edward’s flurry of punches on his forearms as the other inmates scrabbled clear of them. The big man grabbed him and flung him against the wall and Edward bounced off and fell to his knees and the blackbeard yanked him to his feet and caught him up in a bear hug and squeezed until Edward could not draw breath. His vision flared redly and then came a dizzy swoon and then blackness.
When next he opened his eyes he was sitting propped against the wall and the blackbeard was squatting before him. Edward tried to lunge at him but the giant simply jabbed his forehead with the heel of a hand and knocked him back again. “Boy, you have got grit, damn if ye don’t,” he said. “But if ye don’t quit trying my patience I’ll truly put an end to this foolishness.”
“You robbed me my whole damn outfit,” Edward managed to say. His breath still came hard and his lips were bloated from the punch he’d taken in the cantina. He tried to spit off to the side and got most of the bloody gob on his sleeve.
“That I did,” the blackbeard said. “But I didn’t kill you, did I? I don’t begrudge ye a try at me for robbing you, but now you have had your try and it fell shy and that it is all the attack I will tolerate from ye. Come at me again and I’ll kill you graveyard dead.”
Edward considered going at the man again but could not muster the fire for it. Every muscle and bone pulsed with pain.
“You stole my horse and sold her, damn ye. I had to thump a fella to get her back.”
“Well hell yes I sold her. I needed the money. It’s the usual reason for robbing somebody, don’t ye know.” He spat to the side and suddenly grinned. “The fella ye thumped, I hope he was a gambler with long mustaches.”
“That be him.”
“Good. I didn’t much care for that sonofabitch. I’m real glad to know you got you horse back from him.”
Edward adjusted his position against the wall and grimaced. “I believe you done bust my spine.”
“Hell boy, if it was bust you wouldn’t be able to move the least bit. You’re just sore some.”
A prisoner passing by stepped on Edward’s outstretched leg and Edward kicked at him and cursed and the blackbeard snarled, “Cuidado, bruto! Ya te lo dije!” The man slank into the shadows.
“Where’s my guns and knives at?” Edward said “My blankets? My goddamn slicker?”
“Done sold the guns. It aint much left of your possibles but for the blanket and slicker. They with my outfit over in the livery. But it’s the alcalde’s livery so we aint either one like to see our goods again.”
“What’s the alcalde?”
“The mayor, ye might say. The fella with the badge arrested ye. Set hisself up his own town this side of the river and calls it Laredo too. Some calls it West Laredo, some say New Laredo, take you pick. It’s the same shithole whatever you call it.”
“That son of a bitch.” Edward told him of his trouble in the cantina.
The blackbeard said Edward wasn’t the first to get locked up for abusing the idiot. “The softbrain is nephew to the alcalde’s wife. What with all the sonofabitches in this town ready to kiss the alcalde’s ass it’s a damn wonder they didn’t kill you like they have some others who provoked the fool.”
“How come you to be in here?” Edward asked.
The blackbeard said he had been on his way to meet up with some partners in Monclova, Mexico, about 125 miles or so west by south from Laredo. He’d taken leave of the company in San Antonio and gone up to Arkansas to settle a matter involving his sister, who he said was the only living kin he had. He knew his partners would be taking their ease in Monclova as soon as they took care of some business they’d contracted to do in Coahuila state. He’d stopped in the New Laredo for a drink and a poke and a night’s sleep in a bed, but the whore proved such a sullen bitch he’d refused to pay her and threw her out of the room. Next morning when he went to the livery he found the alcalde waiting for him and backed up by a dozen fellows with rifles. He was arrested for robbing the whore and clapped in the cárcel. That had been a month ago. He’d since found out that every whore in town had to give the alcalde half of her take and the alcalde had not appreciated being deprived of a dollar by some passing Yankee.
“How about a trial? Don’t we get a trial?”
The blackbeard laughed. “You get you a trial when the alcalde gets around to taking you over to the courtroom where his brother’s the judge. Damn greaser will fine you all you got, including your horse and outfit, and sentence you to six months at whatever labor the alcalde wants you for. You’ll do it in leg irons and under watch of some hardcase guards. I aint had any trial yet.”
“Well damn,” Edward said. “Looks like I’m here for a while.”
“Could be ye are,” the blackbeard said. Then he grinned. “Or could be you got youself thowed in here at just the right time.”
“What you mean?”
“Well now, just last week a bunch of us was took out in leg chains to dig graves for a family of a half-dozen who burned up when their house caught fire. Well now, as we was shuffling back from the graveyard with our shovels on our shoulders who do I see standing in the door of a cantina and grinning at me over his mug of beer but Charlie Geech. He’s with the company I was headed to meet with in Monclova. He didn’t say nor do a thing but give me a wink. I don’t know what he was doing here but unless he’s quit the company the rest of them’s bound to be close by. I stopped to look at him and maybe say something but a guard come up behind me and poked me with his rifle and said I wouldnt be seeing the inside of no cantina for a good while and just keep moving, so I did. I looked back a minute later but old Geech was gone. I reckon they’ll be here to see about me soon enough.”
“You reckon? You must got some damn good friends.”
“Look here boy, you ever done manhuntin? Bandits and Indians and the like?”
“I never.”
“Well don’t tell nobody you never. You strike me as you could learn the trade quick enough and this be ye chance. I figure the captain’ll take you on when I tell him the kind a sand ye got.”
“What captain?”
“Company captain. Name’s Hobbes.”
“You think this captain’s gonna get you out of here, no lie?”
The blackbeard laughed. “I know it for a fact he will. Take you out too if you ready to ride with us. The captain don’t never leave a man of his company in a bad way if he knows about it. It’s the only thing I can say about the man for sure.”
“Well, it’s the best thing about him I heard you say and I hope you be right about it.”
Two days later as dawnlight was beginning to gray the jail windows they heard an outbreak of shooting and the rumble of horse hooves. Heard yeehawing and curses and screams. A minute later the lock rattled in the door and it swung open wide and admitted a rush of gray light and the door guard came running in with his hands to his throat trying vainly to stanch the pouring blood and he staggered and fell. And even as his life bled away into the filthy straw some of the inmates ran up and began kicking him. Others rushed toward the door but stopped short and moved aside as a man strode in with a revolver in one hand and in the other a bowie slicked with blood. Of unimposing height and build he yet moved with the mien of one who commanded whatever ground he stood upon. Black hair hung from his flatbrimmed black hat to just above the buckskin on his shoulders, his mustaches to his chin. His eyes looked cut from obsidian. He paused inside the doors and never glanced at the throatcut man. The shooting outside continued, the outcries and howls.
“Bill Jaggers!” the man called.
“You found him, cap’n!” the blackbeard replied. He started for the door with a wide grin and looked at Edward over his shoulder and said, “Let’s go, boy!”