FRANK AND THE REST of the Bad Seven lay still, moving only to swipe the sweat from their eyes. They were crouched in the camp’s overwatch post, a high grove of trees toward the back of the holler from which they could observe the entrance to the colony. The vantage gave them a clear line of sight at the reaction force sure to come roaring up the road into the camp.
Frank still couldn’t quite believe what he’d done that morning. A strange sense of wonder had filled him as he stood barefoot on the duckboard porch of the tent and raised the heavy revolver from his side, watching as if in a dream as he held it unshaking at the end of his once-broken arm and thumbed back the hammer and pulled the trigger, the big gun bucking in his hand, blasting a brass mirror from the side of the car and the troopers seeming to levitate before him, wide-eyed, unable to believe what they were seeing.
Never had Frank felt himself so much a man in full, spitting in the face of these men, their overarching power, deciding his fate for himself. Then the hills seemed to respond, unleashing fire on the raiding party, the rounds of the Bad Seven and other shooters roaring down on them, ripping up the ground at the troopers’ feet. As if he were not one man but many. A whole army hidden in the trees. He was gone by the time the Bulldog could step down from the car to take control of the situation, ordering his officers to strafe the ridgeline before retreating for reinforcements, red-faced with rage.
Next to Frank, Bonney adjusted his rifle and winced. A bullet from one of the Thompsons had gone right up the sleeve of his shirt, torn a furrow inside his forearm, and punched out through the denim patch at the elbow.
He kept his eyes on the entry road, speaking to Frank through his teeth. “They keep calling it a state of war and insurrection round here, right? As if we missed that fat son of a bitch down there thirty times from this range. As if we couldn’t have shaved his fucking mustache with the first shot.” Bonney shook his head. “As if we wouldn’t have put a bullet in his head, this was a real war.”
Frank nodded, lying prone, squinting through an old set of binoculars. “You ever think all this could come to that, a second Civil War?”
Bonney looked at him. “You don’t?”
Before Frank could answer, he saw a bloom of dust. “Movement on the road.”
“What is it?”
Frank worked the thumbwheel, trying to bring the twin spheres of vision into focus. The binoculars were nearly antiques, the lenses foggy, the sight picture never quite clear. “Somebody on horseback,” he said.
“How many?”
“Just one so far.”
“Scout?”
“Doubtful. They wouldn’t want to give us no warning.”
The rider had come around the bend at a fast trot and now pushed the horse into a full gallop, thundering down the road, crashing through puddles and slop. No rifle slung across his back. No bandolier. A white horse.
“It’s Doc Moo,” he said. Frank rolled over and waved to one of the other shooters, a man perched high in the crux of a white oak with a telescoped rifle. He signaled him not to shoot. When Frank looked again through the binoculars, the doctor had entered the camp but remained on horseback, riding fast through the tents, scattering chickens and dogs, coming finally to where Mama-B sat on her rocker on the same duckboard porch where Frank had made his stand that morning. He knew there was no moving that woman from her porch short of hauling her off it, like the Baldwins had done.
Through the foggy world of the glasses, Frank watched Doc Moo jump down from his horse and crouch beside Mama-B, talking hurriedly. She twisted in her chair and cast her hand in their direction. The doctor nodded and stood in the middle of the road, where he would be visible, and began to wave his hands.
“The hell’s he doing?” asked Bonney.
“I ain’t for sure,” said Frank. “Trying to signal us, I think.”
“Signal us what, they coming?”
Frank wiped the lenses of the binoculars on his shirttail and looked again. Doc Moo had quit waving his hands wildly and now had only one arm raised, high and straight, pointing to the ridge above them to the north.
Frank wheeled to look. “Oh, Jesus.”
A ratcheting bark of automatic fire.
THE INSURANCE MAN HAD watched one of the state troopers freeze midstep, rigid as a dog on point, staring down on a small copse of trees, a woody island lying between them and the tents. Movement. The trooper stayed that way a long moment, only his chest moving, the black knot of his tie rising and falling on top of his green uniform blouse and his campaign hat raked forward like a drill sergeant’s, his chin dripping sweat. Then he raised his Thompson, thumbed off the safety, and fired.
A man seemed to detach bodily from one of the trees, thrust from the upper limbs, becoming visible as he tumbled down through the branches, his rifle clattering after him. He smacked the ground and wadded into a ball. The whole copse exploded with return fire, the colony’s sharpshooters sending rounds streaking through the woods, ripping through laurel slicks and cracking off tree trunks.
The insurance man stood dumbfounded a moment, unable to comprehend the death shrieking through the woods around him. Then he was down in the underbrush, crawling on all fours for the carcass of a blight tree, throwing his rifle over the top and aiming down on the copse. The big .30–40 Krag kicked hard against his shoulder, his right hand rolling the bolt up and back and forward and down, chambering another round, the woods around him cracking and screaming with gunfire.
Nearby, he saw a trooper rise and turn and shriek, seeming to hurl his submachine gun toward the branches overhead, a ragged wing of muscle and blood erupting from his shoulder blade. He fell wailing and writhing, his boots heeling the dirt in crazed gouges, as if someone had put pepper sauce down his pants. Men rushed to give aid and the insurance man turned back to see the miners breaking from the trees, sprinting wild-armed across the meadow.
Without thought, his mind fired with blood, he threw down on one of the runners and led him through the open sights like a flushed dove and pulled the trigger, feeling the buck of the rifle against his shoulder and watching with strange glee as the man slapped his rump as if stung. He staggered, reeling and stumbling, nearly falling but not, skipping and hobbling lame-legged into the trees.
Then the whole force of troopers and Baldwins and vigilantes was rushing down into the colony, a line of them thundering high-kneed behind Captain Brockus, who led the charge with his pistol drawn upright beside his head, a silver whistle shrieking between his teeth. The insurance broker, sprinting down on the camp, could almost imagine they were coming down on a party of Comanches or Filipinos or Johnny Rebs, same as his ancestors had done.
The mining families scattered before them, scrambling from the cat-eye flaps of their tents and fleeing toward the river, their dirty heels thumping down the duckboards and the babies screaming in their arms and men scooping up children, throwing them over their shoulders, others kicking open the doors of jakes and tripping on their own drawers, some veering and crashing into tents that imploded on top of them.
The vigilantes flooded through the colony with knives bared, slashing the pale tents and screaming the people out of them, kicking over stools and coffee cans and corn crates of household belongings, cutting open sacks of grits and flour and beans from the supply tents, ringing themselves in fodder, shooting at stray dogs.
A trooper handed the insurance man a can of kerosene and pointed to the spilled foodstuffs. The broker began pouring the fuming liquid onto the carpet of grits and beans, tipping the can here and there like it was his wife’s watering pot.
“Do those,” said the trooper, pointing.
A line of ten-gallon metal milk jugs, standing like artillery shells beneath the canvas fly of a supply tent. The insurance man lifted off the lids and looked down into the bluish pools of buttermilk quivering in the cans. Here was the pap and manna of the camp, shipped in on Union relief trucks, as instrumental to insurrection as gunpowder or dynamite. He tipped the can and spiked each jug with a slug of kerosene.
When the can was empty, he walked out of the tent and found himself alone. The miners had fled, harried down toward the road at the bottom of the hill. Others were being driven out of the creek, their laundry spinning downstream, and still more were climbing from beneath the shadow of the little stream bridge with their hands over their heads. The townsman stood at the edge of the camp with the rifle slung across his back and the can dangling at his side, emptied. The earth fumed around him, soaked with kerosene.
He didn’t move. Below, the troopers were sifting the males from the roundup and lining them up along the railroad tracks, chaining them into a long gang of prisoners, wrists shackled, ready to march them down the tracks to the county jail. A motley band of rebels, some fifty of them, their faces black and brown and white beneath shabby caps and fedoras, some with bandannas knotted at their throats, wearing stained overalls or ragged vests or torn shirts.
The insurance broker stood amid the wrecked camp, crowned in a glory of fumes, looking down on this parade of clinking chains and iron manacles, the men’s shoulders bowed, their hands cuffed at their waists. His chest swelled with pride.
For the first time in weeks, he was not afraid.
Behind him, the colony was a mess of toppled canvas, nearly every tent flattened or lurching or flapping like a sail, sliced to its interior. Amid the fuming wreckage, a single ancient Black woman sat in a rocking chair. She seemed to be signaling him. The insurance man squinted.
She was giving him the finger.