DOC MOO AND MISS Beulah sat side by side in the darkening holler, watching the fireflies spark heavenward from the grass. It was August 1, nearly a month since the raid on the camp. The arrested miners were still imprisoned, packed into the county jail without bail. Many of the toppled tents had been propped back up, their knife-wounds stitched, but the place appeared more squalid than ever.
Doc Moo shook his head. He was already worried about the coming fall. Three children had died last year of pneumonia. “If conditions don’t improve by first frost, we’re going to have a heavy toll on our hands.”
Miss Beulah nodded. “Hell, I’m surprised I done lasted up here this long.”
“Now, now, Miss B. You’re stout as a horse.”
“I ain’t scared of what’s to come, Doctor Moo. I believed in the Glory since I was a child. I look forward to finding out, either way. It’s the rest of these folks I worry over. They ain’t had all the years I had on this earth.”
Frank appeared at the edge of the holler, walking toward them. Fireflies flashed around him as distant thunder throbbed through the sky. He and the other Lick Creek fugitives, still wanted, had an outlaw camp somewhere up in the Mingo hills, hidden with the help of a valley moonshiner and said to be guarded and booby-trapped.
Frank’s wound was healing well, but he’d developed a slight limp. It hurt Doc Moo to see how much punishment the man’s body had taken, nearly every inch of him lumped or scarred. The mines could break down a man physically before he was even forty; the human anatomy simply wasn’t designed for it. Moo had seen it again and again. But this wasn’t the mines—it was everything the man had endured in the past year. Beaten, burned, shot, chased. Still, he seemed to carry a certain pride that wasn’t there before. He swaggered through the holler dark, his forearms curled like old war clubs.
“He’s mending,” whispered Miss Beulah, watching him. “Though I do worry, Doctor, what wounds he’s got on the inside still to heal.”
Doc Moo nodded. Truly, he’d noticed the man seemed quieter in the weeks since the raid, harder. Something he couldn’t diagnose from any medical volume. A hooded steel in the man’s eyes, a tension in the jaws. He remembered something his father used to say.
Careful, when you beat a dog, you don’t awake the wolf.
Two men had followed Frank down the slope of the ridge. Bonney and Lacey, the Hellfighter twins. They hovered at the edge of the woods, their rifles cradled against their chests, watching for ambushes or raids. Frank carried only a large revolver strapped across the middle of his chest, holstered on a long leather belt, no shirt beneath his overalls.
He stopped just short of the lantern’s glow, as if unwilling to step into the light. “Y’all heard about Sid?”