The Whip Hand

“Let me take a look at that, kid,” Hunter said.

“I’ll be the judge of what’s nothin’ an’ what’s not nothin’.”

Hunter set the Henry down and rose onto his knees, turning to Powwow. “Sit up,” he said, motioning with his hand.

Powwow sat up, his back to the cave entrance and the long, boulder-strewn slope where the dead black man lay in a bloody heap.

Hunter winced when he saw the blood oozing from a hole in Powwow’s denims, on the outside of his left thigh. He canted his head to see the backside of the kid’s thigh, where another hole in the denims oozed more blood.

“You must’ve got hit when you were still in the saddle. Didn’t you feel it?”

“Just a pinch.”

“Well, it went all the way through, anyway.”

“Oh, Lordy.”

Angus looked at Powwow. The kid’s face had gone nearly as white as a sheet. He listed a little this way and that, as though he were about to pass out.

“Hold on, kid. Hold on. I think it’s just a flesh wound. Does it feel like it hit the bone?”

“Oh . . . bone. Oh . . . blood. Oh, man . . .”

“Stay with me, kid. You’re gonna make it.” Hunter removed his neckerchief and pressed it over the wound in the back of the kid’s thigh, which was the entrance wound. The bullet had exited the kid’s leg through the front. “Hold that down over the wound. Hold the other end over the—hey, you with me?”

“I, uh . . . I gotta confession to make.”

“What’s that?”

“I, uh . . .” Powwow shook his head as though to clear the cobwebs. “I, uh . . . can’t stand the sight of blood. ‘Specially ... ’specially . . . my own!”

He gave a ragged sigh and fell onto his right hip and shoulder and lay there motionless on the cave floor, dead out. He began snoring raspily.

“Oh, hell!” Hunter said.

Bobby came over, sniffed Powwow’s bloody leg, gave a little mewl, and turned to Hunter, nervously wagging his shaggy tail.

“Yep, it’s one thing after another, Bob,” Hunter said, rising to a crouch and dragging Powwow deeper into the cavern in case their assailants returned. “I’m gonna have to clean that wound, get the bleeding stopped. You stay here with him. I’m gonna fetch my saddlebags.”

Hunter moved to the cave entrance, gazed down the slope beyond the dead man. No movement. Their assailants must have realized the error of their ways and were staying gone. At least, Hunter hoped they’d stay gone. He needed no more complications.

He hated the added delay, but he had no choice but to get the kid’s wound cleaned, the bleeding stopped. To that end he moved down into the boulders on the side of the slope and found Nasty Pete and the kid’s dun grazing wiry brown grass around one of the boulders and from beneath which clear water bubbled, making a miniature geyser and forming a freshet that trailed off down the slope.

A spring.

Good. He’d need water.

He quickly unsaddled both horses and tied them to a wind-gnarled cedar in the shelter between boulders, within reach of the spring, then hauled his saddlebags and both his own and the kid’s bedrolls back to the cave, where Bobby Lee was sitting in worried vigil over the still slumbering Powwow. He dropped it all down near the kid, and Bobby Lee then took his canteen down to the spring to fill it.

When he’d returned the canteen to the cave, he quickly gathered rocks to form a fire ring in the middle of the cavern. There were pines and cedars growing along both side of the slope, and after two trips and two armfuls of dead wood and branches and pinecones and twigs for kindling, he built a fire, taking his time, coaxing it to life though feeling the nettling impatience, knowing the kid was likely losing a lot of blood while he tended his chores.

They were necessary chores, however.

He set water to boil in the coffee pot, which he hung from his iron tripod, then pulled the kid’s boots off. “Oh,” Powwow said, as each boot was removed. “Oh . . .”

Hunter pulled the kids denims off, tossed them aside, then with his bowie knife he cut a neat round in the kid’s longhandles, around the wound. That task accomplished, he rolled the still slumbering Powwow onto his side so he had better access to both wounds. He cleaned each thoroughly with warm water.

Cynthia McCloud had slipped a bottle of whiskey into the possibles bag she’d packed for Hunter and Powwow. He hadn’t needed much of it due to the poultice she’d made for his ribs, but he was glad to have the bottle now.

He popped the cork and poured whiskey over the kid’s leg, letting it dribble over each wound, cleaning them more thoroughly than water could. The kid’s body stiffened, and he awakened with a screech, saying, “Oh, God! Oh, God—that burns like the smokin’ gates of the devil’s own hell!”

“That’s just for starters,” Hunter said. “I’m gonna suture those wounds closed. Now, I’m no sawbones, so it ain’t gonna be a very neat job, an’ it might be a tad on the painful side, so you’d best have you a swig.” He extended the bottle to Powwow. “Take a big one.”

“Don’t normally imbibe in the daylight hours—ain’t the way I was raised—but since you insist.”

Powwow took the bottle, took a drink.

Then another.

He winced as the busthead raked its way down his throat.

“Have another one,” Hunter said, threading the needle he’d produced from his small, leather sewing kit.

Powwow took another drink then thrust the bottle over his hip toward Hunter. “Lordy . . . that’s enough.” He sighed and rested his head on the cave floor, one hand wedged beneath it.

When Hunter began sewing him up, again the kid stiffened and gasped. He glanced back at Hunter’s handiwork, saw the blood, and promptly passed out again. Hunter chuckled. “Well, that’s one way to skin a cat,” he told Bobby Lee, sitting watching him intently from only a few feet away.

Bobby mewled and shifted his weight from one front paw to the other.

As he continued sewing the exit wound closed, Hunter glanced at the coyote. “You worried about Annabelle?”

As soon as Hunter said her name, Bobby lifted his long, clean snout and cast a low, mournful howl at the cave ceiling.

“Yeah,” Hunter said, pinching up the flesh along the wound and poking the needle and catgut through. “Me, too. Don’t reckon I’ve ever been so worried about anyone in my life. Maybe ol’ Pap during the war, wondering how he was gettin’ along. They separated us as soon as we signed up together.”

He stretched his lips back from his teeth, shook his head. “Never been as worried since . . . till now.”

Bobby Lee gave a clipped cry then lay belly down, resting his snout on his front paws. He gave his tail a sympathetic wag, then just lay there, watching Hunter finish closing the exit wound before once more cleaning the entrance wound with water and whiskey, evoking a groan from his patient, then suturing the entrance wound closed, as well.

He wrapped a tight bandage around the kid’s leg, rolled him onto his back, and covered him with his soogan. Powwow didn’t stir. He lay with his eyes tightly closed, moving his lips a little and whimpering softly against the pain. Hunter cleaned up, returned his sewing kit to his saddlebags, then retrieved his and the kid’s saddles, setting the kid’s down and leaning his head up against it so he was not lying on the cave’s bare, gravelly floor.

Hunter filled the coffee pot at the spring, brought it back to the cave, hung it over the fire, and was soon resting back against his own saddle, sipping the mud and nibbling bits of jerky he shared with Bobby Lee who sat beside him, twitching his ears and tilting his head expectantly this way and that, awaiting the next treat.

Hunter was about to freshen his coffee when the kid sat abruptly up and yelled, “Laurel!”

Bobby Lee leaped to his feet and barked at the kid, frightened.

One of the horses whinnied.

Placing a calming hand on Bobby Lee’s head, Hunter turned to the kid still sitting up and staring wide-eyed out the cave entrance where the light was fading toward dusk.

“Easy, kid. Powwow . . . easy.” Hunter placed an arm on the young man’s shoulder. “Just us here . . . you, me, an’ Bobby Lee.”

The kid seemed to come out of it, rationality returning to his gaze. As it did, the pain of Hunter’s makeshift sutures must have returned to him, as well. Stretching his lips back from his teeth, he placed both hands on his upper thigh and squeezed.

“Oh, man . . . burns.”

Hunter pulled another cup out of his saddlebags, filled it three-quarters full with coffee then filled it the rest of the way with whiskey from Cynthia McCloud’s bottle. “Here. Drink that. Take out some of the sting.”

Powwow accepted the cup in both hands, his hands shaking a little. He brought the cup to his lips, swallowed, sighed, then rested back against his saddle. “Does file the edge off it some.”

“Coffee and whiskey, a couple handfuls of jerky, is all a man needs when you get right down to it.”

Powwow chuckled, then winced again at the pain.

“Sorry, kid. I did as well as I could. I learned from watching the surgeons back during the war. I can set a bone if it ain’t too badly broke, and I can sew a wound closed if it ain’t too big, but I’m not sayin’ I do a nice, neat, pain-free job.”

Powwow looked at him, the kid’s eyes serious, maybe a little incredulous. “You saved my life.”

“Ah, hell.”

Powwow laughed as he stared out the cave entrance. The light bathing the slope had turned a soft blue. “I can go around for the rest of my life now, crowin’ to folks about how my life was saved by Mister Hunter Buchanon his ownself.”

“Careful, kid. Might get yourself shot. We’re above the Mason-Dixie line.”

“Hell, down South you’re a legend. I’m from Texas, an’ I grew up hearin’ your name spouted this way an’ that by the veterans from every loafer’s bench in the town square!”

Hunter was ready to change the subject. He couldn’t do much about his troubled memories of the war, but he could put an end to talking about that bloody time.

“Where you from in Texas, Powwow?”

“Little ranch outside San Antonio.”

“Brothers? Sisters?”

Powwow sipped his whiskey-laced coffee, grimaced, and sighed as he set the cup down on his right thigh, atop one of the blankets comprising his bedroll. “Two brothers, two sisters.”

Powwow turned to him. “I had two brothers. They died . . . in a bad way.” But honorably, he did not add. Shep and Tyrell died helping him fight for the girl he’d been in love with. Whom he’d always be in love with no matter how far apart the fates might take them.

Powwow nodded grimly.

Hunter sipped his own whiskey-laced brew and said, “Who’s Laurel?”

Powwow turned to him sharply. “Who?”

“The girl whose name you called out in your sleep.”

“Oh.” Powwow ran his hand down his face. “Didn’t realize I said it out loud.”

“Who is she? I mean, if it’s none of my business just—”

“Laurel McKinney. Girl from a neighboring ranch I once knew.”

“Oh-oh. One of those girls-from-a-neighboring-ranch stories, eh?” Hunter chuckled. “Got one o’ them myself.”

“Laurel,” Powwow said, and took another sip of his coffee. “She was right special. I can still hear her laugh. We used to pick wild berries together on the way home from school. We sorta grew up together . . . as friends. Then, well, we started goin’ to barn dances together. I reckon we were gettin’ kinda serious, not just friends anymore, and her pa stepped in, wanted us to stop seein’ each other. Laurel’s folks wanted her to marry the son of a wealthy man in town.”

“Yeah,” Hunter said with a fateful sigh, able to sympathize with that aspect of the story, as well. “So what happened?”

“We didn’t stop. Couldn’t seem to. We grew up together. We knew each other better than we knew anyone else. We kept meeting, sending secret notes about places to rendezvous. And then . . .”

Powwow picked up his cup. Hunter noticed his hand shaking as he sipped, then set the cup back down on his lap. Powwow swallowed the coffee, turned to Hunter with a sorrow in his eyes. “Laurel became in the family way. Her parents kept her home when she started showing. We couldn’t see each other. Her parents forbid her to ever see me again. They were going to send her off to have the baby, to some relative back east, but she gave birth early and they both died, Laurel an’ the baby.”

Hunter just stared at him. He’d had a feeling the story was going to take a dark swing. He hadn’t been prepared for how dark it had swung.

“Gee,” he said. “I’m sorry, Powwow.”

Mouth corners drawn down, Powwow stared out at the darkening night from which the only sound was the distant, grating cry of a hunting owl. “Everyone blamed me. Even my own folks. I couldn’t go anywhere, do anything, without people givin’ me the stink-eye.

“Finally, one mornin’, I packed my bags, saddled up, rode up to the cemetery where they buried Laurel and the baby, told them both goodbye and . . .” The kid’s voice quavered. “Th-that I loved ’em both.” He brushed a tear from his cheek with the back of his hand. “And then I rode on out of there . . . just started wanderin’ . . . workin’ where I could find it. Livery barns an’ ranches, mostly. Swamped out a few saloons.”

Powwow glanced at Hunter with a dry chuckle, his eyes still bright with emotion. “An’ here I am . . . with the great Hunter Buchanon . . . helpin’ him rescue his wife back from slavers.”

“That’s some life story.”

“I oughta write it down some day.”

“I’m sorry, kid. About Laurel an’ the baby. I know that feeling of loss.”

“It don’t hurt as bad as it once did but I reckon it’ll never stop hurting completely.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“I hope at least this part of it has a happy ending.” Powwow glanced at Hunter again. “That we get your Annabelle back from Machado. I’m ready for a success like that.”

“Yeah,” Hunter said, finishing his coffee and tossing the dregs into the fire. “Me, too.”

One of the horses gave a shrill, warning whinny.

Instantly, Hunter kicked out the fire and grabbed his Henry.