I sat the boy up on his blankets while Clete looked at the man who was still stretched out.
"Stop cryin', son. You're all right now," I told him. "We thought you was someone else. We didn't mean you no harm. Are you hurt?" He rubbed above his ear. I took his hand away and found a big lump there. I put my arm around his shoulder and give him what comfort I could.
He wouldn't stop bawling, though. Big deep sobs that shook his shoulders.
"Let him alone a while," Clete said. "He'll quiet down in a spell. This one's been shot. Doesn't look like he'll make it, either. Lost a lot of blood and's been gut-shot."
I sat with the boy and Clete tossed the last of their few sticks into the fire. After it caught up good, I saw the white canvas top of a wagon up on the high bank.
"Did you notice the wagon?" I ask Clete.
"Just before you set off that scattergun. I'll go have a look."
"No!" the boy yelled, and then jumped at me, punching and kicking. I wrapped up his arms good and just waited 'til he stopped. He couldn't a been more than ten or twelve, and not very big for his age either. Didn't take him long to tire out and give it up, and when he went back to crying hard again, I let him go. He flopped face down on his blankets and let her out full.
"You suppose there's someone up there?" I ask.
"That'd be my guess," Clete said, taking a gander that way, but making no move. He bent down and looked at the man's face and then turned the boy over enough so's he could see his face too. "Boy's about the right age to be this man's son, and they sort of look alike." He took a pair of burning sticks from the fire and walked up to the wagon. I heard mules nickering, the way they do, and they moved the wagon a few feet when he got close.
"Anyone in there?" Clete hollered, but no one answered. "I'm a law officer and I'm coming in. Hold your fire." He walked up to the back end, raising his sticks high in one hand and laying back the flap with the other when he got there.
The blast from a gun lit up the canvas from the inside at the same time I heard the shot. I grabbed the shotgun quick and scrambled up to the high bank, though it was dark as hell without no light. The glowing sticks were on the ground, their flames out, just back of the wagon.
"You hit, Clete?" I called over there.
He startled the hell out of me, for he was right beside me when he answered. "I'm all right, but whoever's in there ain't gonna be when I get through with him. Gimme that shotgun!" He more grabbed it out of my hands than me giving it to him, and he blasted both barrels into that wagon.
A scream come out of there, one I hope to forget the sound of some day. High and screechy and sounding like someone being branded by devils.
"Jesus, it's a woman," Clete said. He jumped up and ran over while the scream kept up. Clete climbed into the front, over the seat, and the screaming stopped.
It was quiet a long minute after that. Only thing I could hear was the peepers down by the river. "Willie, fetch a light!" Clete hollered, finally.
I run down to the fire and grabbed the biggest stick left, though it wasn't much. The boy and the man was just where they was before, so I went right back toward Clete.
"Everthing all right in there?" I ask when I got close to the back of the wagon.
"Yeah, bring that damned light," Clete said.
When I stuck my head inside and held my burning branch up, there was a woman huddled in a blanket under a big old drop-leaf table. Other furniture was piled around her, too, a rocking chair and such. She was all rolled up in a ball with only her head sticking out. The lady was clutching something and kept rocking her body back and forth and talking low, almost like she was singing.
Clete sat up at the other end on the seat, but with his legs inside. The old muzzle loader she'd shot at him with was in his hands, and his face looked whiter than the wagon cover. After a minute he put the long gun aside and climbed in to where she was, but she still didn't look up. He lifted the blanket from her a little and it was plain she had no clothes on, nothin' at all. The woman held a little baby to her breast, but even from where I stood, you could see that its head was smashed in, and it dead a good while. Blood all over the baby and her and the wagon floor and everything.
Clete dropped the blanket and crawled out the front. I took a lantern that hung just inside the back and lit it with my branch. Pretty soon he come around the back end of the wagon.
"I didn't know there was a baby in there, or a woman either," he said. All of a sudden he turned and walked away from me, back toward the fire.
After a minute, I went around to the front and crawled up over the tongue and the seat. I set the lantern on a little cleared space on the floor and looked at that poor woman. She was rocking and singing low to that little child who would never hear her songs no more. Holding the lantern up high, I saw where the shot from the shotgun had tore through, and it was like I thought before. That baby was dead long before Clete and me come upon this sad camp. I lifted the blanket like Clete'd done, and saw that the blood on her body and her hands was all dried, and still she didn't look up, despite that she was naked and me taken her cover off. I dropped the corner of the blanket and went back outside. She was still singing soft when I started down with the lantern.
Clete sat by the fire, across from the boy, who was awake, but looked dazed. The man was still out. When first I felt for his heartbeat at his wrist, I thought he'd died. But a heartbeat was still there, real faint and slow.
Clete had his knees drawed up and his arms around his legs, hugging them in. I told him where the shot'd gone through the wagon cover, well above where the woman and child was. Then I said about the dried blood, about how the little one would of had to been dead for hours for all that blood to dry. I was telling the truth, too, not just trying to make him feel better, and I think him hearing that in my voice is what calmed him.
He looked at me a second, looked back into the fire, and then nodded slow. "Then DuShane shot this man and knocked the boy alongside his head. God knows what he did to that woman, but it's clear what he did to the child." His eyes bore into the flames.
I started talking to the boy then, telling him who we was and what we was doing there. I asked him a bunch of questions-his name and where he was from and the like-but he wouldn't answer me. Except, when I asked if the man lying beside us was his pa, he nodded his head. Other than that, he just stared into the fire like my pardner was doing. After a while Clete stood up and walked out to where my horse and the roan was. He led them back in and started getting the gear spread out. After hobbling the horses, he took the lantern and gathered a big pile of chips. All the while I kept talking to the boy, but he still hadn't spoke.
Clete went down to the river and come back with a potful of that chalky water. Once he got a good look at it, though, he tossed it away and went up to the wagon and got some from their side barrel. Before long he had peeled a pile of potatoes and set them to boil with bacon frying in the skillet and a pot of coffee going, too. Smelled damn good, I can tell you.
"What about the woman?" Clete ask when we started to eat.
"I don't know," I said. "She'll be all right 'til morning, I suspect. Maybe something'll occur to us by then. I don't know." I dished the boy some of what we had, but he didn't touch it. He laid on his belly beside his pa and stared into the flames.
"It's good food, son, and you're welcome to it," I told him. "I'll bet you're hungry, ain't you? When was the last time you ate?" I guessed that was the wrong thing to ask him, for he begun to whimper again.
About that time we heard a yowl out beyond the edge of the firelight, and Clete stood up and drew his pistol. It was supposed to sound like a coyote, I guess, but any fool could tell it was a man tryin' to sound like a coyote-and doin' the worst job of it.
"Shit," Clete said, bolstering his Remington and then sitting back down.
"I'm coming in, now," a voice called to us. "Don't you go shootin' at me again, Sheriff."
Well, of course it was Banty Foote. He marched in on them short little bowed legs and stood beside the fire with his arms crossed. "Pretty chilly night," he said in that real quick way of his. "Fire feels good. Who's this boy?"
I waited for Clete to tell him, but he looked like he was pretending Banty wasn't there, so I told him myself what'd happened.
"I'll be dogged!" he said when I finished, and sat right down in the dirt. "Are we goin' after him now, the man what done this?"
"You're not going anywhere!" Clete yelled, causing the boy to fidget and sniffle again. "Not with us, you're not."
Clete looked at me and I tilted my head toward the boy. My pardner lowered his voice after that. "Why don't you git the hell out of here?" he ask Foote.
Banty dug in the dirt with his finger and looked downhearted. "Just wanted to help is all," he said. I thought for a while we was going to have two fellows crying on us. Clete went back to his food, and I offered Banty the plateful I had put out for the boy, for it was plain he wasn't interested in it.
Banty Foote spooned potatoes into his face and kept his eyes on Clete. That little man smacked his mouth louder while eatin' than Stalking Bear ever did, and that's saying something.
I told them the rest of what Crawford told me. What the Captain guessed of where DuShane was from and all. "He told Marsh's scout that you'd killed his brother and that he set out to get you back for it."
Clete thought on that for a minute. "The girl mentioned something like that too. But didn't she say he'd told her it was his son I had shot?"
"Yes, I think she did," I told him.
"I wonder which it is?"
"Beats me, but I guess I'd trust Crawford's recollection more than Mandy's. Her lingo is more French than American, and them damn French get the sex of everthing so turned around, I don't wonder they get confused between brothers and sons, too."
"Crawford's a good man," Banty offered. "Acts strange, but he don't miss much."
Clete shook his head and then we just sat quiet. The boy was still awake, though not stirring at all. Banty belched like a cow, stretched himself out on the ground beside the fire, and in a minute he was asleep. I guess he didn't have no bedroll along anyway.
"Then it was me he was after all along," Clete said of a sudden. "I didn't understand why he burned down Nell's house, but I do now. He must have known I stayed there sometimes, and when he saw Jesse go in that night, he thought it was me. Nell got killed because of me, then." He nodded his head slow and the fire glinted in his eye. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and hard as a spike. "Que cabrón de mierda. Wait'll I catch that sonofabitch."
Banty rolled over after Clete said that, and the boy looked more awake than ever. We sat and I listened to the night sounds and smoked my pipe while the fire burned lower. After a while Clete checked the man's breathing and then lay down on his sogans without saying anything, and in a while he was snoring.
I touched the boy's arm and he looked up.
"Ain't you gettin' sleepy yet?" I asked him.
He shook his head.
"Well, I ain't much sleepy myself, but it would be a comfort to hear your voice just once tonight. Want to tell me your name now?"
He shook his head again.
I nodded and rubbed his hair, being careful not to get close to his sore spot. "I know how it is for a young fellow out away from home and a terrible thing like this happens to him, with his family and all. Same thing happened to me when I was about your age." I stopped and relit my pipe.
He looked up again and you could see he was waiting for me to goon.
"Yes, I was coming out from the East with my Ma and Pa and little sister. Just west of the Mississippi River, we was, when a dozen or so Indians jumped us. My Pa killed four or five and I shot one myself. But my little sister must of got scared from all the shooting and run away, for after them braves cleared out, we couldn't find her nowheres. Ma had thought she was under the wagon with my Pa and me, and Pa thought she was inside with Ma. Only, as it turned out, she wasn't neither place. The Indians had took her, for they will do that. We followed them redskins for weeks, long after we knowed we had no chance of catching them, but we kept on after them 'til we got to Texas, and there we stopped.
"That was a long time ago, son, for I ain't no young man anymore. Only thing I can remember about my sister is her name and the color of her hair. It was long and black and hung in ringy curls way down her back. Bright and shiny black in the sunlight, it was. It's hard to lose kin, I know. Often I try to remember what she looked like, my little sister, but all I can recollect is the way her hair looked, black as midnight and shiny as stars. Just that and her name."
The peepers down by the river was raising a ruckus.
"What was her name?" the boy asked.
"Why, it was Amanda, son, but we called her Mandy. Say, your tongue ain't broke, is it?"
"My name's Jimmy," he said, and then laid his head down.
I pulled his blanket over his shoulder and he was asleep well before the moon come up.