CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“What do you think, Broussard?” Buttons Muldoon said. “I mean, how badly hurt is he?”
“I’m not a doctor,” Arman Broussard said.
“Then Red is in a bad way, huh?”
The gambler nodded. “I don’t know if he has any broken bones and I don’t know if he’s got injuries to his insides.”
“Hell, man, what do you know?” Buttons said.
“One time in Wichita I saw a puncher who’d been caught in a stampede,” Broussard said. “He looked pretty much like your friend does.”
“Did the puncher make it?” Buttons said, hope in his eyes.
“No, he died.”
The mine shaft was lit by a single oil lamp, and the Mexican who’d been whipped for Elijah’s sins was dying. The other slaves clustered around him, their lips moving in prayer. Red Ryan lay near the entrance where he’d been dragged.
Broussard stared at Buttons in the evening gloom, the only sound the whispering of the Mexicans and the constant cough from one of the Rathmore guards. “I’ve got to get to my gun.”
“Easier said than done, my friend,” Button said. “Your gun, my gun, Red’s gun, they could be stashed anywhere.”
“Muldoon, I can’t fight them without a Colt in my hand.”
“Seen that already. You ain’t real handy with your dukes.”
“If the good Lord wanted us to fight with our hands, he would’ve given us claws,” Broussard said.
“That’s a thought.” Buttons placed his palm flat on Red’s chest. “He’s breathing easier. I’m pretty sure he’s breathing easier.”
“He’s tough,” Broussard said. “I think he’ll make it. Damn, he looks bad, though, with the shadows gathering on his face.”
“I’ve seen that on the faces of dying men,” Buttons said. “But Red isn’t a dying man. He’s too tough and ornery to die.”
“You’re right,” Broussard said. “He’s not dying.” Then, after some thought, “I need my pistol. I’m not much of a hand with a rifle.”
“Then your education is sadly lacking,” Buttons said, his hand still on Red’s chest. Red’s breathing was shallow but not labored.
Broussard said, “My father taught me to shoot. He was a gambler on the Mississippi riverboats. I’d like to say he was a fine man, but if I did, I’d be a liar.”
“Then he taught you how to put a bullet in a man across a card table,” Buttons said.
“You hit the nail right on the head,” Broussard said. “Draw fast and place your first shot where it counts. That’s what he always told me. It was his way.”
“Did he kill many men?” Buttons said.
“I don’t know, but I guess so. My mother never talked of it. But maybe she knew, because she left him when I was eight, said she didn’t want to be wed to a gambling man any longer. He never talked about that, either, only he told me one time that she’d ran off with a steamboat engineer.” Broussard smiled. “When I was a boy I wanted to catch up with that engineer and put a bullet in his brisket, but I never did find him or my mother.
“You’re right. Ryan is breathing easier and I think the color is coming back to his face.”
As though he’d heard, a guard left the entrance and stood over Red. He prodded him with his rifle and Buttons angrily swatted it away.
Like all the Rathmore brothers, the man was tall and thin, but this one had a wispy chin beard. “Will he live?”
“Damn you, yes, he’ll live,” Buttons said.
“Good,” the guard said. “Papa Mace intends to burn him at the stake.”
The second brother, who stood just inside the entrance covering Buttons and Broussard with his Winchester, sniggered. And then said, “You and the other slaves will watch.”
Broussard, at that point thinking more rationally than the enraged but severely weakened Buttons, said, “When will the burning take place?”
“When he’s strong enough to stand,” the bearded man said.
The guards walked away to take up their posts at the mine entrance, and Buttons watched them go, hate burning in his eyes. He put his hand on Red’s chest again and said, “Don’t get better, old fellow. Best you die peacefully. I don’t want to see you burn.”
Arman Broussard heard sadness and genuine affection in Buttons Muldoon’s voice, and he wondered at the bond that could develop between a stagecoach driver and his shotgun messenger. Before tonight, he’d considered a stage a necessary evil, a hot, dusty, and uncomfortable means of getting from one place to another, and he’d paid little attention to the two usually profane men up in the box. Now he was seeing them in a different light. Men capable of grief and feelings like any other . . . like himself.
The truth would hurt, but maybe a lie would do. “Buttons,” Broussard said, “Red will be just fine, because we’re going to get him out of here.”
“Red isn’t going anywhere,” Buttons said. “He can’t even stand. How is he gonna walk?”
“He doesn’t have to walk. We’ll carry him,” Broussard said.
Buttons shook his head. “Think about where you are, Broussard. How are we going to carry Red out of this arroyo surrounded by Rathmores who’d like nothing better than to put bullets in all three of us?”
“I don’t know how,” the gambler said. “But we’ll find a way.”
“There’s always a way, ain’t there?” Buttons said.
“Sure there is,” Broussard said.
Buttons said, “Not here. There’s no way out of here.”
“There’s got to be,” Broussard said. “We need to come up with a plan, that’s all.”
Buttons looked at the man and said nothing, but his eyes were dead. Like gray river stones.
* * *
Her name was Clementine, a thin, slack-breasted woman with gray showing in her brown hair. She was the mother of three children and had almost died delivering the last one. Her common-law husband, Asher Rathmore, wanted to force another pregnancy on her. He said Papa Mace needed more babies to increase the numbers of the family, especially now that Elijah had been killed. Asher had beaten her—Clementine’s fingers strayed to the bruises on her cheek—and forced himself on her in full view of anyone who cared to look. There was no privacy in the arroyo that was the Rathmore hovel. Asher said things would get better, that Papa Mace was going to lead them to a safer place, with plenty of gold to set them up. Only there wasn’t plenty of gold. Clementine had heard from one of the other wives that the quartz vein had been a big disappointment and that most of what the slaves had mined had gone to pay for the supplies they’d bought in the Forlorn Hope settlement. Papa Mace was penniless, and if the gold seam didn’t start to produce soon, they’d likely starve.
Clementine made up her mind. She had to leave this terrible place and the vile Asher Rathmore who wanted to make her pregnant again, a man who held her life so lightly, a man she’d grown to hate. She could take her children and run, but if she didn’t die in the desert, she’d soon be caught and given a beating. Yet she had hope . . . the three men who’d arrived with the stagecoach. All three seemed tough, though one of them might die soon, either from the licking he’d taken or by fire. The man dressed in a gambler’s finery could be her salvation. She’d seen cardsharps before when she’d worked in a Dallas cathouse, elegant, well-mannered men but men best left alone. In a fight, they quickly went to the gun, a bold new breed of shootists the newspapers had taken to calling draw fighters, fast as a lightning strike and just as deadly.
Clementine was sure the Louisiana gambler they called Broussard was such a man.
Asher had taken his revolver. It was a plain blue Colt with a much-worn gutta-percha handle and was wrapped in a blanket along with his watch and gambler’s ring. The woman made up her mind. That night she planned to take the slaves their supper, tough boiled meat from one of the stage horses, and something extra . . . the gambler’s gun. If he could shoot himself to freedom, Clementine planned to be with him. As she retrieved the Colt from the blanket, she knew the chances of her plan succeeding were slim . . . but a chance that offered little was better than no chance at all.