The next shot came some four hours after the previous one. The one after that followed seconds later, and then it turned into a volley. Night had come again to our little grove, and there was no doubt among any of us that there was now more than one attacker.
“She got friends, hoss?” the Brute said, diving away from the fire he had built. The site of the previous campfire was abandoned on account of the roasted skull in the middle of it. No one wanted to touch it, so they just built another fire.
It seemed to me the Brute no longer believed in the theory that it had been Boon out there all along. I was no longer sure I bought it, either. She certainly couldn’t fire three or five repeaters all at once, and as far as I knew her only friend in all the lonesome blue world was me. Then again, I’d known nothing of Franklin Merrick before the moment I met him. There were all sorts of things I didn’t know about Boon.
“Impossible,” said Willocks. He rested the barrel of the rifle on his right forearm and squeezed off a shot with his left hand. Blind fire, it hit nothing. Our attackers responded with another volley, four or five shots in a rapid string. Cottonwood bark burst on either side of me and I hurried deeper into the copse. The marshal did, too, but not before we all heard a high, loud yell from the pitch.
“Comanche,” the Brute hissed.
“That or Kiowa,” said the other gunman. “Probably both.”
“They’ll be wanting the horses,” I suggested.
Willocks said, “Well, they won’t be getting any of them. Not while any one of us still lives and can shoot.”
“After they kill us, then.”
“You shut your God damned mouth if you are going to talk like that,” he said.
The three of them—the Brute, Paddy, and Willocks—clustered together and set to levering rounds into the two repeaters they had between them, a Winchester and a Spencer carbine, along with Lefty’s Springfield, which evidently took five hands to accomplish. So too did they load one revolver after another, of little use at distance but good for if, and when, the raiders closed in on us. The only fortunate thing about the whole frightening affair was the fact that most Plains Indians were lousy shots—ammunition was rare enough for them that they lacked the experience. Willocks’ men did not seem to know that, or at least give two shits. I watched their harried faces, ghostly in the orange firelight, and said to Willocks, “How about you toss me one of them hoglegs?”
“You think I am stupider than you,” he said.
“I think three and a half gun hands is better than two and a half.”
“Stuff your half up your ass,” he said. “I am whole and can shoot as good as any man.”
I shrugged. The deputies peered at me and then at the marshal, weighing my words against his. None of them said anything. I listened to the crackle of the fire and the fussing of the horses. Willocks should have posted one of his men closer to the remuda, but I wasn’t going to tell him anything. In the absence of further gunfire and halloos from the raiders, it was a certainty that they were drawing closer by the minute.
It hadn’t been but a few months since the second battle at Adobe Walls, which wasn’t much more than pissing distance from where we were besieged beneath the Caprock Escarpment. That was about twenty-five or thirty men against some seven hundred Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne, something I reckoned felt good to remember given how well the white men fared by the end of it all, though I sorely wished for Billy Dixon’s famous Big Fifty Sharps. What I wasn’t so aware of at the time, however, was how high and hot the blood ran amongst the Plains Indians in those bloody days, nor that the indecisive battles waged all across the Panhandle that year were heating up into what the papers and dime novels came to call the Red River War.
And we four—not counting the two already dead—were right in the middle of it.
“It’s that Quanah Parker, you reckon?” said the Irishman.
“Christ, no,” said the Brute. “Probably just boys ain’t even got any hair on their balls, aiming to count coup on us and rob us of our mounts.”
“And raise your fucking hair if you don’t shut up and pay attention,” Willocks growled. “Be quiet and be ready, God damn it.”
The deputies settled down, but the horses got more anxious second by second, the way they tended to when a storm was brewing. Indeed, I supposed there was one on its way, and that the little spattering of fire we’d taken so far wasn’t but a sprinkle compared to the downpour to come. The marshal and his men arranged themselves in a triangular formation, back to back to back, eyes wide and white and rolling like spooked broncs. Chances were mine were, too. It was a spooky place to be.
“We are well armed,” said Willocks, as if to himself. “We will survive.”
Paddy was shaking. I did not think he believed the marshal. He said, “What are they waiting for?”
“It’s a God damned stand-off,” said the Brute.
“No, it ain’t,” I said. “They can see us but we can’t see them. Ain’t any kind of stand-off when they hold all the cards.”
“Shut the hell up,” the Brute said.
“What the fuck are they waiting for?” Paddy said, as though no one had answered him the first time. He was getting hot and afraid, sweating and trembling. Then he screamed like a maniac and when I looked to see if he had gone crazy with fear I saw that there was an arrow sticking out of his chest.
He shrieked and clawed at the shaft and fletching, tearing his shirt and the flesh beneath so that the blood gushed down his front.
“Redskin whore’s sons,” he bellowed. He jumped up to his feet, the shaft bouncing in his breast, and fired wildly into the darkness. Three shots came in response, closer than before, striking the trees and kicking up the dust at his feet. “Burns like hell-fire, you bastards.”
He made to shoot again and Willocks hunched up to stop him, but the next shot came from behind and took a considerable portion off the top of his skull. A flap of gruesome red skin and hair dropped down over one eye as the gray-red mass of brains and skull shards above spurted and oozed, and the Irishman tottered on his feet with one wide eye for a long, horrible second with his mouth flapping and one hand grasping at something that wasn’t there. He dropped his rifle to the ground. The arrow shaft trembled in his heaving chest until his chest fell still. The deputy fell forward, breaking the shaft and smashing his face against a jagged rock. Both Willocks and the Brute scrambled away from the corpse.
“They are on both sides of us, God damn it,” said the Brute. He levered another round into the chamber of his rifle and swept the escarpment, ready to fire.
He didn’t find the assailant in time. The next shot slammed into his heart. The Brute wheezed with surprise and squeezed the trigger, firing at nothing, as he dropped backward. Willocks spun around, his own repeater at the ready, but when Boon stepped out into the firelight with her Colt .44 aimed at his eyes, she said, “I wouldn’t.”
I said, “Howdy, Boon.”
“How’re you doing, Edward,” she said without looking at me.
“Fair to middlin’.”
“Looks like you gained a gap in your grin.”
I nodded.
“Right glad you could make it,” I said.
“More breed friends of yours?” Willocks hissed. He hadn’t fired, but he didn’t lower the rifle, either.
“Kiowa raiding party,” she said. “Passed a couple of dead buffalo hunters yesterday. Probably they reckon you’re with them, or one of them.”
“Buffalo hunting’s been outlawed in these parts,” he said, as though he honestly believed anyone paid mind to it.
Boon shrugged. “Guess they got what was coming to ’em.”
“And my men?”
“I only claim three and a half of them. Arrow wasn’t mine.”
“Then they’re close.”
“They’re right up your nose.”
“Yours, too,” he said.
“Seems like,” she said. “Edward, how about you get some metal in your hands.”
I glanced from the rifle closest to me, which was Paddy’s, to the one strapped over Boon’s shoulder, which was mine.
“You get that in Revelation?” I asked her.
She nodded.
Willocks said, “And the sheriff there?”
She shook her head. “Didn’t want me to take it.”
“Poor Earl,” I said.
“Poor Earl,” said Boon.
She shifted her shoulder a little, just to let me know I could come get my gun. I did.
“You get my knife, too?”
“I ain’t your getting-things lady,” she said.
I levered a cartridge into the chamber and ran one hand down the smooth barrel. It felt good to have her back again.
“So now you cut me down like you do everybody else vexes you,” Willocks said.
“Edward vexes me all the time,” she said. “He’s doing fine.”
“There’s I don’t know how many Indians out there.”
“Five,” she said. “Maybe six, but I only counted five.”
“So I shoot you,” he said, “and both you and your fat man shoot me. I’m dead, you’re probably dead, and then it’s just him and the Kiowa. Poor odds.”
“Poor odds,” she agreed.
“Seems like maybe you and me ought to put aside our differences for the time being,” Willocks said, “given the circumstances.”
“Seems like.”
“What,” I said, “we all friendly now?”
“You got to learn to adapt, Edward,” she said.
She and Willocks still drew upon one another as they spoke. They might as well have been statues for all they’d moved. When at last she lowered her gun hand, I was like to pass right out from the shock of it. Willocks would have had her dead to rights, never mind how fast she was. But he dropped his barrel, too. The horses nickered in the remuda. Someone—or a bunch of someones—was fussing around near to them.
“Adapt,” I said, like I was just trying the word out.
Marshal Willocks said, “It is time.”
Boon nodded once and thumbed back the hammer on her Colt. It was time, indeed.