Beneath Dupree’s coonskin cap was a pinched, weasely face even more starved out and pie-eyed up close than it had been from a distance.
“Whar’s my rifle?” he demanded.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I knowed you took my yagger. We had us a lookout posted what seen you make off with my weapon. I was occupied or would of come after you directly. So give it over fore you find out what happens to a nigger wench steals off of Hiram T. Dupree.”
Seeing the odds tilted heavy against us, I was about to show him the yagger when Solomon said, “Remove your hand from the lady.”
Dupree swiveled his dim, bleary-eyed gaze to Solomon and asked, “Whud you say? Boy?”
“I said,” Solomon repeated, “take your grimy paw off the lady.” This time, he accompanied the order with action and jerked Dupree’s hand off me. The instant Solomon’s black hand touched Dupree’s white one the air became charged the way it does before a thunderstorm.
Almost more amazed than outraged, Dupree stated, “Boy, you done put your hand on me.”
Once the crime was named, his gang fell on us and we were locked in strangleholds and neck locks. And, though we hollered and struggled for help, none of our own people came to our aid. They just looked on and let that pack of hyenas drag us back into the woods where, I expected, they’d finish us off in ways too awful to name.
When they got us back to their campfire, I wriggled free and kicked a couple of them where it hurts a man most. Then I chugged Dupree a stout one in the mouth and the few teeth he had left in his head gave way and came gushing out in a spray of what looked like kernels of corn mixed with blood and slobber. Solomon proved himself to be all wool and no shoddy in the fighting department as well. He had a reach you wouldn’t of expected on a man of his height and a solid upper cut that came all the way up from Alabama to flatten a couple of them egg-suckers.
Then Solomon and me backed toward each other so that we put a solid V of fists between ourselves and the trashy skunks. We were holding our own and edging back away to safety when one of the polecats slipped around behind and coldcocked me with what felt like a round jack sap to the back of the head, and I went down heavy as a dead beef.
When I came to, I was on the ground staring up at a rockslide of fists raining down upon me. Those crackers were refighting the Rebellion and there wouldn’t be any surrender this time. I prepared myself to meet Iyaiya, Mama, and Clemmie. Then, just as the fellow with the bassoon butt was fixing to plant his boot in my face, a shot was fired and he dropped down dead on top of me. Another shot was fired, this one more of a boom than the first, which had had a crack to it, and it blew another fellow out of his clothes. I squirmed out from beneath the dead man in time to hear another shot fired and to see the skunk punching Solomon come down in a pile.
I figured a band of Yankee snipers had finally come to our aid and were hiding out in the woods picking Dupree’s gang off one by one. The gang arrived at the same conclusion, for they left off murdering us and, not knowing where the snipers were, they all clumped together, whirling from side to side and darting glances about, looking for the attackers they reckoned had them surrounded.
Dupree, drooling red slobber, had lost, along with the majority of his teeth, every bit of his bullyboy spunk. The next shot fetched off his cap, revealing that the only hide he had atop his newborn-bald head had been coonskin. Whimpering like a wormy pup, he crouched down, held his hands out in the direction the shots were coming from, and pleaded, “Let us go! We didn’t intend no harm! Please, Grant told y’all to leave us be. It’s peace now. Y’all can’t just shoot at us like—”
Of a sudden Dupree, having seen something emerging from the woods, stopped wheedling, and sounding like he was about to perish from the dry wilts, whispered, “Oh, Lord God Amighty,” and fell silent.
For out of the shadows stepped all the freedmen and women I thought had abandoned us to our fate. Leading them was none other than Gator Mouth. Not a one of them spoke, nor did they need to. With three of Dupree’s ranks dead and the rest near to it from fright, the mangy pack did not require any persuading to clear off. They backed away, bit by bit at first then in a wild, galloping stampede, tearing over one another in their hurry to escape.
“You see them crackers turn tail and run?” Gator Mouth asked again and again, each time to greater and greater amusement as our rescuers were doubled over laughing until they came close to airing their paunches from sheer gut-cramping mirth. Once I collected myself, though, I realized that not one of those folks had any iron on him.
“Who did the shooting?” I asked.
Before anyone could answer, the distant notes of the band whipping into a schottische, a lively Kraut tune that made for good dancing, caught their attention and the freedmen and women rushed off to join in.
When they’d left, I called out for our rescuers to make themselves known so we might thank and reward them for they had surely saved our lives. Expecting a couple of burly pistoleros to appear, I was taken aback when a plump girl bearing my yagger stepped into the firelight. No doubt her accomplices were remaining out of sight to cover her.
The girl wore sparkly earbobs of the sort no laundress or cook could earn in three lifetimes of boiling clothes or victuals. Her face, a delicious color this side of caramel, was rouged up and powdered as befits a fallen Daughter of Eve. She was a comely young woman with glossy hair that hung in springy curls and a figure, though gone to fat at a young age, was still fetching enough that it was easy to see how she could command a pair of sparkly earbobs.
“I am mighty obliged to you,” I started off, not knowing how to go about the business of thanking this stranger and her partners in hiding for saving me and Solomon.
Solomon went to put his hand into his vest pocket, but the girl whipped a derringer from the well-padded holster of her cleavage, cocked it, and ordered in the growly voice of a gin-soaked bawd, “Hold it right there, Top Hat!”
“I ain’t armed,” Solomon protested. “I got money and figured on giving you and your buddies, wherever they’re hid, a reward.”
“You saved our lives,” I said. “Tell us your name.”
The hussy made no answer, for my question had caused her to start bawling like a baby. In that instant, the hands of time turned back and I didn’t need her to cry out in our Africa language, “Am I that fat and ugly that you don’t even recognize me?” to know that I was being held at gunpoint by my baby sister.