“Whuh the—” As soon as Dupree’s mouth was open, I stuffed his words back into it with a dirty rag. The next sound he heard was the hammer of Clemmie’s pepper pot cocking back right next to his ear and me telling him that if he made one more sound, he’d meet his Jesus that very day. I whispered even though the passed-out pack of degenerates littering the ground around the campfire they’d returned to like the morons they were wouldn’t have stirred had an artillery round landed in their midst.
Still half jugged and entirely terrified, Dupree offered little resistance when I ordered him at gunpoint farther into the woods.
The forest floor was carpeted with a deep layer of pine needles that deadened our footsteps. I marched Dupree down to where the Appomattox River, churned to mud by the horses and men of two armies, was flanked by a wall of granite that would do to baffle the sound of the little revolver being fired point-blank into a man.
Not wanting to die next to a desolate mud wallow, the bushwhacker whirled around and made to grab the gun from my hand. His buckskin shirt and britches were stiff with filth and Dupree lumbered about with no more grace than a shaggy bear. I easily sidestepped his lunge and he stumbled face-first into the gravelly muck. He flipped over and lay there panting, two white eye holes and one pink, near-toothless mouth in all that slimy brown.
“Rebel,” I told him, “you already given me two reasons to blow out your lamp. Don’t give me another.”
But he did. He scrambled over and made a grab for my ankle. Lord, the man moved slow. I stepped hard on the top of his hand, trapped it beneath my shoe and the sharp gravel and ground down hard. Dupree shrieked as the shards of granite cut into his palm. Though any motion caused his hand to be mashed even deeper against the pointed stones, he wriggled about and yanked on my ankle until I kicked him in the head with my free foot.
Sometime later, when Dupree came to, he noticed immediately that he was sprawled out on his back in the mud, naked as the day he was born. “Whuh? Whuh?” he sputtered, splashing through the shallow water as he tried to crawfish away from the barrel of the revolver pointed straight at his little nubbin.
“Take your boots off,” I ordered.
“You can have them,” he said, obeying. “I’d of given you the buckskins, too,” he added for I was now wearing his filthy garments.
After the boots came off, he struggled to his knees, put his hands together and begged me to let him live. “Listen, I got money. Silver them planters buried. It’s all melted down. Buried in a secret place. I’ll take you right to it. You can have it. Have it all. Please…”
He started blubbering so hard I could barely make out the lies he was confabulating about the fortune in Secesh silver he was hiding so he could go on living off the weevily hardtack he stole from the Union army.
I ordered him to shut up and get to his feet then took my sweet time circling that miserable specimen shivering in the cold, hands cupped over his crotch, runty legs bowed out, arms skinny as hickory branches. If this item’d come wrapped in a black skin, he wouldn’t have fetched three dollars on the auction block. He’d of ended his life swinging a grub hoe down in Mississippi.
“Please, please, please—”
“Shut your trap and listen.”
His shameless begging fell off to a whimper of the most pitiable sort. When he finally shut up, I advised him, “Next time someone tells you to take your hand off a lady—”
I paused to shoot off the big toe of his left foot and he dropped on his ass, howling and clutching at his four-toed paw as the blood gushed through his fingers and down his skinny shank, before I concluded, “You best listen to her.”