THEY RODE FOR three days before they reached the Trinity River. The roots of the oaks and willows along the banks were exposed by the receding water, and sandbars gleamed in the current, but the river was still too high and swift to ford with the string of horses.
“Let’s go north and look for a narrows,” Son said.
They rode for a half day along the river’s edge and still didn’t find a crossing that wasn’t filled with deep holes and tangles of brush and dead trees.
“Where’s that ferry you told us about?” Son said.
“It was along here somewheres, unless the Mexicans burned it up.”
“You want to turn out the string and swim it?”
“We ain’t going to do that. That’s gold dollars on the hoof. Let’s keep going upriver. We’ll find us something.”
“We ain’t exactly got all the time in the world.”
“I don’t figure they’re still after us.”
“How do you know that? Even riding the way we was we couldn’t have gained more than a half day on them and we done shot that already.”
“Them Mexicans take a nap every afternoon. They don’t get up till somebody cuts a bean fart and tells them it’s dinner time. They’re way back yonder someplace.”
“All right, we ride till last light, then cut the string and swim it. Fair enough?”
“We’ll talk about it then. In the meantime you study on what it’s going to be like coming out on the other side of the river. I’m talking about wore-out mounts, wet powder, and not a piece of money in your britches.”
Ten miles farther up the river, when the red sun was just striking the tops of the oaks and willows on the far side, they saw the ferry moored in the shadow of a huge cypress. In their exhaustion they didn’t wait for the ferry-keeper to come out of his cabin but rode their horses across the split-oak planks onto the barge. Son slid down from the buckskin he was riding and leaned his arms and head against the horse’s withers.
“You don’t have money for pay,” the woman said. Her legs and clothes were spotted with the wet sand from the river bottom. Her face was drawn, the metallic complexion almost discolored like uneven bronze, and Son saw her flinch as she pulled her buttocks back on the horse’s rump and drew her knees up on its side.
“Don’t worry about it,” Son said. “I’ll give him a chunk of lead to chew on if he don’t want nothing else.”
“I not give you rifle for that.”
“I ain’t going to shoot nobody. We just ain’t bargaining with none of these people.”
“Hey, get your ass out here,” Hugh shouted at the cabin. “We got people and stock on board here waiting to get taken across.”
An old man with white whiskers and white hair hanging in knotted strands from under his flop hat stepped through the low cabin door and walked toward them with his back still bent. His face had the softness of a baby’s, and even in the diminishing twilight Son could see the blue veins in his fish-white arms.
“I always yell at the wrong people,” Hugh said.
The old man picked up a long shaved pole that was leaned into a branch of the cypress tree and squinted up at their silhouettes against the late sun’s fire. His gums were pink and without a tooth.
“What you boys and this Indian woman going to give me for poling you across? I don’t take no Mexican scrip,” he said.
“We ain’t got money of any kind,” Son said. “We’ll cut out that pinto for you.”
“Wait a minute,” Hugh said. “That’s worth five American dollars across the river.”
“What else we got to trade, Hugh?”
“Before you boys start arguing, them horses ain’t worth shit to me,” the old man said. “But if you’re G.T.T.s, which I figure you are, and you’re fixing to join up with Sam Houston, you don’t pay nothing for this trip.”
The old man dropped the pine rail into place between the lashed posts on the stern and slipped the mooring line loose so the ferry could swing out into the current on the rope that extended across the river.
“Did them Mexicans do something pretty bad to you?” Hugh said.
“I come here as a colonist with Stephen Austin fourteen years ago. They throwed him in prison in Mexico City, and they been giving Americans hell ever since. The taxes you can’t pay they take out of your larder or drive out of your pen. If that ain’t enough for them, the jefe comes back and takes all the tools and harness out of your barn. Then they sell it to them drunk Indians that come over from Louisiana.”
“To tell you on the square, mister,” Hugh said, “we’re G.T.T.s all right, but we ain’t planning to sign on in no army. So maybe you still got your fare coming.”
“If you boys stay in Texas, you’ll join up with Houston or Bowie, one.”
“You know James Bowie?” Hugh said.
“I taken all them boys across,” the old man said.
“I mean you ferried Jim Bowie from Louisiana across this river?”
“All them people come across on this ferry.” The old man’s light blue eyes turned away toward the water with his lie.
“We’re looking for a horse trader on the other side named Jack Tyler,” Son said.
“I know where he’s at,” Hugh said.
“You ain’t been here in years, Hugh. You don’t know he’s alive.”
“He’s alive, all right,” the old man said. “You watch him, too. He’ll sharp you out of the nails in your horse’s shoe.”
“How far?” Son said.
“I told you where it’s at,” Hugh said. “We catch the trace just beyond the next rise and ride about five miles. Ain’t that right?”
“He ain’t there no more,” the old man said. “Some buffalo hunters didn’t like his whiskey one night and burned him down. He’s about ten miles farther on now at a regular town.”
“There ain’t no town there,” Hugh said.
“There sure as hell is. Jack Tyler’s got a saloon and a couple of stock barns there, and two fellows from Tennessee built themselves a store.”
The ferry bumped onto the mudflat under the overhang of trees, and the old man dropped the rail on the bow.
“What do you want for the trip? We don’t ask for nothing free,” Son said.
“You got what I want up there on the horse, but I done got too old for that.”
Son looked away from the old man’s face and avoided the woman’s eyes, which he knew were upon him.
“Give him the knife,” he said.
“You sure can give away what ain’t yours,” Hugh said.
“Give him the damn knife.”
“You can have this gut ripper,” Hugh said. “I lost the whetstone, but you put one to it and you can lop a young pine in half with it.”
“You stick it in one of them Mexicans for me and we’ll be even,” the old man said.
“Suit yourself,” Hugh said. “Tell me, you taken any Frenchmen across of recent?”
“Last week I did. Five of them. They was wearing coats and pantaloons like New Orleans dandies.”
Son and Hugh looked at each other.
“What kind of business was these Frenchies on?” Hugh said.
“You got me. Only one of them talked English, and he was such a mean-looking sonofabitch I didn’t care to hold no conversation.”
“Was they headed up the trace?” Son said.
“If you’re going across east Texas, there ain’t no other way to go,” the old man said.
They walked the string of horses off the ferry into the trees and rode up the embankment. The shadows around them were deep purple, like a bruise, and the last crack of red sun was burning into the western horizon.
“That’s him, ain’t it?” Son said.
“Maybe.” Hugh was biting down on his lip and staring through the darkening trees.
“Who else comes through this country dressed like that?”
“I didn’t reckon he’d get ahead of us. If he’d figured us right, he should have headed south for the Coast. That’s what we ought to done, and he should have knowed it.”
“The old man said they crossed last week. Maybe they pushed on to Bexar.”
“It might be our luck they’re setting at Jack Tyler’s place waiting for us, too. Ain’t this a slop jar full of it? I thought we’d be drinking whiskey tonight with Jack instead of sleeping in a cold woods again like a bunch of niggers.”
“We can’t take these horses no farther, anyway, Hugh. Let’s bed down by that drainage.”
“That sonofabitch must have sniffed every bush we pissed on since we swum across the Mississippi.”
The wind blew across the river in a cold gust behind them and rattled pine cones along the ground.
“It’s fixing to rain tonight,” Son said. “We’ll cut us a lean-to in them oaks and make a good fire. Tomorrow we’ll decide if we ride into Tyler’s place or cut bait and head south for Galveston.”
“If I thought I knowed where that French asshole was right now, I’d turn it around on him and hunt his camp. I’d like to catch him and them other four asleep and give all of them a big red smile across their throats.”
“That’s what we need—murdering somebody in Texas.”
“We stole horses, boy. They’ll hang you faster for that over here than killing a man. Shit. I hate sleeping on the ground another night. Look at that sky. We’re going to be floating in piss in the morning.”
“Are you going to help us make a camp or complain the rest of the night?”
“You just do your share and don’t worry about me. By morning, I’ll be the one that gets us out of this.” Then, because he had no other place to put his anger, he got down from his horse, stomped and kicked at the ground, hurled a rock crashing through the trees, and shouted at the top of his voice: “Landry, I’m going to fry your balls in a skillet.”
It rained hard during the night, and the fire they built under the lean-to with the powder and flint from Son’s rifle smoked and hissed in the damp air and then finally died. The blankets they had brought from the Indian camp were drenched and soaked with mud, and by dawn the three of them were shivering and miserable with cold. Son tried to find enough dry wood to start another fire and used up the rest of the powder in his horn without ever charring the kindling. They sat in the gray light, their bodies stiff and immobile in their wet clothes, and stared at the string of hobbled horses that were tearing at the grass in the mist.
“What do you want to do?” Son said.
“We ain’t got no choice. It’s more than a hundred miles to the coast, and we ain’t even got powder for game now. We ride into Tyler’s.”
“We might go right back to the pen, too. If they don’t blow us all over the street first.”
“I ain’t going back to prison, either, Son. There’s another way.”
The rain dropped out of the trees on top of the lean-to. Hugh pushed his wet hair back over his head and looked directly at Son.
“She goes in first,” he said.
“Wait a minute.”
“She goes in and finds out if any Frenchies are there.”
“Hugh, that ain’t right to send her in by herself.”
“It’s got to be that way. That ferry-keeper said they got a store there. Indians are always coming by to see a white man’s store. It ain’t nothing unnatural.”
The woman was looking quickly at both of them.
“That saloon is probably full of drunk men, too,” Son said.
“You come up with a better one, then. And while you’re doing that, think about what happens to her if we get shot or put in shackles by Emile Landry. She’s a long way from any Tonkawas, and there’s people around here that would use her for a draft horse, if not worse. That includes Jack Tyler. If I know him, he’s got a jenny-barn built out back of his saloon.”
“It just don’t feel right, Hugh.”
“You spent two years in jail and you’re stupid as the day you come in. I ain’t doing nothing bad to her. I’m trying to keep the three of us alive. You remember she was in on that horse deal just like us.”
Son flicked a twig at the ground.
“How long do we give her?” he said.
“The old man said it’s about fifteen miles. We wait till tomorrow morning and then head for Galveston.”
“No good,” the woman said.
“Ain’t you been listening?” Hugh said. “We ain’t got a choice in the matter. There’s people over here from Louisiana that will kill us or put us in a pen for the rest of our lives. Now, we taken you away from them Choctaws, and I reckon you owe us something.”
“Damn, Hugh.”
“Don’t make me out the bastard. You know I’m right.”
“I don’t have the round metal to go into the store,” she said.
“What?” Hugh said.
“She don’t have any money. What’s she supposed to do? Walk in and start asking if there’s any Louisiana Frenchies around?”
“All right, you do this. Go to the saloon and ask for Jack Tyler. You won’t have no trouble finding him. He never gets no farther from his whiskey than a glass away. You just tell him that Hugh Allison wants to know if he can get credit at the bar. Now, you say my name back to me.”
“I know your name.”
“Say it.”
“Hell, it is. All we got to do is step in our own flop just once today, and you and me is going to be in a jail wagon again.”
“She understands.”
“Well, that’s what I’m talking about. I don’t want no misunderstandings.”
“I’ll unhobble the gelding,” Son said to the woman. “He ain’t fast, but he’s got a lot more stay to him.”
He walked out under the dripping trees with the woman and slipped the bridle off her horse and put it on the gelding.
“You ain’t actually got to go in that saloon,” he said. “Maybe just go down to the horse pen and ask the hostler if there’s a Frenchman around. Tell him a Mexican officer back east of the Trinity sent you.”
“You stay till tomorrow,” she said.
“We got to go if you ain’t back by then. What Hugh said is true. Them men want to put us back in prison.”
She slipped up on the back of the gelding as though she were made of air.
“What you did to this bad man?”
“We killed his brother.”
Her eyes wandered over his face, then fixed steadily into his.
“Why?”
“We didn’t go to do it, I guess, but—I don’t know, I can’t think real clear about it.”
She bent low over the horse and moved it through the wet trees, then once she was out of the timber she brought her heels into its sides and whipped the reins across its neck. Son watched her become smaller and smaller as she disappeared like a dark cipher into the mist rolling across the distant meadow.
“You ever seen the buck kick the doe out of the woods when he knowed a hunter was out there?” Son said.
“I don’t want to listen to no more of it. You got too much a way of going along with what I say and giving me hell about it at the same time. You didn’t hear her holler none. An Indian knows what’s got to be done and keeps her mouth shut about it.”
“Where you going?”
“To follow behind her. Use your head. There ain’t no sense in shivering here all day and waiting for her to ride back the whole fifteen miles.”
By noon the sunlight broke through the haze and dappled the soft green of the rolling hills. There were groves of live oaks and blackjack in the fields, and occasionally they saw mud-chinked log cabins with chimneys built of field stones. When they topped a hill, the country and the vast sky overhead seemed to reach endlessly to the western horizon.
“It’s just big, ain’t it?” Son said.
“Yes, it’s enough country almost to make you give up being a criminal,” Hugh said. “It’s probably what Kentucky looked like when Dan’l Boone come in it. There wasn’t nothing there except some Shawnees, and all you had to do was spit on the ground to make something grow.”
“What do you reckon’s going to happen to this revolution?”
“Who knows? I’d sure hate to come out on the wrong end of it, though. That general Santa Anna is supposed to be a sonofabitch. It wouldn’t surprise me none if he fired every white town in Texas. But then again Jim Bowie can take a real mean vengeance when he gets the blood up in his head.”
“What do you know about Sam Houston?”
“I always heered he was a drunkard. They run him out of Tennessee when he was governor. They say he went over to live with the Indians in Arkansas and stayed so drunk all the time he wasn’t hardly human no more.”
“How’s he run an army?”
“From what I hear he’s an old fox. He must be if Santa Anna ain’t caught him yet and dropped him off a tree.”
“Hugh, you ever think about putting it down in one place?”
“What?”
“I mean your own place. Not doing nothing for nobody else, just yourself.”
“Anything I ever done was for myself. But what you’re talking about is something else. That’s why you come down the river to New Orleans. You had a notion of being one of them French dandies down at the cotton exchange. You seen what that got you. Them gentlemen in the courtroom put a little snuff up their nose and sent your ass to prison. The only place for the likes of us is rolling free so they can’t get a chain on our leg. And that don’t change no matter where you’re at. Once this revolution is over, Texas won’t be no different than back in the United States. They’ll have a rule for everything and a manacle to go with it.”
“You was in jail because you killed a man.”
“But you wasn’t. And I gone to prison before just like you. They should have hung me for what I done with the Harpes, but I always got in the worst trouble for stinking up the air around gentlemen. That’s something Jim Bowie understood. When he come down to New Orleans he learned to dress and talk just like them. But they always knowed he’d slit their noses if they didn’t address him proper.”
LATE THAT AFTERNOON they stopped their horses in a stand of oaks on a hilltop overlooking miles of meadowland. In the distance they could see where the trace disappeared into more trees and then a hazy line of green hills beyond.
“Tyler’s place is probably beyond that next rise, ain’t it?” Son said.
“I hope it is. My butt feels like somebody put a dirk up it.”
“Five dollars a head, right? We’re going to be rich if Landry ain’t there.”
“You watch out for Jack, though. He’s got a way of putting it back in his purse.”
“I don’t plan on getting drunk on his corn or fooling with none of them jenny-barners.”
“We need saddles, food, powder, and a shit pile of other things if we’re going on to Bexar and don’t want to keep looking like convicts. That shirt of yours smells like something died inside it. You might not know it, but living in an Indian camp gives you a stink that makes a white person’s nose fall off, and that dried blood don’t help it none.”
“I’ll be damned. Lookie yonder,” Son said.
Hugh leaned forward on his horse and squinted with his walleye through the failing light.
“She must have poured it on that gelding,” he said. “You see anybody behind her?”
“Not unless they’re coming out of them trees.”
“I got to admit: an Indian can get forty miles out of a horse when a white man can’t get twenty. You sure you don’t see nothing behind her?”
“There ain’t nothing behind her except a shadow.”
Five minutes later the woman walked the gelding into the oak trees. Its neck and flanks were covered with foam and its rib cage quivered under the touch of her heels. The woman’s face was drained with exhaustion, and perspiration rolled in drops out of her black hair. She pushed herself back on the gelding’s rump and dropped the knotted reins on its neck. Her exposed thighs were shaking.
“What’d Jack say?” Hugh asked.
“You can drink at the saloon all night on credit.”
“He didn’t see no Frenchmen there?” Hugh said.
“He say you come in and drink.”
“Was there any foreign-looking people around? Men that look like they don’t belong around here?”
“She done told you, Hugh. Don’t talk to her like she’s a child.”
“Well, shit then, our luck has changed in another direction. I’m going to buy you all a supper tonight that would make the king of England piss in his slippers. I can’t believe we got a chance to be free white people again.”
It was dusk when they reached the settlement, and the cold twilight lay in a purple band on the rolling horizon. The road that led between Jack Tyler’s saloon and stock barns and a store on the opposite side was scarred with wagon and horse tracks, and there were at least a dozen horses tethered in front of the saloon. Son’s eyes moved over each saddle and gum coat or blanket roll tied across the horses’ rumps.
“You see anything that don’t smell right?” he said.
“None of them saddles is French. Quit worrying,” Hugh said.
The saloon was built of split and notched logs with a raised porch, and the shuttered windows glowed with the yellow light of the oil lamps inside.
“I wish I had a load in this rifle,” Son said.
“They wouldn’t try to arrest us in there, nohow. I bet most of the boys drinking in there are Tennessee and Kentucky, and they ain’t going to let a bunch of Frenchies arrest nobody in their place.”
The two of them slipped off their horses and stepped up on the porch, but the woman stayed behind.
“Come on,” Son said.
“The Americans don’t want Indians,” she said.
“You was in here this afternoon, wasn’t you?” Hugh said. “They ain’t going to eat you.”
“I wait.”
“No, you ain’t,” Son said, and took her by the arm and led her with him.
They pushed open the oak door and stepped into the heavy warmth of the room and the smell of stale tobacco smoke, wine, raw whiskey, and men’s bodies. A fire was burning in a hearth made of field stones, and a black pot filled with chicken stew was boiling in the center of the logs. The long square tables were filled with men dressed in animal skins or colorless sweat-faded eastern clothes. Their unshaved faces were red with windburn and alcohol, and many of them wore pistols or knives on their chests. Son felt strange at being around so many white people who were not convicts. Then he noticed the women at the tables.
He had never seen women in a saloon before, except in New Orleans and they were mulattoes. But these were white and Mexican women, and they were as drunk as the men with them. His father, who had been a religious man, once told him about a saloon in Nashville that had jenny-barners working in it, and his father had said he hoped Son would never allow his body to be corrupted by women who had Satan’s diseases inside them.
A Mexican woman in a dirty white blouse with snuff stains on her lips sat on a hogshead behind the long plank that served as a counter.
“Where’s Jack Tyler at?” Hugh said, loudly.
“In the back,” she said.
“Tell him to get his dirty bum out here. My name is Hugh Allison, and I want three cups of that wine you’re setting on.”
“Fifteen American cents for each cup,” she said.
“You just serve it up and get Jack.”
“Fifteen cents for each.”
“I ain’t going to have to go around there and serve myself, am I? You put it right here on the board and tell that old sonofabitch to haul it out here.”
“Slow it down,” Son said, and leaned his rifle against the plank. He looked around at the men who were now watching the three of them.
“Ah, now there’s our wine. I thank you, ma’am, because this is surely a gentleman’s cup. Once, Jim Bowie and me and two other fellows from Kentucky drank a whole cask of this down on Congo Square in New Orleans. We got so drunk we set a cotton bale on fire, and Jim was going to roast one of them Frenchy gendarmes for breakfast.”
The Mexican woman had disappeared behind the burlap curtain at the back of the room. The men at the tables had stopped talking and were looking intently at Hugh.
“You know James Bowie, mister?” one man said. He wore a gray flop hat over an enormous head, and his hands looked like frying pans. There was a large knife and a cap and ball pistol in a double holster on his chest.
“I knowed Jim for years. I knowed both of his brothers, too, when the three of them bought out most of the cotton exchange in New Orleans.”
“Then if you know so damn much, what do you think about a Texian that marries into Santa Anna’s family?” the man said. His eyes were black and dilated with whiskey, and his body had the heavy, confident proportions of a man who knew he could command a room’s attention simply by changing the tone of his voice.
Hugh sipped out of his cup and squinted his shining walleye at the men staring at him from the tables. Son moved his hand over to the rifle barrel and looked backward at the oak door.
“From what I understand James Bowie and Sam Houston is about to tear Santa Anna’s nuts out,” Hugh said. “I also understand that James Bowie would use that knife of his to slip the head off a drunk man that made a remark about his marriage. That probably don’t apply here, but I’d sure hate to tell him about it when I get to Bexar. What’s your name, anyway, mister?”
The pot of chicken stew cooking in the logs boiled over and snapped in the flames. The men at the tables went to fixing their pipes or motioning quietly to the Mexican woman to fill their cups again.
“It’s all right that you don’t remember your name, mister,” Hugh said. “Sometimes a man gets his tongue caught in his cup and don’t know how to speak right. Damn, if that ain’t old Jack Tyler walking out with his britches unbuttoned.”
Jack Tyler came through the burlap curtain at the far end of the plank. He couldn’t have been over five feet tall, Son thought, and his hair hung on his wide shoulders like a girl’s. His shirtsleeves and long underwear were rolled, and his stubby arms were knotted with muscle. There was a line of dead skin where his hat fitted his head, and Son could smell the corn whiskey and tobacco juice on his breath like a rancid odor corked in a stone crock.
“Ain’t you got no shame, Jack? Why don’t you button it up before it catches cold?” Hugh said.
“It’s been a hell of a long time, Hugh,” he said. “From what I heered about you, I didn’t think you’d ever be over this way again.”
“I always figured to come back to Texas eventually. New Orleans is all right, but the likes of me can’t make no money there and I understand you all been having more fun shooting at Mexicans than hogs rolling in shit.”
“Dealing with them sonsofbitches ain’t exactly fun.”
“Don’t poor-mouth me, Jack. You’d make money selling sand to a thirsty man in a desert. Look, this here is Son Holland, a friend of mine from Tennessee, and this is White-Man’s-Woman. We stayed a bit with the Indians back toward the Sabine.”
Son put out his hand, and Tyler shook it as though he were momentarily picking up something strange and unfamiliar.
“You got something dead inside that shirt of yours?” he said.
“What do you mean?” Son said.
“You fellows must have been eating dog with them Indians,” Tyler said.
“Maybe it’s just where I’m standing,” Son said. “The air smells right rank to me, too.”
“The reason we stopped here, Jack, is to do some trading,” Hugh said.
“I know the reason you stopped here, and we better go in back to talk about it.”
“I ain’t talking about nothing right now except money and some of that chicken stew and a lot of wine,” Hugh said.
“We got time for that, but you all had better walk in back with me.”
Son finished his cup and set it on the plank.
“I think he’s got some news for us we don’t want to hear,” he said.
The three of them followed Tyler through the curtain into a back room with a dirt floor and a log ceiling. A plank table was nailed to the top of a sawed-off oak stump with an oil lamp on it and in the dim yellow light Son saw a fat Mexican woman lying on a bunk bed. Her stomach brought her dress over her knees, and there were rings of fat on her thighs.
“Vaya por la comida y vino,” Tyler said, then pushed the woman in the rear with his boot.
“Jack, your taste in a bunkie has sure changed. You used to be chasing the young ones around. Maybe we’re getting too damn old for anything except them big sows, and that’s what I wanted to talk with you about. What’s the toll on them lady-fairs out there?”
“You better get serious for a space,” Tyler said. “You and your friend from Tennessee ain’t over here to shoot at no Mexicans. Four days ago a bunch of Frenchies come through here, and they had papers on both of you. I don’t read no French and I couldn’t hardly understand the head sonofabitch, but it looked to me like you all killed a prison guard.”
“It’s hard getting out of them Louisiana jails sometimes, Jack,” Hugh said. “Then again, you can’t always believe what a Frenchie will tell you.”
The Mexican woman brought three plates of chicken stew with wooden spoons to the table, and a large green bottle of wine in a wicker cask.
“I ain’t telling you what to do,” Tyler said. “But that head fellow was a mean bastard, and I wouldn’t want him after me.”
“Where did they head?” Son said.
“West, down the trace, but that don’t mean nothing,” Tyler said. “Did you all really kill a prison guard back in Louisiana?”
“We killed that fellow’s brother,” Son said, and lifted a spoonful of the chicken stew into his mouth. The taste of cooked meat that wasn’t game or boiled dog made him weak inside.
“What the hell are you going to do now?” Tyler said.
“After you sharp us out of the horses we got outside, we’re going to Bexar and see ole Jim Bowie,” Hugh said. His mouth was filled with food, and wine dripped out of his whiskers.
“Do you know what’s going on over there?” Tyler said.
“What?” Son said.
“Ben Milam says he’s going to kick all the Mexicans out of there and make it the capital of a new republic.”
“Who’s Ben Milam?” Son said.
“You ought to know that, boy, if you’re fixing to join up with him,” Tyler said. “He’s from back in Kentucky, and he’s a crazier sonofabitch than Bowie or Houston, both.”
“Who you putting in with on this deal, anyway?” Hugh said.
“Anybody that can cut us loose from the Mexicans. But I don’t think any of them fellows we got right now is going to help us. They say Sam Houston is drunk half the time, and Jim Bowie has been too close to Santa Anna to suit me. Stephen Austin claims he’s general of the Texas army, but there ain’t no army, except the volunteers they try to hold together from one day to the next. I’d like one Mexican rifle ball to fly across the Sabine so Andy Jackson’s soldiers could come in and take over the whole damn country.”
“Andy Jackson wouldn’t do shit for none of us,” Hugh said. His jaw was becoming slack with drink, and there was a fine bead of light in his walleye. He lifted his cup again and drank it to the bottom. “You know that. You was at Chalmette, too. We killed them redcoats by the hundreds. We drilled them right in the midle of their silver breast buckles while they marched into us with the sun in their eyes and the bagpipes playing their death song behind them. Then we run them with pig-stickers from the mudworks all the way back to the Gulf. What did Andy Jackson give us for it, or the ball I caught in my leg? Not enough scrip to buy two quarts of rum in New Orleans.”
“It don’t matter. Anything is better than living under these arrogant greasers,” Tyler said.
“We want to trade that string we got out front,” Son said. “You want to take a look at them?”
“I reckon you got a bill of sale on all of them, ain’t you?” Tyler said.
“We got the same kind you probably got on some of them horses in your lot,” Son said.
“The Mexicans is rough on me sometimes,” Tyler said. “They come by and check my lot every couple of weeks, and they take anything I ain’t got a paper on.”
“We ain’t trying to bargain with you,” Son said. “Just look at the string, and we’ll take half the amount in American money and the rest in trade.”
“This is part of Mexico, boy, and you deal in Mexican money here.”
“If you want to talk to me, my name is Holland, and that woman out at the plank wasn’t taking no Mexican money for the drinks.”
“You got a real pistol for a partner,” Tyler said to Hugh.
“I got to admit I told him you’re a bit of a sharper, Jack. But go look at them horses. They’re a good string. They ain’t branded or shoed, and you got many an Indian pony just like them. You and me both know the Mexicans ain’t going to give you no trouble over them.”
“What do you need in goods?” Tyler said.
“Everything, including a new shirt for Son.”
“All right, you set here and I’ll be back. Holler at the woman if you want more from the pot.”
Tyler went back through the burlap curtain.
“You sure pick some mangy bastards for friends,” Son said.
“He is a little rank sometimes, but he’s still a friend. Don’t forget we’d be between a rock and a hard place if he wasn’t here.”
“What do you reckon he’ll offer on the horses?”
“Anything he can get away with. But figure it this way: an hour ago we didn’t have nothing between us except an empty rifle and some spent horses that ain’t worth their hides, and right now we’re eating his food and drinking his wine. Pass that cask over here again. I believe he put a whole block of salt in that stew.”
“You’re into your cup, Hugh, you got your mind on them women out there, and if you let him sharp us on this deal we’re going our different ways on the trace tomorrow.”
“Now, that’s a bad thing to say to a partner, ain’t it, White-Man’s-Woman?”
“I not White-Man’s-Woman,” she said. In the light from the oil lamp on the plank table her face looked as though it were cut out of mahogany. She held the wooden spoon balanced over the plate in her whole hand.
“Well, we ain’t got anything else to call you,” Hugh said. “I was just saying Son shouldn’t be rough on his partner.”
“You want bad women outside,” she said. “They take your round metal and give you sickness back for it.”
Hugh wiped the wine out of his whiskers with his hand, and poured again out of the cask.
“If this ain’t something,” he said. “A man spends three years locked in a pen, and when he gets out he’s got a couple of church deacons for company. You just take care of yourselves. I was through this country in 1821 when an Indian would put an arrow shaft through your back as soon as he caught you sleeping in the saddle.”
Hugh hit his hand on the table and knocked his plate into his lap. He stared at it blindly, then raked it with his palm onto the dirt floor.
“We’re going to need a block and tackle to get you on a horse tomorrow,” Son said.
“The last time I seen a block and tackle we was doing something else with it,” Hugh said. He raised his cup to his mouth and spilled most of it down his shirtfront.
Jack Tyler came through the burlap curtain with a leather purse in one hand and a large holstered pistol in the other. He looked at Hugh, whose face was white and vacuous as he stared at the green neck of the wine cask.
“That’s a right fine string you got out there,” he said. “I’ll give you fifteen dollars American, the tack for two horses, all the grub and clothes you need, a dress for the woman, and I’ll throw in something extra you ain’t ever seen before.”
“Wait a minute, mister. That’s forty dollars worth of horses out there,” Son said.
“You said you wanted it in goods as well as money, Holland. I’m giving you the best deal you’ll catch between here and some Mexican trader up the trace.”
“You said saddles for only two horses,” Son said.
“An Indian don’t ride a saddle,” Tyler said.
“Three saddles, Jack,” Hugh said. “We don’t want no army ass-busters, either.”
“All right,” Tyler said.
“Hell, it is. You’re trying to sharp your friend when he’s got his head in the jug,” Hugh said.
“You look here at what I got in this holster,” Tyler said. “I reckon you heered about them, but you ever seen one before?”
“No, I ain’t. It’s a big sonofabitch, though, ain’t it? Will all them chambers really fire?”
“Sam Colt himself was through here about five months ago, and he left me this one for the bill he owed at the bar,” Tyler said. “We took it outside, and he knocked five slats out of my fence as fast as he could cock it.”
Hugh picked up the heavy revolver in his hand, pulled back the hammer on half-cock, and rolled the cylinder across his palm.
“It looks to me like all them caps would light with the first flash,” he said.
“You make up your own mind about it. I got all the powder and caps you need out front. Sam Colt said he figured out that turning chamber while he was carving a wood gun on board a navy ship.”
“Before this goes on no further, let’s make sure what we’re going to get for our horses, Hugh,” Son said. “We don’t want no woman’s dress, we don’t want no salted fatback for grub, and no bill in the morning for what you’re fixing to do tonight.”
“You all talk about it. I’m going to find some real company,” Hugh said.
“Damn you, it’s coming out of your share if you have to go hungry down the trace,” Son said.
Hugh careened through the curtain into the front room.
“Where can we sleep at?” Son said.
“I got some pallets fixed up in the back of the barn,” Tyler said. “I’ll send my Mexican woman over with some blankets. You want to take the bottle with you?”
“You can quit what you’re thinking, because I ain’t going to have liquor in my head when we count out our supplies tomorrow morning.”
“You ought to take it with you.”
“You just keep your dirty mouth to yourself, mister. And I’ll take the pistol so Hugh don’t forget what you already give him.”
Son and the woman walked through the crowded front room toward the door. Hugh was at one of the long tables by the fireplace with a Mexican woman on each side of him. He was telling a story and crashing his fist down on the planks each time he finished a sentence.
It was cold outside, and the wind was blowing hard out of the north. The few stars in the blue-black sky were low over the dark hills, and leaves were shredding from the clumps of oaks in the fields.
“Ice fall from the sky in the morning,” the woman said.
“What?”
“It comes from that star above the little hill.”
“That’s the end of the little dipper. It don’t have anything to do with the weather. People at home say it means Jesus is showing you ain’t got to reach up but just a little to see his plan.”
“You see.”
They went into the barn and walked between the stalls to the back, where hay had been piled and flattened under quilts beside one wall. In the darkness they could hear the wind ripping across the loft floor.
“I hate to think about the drunks that’s going to be sleeping with us later,” Son said.
“They stay all night in the saloon,” she said.
“Hugh won’t. They’ll throw him out on his butt as soon as he’s drunk enough to handle.”
“He sleep with bad women tonight. He not come here.”
Jack Tyler’s fat Mexican woman came into the barn with an angle lamp and four folded U.S. army blankets. In the yellow flare off the lamp she looked awful. She dropped the blankets on the hay.
“No orinen por aquí,” she said, then walked with her lamp through the stall while the horses knocked their hooves into the wood.
“What did she say?” Son said.
“She not want a squaw man and Indian woman in her barn.”
“She didn’t say that.”
“How you know?” She unfolded one of the army blankets and lay down on the hay. “You think they like me here? How the Americans look at you when you walk out with me?”
“Those are all drunk men. Their heads are full of rut and whiskey. They wasn’t paying no mind to us.”
“Why you keep your hand so tight on pistol, then?”
He felt his face flush in the dark.
“Because I don’t like dealing with a sharper like Jack Tyler,” he said. “I don’t like being in a saloon full of white trash and jenny-barners, either. Last, I put in a good day today and I don’t feel like nobody holding me to the fire before I go to sleep.”
He sat on a quilt and pulled off his boots. The hay sank under his weight, and a pain shot out of his rib cage into his heart that made his mouth go open for breath.
“Stay back,” she said, and pressed her palms against his forehead.
He could smell the animal odor in her clothes again. She pulled his shirt back and touched her fingers along the scabbed wound in his side.
“You start bleed again,” she said. Then she knelt beside him and began tearing away his shirt in strips.
“You crazy Tonkawa woman. That’s the only shirt I got until Tyler gives me one in the morning, and Hugh’s probably already drunk that up by this time.”
“I wash. You wait,” she said.
He watched her walk through the row of stalls, looking for a pail, then find one in a trough and push open the front door against the sky. He heard her release the winch on the well out in the lot and the hollow sound of the bucket hitting the water far below.
She washed his wound while he sat hunched with an army blanket over his shoulders.
“How’d you learn to talk English when you was with them Mexican buffalo hunters all the time?” he said.
“Mexicans not take me from the Tonkawas. Americans did. We were four women and seven children picking berries when they shoot everyone. They not kill me and my sister, but she die later. They take away my name Sana and call me White-Man’s-Woman. Iron Jacket told you I was Tonkawa hand-blower. They not have that in my people. Later the Americans gave me to the Mexican hunters for the magic water and a gun.”
“How’d your sister die?”
“She get the disease that lives in the water where the Comanches stay. It can live inside the Comanches and not hurt them because they are bad people, but it kill other Indians.”
“Why’d you let Iron Jacket tell all them lies about you?”
“You and Hugh not ask me. You just listen to coward Indian.”
“I’m listening now, ain’t I?”
“You got bad feeling inside about Indians.”
“That don’t mean I don’t like none of them.”
“I hear you call them red niggers to Hugh. What they done to you that’s so bad?”
“It don’t make no difference now who done it.”
“What they done?”
“Some drunk Shawnees killed my folks back in Tennessee.”
“Who Shawnee?”
“I told you it don’t make no difference. All them people is rubbed out, anyway. The only thing I got in my mind is getting away from Emile Landry. If Hugh don’t stop getting careless, we’re going to make a mistake and get sent back to the pen. They’ll hang us when they get us back there, too.”
“You strange boy. I never think you kill.”
They heard voices rising in the saloon, then a crashing sound like a table being thrown on its side.
“Damn, I bet Hugh is back with the Harpe gang now,” Son said.
“You not worry about him. He always know what he do.”
“I think I remember one time he didn’t and somebody went upside his head with a stick of firewood.”
“You lie down now. Tomorrow you have new shirt.”
“Tomorrow I’m going to be sobering up Hugh in the trough.”
“He be all right. You lie down.” She pressed him back on the pallet with her fingers. “You good boy. You live too much for so young.”
He closed his eyes momentarily and smelled the hay and the odor of the horses in the stalls. The wind was rattling a piece of loose tack in the loft overhead. When he opened his eyes in the darkness again, he saw Sana lying on her hip next to him with her long hair folded into a curve under the blanket’s edge.
Then between sleep and a dream, just before he was pulled away into the clicking of hailstones against the roof, he felt her lean over him, brush his forehead with her fingertips, and touch his mouth with hers.
IT WAS BRIGHT and cold in the morning when Son walked out of the barn with an army blanket wrapped around him, and the hailstones had frozen in the horse lot like pieces of broken glass. Hugh was already up, tying their supplies down on a pack mule. His face was red in the wind, and he wore a flop hat pulled down low on his ears. He picked up a wool-lined canvas coat from the stack of supplies and threw it at Son.
“Put that on before you get the pneumonie,” he said.
“I didn’t reckon you’d be moving around this morning.”
“The whiskey or wine ain’t been made that can give me a hangover, boy.”
“Let me get Sana and let’s move it down the trace.”
“Who?”
“That’s her name.”
Hugh grinned and pulled a leather thong into a tight knot.
“Don’t say what’s going on in that worthless mind of yours,” Son said.
“I wouldn’t dream of it. Don’t walk off just yet. I done some late drinking and talking with Jack, and I think I got a couple of pretty good ideas. You remember what that ferry-tender said about hiding in the army? That ain’t a bad notion. Besides, Jack said Sam Houston’s promising six hundred and forty acres of land to any soldier that’ll see it to the end with him. You was talking about putting it down in one place, and that’s a hell of a lot of land to do it on.”
“It don’t look to me like he’s going to have any land to give out.”
“Well, you take your chances when you play, don’t you? And once we’re in the army, Emile Landry can’t do shit to us.”
“What’s to stop him? Sam Houston don’t represent no real government.”
“You don’t know nothing about soldiering on the losing side. They ain’t going to let nobody take you, because they need your butt and musket there in the trench. It’s the desperate people that win the wars, boy.”
“What about Sana?”
“I got that worked out. Jack says there’s a Tonkawa camp over on the Brazos. We leave her with her people and then head for Bexar or wherever Sam Houston’s at.”
“Maybe she don’t want to go back.”
“Son, stop making it hard every time we got to do something. We can’t wander all over Texas with an Indian woman. Somewhere along the line our luck is going to run out. The Mexicans are going to get us, or Landry is, or maybe we’ll just end up freezing to death on the plains. When you’re in a foul-smelling outhouse, you shit through the hole and get out.”
“You got a coat for her?”
“It’s under them bags of jerky.”
“I reckon I’m the one that tells her, too.”
“That’s up to you. But there ain’t no two ways about it: she’s got a spark in her eye for you.”
“I’ll tell her on down the trace.”
Hugh took a stub of a cigar from his shirt pocket and put it in his teeth. He pulled the pack cinch tighter on the mule’s belly and looped it through the metal ring.
“If you want, I’ll do it. She’ll take it from me without no complaint,” he said. “What you don’t understand about Indians is that they don’t fight against what they know they got to do. That’s why they don’t have no fear in a battle.”
“I’ll talk with her. Don’t say nothing.”
“All right, let’s get it, then. There’s a woman inside that wants me to jump the broomstick with her. I don’t know whether she’s drunk or crazy.”
“She probably just don’t see too good.”
They rode westward on the trace through the hills in the cold yellow sunshine, and at noon they ate a lunch of boiled coffee, jerked venison, and parched corn on the edge of a piney woods. Son had slipped the pack off the mule, and sat with his back against it and the barrel of the Kentucky rifle propped across his shin. The wind bent the grass to a pale green and yellow in the fields. Hugh had just lit another cigar he had gotten from Tyler’s store when three men rode their horses out of the woods a hundred yards down from them. Son pulled the rifle up across his lap and snapped the hammer back to half-cock, and Hugh opened his coat and casually worked the Colt’s revolver loose from his belt.
“Them three look like they fell out of a slop jar, don’t they?” Son said.
“They’re pretty mangy-looking, all right,” Hugh said. “That one in front looks like somebody whipped his face with a thorn bush.”
“Let’s stop them where they’re at.”
“Let them come in. Maybe they just smelled our coffee.”
The three riders were dressed in filthy deerskins, their breeches streaked with dung and horse sweat, and two of them had Mexican water canteens slung over their pommels. The man in front had long flaxen, greasy hair that hung from under a U.S. Army bill-cap. His face was as white as a carp’s bely, Son thought, except for the sores that looked like a spray of bird shot in the dead skin. A withered scalp and what looked like a dried and blackened human ear hung from a beaded thong on his shirt.
“What can we do for you fellows?” Hugh said, grinning over his cigar, his walleye rolling with light.
“We was chasing a doe through the woods back there,” the man in front said. “You seen her come out here?”
“No, sir, we didn’t see no deer,” Hugh said. ‘That’s a pretty hard place to chase one, isn’t it? Them brambles and tree limbs must have chewed you up.”
“We been short on camp meat since we come down from the Red,” the man said. “That norther’s been pushing the game ahead of us each day.”
“You can have what’s left of our coffee and some jerky. We ain’t got too much else,” Hugh said.
“That’s mighty kind,” the man said. He and the other two riders dismounted and took turns drinking the scalding grinds out of the pot while they filled their hands with strips of jerked venison from the mule’s pack.
“Where you fellows headed on the trace?” the man said.
“Maybe over to Bexar or on up to the plains. We ain’t sure yet,” Hugh said.
“What’s it to you where we’re headed, mister?” Son said.
“Nothing. I just figured if you all was riding to Bexar maybe we could head that way together. I heered the Mexicans was trying to conscript Americans into their army. I sure wouldn’t want to be caught with just the three of us and run into a whole column of Mexicans that wanted to put us to soldiering again.”
“Which army was you in?” Hugh said.
“Andy Jackson’s, before they throwed us out.”
“It looks to me like you taken some scalps of recent,” Hugh said.
“We got jumped by Comanches up on the Red a couple of times. They get madder than hell when you shoot up their buffalo. I don’t blame them, though. The herds is getting thinner and thinner. A fellow can do a whole sight better these days bringing back slaves from up north. One of my bunkies here made five hundred dollars in one month. He caught fourteen of them hiding in a cave.”
“You fellows sure know how to turn a dollar, don’t you?” Son said.
“You don’t always get to choose the kind of living you make, mister,” the man said.
“We’re fixing to ride out, mister,” Hugh said. “You can come along if you like, but we plan on camping early because my partner here has got a boil on his butt that don’t let him ride too far in a day. We’ll be behind you most of the way.”
“We’ll get together before dark,” the man said.
The three men in deerskin got into their saddles and trotted their horses along the trace through the field of windblown grass. They posted on their thighs as though they had blisters from riding a long time.
“Why’d you let them off so easy?” Son said.
“I got them out in front of us, didn’t I? You just have your rifle ready when they turn. Kill the other two, but leave scab-face alive. Sana, you keep way behind us, like your horse has gone lame, and you don’t know what to do with it.”
“You reckon they’re going to hit us in an open field instead of in the woods?”
“Damn right, because scab-face there thinks he’s a smartass, and he’s going to do what he thinks we wouldn’t figure him to. Oh Lord, the innocence of your children.” Hugh clicked back the hammer on his revolver. “I sure hope this thing don’t blow my head off. I got a feeling I’d do more damage with it if I gave it to them and let them shoot at me.”
Five minutes later they watched the three riders slow their horses, then stop, as though they had forgotten something. The leader turned his horse around with a casual flick of the reins, and the other two men fanned out beside him. They rode slumped in the saddles with no weapons in sight.
“Yes, sir, they just remembered something they wanted to tell us,” Hugh said. “You take the one on the left, and don’t aim no higher than his nipples.”
“Hugh, you might be wrong.”
“I ain’t. I been with too many of their kind. Scab-face is going to start grinning like a shit-eating cat, and then he’ll move.”
Son’s hands were tight on his rifle stock. He began to worry about the powder they had gotten from Jack Tyler. It would be just like that sharper to mix black sand in it, he thought. Then the leader smiled and called out something at them in the wind. At the same time his hand went inside his coat and came out with a huge cap and ball pistol.
Son threw the rifle to his shoulder, raised in his stirrups, and sighted on the breastbone of the rider to the left of the leader. The pan flashed, and an almost simultaneous explosion roared in his ear and spooked his horse in a circle. He heard Hugh fire, then saw him cock the Colt with both hands and fire a second time. The man on the left had been blown backward off his horse and lay in the grass with one leg bent under him. The rider on the right was hit in the throat and was bent forward over his horse, roaring blood over its neck while he tried to pick the reins off the ground with one hand. The leader’s pistol had misfired, and he sat frozen in the saddle, his face bloodless with fear and shock.
“Take him!” Hugh said.
Son kicked his boots into his horse’s ribs and rode at a full gallop straight at the leader. The man tore the defective cap from his pistol and pushed another one into the firing hole. He raised the pistol just as Son swung the rifle by the barrel with both hands across his face. Son could feel the wood stock cut into the bone. The man’s foot was twisted in the stirrup, and his horse dragged him thirty yards before it stopped and started tearing at the grass with its teeth.
The man with the wound in his throat was slumped motionless along his horse’s neck, his open mouth a brilliant red.
“You done good, boy!” Hugh yelled. “I think you tore scab-face’s head off his shoulders. Come over here and look at this one. Does that Kentucky do a job on a man. The ball went in as neat as a thumb hole and come out like a frying pan.”
Son couldn’t speak. He was shaking all over.
“Get out of it. It’s over,” Hugh said. Then, “Do you hear me? They’re dead, except for scab-face, and he ain’t far from it.”
“What happened with your second shot?” Son’s voice sounded far away from him.
“I just missed, that’s all. I hit the first one so clean I figured I could catch scab-face in the side without even aiming. But ain’t this some beautiful pistol? I had that sonofabitch cocked and ready to fire again two seconds after the first shot. If the Texians get a bunch of these they’ll run Santa Anna plumb back to Mexico City.”
“Ain’t you got enough of that dead man?”
“I always admire good shooting, boy. And before you start to lecturing me again, you think about what they had in mind for us, not to say nothing about Sana.”
“What’d you want to do with that other one?”
“That depends a whole lot on him.”
They walked over to the unconscious man in the grass. Blood dripped from his nose into his unshaved face.
“Wake up, sweetheart,” Hugh said, touching the man on the shoulder with his boot.
“He looks like his brains is busted loose,” Son said.
“No, I think he’s just turned into a possum. But we’ll see.” Hugh knelt beside the man and began pushing divots of grass into his mouth. The man gagged and spat and tossed his head sideways. His eyes rolled wildly.
“That’s a little better, my friend,” Hugh said. “Now, you listen to me real careful. We killed your bunkies and you’re all on your own. So you’re going to tell us why you was dogging us through them trees back there, and don’t tell us you was running no deer.”
“We seen you leave out of Tyler’s this morning with all them supplies,” the man said.
Hugh raised his fist high over his head and smashed it down into the man’s face.
“Hold up, Hugh,” Son said.
“My ass. The next one is going to have his brains running out his nose,” Hugh said. “Why was you dogging us?”
“We rode into Tyler’s about two hours before light. I seen you was drunk and you was trading off that string, and I figured we’d take you easy today.”
Hugh hit him again, this time a short blow that brought the man’s lips into his teeth.
“I reckon you just lie by habit, don’t you?” he said. “There was a dozen men that left out of there this morning, most of them riding single with more money and supplies than we got. So I reckon we’re going to get it out of you the Indian way. What do you think about that, Sana?”
“He tell,” she said.
“We was going to kill you and take your supplies and animals, mister. The man your partner shot was after the squaw. What else you want out of me?”
“I can tell you’re a toughie that don’t get broke down easy,” Hugh said. He slipped his bone-handle knife out of the buckskin scabbard on his side and began sharpening the edge with a flint over the man’s face.
Then he pulled the man’s flaxen hair back in his fist and placed the knife’s edge between his ear and skull.
As Son stared at Hugh and the man lying on the ground, he didn’t know which of their expressions looked more horrible. Involuntarily, he stepped forward to pull Hugh away, but Sana held his arm with both her hands.
“You only make worse,” she said.
Hugh twisted the man’s hair tighter in his fist and pressed the flat of the knife blade against his scalp.
“Last chance or say good-bye to it forever.”
“Don’t do it. Please,” the man said. His mouth was trembling and tears ran out of his eyes. “A Frenchy named Landry has got two hundred dollars out on each of you.”
“Where’d you see this Frenchy at?” Hugh said.
“In a saloon where the trace branches off toward San Felipe.”
“What made you figure it was us he had the money out on?” Son said.
“He described that walleye. He said it looked like a black clam shell.”
“You ain’t off the point of my knife yet, asshole,” Hugh said.
“There ain’t anything else to tell you.”
“Where’s he supposed to pay you at?” Son said.
“Bexar or Matagorda Bay.”
“So you was going to put us in a salt barrel and haul us around half of south Texas. You’re lying again, boy,” Hugh said.
The man was silent, his eyes reaching upward into the blue sky. Hugh hit him on the ear with the butt of the knife.
“He said to pickle your heads in a jar and leave the rest,” the man said.
Hugh wiped the knife blade on the grass, slipped it in his scabbard, and got to his feet.
“This is the sonofabitch you thought I was being cruel on,” he said to Son.
“What do we do about him?”
“Kill him,” Sana said. Son turned and stared at her.
“She’s right. He knows who we are and where we’re at,” Hugh said.
“Hugh, we got to stop it somewhere.”
“He kill Indians’ food and then show off Indian scalp.”
“I got a feeling this boy would skin a skunk’s bottom if it’d put some money in his pocket,” Hugh said.
“I’m against it, and my say is half the vote here,” Son said. Hugh looked down at the man on the ground.
“You see, me and my partner vote on everything,” he said, “and he votes for your life. That’s lucky for you, ain’t it? The problem is that he don’t have a ball in his rifle, and I still got three in this Colt. So that’s unlucky for you.”
“I ain’t going to tell nobody,” the man said.
“I know you ain’t,” Hugh said.
“Please, mister. I’m heading for Galveston, and you won’t never see me again.”
“Galveston is right down the pike from Matagorda Bay, ain’t it?” Hugh said.
“I swear before Jesus I’ll get out of Texas. You can kill me if you ever see me anywhere again.”
Hugh took the revolver out of his belt and cocked the hammer back with his thumb. The man shook his head from side to side in the grass.
“Where’d you get that black ear you wear on your shirt?” Hugh said.
“I took it off a Comanche buck.”
“You never fought an Indian buck in your life. Who’d you cut it off of?”
“A squaw that used to tote for us.”
“What?”
“You heered me,” Hugh said, and placed the pistol barrel to the man’s temple.
A few minutes later he had the man take off his boots and buckskin breeches. The man’s white buttocks were puckered in the cold.
“I got a big bean fart working up in me right now,” Hugh said. “I’ll give you till it breaks loose to make them pine trees over yonder. Then I’m going to blow your skinny nuts all over this field.”
They watched the man race through the grass toward the stand of pines, the unnatural whiteness of his legs flashing in the sun.
“I guess you was with the Harpe gang, wasn’t you?” Son said.
“What you just seen is one way of doing it, boy. You either kill a man like that, or you shame him so he don’t ever bother you again. He’ll be afraid to sleep at night because of the dreams he’ll have about us.”
Behind them they heard the drone of deer flies in the grass.
“Let’s get out of here,” Hugh said.
“You reckon he was telling the truth about Landry being over in Bexar?”
“Shit, who knows? Landry might have lied to him, figuring scab-face would come out second best when he caught up with us and we’d cover him up in an ant pile. Piss on it, anyway. I need a drink. Sana, get that rum bottle out of my sack.”
“Let’s take their guns. We can sell them on down the trace.”
“You’re growing up all the time, ain’t you?”
As they rode away with the looted guns and powder horns and flints, the wind blew out of the pines and pressed the green and yellow grass flat in the field, exposing the booted leg of a man twisted on his knee like a tilted cross.