“Got a knife on you?”
“No,” Frailey said. “I got nothing but the clothes on my back. I’m as dirt-nigger poor as you, right now.”
“Well I ain’t gonna die from that,” Boag said. He got both hands on the pants cuff and ripped it up to the knee and rolled the cloth back gently; it was already starting to stick to the wounds.
They’d put two bullets through his right calf. Not through the bone. The blood was a slow ooze so it was vein blood. The bullets must have gone straight through. He twisted his leg around and saw where they’d come out the back in the soft fleshy part of the calf. Probably cut some muscles up. The exit holes were wider than the others and the two had coursed together into one ragged bleeding wound.
“You maybe ain’t going to die from it,” Frailey said, “but you sure as hell ain’t going to walk very far on it for a while.”
Boag untied the bandanna from around his neck and wrung water out of it and tied it around his calf. He’d seen enough battle injuries to know you had to keep it clean and you had to keep quiet until the scabs built up. If you did those things there wasn’t much danger in it.
He sat and brooded on John B. Wilstach for a while. Finally Frailey said, “Tell you what, I’ll get a stick, scratch a hole for him.”
“That’s mighty kind.”
“No. He’s liable to start to stink in the morning. Bring a lot of buzzards down. Draw everybody in Hardyville down here to find out what’s happening. I can’t get far enough on foot if they start a search.”
Boag lay on his side listening to the river and the bugs. The leg throbbed and he watched Frailey make a trench grave for Wilstach. There was a great deal of dried blood in the palm of Wilstach’s hand where he’d twisted the knife away from Gutierrez. Wilstach didn’t look dead, he looked calm and pleased with himself; a couple of teeth showed where his lips were open a little, and he looked as if that rowdy grin was about to flash.
Boag said, “Hey.”
Frailey paused in his labors. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Pickett said he knew where he could sell that gold in Mexico.”
“Did he?”
“You got any idea where in Mexico?”
“Naw. I wasn’t even with them as long as you was.” Frailey started to dig again but then he stopped and straightened up and looked at Boag. “Shit, you ain’t thinking of going after them?”
“They owe me.”
Frailey let out a bark of laughter. Then he went back to his digging.
Boag said, “How much did you have coming?”
“Twenty-five hundred, same as you.”
“Then they owe you too.”
“Coon, when you’ve played enough cards you know when it’s time to take your losses and go look for another card table to swill at.”
“Well maybe.”
“Old Frailey’s just going to move on, give some other place a potshot at me.” Frailey stopped digging and looked up across the river. “California over there. Maybe find me a stake and a card game.”
Frailey seemed to judge he’d dug deep enough. He threw the stick aside and walked over to Wilstach. Boag said, “If you’re thinking about stripping that dead man you can forget it. He ain’t got nothing on him.”
“I wish he had a hat. I could sure use a hat.” Frailey picked up Wilstach’s bootheels and dragged him over toward the grave. “Boots are a lot too small for you or me.” He rolled the body into the hole and picked up dirt in his cupped hands and gradually Wilstach disappeared from view under the mound of soil.
Afterward Frailey went down to the river and washed his hands off, took a drink and stood a while looking at the far bank. “California,” he said, and the word barely reached Boag’s ears over the tumble of the river. In the end Frailey said, mostly to himself, “Well my boots are still wet anyway,” and walked out into the river until it was up to his neck.
The river was about a quarter-mile wide. Boag watched Frailey swim across, the current carrying him ten feet down-stream for every two feet headway he made; he was almost out of sight beyond the bend when he waded up on the far shore, a small figure in the moonlight. He didn’t turn or wave or anything. He just walked up into the bush willows and disappeared.
He slid himself down to the river. There was no hurry. He soaked the bandanna to get it as clean as he could and then he had a closer look at the wounds. He picked a few small pieces of grit out of them. They were still-bleeding a little and he made compresses out of ripped pieces of his shirt-tail, washed them and fitted them into the wounds and tied the bandanna around them, tight but not tourniquet-tight. He left the compresses in place fifteen or twenty minutes and then he removed them and was satisfied to see the bleeding had stopped, at least on the surface. He tore off a few bits of frayed skin and then lapped the openings together as well as he could while he brought the bandanna up around his leg again and tied it firmly.
Now it was best not to move for a while. You had to leave the wounds alone for the raw edges to start to knit together.
He heard an owl talking in the cactus somewhere uphill of him. That made him feel a little better because it suggested a way to get food but right now it was sleep he needed and he lay flat seeking it.
But sleep was hard to come by. There was thinking to do, there was emotion to accommodate.
He spent a long time remembering John B. Wilstach whom he had known six years and partnered with for three, in the army, and half another year since mustering out.
Then he was thinking about Gutierrez and Sweeney and Ben Stryker, and mostly about Mr. Jed Pickett with his big voice and his stiff blond mustache. Of course they hadn’t planned to cut Boag and Wilstach and the other new hands in at all. They’d just wanted strong backs to move the gold for them while they used their rifles and shotguns to keep the town of Hardyville at bay. Boag and Wilstach and Frailey and those two Yumas and the rest of them had Been pack animals to Mr. Pickett, nothing more than pack animals. When you were done using a pack animal you turned him in or turned him out. Mr. Pickett had left half his pack animals in Hardyville for the citizens to play with and he’d thrown the other half overboard after shooting the two Yuma Indians to death and trying to kill Boag and succeeding in killing John B. Wilstach. There were white men who did that kind of thing for sport. Nobody had shot Frailey; Frailey was white and Frailey took a white man’s view of it—a bad turn of the cards so Frailey would forget it and move on.
So they’d been shooting at Wilstach and Boag in the water not because there was any real reason to kill them but just because it was fun to shoot at moving targets.
Falling off to sleep Boag wondered if Mr. Pickett knew what it was like to be a moving target that somebody was shooting at for fun.
By daylight the gunshot ugliness in his leg was annoying: there was no point putting his weight on it yet because that would bunch the muscles and tear the things open again. He dragged himself around slowly doing what had to be done: a drink from the river first, and then up the bank until he came to a game trail in the brush where animals came down to drink. That took more than an hour although he found the game trail within a half mile of John B.’s grave. He spent two hours breaking sticks and honing them against rocks to make a figure-four trigger of branches on top of which he balanced the biggest stone he could claw out of the ground and roll up the bank on his knees. If a deer came along first it would be bad luck because the deadfall wasn’t tall enough off the ground and the deer would just knock the thing over. He had to hope the first drinkers after dark would be maybe badgers or a ’possum.