“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 further 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.”
“That’s enough, Hugh.”
“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 heared 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.”