“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 heared 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 wind-blown 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.