not drop those guns and surrender?”
“To hell with you!” Yates yelled. And his hands flashed to his Colts.
Reeves had been right. What happened next was almighty sudden.
I drew my Colt and fired at the man in the cow-skin vest, who was just then drawing a bead on me. My bullet hit him low in the chest and dead center and he screamed and dropped to his knees. I had no time to see what happened next because a bullet split the air inches from my ear and I caught the smoke and muzzle flash of a gun to my left. A tall redhead was thumbing back the hammer readying another shot, but I shot faster. My bullet hit the cylinder of the gun in his hand, bounced off and crashed into his chin. The man made a gurgling sound, rose up on his toes, then stretched his length on the ground.
I turned quickly and saw Yates lying facedown, his blood staining the grass around him bright scarlet.
Reeves was still shooting and one man went down to his gun, then another.
There was only one outlaw still standing. The man dropped his Colt and yelled: “No! Don’t shoot, Bass! I’m out of it.”
“Then step away from the fight!” Reeves hollered. “Back there by the tree.” The outlaw quickly did as he was told, stark terror in his eyes, his mouth working.
I looked around me. The battle had taken less than ten seconds, but in that short time me and Reeves had played hob. Four men were dead and another lay by the fire, gut-shot, groaning his pain, his bootheels convulsively digging into the ground.
Gunsmoke drifted thick and gray like a mist among the surrounding trees and my ears were ringing from the concussion of the guns.
I felt sick to my stomach and my head ached. But I had no time to dwell on my miseries because the buckskin suddenly collapsed under me. I kicked free of the stirrups as the horse fell, and I sprawled flat on my back on the grass.
Reeves, bleeding where a bullet had burned across the thick muscle of his left shoulder, swung out of the saddle and gave me his hand. I grabbed it and he pulled me to my feet.
“The buckskin took a bullet early in the fight,” he said. “I saw that. But he was game, stayed on his feet until the shooting was over.”
The lawman slapped me on the back. “You did good, Dusty. When the chips were down you played the man’s part.”
I looked over at the two men I’d shot. “Are they both dead?” I asked.
Reeves nodded. “As dead as they’ll ever be. You drilled ’em all right.”
The green bile rose up into my throat and I turned away and retched convulsively for what seemed like an eternity until I started to figure there must be no limit to the contents of my stomach.
When I finally stopped and straightened up, I wiped a hand across my mouth and turned to Reeves. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It just came on me sudden like.”
Reeves, his black eyes unreadable, just smiled, kind of slight and slow and said: “I’ve seen worse.” Now his eyes searched mine, carefully reading what he saw. “It ain’t easy to kill a man, boy. And them as say it is, aren’t men—they’re animals”—he nodded toward Yates, who was staring sightlessly at the blue sky—“like him.”
The wounded man by the fire groaned and kicked his legs and Reeves stepped over to him. “How you feeling, boy?” he asked.
The man raised his head, his face gray with pain and shock. “Bass Reeves,” he gritted through bloodstained teeth, “you’re a black son of a bitch.”
Reeves kneeled and carefully set the frying pan back on the fire. He pulled his knife and one by one turned the bacon strips. Only then did he look at the wounded man. “You’re gut-shot and dying and your time is short, boy,” he said. “You ought not be cussin’ like that when you’re soon to meet your Maker.”
“Damn you, Reeves,” the man said. He clutched at his stomach and when he brought his hands away again they were stained bright scarlet with blood. “I’m dying hard,” he whispered, “and I wish I’d never left Missouri.”
“Do you have a ma, boy?” Reeves asked. “Some body I can tell how you met your end?”
The outlaw, a freckled towhead who looked to be not much older than me, nodded. “I have a ma. She’s back in Missouri but I don’t want her to know I died like a dog. Best she never knows.”
“Then so be it,” Reeves said. He glanced over his shoulder at the outlaw who had quit the fight. “You,” he yelled, anger edging his voice, “get the hell over here.”
The man, fear camped out in his eyes, rushed over and stood beside the big lawman, his hands trembling. “Tend to this bacon,” Reeves said. “And mind you don’t burn it.”
Immediately the outlaw dropped to one knee and shook the bacon in the pan, all the time looking at Reeves in horror, like he was a rattlesnake coiled to strike.
Reeves rose to his feet and began to feed shells into his Colt. “Dusty, I told you I’d ride with you as far as the Texas border,” he said, reholstering his gun. “But that’s changed now.” He nodded to the outlaw who was frying bacon with a lot more careful attention than it warranted. “After we lay out the dead decent, I’m taking him back to Fort Smith.”
“What about him?” I asked, pointing to the groaning young towhead.
“He’ll be dead before nightfall,” Reeves said. “I’d count it a favor if you stay with him until then. Even an outlaw shouldn’t die alone.”
I opened my mouth to object, then thought better of it. I’d now killed three men and their deaths lay heavy on me. Maybe if I stayed with the dying outlaw it might help even the score with my conscience, though I very much doubted it.
All I’d ever wanted was to get back to Texas with Simon Prather’s thirty thousand dollars and then go to courting pretty Sally Coleman and give her the Dodge City straw bonnet.
Now I’d lost the money and been in two desperate gunfights and it was getting so that I could scarce bring Sally’s face to mind, no matter how hard I tried.
The dream of marrying Sally that I’d kept alive through the heat and dust of the drive up the trail, the longing for her all bunched up in my throat, was fading fast, lost behind a haze of gunsmoke and the death cries of men. It was a worrisome thing and it was nagging at me, giving me no peace.
I vowed right there and then, as the wounded man by the fire groaned and cursed at his own dying, that when I recovered Simon’s money and got it back to the ranch I’d hang up my Colt and touch it no more.
I did not want the name of gunfighter. I’d no wish to end up like the men around me, gunmen dead in a lonely place, unmourned, with only the uncaring wind and the trees to whisper of their passing.
Nor did I want to kill ever again, though even as that realization dawned on me, I knew inevitably there must be more killing, more dying, before I got back my boss’ money and once more crossed the Red and saw the familiar barns and corrals of the SP Connected.
Above me, a passing smear of thin cloud drew a brief veil across the sky and I heard a fish jump in the creek. Over by the cottonwoods, bees hummed among the wildflowers and at the fire the sizzling bacon in the pan spat and sputtered, filling the air with a down-homey smell that reminded me of cold Sunday mornings and Ma Prather in her gingham apron, round cheeks flushed, serving up hot buttermilk biscuits and coffee steaming from the old fire- blackened pot that stood day and night on the ranch house stove.
Would I ever sit at her table again?
It wasn’t difficult to fire the odds facing me and come up with the answer, especially now that Bass Reeves was heading back to Arkansas with his prisoner.
It was Reeves’ voice that interrupted my thoughts and brought me back to the stark realities of the present.
“Dusty, come over here and eat,” he said. “It could be a while before you get the chance again.”
I had no appetite, but I stepped round my dead horse and joined him at the fire. Reeves had taken the frying pan from the nervous outlaw and was holding it just above the flames. There was a half a loaf of stale sourdough bread among Bully Yates’ supplies and this he cut into thick slices, laying each one on top of the bacon to absorb a goodly amount of fat. That done, he placed a few strips of bacon between two slices of bread and passed it to me.
“Eat, boy,” he said. “It will settle your stomach.”
Truth to tell, I had to force myself to bite into the sandwich, but I managed to chew it up some and gulped it
