Perhaps five yards behind and a little to the left.
Thought he was dead.
No sound like the hammer of a six-gun going back.
“Y-y-y-y-you go on and, and, and, and, and throw that rifle away.”
Ezekiel remained crouched in the snow, leaning against the rock.
“Swear to God. I-I-I got a bead drawed on the back a your head.”
“All right.” But Ezekiel didn’t throw his carbine aside. He kept a firm grip on the forend stock, a finger in the trigger guard, and turned slowly until he faced the boy standing waist-deep in snow.
Ezekiel had hoped to see the revolver trembling in Billy’s hand, but the enormous Walker Colt was steady and leveled on his chest like a small cannon. “That was some shootin back there,” Ezekiel said. “Head shot from what? Fifty, sixty yards?”
“Told you, throw that artillery down.”
Billy’s face twitched as if someone had placed hooks in the left corner of his mouth and was yanking them with a string. Ezekiel found the boy’s eyes, didn’t like the jitteriness he saw, would have preferred two rounds of ice. At least you saw it coming that way.
“We’re neighbors, Billy. Our wives are friends.” As he spoke, Ezekiel let the carbine’s barrel ease down. Another few inches, he’d take the boy’s head off. “You got a nice family in Bessie and Harriet, and I believe that shot that kilt the Doc was a accident. Now, I can’t speak for your partner, but your bark ain’t this hard.”
“Well, Mr.Curtice, guess you don’t know me so good after all.”
THIRTY-TWO
W
hen Oatha Wallace arrived, Ezekiel was leaning back on a small shelf in the rock. He’d pulled off his fleece-lined gloves and unbuttoned his slicker and sack coat and vest, unclipped his suspenders, torn open the muslin shirt.
“Where’s his rifle?”
“Somewhere i-i-in the snow yonder.”
“He ain’t got a sleeve gun, do he?”
“Naw, I checked.”
Oatha stared at Ezekiel. “He’s gut-shot.”
“I-I-I-I tried to shoot him in the head, but—”
“Naw, that’s fine, Billy. His horns is clipped. Lead ball from a Walker in the bread wallet. Helluva thing. Caught a case a the slow, didn’t you, old buscadero?”
Ezekiel watched the steaming black blood leak through his fingers as he tried to put back the gray tube of gut that kept pushing out. He could feel blood running down his legs and into his boots. Some had streamed down the rock and melted a burgundy hole in the snow. He looked up at Oatha, at the boy who’d set him on his sunset trail, and when he spoke, his voice came broken and strained by ragged exhalations. “Bushwhacking, huh? So that’s how you operate?”
“Whatever gets it done,” Oatha said.
“How much y’all come away with?”
“They’s sixty-nine bricks, twenty-two pounds apiece.”
“But you done the math.”
“Sure, I done it. Just over five hunerd thousand.”
Ezekiel nodded. “Maybe you can buy this boy a new gun. That Walker must be forty years old.”
Oatha grinned. “And some clothes, too.”
Billy blushed. Too poor to afford a greatcoat or a slicker, when he ventured out into winter conditions, his only recourse was to clothe himself in every ratty, moth-eaten garment he owned, so his ensemble comprised layer upon layer of old shirts, threadbare hand-me-down sack coats two de cades old, and a blue frock coat that had barely survived a house fire back in Tennessee, and still bore the black-fringed fire-eaten holes to prove it.
Ezekiel looked at Billy. “You’ve broke your wife’s heart, son.”
“Ain’t ye son. I want his Justins, Oatha. My feet are cold.”
“We’ll discuss the man’s plunder in a bit. You got even a jot a decency in you, boy?”
Ezekiel moaned, “Got-damn.”
“Hurt as bad as they say?” Oatha asked.
“They wasn’t buildin a high line.”
A dense cloud had blown over the pass and begun its rolling descent through the boulder field.
“You wanna go on and tell me, then?” Ezekiel said. “Don’t see what you got to lose now.”
“Tell you what?”
“I know my brother left Silverton with you back in the fall. He wired me before he left. I know it was you, Nathan, and two other men. Then you come into Abandon three weeks later all by yourself, sayin they decided not
