“Yeah,” Phew said. “Like a damned ol’ puma with his tail hung up in a b’ar trap. Grates on my nerves when you git to hollerin’.”
Audie ignored him. “Considering the mentality of those who inhabit that miserable village, I must keep this as simple as possible. Therefore, the Socratean maieutic method of close and logical reasoning must be immediately discarded.”
“Umm,” Nighthawk said.
“Whut the hell did you say?” Lobo growled. “Sounded like a drunk Pawnee. Gawdamnit, you dwarf, cain’t you speak plain jist once in a while?”
“Rest your gray cells, you hulking oaf,” Audie responded. “I’m thinking.”
“Wal, thank to yoursalf, you magpie!”
“Silence, you cretin!”
Smoke let them hurl taunts and insults back and forth; they had been doing it for fifty-odd years and were not about to quit at this stage of the game. He turned to face the direction of Bury.
He would give them more of a chance than they had given his brother or father. Ever so much more of a chance than they had given his baby son and his wife, Nicole. Ever so much more.
He let hate consume him as he recalled that awful day….
He had made a wide circle of the cabin, staying in the timber back of the creek, and slipped up to the cabin. Inside the cabin, although Smoke did not as yet know it, the outlaw Canning had taken a blanket and smothered Baby Arthur to death. Nicole had been brutally raped, and then her throat had been crushed. Canning scalped the woman, tying her bloody hair to his belt. He then skinned a breast, thinking he would tan the hide and make himself a nice tobacco pouch.
Kid Austin had gotten sick watching Canning’s callousness. He walked outside to vomit.
Another outlaw, Grissom, walked out the front of the cabin. Grissom felt something was wrong. He sensed movement behind him and reached for his gun. Smoke shot him dead.
“Behind the house!” Felter yelled.
Another of the PSR riders had been dumping his bowels in the outhouse. He struggled to pull up his pants and push open the door at the same time. Smoke shot him twice in the belly and left him to die on the craphouse floor.
Kid Austin, caught in the open, ran for the banks of the creek. Just as he jumped, Smoke fired, the lead taking the Kid in the buttocks, entering the right cheek and tearing out the left.
Smoke waited behind a woodpile, the big Sharps buffalo rifle Preacher had given him in his hands. He watched as something came sailing out the open back door. His dead baby son bounced on the earth.
The outlaws inside the cabin taunted Smoke, telling in great detail of raping Nicole. Smoke lined up the Sharps and pulled the trigger. A PSR rider began screaming in pain.
Canning and Felter ran out of the front of the cabin, high-tailing it for the safety of the timber. In the creek, Kid Austin crawled upstream, crying in pain and humiliation.
Another of the PSR riders exited the cabin, leaving one inside. He got careless and Smoke took him alive.
When he came to his senses, Smoke had stripped him, staked him out over an anthill, and poured honey all over him.
It took him a long time to die.
Smoke buried his wife and son amid a colorful profusion of wild flowers, stopping often to wipe away the tears.
16
“What are you thinking, young man?” Audie asked.
“About what Potter and Stratton and Richards ordered done to my wife and son.”
“Preacher told us. That was a terrible, terrible thing. But don’t allow revenge to destroy you.”
“When this is over, Audie, it’s over. Not until.”
“I understand. I have been where you are. I lost my wife, a Bannock woman, and two children to white trappers. Many many years ago.”
“Did you find the men who did it?”
“Oh, yes,” Audie smiled grimly. “I found them.”
Smoke did not have to ask the outcome.
“There will always be men who rise to power on the blood and pain of others, Smoke,” the former- schoolteacher-turned-mountain-man said. “Unfortunate, certainly, but a fact, perhaps a way, of life.”
“The people who run the shops in that town can leave,” Smoke said. “Even though I know they are, in their own way, as bad as Potter, Stratton, and Richards. I’ll let them go, if they’ll just go.”
“They won’t,” Audie prophesied. “For most of them, this is the end of the trail. Behind them lies their past, filled with crime and pettiness. For most of them, all that waits behind them is prison—or a rope. Theirs is a mean, miserable existence.” He waved his hand at the mountain men. “We, all us, remember when that town was built. We sat back and watched those dreary dregs of society arrive. We have all watched good people travel through, look around them, and continue on their journey. I, for one, will be glad to see that village razed and returned to the earth.”
