…and grinned!
BOOK TWO
—Kipling
1
Twice, Adam thought he heard something back in the timber behind the Colby house. He lifted his head and concentrated. Nothing. He returned to his reading of the dime novel about the adventures of Luke Nations.
He was just getting to the part about where Luke rides into the Indian camp, both six-guns blazing, to rescue the lovely maiden when he heard kind of a muffled, cutoff scream from in the timber.
“Velvet!” he called.
Only the silence greeted his call. And then it came to him. The silence. The birds and the small animals around the place were used to Velvet’s walking through the woods. They seldom stopped their singing and chattering and calling simply because she came gently walking through.
The boy picked up his single-shot .22-caliber rifle and put his dime novel in the hip pocket of his patched and faded work pants. “Velvet!” he shouted.
Nothing.
Not the singing of a bird, not the calling or barking of a squirrel.
Something was wrong.
Adam hesitated, started to go back to the house for Mister Wilbur. Then he shook his head. It would take too long, for Velvet had strayed a pretty good piece from the house.
There was movement from his left. Adam turned just as something hard slammed into the back of his head and sent him spinning into darkness. The darkness blotted out the sunlight filtering through the trees.
When he awakened, the first thing he noticed was that the sunlight through the limbs had changed somewhat, shifting positions. Adam figured he’d been out a good thirty to forty-five minutes. Painfully, he got to a sitting-up position. His head was hurting something fierce and things were moving around like they shouldn’t oughta.
He sat very still for a few moments, until his head began to clear and settle down. He thought he heard some sort of grunting sounds. Adam couldn’t figure out what they might be.
He got to his feet, swaying for a moment. When things settled down, he looked around for his .22 rifle. He checked it, brushing the dirt from it, and checked the load. He kept hearing that grunting sound. Slowly, cautiously, the boy made his way through the timber toward that odd sound.
He came to a little clearing—must be two miles from the house—and paused, peering through the branches.
What he saw brought him up short and mad.
It was Velvet, and she didn’t have no clothes on; her dress was torn off and tossed to one side. And a bunch of them TF riders was standing around, some of them bare-assed naked, some in their long-handles.
And there was money all over the ground. Adam couldn’t figure out what all them greenbacks and silver dollars was doing on the ground.
But he knew what them men was doing. He’d never done it with no girl hisself, but he wasn’t no fool.
It looked like to him that Velvet wasn’t having no good time of it. It looked like to him she was out cold. He could see bruises on her face and her…on her chest. And there was dark marks on her legs where them riders had gripped at her with hard hands. Like that one was doing now. Pokin’ at her. From behind. Like an animal.
Adam lifted his rifle and sighted in. It was not going to be a hard shot, but he had the rifle loaded with little shorts for squirrels. He sighted in and pulled the trigger.
It was a good shot, the little chunk of lead striking the rapist in his right eye. The rapist just fell backward, off Velvet, and lay on his back, his privates exposed.
Velvet sort of rolled off the log they’d had her bent over and lay real still.
Adam quickly reloaded and sighted in again. But before he could pull the trigger, a short gun barked and something hard struck him in the chest. The slug knocked him backward. He lost his grip on his rifle. Adam knew he was bad hit, maybe going to die, but he lay still as the men ran up to him.
“Let’s get outta here!” he heard one say.
“What about Steve?”
“Take him with us. We’ll bury him proper.”
“Little son of a bitch kilt him with a lousy .22,” another spoke.
“Let’s ride.”
When the sounds of their horses had faded, Adam tried to reach his sister. He could not. The pain in his chest was getting worse and he was having a hard time seeing. He pulled his dime novel out of his pocket and took his worn stub of a pencil. Slowly, with bloody fingers, he began to print out a message.
A few minutes later, the boy laid his head down on the cool earth and closed his eyes. A moment later he was dead.
Smoke and the others arrived back a few hours before dark. They had pushed their horses hard. Colby and Charlie were about two hours behind.
Belle Colby met the men in the front yard.
“I can’t find Velvet or Adam,” she told Smoke. She had been crying, her eyes red-rimmed.
“Bob met us, Belle,” Smoke said. “Charlie stayed with Colby just in case. They’re a couple of hours behind us. Any idea where they might have gone?”
