“I got him.” Danny’s voice was high-pitched, more like a woman’s voice.
“Good!” Dooley took a long pull from his whiskey bottle, some of the booze dribbling down his unshaven chin. “One less of that bastard’s whelps.”
He was still mumbling and scratching himself as Danny walked from the room and stepped outside. Dooley’s sons were on the porch, sharing a bottle.
“Did he squall when you got him?” Sonny asked, his eyes bright from the cruelty within the young man.
“I ’magine he did,” Danny told him. “But I couldn’t hear him; I was a good half mile away.” Danny stepped from the porch and walked toward the one bunkhouse that was still usable. With the coming in of Dad Estes and his bunch, tents had been thrown up all over the place, the ranch now resembling a guerrilla camp.
The other gunhawks avoided Danny. No one wanted anything to do with him, all feeling that there was something unclean about the young man, even though Danny was as fastidious as possible, considering the time and the place. He was considerate of his personal appearance, but his mind resembled anyone’s concept of hell. Danny was a cold-blooded killer. He enjoyed killing, the killing act his substitute for a woman. He would kill anybody: man, woman, or child. It did not make one bit of difference to Danny. Just as long as the price was right.
He went to his bunk and carefully cleaned his rifle, returning it to the hard leather case. Then he stretched out on the bunk and closed his eyes. It had been a very pleasing day. He knew he’d gotten a good clean hit by the way the man had jerked and then slumped in the saddle, slowly tumbling to the ground, hitting the ground like a rag doll.
It was a good feeling knowing he had earned his pay. A day’s work for a day’s pay. Made a man feel needed. Yes, indeed.
At the Circle Double C, the men sat, mostly in small groups, and mostly in silence, cleaning weapons. The hands, not gunfighters, but just hard-working cowboys, were digging in warbags and taking out that extra holster and pistol, filling the loops of a spare bandoleer. They rode for the brand, and if a fight was what Dooley Hanks wanted, a fight would be what he would get.
The hands who had come over to Cord’s side from the D-H did not have mixed feeling about it. They had been shoved aside in favor of gunhawks; they had seen Dooley and his ignorant sons go from bad to savage. There was not one ounce of loyalty left among them toward Dooley. They knew now that this was a fight to the finish. OK. Let’s do it.
Just before dusk, Cord walked out to the bunkhouse, a grim expression on his face. “I sent Willie in for the doctor. Max is coughin’ up blood. It don’t look good. I can’t stand to sit in here and look at my wife tryin’ to be brave about the whole damn thing when I know that what she really wants to do is bust out bawlin’. And the same goes for me.”
Then he started cussing. He strung together some mighty hard words as he stomped around the big room, kicking at this and that; about every fourth and fifth word was Dooley Hanks. He traced the man’s ancestry back to before Adam and Eve, directly linking Dooley to the snake in the Garden.
He finally sat down on a bunk and put his face in his hands. Smoke motioned the men outside and gently closed the door, leaving Cord with his grief and the right for a man to cry in private.
“It’s gonna be Katy-bar-the-door if that boy dies,” Hardrock said. “We just think we’ve seen a little shootin’ up to now.”
“I’m ready,” Del said. “I’m ready to get this damn thing over with and get back to punchin’ cows.”
“It’s gonna be a while fore any of us gets back to doin’ that,” Les said, one of the men who had come from the D-H.
“And some of us won’t,” Fitz spoke softly.
Someone had a bottle and that got passed around. Beans pulled out a sack of tobacco and that went the way of the bottle. The men drank and smoked in silence until the bottle was empty and the tobacco sack flat as a tortilla left out in the sun.
“Wonder how Dooley’s ass is?” Gage asked, and the men chuckled softly.
“I hope it’s healed,” Del said. “’Cause it’s shore about to get kicked hard.”
The men all agreed on that.
Cord came out of the bunkhouse and walked to the house, passing the knot of men without speaking. His face bore the brunt of his inner grief.
Holman got up from his squat and said, “I think I’m gonna go write my momma a letter. She’s gettin’ on in years and I ain’t wrote none in near’bouts a year.”
“That’s a good idea,” Bernie said. “If I tell you what to put on paper to my momma, would you write it down for me?”
“ Shore. Come on. I print passable well.”
They were happy-go-lucky young cowboys a few weeks ago, Smoke thought. Now they are writing their mothers with death on their minds.
That ghostly rider would be saddling up his fire-snorting stallion, Smoke mused. Ready for more lost souls.
“What are you thinking, amigo?” Lujan asked him.
Smoke told him.
“You are philosophical this evening. I had always heard that you were a man who possessed deep thoughts.”
Smoke grunted. “My daddy used to say that we came from Wales—years back. Jensen wasn’t our real name. I don’t know what it was. But Daddy used to say that the Celts were mysterious people. I don’t know.”
“I know that there is the smell of death in the air,” the Mexican said. “Listen. No birds singing. Nothing seems to be moving. ”
The primal call of a wolf cut the night air, its shivering howl touching them all.
