Bad Medicine

“I ain’t gonna ever forget what I had to do here,” Ray said, his voice a tone of huskiness Will hadn’t heard before.

“No,” Will said. “You won’t. But you done what you had to.” He put his arm over Ray’s shoulder. “Come on— let’s get back to our horses.” Ray slipped the sling of his buffalo gun back over his shoulder as they began walking.

Chapter Eight

They said next to nothing as they walked back to their horses. Even Wampus was subdued, walking closely enough to Will so that the dog’s side touched the man’s leg.

Wasn’t anything else we could do for those two men once the fires started—not a single thing. Was I in the same fix, I’d welcome the bullet, the quick, clean end rather than the awful suffering, the screaming, the begging.

Still—we killed them. It for certain wasn’t murder, but that doesn’t make them any less dead, their bodies charred and twisted, with no more resemblance to the living men than a dead mouse has to a mountain cat.

Jesus.

A couple of guys, no doubt with women, maybe children, waitin’ for their men to rattle up in their wagon loaded up with the framing for the houses the families would live in—free, with no more shackles, no more whips, no more “Yassuh, massa boss, sir” horseshit.

And then—Olympus. It must have been some time since they’d been to town. They knew nothing of One Dog.

’Course they couldn’t buy a drink in the saloon, but they’d bought a whole lot of lumber from the mercantile for cash on the barrelhead, so the clerk would sell them a bottle, carefully avoiding touching their hands. They’d probably drunk and laughed all night, headed to their homes—or what would be their homes.

Wampus whimpered quietly, plaintively, as if he were reading Will’s thoughts.

Ray’s skill with that .50 caliber saved those men a world of pain. It was a good thing—the right thing—to do.

Will Lewis felt like a murderer of innocent men.

They mounted and rode at a jog back to their camp. After a long time of heavy silence, Ray said, “Where do you think all them extry men came from?”

Will considered. “Well, like I said, there’s always a slew of crazies lookin’ to ride with somebody like Quantrill or One Dog. I’m thinkin’ this might be somethin’ else, though.”

“What’s that?”

“I had a smith—a good friend—tell me that once every year or so bands of loons meet, get drunk, eat mushrooms, smoke ganja, an’ carry on—shoot one another if they get to arguin’.

“See, it’s like when the mountain men meet, ’cept them trappers an’ hunters aren’t loons. They jus’ don’t like anybody but other mountain men. No harm there that I can see. A man’s ’titled to pick his friends.”

“Where’s the army at?” Ray asked. “The raiders.”

“Chasin’ Indians.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah—forcin’ ’em onto reservations or killin’ ’em.”

“So,” Ray said, “there might could be a bunch of these raiders comin’ toward Olympus? No?”

“My friend, he says there’s a whole herd of the sonsabitches get together.”

“No big deal. All we gotta do is kill ’em, an’ we been doin’ that good.”

“Good point,” said Will.

Neither man slept the balance of the night. Ray honed his knives on his whetstone almost mechanically, as if he were a nonthinking machine designed to do only that. The whish, whish of the blade over the stone eventually began to grate on Will’s nerves, but he kept his mouth shut. If sharpening his knives is what Ray needed to do, then he should do it.

Still, it was driving Will around the bend.

Will rolled and smoked cigarettes one after another, flicking the nubs out into the prairie.

“You might could start a fire in the brush with them cigarettes,” Ray said.

Will glared at him. “Don’t matter. It’s nothin’ but scrub, scorpions, an’ rattlesnakes. Let it burn.”

Dawn was painting the sky with its usual glory of pastels and sharper colors, too. The men didn’t notice.

Finally, as Will was lighting another cigarette with a lucifer he’d snapped with his thumbnail, Ray sheathed the knife he’d been working. “Them goddamn things’ll kill you,” he said.

“Bullshit. Tobacco smoke builds up lungs—makes ’em stronger. Plus, it tastes good an’ calms a man down, makes him feel better. Hell, they oughta teach smokin’ in grade school.”

Ray grunted disgustedly.

Will stood and worked the kinks out of his back. He was silent for some time, but Ray knew from his face that some sort of pronouncement was coming. It was.

“Only one way we can get this done,” Will said. “We’re both good—real hardasses an’ damned deadly fighters—but One Dog has about fifty men around him now. The odds are impossible.”

“Could be. But what can we do? The army . . .”

“The army is a bunch of clowns chasing Indians off their own land, killin’ kids and squaws an’ old folks, while the warriors put arrows an’ slugs into the bluecoats. If Bobby Lee hadn’t screwed up so badly at Gettysburg—an’ that moron Pickett didn’t do what he done—things’d be a whole lot different.”

“Sure. But . . .”

“We need an army of our own—of men like us,” Will growled. “I know some fellas from Folsom who owe me a favor, an’ some others from my robbin’ days—good men who ain’t afraid to pull the trigger an’ don’t mind the stink of blood.”

“I know a few myself,” Ray said. “Thing is, they ain’t a real trustin’ bunch. Most have posters out on ’em. They kill bounty hunters like a housewife steps on a cockroach.”

“These boys friends of yours?”

“Tight friends.”

“Same with the bunch I know. We gotta get ’em here, Ray.”

“Ain’t many who’d work for free.”

“I know that, an’ it’s no problem. I got stashes all over the goddamn place. Plus, maybe we’d find out where One Dog’s rebel gold is at,” Will said.

“There’s a—hell, it ain’t really a town, it’s a depot—but it’s got a saloon, a whorehouse, an’ a telegraph monkey in the depot.”

“How far?”

“Hard to say. Maybe eighty miles.”

“Can you find it?”

Ray grinned. “Hell, boy, I could find a nice, cool spot in hell, I needed to.”

“Thing is, these men don’t have addresses,” Will said. “It’ll be awful hard to find most of them.”

“That’s OK. We don’t need most of them. Eight or ten’ll do jus’ fine. Ten of them boys is worth thirty renegades. Tell you what: you make up a list with names an’ towns or ranches or whatever where your men last were, far as you know, an’ I’ll do the same. I’ll send the wires out an’ ask that they be forwarded, need be. Then we set back for a couple days an’ see what happens.”

“Could be no one will show up.”

“Could be that pigs’ll fly outta my ass an’ we’ll have free bacon forever, but neither one ain’t likely, Will.”

Will laughed. “Let’s saddle up.”

“No. It don’t make no sense for both of us to go. You an’ your wolf stay here an’ watch what the outlaws are