you borrow my wagon.”
“You’ve done plenty,” Joseph said as he emerged from the house.
Nick looked at the items Joseph was carrying. There were a few articles of clothing, which were used more for wrapping up a shotgun than anything else. Its barrel poked out of an old shirt.
“What’ve you got there?” Nick asked.
“Just some things I’ll be needing. Sorry about taking your horse, but I figured on returning her as soon as I rounded up one of my own. There’s got to be a few still wandering around here. If not, I’ll have to buy one.”
“What about Sam? Were you just going to leave him?”
“Catherine has been doing a fine job of taking care of the boy. Better than I could manage for now. I told him to go to his uncle’s if you two looked like you had your hands full.”
“Isn’t that a big decision to put on a boy’s head?” Nick asked.
Joseph squinted as if contemplating that was giving him a headache. Finally he waved off the question and muttered, “I can’t think about that right now. He’s taken care of himself before and he knows how to get to his uncle’s just fine.”
“You’re not thinking straight, Joseph.”
Joseph was quiet for a few moments, but when he looked at Nick, there was the glimmer of a smirk on his face. “Catherine sent you out here, didn’t she?”
“Not at all. She’s concerned, but I’m the one that’s got a better notion of how you’re feeling right now.”
“Have you seen your family slaughtered in front of you?”
Before he could prepare himself for their arrival, the ghosts swarmed back into his head, filling it with visions of lynch mobs and friends dangling from nooses. He could smell the potent mix of burned gunpowder and freshly spilled blood. Echoes of screams rolled behind his ears.
“I’ve seen plenty,” Nick said. “Maybe not the same things as you, but more than enough to know what it’s like when all you can think about is paying someone back for the wrongs they did to you.”
“So what?” Joseph grumbled. “Are you going to try and tell me how I should just forget about everything that happened, take Sam to another place and try to be happy?”
That was more or less what Nick was going to say. Unfortunately, he didn’t know exactly what to tell Joseph next. As he took a moment to think of something, Nick realized that there wasn’t much of anything he could say to make the man feel any better. The wounds were too fresh. Many of Nick’s own wounds were several years old, and they still caused him no end of pain.
“What if I can help you?” Nick finally asked.
Joseph studied him carefully, as if he was waiting for the second boot to drop. “If you want to bury those murdering bastards when I’m done with them, you’re welcome to it. Otherwise, I don’t see how you’d be much help.”
“You plan on hunting that gang down by yourself? There’s at least a couple dozen of them. By now, they might have already replenished the ones they lost the night they took your ranch.”
Joseph shifted on his feet and gazed around as if he was seeing it all for the first time. There were burned- out shells where there had once been buildings. Scorched dirt covered spots where his children used to play. Dried blood stained the ground where his wife and daughter had made their last stand.
Watching him take in the sight of it all, Nick swore he could hear the other man’s ghosts settling in and making themselves at home.
“I’ve got to do this,” Joseph said. “I won’t be able to look at myself in the mirror again if I don’t. Already, I can barely stand to see Sam smile at me. He looks at me like I’m something special, and I couldn’t even keep his mother and sister alive.”
“He’ll always look at you like that. I’m sure he’d rather see you sad for a while than dead.”
Joseph pondered that, but his eyes were drawn back to the ranch. “I’ve been standing here for a while. I thought I’d collect what I needed and get moving, but then I realized I hadn’t been back here since everything happened.”
“I thought about taking you here when you mentioned it the first few times, but that was only a day or so after you were hurt. You may not even recall saying anything.”
“I don’t.”
“It may have been better for you to not come back here at all.”
“Why’s that?” Joseph asked with a hint of venom in his tone. “So I would forget?”
“You’ll never forget. That night will be like a scar, but it don’t mean there’s a reason to tear it open on purpose.”
“If I didn’t know any better, I would have pegged you as a preacher rather than a gravedigger.”
“This is something I know about. Things would have been a lot different if someone had tried to talk some sense into me when I was at the start of taking on more than I could handle.”
“Yeah, but would you have listened to them?”
Joseph’s question hung in the air. After enough time had passed, Joseph nodded and started walking to the house. “I need to get one more thing. That is, if it’s still there. Whatever I decide on doing, I’ll need it.”
Nick followed Joseph into the ranch house. The place looked even worse on the inside than it did on the outside. Walls were charred black and nothing was in its proper place. The stench of smoke was thick in the air and Joseph kept his hand over his mouth to keep from breathing too much of it in.
After stepping into a large room toward the back of the house and across from the kitchen, Joseph lowered himself to one knee and placed both hands upon the cracked floor. His head hung low and his fingertips pressed between two chipped boards as if he meant to pull it up.
Recognizing that posture from folks mourning at a fresh grave, Nick took a few steps back and left him to his grief. Then Joseph straightened his back and lifted the two planks from the floor. They came up halfway before catching on one of the shattered boards next to them. After a few more pulls, however, the boards came free and Joseph tossed them aside.
Nick stepped forward and craned his neck to look over Joseph’s shoulder. “What’s that?”
A gunshot blasted through the room, accompanied by the sound of shattering glass. Joseph dropped to the floor and rolled away from the rectangular hole he’d uncovered. Nick flipped his coat open so he could draw his pistol. Both men looked in the direction of the shot and found a skinny man leaning out from behind a cabinet that had been propped in a corner. The man’s face was as filthy as the rest of the room, and his wild eyes stared from behind the filth like it was a mask. Ashes and splinters were tangled in his hair. He peeked through one of the cabinet’s doors, which dangled open on one set of hinges. The gun in his hand was still smoking. “Dutch knew there’d be more!” he shouted.
Nick closed his hand around the nub of his pistol grip and brought the weapon up. The grooved contours of the gun’s barrel fit within the matching ridges inside his holster to shift the pistol into the palm of Nick’s hand, compensating for his missing fingers. Although he drew the weapon fairly smoothly and quicker than a man in his condition should have, he wasn’t fast enough to fire a shot before the gunman behind the cabinet took another of his own.
Firing several times in quick succession, the gunman squirmed out from behind the cabinet until he was able to pull free of it. He flinched as a few shots from Nick’s pistol chipped away at the wooden frame in front of him, but managed to get in a lucky shot that was close enough to move Nick back a distance.
“Get away from that money!” the gunman shouted.
Just as Nick settled his aim, he saw the gunman lower his empty pistol and make a hasty grab for another one wedged under his belt.
“Dutch said you’d be back to collect the rest of that money, and he sure as hell was right!”
Nick pulled his trigger and blasted a hole through the gunman’s hip. He started moving toward the gunman, but had to stop as the other man’s empty pistol was thrown directly at him.
Despite the blood flowing from his hip, the gunman staggered forward and fired a shot in Joseph’s direction. He snarled through gritted teeth, but couldn’t manage to form any words.
After the empty gun bounced off his forearm, Nick stepped forward and fired another shot at the gunman. He was aiming for the man’s other leg but took too much time in doing it. As he was pulling his trigger, he saw the gunman twist around to fire two quick shots at him.
One bullet blazed past Nick’s torso and the other clipped a bit of flesh from under his arm. Being hit in such
