It was dark in here—dimly lit at best. Four horses milled about, pawing, rearing at the noise. Some gun smoke hung in a murky haze at the far end of the stable, swaying with the rocking light of the disturbed lantern hung upon a long nail. Hay dust stirred, making it hard to see. Wiser could not make out what was happening.
“Major Wiser!”
It was Hastings’s voice.
“Captain! What’s going on? Where is he?”
“He’s in here! Got two of my men! Get the sonofabitch!”
Wiser read the panic in Hastings’s voice. Strange that a man as proven as the captain should express so much fear. Perhaps only the tension coming now at the end of a long scout. Then Wiser’s belly convinced him of something different. Hastings would know, better than any, about the enemy they were up against.
“What’s he got for weapons, Captain?”
“Those two pistols—all I saw him carrying.”
“He’s got something more,” someone said from the darkness.
“What?”
“Dunno.”
“Shuddup! Now get your boys to rush him,” Wiser ordered, with his pistol waving two of his own to go down either side of the center aisle between the two rows of stables.
Boothog could read more than reluctance on their faces. He pointed the pistol at one of them. The man moved on into the murky darkness, carefully, his head pulled back in his shoulders like a gun-shy tortoise.
Wiser watched as a pair of Hastings’s men argued with their captain at the far end of things.
“Get them moving! This can be over in a matter of seconds, Captain!”
Hastings shoved the two forward with his big, fleshy hands. They dived into the dim light shed from the solitary oil lamp. Something flickered across the corona of light—the shadow of a man. A bevy of shots rattled through the stable. Three of the gunmen fell. Two of them screaming before they passed out. The third crumpled silently.
The fourth lay wounded in the dust and hay, dragging himself back toward Wiser. A hand over a dirty blotch on his shirt.
“Bastard got us in our own cross fire!” hollered the wounded man.
“You think you’re gonna die—that it?” Wiser shouted back at the man.
“I’m gut-shot, Major,” he begged, crawling close to Wiser’s legs. “It’s a slow, mean way to go.”
“Go to hell then!” Boothog cried, instantly aiming his pistol at the man’s face below him and pulling the trigger.
The back of the gunman’s head exploded in a spray of red that splattered the hay and dust with gore and crimson. Wiser stepped over the quivering body, waving the last two ahead with him.
“Hastings!”
“Major?”
“You and me gotta see to this—don’t we now?”
“I suppose we do.”
“You especially, Captain. You brought him in.”
There was a moment of quiet reflection from the far end of the livery. “You’re right. It’s my doing. I’ll … clean things up for you, Major.”
“That’s a good soldier.”
A wild laugh split the shadows. “Ain’t that just like you goddamned officers!” the drawl called out from the darkness.
“Ah, Mr. Hook!” Wiser replied. “How good of you to let us know that you plan to join the celebration.”
“All you officers can do is send good soldiers to their death, ain’t that so? And now you’re gonna follow orders like the rest, Hastings? Or you gonna get out while you still can?”
“Go ahead, Captain,” Wiser reminded stiffly. “Let’s see you tidy this matter up.”
“Sure—c’mon in here, Hastings. I’ll put a couple of holes in you before any of the rest of your boys get close enough to finish me off. And what’s it get you, Captain? A decent burial in a hero’s grave back in Zion? Shit—you know damned well Wiser will leave you rot where you lay. Like he done with all the rest before you.”
“Don’t listen to him, Hastings! That’s the devil’s own hand servant in there! Let’s finish this and get the girl.”
“That’s right, Hastings,” the Southerner’s voice called out. “The girl is all that Wiser wants. He don’t care a good goddamn about you at all.”
“Goddamn you, Hook!” Wiser spat.
“Say, Major—where’s Hattie’s mother?”
That stopped Wiser. And the major saw it had stopped Hastings in his tracks as well.
Hook called out again. “The woman’s with Usher, ain’t she?”
Wiser was slow making sense of it. How did the man know?
“I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about, Hook. Perhaps if you come out and give the girl up, we can sort—”
“The girl’s name is Hattie. She has a name, Wiser.”
Boothog smiled. He had it fitting together nicely. “And the woman? What was her name?”
“Gritta.”
Wiser listened to the rumble of the two men left with him, and those still with Hastings. If they had been spooked by a man hiding in the dark before, they now were a little less than anxious to tackle someone who had tracked them across more than three years and hundreds of miles of wilderness.
“Three winters gone, Wiser. I been waiting a long time to put a name on the bastards come and stole my family. Now I got names. And I got you here with me. Whyn’t you send the rest of these hired killers out of here, and you and me finish his—like the big man you’re always bragging you are.”
“You’re a back-shooter, Hook. I saw it in your eyes when we first met. You’d never fight me fair.”
“Shit—I’d never expect you to fight fair, you bastard. Your kind never does. You run and hide less’n the odds are in your favor.”
“Live to fight another day has always been my credo.”
“And let other men do your dying for you.”
“I’m done talking with him, Hastings! Finish it!”
“Major—why don’t we just burn the sonofabitch out. We can do it real easy—”
“I want the girl, Hastings!” he shrieked. Then, attempting to gain some self-control, he said, “The colonel wants the girl too. She’s no good to us burned alive.”
“None of us good to you killed, Major.”
“You’re not going in there to finish this off, Captain?”
Hastings hesitated a moment, finally wagging his head. “Never meant to fight a badger buried in a hole —”
Suddenly the captain was knocked backward a step, still standing, staring down at the tiny hole in his belly, a red blossom slowly spreading around it. He started swiping at the stain with one hand, wide-eyed—
—a second hole opened up in the center of his chest. Right where Wiser had aimed. Hastings looked up at the major with dull disbelief, trying to raise his own pistol to fire at Wiser.
Boothog fired a third shot, watching it connect low in the neck, spurting bright blood as Hastings stumbled backward against his men diving helter-skelter for cover. Near Wiser, the last two were scrambling out of the way. Boothog yelled for them to come to him. They did not.
He emptied one pistol at them taking cover in the dark, shadowy corners of the stable behind him. Then calmly holstered the weapon and shifted the other to his left hand, where he spun the cylinder, methodically checking the caps on each nipple.
Deciding he would have to finish off this goddamned Gentile himself.
But Jonah Hook didn’t get back-shot. He had shoved Hattie back down in a dark stall, slapping the horses out
