“She’ll throw rocks at your pecker once she gets a fill of mine, Hiram.”
Simmons savagely tore up the bottom of her deerhide dress, stepping in between the woman’s legs. They were encased in deerhide leggings tied to a belt around her bare waist. A wide piece of wool cloth hung like a short breechclout from the same belt, covering that flesh left bare by the leggings. Hiram yanked on it once, then a second time before the belt snapped and the cloth fell away. She began kicking at Simmons for all she was worth, with what strength she could muster against the both of them, cursing in her own tongue.
The heat had risen in Hook’s throat, knowing what was about to happen and not knowing what to do. Perhaps leave. It was not of his concern, he told himself.
Then he remembered Gritta. Sensing somehow that she too might be alone against men such as these who came and took what they wanted and all others be damned. Gritta too might be unable to fight her own fight—
“Leave her be!” Hook said, loud enough that Hiram’s head snapped up.
But only his. Simmons kept on, one thing only on his mind now, blood worked up and warmed to lust as he braced one of the woman’s legs against the table, the other leg pinned with his huge hand, bruising the woman’s dark-haired flesh while he tore at the buttons to his britches.
“Simmons! You got trouble,” Hiram snarled, wagging his head once at the table.
The big man glanced over his shoulder, squinted his eyes at Hook, then slowly grinned as he freed the last button on his britches. “Don’t you want none of this, Secesh? A good Pawnee honey pot? Best you ever had out here, I’ll bet.”
“Said to leave her be.” Jonah leaned back slightly at the same time the well-dressed dealer backed slowly from the table, arose, and walked slowly to the bar behind Hook.
“I heard you, Secesh. But I ain’t gonna leave it be. She’ll get paid, so she’s got what’s coming.”
Artus eased back from the table. From the corner of his eye, Jonah could see his cousin’s hand resting on the pistol.
“Let’s play cards, boys,” Hook said quietly, as he watched Simmons tug at the front of his longhandles, trying to free his swollen flesh.
“When I’m done here, you goddamned stupid idjit!” Simmons barked.
“Pull your damned trousers up,” Hook said quietly.
Simmons turned, his engorged flesh protruding from the front of his stained longhandles, eyes flaring like glowing flints at the other two men still seated like stone at the table with the Southerners. “Shut that stupid Secesh bastard up!”
As if moving in deep, clear water, the other two tie-gang laborers turned to look in Hook’s direction, then rose from their chairs. Their eyes told it—going for their guns.
Beside Jonah, Moser was no slower in getting his big hog-leg out of his coat, and stumbling backward as he pushed himself away from the chair.
Hook fired and fired again at the first of the pair, watching him crumple in half and go to the floor like a damp rag neatly folded and lying still in the muddy water. A bullet whispered past Jonah’s ear, from the second man’s gun. Funny to think on it like that—a whisper when the guns were roaring, rocking off the roof of this tight, closed room.
Jonah’s next shot missed the second man as he dived to the side, his left arm already bloodied by Moser’s ball. Then the laborer was shoved forward, clutching at his back with his gun hand, slowly turning, his eyes full of fear and question as he turned round to look at Hiram behind him.
“Shit!” Hiram cursed, his gun out, realizing he had shot one of his own in the melee.
It was all he said as Hook dropped to his knees and aimed, hitting Hiram low in the gut. The man clutched his belly. Hook fired a fourth shot, blackening Hiram’s chest just as Jonah felt an intense heat and pressure in a shoulder. Spun around sideways, falling, seeing the muzzle of Simmons’s gun blaze a second time in the dim light, an orange burst of quick flame, followed by a snap of breaking floorboard beside Jonah’s head where the ball impacted.
Hook straightened the arm at his target and pulled the trigger on instinct, hitting Simmons high in the chest, almost in the throat. The hole opened up bright red on his dirty longhandles. Still the big man took a step forward, his manhood wagging before him, and fired at his tormentor.
Through the gunsmoke at the corner of his eye Jonah saw Moser struggling with his old pistol on his knees, snapping caps. Then Hook fired again, hitting Simmons lower in the chest this time. The big man reeled a moment and took another step forward, bringing his pistol up slowly.
Hook clicked one cylinder, then a second as Simmons came on, smearing the bright blood down his greasy shirt with one hand. Frantic, Jonah shouted. “Shoot ’im! Artus, shoot!”
Moser opened his mouth as Simmons got his pistol up and cocked the hammer.
“My play now, Secesh,” he growled with a smile as a gurgle of blood poured from his lower lip.
Then the side of the big man’s face disappeared in a blinding glow of pink gore.
Hook winced at the blast, like a turtle shrinking his head back into his body, whirling onto the painful shoulder in that echoing roar of a pistol behind his ear. Moser was flattened on his belly, still struggling with his own weapon.
And the well-dressed young card man gripping an army 44 at arm’s length, smoke crawling lazily from the muzzle.
Hook stared, blinking, while the man walked over to him.
“You’re bleeding a bit,” the stranger said. “That will be a nasty one, I reckon.” Then he stepped over to Artus. “Help your friend get out of here, will you?”
Moser nodded. Both of them watched the younger man walk over to the fallen laborers. He knelt and inspected one, then the others.
“Simmons is dead. So’s this one called Hiram.” The stranger stood, straightening his coat and stuffing his pistol away beneath it at last. “The other two are hurt bad—but they ain’t dead.”
“You two g’won get outta here now.”
Hook turned to find the barman with a double-barreled fowler at the blanketed doorway.
“We’ll go,” Jonah said, rising, feeling the sharp numbness growing in the shoulder. Half his chest was burning with sharp pain already. He glanced at the young Pawnee woman as she rolled off the table and collapsed to the floor, gathering her clothing up, straightening it as best as she could.
It had all happened so quickly, sweeping them all up into the maddening swirl before any of them knew how to pull out.
“These four will likely have friends,” the card man said. “I spent some time scouting for the Union during the war, and some time out here since. So I figure you ought to take my advice. You best do what this barkeep says— and ride while you can.”
“Where?” Moser asked.
“Doesn’t matter now,” said the barman. “Just get out of my place. Out of Abilene.”
Hook stuffed the pistol into his left hand already wet with blood from the shoulder. He held out the right to the young card man. “Thank you, mister. Likely saved my life.”
“I’m still trying to do that. But your life ain’t gonna be worth much if you aren’t long gone from here in the next few minutes.”
“My name’s Jonah Hook.”
The young man smiled. “I’ll remember that.”
Jonah squeezed the gunman’s hand. “Maybe we’ll run across each other down the road sometime.”
“If you like cards and beer, we’ll likely bump into one another, sometime,” he said to Hook. “My name is James Butler Hickok.”
21
“YOU GONNA KEEP her with us?”
Many times had Artus Moser asked that question since the snowy night he had fled the Abilene watering hole
