Zane raised his head wearily and nodded once, his eyes glazing.
“Then I reckon you been stuck by an arrow afore,” Titus replied.
“Neber,” he said quietly around the shaft.
“Seems that makes two of us, Ebenezer.”
Zane asked, “How’s dat?”
“I ain’t never cut a arrow outta a man afore neither.”
Suddenly a little scared when he saw Zane turn slowly to peer back over his shoulder at him, Titus tried to look away but could not tear his eyes off the pilot’s clay-white face as Ebenezer took the shaft from his mouth.
“That’s good, Titus Bass,” Zane said, his glassy eyes smiling more than his lips. “A man what can make me laugh just when he’s fixing to go cutting on my leg—that’s all right, Titus Bass. Like I said afore: you’ll do to ride the river with.”
He watched Zane return the shaft between his teeth, then turned back to Kingsbury. “I figure this cutting is gonna hurt him something fierce.”
“We’ll hold him,” Ovatt said, locking Zane’s arms under his.
“Just get on with it,” Root said from the pilot’s legs.
“You cut slow enough, maybe he won’t feel it so bad,” Kingsbury suggested almost in a whisper. “Not near as soon anyways.”
It took all his strength to put the tip of his knife against that flesh, piercing the ragged hole cupped around the shaft, oozing blood shiny in the light spilled by the candles hung from the beam just above their heads. As he began to drag the blade through the soft, giving skin and down into the muscle, stroke by stroke by stroke below the shaft, Zane whimpered, groaned, growled around his piece of wood, but he lay amazingly still. Only the punctured leg quivered uncontrollably in something resembling a muscle spasm each time Bass’s blade sank deeper.
“Try it now,” Kingsbury said, then nodded to Ovatt and Root as if to tell them to lock down on Zane.
With his left hand Titus put some strain on the shaft. The pilot squealed in pain. While he heard Ebenezer gasping, Bass pressed on with his work and pried open the incision he had made with the bloody blade, pulling up with a steady pressure at the same time.
The shaft yanked free.
With a loud grunt Zane went limp.
“Ebenezer?” Ovatt called out. Then repeated it again more loudly. He touched the pilot’s face. “He’s gone, boys.”
“G-gone?” Titus groaned. “I kill’t him?”
“Jesus God, no!” Ovatt replied with a. chuckle. “Zane’s done passed out.”
“Good thing, too,” Kingsbury said. “He took that longer’n nary any man I know of would taken it. G’won now, Titus.”
“G-g’won?”
“You’ve more to dig outta his leg.”
“More?”
Snatching the shaft from Titus’s hand, Kingsbury held it inches before the youth’s eyes. “Can’t you see, goddammit! Here’s the arrow! But there ain’t no point on the son of a bitch.” He wheeled on Root. “Get over there to larboard and pull one of them arrows out’n the side of the boat, Reuben. I wanna have us a lookee at it.”
When Root returned, he handed two arrows over to Kingsbury. “Side of the boat looks like a porkypine, stuck the way it is.”
“I s’pose Ebenezer’s lucky he only catched the one,” Kingsbury replied. “Look there, Titus,” and the boatman held both arrows to the lamplight. “These got ’em some iron points. Damn it all. See how they’re tied round the shaft with that wrap.”
“I see.”
“It all come loose inside his leg. The wrap and the point too. Got wet in his blood.”
“An’ slipped off the shaft,” Ovatt finished for them.
Root inquired, “Gotta dig it out, Hames?”
“Gotta try.” Then he peered up at Bass. “Don’t we, Titus?”
“I’ll … try.”
He went back to work, pressing down on one side of the incision with his bloody fingers, slicing down a little at a time with the point of his blade until he saw something fibrous. He snagged it between his trembling fingers and pulled slowly. Out it came in a long, thick thread.
“Just like I tol’t you,” Kingsbury declared. “Now, go back in there and get the head of it afore Ebenezer wakes up.”
“I don’t think he’s coming to till morning, Hames,” Ovatt reported.
“Good thing too,” Kingsbury responded. “Finish it, Titus.”
Back down into the meat of the river pilot’s muscle he probed, until it felt as if the tip of the blade scraped against something harder than the soft, giving tissue. Hoping it wasn’t bone, he slowly pressed two fingers deep into the incision, both of them feeling down the knife’s blade until a fingertip struck it. Taking it between his fingers, he pulled. Slick with dark, warm blood—his fingers slipped off.
Again he grabbed hold of it, pulled, and slipped off.
“I c-can’t get a hold on it.”
“Stuck in the bone, most like,” Ovatt grumbled.
“Yeah,” Kingsbury agreed. “Don’t you got something in your shooting pouch you can grab it with, Titus?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“What’s a fella use when he’s got a ball stuck down his barrel and you’re wanting to pull it out?”
“I got a screw I put on the end of my wiping stick.”
“Yeah, I know—but when you got the screw into the ball, what you use to yank hard on the wiping stick get that stuck ball out?”
It came to him all at once. “That just might work. Get me my pouch.”
Heman Ovatt flung the shooting pouch his way. Scrounging at the bottom of the front section of the pouch, Bass pulled out the forged-iron tongs he had never used all that much.
“Them looks like they’ll work,” Kingsbury declared.
“Hames, help pull that meat outta my way,” Titus told the boatman. As Kingsbury tugged the muscle in one direction, Bass eased it down in the other. Working his fingers back into the incision, he touched the rounded end of the arrow point once more. Slipping the small, narrow tongs into the incision, he guided them into position, clamped them around the point, and began to pull; “Damn, but that’s stuck in there.”
“Work on it—it’ll come,” Ovatt said.
Rocking it back and forth slightly, Titus felt it begin to give way, eventually freeing itself from its lock in that biggest bone in the human body. Carefully he slid it from the deep incision, captured between the tongs. Holding the point up to the light for a moment, Titus turned it around slowly so all could see.
“We best save that for him,” Kingsbury said.
“That’s for sure,” Root agreed. “He’ll be one mad kingfish gone alligator-horse if’n we throw that away!”
“He might even wear it on a cord round his neck,” Hames predicted.
They washed the wound out with hot water, then pried open Zane’s lips so they could extract a little of the tobacco quid he had pulverized inside his cheek before passing out. Kingsbury pressed the dark, soupy leaf and spittle down into the laceration. They finished by cutting a strip of cloth from the bottom of Ebenezer’s spare shirt and knotting it around his leg. With a pair of blankets pulled over their leader, the three boatmen decided they would draw lots to take watch until dawn, when they would once more set off downriver.
Root happily sat up the first pull, and Kingsbury took the second watch. An hour or more back now, Hames had awakened Titus with an insistent nudge.
“Cold,” Bass had muttered as he sat up, slowly coming awake.
“Real cold,” Kingsbury said as he slid past the youngster. “And cold does a good job keeping you awake.”
But it hadn’t.
He awoke himself with a start, hearing himself snore. He sputtered, then fell silent, still half-asleep, listening
