your back and a hankering to get back home fast as you can.”
“So that’s just how we gotta look to folks, ain’t it?” Ovatt asked.
“Like we’re poorest of the lot, and ain’t worth the time of no robbers to shake us down for the lice in the seams of our old, wored clothes,” Kingsbury added.
“You fellas all got your pistols, don’t you?” she asked, her eyes touching each one of the four.
“Only thing you let us spend our money on today,” Root grumbled.
“G’won and throw your money away like you fixed on doing at Natchez: whores and whiskey—just to get your throats cut.”
“Aw, shit,” Root said sourly. “This damned woman’s right again.”
“I wanna make the Ohio country with my fortune,” Kingsbury declared. “To do that, we gotta be smart and use our money only for food, some new blankets, and these pistol guns we bought us for our journey. We go off buying too much fancy things—folks can tell we got money just by looking at us on the way home.”
Ever since that morning when they had moved from gun shop to gun shop looking to buy enough weapons so that each of them would have a pair of pistols, including the woman, Titus had kept his tucked in the old sash tied at his waist. As he stuffed coins into the waistband he was sewing, he touched those pistols where they lay beside him. It reassured him now, to have such power—the longbarreled, big-caliber pistols, in addition to his grandpap’s rifle. He let his chest swell again as it had many times this day, just to think how he would turn away any would-be highwaymen by simply pulling out his weapons. And once more Titus practiced that determined look he was certain would turn any thief’s knees to water when they laid their eyes on him.
He was still dreaming on how he would convert robbers to cowards on the Natchez Trace when Heman Ovatt nudged him awake the next morning in that cold room they all shared.
“Them wagons ain’t gonna wait for us,” Root said as Titus came up onto an elbow slowly.
“Time to go,” Kingsbury said as he stood, slinging over his shoulder that pair of blankets he had rolled into a tube, tied at either end with a leather cord.
Titus’s stomach complained with a fading whine as he yanked on the second of his moccasins. “We got time for breakfast afore we catch up them wagons?”
Beulah shook her head, patting the big pouch that hung at her hip, suspended over her shoulder. “No, but I got us some biscuits and hard-meat from last night’s supper. It will do once we get rolling north.”
Leaving their tiny room, the five hurried into the cold mist and down the outside steps that were braced into the back wall of the gambling house. A few yards behind the brothel next door they stopped among the trees where three outbuildings were stationed. Titus was the last to have the chance to duck out of the cold dawn mist and settle himself on the plank with that hole sawed out for him to nest upon. While it was dry in there, he had to admit the air damned near choked a man. In enough of a hurry to breathe some better air, he shuffled outside, pulling his britches up. In the chilling mist he got them buttoned, shifting the new and unaccustomed weight of the waistband while he retied the belt sash.
Through the litter-clogged streets of New Orleans they hurried as the mist became a chilling rain. Among the heaps and mounds of garbage, children fought for any edible morsel, every one of them dressed in their tattered frocks, muddy and barefoot, noses running and eyes red and matted in disease. Ragged-eared dogs, soaked and shivering, slunk back in the shadows of the alleyways. Along those dark passages the boatmen and Beulah hurried, watching and listening for windows that would open above them, chamberpots emptied by the oblivious tenants on any unsuspecting pedestrians below.
Titus smelled the wagon yard a full two blocks before they reached the freight district—mules and oxen steaming in the downpour, the smell of fresh dung and old hay. Arriving at the proper yard just as a sheet of oiled canvas was being lashed over the walls of the last wagon, they found the head teamster, who looked them over, then held out his open palm.
“When you wasn’t here right away, I thort you’d had you a change of mind,” said the moon-faced, red-nosed man.
“We’re here, and we’re going,” Kingsbury replied, glancing down at that open hand suspiciously. “We done paid you already.”
“That was for my boss,” he said, an ingratiating smile seeming to cut that bare-shaven round face right in half. “This morning you pay
“We had us a deal—”
“You had a deal with my boss.” The wagon master smiled, snapping his fingers, then opening his palm once more. “He just owns the wagons. I’m the man what sees they get to Natchez and back with the goods.”
“I wanna talk to your boss—where’s he?”
That smile fading quickly from the moon face, the wagon master turned and began to step off. “Get yourself another ride north.”
“Wait!” Beulah cried, lunging forward to grab the man by the elbow. “What do we owe you?”
For a long moment he looked down on the small woman; then the smile returned as he peered back at the four men who stood in the rain, small puddles growing at their feet. “Ten dollar each ought’n be about right.”
She let go of his elbow, looked back at Kingsbury quickly, then shook her head. “We ain’t got that kind of money.”
“Don’t tell me that crock of horsepuck,” he growled, and laughed. “You’re going north, back to home. Got you all kinds of money—”
“Five dollars each of us,” she wheeled and interrupted with a snap. “That’s twenty-five dollars for you. And I’ll wager you ain’t seen that much money for your own self at one time in many a month.”
For a second the heavyset man was startled by her words; then his smile broadened and he licked his bottom lip. “I ain’t in the business of arguing over money, ma’am. Ain’t nothing for us to settle here. All you gotta do is get out your ten dollars for the each of you—”
“Five dollars,” she snapped at him again, putting one finger against his chest. “We don’t go, you don’t make no extra this trip north. That’d be a real shame.”
Cocking his head, he licked his lips again and let the rain drip off the floppy brim of his cheap wool-felt hat a minute longer, then said, “Eight dollar.”
“Six.”
“Seven.”
“Six,” she repeated adamantly.
“Awright,” he grumbled, holding out his hand again, this time toward the woman. “Six and a half.”
“She ain’t got the money,” Kingsbury declared as he shuffled forward in the mud. “I do.”
Eyes dancing, the wagon master watched the coins clink into his hand one at a time, smiling with more largesse than ever. “Just figured she’d be the one to have the money, I did,” he clucked, “the way this female panther ’pears to have just about all the brains and balls in your outfit.”
15
“We stick to the Catholic streets of Natchez,” Kingsbury whispered in the wavering shadows cast by the Spanish moss clinging to the tall cypress at the southern edge of town, “an’ I don’t mean the Irish Catholic streets, neither—we’ll be awright. Wait till dark to start through, and get on out of town afore light.”
The other two boatmen nodded, then looked at Bass. Grim-lipped, Titus nodded, sensing his Adam’s apple bob high in his throat as he did.
“We need us food, Hames,” the woman reminded.
Glancing now at her haggard features, Titus thought Beulah looked older than she probably was.
“Don’t you worry—we’ll get us food,” Kingsbury replied. “Do that, first whack.”
It was their nineteenth day since leaving New Orleans, well into December now, with the weather growing colder the farther north they bounced and jostled atop the tarped wagons hauling staples up a well-beaten road to Natchez, Mississippi.
Recognizing that they were nearing the outskirts of that settlement, Kingsbury bellowed out to the wagon
