“Leave the woman go,” Kingsbury pleaded, taking a small step to move in front of Beulah protectively.
The slaver must have enjoyed that, for James laughed, throwing his head back lustily. Then he said, “Shit, now. I never knew a man who could hold a candle to a woman when it come to dangerous talk. No—a woman wags her tongue sooner, and a lot faster’n any man I ever knowed. The bitch’ll die with the rest of you.”
“Let’s just get it over with,” another of the horsemen growled.
“Not just yet,” James snapped, his horse sidling nervously, fighting the bit. “Not before I see if these three rivermen are carrying what I think they’re carrying.”
The trio of boatmen backed closer together, Beulah between them.
“What about her?”
“Yes,” James answered one of his men. “She might just be carrying some of the money too.” He looked hard at the woman, saying, “You’ve got it under your clothes, don’t you?”
“Haven’t got nothing of no value,” Kingsbury said bravely, his teeth chattering with cold.
Bass’s heart whimpered with a twinge of sympathy for that brave man as he tapped on Hezekiah’s shoulder, nudging him toward the horsemen. Leaning over to speak into the slave’s ear, Titus whispered, “Grab you something big and long. Get you a branch off the ground.”
While he kept his eyes on the horsemen, Hezekiah hunched over, creeping off in search of a limb among the dark, decaying leaves.
“You first,” James said, wagging his pistol at Kingsbury. “Open your shirt.”
He did as he was told. And the horseman James had ordered out of the saddle to search the river pilot found nothing.
Wagging his pistol again, the slaver thundered, “Off with your britches!”
“You heard him!” the man beside Kingsbury growled, pounding him on the back. “Take ’em off.”
Kingsbury pulled free his wide leather belt from its buckle, allowing it to drop to the sodden ground. He yanked at the fly buttons, shinnying them down to hop out of his soggy pants.
The slave hunter snatched them up from the ground, shook them, then tossed the britches up to the leader. “They feel heavy, James.”
“Aye, they do at that,” the leader replied. “The rest of you, off with yours. Now!”
“And you, woman.” The thief on the ground whirled on Beulah, reaching out and stuffing his hand inside the neck of her blanket coat, flinging open the flaps. “You I’ll search my own self.”
The moment he grabbed hold of the top of her blouse and rent it in half, Kingsbury lunged for him. The thief brought up his pistol in a backswing, catching Hames across the temple. The river pilot stumbled backward. Root caught him as the thief hurled the woman down into the mud. Standing over her, his pistol in one hand, he fought his belt and britches with the other. Kingsbury came to and tried to fight off Root and Ovatt, struggling to reach Beulah, who refused to let out a cry.
“Stay where you are, boatman!” James ordered, urging his horse forward a yard, wagging his pistol at the three rivermen. “This ought to be a pretty sight to watch.”
“I swear—I’ll kill you,” Kingsbury growled. “I’ll hunt you down. I’ll see you hang—”
James’s pistol barked in that hammer of rain, spinning Kingsbury around. He crumpled from the grasp of his two companions, spilling back into the leaves and dead grass beneath the bare branches of a hickory tree.
Beulah scrambled to the side, attempting to crawl to her feet and reach him, crying out only when the thief struck her across the jaw with a flat hand. She sprawled back, and once more he stepped over to straddle her, exposing himself as the two other horsemen dismounted and slogged over.
“I get some’a that next.”
“Hell with you! I was on the ground afore you.”
The first shoved the second. The second reached out to grab for the first, squabbling.
“Stop it!” James bellowed in the dying growl of thunder. “Just take her and be done with it! And you,” he said to one of the two on the ground, “get back in the saddle and keep your gun on the rest of these here.”
“I’ll damn well be next,” the man grumbled in disappointment as he stuffed a boot into the stirrup and rose to the saddle.
Wincing, Kingsbury slowly rose to his elbow as Ovatt and Root knelt beside him.
“You hit?” Reuben asked.
Touching the top of his shoulder, the river pilot nodded. “I’ll live,” he huffed, clearly in pain, glaring up at James, who was pulling a second pistol from the sash at his waist. “Long enough to find you.”
The man climbing back onto his horse guffawed nastily. “You ain’t gonna live nowhere near that long, you dumb son of—”
In that next flare of lightning the man began swinging a foot over the rump of his horse—when he suddenly pitched sideways from his saddle, his horse bounding away from the falling body, colliding with another riderless horse.
That’s when a piece of that black night tore out of the bowels of the forest and flung itself like a crazed, demonic shadow right into the midst of those two dismounted horsemen.
17
As Titus stuffed the fired pistol into his waistband, pulling the loaded one into his right hand and drawing back its hammer, Hezekiah burst past him, through the tangle of trees and shadow toward the ring of frightened horses and slave hunters thrown into instant confusion.
There the big slave lunged through the frightened animals, landing among the two thieves standing over Beulah. Hezekiah swung a huge limb at the end of his powerful arms. Every time it cracked against one of the slavers’ bones, it rang with the smack of a maul splitting hard oak.
At the same time, James’s mount reared wildly, but he struggled it back down, wagging a second horse pistol this way, then that, trying to hold it on the black terror pummeling two of his men senseless as the woman crawled off on her belly through the leaves.
Suddenly Kingsbury leaped, snagging the famous slave hunter’s wrist, yanking, snapping his head forward to lock his teeth in that pliant web of flesh between thumb and forefinger of the hand holding the pistol, gritting his teeth together as James flung his arm up and down, fighting to free himself from the wild beast pulling him from the saddle … when the pistol went off, the muzzle flash a bright, painful flare in the darkness of that thunderstruck forest.
As Kingsbury hurtled back, arms akimbo, the leader cruelly drove his spurs into the horse’s flanks. With something close to the sound of human pain, the animal cried out as James savagely wrenched his mount’s head to the side with the reins, hammering the beast into furious motion.
Clearing the last fringe of trees surrounding that deadly clearing, Bass brought his pistol up, marking a spot on the slaver’s broad back. With the instincts of a hunter he quickly considered, then decided. Stuffing the pistol back into his waistband, he brought the longrifle up to his shoulder as he snapped the goosenecked hammer back, flicking off the greased leather sock that kept the powder dry in its pan.
He blinked. Then once more, trying desperately to clear his eyes of the swirling rain that drove down on them in dancing sheets. Unsure in that darkness, he touched off the trigger.
Thirty yards away, the slave hunter twisted to the side, arms flung up, screwing partway out of the saddle as his hands flapped down, fighting to secure a purchase on the horn, seeking to regain the reins that flopped out of reach. Boots freed from the stirrups, James hurtled from the back of that terrified animal in a low arc. He collided against the great trunk of a chestnut tree, spilling to the damp ground with a great rush of air from his lungs.
Just beyond the slaver, the horse came to a stop, gazed suspiciously from side to side, then calmly dipped its head to forage among the moidering leaves for something worth nuzzling in the way of graze.
Root was the first to reach the slave hunter, standing over him as Titus came up—trembling. Bass tried to stand just so, mindful that if he didn’t, the others would surely tell his knees were rattling like all get-out. He’d never shot a man in anger. Standing there at that moment, he finally realized his veins burned with a fire never before this hot, adrenaline pumping through them still. His mouth gone dry, he could only stare, slack-jawed, at the
