“I s’pose. You take your outfit off to Californy, an’ them others stay on the road all the way to Oregon.”
The train captain grinned. “Sounds like everything is turning out rosy in the end, doesn’t it?”
“’Cept for one thing, Hargrove.”
“Ah … yes,” he sighed as the third wagon clattered to a stop and its driver turned to holler back at the others to halt.
Already the drivers of those first two wagons had clambered down from their seats, dragging their prairie rifles after them, those short-barreled, percussion-capped weapons being manufactured on the borderlands for the new breed of frontiersman coming west. Titus hoped the three family members he had secreted in the rocks would each remember to choose a different target, on their side of the open ground—and keep their rifle trained on their particular target … no matter what happened to him and Hargrove when the shooting started.
“Listen, Hargrove,” Harris said, his eyes narrowing as they bounced over the rocks once more, “I’ve managed to keep my hair for all these winters already … I ain’t gonna lose it to this son of a bitch what wants a piece of your tail.”
The moment Harris attempted to turn his horse away, Hargrove reached out and snagged the reins. “You’re staying. In for a penny, in for a pound, I always say. If I don’t come out of this—you don’t get paid, Harris. Simple as that.”
“This ain’t got nothin’ to do with me,” Harris complained. “Between you an’ him.”
“Let me explain it to you again,” Hargrove growled, dragging the pilot’s horse closer. “The other men that old bastard has killed, they were expendable. Practically speaking, I could count on a certain number of my employees not reaching our final destination with us. That always meant there would be more of the pie to share, don’t you see?”
Hargrove waved one of the riflemen left, the other to the right, both of them stopping just ahead of the two horsemen so that it would be hard for the trapper to swing his weapon far enough from right to left before someone dropped him.
Hargrove cleared his throat dramatically and continued, “Do you get the import of what I’m telling you, Mr. Harris?”
“You figger me to sit here and shoot that man with the three of you?”
“If you want to get paid when we get to California.”
“Th-that ain’t part of being a pilot,” Harris protested. “I kill’t my share of Injuns, an’ I’ve done a helluva lot I ain’t real proud of in my life … but I ain’t ever out-an’-out shot no man for money.”
Hargrove’s jaw set with a jut as he ruminated on that. “Very well. You’ve cast your lot with spineless cowards, Harris—”
“I ain’t no coward!”
But the captain was already waving his pilot off with a disdainful gesture. “Be gone with you. Get out of the line of fire, you coward.”
“Tol’t you—I ain’t no coward!” Harris was starting to fume.
“Move aside and let the real men finish this once and for all—”
Titus interrupted, “You better listen to him, Hargrove. Moses Harris may be a lot of things, but he ain’t ever been no coward. Dead of winter, he’s walked back to St. Louie from the mountains. Not once’t … but twice’t.”
With a sneer, Hargrove shifted his rifle so that it lay along his right thigh, pointed in the target’s general direction. “More myths of your brave breed? So Harris has performed mighty deeds. That still doesn’t alter the fact that he’s grown spineless in his old age.”
“I ain’t spineless—”
Yet Hargrove paid Harris no mind as he continued, “Which is something it appears you still have, old man.”
“A spine?”
“Some backbone, yes.”
Harris leaned forward, reaching down to tear his reins from Hargrove’s grip. “Take your damn hand off my horse!”
The captain did just that, but brought that very fist up so fast and hard beneath Harris’s chin that the pilot’s head snapped backward, his wide-brimmed hat flying off before he slid from the saddle, dazed, spilling onto the sand.
Hargrove tapped heels into his horse, urging it forward at a walk as he brought up the rifle in his right hand. “Which ball will get you, Mr. Bass?”
“Won’t be yours, Hargrove.”
The man gentled back on the reins and halted, still clutching that short-barreled carriage gun on Scratch. “What makes you so sure it won’t be mine?”
“Have to be one’a these other hired niggers,” Titus said as he pulled the hammers back on the big pistol he gripped in the right hand, on the sawed-off trade gun he kept loaded with drop-shot that was in his left.
“My aim is excellent,” he replied to the trapper.
“Not when you can’t even get off a shot,” Scratch declared. “You’re the first’un I’m gonna shoot.”
“You’ll take your chances on these other two?”
Titus quickly appraised them. “Neither one of ’em look like killers to me, Hargrove. I figger you sent the ones what could kill on ahead to get me. If’n either these two had the stomach to cut a man down, you would’ve sent ’em along with Benjamin. But this’un an’ that’un too … I think they like breathin’ a li’l more than you give ’em credit for.”
That appraisal clearly unsettled Hargrove. As the hired men turned their heads to look at their employer, he ordered, “Don’t listen to his rantings. If he makes a move to use either of those guns, drop him where he stands.”
“Come down to just you an’ me, Hargrove,” Titus said as he flicked a look at Harris starting to stir among the sagebrush.
The pilot wagged his head, groggily rolling onto his hip behind Hargrove, rocking onto his hands and knees shakily.
When he fixed his eyes again on the train captain, Titus found Hargrove had cleared a pistol from his belt, yanking it into sight with his left hand.
Without considering those orders Hargrove had given his two henchmen, Titus brought up his two weapons on instinct, instantly deciding he would take the horseman with the pistol, then use the trade gun loaded with shot to deliver a scattered pattern at the man to his left because he stood a better chance of hitting him with a wide pattern than with a single ball.
He pitched forward onto his knees after firing his first shot with the pistol, with barely enough time to watch the ball slam into Hargrove’s shoulder before he pulled the trigger on the scattergun in his left hand. He felt the hired man’s ball snarl past his ear at the very moment that double load of coarse drop-shot chewed through the gunman’s belly like a nest of angry wasps, flinging him backward, his feet pin-wheeling in the loose sand.
But a gunshot rumbled from the rocks behind the bloodied man, knocking his body forward. He landed with the side of his face down in the dirt.
Immediately afterward a second weapon roared from the boulders, off to Bass’s right this time, the ball furrowing into the ground beside the second gunman’s boot.
“No! No! Don’t shoot me!” the henchman screeched in utter panic as he hurled his rifle loose and raised his arms.
Fury clouded Hargrove’s face as he gazed down at his bleeding wound, angrily nudging his horse forward. “Isn’t this a predicament, old man?” he crowed. “You’ve emptied both of your weapons … but I still have both of mine.”
Scratch hoped Waits could place her shot close enough to Hargrove that it would give her husband at least a heartbeat to dive out of the way, perhaps even make it to that loaded rifle the hired man had just pitched aside before the bully shuffled back in terror, his arms still high.
“I’ll still make it to California, old man,” Hargrove growled, “but your bones’ll rot here in the middle of nowhere.”
The instant Hargrove whipped both of his weapons into play, Bass dove for that loaded rifle in the sand. One of the captain’s bullets kicked up dirt at his heel the moment he smacked onto the ground and his hands scooped up
