62
September 2, 1865
Five hundred dollars!
The thought of it filled Billy’s brain like a fever as he lay in the dappled shade beneath the mesquite. The occasional fly buzzed around his head, apparently desperate for his sweat or enticed by the way he smelled after a week in the brasada. Not an hour earlier he’d watched a scorpion—worried by the way he’d shifted on the hot white limestone rock—skitter away.
A family of wrens had passed by not fifteen minutes ago, hardly paying him any heed at all as they hopped about in the cedars surrounding him.
Across the canyon, heat shimmered on the white rock and dark green foliage of live oak, redolent cedars, mesquite, and currants. From his perch, Billy could see down to the trail below where it skirted a dry and rock-filled streambed. In the distance he could see Packsaddle Mountain. Every two weeks, the captain and his patrol of mounted Negro cavalry made this loop. At Llano, they would spend the night before riding down to Fredericksburg, then back to Austin.
Billy hadn’t a clue why anyone would want to kill the captain—let alone pay five hundred dollars for it. Nor did he particularly care. The man was a Yankee, a pawn on the conqueror’s game board.
He shooed a fly. Maybe, if he made a good kill, the dreams would stop. He had awakened Danny last night after the nightmare image of Sarah, naked, her breasts bruised and bitten, had risen over his supine body. As her hair billowed and twisted around her, she’d looked down at him with icy blue eyes and her lips, looking rotted, had twisted around fanglike teeth.
She had bent down then, her hands fastening on his pizzle.
Billy’s pumping loins had brought him awake screaming.
God in heaven, he hated that dream.
Miracle was, Danny hadn’t shot him dead when he jerked upright in the blankets.
The crack of a hoof on rock, followed a moment later by the metallic clink of buckles, gave Billy his warning. A shod hoof clicked on stone. A man laughed. The sound funneled up the canyon.
Soon now.
Billy’s heart began to slow, the feeling of euphoria rising. He shifted the Sharps where it lay propped on his pack and snuggled behind the stock. With the gun up, he peered through the sights to the place where the trail climbed up through the limestone rim. One hundred and twenty paces. He could see the cracked rock he’d practiced on yesterday. The elevation and windage were perfect.
“What you gonna do wit dat gal, Samuel? She gonna wan’ you t’ marry her. Den you’se gonna get transferred someplace else,” one of the colored troops called out.
“I’s gwine t’ marry her,” another called back. “An’ if’n I’s be transferred, I’s gwine t’ give her money t’ come. Dat’s what. Don’ gotta let massa break no marriages no mo’. Even if massa’s de army. Ain’t dat right, Cap’n?”
“Reckon so, Samuel,” a white voice, Northern accent, called back. “Though God alone knows how you can keep a woman on army wages.”
The first of them passed below Billy’s perch. The point riders, three black men in blue uniforms, kepis strapped tightly under their chins. They and their mounts looked tired and sweaty.
Then came the captain, crossed sabers glinting gold on the front of his campaign hat. He rode as if one with his mount, a big blood bay. Though he scanned the rim as he passed, it was with a trained soldier’s casualness, not that of a man expecting trouble.
The rest of the column followed in twos, the black soldiers in various postures, their carbines muzzle-down in the thimbles attached to their stirrup straps. The carbines yanked and swayed, tugging on the broad shoulder straps, as their horses labored up the grade.
Billy began to breathe as he settled the front sight on the notch. Inhale, hold, exhale; he followed the mantra Paw had taught him so long ago.
The point riders climbed through the narrow defile one by one, and then came the captain.
Billy let him ride into the sight picture, applied the slightest pressure to the trigger, and felt the Sharps punch back into his shoulder. Even as the report boomed in the narrow canyon, he heard the meaty smack of his minié ball into flesh.
Through the spinning cloud of blue smoke he saw the captain sag forward, then tumble sideways off his mount. The blood bay panicked, trying to shy sideways in the narrow gap, then bucked and kicked as it fought free.
Billy had already snapped the lever down, dropping the block. He shoved another greased cartridge into the smoking chamber and flicked the lever closed, shearing the paper to expose the powder. Plucking up the cap he’d set to the side, he pressed it over the nipple and resettled the rifle over his pack.
Below him was chaos, men shouting, horses milling, the clatter of confusion.
Two of the colored troops had dismounted and rushed to the captain. A sergeant was bellowing orders, pointing this way and that.
Billy waited.
As the two soldiers attended to the captain and raised him into a sitting position, Billy took up the slack on the trigger. One of the men was supporting the captain’s head.
Now!
The Sharps boomed again and spewed another wreath of smoke into the air.
Billy didn’t see the captain’s head explode as the lead bullet hit it—but the mess was apparent: the two stunned soldiers were spattered with blood, brains, and bone.
Then Billy was wiggling backward, bullets whacking off the limestone below his hiding place.
Getting to his feet, he ran. From long practice, he dropped the block, fishing another cartridge from his shirt pocket and slipping it into the chamber. Keeping low, he zigzagged through the brush—cat’s claw and mesquite thorns tearing at his clothing. He leaped from one limestone boulder to another, sprinted across an open expanse of stone, and slipped and slid his way down through a crack into a side canyon on the other side of the ridge.
Wasn’t no horse in the
