Wheeling the big black horse, he spurred it toward the third rider, one of the Henry riflemen, and shot the man through the face as he fought his bucking horse.
Wheeling around, Billy instinctively ducked the shot as the man on the ground thumbed the hammer back on the Starr revolver he’d pulled from his belt and triggered it.
Billy took a breath, aimed, and shot him through the forehead as the vigilante leveled his pistol for another shot. The man dropped as if he were poleaxed.
But for the scattering horses, one tripping over its reins, the evening had gone quiet.
“By damn!” Billy cried. “Now that’s just daisy, ain’t it? Haven’t felt this fucking good for ages!”
He slipped the Remington into its holster, pulled a cartridge from the box on his belt, and after inserting it into the rifle’s chamber, he plucked a cap from its tin and pressed it onto the nipple.
Only then did he ride over to where Parmelee sat on his horse. The animal had backed away, pulling the rope up over the branch.
Billy caught up the animal’s reins, turning Locomotive so that he could reach out with the Bowie and sever Parmelee’s bonds.
The man wasted no time peeling the rope from around his neck and throwing it aside. For a moment he just sat, hunched in the saddle, breathing heavily.
“Reckon you got a right to be shook up some,” Billy remarked as he considered the men he’d killed. One was going to need another bullet or he’d linger.
“I’ve got no idea why you did that, Mr. Hancock, but I’m damned sure glad you did.”
“Reckon I been curious about you since Fort Benton.”
“Why?”
“That a fact? That you murdered and raped?”
Parmelee was recovering his wits, the cold glare was back. “The man was a deserter. The women were both his whores. By definition, you can’t rape a whore.”
Billy walked Locomotive over and pulled the Remington. Calling, “Whoa, now,” he steadied the horse and shot the lingerer through the head.
Rather than reload his empties, he pulled the loading lever down, pressed out the cylinder pin, and reached into his pocket for a second cylinder with five loaded chambers. Fitting it into the frame, he pressed the pin back in and clipped the loading lever home.
“We’d best take them Henry rifles,” Billy said. “Especially for the trail on the other side of Bozeman. A smart man wouldn’t risk his hair crossing the Powder River country. I figure it’s chancy enough if we head down through the Big Horn Basin. Them Henrys might come in handy.”
“You always thinking?” Parmelee asked as he stepped down from his horse and started rummaging through the vigilantes’ clothing.
“Yep. Like it might not do to have those horses get back to where people could recognize them any too quick. I’ll be back just as soon as I get them.”
As Billy rode after the horses, he felt jubilant, as if his chest were going to explode with sheer unadulterated joy. In his mind he kept replaying the shooting, seeing it over and over again.
By damn, he did good work when the devil was in him!
105
April 10, 1868
They called the windswept cemetery hill just east of town Jack O’Neill’s Ranch in honor of the well-liked bartender who’d been buried there. John Walley—self-declared undertaker—had claimed possession of the graveyard. Walley had started out as a cabinetmaker. A talent that easily had been turned to the manufacture of coffins—a commodity in perpetual short supply on the Colorado frontier, but in particular demand in violence-prone Denver.
Sarah stood in the blustery cold, bracing herself as the wind tried to billow her dress into a sail and blow her off to Kansas. Low blue-black clouds scudded toward the southeast; misty drops, little more than drizzle, beaded on her wool coat, turning the black fabric light gray. Here and there droplets had streaked.
She kept her back to the wind, as did Philip. He stood, head down, hat off, heedless of the fine misty rain that was already darkening his blond locks and sticking them to his skull. His gaze was fixed on the two freshly dug graves. One large, the other small.
God, Sarah’s heart ached for him. He looked as if he were a husk. Nothing more than skin wrapped around a frame of bone and absently clothed. Emptiness lay behind his eyes—a blue vacancy that had retreated beyond distance and time. The old Cherokee stories about soul loss that she’d heard as a girl came back to haunt her.
Philip had thrown every bit of himself into his marriage. He’d worshiped Aggie, blossomed with the growing promise of a child. Having invested that much of himself, the loss of lover, wife, partner, and child had crushed him the way a stone did a berry.
Had Aggie’s and his unborn son’s deaths forever ripped the soul from his body?
“And so we lay our beloved sister, wife, and mother, Bridget Hancock, to rest,” the preacher droned on. “At her side, taken too early, we inter the physical remains of her son, James Butler Hancock. Yet, in doing so, we are reminded that the dead are resurrected in eternal glory. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
As the preacher went on to recite the Lord’s prayer, Sarah stepped up to Philip and took his hand. Followed his gaze down into the ragged holes Walley’s men had hacked through the plains’ sod and down into the buff-colored dirt. Both coffins were covered with a smattering of wildflowers that Agatha had purchased for a penny from a street urchin. At least they hadn’t had to use paper flowers as was the winter custom.
After saying the obligatory amen at the end of the prayer, Sarah squeezed Philip’s hand. “She was my dear friend. Odd, isn’t it? For all the family’s prominence in Arkansas,
