Billy gestured grandly with his glass. “I mean, you can’t let her get the best of you. So now, after all them men you hired me to kill, you’ll pay me five thousand dollars to shoot Sarah Anderson in the face. Not because you want to get your fingers on a mine, like them other times, but because she drove you out of her house when you went to rape her.”
“Shut your lying mouth!” George started to walk away.
“You take another step, George, and I’ll shoot you down.”
George stopped, his breath coming in fast gasps. “Billy, you’re drunk. Talking crazy. You been in the opium again?”
“That odd turn of events I was talking about? Sarah Anderson is my sister, you pile of walking shit. She was Sarah Hancock before the war. Me, I let her down once. She and Maw both. I let her down again today. But it stops here. Turn around, you belly-crawling worm.”
George turned, the only sound in the room coming from the raucous celebrants in the room below. George’s face was a conflicting mix of anger, disbelief, and soul-blanching fear.
Billy said, “Time to give the Devil his due,” and shot George Nichols through the heart.
George was gasping, his legs pumping weakly in the sawdust. Billy stopped long enough to pull a meadowlark feather from his pocket and stuck it in the bullet hole. Then he glared around the stunned room and started down the stairs.
He was most of the way to the door before a man came pounding down after him, pointing, and crying, “He just kilt George Nichols! Grab him!”
Billy pulled his pistol, waving it around, shouting, “Get your drunk carcasses away from me!”
When one burly bullwhacker grabbed at him, Billy calmly shot the man in the face. Then he was out into the night, charging up Blake Street, feet pounding on the rutted thoroughfare.
They came pouring out of the Criterion in his wake. Several pistols banged in the darkness. Billy flinched as a ball buried itself in his shoulder. Then came a staccato of gunfire like a string of Chinese firecrackers.
The louder bark of a rifle accompanied a numbing impact in his hip. Something else slapped low into his back.
Turning, he thumbed the hammer back on the Remington; his return fire scattered them into the darkness. A deep ache burned through his right hip, that leg going weak.
Blinking, he stiff-legged into the sanctuary of an alley, found a board for a crutch, and hobbled forward. The pain was atrocious. Warm blood drained down the inside of his thigh. He stopped only long enough to throw up, then staggered on.
He had just stepped out on Fifteenth Street. In one sense, he only had made it for a couple of blocks. On the other, he was as far from salvation as he’d ever been.
That’s when a voice called, “There he is, men. I want him surrounded and unable to flee.”
125
June 30, 1868
Doc poured coal oil into one of the lamps, then screwed the lid back onto the tin. After setting the tin back in its place, he threaded the hot lamp back together, lit the wick, and replaced the chimney. With three lamps burning, the surgery was as well illuminated as it could be for this time of night.
He crossed to where Sarah lay on the cot. He’d just used his thermometer, finding her temperature a little high at 98.8. She usually ran about 98.5.
“How’s the leg?” he asked.
“A slight ache,” she told him, looking up at him with dreamy eyes. “Removing the bullet hurt worse than being shot.”
“It wasn’t the bullet that worried me. It was the fabric it carried in with it. One of these days we’re going to understand why foreign objects cause wounds to infect. But cleaning out a wound and irrigating it with boiled water seems to help.”
“I like morphine,” she told him. “It’s like floating in warm water.”
“Don’t like it too much. You’ll end up like so many of the girls down on the line. If it’s such an easy way out, why do they always end up dead?”
She shook her head. “I’m past that trap, Doc. What am I? Twenty-three? I feel like an old lady.” She paused. “Butler’s a kind man, isn’t he?”
“Him and all of his soldiers.” Doc reached for his coffee.
“He’s so … odd. Talking to the air, but he seems to think like a normal person. Outside of losing the thread of the conversation on occasion.” She shook her head. “I keep thinking he’s fooling with me, playing games.”
“It gets worse when he’s worried, like at your house tonight. Sometimes, when everything is going well, you can almost forget that he’s a lunatic.”
She frowned. “Do you really think that letting him go back to the Indians is a good idea?”
Doc sipped his coffee. “He seems happy, Sis. He lights up when he talks about this wife and family of his. But as to letting him go back? I think now that Billy’s here, maybe it ought to be a family decision.”
“Perhaps.” A flicker of dreamy smile crossed her lips, and she asked, “Do you believe what he says about Paw?”
“I’m not the one to ask. I always saw through Paw’s clapjaw and bluff. Maybe because I was the oldest.”
She stared distantly at one of the lamps. “I fell for it. He was going to take me to Little Rock, find me a husband who would make me a lady. I’d be a happy brood mare, dressed in finery. The perfect accoutrement to augment a prominent gentleman’s social position. Envy of Arkansas high society.”
“And?”
Her lips twitched. “I suspect Paw would have pawned me off to whomever offered him the greatest gain. If I could go back I’d slap that little bitch silly, stand her on her own two feet, and start her practicing with a revolver at the age of eight.”
“That sounds hard.”
“It’s a hard world, Brother.” She made a face. “Discovering that? Well … believe me, the epiphany is not
