Around him, the men were giving him a hollow-eyed look. Butler realized his heart was pounding. He swallowed hard and took a swig of coffee.
Sarah drummed her fingers on the table. “What would I change if I could go back? I’d shoot Dewley off his horse the day he rode into the yard. Fight him off from the house, even if it meant they burned it down around Maw and me. But it would have saved me the rape and all that followed. Saved Billy the guilt. Kept him from having to find me like that. I think that’s what really drove him crazy.”
“You’re the strong one, Sarah.” He reached out and took her hand. “After I’m gone, Philip is going to need your strength. The men and I have discussed it. They are going to hang Billy. He’s evil, and he knows it. But Doc is only going to see his little brother going to the gallows, and it’s going to crucify his soul.”
She met Butler’s eyes and nodded. “Hell, it’s going to be hard enough on me. I’m the cause of it, even though it wasn’t my doing. Damn it! It was all I could do to save myself, let alone him.”
“This is Billy we’re talking about,” Butler said softly. “He was bound to be a hellion. Maw knew. So did John Gritts. Paw might have had a hint, but he wouldn’t have cared. Billy always hung on the edge. If the war hadn’t come. If Gritts had stayed around, and Maw had been there for a guide, maybe they could have taken the sharp edges off Billy’s nature. One thing I can tell you, he wasn’t ever going to stay and be a farmer.”
“You were going to be a scholar. Now what? You’re going to be a wild Indian?”
He smiled at that. “Not wild. Just free. For as long as it lasts.”
She pursed her lips. “I wish you wouldn’t go. I’ve heard talk. The man Billy killed leaving the Criterion? Swede? He has friends. They’re burying him tomorrow. There’s talk of forming a vengeance committee.”
“Dave Cook won’t let them.” Butler glanced at the men, reading their expressions. Pettigrew tilted his head, as if indicating it was time to head north. “I know, Corporal. We’ve been away too long already.”
To Sarah he said, “A couple of days. Just long enough to get to know you again, and maybe talk to Doc about Billy. Then we’re heading north.”
He thought her eyes had changed. More of a steely blue now. Harder. After his last visit to the farm he’d left hoping that Sarah would one day be the dreamy-eyed girl he’d known before the war. Before blood and dying men. Before the famine and hard times. Instead, after fate had played its hand, she’d become this beautiful, tough, and calculating woman. God help the man who tried to cross her.
She said, “I can promise you one thing: I don’t know how, but one way or another, I’m not letting Billy hang.”
128
July 3, 1868
The pain was down to a dull ache, except when Billy moved. Then it blasted through him like lightning, causing his eyes to water and his guts to squirm. A part of him cussed and fretted about being laid up like this. All that time, all those fights, and he’d never so much as been scratched. Now Philip told him he’d never walk without crutches. His physician brother might fret about the wound in Billy’s ass, but the one that played hell was the two smashed ribs that had stopped one of the pistol balls. If he so much as drew a breath too fast, his chest stitched itself in agony.
And God help him if he sneezed or coughed.
Billy glanced sidelong at where Philip sat at the small desk. In the glow of a coal oil lamp he was reading a medical journal. Not much more than a pamphlet that Doc subscribed to from Boston.
“What time is it?” Billy asked.
Doc pulled his pocket watch. “A little after eight.”
“Got to take a leak.”
“Well, do it.” Doc looked over from his journal. “That’s why you’re on the table with the hole in it.”
Billy made a face, letting go and listening to his urine dribbling into the thunder mug under the table.
“Hell of a circumstance,” he muttered under his breath.
“Believe me, you really don’t want to try and stand up and urinate like a man.”
Doc set his medical pamphlet aside, stepped over, and removed the chamber pot. Eyes thoughtful, he inspected the pot’s contents. “Good, the bleeding in your bruised kidney has slowed. You’re healing.”
“Wish t’ hell that bastard had used a bigger gun.”
“If it hadn’t been a .32, it would have killed you, little brother.”
“That’s the point I was trying to make.”
Billy waited while Doc went out back to the jakes and emptied the pot. When he came back in and replaced it, he studied Billy with pained eyes. Damn, did he have to look that way? Half crazy with worry?
“What?”
“I can understand you going after Dewley’s rapists. I’d have done the same.” Doc pulled his chair over and sat where he could look Billy in the eyes. “But the first time you took money to kill someone? You had to know that was a step over the line.”
Billy smiled faintly, thinking back to Charlie Deveroux. “That was Texas. It was war and war’s paybacks. The man I killed was the enemy, a skunk who’d used his position to kill others and take their property. Wasn’t much of a moral line to step over.”
Billy slowly shifted his good arm. “See, the thing is, I could have looked all I wanted to, and I never would have seen no line, Doc. It’s like what shade of pink is the difference between white and red? And one day it just plumb hits you that you’re something you never quite
