“Me and Satan.” He looped his rolled blanket around his shoulders and reached a hand down to pull her up. She could see the hardness behind his eyes, the fact that something was tearing him up on the inside. Maybe it was that they still hadn’t seen to Maw’s body? He said he’d left it on the porch in a blanket.
She winced as she got painfully to her feet, looped her own blanket around her shoulders, and picked her tender way out onto the frosted grass. Her injured bare feet burned with the cold.
To her surprise, Billy stopped long enough to pick up a piece of white ash he’d been whittling on, and leaned on it like a crutch.
“What are you doing?”
“Making it look like I’m hurt.”
“But you ain’t!”
“They don’t know that.”
He led her on an easy trail that dropped down into the White River bottom, past an old logging camp, and along a partially overgrown haul road to the base of a cliff. Their progress, given Billy’s crutch, had proven uncomfortably slow.
“We got to go faster!” she called from ahead as he lagged.
“Stop a minute,” he said, glancing at the boggy ground.
She walked back, mud squishing between her toes, irritated that Billy was looking approvingly at the tracks she was leaving in the damp soil.
“We got to hurry!” she pleaded. “God, Billy, it’s bad enough with what I see … relive … every time I close my eyes!” She thrust an arm out. “They’re just back there! They’re coming!”
“Uh-huh.” One by one, he removed paper cartridges from the black cartridge box and carefully rolled them into his blanket. Leaving three in the box, he gestured her forward as he stumped along on his crutch, saying, “Take the trail to the right at the foot of the slope.”
“Up that cliff?”
“That’s right.”
She just happened to look back as they rounded the brush, seeing Billy drop the cartridge box with its precious three rounds.
“What are you doing?”
“Laying trail, sis.”
“They’ll think that’s your ammunition.”
“Reckon they will.”
Fifteen minutes later, sweating, her feet bleeding and raw from the abrasive limestone, she wondered when, if ever, they’d reach the top. In places she had to pull herself up, scrambling on all fours, only to find the trail edging along a limestone shelf above a sheer drop. Looking over the edge she saw jagged boulders at the bottom. By crickets, that was nothing to fall on.
Billy was stumbling, making a racket, dislodging small stones, as if he were on his last legs. She looked back, froze, that terrible cold wash numbing her to the core.
“Billy?”
He looked back, stopped short, seeing Dewley’s riders as they emerged from the haul road and stopped at the boggy stretch. There Silas stepped down from his horse and bent over their tracks.
Billy grinned for the first time that day. “’Bout time.”
Sarah scrambled for the next switchback, trying to forget the pain in her feet.
“Hold up,” Billy called as he lay down over a boulder, propped the Sharps, and adjusted the rear sight. The muzzle shot flame and smoke as the report carried out over the valley.
Sarah shaded her eyes. To her surprise, Dewley’s big black horse, called Locomotive, rose up, shook its head, and staggered sideways. Colonel Dewley barely kept his seat. Immediately, men scattered into the trees. Dewley stepped out of the saddle, checking his horse’s neck. Turning, he glared up at the steep trail.
Sarah said, “He sets store by that horse.”
One of the men was pointing at where Sarah in her red wool shirt and Billy stood exposed on the trail.
“Guess that got their attention,” Billy noted. “They got spyglasses?”
“Of course!”
He then made a show of reaching for his belt where the cartridge box should be. Fumbling, jerking his head around as if looking for it, he slapped his pockets, and lifted the Sharps, staring at it wistfully.
“They’re shooting!” Sarah cried as blue puffs were followed by the popping sound of guns. Moments later, bullets slapped the rocks and soil around them.
Billy pulled up his pistol, banging away. He shot three times, then bellowed, “Go away! Leave us alone!”
“You killed my men! Mutilated them, you son of a bitch!” Dewley shouted across the distance. “You shot my horse! You run, you little pissant!”
Billy fired another shot from the Remington before turning and saying, “I want you to scream ‘Billy, you stupid fool!’ as loud and angry as you can, then turn and see how fast you can scramble up to the top.”
“Billy, you stupid fool!” With the patter and snap of bullets wanging off rocks and the distant pop of the guns, her torn feet were forgotten as she scrambled for footing.
For the last twenty or thirty feet the trail clung to the face of the rock before entering a narrow defile that was little more than a crack in the limestone cap rock. The cleft gave her the willies.
A bullet spattered her with rock fragments and hot lead.
Panting, she made the crest, followed moments later by Billy, struggling along on his crutch.
As soon as he was hidden from sight, he tossed the crutch aside, dropping to his knees as he laid out his blanket, unrolled it, and loaded the first cartridge. Then he turned to the Remington, loading all six.
“What are we doing here?”
Billy looked up at her, eyes crystalline and cold. “John Gritts showed me this place afore he went off to war. It’s old, this trail here. And we’re not the first ones to use it.”
He pointed. “I need you to start collecting them rocks. The head-sized ones. Here, take the crutch in case you need to lever any out of the ground. Pile them up on that point beside the trail.”
“You sure they’re coming? It’d be suicide.”
“They think I’m hurt. By now they found the cartridge box and think I lost it. Without ammunition, hurt, and you screaming at me, they’re thinking they got the
