“What if they circle around? Ketch us from behind? They’re bushwhackers, Billy!”
“If you’re right about Dewley and his mad pride, I killed and cut his men, took a woman out from under him, and just wounded his horse. Reckon he ought t’ be right fit to chew nails about now.”
As she turned to collect rocks, Billy crawled up behind a currant bush and stared over the edge. “Here they come. Maybe five minutes, sis. When I shoot, you start tossing rocks down onto the trail.”
She willed herself to forget the agony in her feet; the cold rocks cut and bruised her fingers. Some she could barely lift. She piled them just back from the edge, wondering at the dull acceptance in her numb heart.
If we lose here, I’m throwing myself off the edge before they can lay hands on me again.
Billy’s shot surprised her.
She peeked over, saw Silas, the tracker, fall backward and bowl Dewley over on a particularly steep section just ten feet below the cleft. She picked up a head-sized chunk of limestone, aimed, and slung it out into the cleft. It hit the trail literally at Dewley’s feet, took his legs out from under him, bounced off a boulder and struck O’Shaunessee full in the chest where the man followed close behind. He screamed as he toppled off the ledge.
Billy’s rifle barked again as a man clambered out of the mass of falling, screaming men. The fellow arched his back, then sagged limply across the stone before tumbling out of sight.
Sarah reached for another of her rocks, surprised that it lifted so easily. Stepping to the edge, she lofted it and sent it crashing down into the screaming melee.
Guns were banging, bullets whirring off the cap rock and ripping harmlessly into the midday sky. Billy shot again. Someone screamed, others cursed.
Sarah returned with another rock, smaller, and picked her target before she tossed it out. Again it bounced off the slope before thudding into the men clinging to the trail below the cleft. She had a glimpse of the man they called Tennessee as he slipped and dropped over the precipice. She caught sight of him as he smacked onto an outcrop farther down the slope, and plunged headfirst onto the rocks.
Billy shot again, and someone shouted, “Fall back!”
“Get back here, you bastards!” The voice was Dewley’s.
Sarah carried her rock to the edge. Men were leaping, jumping, falling, in their mad descent. At the report of Billy’s rifle, a thickset blond man pitched face-first down the trail, knocking two of his companions off their feet to disappear over the drop. Someone was screaming from where he’d fallen onto the rocks.
At the bottom, seven of the survivors ran full-out to where a man held the horses. Each vaulted into his saddle, looking back as if to see who was following.
Billy’s Sharps cracked. A second later one of the riders cried out and clapped a hand to his thigh, his horse shying. With an oath, one of the others wheeled his animal, and leaning into the lunge laid spurs to it. The others, after a moment’s hesitation, bellowed their defeat as they charged off in pursuit. The rest of the horses broke free of the handler and followed at a gallop across the track-stippled bottom.
One by one, three men hobbled down the trail, each fleeing as fast as he could in the wake of the horse handler who was pelting off behind the vanished horses.
Sarah threw her last rock, watching it land squarely on Dewley’s leg where he was crawling back down the trail. Dewley screamed. Then the rock clattered down the slope, dislodging more stones as it did.
Sarah stood at the crest, the wind blowing through her hair, fluttering her red wool shirt, waffling her pants.
Dewley cried out in pain. “Help me! Damn it, boys, come help me! My leg’s busted.”
Billy stepped up beside Sarah and offered her the big Bowie. “You want Dewley?”
She looked at the blade and sniffed, a burning at the base of her throat. “I don’t know how.”
“Just like butchering a pig, sis.” He paused. “Nothing much different to it that I can see.”
She took the Bowie. “Reckon, little brother, there’s a heap of difference.”
She didn’t feel the pain in her feet as she started down the trail. But then, who could feel anything when all of her dreams had been murdered?
43
November 5, 1863
Billy tossed the shovel aside and climbed up out of the grave. Head back, he looked up at the leaden sky, the clouds dark, bruised, and torn as they worried their way toward the southeast. A bitter wind alternately gusted and harried its way through the trees, and called forth a rasping howl from among the branches. Streamers of leaves, ripped away by the gale, scattered and whirled, as though fleeing desperately before the approach of some terrifying beast.
They had chosen the flat out back and next to the old cabin. At the end of the line where they had buried pets, he and Sarah had taken turns digging Fly’s grave first, and after having placed the dog’s few remains and covered them, now dealt with Maw’s.
The wind moaned through the pines, flipping the brim of Billy’s hat. Sarah stood, arms crossed against the cold, her rag of a dress—the only one left after Dewley’s looting—was pressed against her legs. Wind kept whipping her long blond locks.
A dull emptiness lay behind his sister’s face—a glittering despair—as though hell had reached out from some dark place and clawed away everything that was she.
“Reckon that’s deep enough,” Billy said through a tight throat. His heart could have been a cold stone in his breast. He looked over at the tattered blanket that wrapped Maw. Clothing, let alone blankets, being so rare in the country, this was the only one Dewley had left behind. It had lined Fly’s bed. Had served as Maw’s shroud. Now it was her coffin.
The wind whisked the blanket’s flap from Maw’s
