Odd how the simplest things, like building a fire, didn’t seem to mean anything to a man. The men in this camp hadn’t had the foggiest notion they were building the last fire they’d ever see.
Billy stood over the wounded man, staring down at him over the Remington’s sights. The fellow lay on his back, air wheezing in and out through the hole blown out of his chest. With each breath the wound frothed with bubbly lung blood that soaked into the man’s blue wool shirt, exposed where the stained and patched buckskin coat hung open.
The dying man looked up with shocked, disbelieving gray eyes. Speckles of frothy blood stained his dark blond beard. His nose was razor-thin, a pearling of lung-blood on his lips.
He lay where he’d fallen on his bedding, stunned by Billy’s shot.
Two more bodies lay to either side, one facedown, legs akimbo, the other looking like he’d just fallen asleep on his side, but for the pool of dark crimson leaking out of the hole in his head.
Three down. One got away.
Danny was bent over the facedown man: George Fletcher as Billy had heard him called. He’d been one of Dewley’s riders. One of the men who’d haunted the Hancock Farm looking for Billy and Sarah. Now Danny was rifling Fletcher’s pockets and possessions. Most of Dewley’s men carried gold, fancy watches, rings and jewelry, and other plunder they’d made off with from raiding.
The second man, the one who looked asleep, had been called Francis Scopol, a burly black-haired man in his thirties. He’d been the man wounded in the thigh by Billy’s last shot the day after he rescued Sarah. The last of Dewley’s riders to be brought to justice.
Maybe Maw’s hideous ghost would no longer rise up from the grave, clods of dirt falling from the old red blanket. Maybe the glowing hellfire in her empty eye sockets would dim. Hopefully she wouldn’t turn her rotted face toward him and reach out and unleash damnation from the tip of her skeletal finger.
Hopefully the terrible demon image of Sarah wouldn’t slip into his nightmares anymore. She had first haunted his dreams the night he’d freed Sarah after the rape. That night her naked, abused apparition had hovered over him. To his horror and shame she had reached down and grabbed him. As her fingers wrapped around his cock he’d pumped seed into his trousers.
What kind of head-sick son of a bitch had dreams like that about his sister anyway?
God, he hated to sleep. Never knew if he’d rest, or if Maw would come to condemn his soul, or Sarah would corrupt his body with the most forbidden kind of sin.
“Who’re you?” Billy asked the lung-shot man.
“George Crawford,” the man whispered through the blood. “Why’d you shoot me?”
Billy tilted his head at where Danny was pulling the pockets inside out on Scopol’s pants. “You were riding with Dewley’s men. They kilt my maw, raped my sister. Makes us at war.”
“Raped…? You … swear?” Crawford’s wounded voice was barely audible.
“Swear,” Billy agreed.
“Didn’t … know that. Thought they’d join Paw’s rangers.”
“Debts gotta be paid.”
Crawford coughed weakly, blood spurting from the hole in his chest. He spit blood to clear his mouth and said, “My brother? Tobe? He … get away?”
“Yep. But if he wasn’t part of Dewley’s rangers, well, I don’t got no fight with him.”
“Reckon you do,” Crawford said, his eyes starting to flutter in his head. “You jist kilt me. He’ll be coming. Along with the rest.”
“Crawford?” Danny asked, stepping over. “From down to Van Buren County? Relation to Amos?”
“My … grandpap … Amos.” Crawford’s gaze drifted off, his mouth working weakly.
“Shit and hellfire!” Danny cursed, stamping off to the side. He straightened, looking off in the direction Tobe had fled. “Reckon it’s too late to catch him?”
“I heard of the Van Buren County Crawfords.” Billy looked down at where George was fading, his chest pumping weakly as his lungs filled with blood. “What in tarnal hell was any of the Crawfords doing riding with Dewley’s lot? Crawfords is Yankee guerrillas. Dewley’s lot was Rebel.”
“Maybe they’s looking to change sides.” Danny licked his lips, looking nervously down the trail where Tobe had fled. He clicked the short stack of coins together that he’d culled from the dead men’s pockets. At the picket, the horses snuffled and whickered as they looked off in the direction Tobe had taken.
“And what will the Crawfords do when good old Tobe reports?”
“Come looking for us,” Danny said. “That Crawford bunch, they’s thick with Jeff Williams and his Yankee jayhawkers. They got them a regular war going with Allen Witt and his guerrillas over to Quitman. And somehow, Billy boy, we just got ourselves stuck right in the middle of it.”
Billy looked down at the dying man. “Reckon I’m sorry I kilt you. Just bad luck. You was camping with the wrong men.”
Even as he said, it, Crawford’s chest expanded one last time, the sucking wound under his right breast gurgling and going still.
“Billy? What are we gonna do?”
Billy turned his attention to the Boston Mountains where they rose to the south. They were smack in the middle of Franklin County, in unfamiliar territory. Billy glanced up at the sun, just nearing midday. “Reckon we’ll head home. Them are three good horses on that picket yonder. With our mounts, we can switch off. By this time tomorrow, we can be at the trapper’s cabin.”
“They’ll figure it out, Billy. You don’t know them Crawfords. They’ll hear that you was hunting anybody what rode with Dewley. You done made a point of it to too many people since Sarah left. Reckon they’ll comb the whole length and width of the Upper White until they flush us out like lice.”
“Might want to be shut of this country for a while.”
“What if Sarah comes back?”
Billy shook his head, thinking of how craftily she’d outfoxed even his
