Doc shook his head wearily, then reached for his coat.
“Looks like we gonna get a fine New Year’s Eve supper after all,” Kershaw murmured in Butler’s ear.
“Ya’ll reckon they gots black-eyed peas and ham?” Jimmy Peterson wondered.
“While Philip stitches, I’ll be most happy to clean up the blood and dispose of the wrecked furniture. That surely will be worth a bowl or two of whatever feast Hallie Louise has prepared.”
“I don’t know how you do it,” Doc muttered as he picked up his hat and bag. “If I didn’t know you were cursed, I’d say you were blessed.”
Clapping his hat onto his head, Doc followed Sally Hamilton down the stairs. Butler slammed the door behind him, grinning ear to ear as he followed them down the rickety stairs to the alley.
51
March 11, 1865
Billy Hancock rode his tired and stumbling gelding through the thicket along the creekside trail. A good felt hat was clamped tight to his head, his long locks hanging down over the collar of his coat. The Sharps rested across his saddle, easy at hand, and high cavalry boots rose to above his knees. Compliments of a Yankee trooper who no longer had need of them.
All in all, with his linsey shirt and tan pants, Billy thought he cut quite the figure.
Evening was coming, and the birds sounded as full of spring as the flowers that blossomed in the newly sprouted grass. In the south, lightning flickered in tall, bruised clouds.
“Who comes?” a voice called from the scrub oak to the right.
“Billy Hancock. As if you, Bub Dix, didn’t have eyes in yer head to recognize me.”
Billy followed the trail into the small camp where nine stained-and-moldy tents and a couple of lean-tos surrounded a clearing. The camp was home to about twenty men, former Confederate soldiers. Most were deserters, hiding out to avoid conscription at best—trial and execution for desertion at worst. In Billy’s mind, the only crime they’d committed was being smart enough to want out of the whole damn mess back East.
“What news?” Charlie Deveroux asked as he stood. His Enfield rifle hung from one hand, a tin coffee cup in the other. Charlie was closing in on forty. A thin man with weary brown eyes and a thick black beard, he walked with a slight limp from a wound received at Vicksburg. He was sort of the leader, if any man could be called that.
“Not much. I slipped into a tavern outside Fort Worth a couple of nights ago. Talk is that the militia is going to leave Waco and make a sweep north looking for conscripts.” Billy smiled. “Word is they ain’t gonna be looking any too hard even if they get their lazy asses out of camp.”
“What’s changed?”
“The war, Charlie.”
Here and there men appeared out of tents and the brush down by the creek. Any arrival of news was greeted with curiosity.
“Is it over?”
“Not yet. Reckon it’ll be soon, though. South Carolina is wrecked and Sherman is marching into North Carolina. Won’t be another month and he’ll be coming in ahind Gen’ral Lee. Ain’t nothing but guerrilla bands fighting the Yankees. Little pockets of Rebs like in Texas, southwest Arkansas, and northwest Louisiana. Heard that Florida’s mostly untouched, but who’d want it?”
Charlie scratched his beard, black eyes thoughtful. “Where’s Danny?”
“Looking to a young lady at a place called Eulalia’s in Fort Worth.” Billy walked his horse to cool him out after shucking the saddle. “Told him I’d ride up and give you boys the word that it won’t be long and we’ll all be free.”
“You starting to sound like a Yankee?” Amos Kern asked facetiously. He was a lanky and tall man in his thirties who longed constantly for his wife in Shreveport.
Satisfied that his worn-out gelding had been seen to, Billy tied him to the picket rope before walking over and seating himself by the fire.
Charlie was watching him with those hard black eyes, a curious reservation in his face.
“What?” Billy demanded.
“You going back to Arkansas after it’s over?”
Billy chewed his lip, frowned. “Maw’s dead. Reckon Paw is too, since no one heard a word of him after Shiloh. If Sarah’s back at the farm, she sure as hell don’t want to see me. Had one brother in prison camp up to Camp Douglas. And Butler? If he survived Chickamauga, there was the Atlanta battles, then Franklin and Nashville. He was an officer, so if he survived, Yankees’ll most likely throw his bones into a prison camp after the surrender. Maybe hang him. No telling what’s gonna happen to all them Rebels.”
“So … what’re you gonna do?”
Billy could feel this leading up to something. “You got a suggestion?”
“You been pinch-mouthed about it, but I heard you killed a renegade Confederate lieutenant in a card game up in the Nations.”
“He was a bottom dealer. Danny caught him cheatin’.”
“Heard he got off the first shot and missed. That cool as a springhouse, you shot him through the heart. That he’d killed five men in pistol fights, and a heap more riding with Bloody Bill Anderson. That he was known as a mighty mean man.”
Billy narrowed his eyes. “He’s a cheat. Don’t matter how tough a man is said to be, a bullet to the heart’ll make him dust.”
“And there’s the Dewley bunch over to Arkansas.” Charlie lifted a calming hand. “Yes, I been asking about you. I’da been a fool not to. Something about you is like a coiled snake, Billy Hancock. Cold and deadly.”
“You got a point to all this?”
Charlie glanced around, making sure the others had drifted off. From his boot top, he pulled a whiskey flask and offered it to Billy. “Not a point. A proposition.”
“Then make it.” Billy took a swig of the whiskey.
“War’s ending, and the Rebs are losing. There’s
