by Paul Bagdon
It was a good thing to say. Lee thought about it, about what it could mean.
“When we get back to Snorty,” Ben continued, “we’ll set up a little camp, and I’ll go out on foot to see if I can find us some grub. I’d like you to have a good meal in you before you start back to Burnt Rock tomorrow. You won’t make it in a day, but I’ll give you my slicker to sleep under. You’ll strike the town or tracks the next day for sure, and you’ll sleep in your own bed that—”
“I’m not going back tomorrow,” Lee interrupted. “I’m riding with you.”
* * *
7
* * *
Ben sat as if he’d been poleaxed, and for a few moments he was too stunned to speak. But when he did, his tone was harsh. “That’s pure crazy! What you’re going to do is set out at first light tomorrow and find your way back to town, and I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
Lee reined in ten yards or so from where Snorty was ground tied. The horses glared at one another in the dimming light, neither willing to make the first overture toward acceptance. Ben slid off Dancer, and then Lee dismounted.
“Whether or not you want to hear about it, it’s what’s going to happen. I’m going on with you, and I’m going to help you put an end to the Stone gang.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Absolutely not?” she said, mocking his tone. “You sound like a schoolteacher telling a ten-year-old she can’t bring her new puppy into the classroom! Who do you think you are to tell me I should run home because things might get sticky!”
“I know who I am. I’m the marshall of Burnt Rock, Texas. I’m in the course of my work, and I’m giving you a direct order. And I’ll tell you something else: Things are going to get a lot more than sticky before this thing is finished.”
“A direct order? What makes you think—”
“There’s no reason for more arguing, Lee. You’re heading for Burnt Rock tomorrow.”
Her face was crimson with anger, and she swallowed a couple of times before speaking. “You chowderhead!” she snapped. “I thought at least you, of all the men in town, would have enough sense to realize that a woman is every bit as brave as a man, and every bit as ready to fight for what’s right!”
“Look, the—”
“No, you look! You and every other cowpuncher and sodbuster in the West think women aren’t good for anything but looking pretty and keeping quiet when the menfolk are talking. The whole silly bunch of you with your antiquated ideas are going to find out different real soon, Ben Flood! Women were already saving lives with the surgeons on the battlefields—Shiloh, Gettysburg, Antietam—and now back East we’re being recognized as real people who can accomplish as much as a man. Why—”
“All I said was that you aren’t going to get caught up between me an’ a bunch of desperados who’ve already proved they’d just as soon kill as not! ’Course women deserve better’n they get. My point is that you don’t have the skills to be of any help to me.”
Her voice was suddenly arctic; icicles seemed to hang from each word. “What skills are you referring to?”
He spoke before thinking. “Shooting and riding and being able to—”
“You, sir, are terribly mistaken!” she shrieked. “On the worst day I ever had, I could outride you! And do you think the rabbit I ate volunteered to become food? I got it with a pistol that’s probably twenty years old and that I’d never even tried before I had to fire it!”
“There’s a lotta difference between dropping a rabbit and killing a man. For one thing, the rabbit doesn’t have a Sharp’s and a skinful of Mexican liquor, an’ isn’t out lookin’ to spill your blood.”
“Don’t patronize me, Ben. I know the dangers. I was with Stone, remember? I realize that I’m not a gunfighter. In fact, I’d never pointed a weapon at a living thing until I killed that first rabbit. But that doesn’t change anything. I have the skills to help you. I think you’d better start figuring out that you do need me.”
He threw up his hands in exasperation, then spun on his heel and stalked over to where Snorty stood still glaring at Dancer. “I’m going to get us some food,” he snarled over his shoulder. “If you’re such a top hand with horses, how about getting these two together without them chewin’ an’ kickin’ pieces outta each other?” He tugged the rifle from his saddle scabbard and set off on foot toward a small rise that was still visible in the dusk. He saw that he had maybe an hour or slightly longer to shoot whatever he could and get it back to camp.
As he trudged away, he felt confused by the sensation he was experiencing. What was it? Was it anger that caused him to clench his left fist so tightly that his fingernails were digging into his palm? He didn’t know. But what he did know was that what he’d felt for Lee not fifteen minutes ago was real, a powerful surge of emotion he’d never experienced before. When he’d first seen her as they topped the ridge and their eyes met, it was as if a terrible pain in his heart had suddenly eased, as if dark night had turned to bright day. But now . . .
What she proposed was nonsense! She knew nothing of the terror that accompanied any fight to the death. She rode wonderfully, and her skills on horseback were strong. He’d seen her perform the flying mount, the switch from horse to horse at a full gallop, the barebacked jumping over a parked delivery wagon loaded with two layers of sacks of grain. And he’d seen her groundwork; he’d watched her gentle a mare after a fight with another mare that left both horses bleeding and ready to continue the battle, and he’d watched, awed, as she rode an aggressive stallion to a standstill after the horse had done his level best to throw her over the moon. But none of that was done with lead in the air or rifle sights looking for her heart or her back!
Or was it? She’d snatched a horse out of the middle of Stone’s gang and lived to tell about it.
Suddenly a fat jackrabbit squirted out from behind some scrub a few feet from him and was just as quickly swallowed up by a patch of mesquite. He hadn’t even gotten the rifle off his shoulder. He berated himself for letting his thoughts carry him away.
He looked down at his rifle. He knew Lee had a good eye with weapons. She’d looked at three new rifles the town had purchased for his office to arm posse members, should he need to assemble one in a hurry, and she’d handled the long guns with respect but not fear. After twenty minutes she was shooting a cluster of six rounds into a pie-plate-sized target at forty yards. She was handy with a pistol too. They’d dragged out into the prairie a sack of empty syrup bottles from O’Keefe’s Café, and Lee shattered her targets cleanly and quickly, shooting six times and breaking the last bottle while the shards of the first two were still in the air.
But targets and bottles don’t shoot back.
When Ben strode back into camp, the light of day was almost gone. He threw together a fire and got it going before skinning the rabbit, two blacksnakes, and a prairie hen he’d killed. Lee had Dancer and Snorty grazing together in the same stretch of dry grass. He grinned. No one would ever suspect the two of being friends, but they tolerated one another without open warfare.
Ben put the meat on the spit and the peach can full of water on the fire to boil. Then he squatted down and turned the meat over the flames. He looked over at Lee. They hadn’t really spoken since he’d returned with the game.
He caught her eye, and she moved forward and put her hand lightly on his shoulder. His throat constricted with emotion; she had never looked so beautiful to him. The light from the flames flickered across her face, lining her sculpted cheekbones in brass and imbuing her hair with an inner light that gave it the hue of a melted black diamond. Her eyes were incandescent, and their chestnut glow, fragmented by the flames, turned to sparks of copper and black.
She moved over to sit next to him. “I’ve seen how Stone operates,” she said. “I don’t know much about a person being possessed by an evil spirit, but I do know that he is. He’s so cold. Life means nothing to him. Maybe the only thing that does mean anything to him is killing you, B
en.”
“Maybe so. But none of that means it’s your fight. I’m a marshall. I enforce the law. Some days Nick and I play checkers and drink coffee, an’ other days we risk our lives. That’s the job.”
“The job is going against a mad-dog killer and ten other men alone?”
“If that’s what it takes. I couldn’t leave the town with no lawman, and I couldn’t ask a civilian to get involved in this thing.”
A bit of exasperation crept back into Lee’s voice. “Couldn’t you at least wire for some help, then?”
“Don’t need it.”
“You do need it—and I can give it to you! Look, I’m not planning to ride into Stone’s camp shooting, but I can create a diversion, free the horses, confuse those killers while you do what you have to do.” She stood. “Think about it,” she said as she walked off into the darkness, her tall form silhouetted momentarily as the cloud cover broke in front of the moon.
Ben sighed and poured the last of his coffee beans into the peach can. Then he began to pray for guidance. What she said made some sense, in a way . . .
Their meal was quiet but not uneasy. Lee ate the meat from the blade of her knife; Ben ate his directly from the stick he’d cooked it on. The roasted food tasted as good as anything she’d ever eaten. As she helped herself to some more snake, she caught Ben grinning at her.
“What?”
“I’ve never known a woman other than my ma who’d eat snake, till I met you. It shows some grit.”
She shrugged. “Food’s food. Have you thought over what I said?”
He prodded and dragged the can of coffee off the embers with his stick and left it to cool a foot from the fire. “Yeah. I have. I can use you, but the idea scares me. We’d need some ground rules if we’re goin’ to ride together.”
“Like what?”
Ben counted them off on the fingers of his right hand. “We never go in together. Your work will be kinda behind the scenes, like you said. You don’t expose yourself to gunfire if you can avoid it—and that means you turn tail rather than face guns, no matter what’s going on.” He paused.
“Go on,” she urged.
“Here’s the most important one: If something happens to me—if I get shot or captured or whatever—you head for home, an’ by home, I mean Burnt Rock. I need your word on that, an’ I’ll ask you to swear on my Bible to make sure I’ve got it.”
“What if I could get you out somehow? What if—”
“I ain’t about to negotiate on this, Lee. That’s the way it’s gonna be, or I’m goin’ on alone.”
“I’d follow you if you tried that.”
Ben sighed. “I’ll tell you what. If it comes down to it, I’ll tie you over your saddle like a sack of grain, carry you back to town, lock you up, an’ set off again, on my own. Nick’d let you out in a few days. I’d lose some time doin’ all that, but I’d do it.”
A long moment passed. Finally she spoke. “Yes. I’m sure you would. Fetch your Bible.”
The oath he asked her to repeat with her hand resting on the cover of his Bible was a simple one, short and succinct, the crux of it being that she would immediately ride to Burnt Rock rather than attempt to help him if he were captured. If he were wounded but able to make it to their camp, it would be him who decided if she stayed or rode off for help. If he were killed, she’d head for town.
Ben set his Bible aside and picked up the can. He passed it to Lee, and she took a long drink. The brew was strong enough to melt a horseshoe. The ahhh she released after swallowing brought a smile to his face.
“I’ve yet to see anyone—man or woman—who enjoys a cup of coffee as much as you do. You’d think it was milk an’ honey the way you drink it down.”
She returned the smile. “This beat-up tin can is a far cry from a cup, but you’re right. The blacker and stronger it is, the better I like it.” She handed the can to Ben, and he lowered its level by half before handing it back.
“I need to know what you’re planning,” she said after sipping at the coffee again.
“There’s not much to it, really. We’ll ride by day till we catch up with Stone and then do all our work at night. They’re a squirrelly enough bunch to begin with, and I can’t see the gang holdin’ together if members start gettin’ killed or captured. I think we can play on their weakness—kinda turn them against one another. Once we start our attacks, we’re gonna keep right at it, hittin’ them every night, till they’re afraid to sleep an’ too mad to shoot or think straight. Stone’s the craziest of the group. He might even break first an’ do something stupid that’d let me take him.”
Lee swallowed some more coffee. “I wouldn’t bet on that. You’re right, he’s crazy, but he’s . . . well . . . he knows what he’s doing too, I guess. Killing you in a gunfight is more important to him than anything else in his life, and the hold evil has on him is so strong that he’ll hold himself together until he gets what he wants, or is captured, or . . . or killed.”
“You don’t like to use that word, do you? I don’t particularly either. But you got to recognize that’s most likely the way this thing will play out. Stone won’t give up, and he won’t go in alive.”
Lee hesitated a moment. “Are you better than Zeb Stone?”
“Yeah. But that doesn’t mean much. Gunfights aren’t like horse races, where the fastest and the strongest almost always wins. If it comes to me an’ Stone facin’ one another, it’s anybody’s bet who walks away. If he put notches in his gun, he’d have whittled away the grips by now. He’s been in lots more face-to-face gunfights than I have, and he knows all the tricks there are to know.”
“You know something more important than a gunman’s tricks, Ben. You know God. That’s what counts.”
Ben nodded in agreement. “Back in town, Stone said I was nothin’ without my voodoo book. I told him he was right.” He stood and stretched his back. “I’d like to get moving with first light tomorrow an’ cover some ground before the heat gets bad.”
He walked toward where the horses grazed. In a moment, Lee joined him. Snorty and Dancer were separated by fifteen feet or so and seemed to want to keep that distance. Ben stood next to Dancer, stroking his neck.
“Muscles on this boy like they’re cut out of spring steel,” he commented. He carried their saddles closer to the fire, took his own rifle, and handed it to Lee. “You keep this handy from now on,” he said. “I’ve got all the ammo we need, an’ I’ll split it up between our saddlebags tomorrow.” He spread his slicker on one side of the fire and Snorty’s saddle blanket on the other.
“Well,” he said. “Good night.”
Lee hid her smile; the light from the fire had shown her the blush on his face. “Good night,” she said and settled down on the slicker, rolling over once to bring it close around her body.
The sound of gunfire ahead—first, a spatter of pistol rounds that sounded like the pops of cheap firecrackers, and then a burst of deeper, louder rifle fire that went on for half a minute—brought a wide grin to Zeb Stone’s face. He reined in and held up his hand to stop the others, then waved them toward him.
“Some of you boys thought I was turnin’ yellow, not takin’ the fast ride over the Busted Backs. Well, I’ll tell you what: Them gunshots mean only one thing—that takin’ the route the traders an’ drummers use makes nothin’ but good sense. The men I sent ahead ain’t shootin’ at targets. I don’t know what they’re onto, but somethin’s ours that weren’t ours before. Lissen up, now.”
The group sat on their horses quietly for a long moment. There were no more shots.
“Good. The fightin’s over.”
The conversations burst forth around him, focused on what the scouts had come across, each outlaw hoping something of value waited for them a few miles ahead: whiskey, horses, women, money, cattle, firearms—the things that made life worthwhile.
Stone held the men back from beating their horses into a mad gallop. “Whatever it is, it ain’t goin’ nowhere,” he shouted. “Fir
st man to break away gets a slug from my Sharp’s in his back. I want these horses kept alive!”
He lit a cigar, slowly rolling its head in the flame of the match, purposely taunting his followers. He looked from man to man, and not one made eye contact. That made him feel powerful, better than this group of gunslingers and crazies who wouldn’t live a month without him to lead them. Those the bounty hunters and the law didn’t get would kill one another in stupid fights over nothing. The thought brought a grin to his face as he nudged his horse into a walk.
Ahead was a gentle curve to the left that swung around a knoll covered with brown grass. Stone used his heels to goad his horse into a lope, and the others followed, most of them whooping and hollering in anticipation. The scene opened up to them as soon as they rounded the bend. The body of a young man—a hired hand or a drifter from the looks of his worn and disheveled clothing—rested on its side in the rutted dirt of the path. Twenty feet beyond the young fellow was another body, that of an old man whose white hair spread around his head in the dirt like a halo. A wagon with a pair of mules in the traces was angled into the scrub grass near the corpse.
One of Stone’s scouts was sitting on the edge of the wagon, head tilted far backward and a bottle to his lips. The other scout was pawing through the small wooden crates stacked two high on the wagon, tossing what were apparently women’s dresses over his shoulder. The clothes fluttered to the ground like wounded butterflies, the colors bright against the drab earth tones of the prairie.
Stone held up his hand with the cigar between his fingers to stop the men behind him and rode up to the wagon. “Whadda we got here?”
The drinker lowered his bottle. “An ol’ drummer an’ his helper, looks like. Me an’ Tory, we found a case of booze an’ a bunch of clothes so far, but we ain’t gone through but a few of the crates.”
