by Greg Hunt
This day’s work was not something that he would ever talk about to anybody, not unless it would be to the Lord himself. But he had to do it.
He didn’t try to sneak into the cave like a marauding skunk, in case any of them might be awake and watching. Instead he walked right in, carrying the sentry’s musket as if he belonged there. He had his best handgun in a holster at his side, and carried two more hanging from rawhide strips around his neck. The knife was in its sheath on his belt.
The watch fires had burned down to coals hours before, but there was enough daylight now to make out the dim lumps of sleeping men. Mel moved to one man who slept off a little from the others, and smashed the thick metal butt plate of the musket hard down on his head. Then he moved to another man several paces away and did the same to him.
The second man made a louder gasp than the first as he died, so Mel laid the musket aside and drew his knife to deal with the third. It would be a truly curious and miraculous thing, Mel thought, maybe even a sign from God, if he was able to do away with every blasted man in the cave one by one as they slept. Easy and safe, and leave the mess for the wild creatures hereabouts to clean up.
But that didn’t seem likely.
The next man woke as Mel knelt beside him, the bloody knife poised for its work. Instinctively the man grabbed Mel’s arm with both his hands and shoved it away from him. Off balance, Mel fell sideways on the stone floor, and in an instant the man was on top of him. By chance Mel’s hand closed on the grip of one of his guns. He pointed it up and pulled the trigger. The target was too close to miss.
The man started to scream before the echoes of the gunshot died away in the cave. His blood splashed thick and hot across Mel’s face, eyes, nose and mouth. Bitter bile rose in Mel’s throat and he tried not to gag. The man fell away, clawing at his face and shrieking out his terror like a dying man, which indeed he was.
And that ended Mel’s silent, murderous journey. All around the cave men were tumbling out of their blankets, grabbing for weapons, and staring about in confusion and fear.
“Assassins! They shot Bob!” Mel called out urgently. Every outfit this size was bound to have at least one Bob in it. “They come in the back way, like before.”
To make his point, he stood up and cut loose a couple of shots toward the dark recesses of the cave. That set off a brief, earsplitting, and totally pointless fusillade toward the rear of the cave. As they fired, reloaded, and fired again, some of them still in their ragged drawers, hunkered down low, Mel crept over to the nearest group of survivors, a revolver in each hand.
The first moment of panic was passing, and the men began to shout back and forth, trying to figure out where the attack was coming from and how many attackers they were dealing with.
Mel shot one man in the back of his head, and another in his neck as he turned to see who was behind him. A third man nearby stopped in the act of reloading his musket and stared at Mel, realizing in panic that the assassin was not back in the rocks someplace. He was right here, ready to take his life.
“This is for them two girls you took,” Mel growled, not really knowing why he bothered to explain. He raised the revolver and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell, but there was no explosion of powder. Misfire! The man threw the musket aside like it was on fire in his hands and fled toward the cave entrance. In seconds he had disappeared into the brush outside, in his panic not even bothering to shout out a warning to his comrades.
Mel knelt behind a jumble of rocks and stuck the revolver back into his holster. He didn’t have time to figure out what had happened, but knew he couldn’t trust it now. Instead he grabbed one of his neck guns.
In the heat of things he couldn’t remember how many he had killed, but he figured there couldn’t be too many of them left. Three, maybe four, six at most. But they weren’t panicked anymore, and they probably knew about where he was.
“Who the hell are you?” a voice called out.
“I’m God’s Avenger!” Mel said. His voice was hoarse and his heart pounded in his chest like a hammer on iron. “I come to settle with every last one of you skunks for what you did to them girls.”
“It warn’t none of us! It was Foley and Gale mostly, and a couple of others.”
“Then too bad for you.”
“I swear to God, mister. I got a daughter myself, and a wife and two sisters. I wouldn’t do none of that to them girls, nor would these fellows here, either.”
“You have daughters, and still you let that happen?” Mel asked. “Maybe you need to drop your drawers and see if you got anything left down there. Shame on every damn one of you.”
“All we want is to leave this cave and head on home.”
“That ain’t likely,” Mel said coldly.
Mel heard the mumble of hushed conversation but couldn’t make out the words. It seemed like they were a few dozen feet away, over against the far cave wall, but it was hard to tell because of how the cave twisted and misdirected sounds. He knew he didn’t stand much of a chance if they rushed him, especially if they came at him from more than one direction. But he welcomed the chance to have at them one last time. He thumbed back the hammers on both neck guns and waited.
Then they burst from cover, four of them in a tight clump. It took only an instant to realize that they weren’t rushing him, but were fleeing instead for the mouth of the cave.
In the few seconds that it took them to scatter into the brush outside, Mel emptied one gun at them, and fetched up the other one ready to shoot. One of them was an older man with gray hair and a twisted, shuffling gait. Though desperate to escape, he immediately fell behind the others. Mel had the best chance of downing him, but fired past him at the others. One fell face forward, skidding in the loose gravel, and then laying still. Another yelped and staggered, but made it into the anonymity of the brush.
Mel switched his aim back to the old man, who was still at least ten strides from safety. He was about Daddy’s age, maybe hauled off to the war with no say in the matter. Or maybe a low-down weasel that liked young girls. Mel let him live.
That left three that got away in the brush, one hurt, and maybe some others still hiding in the cave. He knelt and began reloading from the cartridge case on his belt. The fight seemed over, but he wasn’t sure. He worked his way back into the darker recesses of the cave, not seeing or hearing any sign of life as he did. He hadn’t given much thought to what came after the fight, not figuring on surviving it, he supposed. But here he was.
“Far as I’m concerned this fight’s done with,” Mel said out loud. The sound of his voice bumped around inside the cave, and he felt very alone. “If anybody’s still in here and you have a soul in you, you might want to spend the next few minutes thanking the Lord for letting you live through this one. And I plan to do the same.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Away off southeast, Mel could hear the muted throbbing that he now recognized as cannon fire. Not over towards his place, and not near Palestine, either. Farther away than that, maybe down as far south as Sweet Springs. From the sound of things, those Arkansas boys were being pushed back home where they belonged.
Except for Major Elliott, he had no liking for any of them, nor any sympathy for the lives they had squandered on their damned fool errand north. It would have made more sense to Mel if they had been defending their own towns and farms and kin, but that didn’t seem to be how this fight worked. Even Elliott, who clearly had plenty of sense and a good heart, seemed kind of confused by the whole thing.
Mel didn’t make much better time today on his way back from Meat Holler to the Adderly farm than he had the day before with Rochelle and Becky in tow. He knew he was about used up physically and mentally. More than once he had to pause and grab ahold of some nearby tree while he fought off a wave of dizziness and sorted out the right direction in his head. For days now he had reached down inside himself over and over to find just a little more strength and resolve to push on. But the bucket had finally hit dry rock
bottom. The well was empty.
At one point he came to curled up on the ground, not even aware that he had passed out, or fallen to sleep on his feet, or whatever had happened. Laying there for a few minutes, he remembered the dream that his awakening had interrupted. He was back in the cave watching that sad old man hobbling and stumbling, desperate to save what Mel knew at that moment had been a wasted and worthless life. Mel raised his gun and thumbed the hammer back. It was an easy shot. But then the old man was his own daddy, moaning in pain, blood staining the back of overalls, falling down and struggling back up, running desperately for the peace and darkness of the woods. Mel’s aim never wavered.
He had been jolted awake by that terrible, impossible decision whether or not to pull the trigger.
For a moment he felt like he might cry, which of course was a silly and weak thing for a grown man to do. He fought back the tightness in his throat and the blurriness in his eyes, rolled over onto his hands and knees, and rose to his feet. His head still swam, but looking around he knew where he was and what direction to go. It was only a little bit farther.
Leaving the woods on the hill above the Adderly farm, the whole place looked deserted. He figured Becky had done what he told her and was hiding out someplace close by with her mother and sister.
It wasn’t till he was closer that he saw the still form in the shade of the cottonwoods that sheltered the Adderly family cemetery. And he had to walk closer still before he made out that the form was dressed in white.
At first Mel thought Becky might have left her unconscious sister there, propped up against a tree, while she went off to forage for food. But then, as he approached, he saw Rochelle’s head turn slowly toward him.
“So you’re back with us again,” Mel said, smiling, kneeling beside her, and taking her hand. “That sure is a fine thing.”
For a moment Rochelle just looked at him, and Mel had the uncomfortable feeling that she was trying to sort out who he was. Her face was still badly bruised, but the bruises were fading from black to shades of blue and green, and some of the swelling was gone. She still had the rag wrapped around her head, and the wound had bled through. Her hand lay limp, cold, and unresponsive in his.
“Mel,” Rochelle said quietly. “Mel Carroll. Becky told me you had come for us, but I don’t remember.”
“It’s ’cause you were knocked out the whole time I was here,” Mel explained. “Things will come back to you.”
“She told me about Daddy, too,” Rochelle said. “She left me here to say good-bye to him. She and Mama are off across the river picking berries. And I heard a shot a while ago, so maybe she kicked up a rabbit.”
Mel released her hand and she hid it in the folds of her dress. He sat down cross-legged in the dirt facing her, not really sure what to say. He watched as Rochelle’s eyes closed for several long seconds, then opened again and settled on him.
“I said a prayer for Daddy. Or with him, or something like that. It’s hard to believe he’s laying dead right there under that dirt.”
“I know. I felt the same when we buried Mother. But you get used to it.”
“Nothing ain’t the same now. Everything’s changed. The farm’s gone like it wasn’t never here. Daddy’s dead in his grave, and Ham and Jaipeth are off Lord knows where. Even Mama ain’t right in the head.”
Her eyes swept the empty expanse in front of her that had, just days before, been their family’s well-tended farm. Her gaze settled on the rows and rows of graves in what had been Ezekiel Adderly’s south pasture. Mel figured they should have planted their dead in plowed ground where the digging was easier.
“For all I know, my own brother Ham might be down there among them,” Rochelle mused.
“Maybe not,” Mel said. “Maybe he left with them, and he’ll find his way home again after all this is done.” His words sounded weak even to him.
“It’ll be hard to sleep at night, thinking about all them ghosts floating around lost in the dark. It’s frightful, but sad too. All them souls, scared and lonely, prob’ly not even knowing what happened to them. And maybe Ham amongst them.”
“They’ll move on, by and by. It’s the same at my place. Plenty of men died there, and they put them in the ground in long rows all over my fields and pastures. They didn’t plant them none too deep, either. I guess I’ll be plowing up bones from now to doomsday.”
Rochelle was quiet for a time, then she turned her gaze back to Mel and asked, “So what now?”
“I figured to take the three of you back to my place,” Mel said. “It’s not much better there, but I’ve still got a piece of a cabin standing till I can build something better. My mule should be someplace close about, and my stock is out in the woods. Either I’ll herd them back or hunt them for meat. We’ll get by.”
Mel heard a distant call and turned his head toward the Little Bold River nearby. In the open grassy meadow on the other side he saw Becky and her mother walking in their direction. Becky lifted up the hare she was carrying and waved it in a sign of triumph. Henrietta Adderly was holding up the corners of her apron, which bulged with one sort of victuals or another.
“Once we get there, we need to find a preacher first thing, Mel,” Rochelle said. “It’s like Daddy said. We had our fun at the dance, and now it’s time to pay the fiddler.”
“I came all this way with nothing but that on my mind, Rochelle,” Mel said. It felt good to get that said. He smiled at her, feeling the certainty of his words, and that felt good too.
“I’ve been sitting here wondering why all this happened. Do you have any notion of what this was all for, Mel?”
“Nope, it beats the hell out of me, Rochelle.”
She turned her head slowly toward him, and her gaze was steady. The look in her eyes changed from sadness to something else.
“I know you’ve been living for a long time alone, Melvin Carroll, and you’ve seen some rough times lately. But now you’ll be around Christian women again on a regular basis,” she said. “You’re going to have to save that kind of language for the barn and the fields. I won’t abide it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mel said without hardly thinking. In all his pondering of what married life might be like, he had never considered the possibility of living under one roof with three righteous women. He wondered what he had gotten himself into.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Over the past thirty-five years Greg Hunt has published over twenty Western, frontier, and historical novels, as well as several books on computer topics. A lifelong writer, he has also worked over the decades as a newspaper reporter, photographer and editor, a technical and freelance writer, a tech project manager, and a marketing analyst. Greg served in Vietnam as an intelligence agent and Vietnamese linguist with the 101st Airborne Division and 23rd Infantry Division.
“Writing fiction has been my true, lifelong occupation,” said Greg. “The randomness of life and my own restless spirit have steered me in many directions, but since my early years there was seldom a time, even in a war, when you wouldn’t find a pencil in my pocket, a piece of paper close at hand, and a plot coming together in my head. I tried to give it up a couple of times when things got rough, but it always kept its grip on me until I finally realized that I could never not be a writer. My first rule of writing is as simple as it gets. Tell a Good Story.”
Greg currently lives in the Memphis area with his wife Vernice.
