Jacob hauled up about sixty yards away, and his men quickly fanned out to either side of him. As soon as they did, I realized Pablo had either miscounted their numbers or hadn’t seen Jacob’s whole crew. I counted an even dozen men in the rapidly fading light, half again our number and I’ve got to admit my throat went as dry as an old cornhusk. A strained silence hung over the trail for perhaps a full minute. Then Klee shouted: “Clear the way, McCallister! We’re coming through!”
You might consider my reply reckless. “Go around!” I yelled.
Even from so far away, I clearly heard the grumbling that followed my response. Finally Jacob held up a hand, and his men fell silent. “I’ll not suffer the whims of a fool, nor the howling of pups. It’s a free country, and I mean to pass.”
“You’ve been trailing us for two days or more,” was my return. “You’ve had plenty of time to go around, if that was your intent.”
“Where I go and how fast I get there is still my business, youngster. Don’t think the name of McCallister cuts any sign with me.”
I hesitated, and in the silence Artie said: “Maybe we ought to pull back, Boone. Let ’em pass to the north.”
“Bullshit!” Roy Turner bristled. “That’s just what them skunks want, to get ahead of us. Then they can set up an ambush somewhere down the trail where we ain’t expecting it.”
“They can rush us from the back just as easy as they can from the front,” Artie argued.
“Hush,” Casey chided. “Boone’s bossing this outfit. It’s him that will decide.”
Well, it was a McCallister herd, for a fact, and no denying the decision was mine to make, but I’ll confess my resolve was starting to buckle. I would have given just about anything to ride back and ask Jim what he thought I should do, but asking a Negro for his opinion on anything simply wasn’t done in those days. Glancing uncertainly at Casey, I said: “Maybe Artie’s right. Let’s pull back and let them pass, but keep our guns handy, just in case.”
“Dammit, Boone,” Roy hissed through clenched teeth, but Casey cut him off before he could get started.
“Come on, boys, let’s give those murdering cutthroats the trail,” Casey said, and I couldn’t tell from his voice or his words whether or not he agreed with me.
I waited until everyone had pulled back alongside Negro Jim and Calvin and Dick, then raised my voice for Klee and his boys to hear. “The road is yours, Jacob. Pass on by, but don’t stop where we can see the light of your campfire tonight, or we’re liable to come calling.”
That brought only rough laughter from the Klee faction, and I began to wonder if I’d done the right thing. Some men would see wisdom in my retreat from the road, but others would view it as weakness, with the belief that if I did it once, I’d surely do it again. Jacob Klee would fall into that latter category.
As Klee and his men kicked their mounts forward, I reined out of their way. I watched warily as the gang fell into line behind their corpulent leader. Although they carried their rifles out where they would be quick to swing into action, I wasn’t especially alarmed, as we were doing the same. Still, I was caught off guard when the man riding immediately behind Jacob let his shotgun fall over the crook of his left arm and pulled the trigger.
A gray-white cloud of powder smoke blossomed from its muzzle, center-punched by a flash of smoky yellow and a bright, arching stigma of crimson. Buckshot screamed past my left shoulder, and someone behind me hollered in pain and surprise. Then all hell broke loose, with guns banging out on every side and men yelling and cursing as they either sought shelter or fled.
Spilling from my saddle, I slapped my marshtackie’s rump with the barrel of my rifle to drive it out of the line of fire, then threw myself to the earth, lead whistling past my ears all the way down. Even though my view from the ground was hampered by clumps of palmetto and Spanish bayonet, I managed to squeeze off a single shot before the rustlers could scatter and take cover.
The Sharps slammed back firmly against my shoulder, spitting out its own dingy brume that briefly obscured the flat plain in front of me. Working swiftly, I lowered the trigger guard to expose the rear of the chamber and inserted a fresh linen cartridge from my shooting bag. As I slapped the lever closed, I could feel the soft tear of cloth as the upper edge of the breech sliced off the rear of the cartridge, like a pair of scissors snipping off the tip of a fine cigar. With the powder inside the chamber exposed, I thumbed a fresh cap over the nipple, then eared the hammer back to full cock. Altogether it probably didn’t take me twenty seconds to reload, yet by the time I was ready to fire again, the field in front of me was empty. There wasn’t a Klee in sight.
Cursing under my breath, I rose cautiously to my knees. As soon as I did, a shot rang out from the scrub on my left, the bullet whump-thumping a foot or so above my head in that peculiar whine anyone who has ever been a target on the plains will instantly recognize—and anyone who hasn’t, I’d wager, never will. I swung instinctively toward the billowing cloud of gunsmoke that was scooting through the palmetto like a feral hog and shouldered my rifle. Although most of Klee’s men had vanished into the gloaming, I spotted one of them darting into the scrub about eighty yards away and snapped off a shot before he could disappear. My bullet raised a startled squawk and a hearty obscenity, although I was fairly sure that I’d missed. I’ll have to admit, though, that his response brought a satisfied grin to my mug.
After that last shot, an unearthly silence enveloped the flat, as if the normal night sounds had been struck mute. I reloaded by feel, keeping my eyes rolling across the empty plain. Hearing the scud of boots coming up on my right, I started to swing in that direction, but it was only Casey, coming through the palmetto in a bent-over run that reminded me of an armadillo scurrying for the woodpile.
“Dang it, Boone, are you OK?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. How about you?”
“I ain’t bleeding nowhere obvious, but I sure as hell figured you for a goner, the way you tumbled out of your saddle. We all thought you’d been shot plumb center.”
A self-conscious grin tugged at my lips. “No, just scared and in a hurry. Is anyone hurt?”
“Artie got his arm punched by a chunk of buckshot, but it ain’t bad enough to kill him. It sounds like a couple of cows got hit, too, from the way they’re bawling.”
I could suddenly hear the cattle again, above the tentative croaking of frogs, and realized that life was returning to normal in the scrub. From where I was crouched, the cows’ lowing didn’t sound panicked, like it would have if one or more of the animals had been seriously injured. All in all, I figured we got off pretty lucky.
“Did you see where they went?” Casey asked.
“No, I was hoping you did.”
“I guess me and the boys were too busy ducking to pay much attention, although Calvin said he thought a bunch of ’em made a run for those trees yonder.” He nodded toward a hammock about three hundred yards away, looking like a column of black coal propping up a violet sky.
“Did he say how many?” I asked.
“He didn’t.”
I was still squinting in the direction of the hammock, trying to decide what our options were, when a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard before rose from the scrub to our left, near where the man I’d taken my last shot at had disappeared—a piercing screech raking at the dark belly of the sky. I’ve heard panthers shriek in ways that can curdle your blood, especially when they’re close by and it’s after dark, but this was far more harrowing than that. Then a single pistol shot came from the direction of the scream, followed by an abrupt silence, so deep it felt like we’d been dropped to the bottom of a lake.
“Jesus Christ,” Casey gasped. “What was that?”
I was so startled, I didn’t even attempt a guess. From the Thumb, I heard Roy calling for Casey, his voice taut with fear.
“We’re here!” Casey shouted. “We’re both here. Boone’s all right.”
“Stay where you are and watch the herd!”
I bellowed on the tail end of Casey’s reassurances, then gave my ramrod a troubled glance. “You reckon it might be a trick to draw us away from the cattle?”
After a pause, Casey shook his head. “That sounded too real to be fake.”
As if in agreement, Jacob Klee’s voice echoed from the distant hammock. “Davey! Davey Klee, are you OK?”
“Son-of-a-bitch,” I swore softly. Then, after a pause: “I guess we’d better go take a look.”
“Are you crazy? If we cross paths out there with Jacob or his men, it’ll mean a fight for sure.”
“It’s already a fight, Case. Come on, I want to see what’s going on.”
Staying in a crouch, we swiftly made our way through the palmetto, me up front and Casey tight on my heels. I had an idea of where the sound had come from and didn’t slow down until we were fairly close. Finally, dropping to one knee, I waited for Casey to come up beside me. The edge of the slough lay directly in front of us, its shore crowded with cattails and ferns and clumps of sedge, a maze-like collar I found myself reluctant to enter.
“We don’t have to do this,” Casey whispered, as if reading my mind.
“No, but I guess we will.” I thumbed the Sharps’s big side hammer to full cock, then cautiously eased into the bracken flanking the slough. My scalp was twitching like it wanted to jump off my skull and take flight, and when I look back on that evening now, I’m not so sure it didn’t have the right idea.
Although we hadn’t wasted any time getting there, I was no longer in a hurry. Moving through the tall grass, planting each foot with care as my eyes probed the deeper shadows surrounding us, I tried to shut out the self-doubt that dogged my every step. After about twenty yards, I felt Casey’s hand on my arm.
“Hold up, Boone,” he whispered, then nodded toward the smooth, black water of the slough. “What’s that?”
Following the direction of his gaze, I spotted a patch of white cloth floating several yards out. At first I couldn’t make out what it was. Then something seemed to twitch unnaturally beneath the fabric, and I grunted as if punched hard in the kidneys. “It’s a man.”
“Oh, hell, it is,” Casey breathed.
I took my hat off long enough to pull the shooting bag off my shoulder, then handed that and my rifle to Casey.
“What are you doing?”
“Whoever it is, he’s moving. I’m going to go fetch him in.”
Casey’s grip tightened on my arm. “You smell that?”
I hesitated, shaking my head. The fact is, I couldn’t smell much of anything after all the gunsmoke I’d inhaled. Yet when I concentrated, I was able to pick out a couple of familiar odors, filtered through the thick, sulphury stench of burnt powder that lingered over the plain. One of those smells was blood, which I knew didn’t come from either me or Casey. The other was a heavy, musk-like odor I remembered all too well from past excursions into the swamps.
“That’s a ’gator.”
“You damned well better believe it’s a ’gator,” Casey said earnestly. “Close by, too.”
My gaze returned to the patch of white fabric floating on the water’s surface. Once again, I thought I saw it move. Or was that only a trick of the poor light and my own jittery imagination? Then I heard a groan, followed by a faint splashing as an arm moved in the water, and I said: “I’ve got to get him out of there, Casey. We can’t just walk away.”
“You think Jacob Klee would do the same for you?”
I knew the answer to that without even pondering it. He wouldn’t. But I wasn’t Jacob Klee, and I hoped never to become like him. I said just about that same thing to Casey, then pulled my arm free. “Keep an eye out for that ’gator,” I said.
“Dammit, Boone, I ain’t never gonna see that ’gator in this light. I probably couldn’t see him if it was full-on noon, not if he came at you from below.”
“I ain’t got a choice, Case,” I replied tersely. “Just watch close, and if you see so much as a ripple, sing out.”
“The only ripple I’m going to see is the one you make when that reptile pulls you under,” he replied glumly. Moving up to the very edge of the slough, he propped my Sharps against his hip, where it would be easy to grab, then shouldered his own rifle. The ratcheting of the Mississippi’s big lock as it was thumbed all the way back sounded like the tolling of a distant bell in my ears.
There was a lot of shouting off to the west, from the direction of the hammock where Jacob Klee and his boys had taken shelter, but I couldn’t make out who it was or what he was saying. Later on, Artie would tell me it was Jacob, trying to get a fix on the men who weren’t with him in the trees and wondering who had screamed. Jacob may have been curious, but I noticed he wasn’t in any great hurry to venture out of his snug, little hidey-hole to investigate.
Dropping my gun belt in the grass, I stepped gingerly into the slough’s black water. It was March and cooler than you might imagine for being so far south. Or maybe that was just my own gut-numbed feeling as I inched toward the still-floating body. The water rose quickly at first, then seemed to level off about hip-deep. Thick mud sucked at my boots, threatening to pull them off even as it slowed my progress to an awkward plod.
My eyes swept the smooth surface of the water, following the gentle, outward flow of ripples that marked my progress, looking for any that weren’t of my own making. Inexplicably, my teeth began to chatter, and I began making small, inane noises far back in my throat. I’ve seen alligators pull dogs, colts, even full-grown cattle under water, dragging them beneath the surface in what the ’gladers call a death roll, until their quarry drowns and can be hauled back to the big reptile’s underwater lair. There, the carcass is left to rot, the bones cleaned at leisure. I’ve also seen the half-eaten corpse of a man who had been caught by one of these wily beasts, then dragged ashore by a companion after the ’gator had been killed. Those were the memories that were most vivid in my mind as I moved deeper into the slough.
Although I could logically tell myself that this couldn’t have been a very big ’gator, otherwise it wouldn’t have left such a valuable prize floating so close to shore, I was having a hard time convincing my legs of that. Logic can seem like a foreign creature at times and is often at odds with what a man feels deep in his guts, and what I was feeling that night wasn’t going to be quelled by something as wimp-kneed as rationalization. Fact is, I had fear racing up and down my spine like a child’s yo-yo, puckering more parts of my anatomy than I care to acknowledge. I think if I’d heard so much as a frog croak nearby, I would have shot straight up out of that slough like I had rockets on my boots, instead of spurs. [Ed. Note: Although a seemingly modern toy, references to yo-yos can be traced back as far as 500 B.C.] Luckily the nearby brush remained deathly quiet, and although it seemed like hours, it probably wasn’t even a full minute after stepping into the water that I was able to grab that guy’s collar and start hauling him to shore.
As strange as it may seem, I believe I was more frightened coming back than I was going out. I was sure as heck moving a lot faster and making more noise than a smart man ought to with ’gators nearby. To be honest, if I’d lost my grip on the guy’s shirt, I’m not sure I would have gone back for him. Fortunately I didn’t, and it wasn’t long before I was clambering ashore, Casey reaching out to help me drag my grisly cargo onto the bank.
Safe on dry ground, I fell forward onto my hands and knees with my heart clattering like one of those old Singer sewing machines. After catching my breath, I scooted back on my hands and knees to peer into the slack face of the man I’d rescued. That was the first time I realized who it was.
I think I’ve already mentioned that David Klee was Jubal’s boy, not Jacob’s, although the way all those Klees ran together, it was often difficult to remember who belonged to whom. I knew Dave pretty well, though. He used to work the docks at Tampa before the war, punching cows up that long, cypress-wood pier from the holding pens onto the decks of Gulf-bound cargo ships. At one time or another, he’d w
orked for most of the cattle buyers around Tampa and was generally well-liked by the cow hunters who sold their herds there. Folks used to say Dave would someday be a man to be reckoned with, and a lot of people believed he would eventually become an independent buyer, maybe even have his own dock and scow. Of course that was before the war brought everything between the Ten Thousand Islands and Tampa Bay to a grinding halt, forcing the cattle trade toward smaller ports along the coast, like Punta Rassa and Punta Gorda, and smaller, faster sailing vessels.
I reckon if any Klee could have done it, it would have been Dave, but I knew as soon as I looked into his face that night that he wasn’t ever going to punch another cow across anyone’s wharf, let alone his own.
“Sweet Lord,” Casey breathed. He was staring at what remained of Dave’s right leg, not that there was much to it. I noticed that the spurting blood from a severed artery was already starting to lessen. Meeting my eyes, Casey said: “This boy’s dying, Boone.”
I gave him a sharp look, but didn’t say anything. Dave’s eyelids were fluttering, and I wasn’t sure that he couldn’t hear what we were saying. Leaning close, I said as gently as possible: “Dave. Dave Klee.”
The lids quivered some more, then peeled back. “Did . . . did I get him?”
“Did you get who?”
“’Gator, big . . . big ol’ boy. I think I . . .” His right hand was moving clumsily over the empty holster at his waist, and I remembered the solitary report I’d heard immediately after his scream.
“You must’ve got him,” I said. “He ain’t around now.”
Dave nodded weakly. “Good, it’s good I . . . I killed the sum-bitch, ’cause he sure as hell killed me.”
Miami Gundown Page 3
